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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."
Go back to the basics. Hell, just go back to Space Police, Blacktron, Castle, and Forest legos.
It's funny to see comments like this. When I was growing up, the original Space sets were just coming out. My older brothers complained that Lego was making far too many specialized pieces in order to help you construct their pre-prepared models.
Plus ca change...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
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.
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 think that's the difference. When I was a kid, my brothers and I got a new set of lego for every birthday and xmas. The thing was that after we built the model, it got pulled apart and went in with the rest of the sets. We wouldn't build singular model jets, or spacehips, or cars, or boats. We built entire cities, space centres, ski resorts, fleets of ships. We would literaly build until we'd run out of blocks. Then pull it apart and start again. But these were 3-4 week projects, and everything worked. Ski lifts that actually worked, tractors with ploughs that moved etc etc. We couldn't afford transformers, so we'd build our own out of Lego. We weren't allowed to have a proper electric trainset, so we got a lego one and build a dozen different train sets. That was and IS what is cool about lego. Our lego was the only toy we ever needed, because with a bit of creativity it WAS every other toy.
Just recently, I started collecting all the star wars stuff that I couldn't have when i was a kid. Like the AT-AT, Millenium Falcon etc. And they do sit there and wont go in with the rest, because they are models in their own right. So you can have a bit of both.
But really... the Harry Potter and Spiderman stuff REALLY sucks.
I refuse to have a sig... dammit!
Ok, this is the third time this month I have heard this statistic, but It's about time we cleared a little of the BullSh*t around this topic.
The US graduates just over 40,000 engineers / ~250 Million individuals. This is about 1 in every 6000 people.
The pacific Rim graduates about 450,000 engineers / 2.7 Billion individuals. This is about 1 in every 6000 people.
The long and the short is that we are about on par as education goes, we are simply outnumbered on this planet at almost 30 : 1
As for lego, Their main malfunction has been pretty much just as TFA described: Bad market analysis coupled with a changing market. Shame on them for not doing their homework and we can all move on.
-=Geoskd
www.geoskd.com
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Because eveyone has to eat, and few people are willing to work for nothing and rely on the soup kitchen.
Sell Mindstorm kits at $50, have them fly off the shelves this Christmas. Have every kid in the world own a kit.
Then what? What do you sell then? Or are you going to take the miniscule profits you made off the first run and continue to pay your employees off of it? Fat Chance.
They have to continue to sell because they need your money to pay the cost of doing buisness. They charged $200 not because they were gouging, but because that's the price point where they thought they could make back the loss in repeat customers with direct profit.
Now, I'm not taking their side on the issue, I'm not taking the stance that they should just return to 100% reusable cheap parts either.
But to not see why people build obselence into their products is to have a fundemental misunderstanding of economics in this world. There is nothing wrong with trying to 'keep them coming back', the problem is when the methods you choose in themselves are poor or unethical. In Lego's case, I would agree with another poster, they've failed in either case. That's why they are pulling back from the line. They can't see a way to sell it that won't cut their throat further down the road, so they are just slowly abandoning the line. It's sad. But it's the fate of hundreds of products out there and it's simply an economic fact that not everything the public loves is going to be something a company can make money off of in the long-term, at regarldess of price.
Come on. They could easily sell a Mindstorms set for 50 USD and then release individual pieces like additional motors or a better main unit separately. We use Mindstorms at my university for simple robotics learnning. It's amazing how a 200 Euro kit contains basically just two motors, two sensors, an 8-bit ATMega chip and a bunch of Lego Technic things. If I had the time I'd make an ATMEga PCB myself and give the plans to the university - they'd save a lot of money, gain access to C programmable exercise robots and have the ability to give people enough parts to actually make something useful (a robotic arm with 1 DOF is not).
The parts for the PCB themselves come in at about fifteen to twenty bucks, including a 16-bit ATMega. If we add a few motors, some wires and a bunch of simple sensors we might reach the fifty EUR mark, not counting bulk discounts. Even though the Mindstorms prices have dropped a bit 50 EUR is a damn good price for a kit that does much more than a 120 EUR Mindstorms kit. Mindstorms might be competitive if it was priced similarly (people don't have to learn C in order to program it), but not for the current price.
Maybe I should tell the Prof to just give some E-Tech student twenty bucks to make a PCB design...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
My son has just turned 8, and he loves Lego. We buy new stuff regularly (and the odd tub of basic pieces) and he makes them up, pulls them apart and they all end up in that enormous soup of Lego blocks. He makes some amazing stuff from that primordial soup, none of it scripted, but he frequently does use some of those parts that came with the Spiderman sets, or the Harry Potter sets or the X-Pods or the Orient Expedition sets or the Star Wars sets.
In fact I don't see that things have changed a whole heap, except that with a big pile of Lego now you can make a damn site more interesting things than I could thirty years ago when I used to babysit for some kids who had Lego (I had Meccano as a kid myself). I used to build houses (well, with bricks, windows and roofs what else are you going to make?) and the kids I was babysitting for used to play with them for the next few weeks. When their parents would tell them they were going out and they would have a babysitter they would destroy everything, in the hope that I would have some more fun with their lego and they could have some more fun playing with a new set of designs.
Sure, so I never read the books and it was just purely creative play. My son's read all the instructions, but that just doesn't challenge him and he moves on.
Lego, on the other hand, has substantially more variety than it did when I was a kid, and that means that what can be created is exponentially more varied.
Great article though. It would be nice to see Lego producing some of the sorts of kits that are suggested at the end, and perhaps that is what the X-Pods do, and some of the other things that encourage the kids to build and rebuild in different configurations.
I was on a tour of the Danish Headquarters of Lego last year, the speaker there told us that they felt the same way about it and wanted to return to the basics. Just last week i heard in the news that they are actually making money again due to their returning to the basics. So would say they ahve already done this, dunno if its visible all over the world yet, but atleast around here they are selling good again.