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Lego Mindstorms: What Went Wrong?
latif writes "In recent years, Lego Mindstorms has generated more media buzz for Lego than
all of its other product lines combined, but surprisingly, Mindstorms seem to
be out of favor at Lego. The Mindstorms line has been cut down to a
single set and Lego is not interested in marketing even that set. Lego has been in
a lot of financial trouble in recent times and its neglect of a product line
with solid sales potential might seem odd but this is not so. I have done an
analysis of Lego's Mindstorms options and my analysis indicates that Lego has
solid economic reasons for backing away from the Mindstorms line."
Similarly, what went wrong with Slashcode this afternoon? It seems like four or five articles have all appeared at once even though their timestamps claim they were posted hours ago. Note the time of this article, the time of my post....and yet, FP? Wtf?
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Did someone forget to push a button?
The thing that made legos great was how much they used to enable creativity. Now they've gone the other way, and all the sets prevent you from making your own creation because of wierd specialized pieces.
Go back to the basics. Hell, just go back to Space Police, Blacktron, Castle, and Forest legos. That'd be cool.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
On the plus side, at least they keep on churning out basic tubs.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
is that someone forgot to hit "Process Queue" about 10 hours and 46 minutes ago ;P
but seriously, I havent heard much in the way of anything from lego in quiet some time even the new younger demographic barely recognizes its existance anymore, with the advent of so many other alternatives to distract an already ADD generation.
I remember the vast amount of options in my childhood to amuse my imagination, legos and erector sets
but then I found out our princess was in another castle and it all went downhill from there
I love Legos* to death, but they are just too damn expensive. Normal, everyday people just don't like the idea of paying a hundred bucks for a couple of handfuls of plastic blocks, no matter how cool they are.
On the more specific topic of the Mindstorms kit, the author of that article seems to assume everyone who might be interested in Lego would be interested in Mindstorms, which just isn't true. Most people aren't interested in programming their own toys. I know it is difficult for geeks to believe this (and I say this as a professional C++ programmer for the past 10 years), but it is true.
*(yeah, that's right, I called them Legos, suck it down trademark Nazis)
No wonder Lego is in financial trouble--Someone is stealing them all!
And for their victims - Lego playing boys. Two Lego stories within hours!
I lost interest in Lego before Mindstorms, because all the sets I wanted - like the Model Team line or the high end Technics - cost over $200. They might have more sucess if they had the more popular models in stores and moved the higher end stuff to mail order status to reduce inventory and price. Instead of getting a phancy box with packs of individual parts, you get an instruction book in a plain box with a bunch of parts in zip lock baggies.
Yes, a Mindstorms set's production costs are probably 10% of retail, but this is the toy business, where production costs are not the main issue, and keeping on top of a fickle marketplace is.
There are likely to be slotting fees that Lego has to pay on an ongoing basis to keep each of its products in stores, and no doubt Lego is trying to make the smart business decision of maximizing profitability by using that shelf space to sell products that have higher volume and the same level of profitability.
No argument that it would be cool to have more Lego Mindstorms sets available, but unfortunately this ain't the perfect world, and things are never as simple as they seem from outside the corporation.
I heard that in 2004, American colleges graduated but 40,000 engineers while Pacific Rim ones graduated 450,000. Not only that, when you consider that 1/3 to 1/2 of American students are actually forigners, the picture looks even bleaker!
This is sad and pathetic! America needs a reality check lest we become an Engineering third world country!What went wrong is they charge $200 for a toy. That's the only reason I don't have one.
Yeah, you can find some on ebay for less, but who's counting those 718 parts?
Over at legoeducation.com you can find school-oriented Mindstorms kits, and you can also buy each of the most expensive parts (RCX, sensors, motors) individually.
Better to
My favorite Lego sets have always been the Kinetics set (the ones with the gears and pullies and blocks with holes). Those would've been so much more fun if I had a Mindstorm set...
When I look at Mindstorm, it's anyone's first step into programmable machines and robotics. It's actually how they teach some Mechanical Engineering and Systems Design Courses at school. It's an extremely versitile tool for learning. The Science/Engineering summer camp that the faculty runs, some age groups have extensive portions of the week focused on Mindstorms, and the kids loves it.
I admit that there may not be too much profit to marketing the set commercially, but to give it up entirely, I think a lot of benefits would be lost.
-----
"If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on." - Murphy's Law
Someone made a "battlebot out of lego mindstorms, they didn't get past the qualifying rounds though, some about being smashed to peices?!
For Free Computer Help, and Technical Answers
the price of legos is the problem, duh. someone who knows better figure out how much they are charging for a 1x1 brick. bet it is above 10 cents.
"I'm not high, just stupid" --JY
It's an interesting write-up, but I think the conclusions latif's come to aren't warranted. Firstly, all the speculation about Mindstorms price elasticity of demand are based on the assumption that strong consumer interest exists. Lego Mindstorms is competing against (read in the same price range) as Robosapien and the like. These toys are in a premium segment of the market - they're the "big gift" for Christmas and birthdays. Without having seen any sales figures, I'd be surprised if there were strong demand for Mindstorms - the price is just too high. It's anecdotal, but I've only ever seen a few (if any) mindstorm stock items on the shelves in any of the stores I've ever been into. And, they've typically been in electronics stores, not toy shops. That's not typically a characteristic of a high demand item.
To be honest, it looks like someone's just completed an economics course and decided to try applying their knowledge to a real-world problem. I mean, the only point in examining price elasticity of demand in this context would have been if one had already established that Lego was losing money and were interested in determining whether or not Lego could raise prices without sacrificing sales. Same goes for the piece cost analysis. Which doesn't take into account the complexity of unique parts, I might add - Lego can achieve some degree of economies of scale with their common parts (6x2 / 4x2 bricks, helmets, etc). Mindstorms has a large number of parts that are only relevant for the Mindstorms line (such as gears, IR sensors, pulleys, etc). Production costs are likely to be higher, and because they're not piggy-backing on a fad (like Harry Potter or Star Wars), sales are also probably going to be lower.
The assumption that Mindstorms is cannibalising sales is also a stretch, in my opinion. Far more likely that their association with movie brands such as Star Wars and Harry Potter creates substitutable products. Both those brands, as an example, are pitched at the same demographic. And, neither is strictly complementary, from a kid's perspective. Which would you rather - a complete line-up of Star Wars characters, vehicles, and environs, or a blend of HP and SW?
