Brian's Brain

Sometimes, in your engineering professions, you have the opportunity to design something brand new, from scratch. Other times, driven by cost-reduction, bug-fix, competitive one-upmanship, or other reasons, your next project involves incrementally tweaking an existing design. Having been faced with both scenarios many times in my engineering past, I can confidently say that I much prefer the former....and I bet most of you do, too!

Regardless of whether your next project is an evolution or a revolution, your marketing counterparts will invariably spin it as the latter when they pitch it to someone like me. They do this by over-emphasizing the 'revolutionary' aspects of the product (even if there really aren't any ;-) ), and de-emphasizing (often to the point of complete omission) the evolutionary facets. While I understand why this may be necessary for generalist press, it's often disappointing for someone like myself with a technical bent. Not only does the imbalanced presentation make it more difficult for me to get an accurate sense of the product's significance, it also unfairly demeans the important benefits of evolutionary product development.

Nintendo's Wii is a perfect example of this imbalanced-pitch scenario. Last fall, when I was researching my December 2005 Hot Technologies issue writeup on living room game consoles, all Nintendo wanted to tell me about was Wii's (then known by its project name of, ironically, Revolution) wireless and remote control-reminiscent game controller. Any time I asked about other console specifications....CPU and GPU speeds and features, amount and type of on-board memory, etc....I was met with blank stares, stammers, and ultimately unrequited promises that 'we'll get back to you on that'. Nintendo's stance stood in stark contrast both to its past candor with GameCube and to the spec-soaked discourse of its primary competitors, Microsoft and Sony.

I interpreted two conclusions from Nintendo's behaviour:

1) Wii would, at least on paper, be underpowered compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360, and

2) Wii was fundamentally, probably, a GameCube which had undergone cost-reduction steps such as litho-shrunk CPU, GPU and memory subsystems (all of which might also run slightly faster as a result) with the new game controller (simplistically speaking) 'bolted on'.

Posts such as this recent one from Ars Technica (commentary by Slashdot), as well as various teardowns that have popped up on the 'Net, bear out my year-plus old prediction.

Again, let me emphasize; Nintendo's Wii strategy was not flawed. In fact, I think it was quite smart, and makes for quite an interesting product development case study. Before continuing, I recommend you read over the interview with Nintendo's engineering representatives that I linked to in this past blog post. One of the issues that hurt GameCube was that, especially at the beginning of the console's life, Nintendo over-emphasized its own game titles and didn't cultivate sufficient third-party publisher support. In contrast, Microsoft leveraged developers' already-existing PC architecture expertise with the first-generation Xbox, while Sony garnered developer attention by virtue of its year-plus production lead over both Microsoft and Nintendo.

This time around, things were quite different. Nintendo's internal software teams and third-party partners were able to target a hardware platform that, with the exception of the new controller, they were already very familiar with. In contrast, both Microsoft and Sony forced developers to migrate to a completely new, and quite complex, hardware design. By being first to market by a year, Microsoft gained first-mover advantage with the developer community, but that's a subject for other another post....

Continued with 'Wii Will Rock You'....

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