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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."
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
A lego plan is valuable in the same way that "hello, world" is valuable -- it teaches you a technique that you can apply to your own designs.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?