In my opinion, the simpler explanation is that Mindstorms appeals to a very small niche - kids who think with parents who are trying to encourage learning and are willing to spend the time with their kids. Far more likely that they never achieved the scale of sales they were expecting, but because of the sunk costs associated with R&D and brand development, they're unwilling to kill the line entirely. Whether or not that's the economically wise decision depends on their unit revenue and long-run average cost of production.
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
But let's talk about Mindstorms. I bought one when they first came out. They cost $200. That is a lot of money for a kid's toy (you can buy a Nintendo DS and two games for that). You can only program them with the Lego Mindstorms software which I found annoying and limited (I soon found the free C complier for it on the internet). I don't even think it would work with my Mac that I have today.
What kind of sensors did you get? As I remember you got.. 2 touch sensors. Or was it 3. And two motors. They offered rotational sensors (cost extra), a vision system (costs a TON extra), etc. I just spent $200 on a Lego set (that didn't include enough pieces, if you ask me), I'm NOT going to go buy a $50-$100 camera for it (I don't know what it costs, wasn't available when I bought it).
I think that was the last Lego set I bought. I used to love Lego. But there isn't anything like it today that I know of. Legos aren't the same. I remember building house kits, airplanes kits, a moon base with a monorail, the trains, and all sorts of other stuff. Today they seem to license half their product lines and there is almost nothing "normal" like I remember.
Maybe Megablocks or one of the other "rip-offs" is better. I don't know. I never looked. But Lego priced themselves out of my market. A quick check on Amazon shows the set is still $200. What can I buy for $200 bucks? Let's look at some of the things I've been looking at lately. I can buy a little stirling engine that will run off sunlight or the heat of my had for $140. Or for the same amount, I can buy a Steam Engine kit. A working kit that includes a whistle, governor, and more. Both of those leave me with $60 to spend (a video game, perhaps?).
The older I got, the fewer Lego products I got as gifts for Christmas and such. While there were things I wanted, they just got more expensive. About the only models I remember wanting to build since I was maybe 10 or 12 (I'm currently 22) cost $100-$200.
Between the proliferation of video games, other electronic gadgets, and issues like I mentioned above, I think Lego will be a gonner soon. My parents had a hell of a time finding me an Erector set when I was a kid. I don't know if that has changed, but between that and Lego, what is there for kids to build things with these days?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I've bought Mindstorms and a zillion other sets for my son. He loved assembling the other sets but never even touched Mindstorms. Reason: it was too complicated for him to get started on (even though I bought the books etc. etc.). The way to get Mindstorms on track is dirt simple: Mindstorms Wars!! A TV show showing how cool it is to build crazy contraptions that have to do something to either beat each other or perform some quest. Make the thing Open Source: to enter, you must submit your design online (available after the show). This way, any kid with a kit can download the software and build the EXACT same machine as on the show. Kids today don't have the luxury of the time we had. They need to be part of fads right quick. This might be an answer.
*** Don't be dull.***
Specialized bricks are what is killing Lego!
There, we may all go on with trying to catch up with all the new stories that just appeared...which are dated several hours ago.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
It was easy to go from TinkerToys to modelling of chemical structures.
Obviously Hemos saw this post, and was so shocked by the slagging on Slashdot going on in its own forums, that he took the time to build a time machine and avert this disaster!
That we still remember the past any other way is just an artifact of the time travel device used. Hemos, we salute you!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
In a computer class I taught to middle school kids last year, I was the lucky recipient of a grant to outfit the whole class (7 groups worth of kids) with Mindstorms. I spent a semester teaching them not only the basics of Mindstorms, but how to program, how to debug, how to test, and all the other basics for computer programming. They had a blast doing the different projects, and I've never seen these kids so engaged before. Several of them actually wanted to come in after school and work on their robots which is unheard of. This is sad if Lego is cutting back on that and all but phasing it out.
I was in a club in high school called TSA (Technology Student Association) and one of the most popular events at regional, state, and national levels of competition is the System Control event, which 99% of teams use the Lego Dacta/Mindstorms equipment. However, with all these single-use model pieces, theres no real room left for the imagination, thus why it's dying.
If Lego starts killing off these branded, model-building ploys and goes back to where they are strong - a tool to use the imagination, I think they will survive. I've been seeing some new stuff that looks promising, some firehouses and trucks and such, that reminds me of Lego of old, perhaps if they can go more that way (and back to other good ole themes, Pirates, Castles, Space, Submarines, etc - things that you can build the models once, then break them down and mix and match to build your own ideas) then they will be ok. If not, RIP Lego, a victim of bad decision making.
the only person I know who regularly buys legos, is a girl, who's obsessed with Harry Potter. Even though she's 30, she still buys every single Harry Potter branded lego set. Before you reply to this..ask yourself how many hundreds of dollars you've spent on Legos in the past few months.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
Then there is always the having good software issue...
Two guy I work with have a kids who are involved with other 4th and 5th graders doing a club thing with Mindstorms. One guy had me redo an unused five year old laptop from Win2K (which it came with) down to Win98. This is because he heard the software (even the newer version) works best under Win98. Most of my web searches seemed to confirm this information.
If it doesn't work well under XP, which comes on almost every new PC, you aren't going to get a lot of good "word of mouth" advertising.
After owning a RIS kit for some years now + expansion kits, having gone to the Robotics challenge at LegoLand, and demoing the kit at various school functions, here's my observations about it:
This kit has or had potential to hook kids into robotics, but IMHO they should emphasize extending a "video game" interface into real life peripherals (ie, doing something in a "video game" experience causes something in real life with Mindstorms something like augmented reality). Once kids see augmented reality with Mindstorms, then that can hook them into learning how to do the more complex things, like programming. Furthermore, open up the kit so other companies can extend the kit without threats of lawsuits from Lego.
Why do we have to turn everything in to a time limited, disposable, keep repurchasing nightmare?
Because companies are in for the long haul.
Let's say they take your advice, and build a Mindstorms lineup with the cool electronics bricks on the cheap. Say, $40 for the RIS with just the electronics and mechanical parts. Maybe a couple of add-on sets for more electronics and mechanical gears. Then say they go back to selling the big boxes of bricks again, like they had when I was a kid. You use these to build the models themselves, and the RIS stuff for the movement and such. Mark it all at a reasonable price so that for $100-150, you can get one fantastic set of Legos that will let you build anything you can imagine, as a kid. Nothing huge, but all the joy of Lego plus the learning experience of the Mindstorms gear. Easily done, and they'd make a killer profit. Everybody would get one.
