Epic Fail: The Entire Wall St. Concept

Almost every day I read or hear about a longstanding truth discovered to be false.  Things like “X substance once thought to be healthy, now found to cause cancer,” or “X substance once feared as cancer risk now found to reduce heart disease by 80%.”  It is with this lens that I look at today’s economy and wonder if the stock market is worth having at all.

After all, it was once accepted wisdom that buying a house is superior to renting, that putting money in banks was secure and that holding onto too much cash was not a sound strategy.  There is still some truth to these things, but the buckets that hold them have several major leaks and don’t hold water as well as they used to.

Epic Fail: Nintendo 3DS – Could this happen to Apple?

Today the world’s most successful video game company took some rare, drastic steps to jumpstart sales of their newest product with a giant price cut.  Nintendo has long been considered similar to Apple, due to its ability to offer innovative gaming consoles (not to mention the white plastic industrial design) that are rarely discounted and can maintain premium pricing even during recessions, while competitors must slash continuously to maintain sales.  Hopefully this is not the latest sign of the lingering nature of global economic malaise.

Some of the lessons from the struggles of the 3DS:

To quote MIT’s Charlie Fine, “All advantage is temporary,” and recent results are not an indicator for future success.  While the two predecessors of the 3DS (the DS and the Gameboy Advance) were supremely profitable market leaders, the newest innovation is not maintaining that legacy.  You are truly only as good as your last product.  Nintendo has another major new console launch (the WiiU, successor to the mega successful Wii) coming up in the next year, and this recent development will surely affect their entire business model for that product.  Could this ever happen to Apple?