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Lego Welcomes Hack Of Their Design Program

Posted by Zonk on Fri Sep 16, 2005 12:09 PM
from the come-on-in dept.
Toys Programming IT Technology
fdiskne1 writes "We've all heard about big companies suing their customers for hacking a product they purchased. It's about time we hear about a company that welcomes it. One of the most geek-friendly toys has just gotten geek-friendlier. CNet News.com has a story about how the Lego company is cheering the fact that people are hacking their public design program to better fit their customers' needs. Lego has a free program (available for Windows and Mac) that allows a person to put in their own 3D design and the program will tell the customer which Lego 'palettes' they need to order to complete the design. The problem with it was that the palettes each contained a number of bags of different shape and color Lego blocks. If someone needed only one block out of a particular palette, they would end up with many bags of bricks they didn't need. The hack involved someone taking an inventory of how many bricks are included in each bag. The program would then tell the customer how many BAGS of each to order, greatly reducing the number of bricks the customer would have ended up not using in the project. I can think of many companies that wouldn't think of doing such a thing. In fact, I can think of many companies that would intentionally use the flaw in their program to make the customer buy even more."
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Lego Welcomes Hack Of Their Design Program 50 Comments More /

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  • Lego without limits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CDMA_Demo (841347) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:12PM (#13577408) Homepage

    Don't you think the very reason Lego is popular is because it allows people DYI in many ways? You can make robots, cranes, smart buildings and other things out of Lego and thats the reason the company is alive. Why would they want to force their customers into doing otherwise?

  • That's Great! (Score:5, Funny)

    by cloudkj (685320) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:15PM (#13577480)
    Now I won't have to spend extra money buying those extra bags of Lego blocks for building my robot.....


    ....my girl robot!

  • The "I'm Not Going To Prom" page (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChrisF79 (829953) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:16PM (#13577489) Homepage
    Take a look at this lineup. Think these folks went to prom?
    http://www.lego.com/eng/factory/design/bios.asp [lego.com]
  • Well by making a program hacker friendly. They just allow more people to consider using Legos. For all the people who buy legos in bulk and they end up loosing the money on a couple bags out of 100 it is worth it. First they will have more blocks to sell to their core market of smaller bags in the normal lego sets, at a higher price/brick. Also it allows hobiest to save money thus being able to put the money to future projects. So you Gray DeathStar is completed. and you saved a couple bags of legos. The m

  • I Only Wish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Krast0r (843081) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:27PM (#13577614) Homepage Journal
    I wish that more companies would follow the recent examples of Lego and the BBC; instead of just sending out legal threats and public announcements as a reaction to something they should consider why people are doing it. The BBC realised that people were recording and distributing Dr.Who and while they took a hardline on this (as it is, after all, piracy) they also decided that they should make their shows available on the internet as people are obviously looking for other ways to view their favourite shows. Here, Lego have taken the rational direction and thought "how does it harm us?" and have realised it doesn't, it just opens more creative dimensions. Companies rarely have anything to gain by sending constant legal threats (recent examples include RIAA and the MPAA) and may do well to think of why people are doing it in the first place, and how they can change their stance for mutual benefit.
    • I think the major problem with business is the mindset that one must have a plan, follow the plan, and everything that isn't in the plan is Evil(tm).

      Granted, the operation of any large organization hinges on the ability to make consitent decisions on all levels of management. What get Big Business into trouble is that the scarecely make a decision beyond that of a front-line manager, i.e. reactionary.

  • Great marketing move (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andrewman327 (635952) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:29PM (#13577643) Homepage Journal
    I am sure that many people only know about this application because of Lego's allowing people to hack it. I had not heard of it until I read this thread. Regardless of how many units they might lose from this hack, they will make money from increased awareness. How many people do you think read this /. thread and tried the program for the first time?

  • Too bad (Score:3, Insightful)

    by antifoidulus (807088) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:30PM (#13577652) Homepage Journal
    Lego is also losing money hand over fist....
    • Someone needs to mod the parent up. It doesn't matter how "nice" a company is if its business model isn't sound.

      Lego doesn't make profits by selling individual bricks (or bags of identical bricks) to DYIers. Lego makes its money by promoting a particular collection of bricks as a "set" for building some larger thing (a moon rover, a race car, whatever). The profit comes from being able to sell that special collection (plus the design it is intended for) in a marketable box plastered with enticing picture
      • If you read the CNet article, one of the LEGO execs talks about what seems to be a plan of theirs to (I'll summarize here rather than quote directly) 'let the customers run the company.' Not literally of course, but rather than just have the 100 in-house, presumably full time designers that they have right now making their boxed sets which are the company's bread and butter, they can use the LEGO Factory as a source for new product ideas.

        There's an example in the article of a kid who won a contest to design

    • Lego is also losing money hand over fist....

      Can you provide data to support this? Any linkage?

  • Hooray For Lego (Score:4, Interesting)

    by taskforce (866056) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:34PM (#13577688) Homepage
    Lego is the original "Rip, Remix and Burn" passtime and I'm glad to see that they're sticking to their heritage. Three cheers for lego! Can you imagine the MPAA packaging ripping, video editing and burning tools with all that extra space on the DVDs?

