Slashdot Mirror
Lego Goes Back to the Basics: Building Blocks
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Slashdot recently covered Lego's plan to stop producing its Mindstorms line in response to the Danish company's worst financial loss in history. While the original article linked focused primarily on Lego's plans to cease production on various toy lines, Yahoo News now has a follow-up article that looks in greater detail at Lego's plan for the future. 'We are returning to Lego's former concept,' says Lego owner and president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. 'We're going to focus on building bricks as our main product, concentrating on little kids' eagerness to assemble.' Kristiansen goes on to blame the company's financial woes on its attempt to follow trends rather than focusing on its more traditional products. In turn, the company's plan for 2004 will include a renewed marketing push for Lego bricks as opposed to licensed products like the Harry Potter and Star Wars lines. Toy researcher Joern Martin Steenhold also notes the following in the article: 'All research, including my own, shows that computer games and other electronic games take up only 20 to 30 percent of children's play time. Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"
Like you were going to make money from your crappy code in the first place. Dream on.
On Coolidge Corner in Brookline, MA there is a Walgreens drug store. On another corner at the same instersection there is a CVS drug store. Now if you go up the street from Walgreens what is the next store that you run into? Another CVS, less than a half a block from the other one. And these aren't drugstores that are set at the back of a gigantic parking lot. The storefront is on the sidewalk. You could throw a rock from any one of the drugstores and hit any of the other ones. I am sure there is some reason for this, but I have yet to be told what it is. Of course you have to go up the street to find the three toy stores within a block of each other (at least one is going out of business) and none of them has a good selection of Legos.
Lasers Controlled Games!
"Now, craploads of them have gone out of business"
They're building craploads of new Walgreens around me, along with 3 or 4 other drugstores thanks to the fogey boom coming with their prescription drugs.
The new Walgreens are not as big as the old ones. They fallow the large convenience store/drug store format.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Yeah, Walgreens is definitely hurting... sales up 18%, comps up 13%, no debt taken during expansion... looks like bankrupcy any day!!
Well, the rumors of Walgreen's death, then, are greatly exaggerated. Here in Oregon we've already had two new Walgreens open close to me. One in Sherwood, and one in Wilsonville, just a very short walk from my apartment. (Hmm, being a SCS, methinks I should put in an application)
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
It sure beats watching the same mind-numbing gameshows every evening with your fat, ugly wife, which you married because she got pregnant in high school, doesn't it?
Walgreens pharmacy did a similar thing. It seemed like suddenly every single corner had a Walgreens on it- everywhere you looked, another frickin Walgreens. Now, craploads of them have gone out of business, and the corner is left with a VERY cheap building. They didn't do themselves, or anyone else any good by over-expanding. (My old neighborhood had an awesome coffee shop that leased a corner building. Eventually, the landlord sold the corner lot, the coffee shop went out of business, and nice shiny new Walgreens was built. 2 years later, it is an empty building, where once my favorite coffee shop, with a fireplace even, stood.)
As others have already pointed out, Walgreens sales are up, and they're building like crazy. A new one is going up in my town even though there's already another one not a mile or two away. They're doing quite well.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I don't expect you to make money, Mr.Bond. I expect you to die! HAHAHAHAHA!
There was a nifty program called Rawcopy floating around back in the day that solved many a backup problem with older games. I'm not sure if it still exists, though, as I certainly have found newer programs that are much more up-to-date.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
"Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"
:)
I dunno, that seems to sum up the intellectual average of most posts... Slashdot is still firmly in the target niche.