Precedent: How Nintendo did it

I’ve consumed several Acquired episodes, and one I found particularly interesting was about Nintendo, where they describe how lateral thinking shapes how to company thinks about their products: instead of always going after the new shiny thing that still has several unknowns and will need time to iterate on, know and perfect, use instead cheaper, already established technologies / materials and come up with new ways to use them¹

• NES: Nintendo’s CEO provided guidance that each unit should be cheap to the consumer, but also be one year ahead of competition, which steered developers away from very expensive CPUs (competition was using just a single CPU), and instead using a cheaper slower CPU with a dedicated PPU (picture processing unit), maybe the first GPU (graphicals processing unit) on console, that leapfrogged the entire competition 5 years ahead.
• Game Boy: at the time, color displays were all the rage and the new attractive technology. Leadership guidance was that Game Boy should be low price, therefore requiring low cost of bills, so instead of using a color display it used a monochromatic display that was well visible under the sun, and consumed much less battery.
  • Released in 1989, it became a massive success due to its long battery life, low price, and the inclusion of Tetris. Its initial 300k-unit shipment sold out within two weeks, and about 118 million over its lifetime.
  • On the other hand, Sega’s Game Gear used a color display, consuming six AA batteries in roughly 3-5 hours, whereas the Game Boy could run for over 15 hours in just four. It sold about 10 million over its lifetime. 10x less than Game Boy.
• Game and Watch used calculator technology, which was inspired by an observation made by Nintendo’s R&D department lead, that during one of his train rides a business man was just fiddling with his calculator to kill time. If they were receptive to the point that even a calculator would entertain them, surely they would also be a target audience for Game and Watch and later Game Boy. Interestingly enough, adults were a big target demographic for Game Boys.
• Wii sported a slower processor when compared to its powerful peer consoles, but it combined existing technologies in novel ways, which unlocked new player experiences that would be more accessible for casual players. Even the UI was shaped in a way that seemed by one was choosing TV channels, and the remote had the familiar resemblance to a TV remote.

Combine solid technologies, solve real problems

Today LLMs, vibe / agentic coding, and other new technologies are all at rage. This means that a lot of humanity’s headspace is directed towards these new technologies, but there is still an immense unexplored space for the already established tools and technologies that were not fully exploited and combined. For example:

• Pieter Levels, with only HTML, jquery, and SQLite created incredibly profitable businesses, when everyone at the time was completely focused on the new tech, libraries, new JS packages, react, vue, etc. Pieter now also uses several new machine learning technologies available though.
• Existing simple linear regressions, established programming languages (e.g. python, C++ and Java), time tested frameworks (e.g. Laravel, with which vivotime.net was built on), tools (e.g. Blender²), hardware kits (e.g. Arduino still pack a punch, and are right in front of all of us waiting to be combined in novel ways.

The most important thing at the end of the day is: are these solutions solving a real problem? Are they generating value? Their end user likely doesn’t really care how something was implemented behind the scenes, they just need something to solve their problems.