Lego 'lost the plot' for quite a number of years and their only drive was to sell more (poorly designed) sets to survive financially, rather than to see what drove people to buy those sets in the first place: the fact that their kids wanted them. Branching out into the upmarket sets for adults and older kids (large Starwars sets, modular houses and architectural sets such as the London Bridge) was pretty clever as well: you have to sell far fewer sets to people with much deeper pockets to make money that way.

The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego management, and that's why they couldn't have invented Minecraft. If they had it would have been buried deep. The obvious next step was to allow anything created in such an environment to be immediately orderable, Lego experimented with that for a bit, shipping 'MOC's, but ended up having to withdraw it due to overwhelming success. Obviously that is something you should then fix but instead the idea was - as far as I know - abandoned.

> The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego managemen

It seems that 'free bricks' in general horrifies them. I went to visit one of the biggest sellers of Lego in Norway and they had been told that Lego no longer wants stores to sell plain lego bricks, but only Lego sets. Which for me seems rather strange.

My step-mum ran a small toyshop a few years ago. She could only order limited numbers of plain lego bricks and the amount was dictated by the number of expensive fancy sets she bought.

It's not strange. Sets have high margins and their logistics can be optimized to hell and back. Loose pieces are low-margin and awkward to deal with. It's the same reason you cannot buy Coca-Cola, or milk, on tap from a supermarket.

Capitalism gonna capital.

Given that the Lego patent has expired and there's plenty of "off-brand" sets out there now, the market is free to fill this gap; it just needs a quality producer, because most of the knockoff stuff is just crap in comparison. A big one could be Minecraft, if they were to produce bricks and brick sets. They'd have to stop charging the merchandise premium though.

I'm sure the Minecraft licensing deal that already exists with Lego forbids that for some extended period of time.

Oh I love mindstorms. We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything.

But mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. The point of lego bricks is that they're inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. But strangely, lego's software doesn't follow this at all. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms/poweredup/boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. But you can't. Its all strangely siloed by "theme". Despite using the same plug, you can't even use all of the poweredup / train / mindstorms sensors and motors interchangeably with all of lego's microcontrollers.

On the software side lego maintains two separate & mutually incompatible scratch style programming languages, driven through different apps, to talk to physical hardware that is fundamentally, technically deeply compatible. From any other company I would understand. But this is LEGO. The whole point of lego is that it all connects together. If you have a voice at lego, please help the software teams understand and uphold the same mandate for fundamental interconnectedness in code.

Try PyBricks which allows to control any Powered Up/Boost/Mindstorms hub.

https://pybricks.com/

You guys should have invented Minecraft. Even LEGO Digital Designer was crap and got outcompeted by Bricklink Studio, which was a company like 1/1000 the size.

Free Bricks are anathema to a company selling bricks.

There are a few programs out there that let you build sets using the ldraw spec.

A good place to start is https://www.ldraw.org/ https://www.ldraw.org/downloads-2/third-party-software.html

They had plugins for awhile that exported to 3d programs (blender, pov, etc) for awhile if I remember correctly. There are also links to semi reasonable CAD style programs. There is another editor someone recently came out with (the name escapes me at the moment) that looks very promising.

I would combine the ldraw programs with sites like brickset and others to get the exact pieces in the sets I knew I owned. That way I could build things in 3d then build them for real. I think one of the programs I used had a instruction builder too that you could print out.

Has you heard about *"Datsville RPG" project — a free 3D game based on LDraw?

[0] https://isometricland.net/blog/2021/03/datsville-rpg-synopsi...

They massively missed the boat there - Minecraft became a multi-billion dollar industry.

There was a statement by LEGO's CEO a few years ago making the same point - that they wished they invented minecraft, and talking about how they totally missed the ball on that.

You can listen to that testimony on the Bits n' Bricks podcast published by The LEGO Group. This is in episode "A Fabled History" (April 7th).

https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-g...

For mindstorms, I always found NXC more intuitive than using the blocks. And that was even before I properly learned how to program.

My son wants your job!

I like my job very much, but the day-to-day is the same as in any other big corporation with all the "agile coaches" and office politics that come with it. What we also get is an amazing workplace (look up LEGO Campus) with a huge amount of tool freedom and flexibility. I've done projects in Rust for internal tooling because that's what I'm excited about right now, and one of my more TDD and CI/CD-interested colleagues is allowed to spend time really fleshing that part of his work out.

And of course, when I first got the job I (as a Dane with Danish family) wasn't told "congratulations with the job". I was, however, told "congratulations with the job at LEGO" with a very big emphasis on the last at LEGO. It's a point of pride when extended family asks because it's so revered.