In early May, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was quoted as saying that Apple and the iPhone business represent the "enemy of the future." Here's the problem, however: according to Nintendo, Iwata never actually said anything of the sort.
Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime has repeatedly said that Apple is not a threat to the DS business, and most recently as part of an in-depth interview, he noted that Iwata never made comments about Apple being the "enemy." He told us, "...those were not attributed quotes. You know, we’ve gone back to the reporter and challenged them as to where they got this information, because they never talked to him."
Reggie continued, responding to our question about iPhone: "These are reported quotes that never happened. The fact of the matter is, and Mr. Iwata and I are completely aligned on this, we compete for consumers’ time. And our challenge is to provide more compelling experiences for the consumer to invest their valuable time. And we look at it this way because every day the consumer has... every consumer has the same amount of time, and the time pressures are increasing for every consumer. To get one incremental minute of the consumer playing with the Nintendo 3DS or one incremental minute of the consumer playing with their Wii home console, that’s market share that matters, and looking at it from that way, we compete with a wide range of different companies. Not only the ones that you’ve mentioned, but we compete with magazines, we compete broadly with the internet, we compete with free games on the PC, we compete with a plethora of different experiences, and we have to be more compelling for the consumer to invest their time."
