Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo has published an interview with Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo. I’ve written quite a bit about Nintendo on this blog, and prior to the iPhone’s appearance, most of my gaming was on Nintendo handhelds. I particularly loved the DS, but I also own various Game Boys, and they all sit sadly unloved in a chest of drawers in my office.

Despite this, I’m not of the opinion Nintendo should throw in its lot with Apple and other third parties, effectively becoming another Sega—yet. This is because Nintendo still has the potential to out-Apple Apple in the gaming space, through making games and hardware. This, note, is what Apple proponents rightly say sets Apple apart from much of the competition—it makes devices and operating systems, and so can mesh those things together far better than other companies. But Apple doesn’t do this in gaming.

What Apple does do in gaming, however, is provide a number of lessons that I still believe Nintendo must learn from:

• More of an emphasis on digital downloads, with the immediacy and better value  those things can provide.
• A better way of dealing with indies—perhaps not quite a iOS-style free-for-all, but there must be a happy medium where bedroom coders are encouraged to bring further innovation to the platform.
• More linkage with the wider world, through the use of non-gaming apps. Again, Nintendo shouldn’t follow Apple in this regard—a Nintendo device doesn’t need a half-million apps. But it does need to keep the device in someone’s hands, so they don’t stray. So: stronger social, browsing and video apps are a must, for a start.

The main focus of a Nintendo device must remain games, but that shouldn’t be the only focus, otherwise Nintendo runs the risk of its devices becoming increasingly niche, which in itself is a danger in that such things will appeal to people with very specific demands. The success of Nintendo handhelds has often hinged on their accessible and widespread nature, not them only finding favour with the select few.

The Kotaku interview is interesting in that instead of being bullish—Nintendo’s tactic of the past—Iwata is seemingly very aware of the changes in the market and yet has a belief Nintendo can continue to succeed. Again, there’s evidence here from Apple’s history—when the products are good enough, the company has been massively profitable with a minority share. Nintendo therefore must ensure its products are good enough—’magical’, to use Apple’s rather naff terminology—and not merely OK.

One way of doing this is in creating unique experiences, argues Iwata:

I think that if we are able to provide experiences on handheld devices that consumers cannot get on another device, then we will continue creating software and hardware going forward…

Strong first-party games married with intuitive and preferably innovative control mechanisms are the way to do this. But Nintendo has of late too often wavered and retreated to its default position of “release the same hardware in different colours and at different sizes”, which leads to Iwata’s flip-side of the coin:

… and if it comes to a point when we’re not able to do that, I think, yeah, you will see portable handheld gaming devices go the way of the Dodo

Curiously, though, Iwata also isn’t blind to its rivals, nor seemingly scared by them, as the Kotaku piece notes:

The entirety of what you might need to know about how Satoru Iwata feels about the supposed threat of Apple and iOS gaming is that, during our interview last week, Iwata read 3DS sales figures to me off of a MacBook Air, which was plugged into a white iPhone, presumably his. When a gaming reporter goes to a showcase for, say, a Wii game or an Xbox game, Nintendo and Microsoft show their games on non-Sony TVs. They don’t let you see hardware from supposed rivals. But there was Iwata, sitting around the corner of a table from me, laptop flipped open, Apple icon presented toward me.

This to my mind shows a confidence in Nintendo’s products, and also an admission that other companies exist, and that their products are also worth using. Additionally, Totilo also got an interesting response from Iwata about the thorny issue of convergence:

[In] the day of the GBA our challenge was to provide experiences you could not have on a cellphone at that time. In the same way, we have to look at the Nintendo 3DS and other platforms in our future as being able to do the same thing in terms of what smartphones can provide as well.

However, Totilo makes a statement that’s almost a counterpoint and that rings very true:

[The interview] was eye-opening, because it did not conform with the critique from some quarters that Nintendo’s head is in the sand and that it does not appreciate the threat of cheap, downloadable iOS and Android games. But it was also short on specifics of how Nintendo would set itself apart in a world that seems more gaga over the next iPhone than over, say, the 3DS’ glass-free 3D.

This appears to be the challenge for Nintendo now: not in realising the market has changed, but responding to that. I’m going to be very interested to see what’s next from the company. Another DS with a gimmick is clearly not going to be enough. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Game Boy brand back, but as a much stronger device in terms of being multifunctional, but also with innovations for gaming that no-one else had thought of. If not and we just get the 3DSMax-o-tron II, I think Nintendo could find itself in a much worse situation.

