Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…I totally sympathize with this point of view. Iwata says—this is an actual quote from him around the time—"Making smartphone games is absolutely not under consideration. If we did this, Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo. Having a hardware development team in-house is a major strength. It's the duty of management to make use of those strengths. It probably would be the correct decision in the sense that the moment we started to release games on smartphones, we'd make profits." Remember, they're not making profits at this point in time. "However, I believe my responsibility is not to short term profits, but to Nintendo's mid- and long- term competitive strength." He's absolutely right, and history proves him right here. From a shareholder perspective at the time, people are like, you got to go, we've had enough. The funny thing about this survivorship bias is if history didn't prove him right, in the long-term, we also wouldn't be doing this episode. Somebody who could have had that same opinion, then got in the way of Sega, and today we will be talking to you about the Xbox or some other episode. Totally. Nintendo stock price from the highs after the Wii declines over 80%. It's brutal. I think there's probably a decent chance that Iwata would have been forced out. Unfortunately and completely tragically, he dies way, way, way too young and unexpectedly of cancer in 2015.…

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