What Happened with Lego
I have a different perspective: I’d say Lego is having a hard time keeping its core principle (building stuff) while going along with the times.<p>In particular Lego has a “Technic” and “Boost” series that in particular allows remote control, with motors, actuators and these recent years bluetooth hubs.<p>The first saliant point: Lego doesn’t sell the “Control +” bluetooth hub alone, and it’s been a while now that the piece has been in sets.<p>You’re SOL if you break&#x2F;lose the one from the set, there is no legit way to get one if you want to use it on other creations in parallel, even if it’s arguably the central piece of a lot of constructions. It’s not listed with the other bricks in the order site, and it’s not handled by sites like bricklink.<p>Then Bricklink: taken over by Lego, they got rid of most custom parts and anything that was extending what you could do with lego bricks ahead of what Lego publishes.<p>Last, their whole latest Control + app has customizations for their specific sets. For the Top Gear one for instance there’s specific mini games and efen the motor control is slightly tweaked to have a “racing” effect. This goes pretty far astray from having generic playing tools.<p>In general their efforts in the Power Functions&#x2F;Boost&#x2F;Mindstorm&#x2F;NXT&#x2F;Control + area seem overly proprietary, limited and way too expensive for what we get. So much that at this point third party hubs are better than Lego’s in almost every respect especially ability to use vanilla Scratch), but get limited by Lego stalling the whole ecosystem. Why is there even 4 different systems doing the same thing, it’s insane.<p>I guess the people staying on more classic sets feel it less heavily, but for me Lego is really lost in how they want to move forward, now that kids playing with gears and programmed parts has become realistic and commercially viable.