Don’t listen to your customers, says Nintendo

Here’s an interesting quote from the recent issue of Time, where they preview the Nintendo Wii (aka Nintendo Revolution)

TIME.com: A Game For All Ages — May 15, 2006 — Page 4

But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal–they blog a lot–but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.”

Two things come to mind:
1. It’s amusing that the fact that Microsoft listens to its customers is cited as a fault – considering that for the longest time (and still?) there is a belief that Microsoft doesn’t care. (Fortunately we have Scoble working on that.)

2. Didn’t Steve Jobs say this once too? To ignore your customers?

Indeed this is a very tough problem to solve – how do you innovate and please your existing customers.

Companies that soar are ones that make new customers – not from their competitors, but the ones who aren’t consuming at all. Attracting people who are stuck with the status quo.

Take Southwest – you could say that they stole customers from the existing legacy airliners, but I think that they created new customers: people who never thought of flying because… well… they never thought they could afford it.

Making breakthroughs like this typically requires that you produce a product that is insanely easy to use, amazingly great, or ridiculously cheap – preferably all three of these. (Though as the iPod demonstrates – ridiculously cheap isn’t always necessary.)

Personally, I’ve only owned 2 video game console systems ever: a NES and a GameCube. And, truth be told, I only have 1 game on my GameCube: Mario Kart DoubleDash. I’m just not a FPS fan.

Will the Wii be able to win non-playing consumers over? I wish Nintendo the best of luck.