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> That’s why being a fast follower is so valuable, you get everyone else to waste money on the wrong ways to build things. It also causes R&D to show much worse

> That’s why being a fast follower is so valuable, you get everyone else to waste money on the wrong ways to build things. It also causes R&D to show much worse returns. Frankly I think this is the big cultural change in tech generally, isn't it? People come up with ideas and everyone goes "oh I want to do that", so they replicate it off the back of the work everyone else has done. Uncritical FOMO. But actually it's better to be an even slower follower, generally, as a survivor strategy. Apple and Nintendo shows this. It's better to go "I see what they are all doing, and I see where they think consumers are, but I think they are wrong, and I think it's not just a question of them going about it wrong, but that all of this evidence suggests consumers actually wish they were getting this other thing, and that is what we should build".

moron4hire 1y ago
Apple and Nintendo have some of the strongest brand loyalty this side of macrobrewed beer and sports teams. They can afford to go against the current because they have extremely deep barrels of fanatics who will buy just about anything they make, regardless of whether it's cutting edge or not.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Nintendo in particular also has a different culture than the modern explosive shareholder mentality. They have a huge war chest can likely operate at a loss for over a decade, even if their stock crashed to zero tomorrow. In other words: they have cultural skin in the game. A bad quarter or even year won't have them seeking out private equity funding.
  - nmfisher 1y ago
    Didn't they almost go broke after the Wii U? I vaguely remember that the Switch was do-or-die for them.
    - nfriedly 1y ago
      Yep, and it wasn't the first time the company nearly went bankrupt before miraculously recovering.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      Yes, and the Wii U would have been 4-5 years of disappointing sales. But they still tried to invest hard into their hardware and software. In comparison. How do we think Activision or Ubisoft would have reacted to those kinds of shortcomings?
- brookst 1y ago
  That’s a pretty spectacular way to miss the point. The implication that these “fanatics” are misguided because they fail to prioritize “cutting edge” over every other purchase criteria tells me you haven’t been around the block enough to realize that cutting edge is not a positive product attribute. Believe me, I have storage bins full of obsolete cutting edge products that I got less joy from than many boring old appliances I use every day.
shakow 1y ago
This works for Apple & Nintendo because they built their brand image while being fast-followers – and even pioneers decades ago (the Apple ][ was among the trailblazers, just like the GameBoy or the (S)NES). I would bet that a company trying to replicate that strategy without the previously established brand image would not go very far.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Wouldn't those two be the opposite of fast followers? Indeed, they trailblazed once upon a time. But they maintained that after being surpassed by focusing on being slow followers. Analyzing the market, polishing what worked to perfection, and making it super intuitive. Or perhaps the time scale of "fast follower" is distorted in my head, compared to the scale of business.
  - mattmanser 1y ago
    I think as they're quite secretive so it seems they're slow followers but they're fairly fast in starting the project, keep it under wraps and take their time to get it right. Younger readers might not know that before the iPad came out, Michael Arrington tried to make a tablet before tablets were a thing. So the problem back then was that touch screens were expensive and scaling up from a smart phone to a tablet had a lot of engineering problems. It didn't happen overnight. And Arrington started building TechCrunch’s "CrunchPad" in public, and people thought he might steal a march on tablets. It went a bit wrong with a falling out with a manufacturer, and the manufacturer released the JooJoo. But obviously Apple had been working on the iPad the entire time, kept their mouths shut until they had perfected it and crushed the JooJoo a couple of months after the JooJoo's release date. The JooJoo was more expensive than expected, almost the same price as the iPad, but had performance issues, poor software, no app store and a short battery life. You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.
    - DrScientist 1y ago
      Apple's acquistion of fingerworks was probably important here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Your exemples are not very good. Nintendo has always been an innovative company. They have gone against the rest of the industry time and time again. What they don’t do is follow. They don’t go for ever increasing performance. They don’t chase ports. The Wii with motion control, the switch merging handheld and tv based, both were very new idea.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- brookst 1y ago
  Respectfully, I think you missed the point of GP, as you are agreeing with them. Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator. Like you said, Nintendo saw that consumers didn’t really want more polygons/second, they wanted fun. Similarly, Apple saw Rio and other MP3 players and realized that consumers didn’t want a 800 128kbps mp3s in their pocket, they wanted a stylish way to listen to music on the go. Sure, the Wii controllers and iPod clickwheel were novel and innovative user experiences and big hits, but they weren’t heavy lifting technically.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    > Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator. I think you are making the same mistake that OP. You think R&D in the video game industry is releasing more powerful systems. It’s not. R&D is proposing innovative value proposition. Nintendo does that all the time from the Switch to the weird game with cardboard. Nintendo does a lot of R&D in an industry where their competitors do very little and mostly just update their existing product. Calling them an exemple of a follower couldn’t be further from the truth. Apple indeed used to do a lot of R&D. They do a lot less nowadays.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

