I discovered an interesting analysis of why Lego was pulling back on its Mindstorms line. For those who don’t know, the Mindstorms line is a neat set of tools designed with the idea to create real working programmable robotics systems using Legos. The sets have proven wildly popular, but in recent years Lego has pulled most of the sets and all of the funding for them. This article goes into why.
The article is rather in depth and long, so I’ll just summarize the points here. Essentially, Lego discovered that the Mindstorms line, rather than increasing growth, ended up cannibalizing their current Lego sales. People bought Mindstorms, but not much else, leading to a net decrease in profit for the company despite the greatest sales in decades. The article goes on to posit a reason for the cannibalization of Lego sales; essentially, Lego markets their sets not as creative engines, but as find-the-piece-and-put-it-here assembly line work. The majority of people just follow the instructions and don’t understand all the mechanics needed to get working Lego machinery. They’re not encouraged to discover or find out anything more beyond that, meaning that people buy sets to assemble neat stuff not to create neat stuff.
The article then presents a possible means by which Lego could help itself. Rather than have the instructions be a set of assembly directions, the instructions could focus on having the user understand how everything fits together. They could have seperate sets designed for understanding torque and gearing, programming, etc. Once more people understand how things work together, they can improvise to create their own stuff, leading to an increase in overall Lego sales; people will be able to use all the sets together and won’t have to rely on the instruction book.
It’s an interesting analysis and if you’re a Lego or Mindstorms fan, it’s a good interesting read.
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