Still, even if the worst comes to the worst and Nintendo did have to do a Sega, imagine if its games ended up officially on iOS: Angry Birds would be ousted from the top of the charts by Mario and chums, probably forever. As a worse-case scenario, that’s not too bad a prospect, and you could bet even a gaming-ambivalent Apple would sit up and take notice if it got an email from Iwata mentioning that Nintendo’s games were soon coming to the iPhone and iPad.

Ron Johnson did wonders at Apple, crafting a shopping experience like no other and that the competition would do well to ape (although not quite that closely, Samsung). But in his CEO role at J.C. Penney, things aren’t going well. His cunning plan of stopping race-to-the-bottom discounting, in favour of quality and honesty has made customers leave in droves.

Meanwhile, over at Apple, new retail VP John Browett has pissed off a whole bunch of people—not least staff—by attempting to make the already hugely profitable stores more profitable. His cunning plan: get rid of staff and essentially make Apple Stores more like any other mass-market retailer. To be fair to Browett, that’s what he knows—he used to fly high at Dixons and Tesco, neither of which is renowned for being a great experience, but Tesco at least is insanely profitable.

While it won’t happen, it strikes me everyone would be a lot happier (and two well-known retailing experiences wouldn’t be derailed) if these guys just swapped places.

Those cheeky chappies at Tap! magazine have been looking at the numbers surrounding iOS, and they’re big: 650,000 apps, 75 per cent of parents sharing app-enabled devices with kids, a grand a second raked in by Apple through the App Store, and, apparently, enough iPhones and iPads have been sold to make a Saturn-like ring around Earth. I also chuckled on reading Tap!’s extrapolation regarding the number of apps:

It would take you a week just to read the names of all the apps on the store

That’s how I feel time’s passing when trawling through insanely long RSS feeds, looking for apps to review.

Anyway, the spiffy graphic is below (Control/right-click and select the relevant option to view in big-o-vision) and Tap! the app is available now from the App Store. It’s very good.

There’s a story on the BBC about Tory MP Louise Mensch resigning, and it talks about her ‘Not Twitter, honest’ social network, Menshn:

Mrs Mensch was a prolific user of the micro-blogging site [Twitter] with 102,000 followers.

But she said recently she had grown “frustrated” with it and has set up a rival site – Menshn – which aims to keep conversations on topic and allow people to post 180 character messages – 40 more than Twitter.

There have been plenty of reports that have either failed to qualify the 180 character thing or have cited it as some kind of added value. Even all this time after Menshn launched, I find the 180 character decision arbitrary and odd. I can only assume Mensch and co. didn’t want to go for 140 through fear of being sued (or it being even more obvious about the service’s attempts to ‘clone’ Twitter). And so 180 was presumably plucked out of the air, because more equals better equals value equals PROFIT!? But Twitter chose 140 characters for a specific purpose: to enable compatibility with SMS.

Twitter’s now looking likely to move away from its roots, with things like expanded tweets, but the 140-character limit remains, enabling people using feature phones to still engage with the service. Menshn on the other hand remains lodged in a broken version of Twitter’s past, and lacks the ability to embrace what Twitter foresees as its future. It’s a strong lesson that decisions need to be more than arbitrary in order to make sense but also provide a service that enables more users to become involved.

Mac Performance Guide writes about data loss with OS X Mountain Lion and Save As. The Save As command was effectively removed from Lion, with Apple clearly wanting to end people’s reliance on saving at all, instead letting the OS deal with such things. In order to facilitate making copies of files (which many users had been trained to do via Save As), Apple provided a Duplicate option to clone an open document.

From what I can tell, Apple’s brave new way went down like a spoonful of piss. There was a lot of bitching and whining about Apple being stupid idiots for changing the way you deal with files. Personally, I liked the new workflow: I so often accidentally overwrite boilerplates, but the Duplicate option also enables you to revert the file you’re cloning from, which was for me a little slice of bliss.

Still, Apple relented and brought back Save As in ‘hidden’ form to OS X Mountain Lion (it’s only visible upon holding Option when you’re in the File menu). But instead of just saving a copy of the current document with a new name, it also overwrites the original with the same changes. Either this is a bug or Apple really has it in for anyone who doesn’t like its new ways of doing things.