Then next year rolls around, and they go out of business. Those Lego bricks *last*. My sister's kids will be playing with the same bricks I had 30 years previously. As long as you don't lose them to the evils of the vaccum cleaner, they just freakin' last forever.
Lego just has an unusual business. They're into selling timeless toys, but the problem with timeless toys is that they are actually timeless. They sold the big boxes of bricks 30 years ago and it almost killed the company. It's all down to profit, really. They make more money selling those crappy models with all the custom pieces and selling *less* of them than they did by selling the generic bricks on the cheap at a still substantial profit.
Yes, we all want the big buckets of bricks and we all want the electronic coolness that is the Mindstorms line, but the fact is that selling those is not a way to achieve long term profitability. They're not trying to sell to you right now, they're trying to continue selling to you and your kids, and their kids, forever.
Okay, so that sucks, but it does make sense from their point of view.
One thing not seemingly mentioned anywhere is that Lego seems to have the notion building internally of starting up a different market for the older people into Lego. Us old people who still remember the big buckets of bricks can sign up for their catalog. I got one the other day, and yes, you can buy bricks in bulk. Not random sets, but sets of specific brick types, basically by the bag. It's kinda interesting, actually. For the Lego-philes, I recommend looking around their webpage and signing up for the catalog to see what's what there. Yes, the catalog is full of all the Harry Potter and Spiderman crap, but in the center is a nice foldout where you can just buy pieces in bulk. You could amass one hell of a large lego collection for a decent price by buying one bag of everything they have. Or if you have a specific idea, it would be great for making a large model of whatever type you like.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I've spent $850 last month on Lego, and $1200 last year.
What did I buy? Last month, it was all Star Wars: a Death Star II (almost 3500 pieces!), a Millenium Falcon and a Snow Speeder. Last year, it was a mix of Star Wars and other technics sets.
Mind you, because of the specialized nature of a lot of the technics parts, until I bought the Star Wars stuff last month *I didn't have enough basic parts* to build random non-technics creations. Now I have more wings, flats and other spacy-parts than I know what to do with. 8)
I agree with the other posters, that Lego has become more specialized and that this is hurting its usefulness as a toy for imaginative kids. However, they are also faced with the problem of trying to sell more Legos to the parents kids who already have plenty. That just doesn't work for most parents, unless there is some 'super new, super cool' branded theme to the sets so that parents will buy them. Harry Potter or Star Wars are both brands that a parent will buy for their kid for Christmas. They are much more likely to get that than a police station or something.
Just my 2c.
They found the guy...sold over $600K on ebay, and $300K on hand.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/25/lego.theft.ap/
One thing the author does not seem to take into account is the fixed cost of creating machines, factories, etc.. to build any blocks or other items specific to mindstorms. Even if the RIS is selling for 3 times the price of similarly equiped sets if way less people are buying the RIS it may not be worth the cost of keeping the factory running and other fixed (yearly) costs to produce that product line. The same issues come into play with the cheap chinese product he compared to the lego product. Additionally quality, place of production and other factors can all combine to make it considerably more expensive.
Frankly I find the canibalization idea pretty hard to swallow. It just doesn't seem reasonable to believe that the same people using the RIS would otherwise be out there buying all the different specialized lego models. Most likely they would be the people out there buying the big boxes of assorted pieces if they were buying legos at all. The best explanations I can think of along these lines is that either LEGO was afraid of dilluting it's child friendly brand by marketing toys which might be too complex for some young children or that if feared connecting basic lego sales to something like mindstorms where more savy adult customers are involved might allow FischerTechnik to get a foot in the door. However, neither of these seem plausible.
Ultimately I suspect the economics of selling mindstorms were just more complicated than the author realizes. He never quotes actual mindstorms sales figures, only a positive press buzz, so it is quite posssible they simply never achieved wide enough adoption to make money and there are large costs he never even considers. Marketing, deals with stores for promotions and other costs may all play a role in lego's deciscion.
While I don't think we can really say what the whole story is without more data I think a more reasonable guess is something like this. Despite positive press buzz mindstorms simply don't sell enough to generate significant amounts of profit. While the development of mindstorms itself may be a sunk cost this means it simply isn't work lego's while to develop new addons, promote the product or otherwise devote further resources. Lego discontinued all mindstorm products other than the RIS because these other *mindstorm* products were canibalizing revenue from the RIS. Even though these other product lines may have themselves been profitable without the same sales as RIS they just wouldn't have as high a margin so if a reasonable fraction of people would buy a second RIS if they didn't have these other options lego might improve profitability by dropping these additional sets. If they don't think it is worth investing more money in the mindstorm line this has no real downside for them.
As for why lego doesn't simply adjust prices to make the mindstorms sufficently profitable to justify further investment I suspect things are a little more complicated than the author suggests. The demand curve is likely far from linear which dramatic drop offs in sales if they push the price much above $200 and beyond what most people consider to be in the 'toy' range. So raising the price much isn't really an option but this doesn't imply that lowering the price would have similarly dramatic increases in purchases (the elasticity is far from constant). Likely in order to make mindstorm sales high enough to be worth significant R&D money they would have to lower the price so considerably that then mindstorms would directly canabalize regular lego sales (if you can get the computer set for an extra $30 who wouldn't).
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
2 lego articles in one day here? whats going on? CONSPIRACY!!!
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
When it comes to the play experience, much of the fun of assembling a robot is similar to the fun of building a city or an empire in SimCity or Age of Empires. Instead of gears and pulleys, you manipulate serfs or workers or whatever ... but otherwise it's all figuring out what thingies do what and how to combine them to do what-ever.
Lego has the great advantage of being physical and tactile, but OTOH computer games do much better with graphics and sound. I feel the same sense of pride in a well-built empire as I do in a well-build Lego thingy ... and the computer game has the added element of competition (... and, ahem, cheat codes ... .)
As to the impact on our educational system ... it may be unfortunate that the engineering skills Lego can teach are something America may be falling behind on, based on the number of engineers in our schools. However, the skills of organizing a complex organization (a.k.a. empire) may be just as valuable. Is it better to be a top-notch engineer, or to be the employer of a dozen top-notch engineers?
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Too f*cking expensive.
He also throws in words like 'ought' & 'should' which have no place in any kind of analysis. This "analysis" doesn't even have 1 (one) graph or bar chart.
*SPOILER*
His giant conclusion is that Mindstorm canabalized existing Lego sales... meaning about half the article was mental wankery.
