[susanhi]

“The thinking that guides us is: what can we do to pleasantly surprise players? It’s not that we’re consciously trying to innovate; we’re trying to find ways to make people happy. The result is that we come up with things other people have not done.”

Love this. Focuses you without restricting what you’re doing. We have a now 10 year old app/social community that we’ve been trying for several years to grow/innovate. In past years, we focused on growing revenue, which we needed to do to pay the bills. It helped some but not as we expected. Recently we decided to double down on our product, innovating our community and app to try help users. I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users. Will be putting that into play.

[lazydon]

Reminds me of the way Bezos writes about Customer Obsession in his letters to shareholders:

"There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invention on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen."

[ekianjo]

> obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

It's a nice way to look at it, but then it's hard to explain why they force-feed Amazon Fire TV Sticks as a poor man's alternative to Chromecasts and prevent Chromecasts from being sold on Amazon at the same time. Costumer focus much?

[ekianjo]

> I really like the concept of “pleasantly surprising” our users.

Except that when users complained about the WiiU not being fun or remotely interesting, nobody listened at Nintendo and they kept marching to release it as is.

It's nice to have narratives, but when facts don't match it, it's just a nice PR story and nothing more.

[djur]

The Wii U was a good console that failed for a lot of reasons that didn't have much to do with the console itself. It had some of the best games Nintendo ever released.

I don't know what kind of response to feedback you expect -- once the console was out, there wasn't really much to do other than try to support it, and once that failed the only reasonable option was to try to quickly develop a successor. That's what they did.

[Cyph0n]

The Wii U was a failure, yes, but that didn't stop Nintendo from releasing excellent first-party games for it. Besides, Nintendo was able to (relatively) quickly come up with a much cooler and more practical console.

[rangibaby]

Nintendo have released some turds of consoles before (Virtual Boy, N64, Wii U) but they all had some good games.

Super Mario 64 was the first 3d platformer and it is still fun and innovative now. The only thing dated about it is the camera control and it’s not that bad.

[jon-wood]

I genuinely believe the Switch is what Nintendo wanted the Wii U to be, but couldn’t pull off at the time.

[CM30]

Yeah, Nintendo has a few issues with being unwilling to do what's best for business/customers in favour of something 'different' even when the new idea isn't any good and the simple one would work significantly better.

See also how they treated F-Zero, Star Fox, Paper Mario, Donkey Kong in the GameCube era, Chibi Robo, etc. All things which had a perfectly fine formula that would have made for fantastic games if Nintendo did what people expected, yet which ended up commercially failing or being abandoned due to an obsession with the 'new'.

It's nice to try and surprise people, but you have to also ask yourself "Is this new idea any good, or is it being different for the sake of being different?"

[tropshop]

Care to share a link? I’m interested in community software and how the market will evolve to serve these groups.