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Lego Welcomes Hack Of Their Design Program
fdiskne1 writes "We've all heard about big companies suing their customers for hacking a product they purchased. It's about time we hear about a company that welcomes it. One of the most geek-friendly toys has just gotten geek-friendlier. CNet News.com has a story about how the Lego company is cheering the fact that people are hacking their public design program to better fit their customers' needs. Lego has a free program (available for Windows and Mac) that allows a person to put in their own 3D design and the program will tell the customer which Lego 'palettes' they need to order to complete the design. The problem with it was that the palettes each contained a number of bags of different shape and color Lego blocks. If someone needed only one block out of a particular palette, they would end up with many bags of bricks they didn't need. The hack involved someone taking an inventory of how many bricks are included in each bag. The program would then tell the customer how many BAGS of each to order, greatly reducing the number of bricks the customer would have ended up not using in the project. I can think of many companies that wouldn't think of doing such a thing. In fact, I can think of many companies that would intentionally use the flaw in their program to make the customer buy even more."
Considering that most of them look to be elemetary school aged, I'd say no.
By doing this, Lego is providing a better service to their customers promoting increased sales in the future. Trying to rope your customers into buying things they do not want may increase sales in the short term but doesn't make sense long term.
There's one thing they won't let you do, though - call them LEGOs.
http://www.legos.com/
They've always been happy about people hacking their stuff. The only time they did have to complain is when some people wrote software for their Mindstorms stuff that used the LEGO name. Under trademark law they have to do that or lose control of the name. (All the other plastic block companies could call their stuff LEGO too, compatable or not.)
A class act. I guess people taking their stuff and building it into something else is kind of their philosophy.
They threatened to sue me... http://www.livejournal.com/users/gthing/78721.html
or else!
Adults with credit cards can use the Intarweb thingy to order what they need direct:
http://shop.lego.com/Product/Factory/About.aspx
KFG
The problem there is quality control. One of the reasons that Lego sets are so great is that you never get a half-molded piece... you never get pieces that don't snap together... you never get pieces that fall out due to temperature changes, etc. You also never get sets with missing pieces... Their plastic technologies are so precise that they actually have different molds for each color of brick, since they shrink to very very slightly different sizes (smaller than tenths of millimeters iirc) and they want the finished pieces to be exactly the same dimensions. You get other companies making sets that don't have these same tolerances and quality control, and you'll end up with sets that don't always go together or stay together... or are incomplete.. (Based on my (probably faulty) memory of some research I did on Lego about 8 or so years go...)
Can you provide data to support this? Any linkage?
It doesn't take much searching to find lots of information about their losses, but here's a link...
http://www.toynewsmag.com/newsitem.php?id=59
And a PDF of their financial statements from their own site...
http://assets.lego.com/upload/contentTemplating/LE GOAboutUs-PressReleases/otherfiles/2057/upload85B7 540F-B204-4D2F-91DB-4FF4E7B5244D.pdf