It is a good effort... but lacking.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Most of what has been said is true. In addition to pricing issues, I believe that the expansion sets were not very well laid out. After purchasing my initial kit in 1999, I waited for the expansions to come with the other cool sensors, but the kits that came really didn't offer much (especially at their $50 price point). To get the special sensors I was going to have to special order them individually at an outrageious price. I did purchase a few Technic kits to canabalize for parts for my robots though. The other issue I had with the kit, though this wouldn't have caused sales problems but would have been nice for the next generation of mindstorms, was that all my robots were built around the brick, motors and sensors. If the motors and sensors had been slighly less expensive and more readily available individually, I would have picked up more of them and if the main brick could have been smaller and seperated from the robot somehow (perhaps with a central wiring harness brick) then I could have built more robots without having to take one robot apart just to make another one. This would have help increase sales. I think that Lego should have embraced the other programming options for the Mindstorm.
Bottom line, smaller Mindstorm kits on store shelves for motors, sensors, gears, etc; Continued gradual improvements to keep the product line moving forward.
Back in the (my) day, Lego just sold boxes full of rectangular blocks, mostly just red and white ones, with some gray flat plates and the occasional clear or triangular roof tiles. I made TWA jetliners, Apollo rockets (they had to be square, since I didn't have enough curved pieces), space ships, tanks, garages, bridges and tunnels for my Hot Wheels, etc.
The sets didn't include step-by-step instructions for making any of these things. AAMOF, I don't remember any instruction sheets at all.
Inspiration came from the pictures on the Lego box and the imaginations of my friends and myself.
Years ago, I looked back at my Legos and realized it was probably the most influential toy of my childhood. Hence, I wanted to pass this glorious experience on to my son. I spent, along with the help of many relatives, literally thousands of dollars on Lego for my boy.
We started with Duplo, then graduated up the Lego ladder. As time passed, the kits became, as others have noted here, very specific to themes, and highly specialized. Sometimes the pieces were so specialized that they would not work well with other kits.
I watched my son assemble these kits, following the supplied instructions exactly. He was very good at it, and he was very happy with the results he got. He also got to be very good at troubleshooting where he put in the wrong piece in Technics sets. This was a Good Thing(TM), I thought.
Then one day, while he was bored, I suggested that take apart some of his Lego and build something new from the pieces. He looked at me like I had three heads. He asked me where he could get instructions for assembling new objects, since he had already assembled all of the variations of the kits' instruction manuals.
I was crestfallen. It confirmed right then and there that Lego Corporate had, over the years, managed to remove all the imagination and excitement of Lego and kids being creative with simple chunks of plastic.
Then Mindstorms came out! I was so excited that I bought a set right away, plus a few (expensive) accessories for it. I gave it to my son, at the time 9 years old, for Christmas. Once he saw that it contained no instructions for specific projects he lost interest quickly.
Some may read my post and judge my son to be an unimaginitive drudge without capacity for creative thought. He isn't that at all. But he has been conditioned by Lego, through Lego products, to treat Lego as a step-by-step construction project, much like a 3D jigsaw puzzle.
Lego might as well print on the box "No Imagination Required!" on all their products.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
Actually, something more like Radio Shacks Vex line
r yId=2032404&cp=2032062.2032398
http://www.radioshack.com/family/index.jsp?catego
There are some great sets that Lego still makes.
The Designer series is top notch and a current favorite of mine. Sure there are some custom pieces here and there but the majority are hinges and cosmetic blocks that can be used in many interesting ways. The models are great too; I've got a T-rex by my monitor at work and a (sadly discontinued) crab sitting on my system at home.
The Technic series is still going strong from the eighties. What's not to like?
The City is like the LegoLand sets of old that you probably remember. There are a few other lines that are in the same vein but those little yellow people don't interest me as much as they did when I was a child.
And the new Factory series are designed by fans. I'm strongly recommending that you check them out.
Lego is a for profit company and will continue to manufacture what sells. Licensed products like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Dora the Explorer are making them money so they will continue to make them. They have had moderate success with their annoying Bionicle line so it is still being added to. All is not lost yet; Lego is still making some decent and interesting products, so go out and support those.
P.S. You can also get buckets of regular blocks. Think about that the next time you want to buy that Star Destroyer.
Lego has a great product. There is nothing wrong with the product. It is not hard to develop or research because the blue prints can be derived from real life applications, like the Technic series was.
The person who wrote the article stated that Lego assembly was "scripted" and "devoid of imagination". The only people who wrote that stuff are the people who HAVE not imagination. Generally, this can be attributed to the marketing agency which limits itself to a select few brand names or icons that they believe people will recognize and buy products related to the other icons or brands insted of the Lego brand. Hence, Spider-man, and Harry Potter get more recongintion than Lego. The people in charge of marketing did not help Lego, the helped the people at Marvel Comics and Time Warner. Accounting also has a hand in the destruction of the Lego corporation. These are simiple plastic peices that can be manufactured at any plastics molding plant. However, the accounting department decided that only China should be given the honor. Hence, instead of producing an inexpensive product, the cost of creating the Legos have increased.
If consumers aren not happy, the investors won't be happy, and the Lego corporation won't be happy. It is a loss for everyone.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
That's not the only stupid thing they've done recently. In 2004 they decided to change their 50-odd year core colour palette.
3 .htm.
The light gray and the dark gray changed into a light blueish gray and a dark blueish gray, which were given the derisory name "bley" by the aficionado AFOL community (AFOL=Adult Friends Of Lego).
All new sets since 2004 contain only pieces with the new grays, making it difficult for owners of existing sets to build anything without ending up with a patchwork of different shades of gray in their creations. The brown color was also changed into a more reddish colour.
The official response from the LEGO CEO can be read here: http://f24.parsimony.net/forum61776/messages/9746
As far as I am concerned, I think LEGO is aiming too much towards the market of "grown-up" children who are interested in robots and monsters. The Bionicle sets are cool, but they do not belong in the LEGO construction system. They don't even have studs, they don't interlock with the standard pieces. They sell well, good for them, but they are just one of endless companies to fight in that market.
My feeling is that LEGO could rediscover its roots (and sell) by targeting once again the small children market, with small sets mostly made of standard pieces, as in the famed Legoland series, or the much-loved Classic Space series.
The fact that LEGO is currently showing no sense of direction saddens me to no end.
To conclude with a further tiny bit of information, if you want to find again the old sets that you loved as a child, you might find this site quite interesting: www.bricklink.com
Legos don't die. That's half their fun. If the company goes bankrupt tomorrow and liquidates everything they have, renaming Legoland to Megabloktopia and dumping the Harry Potter franchise, there's more than enough Legos out there to sustain the hard-core Lego fans until the generic people step up production.
