I would actually reckon that the NES was Nintendo's original successful Hail Mary. The games market was dead, introducing a new game console at that point was suicide. They coasted through the SNES due to a lack of real competition (Genesis being the only threat) and name recognition. They flopped the N64 and Gamecube for being more of the same. They've always had innovative ideas in the marketplace; The gameboy, the Virtual Boy, the Famicom Disc System, the Satellaview, the SuperFX chip, rumble paks, minidiscs, etc.

The Wii was just returning to form in fabulous style. They weren't hinging the success of their entire company on a low-chance market like they were with the NES, or Apple did with the iMac. Nintendo has (and had) plenty in reserves and a handheld that printed money if the Wii failed.

Interesting re: Office 2003, seeing as how even the current generation Office Web Apps still aren't web apps in the common definition.

I suspect the 2003 version may have been similar - running in an IE window, but requiring Windows desktop software to actually run properly.

Final Fantasy on the NES. That's supposedly what the "final" was for; it was to be their last game before the studio shut down. It was a hit, and it and its successors kept them in business until they morphed into Square Enix and became Japan's EA.