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Sony: learn from LEGO Sony: learn from LEGO

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When customers add value to your products, locking them out is stupid.

Wired magazine's new issue has a great article on the new upcoming robotics building toys from Lego, following on the wildly successful Mindstorms product. According to the article, Lego got scads of help from their most prolific users of their products to design the next-generation set, which features a simpler programming language, USB, Bluetooth, more sensors, and so forth.

Lego's story of getting help from the directly from the community is a first, but makes perfect sense given what they've done in the past. You see, when Mindstorms first came out, enthusiastic consumers (call them "hackers") reverse-engineered the programmable brick, the RCX, that comes with the set. They figured out the opcodes, the IR communication, the firmware, and more, and shared all the details online.

Did this massive revelation of Lego's intellectual property result in a torrent of lawsuits? No! According to the Wired article:

After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. "We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting," [a Lego spokesperson] says. "It's a totally different business paradigm -- although they don't get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set."

In other words, these enthusiastic consumers added value to the product, and at no cost to Lego. The Mindstorms sets were Lego's largest selling product in the company's history.

Compare that with Sony: the PlayStation Portable comes with special firmware that ensures that only Sony-blessed games and Sony-blessed media can be used on the PSP. Enthusiastic consumers, seeing more potential for the PSP, have broken through that firmware and made it possible to do more with the PSP. You can run Linux on it, transfer your own media to it, and play classic games on it. They've added value to the PSP, at no charge to Sony, which makes owning one more attractive, leading to greater PSP sales for Sony.

However, each time enthusiastic consumers figure a way around the firmware, Sony gets upset and patches it to prevent this. Sony's PSP sales are "solid but not spectacular."

What possible reasons could Sony have to turn away additional sales bolstered by additional features that were developed at no cost to Sony? Why spend additional money patching the firmware to make a product less attractive?

Lego's smart; Sony is ... well, it starts with "s."


Thursday, January 05, 2006 in Opinion  |  Permalink | 

subject

Posted by Anonymous User at 2006.01.14 04.55PM

When's that new mindstorms coming out eh? too bad the PSP can't run tiger, i'd get myself on lickidy quick. -dr3d

Open is good, but...

Posted by Anonymous User at 2006.09.20 08.23PM

Yes it sucks but the reason Sony do this is this - they charge developers a "premium" to have those developers develop games for their platform (PSP). The developers pay for dev-kits and also pay Sony a royalty on games they sell. If Sony were to allow the opening up of the platform, then game developers could write games for the platform without having to pay Sony a royalty. Developers who were paying would see other rogue hacker developers selling content for the cracked PSP and think...well 'why don't we do that?'

Truth is Sony probably don't make too much money from the hardware - but they do cream it in from developer royalties! :)

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