I'm in my 40's and all the kits had instructions when I was a kid. There were odd kids that just built what was on the cover and then never took it apart. That singular lack of imagination had nothing to do with the Legos themselves - most of us dumped all our kits into a big bucket and then just created our own stuff...

However you could accuse them of selling out with all the co-branding. When I was a kid they were space sets and medieval sets, not Star Wars or LOTR sets. All the movie tie-in crap is annoying but a sign of the times I guess...

One way in which they can fail is, as other folks have mentioned, specialized parts. There's a fine line between making something new and different and cool, and making parts so specialized that it becomes hard to build other things out of them. But you know, I'm sure the purists were up in arms when my space kits in the 70's and 80's had wing-shaped parts and other such monstrosities. And maybe some proto-nerd of the era went on his local BBS and whined about how they were destroying Legos, that they weren't allowed to be anything other than cubes...

I'm not certain it's a question of it being justifiable - it might not have been possible for MS to go much cheaper...

* Even with Apple's notoriously generous margins, MS perhaps doesn't carry the same weight in the hardware world to get the types of deals Apple gets

* But even more importantly, if this is a "flagship" device that is supposed to show the way for OEMs, if MS undercut Apple by too much they would have left no room for OEMs to make their models, especially if Apple then matched their pricing...

More people would drive if we repealed seatbelt laws?

Or...

Maybe if we pass a law that requires people to wear helmets while driving we can get cars off the road and reduce pollution and congestion?

What's not clear to me is how the Alibaba handset is positioned. Google is claiming it's an Android fork that will fragment the ecosystem, and Alibaba seems to be claiming it's not part of the ecosystem. Is Alibaba being disingenuous here?

While everyone's Microsoft analogies sound good, they don't really work - because if they were true Google would have kicked Acer out of the OHA for making a Windows phone...

Now if Acer and Alibaba were trying to position their device as an Android phone, and it broke the ecosystem in many ways I could understand Google's behavior. But if it's more of an Amazon thing and Alibaba doesn't want or need anything from Google, then Google really does come off as kind of an asshole by punishing Acer's other business which does comply. That's a classic monopolistic strategy.

In any I guess we all know there's a difference between being truly "Open" and just making the source code available...