Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. He presents to the Sega board back in Japan. He flies over to Tokyo and presents a four-point plan of how exactly Sega of America is going to dethrone Nintendo. It's great. The way he gets recruited for this, David and I both read this book, Console Wars, which is really fun if you want the whole blow by blow on this. Tom actually gets recruited by the chairman of Sega while he's on a family vacation in Hawaii on the beach. The chairman of Sega walks up to him and says, Tom Kalinske? For as compelling as the Nintendo story is, it's compelling because they won long term. For this brief moment of time, the Genesis era, I think Sega probably has an even more impressive narrative and hero's journey with Tom Kalinske. Totally. We're going to get into what they do, this four-point plan. It is freaking brilliant. I think this is the best example we've ever seen on the show of how to compete against an entrenched incumbent. They literally walk up to Nintendo and just punch them in the mouth. It's so great. Here's the plan. Point one, we need to preemptively start a price war. We know that Nintendo is working on a new 16-bit system. They're just dragging their feet because they feel no sense of urgency here. We also know, given Nintendo's history and everything we talked about in part one, that they like to make money on their hardware. They want high hardware margins. Here's what we're going to do. We think they're probably going to price the Super Nintendo when it comes out at the equivalent of $250. We're selling the Genesis for $200 right now. We're going to preemptively cut that to $150.…

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