Jesse Schell: Xbox, PlayStation and the Innovator's Dilemma

[Mr Khan]

badgenome said:

Mr Khan said:
Too much listening to the customers is indeed a bad thing (listening to the vocal minority is what got Sony stuck where they were with PS3, which took them a long time to sort out, and listening to the complaints of the vocal minority in lieu of their own success is what produced the Wii U, when a Super Wii would have been the wiser route)

I don't think either of those is a good case of listening to the customers, though. With the PS3, I get the feeling Sony was just listening to themselves and drinking their own Kool-Aid. Much like MS with the Xbone. With the Wii U... well, I don't really know who Nintendo was listening to there. It doesn't look like anything that anyone ever asked for, and they don't even seem comfortable with their own product.

In the PS3's case, it was a clear love letter to the "bigger is better" design mentality embraced by many core gamers: Blu-Ray wasn't just a trojan horse, it had the ability to bring bigger games than anyone had ever dreamed of, and the CELL would be a supercomputer in your console. With the Wii U, it was all the yelling about how Wii was missing out on the third party games because it wasn't HD (when we can see now that the third parties are determined to move their goal-posts) and needed a more normal controller, though enough of Nintendo's design team seemed to understand that was a bad idea, so tried to come up with a concept that could justify a console that was half Wii HD and half proper Wii successor...