• by August 1, 2008

According to Social Media Insider Catharine P. Taylor, writing about Hasbro and Scrabble: "The company actually thinks it owns the game, when consumers actually own the game, no matter how many legal documents Hasbro can throw at the situation."

So true.

Not only should they have bought Scrabulous, they should have kept Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla on to run it and championed them as the ideal Scrabble lovers, turned it into a campaign even.

One thing [Taylor] said with which I disagree is that [she doesn't] envy Hasbro. I do. It's what I call a "good problem to have." Companies, unfortunately, just don't see it that way. It's an opportunity, not a threat.

On a side note, another interesting tangent that hasn't been explored much in all of this hoopla is how fundamentally different Scrabulous and Scrabble were, and how offering the game online changed the way people played (some collaboratively, some competitively, almost all bending the rules at least slightly). Heck, I could even have seen it spawning an entirely different, more interactive form of the game. And Hasbro would have owned it -- at least in the legal sense, from which they would have truly profited.