Specialized bricks have their place. I agree on the one hand that many of them ARE one-use only crap. It's true. I used to love getting their space sets (seems like a popular choice here) and trying to make copies of space sets I already had, and sometimes ones that I just saw in the nifty catalogues that used to come out and for those, you usually needed a couple of those specialized pieces. Great concept... warring space empires ripping off each other's designs for their own knock-off vehicles.
Then came the age of pirates. I loved the boats and still have a huge fleet of them, but the set that is both my most beloved and my most hated was that one where you made a small island fortress using three (I think... I'd have to dig it out of the closet) huge wall pieces and a cannon. I didn't have enough matching pieces to add on to it without it looking stupid, and using the walls for another project always looked a little stupid becuase they didn't fit in with the rest of my sets very well.
And then I couldn't use my basic bricks because they looked out of place and kiddy (who has a solid blue townhouse next to their neighbor's solid yellow townhouse? And what pirate would be caught dead with a bright red castle?) Next the doors looked out of place so they went out of circulation... then the thick wheel units...
Eventually I just gave up on legos altogether because basically I could make the set and have a fun shelf-saver or I could have a bunch of little dinky pieces that, when I was younger, I would have loved turning into lasers for space ships (since EVERYTHING became a laser for my space army's ships) but now exist as just feeder for the bottom of my tubs.
Long story longer, the bricks didn't change... we did. With a little creativity all those one use only pieces probably can be used for all kinds of things... we're just too short-sighted to enjoy them without Lego giving us a couple of alternative ideas. I was blown away the time I saw someone place a fence upside down between two rows of holes and built up from there. My suggestion... give those one-offs to your kids and see how many cool things they can come up with.
As for mindstorms themselves (so I at least appear to be on topic)... never tried them for the same reason I didn't enjoy the few Technic sets I tried... they weren't "pure" Lego. Although I'm sure this is news to some of you, but not everyone that plays with Legos is an engineer in training, some of us just liked having another medium to play in and trying to work the technic stuff into the stuff we were already building was more trouble than it was worth. Nobody is blaming Lego for the lack of support of Clickits or that morphing-boy-show lego set, both of which I think would have touched much larger markets than the robot-fan group.
Oh, and while I'm complaining... I saw the Megablok's Narnia set, the Winter Rescue one, and could I be any more disappointed? Well, only if Lego had made it. There's the mini-figs of a few players and then almost everything else is one big one-use-only brick. It's bad enough they've probably scared Marvel out of the Construction toy market... now they're ruining the one thing that could have given Harry Potter legos some real fight.
High, never flexible price and, of course, the resurrection of its arch-enemy from the death.
I'm suprized they don't have a $100-200 kit that has a motor, video cam, and wheels, so one could wirelessly control the vehicle one makes. That'd even work for non-Lego hovercraft.
Um, why do you care about Legos? Why on earth would you perform an analysis of any sort on Legos? They are plastic blocks. Do you need to know more? I thought is was, "Stuff that matters". Legos do not matter regardless of your delusions of youth.
Yeah, from all the complaining and naysaying going on in this discussion, you'd think that the only things Lego sells are Bionicle and Harry Potter. They still have a very good lineup of Technic, city, and box-o-generic brick sets (alas there's nothing really like the old space, pirate, and castle sets)
Why do people not realize that these products exist?
Because they don't sell. Lego advertises the licensed products and puts them on their limited shelf space at places like Wal-Mart because those are the fast-sellers.
The worst things that ever happened to childhood was when they figured out how to really successfully market things to kids as well as they do to adults. Kids are much more impressionable and easily manipulated. Advertising to kids is really kind of messed up if you think about it.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I spent about $150 on construction toys for my baby cousins, but decided against Legos. I wanted toys that were more mechanically oriented.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The problem with mindstorms was that it was only entertaining for a certain amount of time. Once you learned the programming and how to make a robot that could follow a black line, there was really nothing else you could do that would be all that entertaining. Other lego sets have more flexibility once you get bored with what the instructions tell you to make.
One of my brothers friends had some real solid gold and silver lego bricks. His father was a goldsmith and seemingly just made them for fun.
I think most of ours were inherited or from garage sales. Though i do remember when i first got one of the knights and castles models that had custom pieces - even back then i wasn't too happy about it.
Maybe Lego are running Mindstorms into a siding because it turns kids onto programming and thus away from building real things with Lego?
This is a bit of a reach, but I know that as a kid I soon lost interest in making real things once I learned to program. You can't save an earlier version of a Lego model before making a revision. And I know I'm not the only one.
Xenu loves you!
I think you've hit the nail on the head.
I'd expect that the "target market" is neither the typical Slashdot reader nor the 30-year-old-woman-Potter-Fanatic. I'd expect that the target market is children aged 7-13, and their parents.
The fact that Lego Group's best customers now include 30-year-old-women, and Slashdot readers are the only people who care, strongly suggests that the Group has a problem.
What, exactly, does a Harry Potter-branded Lego set offer your acquaintance that a regular action figure doesn't? Does she play with them? Disassemble and reassemble them to re-enact Potter stories, or make up her own?
Or did she just buy the product because it had a Harry Potter logo on it? If so, she's not a Lego customer, she's just a Harry Potter fan who happens to buy some Lego products every now and then. And that's not a healthy target market for any company.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
I still have Lego bricks from my childhood, and they still mate with brand-new bricks. You're buying a lifetime product here. Expect to pay a little more for it.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That's why TV commercials directed at directly at young children is illegal in Norway. But that doesn't help much. Some satellite channels broadcast from UK so that they can get around this :(
Like many here, I'd say I did the same - used to build any space-ship seen on TV in a somewhat square form. Even out of red house bricks if necessary (grey being rarer than it was before space lego). If you wanted a model, you'd get an Airfix kit instead - but they had far less appeal to me. I don't know how long I'd play with my Lego creations before pulling them apart into something else, but it felt more like drawing, than gluing and painting plastic. Modeling was more about make model, display model - you didn't even play with it after. I think that attracts a different personality type.
.NET Harry Potter edition?
Of course I think one thing that's really hit Lego has been computer games - the feeling I'd get playing the early versions of Sim City or Civ was pretty much the same as I'd get from covering the entire floor area with a Lego city. And like Lego the fun has been driven out of those games as they've got closer to reality in their graphics.
