Michi Knows

Today is news that the Wii is kicking ass. I find two things interesting about this article.

First, only Nintendo-brand products saw an increase in volume in the last notch in the graph. That is probably more of a hiccup than anything, but you could also attribute the growth to the halo effect on the DS and mass shifting of consumer attention to the Wii.

The second point follows up on my earlier post about how lucky Nintendo got. In short, I wrote that Nintendo messed up their pre-launch marketing (at least in the US), causing a less-than-solid demand. Well, the proof arrives today in that graph.

Everybody is busy staring at that huge spike on the end, but my eye focuses on the line before it spikes. That’s right, the Wii was the lowest item on that graph only weeks ago! In fact, on its launch day (Nov 19), it was still the lowest ranked search item among all other consoles listed on that graph.

Yes, Nintendo got lucky that their product is kicking ass due to second-wave word of mouth. This is because unlike Sony or Microsoft, a slow start for the Wii, coupled with its irregular control scheme, would have doomed the console because nobody would want to port games to the “gimmick” console.

Most importantly, Nintendo got lucky because consumers, as they had only hoped, darted for the “novel” control scheme over the bigger and better graphics. In hindsight, most people would claim, “Of course consumers would!” But staring at this decision two years ago — well, Nintendo has very some brave managers. And without knowing how sales were going to turn out until long after launch, and looking at the early consumer interest on the Wii (especially launch day), it must have been a scary ride.

I say “lucky,” but let’s not confuse the fact that it was still an ingenious product. The marketing department, however, deserves little credit for its wild success.

As it was recently pointed out, Yahoo is finally moving forward on its Google-clone. I feel sorry for Yahoo. They’re still stuck in 2001, trying to be best of everything. On one hand are speculations that they are ready to invest 1.5 billion into Facebook, and yet here they are, still dumping money on search.

I know search is lucrative. So is real estate and operating systems, but you don’t see them buying properties and forking Linux, do you? I wish Yahoo would make up its mind and really set its eyes on one business model. Are you a media company or a search engine? Because so long as they try to walk both lines, they’ll only continue to lose the search market to Google, which is, at its core, a search engine company.

And if you’re going to continue to walk both lines, at least innovate. Right now, Yahoo is merely copying Google at its own game, release an application that is (supposedly) as good as the dominant player in the market. You have to beat your competitors by a wide margin to get people to switch. How is copying going to convince people to switch? Copying only keeps your customers, which, I suppose isn’t a bad thing when you’re constantly bleeding users away to Google.