Slashdot Mirror
Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms
nick58b writes "Lego, in response to the worst financial loss in its history, has announced they will stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products. This would include Mindstorms, one of the greatest educational toys ever produced." It saddens me greatly to see the toy that was such a mainstay of my childhood to be in such dire financial straits. If I were a more qualified sociologist, I'd think it may have inspired by the way that our children play today versus how they played twenty years ago.
I've been a Lego fan most of my life too, but I have to say that I'm not surprised or terribly upset about the way this has turned out. Lego sets have become so ungodly expensive over the years (many $100+ sets having nothing to offer for their high price points other than "collector's series" or some other buzzword), it's no wonder more people aren't buying them.
Glog!
Plus Lego is Danish for "play well"
Just a few Lego facts.
I would say that it might send a message if you buy as direct as possible from them.. but I would make sure that they are all bought up by the end of the month. Even if Lego cant keep the product.. it might inspire some other company to do so.
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
Too many of the new lego products have so few generic bricks and too many specialist bricks that can't easily be used for other things, eg, you can build a lego buggy into, um, a slightly different buggy, but not a lot else.
Get back to providing big bags of ordinary bricks, and encourage creativity!
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Price.
Also, how many parent think, "Little Jimmy should have a programmable set of Lego!"
TC Logo and Dacta were also great toys (one of my teachers wrote some of the documentation), but there just wasn't a big market.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
At the very least, they could outsource the playing with Legos to India!
The mindstorms were cool toys, for a little while. But Lego never upgraded them- realistically, they had not released a significant upgrade of any type in the now 6 years since they released the product. They could have made them either more powerful (and hence more appealing to the adults who bought tons of them early on, but got frustrated by HW limitations quickly) or they could have made them simpler (and hence more appealing to the kids who they normally try to target.) They did neither, and let the product stagnate. And that's why they have to kill it now. Shame, really- they could have been really, really great. [I used to maintain legOS, so I fall into the category of 'adults frustrated by the limitations.]
IAAL,BIANLY
The problem with Lego sets in recent years has been the fact that they are very specialized. You used to be able to buy sets that allowed for lots of imagination, such as "pirate", "city", and "space" legos. Now, all I see is "Star Wars: Episode I" or other such sets that don't inspire the imagination in the slightest.
It is not SCO's fault.
:)
Since it reported its first loss of $47.8 million in 1998, Lego has been hit hard by increasing competition from the makers of electronic toys.
It is GBA fault. It is the fault of the game consoles, the computers, and the leap-pad-ish products.
Plastic legos and tinker-toys and cabin logs rocked when I was a child. This year Christmas for my two year old required more batteries than gifts for the rest of my family.
Pure electronic gifts are winning...
All of our kids are going to grow to be bigger geeks than we are.
AC
Not low sales. Low profit margins. They're cutting the electronic, and licensed sets primarly. Which are the more expensive ones to make, electronic ones due to the cost of componates, and licensed sets for the costs of licensing.
One could only wish that they would license out the mindstorm excluseive items to be built and sold by someone else.
It's no wonder that lego is losing money. They seem to be putting a heck of a lot of their resources into stuff like Bionicle. Have you seen those things? There are like 10 pieces, they are not standard brick, and you can only make one thing out of them.
Bring back castle lego at a reasonable price and we'll talk. I would love to get my hands on that original black knight's castle. The big black square one. Now all they make is bionicle, harry potter, and some star wars. It's not the same as it was.
It used to be a toy of building. Now it's just a toy you build.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The real problem Lego is facing right now (let's hope they realize it) is they produce too much custom pieces. Every set has at least 5 - 10 custom bricks and therefore:
1) costs much to produce
2) contains less ordinary pieces to reduce the costs
3) Since it contains less pieces and the ones it contains are custom, there's very little play value to justify the cost.
I would suggest Lego to:
1)reduce custom pieces. Kids are suppose to have fantasy you know... I remember I put two triangles together and pretend it was a star destroyer...
2)kill most of the cinema stuff. Starwars stuff is ok (meaning it's well done and designed). reduce cutom pieces and completely kill the other series ( If they can't make other movies with the same quality, then it's a no go.)
3)Kill bionicles!!!! (what in the world are those things? are they LEGO at all? and they DO contain very few pieces and they're mostly custom!!!! They're model kits, not LEGO!)
4) where are the old series? trains castles cities... there was really tons and tons of stuff!!! (and some amazing works to say the truth) where's all that stuff gone?
Anyway, probably Lego is facing the usual toy VS digital dilemma where most of the kids don't want dull toys and prefer videgames... anyway, I really believe the company isn't facing the crisis for the good... A few steps in the same direction and Lego is gone.
Am I the only one who has noticed that Lego barely sells a kit (in stores) that require any effort or concentration to complete?
When I was younger (here we go....), toy stores always had a great selection of the classic Technics kits. The large, complicated kits seemed to be the hottest items, because they were *challenging* and *interesting*.
Today, most of the sets I see are low-piece count, over-simplifed, plug-the-head-into-the-pelvic-chassis Bionicle garbage, which seems only to make the statement that kids today aren't interested in anything unless it's presented as a completely non-cerebral AARRRGGGHHH-type of monster package.
This really is a shame. I'll never stop appreciating the endless hours I spent creating machines of every type imaginable, and can't help but to think that my exposure to Lego helped to form a little bit of who I am today.
I don't know what a childhood of building Bionicles might do to kid, expect possibly make them wish their parents were cool enough to buy them a toy that doesn't require assembly, like the kid next door.
