Where Wii should have been.

It's pretty common for people on gamers forums to complain about what the Wii should have been at launch. I feel allot of these complaints though might actually be unreasonable given both Nintendo's history and their limited experience in many of the realms Wii entered into. I feel that as of this moment the Wii has finally reached the place it should have been at launch (realizing there is a difference between where they should've been at launch and where they should be two years later).

• Online - Online DIDN'T launch with the system. Instead Nintendo chose to delay online until midway through their first year. This strategy had worked previously with the DS. The DS was Nintendo's first online system so the delay had been more excusable on that platform. Also as a handheld were the feature wasn't as commonplace the launch of online for the DS (even though its competitor the PSP had beaten it to the inclusion of this feature). Nintendo might have been banking on receiving the same second wave of interest they got with the DS, but they KNEW their competitors had those features ready right out the door the decision just seems foolish.
• Wii Speak - The DS came with a built in mic, yet it took until its second batch of online games to support voice chat. It wasn't until Pokemon (several release waves later) that DS games really started to consistently use the mic for chatting on the internet. Nintendo saved Wii Speak for an E3 press conference of all things. They seemed to believe that they could somehow get positive hype from this. Nintendo believed that they were being innovative by making their chat solution more like speakerphone and less like a personal microphone. Sadly they're ignoring several things (like bad roommates) that will likely make it a hassle. Much like the DS the Wii is also not seeing much penetration of this feature, it will probably take another big release to force the feature into standardization. Of course the problem is confounded by Wii Speak being an accessory and not built in.
• Storage Solution - The Wii launched with a pitiful 512megs of on board flash memory. This would have been acceptable had they not promised downloadable games. Many expected a solution to be coming out the same year, but instead it took two years to arrive. While Nintendo's argument that most people had not reached full storage saturation was correct they failed to realize most people would stop buying before they topped out. Eventually Nintendo launched the ability to play games directly of SD cards and once again they were stunned to find no praise.
• WiiWare - The downloadable games that Nintendo featured were primarily there to make quick money off the company's large back catalog of games. While it was cool to sell off nostalgia, it didn't really push the system or it's capabilities. Nintendo waited until a year later to really get a system for publishing original games on their system. However at least in this case Nintendo seems to have realized the profit potential in a downloadable system and their DSi launched with original content first and retro content on hold.

The Lesson here is, don't be afraid to learn from your competition. Or perhaps don't be afraid to learn from your own experience. Nintendo's handheld teams and home console teams are actually two different groups. So it is understandable that not all studios would implement features at one time. But to ignore your own personal history is crazy. Glory comes from exciting new features not by following market trends years after they're standard for everyone else.

Nintendo claimed when entering the online market, that they would ignore what had already been done in favor of fresh innovation. But without knowing what has already been tried, how can you truly do something different? If your going to truly innovate on the market sometimes it still takes a certain knowledge of how things have evolved. Not everything you do needs to be a market disruptor.

Nintendo is now were they should've been two years ago. Now the best they can do is reorganize their corporate structure to better respond and polish the infrastructure they spent way too much time getting to market.