In 2000, Iwata became the head of Nintendo's corporate planning division. He was also put on the board of directors. Over the next two years, he wanted to game development cheaper and shorter while making sure the quality was still good. During his first two years at Nintendo, the company saw profit increase 20 and 41 percent. Iwata's work helped do this. When Yamauchi, the company's president since 1949, retired on May 24, 2002, Iwata became Nintendo's fourth president. He was the first Nintendo president that was not in the Yamauchi family through blood or marriage. Yamauchi asked Iwata for one things: "that Nintendo have new ideas and create hardware that shows that ideal. And make software that has the same standard." Nintendo was a company that wanted individualism, with a policy created by Yamauchi to create new development positions when needed. However, this prevent good collaboration between departments.
When Iwata was promoted, Nintendo was still a profitable company. However, they were not doing as well as other console makers. The GameCube was selling poorly compared to competitors, with Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox outselling it. His presidency also happened when online gaming became popular. Nintendo had not started doing online gaming. He was careful about doing it, saying: "We're not against the idea of going online. We're just practical." He also created a relationship between Nintendo and Capcom that helped the GameCube. During an interview in 2002, Iwata said that he felt the gaming industry was becoming too exclusive. He wanted to make hardware and games that all people would want to play rather than focusing on good graphics.
One of the first things he did as president was to meet directly with the company's 40 department heads and 150 other employees. This was very different from Yamauchi; Yamauchi did not meet with employees often, and he usually had only one speech every year. Iwata was knew that just because he is president, that would not mean everyone would agree with him. He decided to talk to them on a personal level. If employees disagreed with his view, Iwata would suggest they follow their idea instead of his own. He said "creators only improve themselves if they take risks". Iwata also brought more data and science into the business part of the company. Yamauchi made decisions using intuition and experience, Iwata had ideas with a lot of data to convince people. Iwata also promoted Miyamoto, Genyo Takeda, Yoshihiro Mori, and Shinji Hatano to representative directors on the company's board of directors. Their positions had the same power as his own.
Following up on his 2002 interview, Iwata said there was a problem in the gaming market in his keynote speech at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show. During this speech, he thought about the history of the industry and that there was less interest in video games. Starting at the end of the 1990s, were fewer sales in the Japanese market. This continued into the early 2000s. Competition between Nintendo and Sony meant consoles were more focused on powerful hardware. However, the Nintendo 64 was too difficult for developers to make games. Because of this, software was not as good. Iwata asked for an analysis to be done. Nintendo decided that focusing on hardware was not the best way to promote video games. They decided to focus on software. In 2004, there was a big change within Nintendo. Iwata merged various departments created under Yamauchi. He wanted to have collaborative work throughout the company. He later created a "User Expansion Project" in 2005. Employees normally not related to game development would give ideas for new games.
In a March 2004 interview, Iwata said: "Games have come to a dead end." He said that developers wasted far too much time focusing on core gamers; he said that they would not make a profit if they did not make games for the normal game player. He also wanted to show that Nintendo, a "conservative" company, would become a big new creator of entertainment. Iwata created a "blue ocean" strategy to help Nintendo compete against the other console makers. Instead of competing against them about powerful hardware, Iwata decided to make interesting and entertaining hardware and games.
The Nintendo 3DS and Wii U were not as successful as the DS and Wii. Nintendo's finances became worse starting in 2010.
On July 11, 2015, Iwata died of bile duct cancer at age 55.
Lint (material)
Lint is a collection of clothing fibers and other materials usually on or around clothing.
Pocket lint is lint in the bottom of pockets. Pocket lint is usually made up of, but not limited to detached fabric, dust and paper scraps. In some contexts, pocket lint may also refer to random items in one's pocket.
Navel lint, also called belly button lint, belly button fluff or navel fluff, is an collection of fluffy fibres in one's navel.
Many people find that, at the beginning and end of the day, a small lump of fluff has appeared in the navel cavity. People have wondered why this happens for many years. In 2001, Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki of the University of Sydney, Australia, did a survey to find out why this happens. This is what he found out:
Dr. Kruszelnicki was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in 2002. The Ig Nobel Prize is given for "achievements that cannot or should not be repeated".
Austrian scientist Georg Steinhauser has also done research on the navel lint.
Lint
Lint could mean:
Lint could also mean:
Subtropical Storm Andrea (2007)
Subtropical Storm Andrea was the first named storm and first subtropical cyclone of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. It was made on May 9; three weeks earlier than when the 2007 season was supposed to start. Andrea started from a non-tropical rain weather area off the coast of Daytona Beach, Florida. After staying close to the same area, on May 10, Andrea weakened into a subtropical depression after coming near to dry air and wind shear, and on the next day, the National Hurricane Center stopped looking at the storm and stopped giving out advisories.
The storm made bad surf along the beach areas from Florida to North Carolina. Andrea killed a total of 6 people not in a direct way, and 5 of those deaths happened when Andrea was extratropical before being a subtropical storm.
Andrea was the first tropical storm to form before the official start of the season since Tropical Storm Ana from the 2003 season which formed on April 2003. The storm was also the first named storm to form in the month of May since Tropical Storm Arlene from the 1981 season.
Subtropical Storm Andrea formed out of an area of a kind of strong non-tropical rainy place that slowly moved around the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. After becoming stronger a bit more and having the National Hurricane Center look at the storm closely, it was named "Andrea" on May 9 after the NHC discovered that the system had a closed low-level spinning and looked subtropical.
The storm did little more than stay near the same place before it became weak and turned into a subtropical depression after coming in contact with dry air and wind shear, both things which weaken tropical and subtropical cyclones. Andrea then died out off the coast of Florida on May 11 after collapsing because of bad weather conditions for the storm.
The extratropical system that would later be Andrea created high waves that made the National Weather Service give a High Surf Advisory at the coastlines between Florida and North Carolina. Almost right after the NHC called the storm Andrea, it also gave out Tropical Storm Watches to Florida and Georgia's coast. But the NHC those stopped giving out advisories after Andrea weakened into a depression. Also, a gale warning was given out for much of the South Carolina coastline.