When has the market leading console ever released first for the next gen?

Nintendo should be prepared to respond to Microsoft. I believe Microsoft will try to fight Nintendo on it's own ground next generation, probably with a new innovation that has the same attractive principles of the Wii. Nintendo should and will be prepared to respond to that (in fact, they've pre-empted them before with Wii Motion+). That's why both are already developing their next console, the next gen is where the competition really begins.

PS2 unless you count Dreamcast. Which I don't, I consider it to be between generations.

I have a feeling that this generation is going to last much longer than in the past because of the current economic climate.

I think Nintendo will look to be ready when the time is right. But that may not be first -- it really did not help the Xbox 360 long-term, for example.

Mike

itll launch probably the year after they launch there new handheld. what happens to DS generally sets out what will happen to the wii

US release dates used

Gen 3-4 transition:

Super NES: last of 4 (T16 and Genesis in 89, Neo Geo in 90, SNES in 91)

Gen 4-5 transition:

N64: last of 5 (3DO and Jaguar in 93, Saturn in 94, PS1 in 95, N64 in 96)

Gen 5-6 transition:

PS2: second of 4 (Dreamcast 99, PS2 00, GC and Xbox in 01)

Gen 6-7 transition:
PS3: second of 3 (360 in 05, PS3 just a few days before Wii in 06)

On topic: Nintendo has stuck with a 5 year cycle since the SNES, and though they now have incentive to break it, i don't think they will. DSi will put a few more years of life into the DS platform, Wii will hold through, and both will be replaced in 2011, and they'll do that "3rd pillar" thing with the Wii and the Wii2 for about a year, like with the GBA and DS

If anything there may never be a wii 2.
There is almost no point in upgrading it.
It is exactly what nintendo wants it to be.
Putting in graphics chips and whatnot would just make the console less profitable.

Nintendo has had lots of profitable consoles and they have always released follow-up systems ...

Besides that, at low levels of performance (like the Wii is currently) you can get a dramatic performance increase for a fairly modest price increase and by the time Nintendo is looking at producing their next generation system it will be cheap to produce hardware which is several times the performance of the XBox 360 or PS3.

what I mean is that there is really no point in doing so.
look at what makes money, no system stutterers in the lineup. The way it is going more and more companies are going to make content for the wii in its current specs.
Improving everything else only adds to the development costs of any new game, and the big draw for devs is that games can be made relatively cheap on the wii. Given how 3rd party games sell on the wii it might actually be scary for a dev to put any kind of big budget game out.

They hardly seem in a rush to put out new software. Do you think they're in a rush to push out new hardware?