Meditations on the Death of the Mouse

Nintendo has designated Apple (AAPL) as the “enemy of the future.”

The Times Online reports that the video game company is “preparing to unleash the full force of its development and marketing artillery against Apple,” having come to the conclusion that it has already won its console game battle against the Sony (SNE) Playstation 3. The real threat, the company seems to think, is now from the iPhone and the iPad, which post a particular threat to the company’s DS handheld games.

Well,  I agree. The iPhone and iPad are existential threats to Nintendo.  Unfortunately the war is already over. The converged gaming, communication, computing, entertainment device has triumphed. And this is sad–because Shigeru Miyamoto, the design genius behind Nintendo, is a true visionary.

When Shigeru saw that the world had changed and video games were slipping from the computing  avant-garde to irrelevance, he  decided to target a new market that would  use the video game platform in a radically different way. Instead of over-caffeinated teenagers and aging executives who are experiencing mid-life crises, he targeted families, in particular women:

Eighteen months ago, just when video games were in danger of disappearing into the niche world of fetishists, Mr. Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s chief executive, practically reinvented the industry….Their idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: rather than create a new generation of games that would titillate hard-core players, they developed the Wii as an easy-to-use, inexpensive diversion for families (with a particular appeal to women, an audience generally immune to the pull of traditional video games).

The gesture-based interface that Shigeru pioneered with Wii will dominate gaming and home based communication and computing. Within three-years, families will routinely stand in front of their large format screens gesturing, talking, commanding, playing.  But Nintendo, unless it undergoes a radically transformation, will not be providing the experience.

The gesture, voice and touch memes will coalesce into an environmentally stable set. We will touch the devices that we hold. We will gesture to the devices that we hang on walls. We will command our devices to obey whenever it is convenient and effective. The company that realizes this vision wins.The contenders: Apple, Microsoft, Google, HP.

My top pick?

If Steve Jobs decides that Apple is smart enough to figure out how to turn Apple TV from a hobby into a real product, Apple wins. If not, the  field is wide-open for the converged device players.  Kindle, Nook, Wii they are all heading to extinction.