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Yamauchi Retiring from Nintendo's Board
terrisus writes "While he had stepped down as President a few years back, Hiroshi Yamauchi had remained on Nintendo's Board of Directors.
In June, however, Yamauchi will now be retiring from the Board of Directors as well.
He will be foregoing his multi-million dollar retirement package, instead desiring the money be put to work in other places. He will still be a 10% stockholder in the company.
It's sad to see him go."
But despite being sad probably not a bad thing. Yamauchi is pretty much personally responsible for the fact that Nintendo in the mid-90s were frankly a bunch of unrepentant assholes, and thus indirectly responsible for the fleeing of Square and pretty much all of the rest of Nintendo's developer base as well. His departure from the spot at the helm of Nintendo meanwhile is the chief reason for Nintendo's relative degree of recovery lately. Many companies however, such as Namco, have still indicated they retain hard feelings over the treatment they received from yamauchi.
That said, exactly what is the functional difference between being on the board and owning 10% of the company anyway?
I'm impressed by not taking money for leaving, unlike a certain Fiorina we all know.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Yamauchi's last major decision at Nintendo was to get the company into animated films. http://www.joystiq.com/entry/2511842316440486/ This may be a good idea. PlayStation marginalized Nintendo's consoles, and PSP will probably marginalize Nintendo's handhelds. But if Nintendo makes CG movies in house, they could do Pixar quality animation with Ghibli-quality stories at under half of Pixar's production budget.
Admittedly, Yamauchi wants Nintendo's first movie(s) to be about some ancient Japanese poems, but that may just be some personal favor he's asking the company to do for him, since his hobby is Go and other old Japanese stuff. After that, Nintendo will probably start adapting their games into movies, as well as making original movie franchises.
Nintendo is a relatively small company that can't hold onto an established market once cash-rich conglomerates like Sony and Microsoft set their sights on it. Nintendo is best at creating and exploding new markets that nobody else believes in. They did it with the NES. They did it with Game Boy. They did it by bringing Pokemon to USA (in 1996, Nintendo Power itself predicted that Pokemon was too foreign to become popular in USA). Soon, Nintendo might do it again. This time with movies.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Something to look at here is exactly how much Nintendo is making off of Pokemon outside of just the actual Pokemon video games. Between the cards and the tv show and the movies, Nintendo hasn't followed the traditional paths of either making a video game and pushing it/merchandising it in the media, or a media event like a movie with a video game made about it. They've made a media phenomenon that just happens to incorporate both television media and video game aspects. And it's worked well. It might make sense to do that in other areas besides just that of ugly yellow rats that shoot lightning.
:)
Something to note is that Nintendo is slowly more and more buying up Bandai. This is the company that makes Dragonball Z. I see this as having interesting implications. You might not.
Things like this are actually par the course in Japan, where the yearly salary ratio of the top 10% of wage earners to the bottom 10% is only 4:1. In America it's 15:1, for reference.
In short: yay for work ethic.
~Tirinal
Even though most asian languages just happen to have a one-syllable word for every syllable in the language, that doesn't mean the reverse is true, that every syllable in a word is related to the single-syllable word. The syllables don't mean anything by themselves. It's like that old saw of "assume" being made up of "ass", "you" (hey it's the syllable, right?), and "me". That bit about the chinese word for "crisis" being formed from "danger" and "opportunity" is basically the same way.
... it's meant to be a sort of tongue twister.
Of course, the chinese *do* enjoy wordplay, much like that "assume" bit (my favorite silly phrasing is "assuming makes an ass of u and ming"), so you'll sometimes see these patterns "discovered" anyway. One great example is a chinese story that makes perfect sense written down, but read aloud, every word is "Shiu" (with different tonalities). It doesn't make any sense even to Chinese, it's like that "had had had had had had had had" brainteaser
It doesn't point to some exotic holistic school of thought, just a linguistic principle of economy in assigning common words to single syllables, and even overloading them based on contextual rules that would make Larry Wall blush (and he's got a degree in linguistics).
Of course, Nintendo is a deliberately coined name, and sort of like "Agilent" (it's "agile" and "talent", right?) so it's certainly meant to convey the gist of some meaning. Given the fact that they made playing cards for like a hundred years before getting into electronics, my guess is on the latter (casino) interpretation.
But languages aren't (yet) composed entirely of brand names, so try not to read too much meaning into the pieces of words. It's like postmodernism, if you cut everything up into too-small pieces, you have mush, not components.
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