Don't Build It, and They Will Come Anyway

Some things in life just weren't meant to be understood. Take for instance feel good stories of how a sick child is miraculously healed, or how a family in dire need is somehow blessed with a smile from lady luck at the last possible moment. We've come to write these sort of things off as blessed occurrences from a higher power, and that is enough for the majority of us. Call me a softy, but I've always felt that it's enough for me as well, and I leave it at that.

However, this article isn't one of those things. The blessed underdog going into this generation, Nintendo, seems to be struggling a bit too much under the weight of it's own sales, for my taste. Now the problem is, I don't know who to rip into first, about this. You see, we have one side an analyst (yes, I love to poke at these guys), who makes the outlandish prediction that Nintendo may have trouble meeting consumer demand for the Wii up until 2009. On the other side, we have the equally ridiculous concept that a hardware maker with many years of experience under it's belt can't figure out how to crank out a hot product while it's still hot. Like I've stated before, If we were talking about cutting edge technology here, I might be a bit more forgiving. Since we are talking about what amounts to an incremental step from the original Xbox a fair six years after it was released, the thought of it all just confounds me.

For Pete's sake, Nintendo, you have amassed a legion of fans bested only by the yearly totals of American Idol viewers, in terms of sheer numbers. Okay, so maybe I'm embellishing this one a bit, but you can't deny how large the loyal followers of the Nintendo World Order have become. The point is, you could probably talk these guys into building a couple factories for you, and piecing together Wiis from spare parts lying around in any electronics store. If that weren't enough, I'm more than certain that there are enough Gamecubes left in the wild for you to simply gut and refit them with nice shiny white cases. Then all you'd have to worry about is making a few million remotes. You can do that before 2009, can't you?

And as for the aforementioned analyst; your not off the hook either. Are you out of your freaking mind? You have somehow managed to convince yourself that while millions of manufacturers can crank out enough products every day to meet customer demand, that Nintendo will need the better part of two plus years to finally put a Wii in every household that wants one. I'm not sure what the drug of choice is for those in your industry, but I'm glad it's not found over the counter. God help our great nation when it becomes readily available on the street.

So that brings us back to this whole enigma that has yet to be understood by anyone. There's a hot product out there with a niche market. The product seems to be fairly cheap to make, and it doesn't use any form of technology in it's parts that have yet to be reverse engineered from future UFO crash sites. Like the great mystery of just how many licks it really takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop, the world may never know the why this hasn't been remedied as of yet. Until there, I fear that there's no shortage of analysts who will continue to make outlandish predictions about the equally outlandish positions Nintendo has put itself in, yet again.