| spemanig said: Yeah, I basically feel the same. |
There's some interesting discussion to be had about just how much influence the President/CEO has over hardware design. It seems natural to relate Yamauchi to everything from the Famicom to the GameCube, to Nintendo's reluctance to make the switch to CD format among other choices. But giving him all of the credit would be doing a huge disservice to Yokoi and Takeda. Yamauchi didn't invent the D-pad or the analog stick. I think Yokoi made the hardware he envisioned. The Wii and DS do feel like they came from Yamauchi and/or Iwata, because they didn't come from anyone else internally at Nintendo. Wii remotes were made by a random Westerner who sold the idea to Nintendo, so the individual who 'bought' it would be the one in control of the Wii's future. The DS was inspired by the Game & Watch, a creation of the late Yokoi, but we can't really give him credit for the DS line.
What I was thinking of when I mentioned differences between their leadership styles was the way they treated third parties. Negotiating those kinds of situations is probably one of their most demanding responsibilities. Iwata couldn't afford to act like Yamauchi had, but Iwata was also probably incapable of it, and Yamauchi may have known that. He could have recognized that Iwata was the President Nintendo needed because of the ways in which they differed.
Anyway, Takeda is the apparent frontrunner for Iwata's successor, and he was the lead designer of the Wii. They share essentially the same hardware philosophy. He is not going to make anyones' dreams of an ultra-powerful NX come true.
