Big Ideas

Here's a quick prediction/suggestion

A piece on the upcoming Nintendo Wii in the NYT (New Product by Nintendo for Holidays - New York Times) prompted this thought:

Microsoft's got its own networked strategy (that is pretty damn intelligent and should yield them a pretty penny in a few years), Sony thinks it has a strategy (it really doesn't) but what is Nintendo's?

So here's my prediction/suggestion: Nintendo should partner with one of the big online players (of course I would favor Yahoo! :) ) for some of the Internet services they're looking to provide.

Why go down the path of building their own photo services and Internet destinations? Work with one of us (or hell, several) to provide interesting web services that are particularly suited for the Wii. Sure, go ahead and develop casual games, but adapt the ones that Yahoo! has for play on the Wii. Take the casual games that Nintendo develops and make them available to the broader Internet community via Yahoo! It seems to me that there's a lot of complementary work that can be done here AND both Y! and Nintendo have stated their intentions to really focus on the mass market. Yes, both co's want to satisfy the needs of the hard core techie/gamer, but they also want to take the really innovative work in their respective spaces and apply them in ways that benefit the average user.

Am I missing something here? Is this a stupid idea for any reason?




Technorati Tags: Nintendo Wii, Yahoo!, Online gaming, partnership idea, prediction

The dream of the digital home

The Economist, as usual, does a great job of bringing us back to reality in its article on "The Digital Home" . Sure, it sounds great to be able to have everything networked and seamless in your home (and everywhere, really) and I have no doubt that it'll eventually become a reality, but I think that there are a lot of people who believe that it's going to happen sooner than it really will.

They make several points more eloquently than I could:

1. The average consumer doesn't care about this as much as those of us in the tech/media world believes. I liked the way that a consultant quoted in the article thinks about it, "...adoption is a function of the users' sense of crisis (ie, motivation to change)      outweighing their perceived pain of switching...".
2. The companies playing in the space tend to think like they're selling a solution to the customer, rather than the way customers actually buy - piecemeal.
   1. I buy a DVD player and later an Xbox and then maybe later, an MP3 player. I don't buy them  all at once or even planned as components that have to work together, they should just work together automatically. The caveat, I think, to this method of purchasing is that if any company benefits from it, it's Microsoft. IF I do care about buying along a set of standards, might as well make sure it works with my computer, which has a 95% chance of being MS based.
3. Vendors are refusing to make their systems interoperable. Some are talking a good game about how they want to, but so far, they've inevitably chosen to be proprietary about some part of the solution that they offer. They view it as a necessary part of their strategy, but their strategy backfires, b/c it F's the consumer and makes it altogether too complex to execute a "digital home".

Despite being a good discussion of some of the challenges facing this broad dream, the Economist does slip up on a couple things:

• As I understand it, Windows Media Center Edition is really taking off of late, to as much as 43% of retail computer sales
• Apple has a control problem. HP might distribute iTunes on their computers but their agreement to make an HP iPod fizzled out quickly. Competing with partners on hardware has to date, been a limiting factor in Apple's growth
• They don't explore the possibility that interoperability could expand the bottom lines of the involved players. If a likely scenario is that one winner dominates and owns the market, wouldn't most companies be better off cooperating and getting a piece of the potential pie, rather than none at all?