Does the decline of Lego explain the rise of Visual Studio? Just click the components into place and there - you've made a program. Will be have
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
I used to get Technics kits for Christmas, and I loved them. Sometimes I wish I still had my kits around so I could hack up something cool.
Thanks for the story, I never heard of FischerTechnik before but I have a set on the way!
I remember in the height of my Lego interest (around 1981-1982) the family went to some department store in London just before christmas and there was a big Lego section all setup. In the middle was this huge castle, the turrets reached the ceiling. It had this whole town setup leading up to it. It was awesome. I must have spent a good half hour looking around it at all the detail, gathering ideas for my own smaller creations. I owned other building stuff around the same time, including some European thing called Tente, which had a ton of specialised bricks back then, you could build all kinds of space stuff with it. But it always felt like you were being "hand-held" during the construction of anything, like with Lego you can take the basic blocks and make it and it was more of a challenge. I guess it's that whole boundary->creativity thing.
Task Mangler
i will not hash over what others have said so well.
I stopped playing with Legos when i started playing with
girls. both are expensive - only one is worth the cost
used to be so much better than Lego. I wonder what their markt share is today? I think they went through some rough times, but I am happy to see that they are still around. As a kid I used to have some Lego stuff, but once I moved to FischerTechnik, I never looked back. Too bad it seems to be not so well known outside of germany.
In the beginning he wanted me to make things for him, mostly airplans, but he's slowly starting to make his own stuff. I was god damn proud, the first time he came up to me with a odd looking lump of bricks and told me it was an airplan.
I'll probably buy him regular legos one day, but I'll also probably throw-away the building instructions and tell him to just look at the cover, if he want to make the official thing.
TC - My Photos..
Why do people not realize that these products exist?
Because they're being stocked at fewer and fewer places. The last time I saw a Mindstorms set was in a little mom-and-pop toy store. The box was crushed, beaten up, and opened, but they were still asking $175 for it. I haven't seen Technics since Clinton was president.
We didn't even have instructions when we started out with Lego! It makes it more fun.
Lego have really shot themselves in their foot by stopping sets from being re-useable.
I guess their thinking goes: Sets less reuseable --> more sets bought but actually the case is that if sets are more re-useable people want more sets because they want to build bigger and bigger things!
You can _never_ have enough Lego!!
This was my masters project. Ball and Plate system
I say we just keep on using legos in scientific projects and prove to them how valuable legos are.
I've never had an easier time prototyping a model, and the finished instrument table, make out of aluminum and stainless steel to a very high precision, shows the value of legos in the prototyping process.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
They're expensive for a very good reason. The manufacturing tolerances on those little bastards are absurdly tight, because they have to click together solidly, tightly enough that you can build something out of a few hundred bricks and not have it crack apart under its own weight, but loosely enough that they can be pried apart with the force an average 8-year-old can exert. That implies very demanding engineering requirements indeed. Take a look at those little bricks, and measure them. I can easily believe the dimensions on any of the next million bricks off LEGO's assembly line all match to within 0.1% or better.
Now, that would be not so terribly hard to do in metal, because metal is a very reliable material to work. You can mold it, punch it, machine it and cast it and easily make sure every one of a million copies of a given piece matches the rest to the nearest tenth millimeter. But it is a real bitch in plastic, because plastic has all kinds of non-Newtonian fluid weirdness that make it much harder to positively guarantee the final dimensions of a piece.
In short, LEGO's ability to manufacture those bricks in plastic and to the required high tolerance is a real engineering feat. Hence, it costs. You can easily buy LEGO clone bricks for much, much cheaper. But 10% of them won't click to the rest at all, and anything you build bigger than about 50 bricks will just fall apart.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar case with the RCX unit. The....ah, person of modest real-world experience, shall we say, who wrote TFA compares it to some piece of electronic trash that would probably fail in 90 days of real use and concludes: Gee, they look the same and have the same stated functions, so I guess they ought to cost the same to manufacture.
Might as well have looked at a Mercedes E-class and a Yugo and said: Gee, they both have four wheels and an engine, and are designed to transport me at highway speed -- they must cost about the same to manufacture! So why does the Benz retail for so much more?
Complaints of overly specialized pieces were valid for too long, but aren't valid any more. Any one still complaining hasn't looked recently.
The lego 'bots came from the MIT Media Lab -they used to give away the PCB with a parts list, long before it was commercialised. That was a display-less design, but they had other interesting things instead: ir badges on people so they could be identified, solar powered room beacons so 'bots could tell where they were -it was a full infrastructure built on dirt cheap parts.
If lego dont do mindstorms well then yes, maybe we should get out there and so an OSS-like hardware family. The hard part is integration with the rest of the build kit, and here, to be ruthless, I'd go for fischer-teknik (spelling?) over lego.
So your *bits* cost $20.
Then there's your development costs.
Then your business administration costs.
Then marketing costs.
Then advertising costs.
Then sales costs.
Then distribution costs.
Then support costs.
Then... and only then... If you were charging enough and people actually bought what you're selling... You get to make profit, and the government comes along and takes a third of that.
1: Idea
2: ???
3: Profit
See above for ???
Lego BTW, made a loss in 2003 and 2004...
Fuck. People have absolutely no idea...
Deleted
I wish I could link it but slashdot's stupid URL system and their shoddy HTML make it impossible.
ToysRus in Canada has buckets of 1000 lego peices for $9.99 to $29.99 there are about 5-6 diffrent buckets there. NOT SETS.
Admittedly they have about 100 rigid sets but it seems people aren't snapping up the cheap lego....
Vision and "a set" is what is lacking at Lego.
Look the whinning about having a product that lasts forever being a blessing and a curse is well founded.
The issue is that Lego is to worried about cannabilizing their own future sales.
Lego should get off it's soft parts and start to compete in the real world. How long ago did they have the ability to hold a tolerance in manufacturing that was world class? Can you say Six Sigma (well not six but damn close and I think that is long term). Talk about "voice of the customer" I have sat in on to many behind the mirror marketing studies to tell you how many times folks say "make it so I can change it like my/my kids Legos". Why do so many industrial systems out there talk about modular design? Hint they grew up with Lego and know a great idea when their brother hits them in the head with it.
The failure, and it is a real failure, is that Lego is not making real products.
Mindstorms are a toy folks (may I have another flame please).
Let's get angry not about a toy but about the fact that Lego has let us down in so many other ways. I would like to see a list of current products that couldn't be made better with Lego technology.
