Sony Sucks, Lego Rocks
The best part is where Lego talks about how they responded to hackers modding the product and making it do things they never intended:
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,” Nipper 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.”
The lesson here is that when you allow and encourage users to be creative with your products, you get a user community that evangelizes your product and and expands its functionality, and that sells more product.
I own two sets of the original Mindstorms. Would I have been interested at all if I didn’t read about people reverse engineering the RCX controller, writing their own compilers, and creating really awesome things? Probably not.
Sony needs to listen to its users. One of the reasons I bought a PSP was to play with homebrew software, but I can’t because Sony locks the users out of their own device with every software update.
Put me down for two sets of the new Mindstorms, Lego!
