lol at people panicking calling for his head. They will be fine and he will fix it. A true test of a CEO is ow they work through a troubling time. Even good CEO's have them. The company is not about to fall apart. If Nintendo fired a CEO every time some trouble brewed Yamauchi would have been fired 34 times. He nearly took it to bankruptcy in the early 80's,could not figure out what kind of company it was for a couple decades and had a failed toy biz. Nintendo is nowhere near that. Just keep up the marketing and then some and keep a steady flow of games and market those games. Japanese business is often more calm about these things than westerners who want change right away.
If Nintendo wants the Wii U to be a successful product, then the marketing needs to be better and Nintendo needs to bring out its big guns. Nevermind Donkey Kong, where is Fzero and Metroid? Where is Zelda U? Why aren't there any new IP's? Where's a stand alone Fire Emblem game? What's happening with X?
I am not a massive fan of Sony, but at least they're committed to creating new IP's, when was the last time that Nintendo created a new IP? Pikmin? I love Nintendo, but they need to adapt and change or they'll become irrelevant.
The PS4 and the Xbox One are flying off the shelves and that's despite many of their major first party titles not even being released yet. That's the power of third party support and sadly Nintendo doesn't have this luxury. Iwata thought that third parties would jump on board and they haven't. Bethesda have said that Nintendo never bothered with them prior to the launch of the Wii U and as a result they're having nothing to do with the Wii U. EA have even abandoned the Wii U and Ubisoft I dare say will be following suit.
Nintendo systems seem to becoming increasingly more like first and second party systems for Nintendo's own software and that's fine, but Nintendo needs to ensure that it has the infrastructure in place to support two devices and to have enough first party and second party games to really draw in the crowd.
If Iwata remains in charge he needs to really focus on restructuring Nintendo and changing the company's outlook because Nintendo are in danger of becoming irrelevant in the home console industry. People want to play Nintendo games, but aren't prepared to buy Nintendo systems and Nintendo need to change this attitude.
Also who is the Wii U aimed at? Originally it was aimed at the 'hardcore gamer' (excuse the phrase) and there was promise of third party support, now the Wii U is being aimed at the same people who bought the Wii, but are those people loyal enough to Nintendo to upgrade their hardware? If I have a Wii with a fitness board, why would I upgrade to a Wii U? I wouldn't, I'd keep the Wii and I'd imagine that's how a certain amount of Wii owners will feel.
I think the Wii U will end up being a profitable system for Nintendo, but it will be the games that will spare Nintendo's blushes because it's been one bit of incompetence after another from Nintendo and sooner or later consumers will stop accepting apologises, please understand, they'll simply go elsewhere.