For example: Cellphones (sim cards are lego like. Why can't other feature work the same way), Computers.
Let's work together to show Lego that they need to think outside of the box.
Don't whine about markets. Start cannabilizing everyone elses market and grow the Lego brand.
I for one can't wait.
Now I will go out and reassemble my car (darn kids). Nice car Legus Hybrid '05.
Peace out !!
I think I must be the only person willing to admit that my lack of creativity and mild OCD caused me to just want to make the model on the box. No brick out of place! (I did make some of my own (mostly crappy) creations with some random unboxed bricks we got from a garage sale, though).
A very, very long time ago, the (then single) Mindstorm brick appeared as almost a co-design between Lego, MIT*, and famous companies like e. g. Apple co-sponsored computer interface kits that were shown in Legoland (the one in Billund).
That was almost 10 years ago, and Mindstorm was brilliant, technologically off-the-shelf, and very costly.
Since then, Lego, a dane company that tried to keep all its production within Denmark, has lost money years after years maybe because of this (when Denmark voted about joining Euroland, I remember Lego as a key national industrial announcing in the press they *had* to join, and this announcement being given a key impact).
They have lost so much, they have sold this year all their amusement parks ("Legolands", in all countries). It seems now a matter of survival.
They have lost so much, at least, that they never could *upgrade* the Mindstorms core brick.
Which is now an old, dull, and unefficient thing -let's face it.
I'd bet anyone in this discussion finding it nice must be over 40.
What else could they have done I don't know (just provide I/O interfaces for existing PDAs? miniaturize the same thing? add a touchscreen that'd have suppressed the need for a PC?), but the fact is, they did nothing at all for 10 years.
And *that*, went wrong...
Hervé
(*) http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/cricket/ -1997, mind you.
Herve S.
Bottom line is that LEGO has for years ignored the desires of its customers. Look at its brick business. It lost tons of money on licensed products over the years (the licensing fees pretty much eat up all the profit), so what is it doing to get out of its financial problems -- its buying more licenses. Recently it acquired Batman and Nickelodean licenses (already announced plans for Spongebob and Avatar sets -- ugh). The letter about the color change shows just how clueless they are and how little they actually try to gauge the opinion of their heaviest customers and biggest fans:
3 .htm
http://f24.parsimony.net/forum61776/messages/9746
Most companies would kill to have the sort of online communities organized around their product that LEGO has. Instead, LEGO pretty much ignores them when its not threatening them over the proper way to use the term LEGO to avoid infringing its trademark.
We're about to head to a competition which has over 5,000 teams of middle school kids - FIRST LEGO League. They were overwhelmed by the response this year.
I agree that they should unbundle the RIS - make a $100 core set instead of a 700 piece entry level,
I've worked with LEGO on several projects - as the coach of a LEGO sponsored US FIRST team, in product focus groups, and with the original LEGO TC LOGO - back when it used RJ-11 connectors... A day with Seymour, Mitch Resnick and Steve Ocko was the most successful satellite telecast we ever did - kids calling in to talk to kids in a lab full of building projects - they went right past us adults to the ones who were DOING - and they weren't just geek kids - they were of all stripes. It was a real eye opener.
They make an unparalleled product with amazing tolerances and quality control, end-to-end integration of the produc's image, etc. But they have their own in-house management "system" and they are a private company - so decisions like shipping plastic stock from Pittsfield MA to Enfield CT instead of from Bayer in Germany won't come from stockholder pressure to perform, it has to bubble up.
They also need to have an interim "company" that can work on a long leash with the Media Lab - there are several derivatives of the programmable brick that never got past specialized demo sites and could be big - Crickets, interactive jewelry, etc...
I agree that seeing Robosapiens eating Mindstorms lunch is just silly from a geek point of view.
They need to make the commercial stuff more accessible, and make more derivatives that can be focused into the geek markets (and one of thos eis home schooling - they've been cleaning up at FLL in the past few years, and nobody saw it coming.)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
You're right on the mindstorms. They're overpriced, and perhaps, too far from lego's core market for them to make an acceptable margin.
:-)
I looked at mindstorms a few years ago, right before I started getting into building large CNC machines. It amazed me how simple a lot of the sensors were. That's why I didn't buy a kit; with a little more effort, I could just build the pieces I needed for "real".
It wouldn't take much for a open source project to form here; Use the Atmel AVR series microcontroller, which has GNU GCC support. Write some basic blocks for doing motor control. Get some limit switches and temperature / light sensors and build them into existing lego pieces, which is what the mindstorms were. Create the basic blocks and let people loose.
I picked up an older Palm for $20 on ebay. That'd make a killer platform to work around that had a screen and some buttons.
Open source works best when the users are developers. I can't think of a better combination.
Perhaps I'll start writing something up this afternoon.. they didn't REALLY need that work done until tomorrow.
..don't panic
Sorry about the posting onto a troll, but I have to say this.
These Bionicle things were the worst things for Lego to produce.
What do you do with them?
As the poster said below "Lego IS dumbing down"!
Technic Design School explains concepts behind the Technic line. I don't think there is much wrong with LEGO except perhaps not enough shelf space. But there is plenty available online.
I just wish the Technic crane didn't cost $150.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
There seem to be several common themes, skimming through the responses:
* The new "targeted" sets stifle open-ended creativity.
* Legos are getting to be too expensive.
* "Back to basics" is good.
* (wearing our best "Linus van Pelt at the Christmas tree lot" voice) Creativity just isn't where modern culture is at any more, and that's where classic Legos and Mindstorms really excelled.
But tumble these all together, and a simple question emerges:
How much is Lego paying for IP rights to put out sets based on Harry Potter, Star Wars, Spider Man, etc?
How much of their current cost structure is tied up in molding plastic bricks, and how much in IP rights and royalties?
Would Lego do better to drop it's IP-burdened toy lines, and go back to their roots?
Might it be that the revenue would drop, but profitability rise?
There's another issue here, and that's generations. We buy Legos for our kids, because we played with them when we were kids, and feel they were good toys. What will our kids buy for our grandchildren?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The method used to calculate the profit margin on the Mindstorm sets leaves too much up for chance. We are assured the sets do sell in huge numbers on the evidence of press articles (which are later rubbished as inaccurate) and fan websites. The flaw in this is that it may just be possible that the people who buy these sets are likely the people who have the ability and desire to start websites about their hobby.
