John D. Mitchell's Blog

Lego kills Mindstorms

Yahoo news reports that Lego is going to kill off the geekily popular Lego Mindstorms.

Basically, Lego, as an organization, just never learned to adapt to the high-paced world of high-tech toys. Heck, they didn't get the whole trend / tie-in toy market either. So, they lost a lot of money and now their going to try to deal with the consequences by retreating back into their old, core market.

Hmm... Anybody interested in creating a venture to take over that market and do things the seriously fun, geek way?

Comments

• We loved those Harry Potter sets
  " The company now plans to stop making the electronics and movie tie-in products and return to its core mission: producing colored plastic building blocks for children."

  Oh yeah, that's something 50 other companies can't do.

  Posted by: javaerb on January 12, 2004 at 11:07 AM

• Why??
  While I understand that Lego are suffering a downturn right now, I don't think that the Mindstorms kits should be simply discarded. In fact, I think they have great potential if they were marketed properly this time.

  I am a third year student at my local Institute of Technology, and this year I helped demonstrate the course I attend for prospective first years. We used the Mindstorms kits to show the types of skills that are taught; logical problem solving, algorithmic thinking ability, programming a successful application.

  Where Lego may have gone wrong the last time is that they seemed to aim exclusively at the enthusiast, but I can tell you from experience that maybe they would have made a better go of the line had they aimed equally as much at the academic audience.

  Posted by: doodle on January 13, 2004 at 04:41 AM

• Not a good choice
  Lego MindStorm is the only way to program robot without focusing on "Electronic problems".

  It's used by developers like me who focus on smart robot programming without thinking about underlayer and who don't want to use a soldering iron.

  I'm very very disapointed if LegoMindstorm stoped.

  Posted by: nextone on January 13, 2004 at 08:46 AM

• Lego quits on Mindstorm?
  It was a remarkable success within academics and grownups, which was not the inittial idea – kids from 13.
  If they want, they still have a fantanstic product to develop, but in fact they failled to do so until now.
  Business context isn’t the better for inovation, either.
  I really hope they could do a later try.
  Antonio

  Posted by: antoniocacho on January 14, 2004 at 01:52 AM

• Mindstorms and Harry Potter are continued!
  Please read the press release from january 14:

  http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=pressarchive

  "MINDSTORMStm and Harry Potter will continue"

  Posted by: skrump on January 15, 2004 at 11:23 PM

• A "real" computer for Mindstorms/Technics
  OK, this is a shameless plug for the result of three years of development on a very fast native-execution Java "brain" and pluggable I/O modules for Lego(tm) motors and sensors: http://jcx.systronix.com. It also works with other common small DC motors and many other common sensors such as sonar rangefinders, CMUcam, R/C servos, etc. JCX in various prototype iterations has been in use at the University of Utah for three years and will finally be released sometime this spring. The CPU is either JStamp or JStik and there are numerous plugin boards including a peer-to-peer RFModem which will have JXTA support. A prototype of JCX was actually in the "dancing robot" contest at JavaOne two years ago, and JStamp also powered the Sumo bots which Jim Wright and James Gosling demoed in a JavaOne technical keynote.

  So perhaps JCX will be able to carry on where the RCX has ended. All JCX CPUs are 32-bit native Java (J2ME/CLDC with some realtime extensions, FP primitives, etc) systems which can execute several million byte codes per second.

  Thanks for letting me post this.

  Bruce Boyes

  Posted by: bboyes on February 14, 2004 at 02:31 PM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.