The Millennial Changes

[Dunjohn]

Occasionally I come accross mentions of some big watershed moment in TLG's history that occured around 2000, mainly buried in some Brothers Brick article or places like that. I gather it had something to do with a rethink of the direction of the product, as well as a massive cull of the number of bricks in production (I notice a lot of 90's sets contain loads of bizarre and extremely narrow-use elements), and that the whole thing was controversial and split the fanbase into for and against.

I can't find anything that details exactly what happened, though. This was deep in my dark age and the Wikipedia article on TLG rather inconveniently only charts the company up to a point right before all of this went down. Can somebody point me towards something that'll fill me in?

[DLuders]

Here is The Lego Group's own "Lego Timeline" company history: http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=timeline . There is also this 19-page downloadable PDF document entitled "LEGO Company -- Facts and Figures". It has some introspective discussion about the Year 2000 timeframe: http://cache.lego.com/downloads/aboutus/LEGO_company_profile_UK.pdf .