moron4hire 1y ago

Apple and Nintendo have some of the strongest brand loyalty this side of macrobrewed beer and sports teams. They can afford to go against the current because they have extremely deep barrels of fanatics who will buy just about anything they make, regardless of whether it's cutting edge or not.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Nintendo in particular also has a different culture than the modern explosive shareholder mentality. They have a huge war chest can likely operate at a loss for over a decade, even if their stock crashed to zero tomorrow. In other words: they have cultural skin in the game. A bad quarter or even year won't have them seeking out private equity funding.
- nmfisher 1y ago
  Didn't they almost go broke after the Wii U? I vaguely remember that the Switch was do-or-die for them.
  - nfriedly 1y ago
    Yep, and it wasn't the first time the company nearly went bankrupt before miraculously recovering.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Yes, and the Wii U would have been 4-5 years of disappointing sales. But they still tried to invest hard into their hardware and software. In comparison. How do we think Activision or Ubisoft would have reacted to those kinds of shortcomings?
brookst 1y ago
That’s a pretty spectacular way to miss the point. The implication that these “fanatics” are misguided because they fail to prioritize “cutting edge” over every other purchase criteria tells me you haven’t been around the block enough to realize that cutting edge is not a positive product attribute. Believe me, I have storage bins full of obsolete cutting edge products that I got less joy from than many boring old appliances I use every day.

shakow 1y ago

This works for Apple & Nintendo because they built their brand image while being fast-followers – and even pioneers decades ago (the Apple ][ was among the trailblazers, just like the GameBoy or the (S)NES). I would bet that a company trying to replicate that strategy without the previously established brand image would not go very far.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
Wouldn't those two be the opposite of fast followers? Indeed, they trailblazed once upon a time. But they maintained that after being surpassed by focusing on being slow followers. Analyzing the market, polishing what worked to perfection, and making it super intuitive. Or perhaps the time scale of "fast follower" is distorted in my head, compared to the scale of business.
- mattmanser 1y ago
  I think as they're quite secretive so it seems they're slow followers but they're fairly fast in starting the project, keep it under wraps and take their time to get it right. Younger readers might not know that before the iPad came out, Michael Arrington tried to make a tablet before tablets were a thing. So the problem back then was that touch screens were expensive and scaling up from a smart phone to a tablet had a lot of engineering problems. It didn't happen overnight. And Arrington started building TechCrunch’s "CrunchPad" in public, and people thought he might steal a march on tablets. It went a bit wrong with a falling out with a manufacturer, and the manufacturer released the JooJoo. But obviously Apple had been working on the iPad the entire time, kept their mouths shut until they had perfected it and crushed the JooJoo a couple of months after the JooJoo's release date. The JooJoo was more expensive than expected, almost the same price as the iPad, but had performance issues, poor software, no app store and a short battery life. You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.
  - DrScientist 1y ago
    Apple's acquistion of fingerworks was probably important here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

Your exemples are not very good. Nintendo has always been an innovative company. They have gone against the rest of the industry time and time again. What they don’t do is follow. They don’t go for ever increasing performance. They don’t chase ports. The Wii with motion control, the switch merging handheld and tv based, both were very new idea.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
brookst 1y ago
Respectfully, I think you missed the point of GP, as you are agreeing with them. Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator. Like you said, Nintendo saw that consumers didn’t really want more polygons/second, they wanted fun. Similarly, Apple saw Rio and other MP3 players and realized that consumers didn’t want a 800 128kbps mp3s in their pocket, they wanted a stylish way to listen to music on the go. Sure, the Wii controllers and iPod clickwheel were novel and innovative user experiences and big hits, but they weren’t heavy lifting technically.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  > Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator. I think you are making the same mistake that OP. You think R&D in the video game industry is releasing more powerful systems. It’s not. R&D is proposing innovative value proposition. Nintendo does that all the time from the Switch to the weird game with cardboard. Nintendo does a lot of R&D in an industry where their competitors do very little and mostly just update their existing product. Calling them an exemple of a follower couldn’t be further from the truth. Apple indeed used to do a lot of R&D. They do a lot less nowadays.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]