Bill Gates Kills Yamauchi With His Bare Hands!

Given the amount of wrong information I've read about the recent rumors that Microsoft was going to buy Nintendo, I wouldn't have been overly surprised to see a headline like the one above.



Pop quiz time, kiddies.

• Was Bill Gates at an analyst conference in Frankfurt recently?



• Did Microsoft make a formal offer to buy Nintendo at that conference?



• Did Bill Gates announce his intentions to buy Nintendo to the entire conference?



• Has Microsoft made an offer to buy Nintendo in the past?



• Is Hiroshi Yamauchi the majority shareholder of Nintendo?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then I'm afraid you're wrong (or at least not definitely right). But I don't blame you. I blame a wide body of reporting on the story that had an amazing proclivity for getting things wrong. These are just a few of the issues I noticed.



Quoth the Gates



Given that this entire fiasco was based on an innocent quote at a cocktail party, I would hope that the media complex could at least agree on what was said in the quote. Not so:

• Wirtschafts Woche: The original article quoted Gates as saying "Wenn Hiroshi Yamauchi mich anruft, kriegt er mich sofort an die Strippe." The Babelfish computerized translation for this quote: "If Hiroshi Yamauchi me calls, kriegt it me to strips immediately." Not very helpful.



• Reuters: "When (Nintendo's top shareholder) Hiroshi Yamauchi calls, he will get me on the phone immediately."



• Spong: "If Hiroshi Yamauchi phones me up, I will pick up at once..."



• New York Times: "If Hiroshi Yamauchi calls, he'll get me on the line right away,"



• GamesIndustry.biz: "If Hiroshi Yamauchi phones me, I will pick up at once."



• CNN/Money: "If Hiroshi Yamauchi calls, he will be directly transferred to me."



• Gamespy: "If [Nintendo owner] Hiroshi Yamauchi phones me up, I will pick up at once."



• IGN: "If Hiroshi Yamauchi phones me up, I will pick up at once,"



• TotalVideoGames: “If Hiroshi Yamauchi calls me, I’ll pick up straightaway.”

Granted, all of these translations are extremely similar, and information is likely to get garbled a bit in the crossing between languages (and the second- and third-hand reporting that no doubt led to many of these articles). But when the whole story is based on a quote, you better make sure you have its meaning down exactly.



I found it particularly intriguing that Reuters started the quote with "when" while all the other outlets used "if." This one word could mean a world of differece in the implied meaning of the quote -- "when," to me, implies that he is expecting a call, possibly soon. If is much more hypothetical.



My girlfriend, who happens to speak German, translated the quote as, "If/When Hiroshi Yamauchi calls me, he gets me (will get me?) on the phone certainly/right away/pronto." When asked about the if/then dichotomy, she said that, "it's mostly 'if' in the sense of 'in the case where'..." That's good enough for me.



Since When Is 10% A Majority?



An overwhelming majority of these articles, including the original German article, stated that Hiroshi Yamauchi was "majority shareholder" or held a "majority interest." in Nintendo. Fewer sources said that he was simply the largest shareholder. Who's to be believed?



Well, a quick Google search comes up with a USA Today article from May, 2002, which says, "Yamauchi... is Nintendo's biggest shareholder with a 10% stake." It's possible his status could have changed since then, but I think either the Google search or I would have heard about such a large buyback by a retired company president.



Is this seemingly minor mistake a big deal? You'd better believe it. If Gates is talking about buying shares from a majority shareholder, he's talking about owning a controlling interest in Nintendo. Yamauchi's 10% share, if taken alone, would give him a major say in the company's direction, but not absolute authority.



It would be easy to use this oft-repeated factual error to figure out which sources did their own reporting and which were simply aping the reports from the German article. It would also be easy to use this error to emphasize the importance of checking absolutely every fact in an article, even the seemingly apparent and irrelevant ones.



A History of Rumors



"Didn't Microsoft try to do something like this before?" you are no dobut asking yourself. "I remember hearing that they wanted to buy Nintendo even before the Xbox came out."



Indeed, IGN wrote definiteively that "Microsoft, in its attempts to get into the game industry a few years ago, made offers to buy both Nintendo and Sega, but was rejected on both accounts."



Is that so? I found plenty of sources that alluded to the previous Microsoft offer, but they all used words like "believed to," "rumors of," and "allegedly." A UBS analyst, quoted in this CNN/Money article summed up the history of the buyout rumors nicely:



"All I know is since Microsoft announced it was getting in the gaming business, there have been rumors, but I just can't imagine Nintendo selling,"



As a journalist, it's your job to keep straight which past accusations proved to be true and which were simply alleged; to disntinguish the facts from the rumors of the past. If you don't know, or don't remember, then either print it with one of the above caveats or do some research before you state it so matter-of-factly.



The Magazine Is German, Not The Conference



IGN/Gamespy introduced a rather unique fact error by reporting that the conference Gates spoke at was in Frankfurt, Germany. This despite other sources saying that it took place at Microsoft's U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Wash. (even the orignal German article said it was in the U.S.).



Gamespy quoted a Forbes article that had a dateline from Frankfurt but made no mention of the conference being in Germany. Those little assumptions will bite you in the butt every time...



It's Worth Re-iterating Why Spong Stinks



In a follow-up story, a Spong author writes: "At this point it would be worth re-iterating the original context of Gates’ relatively flippant remark. A German journalist asked him informally if he would consider buying Nintendo, Gates said yes, in theory."



Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the term re-iterating imply that the context was iterated in the first place. The original Spong article makes no mention of the comment's casual cocktail connotation (a problem that also plagued the otherwise well-written GI.biz article). The Spong article did sarcastically call the original article "one of the most astute pieces of investigative business-technology reportage ever seen." How can I stay mad at them when they spout bitter little gems like that? It almost makes me jealous.



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I could go on about how some articles overeagerly reported the story without an attempt to get confirmation from Nintendo or Microsoft, how other articles used the rumor as a vehicle for merger cost-benefit analysis instead of any real reporting, and even how the various sources couldn't seem to agree one whether Wirtschafts Woche is one word or two. But I don't have the time or the inclination to keep writing about this subject. Let me know what you all think of the reporting that this rumor received.