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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

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Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#111

Post by gkolli »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #92
schnevets wrote: post #86

Love it. Tech has been so obsessed with "the next Facebook" for the last 15 years that there have been thousands of useful concepts lying on the table. While everyone jumped from mobile to wearables to AR to machine intelligence, there are billion-dollar companies that amount to little more than a CRUD framework, a few innovations, and intelligent marketing/strategy/advisory. It gives me hope for the future - if we c…

Got some examples?

serviceNow and workday are two ‘unsexy’ companies that are huge.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#113

Post by naravara »

dlivingston wrote: post #8

What strikes me about Nintendo is that their hardware quality is rather lacking. Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand. More to the point of the article, however: while Nintendo does use "withered" technology, perhaps it's too withered. The Switch uses an ARM-based CPU/GPU SoC from 2015: obsolete before the Switch came out! The GameBoy Color, released in 1998…

>Maybe I'm spoiled by Apple et al., but my Switch feels quite the opposite of premium in the hand.

The Switch also has an MSRP of $300. The iPod Touch is about $200, but for a much less complicated piece of hardware that gets to draft on the volume discounts from producing the iPhone.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#114

Post by eska »

polm23 wrote: post #26
taneq wrote: post #5

"Withered" is a really weird word to use here since all of these old-and-cheap parts are cheap only because they're massively widely used. I think a better translation would be "commodity parts". In fact later in the article it says "This was a poor translation of the original, which was much closer in spirit to ‘weathered.’" It seems to me that the use of the term in the headline was deliberately obfuscating clickba…

The original word is 枯れる, which really is normally translated as "withered", or, contextually, "dead" or "dried up". Translating it as "commodity parts" loses the implication that common sense says the technology is "used up" in some way. It's not a word you'd normally use to praise something. Here's a bunch of sentences with English translations that use the word: https://jisho.org/search/%E6%9E%AF%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B…

I think withered is a mistranslation (I speak Japanese).

E.g. my dictionary mentions 枯れた演技 for "well-seasoned acting". That sounds appropriately positive to describe such technology: old but reliable.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#115

Post by redisman »

Loulybob wrote: post #105
RookyNumbas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That insight happened 30 years ago. Nintendo's best selling consoles and games have always been portable systems.

I think you're forgetting the massive powerhouse that was the Wii.

Nintendos influence goes very deep into all gaming these days. Portable games started with Game-n-Watch and Gameboy, NES started off the popularity of game consoles, etc.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#116

Post by redisman »

Macha wrote: post #34
Operyl wrote: post #11

While the article is most definitely talking about their hardware, I can't help but feel they probably take a similar approach to their software. Switch's OS is basically a fork of their 3DS OS, with much more thought put into play about security (the 3DS was swiss cheese). Of course, there were many bugs to be found (using a massively out of date webkit at launch, they outsourced this to some vendor). But after all…

Even Sony's offering in that regard has been playing catch up to Xbox Live. PSN on PS4 has reached feature parity with Xbox Live on the 360, but it sure doesn't compete in important areas like actually working, download speeds, and navigating the menus in a reasonable time. Not sure what Live on Xbox One is like as I didn't get a Xbox this generation. Meanwhile Nintendo still hasn't caught up with Xbox Live from the…

I'm really surprised they don't use a light weight Linux or something as a base. Nintendos OSes have been pretty terrible. I remember the 3DS e-store being especially painful to use and that's how they're supposed to make money off you. All the online features always feels like my 1st gen Kindle.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#117

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

schnevets wrote: post #86

Love it. Tech has been so obsessed with "the next Facebook" for the last 15 years that there have been thousands of useful concepts lying on the table. While everyone jumped from mobile to wearables to AR to machine intelligence, there are billion-dollar companies that amount to little more than a CRUD framework, a few innovations, and intelligent marketing/strategy/advisory. It gives me hope for the future - if we c…

Wouldn't facebook fall under this category? It was originally just the universities head shots and a login.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#118

Post by jayd16 »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #69

It's remarkable how their fundamental "lateral" insight of the last decade was so blindingly obvious in this age of the smartphone - portability is king. I wonder if they collected data from the 3DS and WiiU and could tell that playtime on portable systems was orders of magnitude greater on portables. If you ask me, given my experience owning a Switch and watching my PS4 and gaming PC gather dust, the most compelling…

I don't really see how the Switch is a good case of this lateral thinking, nor withered technology. They just got nVidia to make them a powerful gaming tablet, something nVidia was push hard to sell at the time. In this way they were able to continue to dominate the mobile market and hedge their console strategy.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#119

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

hirako2000 wrote: post #107
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got some examples?

I can think of SalesForce, asana and others in the glorified crud category. Slack and similar chatting apps are just IRC for then common user, yet it worked seeing their valuations.

My experience with SalesForce is that it is way more complicated than a simple CRUD app.

Re: Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)

#120

Post by mercer »

oneVoiceOnHN wrote: post #93
dota_fanatic wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a bait, but, I'm curious: if BOTW is average, could you provide me with ~25 above average games? I would love to add them to my library and play them. Or even just 15?

Sure, btw this list has a lot of 2, you don't need to play the originals. Assassin's Creed 2, Bioshock, borderlands 2, call of duty modern warfare 2, (divinity Original sin, combat was great, hated the puzzles), doom 2016, elder scrolls (hardcore start with Morrowind, otherwise oblivion), fable, factorio, fallout 3, far cry 3, Gris(short, get it on sale), half life 2, magika, shadow of Mordor and war, saints row 1 an…

I've played most of those and BotW ranks right along with them.

For an initial experience, I'd say few of those topped that of BotW (Bioshock and Doom 2016 maybe, Morrowind and Kotor 1 Definitely).

Longer-term I'd say BotW ends up somewhere along the games you mentioned. Not as good as the best of them, but not as bad as the worst of them (Oblivion, CoD).

Anyways, definitely not below that list. And that's a conservative assessment, I'd say.

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