And that's a sad thing
Could the less use of legos be due to video games???? I think so. Why use your imaginagtion when someone else can do it for you.
Evolution or ID?
Add that to the cost of making the plastic blocks themselves.
Nope. Plastic blocks cannot cost much more than a few cents. It's simple injection molding, the same way they make CDs. Not much material in each block. The only reason lego charges such outrageous prices for them is because they can.
I mean, a microcontroller with three inputs and outputs, 32 kB RAM, and some ROM (512 kiB IIRC) has to cost at least $100
If you think that a microcontroller with 32kB RAM and 512 KB ROM costs >$100 you have never priced one. A microcontroller such as a PICmicro, an Atmel, a Zilog, and so on costs at most $10 for a "deluxe" version with about 30 I/O pins and Flash memory. What Lego is using is most likely a pre-programmed chip w/o Flash, which are about 1/3 of the price. A 512 KB FlashROM chip costs about $6. These are RETAIL prices, what you can get one single chip for. Lego probably gets them for a fraction of the price since they need quite a few of the things.
I am willing to bet that most of the money from the cost of a Mindstorms kit goes towards marketing and product development. Not towards manufacturing. I'm sure the software inside (and outside) the mindstorms thing cost much more to develop than the hardware.
It did, however, have a patent.
And yes, LEGO's patent has expired... at least with regards to the building brick. The patents on the Technic parts are still alive and well afaik.
Megabloks, a company that makes a building brick that is essentially compatible with LEGO, opened up shop almost to the day that LEGO's patent expired on the brick and has been slowly and steadily improving the quality of their own product ever since. They aren't half bad right now.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
When we found out we were having a boy
Because girls aren't supposed to build robots? Don't tell that to my six year old Natasha, whose favorite playtime is spent building K'Nex Battlemechs and Bandai Gundams with her dad.
1953 just called. They want their gender biases back.
Sheesh.
No, lego has gotten into the business of dumbing down their products by making huge specialized pieces and now real lego enthusiasts are buying both themselves and their children bulk used sets off of ebay.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
The article confirms that Lego has been hurting badly. The writing has been on the wall for a while now though. Just look at Lego's product lines over the past 5-10 years. Added: Harry Potter, Star Wars, video games, Bionicle, Sports, Mindstorms. Lost: classic space, castle, pirates. Plus the saddest thing for me, a lack of focus on good Technic sets.
Why so many problems? I think kids expect more from today's toys than just bricks. That's kind of a sad fact that says something about our culture I think. Second, since the expiration of Lego's stud-and-tube patent, there's been competition from Mega Bloks, which are inferior but cheaper. In today's world though, I think it makes sense that many parents choose cheaper rather than better. Another sad fact.
In any event, while I'm unhappy about Mindstorms, I'm happy they're abandoning Harry Potter and the like. They have totally lost their identity by branching out, and I think they really do need to get back to their core business as they're doing now. I wonder though, is it too late already?
There use to be a steady stream of great Technic sets worth getting, but recently good sets have slowed to a trickle, with just one catching my eye recently... 8455 Backhoe. Check it out, it might be one of your last few chances to grab a great Lego set.
Check this out: http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=pres s
See the Jan 8 post. Nothing there about Mindstorms being cancelled.
I just read something on LugNet as well that was an interview at one of the Lego shows, and one of the Lego reps said that Mindstorms 3 was in development.
Here's hoping!
Also, there are no good, cool sets to buy anymore. It's all Bionicle or sets that are 90% "unique" pieces. Every time i go to the toy store i hope to find something along the lines of Space Police or Ice Station or any of the other good sets, and they just don't exist. Therefore, Lego doesn't get my money.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Honestly, I don't see how that's a bad thing. I always thought the Star Wars sets were a bad idea, no matter how neat it is to have a little Lego Emperor. You get the kid a model kit if he wants a model Millenium Falcon. Lego's for building stuff without instructions. Sure, sell the sets, it keeps the kids busy for the rest of Christmas day, but at least pretend you can take it apart and turn it into something else. What's your kid supposed to do when he takes the thing apart the next day and all he has are irregular slanty bricks with Rebel Alliance logos printed on them and Millenium Falcon hull sections? You can't very well go and build castle turrets out of R2D2's head.
If this was a chinese company they'd sell 5lb buckets of assorted pieces for $5.
And each brick would have a lifetime of less than one year, developing cracks and warp. Of the 5 lb, at least 4 lb would be out-of-spec, either fit too loosely or too tight, and they would have sharp, annoying warts where they were carelessly ripped from the molding sprue. The color would vary extremely from batch to batch, be rather dull, and fade rapidly when exposed to the sun.
The problem with LEGO bricks is not that they are overpriced, but that they are overengineered. They are just too good. And quality is just not generally appreciated these days, especially when we're talking toys.
As a child, I had quite a few Matchbox, Corgi and Dinky cars, very accurate models, well made, often in England. Sure, you can still get those brands today, if you want to pay collector prices. The toy stores, at least here, abound with lousy chinese produced stuff, that breaks when you look too hard at it.
Mind you, many of my toys I had inherited from my older brothers. And many of my toys are still in such a good shape, that my son now continues to play with them. That's good for the customer, but it's just not good for sales: either kids inherit a toy (= no sale) or parents don't care about long life, and therefore buy cheaper toys.
I build plastic models (aircraft, military vehicles etc), and I can tell you that precisely molded plastic parts, even when they come in just one color and still attached to the sprue, as plastic model kits do, are *quite* expensive. *Even* when produced in China.
-Lasse