{"id":445,"date":"2013-07-22T18:13:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T23:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephencalenderblog.com\/?p=445"},"modified":"2021-12-31T17:44:44","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T22:44:44","slug":"quoted-in-the-book-brick-by-brick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stephencalenderblog.com\/?p=445","title":{"rendered":"Quoted in the book Brick by Brick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"Brick<\/td>\nEvery once in a while smart things come out of my mouth, and it is nice when other people recognize that. I was recently quoted by the ink and paper medium in Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry<\/a><\/em>
\nISBN: 978-0-307-95160-1
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\nAs Stephen Calender, a former Universe developer, put it in an interview with the blog MMO Fallout, producing a flawless game with nearly one million lines of code \u201cwould be like getting a perfect score on a math test with that many questions.\u201d
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The excerpt in its entirety:
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It took a team of eight engineers working flat out for six months to produce a brick that met the LEGO design specs. The result was that a single Universe brick, with its lovingly rendered tubes and studs \u2013 each imprinted with the LEGO logo \u2013 was more technologically complex than a fully decked-out World of Warcraft character. <\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was one of those things where we just never agreed,\u201d said Brown. \u201cBut what could we do? It was their IP, and LEGO would never give in on the quality of the brick rendering.\u201d<\/p>\n

The push for perfection breached the logic of a disruptive innovation. At first it\u2019s fine if the disruptive product is low-end and low-quality, so long as it\u2019s easy to use and works well enough to attract less-demanding customers who don\u2019t care if, say, a LEGO logo is etched into each stud of every brick. It\u2019s better to put a cheaper price tag on the product, launch it even though it\u2019s less than ready for prime time, and then make improvements (an charge more) as it moves upmarket. LEGO, however, spent years working to get Universe just right, which cost it the disruptor\u2019s advantage.<\/p>\n

The LEGO Group\u2019s insistence that Universe deliver an ultra-premium play experience even showed up in the RFP we mentioned earlier. A LEGO lawyer inserted a provision that Universe, upon its release, must be entirely free of bugs. It was a preposterous demand, especially for a game that would require somewhere between half a million and a million lines of code. The request signaled that the LEGO Group\u2019s innermost value, \u201conly the best,\u201d would bump up against the disruptor\u2019s \u201cgood enough\u201d ethos, perhaps best expressed by a maxim credited to Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg: \u201cBetter done than perfect.\u201d In the months and years to come, LEGO and NetDevil would ceaselessly struggle to smack back bugs and achieve a rough equilibrium between less than perfect and better than merely done.<\/p>\n

The disconnect between NetDevil and LEGO over Universe\u2019s quality loomed larger as development got under way. At any one time there were thirty or more programmers working on Universe, all changing code in different parts of the game. As Stephen Calender, a former Universe developer, put it in an interview with the blog MMO Fallout, producing a flawless game with nearly one million lines of code \u201cwould be like getting a perfect score on a math test with that many questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Five years later, when Universe was finally launched, the development team had slashed the game\u2019s most bothersome bugs to well below the industry standard. Nevertheless, seven months after the game\u2019s release, Ronny Scherer, a LEGO veteran and Universe\u2019s project manager, still wasn\u2019t satisfied. \u201cMy house here in Colorado has all these nice features, but its questionable quality means it\u2019s going to need a big overhaul in ten years,\u201d he told us. \u201cNetDevil was making software the same way. And fundamentally, LEGO doesn\u2019t think like that. We want to make sure that when we build something, we build it to last.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Thanks for reading, and remember, we are all in this together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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