unless they got super saiyan 4. :P  anyways, this could go on.  fushion and such.  let's get back to topic. :)

Another problem for Nintendo is that quickly ramping up production often leads to poorer quality products.  Nintendo would then have to either play Microsoft and just ship broken (or about to break) Wiis or take the financial hit of higher QA costs and lower production.  It's nothing insurmountable of course, it just takes time. 

Something else I wonder is who all produces the accelerometers for the Wii?  That seems like it could be a possible bottleneck to increased supplies.  Doesn't matter if Nintendo can get Samsung, IBM, ATI, MoSys, etc to increase parts production if they can't make anymore controllers.

Going along our lines of thought here, with Sega working intensely with Nintendo, does this mean we are going to see the likes of Vegito in gaming?!

Mario + Sonic = Manic?!?!

One order of DBZ + Mario + Sonic coming right up. :)

Episode 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MpdxkdnV1A

Episode 2 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwayNoCEX5I 

Proceed at your own discretion. ;) 

I don't recall how many episodes there are, but it's at least 5 or 6. :) 

Onto the subject, I think the "shortage" in NA is because Europe got such a huge shipment last month, oddly enough co-insiding with the PS3's launch. ;) 

Vangaurdian1,

                          Thanks for the link. That was awesome. 

am i the only one that sees the possibility that they met their goals, and it is the end of the fiscal year so they slowed shipments a bit.  Another thing is there is evidence that Nintendo shipped more consoles to Europe then usual.

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2007/04/19/we-want-a-wii-still/

At some point we go from underestimating demand, which no doubt they did in Q1, to sheer incompetence. They're sitting on a golden opportunity here, and I do tend to wonder how long people will wait. However, with something this supply constrained, it can cause artificial demand, in which case it may be a good thing for them to do this... for the time being.

Indeed I'm drifting further from unexpected-demand to mass incompetence. Nintendo could **annihilate** the competition if it had the supply now. If they're still worrying about per-unit profitability at this point then they've been so conditioned by failure they don't know how to win anymore.

The problem is that Nintendo isn't confident they can keep this demand going.  Factories are not disposable things.  If Nintendo wanted to have 5 million consoles ready for November they could have, but they knew they couldn't sell 5 million per month indefinitely.  This would leave factories sitting around doing nothing.  Its not like the parts are rare.  Nintendo just wants to produce at the level of the long term demand.  They do not care if they lose a few sales in the short run because it isn't profitible to produce at a level that will guarantee there will be no shortages anywhere in the world at any time.