I’ve been having trouble putting my finger on what irks me about the success of Nintendo’s Wii and the Sony backed Blu-Ray format. Before you can charge me with Microsoft fanboyism let me correct you: I’m an Apple fanboy. (Full disclosure: I do own an XBox 360, and I want a Wii. I am a gamer at heart.)
Its not the strength of the technology that gets to me either. Sure, 9 times out of 10 Wii control just winds up being a gimmick. That 1 time out of 10 it manages to become sublime. Blu-Ray on the other hand I am impressed with, but don’t see all that much of an advantage of over the competing HD-DVD format. Plus I don’t have an HDTV (yet) so what do I care?
What gets to me can be summed up in these two images:
Both Nintendo and Sony have, in the past, demonstrated a kind of corporate insanity linked to the concepts of “innovative peripherals” and “proprietary media formats” respectively. I do wonder, as responsible consumers, if we should be encouraging this kind “acting out” by our corporate charges. Someone, somewhere, has to be the adult in this situation. After all, repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different result is the down and dirty definition of psychosis.
What are we teaching our corporations when we reward such behavior with success?
1 Comment
January 9, 2008 at 2:43 am
[...] to the Party, As Usual Jump to Comments I just wanted to follow up on last week’s post where I harped on Sony’s history of failure with proprietary formats. I did so with full [...]