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Comment by exasperaited | Hacker News Reader

> That’s why being a fast follower is so valuable, you get everyone else to waste money on the wrong ways to build things. It also causes R&D to show much worse returns.

Frankly I think this is the big cultural change in tech generally, isn't it? People come up with ideas and everyone goes "oh I want to do that", so they replicate it off the back of the work everyone else has done. Uncritical FOMO.

But actually it's better to be an even slower follower, generally, as a survivor strategy. Apple and Nintendo shows this. It's better to go "I see what they are all doing, and I see where they think consumers are, but I think they are wrong, and I think it's not just a question of them going about it wrong, but that all of this evidence suggests consumers actually wish they were getting this other thing, and that is what we should build".

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This works for Apple & Nintendo because they built their brand image while being fast-followers – and even pioneers decades ago (the Apple ][ was among the trailblazers, just like the GameBoy or the (S)NES).

I would bet that a company trying to replicate that strategy without the previously established brand image would not go very far.

Wouldn't those two be the opposite of fast followers? Indeed, they trailblazed once upon a time. But they maintained that after being surpassed by focusing on being slow followers. Analyzing the market, polishing what worked to perfection, and making it super intuitive.

Or perhaps the time scale of "fast follower" is distorted in my head, compared to the scale of business.

I think as they're quite secretive so it seems they're slow followers but they're fairly fast in starting the project, keep it under wraps and take their time to get it right.

Younger readers might not know that before the iPad came out, Michael Arrington tried to make a tablet before tablets were a thing. So the problem back then was that touch screens were expensive and scaling up from a smart phone to a tablet had a lot of engineering problems. It didn't happen overnight. And Arrington started building TechCrunch’s "CrunchPad" in public, and people thought he might steal a march on tablets. It went a bit wrong with a falling out with a manufacturer, and the manufacturer released the JooJoo.

But obviously Apple had been working on the iPad the entire time, kept their mouths shut until they had perfected it and crushed the JooJoo a couple of months after the JooJoo's release date. The JooJoo was more expensive than expected, almost the same price as the iPad, but had performance issues, poor software, no app store and a short battery life.

You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.

Apple's acquistion of fingerworks was probably important here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

> You might argue that Apple's lost that 'skill' now. For example, the Apple Vision Pro, which didn't nail it.

Apple has always liked to dabble with 'failures' too, though. For example, the Newton didn't nail it, but arguably was still an important step towards creating the iPad.

The vision is interesting and encapsulates a bit of old and new apple. It's clearly well made and best in class so in some ways they did wait to bring out something, quality, rather than something during the hype.

On the other hand, you can argue that they didn't wait long enough because the tech to really pull off this vision simply wasn't there yet (or is there but is obscenely expensive, which is saying something given this headset was already lambasted for cost). It's marketing (after looking back at some commercials) for what it offers was half "oh this is pretty useful" (a workststion with very little footprint) and half "oh this is black mirror" (lying along on a couch watching movies, interacting with kids as you have a giant headset on you). Maybe it's the nature of thr medium, but Apple tended to do a good job is making it feel like their technology brought people closer. Here the socialization felt hollow.

I'll give you the Gameboy but the NES and SNES were very much "see what the others did, now do it better".

Switch 2 to an extent too (it's basically a much improved Switch 1)

> but the NES

The NES trailblazed the 3rd generation consoles and nearly single-handedly put a term to the NA videogames crash.

Granted, the SNES was nothing to call home about when it came out.

Eh... it was certainly massively impactful, but the device itself is not revolutionary in any way (the games are another story, e.g. Super Mario Bros).

If the crash hadn't happened and Mattel managed to drop the Intellivision 3, then graphically and aurally it would have been very close to the NES. Hardware wise the NES is just "like what came before, but better".

Even the gamepad was very similar to the Vectrex controller, which had the same shape but used a very small joystick instead of a D-pad. The use of a D-pad on a controller could be considered revolutionary I suppose (though the D-pad itself wasn't invented by Nintendo, they used it best).

But the same could be said of the SNES and the shoulder buttons then, the most revolutionary aspect was the controller.

Your exemples are not very good.

Nintendo has always been an innovative company. They have gone against the rest of the industry time and time again. What they don’t do is follow. They don’t go for ever increasing performance. They don’t chase ports. The Wii with motion control, the switch merging handheld and tv based, both were very new idea.

Respectfully, I think you missed the point of GP, as you are agreeing with them.

Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator.

Like you said, Nintendo saw that consumers didn’t really want more polygons/second, they wanted fun. Similarly, Apple saw Rio and other MP3 players and realized that consumers didn’t want a 800 128kbps mp3s in their pocket, they wanted a stylish way to listen to music on the go.

Sure, the Wii controllers and iPod clickwheel were novel and innovative user experiences and big hits, but they weren’t heavy lifting technically.

> Being a technology follower is 100% compatible with being a user experience innovator.

I think you are making the same mistake that OP.

You think R&D in the video game industry is releasing more powerful systems. It’s not. R&D is proposing innovative value proposition. Nintendo does that all the time from the Switch to the weird game with cardboard. Nintendo does a lot of R&D in an industry where their competitors do very little and mostly just update their existing product. Calling them an exemple of a follower couldn’t be further from the truth.

Apple indeed used to do a lot of R&D. They do a lot less nowadays.

Apple and Nintendo have some of the strongest brand loyalty this side of macrobrewed beer and sports teams. They can afford to go against the current because they have extremely deep barrels of fanatics who will buy just about anything they make, regardless of whether it's cutting edge or not.

Nintendo in particular also has a different culture than the modern explosive shareholder mentality. They have a huge war chest can likely operate at a loss for over a decade, even if their stock crashed to zero tomorrow.

In other words: they have cultural skin in the game. A bad quarter or even year won't have them seeking out private equity funding.

Didn't they almost go broke after the Wii U? I vaguely remember that the Switch was do-or-die for them.

Yep, and it wasn't the first time the company nearly went bankrupt before miraculously recovering.

Yes, and the Wii U would have been 4-5 years of disappointing sales. But they still tried to invest hard into their hardware and software.

In comparison. How do we think Activision or Ubisoft would have reacted to those kinds of shortcomings?

That’s a pretty spectacular way to miss the point.

The implication that these “fanatics” are misguided because they fail to prioritize “cutting edge” over every other purchase criteria tells me you haven’t been around the block enough to realize that cutting edge is not a positive product attribute. Believe me, I have storage bins full of obsolete cutting edge products that I got less joy from than many boring old appliances I use every day.

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