The author identifies another product using the same components being sold for under $2 and reasons that this means lego can construct a similar device for at most double the cost. It is very doubtful that Lego has manufactured (much less sold) as many Mindstorm sets as the cheap Chinese device they are compared to - you are not comparing manufacturing costs in a like for like situation. The quantities, place of manufacture and probable manufacturing difficulty all impact costs - I wouldn't be surprised if the main unit of the Mindstorms cost something close to $10 to actually make in the quantities Lego would require.
And remember that Lego isn't selling very many of these for $200 - most are sold into the retail trade (I'm not sure what sort of margins the toy industry gets, but I'm guessing Lego gets something like $100-120 for the $200 set, especially when you figure in sales tax etc etc).
Computer technology is the perfect opportunity to buck the "timeless" aspect if they do it right. This year, sell 8-bit controllers. Next year, sell 16-bit controllers, more memory, more software, more sensors. There are so many cool features that have already been delveloped, and just need packaging in the Lego form factor. Sensor networks. Two years from now, sell swarms of 8-bit controllers for kids (and adults) to experiment with ant-like behaviour. The problem with mindstorms is that they are thinking of it in the same "timeless" fashion as the bricks. Instead, they should have at least 5 years of new paradigms in the queue to roll out. When they run out of ideas, then they have 5 years to adjust their product line.
You can download (free) lego design software, use it to make your own model.. and submit same to lego.
they'll ship you everything required for your model.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
http://www1.lego.com/education/default.asp?page=7_ 1&productid=9785
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Hi Latif,
I've used the mindstorms a few times. I also do some hardware development. (I'm a ph.d. chemistry student at McGill University in Montreal)
The RCX/game comparison you show is very misleading.
The RCX houses an MSP430 microcontroller, which is a 16-bit Texas Instruments microcontroller. I know this because I program these microcontrollers, and have met the people who designed them from scratch. The microcontroller alone is more than you estimate the cost of the RCX to be, at around 10 USD. (see www.ti.com/msp430)
The LCD is probably about 10$, and the lego shell probably costs them a few more dollars. The buttons probably cost a dollar, and the various circuit boards probably adds between 5 and 10$. Not to mention that the small motors, sensors and the electrical connector bricks would be *FAR* more expensive than the standard lego bricks to produce.
The price you estimate for the 'brick game' on the other hand, is probably way under cost. Just because you bought it for 1.83 from a mom & pop retail place doesn't mean that even close to covers the original manufacturing cost. Likely it was bought as overstock. By the looks of it, the brick game is about 20 years old. What do you think an original game-boy costs now? How about an NES? My guess it that it probably retailed at 20-30 USD when it was first sold (and probably didn't sell too well).
I agree that the mindstorms sets are ridiculously expensive, but I think it's just that at the moment, that is the going market price for an introductory robotics set. Mindstorms is still WAY cheaper than any other alternative with even close to the same functionality.
Your essay is well written, but I think your facts are far from sound.
Francis Esmonde-White
http://www.legoeducation.com/store/SearchResult.as px?pl=7
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
From 10-20 years ago, my folks bought hundreds of dollars of Legos for my brother and me. However, more were bought for me than him, because he had MY Legos, so he didn't need basic blocks, he needed specialized blocks. My wife and I are on the Lego mailing list, because we got nostalgic and can't wait to be playing with Legos with our children. However, I don't see us buying large numbers of generic pieces, I expect to grab the TUBS of Legos in my parent's attic for my children. Sure we'll buy new sets, but not the quantity that was bought for us.
Basically, the market for plastic basic blocks isn't a growing market, because the initial demand was huge, but later generations of fans will get their parent's stuff. So they need more stuff to upsell.
Alex
So it's not different enough from the $200 full kit - a crippled version for not much less than the full RIS.
And it's not on the shelf of your local store - you have to hunt (prety hard) thru lego or pitsco to find it.
My point is it has to be priced along with things that everybody is willing to deal with - if they could price the full RIS at $149 (like a PS2, which everyone has to have for instance) and put the brick/motors/sensors set at $99, and put it on every big box store shelf, they'd be in better shape.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Even if the LEGO folks continue to produce such a product, it won't be popular (or well known) if stores like Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, etc. won't carry it.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Yes, I'm aware of that thing. I dislike it. Part of the joy of lego is building on the fly. Building according to plans takes most of the fun out of it, IMO.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Lego's problem is that their corporate culture is accustomed to being a monopoly, and have not been able to make the transition to a free market. Add to this some craptastic business decisions -- spending tens of millions on licensing fees for movie tie-ins (Harry Potter and Spiderman, for instance -- and you've got a severely dysfunctional company.
You can make the best product in the world, but if you mismanage the company, it will lose money.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I think this is the wrong way to see it. It is the sad and false understanding that a lot of business people have. Just look at the dvd industry. They tried to stop the whole technology, Then the technology still commes thru and people buy dvd players. The market grows, and somehow, miraculously, the prices for dvd goes down. What happens? people buy more dvds! Shock and awe. Having the dvd prices just above the renting price, the industry is blooming, and people buy them all over.
The thing with lego is, its cool to have the basic kit. Its better to have more, because then you can combine. I never had the mindstrom, but I would like to. Its just a tad stiff on price. So I never bought one. But if the basic kit was $50-$70, I probly would've bought it and liked it, and then bought more to expand. And more. The chances are, I would have used more on the series than $200. And there would also be a happy customer out there recruiting new customers. Now I bought nothing.
And, yes, I did inherit lego block from my brother. Was I satisfied? Did I want other toys for xmas? No, I wanted Lego, because I had a base, and could expand even more. I wanted more, and my family was a good customer for Lego.
There might come a time when everyone has too much lego, but then they have to innovate. Make it cooler, so people want more again. Like they did with technics. Like they did with mindstrom. But innovate on the old base. It makes the customers happy, and it makes the customers want more because the already have the base.
Its just basic business sense. Give the customers something they like at a good pricepoint, and he will be coming back. This is something that is not taught enough in business schools, however simple it is.
Clearly he wasn't saying "everybody" in the sense of all 6 billion freakin' people on the planet getting one. But Lego isn't marketing to all 6 billion people. And if somebody isn't going to buy lego now or ever, then clearly they're not part of the market.
The grandparent is correct. It's entirely possible for Lego to oversaturate the marketplace. They sell a product that lasts a long time, to a limited group, and which tends to be passed down from one group to the next group as the group ages and moves out of the market. Older people generally don't buy Lego's for themselves and ain't about to start no matter what you do. Yes, there's a niche market there, but you don't run a big company selling to the niches.