I didn't know Lego had a ptent on the brick at one time...loss of the patent on the brick,
I read about it in the national paper at the time; can't really find a decent link, but wikipedia covers it in brief: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Group ... nd_patents and there are quite a few articles available online about the recent lego vs megablocks copyright trials of '05.Shurtugal wrote:I didn't know Lego had a ptent on the brick at one time...loss of the patent on the brick,
Does anyone know of somewhere that I could read more about this? I'd be much obliged.
) His post is precisley on target here.
Says who?sarous wrote:if you are over 10 you are not a kid
Wow. Here! Here! to that. You have put it very nicely. LEGO would do well to read things like this.davee123 wrote:I think Lego's problem was that it got greedy. And what's worse, it got greedy at PRECISELY the worst time to get greedy.
1998 marked the 1st EVERY financial loss for the Lego Company, which means something in 1997 or 1998 hurt them pretty badly. Recall also that in 1999 or so, Lego announced its plan to become the "#1 recognized brand in households with families". Which was ludicrous, because in order to do that, they'd have to surpass things like Disney and Nickelodeon. And, unfortunately for them, that was also right around the same time that the toy industry started getting hit very hard, mainly by computer and video games.
The long and the short of it, however, is that sometime around 1997, Lego started running its business like a general *TOY* company, and not like the "Lego Building Brick" company. Znap, Bionicle, Galidor, Clikits, expanded clothing lines, video games for each playtheme, etc, etc. Tons of stuff that Lego's not used to doing, and they jumped on ALL of these all at once. IIRC, they also were trying to establish Lego theme parks every year or two, with Windsor in 1996, Carlsbad in 1999, and Gunzburg in ... 2000-and-something.
But their core product line suffered too. Lego attempted to diversify their product lines to please even more target groups. The result was that each playtheme was vastly different than the other playthemes. "Adventurers" Lego sets are HUGELY different than "Star Wars" or "World City". Age range, target markets, branding... Lego was losing its "system" of play, such that the gap between one Lego set and another was vast. Kids no longer felt loyalty to *Lego*, but only to their short-lived playtheme.
My guess is they did this because, well, everyone else was doing it. Lego wanted to be another "Hasbro" or "Mattel". They wanted to be another industry giant rather than the niche toy they always were, and like (as is a good example) Playmobil is. Lego probably hired on a group of marketing gurus who were used to marketing general toys-- but not niche toys.
And I'm not sure whether to be thankful or not. Certainly, Lego paid dearly for their choice. They've now had, what, 6 years of losses? And some of their stuff has started returning to the simpler ideals that the company once had. Perhaps it was a good wake-up call. And perhaps if Lego had been successful, it would have meant even more diversification and their core building bricks might have suffered more. I don't know. They're still a FAR cry from the toy I fell in love with in the 80's. But they're also making improvements that I hope will continue.
The real problem is, I'm not sure that's a problem. LEGO Star Wars II, at least is doing very well, and You can see on brickshelf that the *cough* Bionicle line is selling well. I think LEGO has turned over much of it's theme park content to a theme park company, freeing up much staff and giving them one less thing to worry about. I wouldn't be suprised if there were similar teams dedicated to other 'specialty' products.davee123 wrote:Znap, Bionicle, Galidor, Clikits, expanded clothing lines, video games for each playtheme, etc, etc. Tons of stuff that Lego's not used to doing, and they jumped on ALL of these all at once.
Oh, it's great when it works-- From what I hear Bionicle is an unbridled success, Clikits started off pretty strong (but weakened), and Lego Star Wars is doing pretty well. But I think the problem has that the failures hit them harder than the successes made up for.E of Alshire wrote:The real problem is, I'm not sure that's a problem. LEGO Star Wars II, at least is doing very well, and You can see on brickshelf that the *cough* Bionicle line is selling well.
Yeah, they've been trying to streamline as much as they can-- more outsourcing, discontinuing or toning down less profitable product lines, etc. And it shows. Color variance is worse than it was in the past, mistakes in packing and molding are more frequent, more mistakes show up in instruction manuals, etc, etc. Some of that is due to the fluctuation rather than the new source being somehow worse than the old source, and some is probably due to just lower quality sources. But fortunately, they seem to be back on the upswing. And hopefully that means improvement for the future.E of Alshire wrote:I think LEGO has turned over much of it's theme park content to a theme park company, freeing up much staff and giving them one less thing to worry about. I wouldn't be suprised if there were similar teams dedicated to other 'specialty' products.
I dunno-- sometimes I think that's true, but then I think about their campaign to become 'the most recognized brand in households with families'. If that's not greed, I dunno. Perhaps you could call it simply "ambitious" if you're looking for a less negative word, but same difference, I think. They were going for the gold, and they should have been shooting for the bronze first.ottoatm wrote:The only difference is that I don't think greed was the cause of it