  • All toys should be Lego compatible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2005, @12:35PM (#13577697)
    With the patents of basic Lego (and even 1985 flat pieces, technic and space lego) having expired I hope more Chinese toy makers will make all plastic toys Lego compatible.

    Would it not be great if kids who prefer playing with toy soldiers over building with Lego would still use their old lego to build bridges to blow up as the hole on the toy soldiers feet would be compatible with lego. If the interconnects between rockets, rocket-launcer, vehicle and hide-out could be hooked up to any of the other plastic toys?
    • The problem there is quality control. One of the reasons that Lego sets are so great is that you never get a half-molded piece... you never get pieces that don't snap together... you never get pieces that fall out due to temperature changes, etc. You also never get sets with missing pieces... Their plastic technologies are so precise that they actually have different molds for each color of brick, since they shrink to very very slightly different sizes (smaller than tenths of millimeters iirc) and they w
    • Yes, I agree that all toymakers should make their toys compliant with an open standard.

      This way, MA government will be able to use today's toys with the toys of 2030.

    • Quality is extremely important (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CheeseTroll (696413) on Friday September 16 2005, @01:24PM (#13578227)
      My 5-year-old son has received a few small sets of imitation-Legos. They appear to be the correct size, etc., to intermingle with real Legos. But the quality of these imitations is so poor that pieces either don't stick together very well, or are impossible to pull apart, he gets pretty frustrated. Meanwhile, I let my sons play with my 20-year-old space legos all the time, and everything still fits together perfectly. You can get away with low quality with a lot of toys, but tiny little building bricks are not a place to cut corners.

      (Not that I wouldn't mind seeing a little competition keep prices lower on real Legos!)

  • better service (Score:3, Informative)

    by naoursla (99850) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:37PM (#13577716) Homepage Journal
    By doing this, Lego is providing a better service to their customers promoting increased sales in the future. Trying to rope your customers into buying things they do not want may increase sales in the short term but doesn't make sense long term.

  • But you have to ask.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by petra13 (785564) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:40PM (#13577747) Journal
    Is it really possibly to buy too many legos?

  • A toast... (Score:4, Funny)

    by tktk (540564) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:41PM (#13577757)
    to the Lego company...

    errr....just as soon as I finish building my chapagne glass.

  • Instead of welcoming hacks... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HateBreeder (656491) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:50PM (#13577855)
    Why not just go Open Source?

  • Lego aint THAT nice (Score:4, Informative)

    by nilbog (732352) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:51PM (#13577862) Homepage Journal
    They threatened to sue me... http://www.livejournal.com/users/gthing/78721.html [livejournal.com]

    • Re:Nothing too big imho... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LoganAvatar (869001) <loganavatar@gmail.com> on Friday September 16 2005, @12:21PM (#13577543) Homepage Journal
      There is a big difference between "not throwing a fit", and encouraging the hacking of an application despite the possibility of less revenue.

      • There is a big difference between "not throwing a fit", and encouraging the hacking of an application despite the possibility of less revenue.

        Well, as I recall the software is free.

        Which means Lego recognizes that fostering interest in Lego building is worth far more to them than preventing you from making their software more useful.

        This hack can't decrease their revenues in any way. And it might make them some longer term sales/goodwill, and that has a kit if value. I'm impressed they're tuned in enough

    • Re:Nothing too big imho... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LordKaT (619540) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:23PM (#13577571) Homepage Journal
      Is it only a big deal because the LEGO is not throwing a fit? In short, yes. In an age where companies throw a tantrum when you modify the memory contents of your own computer in order to achieve the desired results in a single-player game, or not allow you to play a game because you have CloneCD installed, it's refreshing to see a company not only understand and accept a software hack but actually embrace it.

    • Re:Nothing too big imho... (Score:5, Funny)

      by $RANDOMLUSER (804576) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:30PM (#13577646)
      Depending on the mix of bricks in the different bags, this could be an interesting knapsack (partition) problem, as in NP-tricky.

    • Re:Grow up, get real: This is a business (Score:4, Insightful)

      by zarmanto (884704) on Friday September 16 2005, @12:48PM (#13577840) Journal
      Responding to: "If you think Lego is actually happy about this, well, have fun at school tomorrow."

      Are you kidding? I'd be willing to bet that Lego is absolutely thrilled at this hack. Think about it like this: Your business is toys -- not software, so naturally you know from the start that there's a good chance that the software firm you hired isn't going to quite hit your vision. You release a piece of software that almost represents what you wanted, under the standard business practice of releasing a product that's "good enough" rather then waiting for the product to be perfect -- which never happens. Your customers then fix the most glaring issues remaining in your software for you!

      Of course this ultimately represents a zero loss for everyone, because it creates a better overall customer experience -- which would have the natural tendency to drive sales up within that demographic of customers. Therefore, Lego's next logical step is probably going to be to obviate the "hack" by having it incorporated directly into the product itself.

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