WIRED has a timely article on this:

Basically these things have been in continuous demand for the whole year - even in the usually-slack summer season. Because it takes so long to ramp up production, Nintendo was unable to catch up as they expected to.

Quote:

"Typically, we'd have begun stockpiling console hardware back in August" for the holiday season... "But this year, we were selling all the Wii we could get, and we got all the way through the summer with basically no inventory in our warehouse."

Here's a product that has vastly expanded the market in its category - despite not being the top choice for gaming cognoscenti. Now we've got people in retirement homes staging tournaments on Wii - people who wouldn't have looked at any other gaming system. A classic market-maker.

Wired story

Erickson Tribune

Thanks to Dave Winer and Marc Andreesen for the latter