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Likely Success of Internet-Related Business Models?
guess-for-success asks: "In Lester Thurow's latest book, published by HarperBusiness Books (Fall 2003), Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build a New and Lasting Global Prosperity, there is a chapter which discusses the beginning of new industries. During this time, several business models are introduced and only a few will survive. Looking at the PC industry, Commodore was the industry leader in the 1980's, but ultimately failed and went bankrupt in 1994. Successful business models such as Dell were not introduced until years after the industry began.
I now ask the Slashdot community: which internet business models they believe are going to succeed? Which companies will rise to the top? Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?"
"You can find out more about Lester Thurow here. He is a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been the Dean of the Sloan School of Business at MIT. He has three New York Times best selling books to his credit and consults widely around the globe."
google cache of /. linked site (old):
E :w ww.atariage.com/
o ur ney.html
w :w ww.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/journey.html +%22lord+of+the+rings%22+atari+game&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:5qsLqbqhik
Doing a google search I found the game on another site (with a screen shot):
http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/j
and the cache:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:wpuA4XgOLV
Well, I don't know much about this vaporware Atari 2600 LotR game, but a lot of other games based on Tolkiens world has been made. ;)
... which reminds me: Mudconnecter has a list of some MUDs based on Tolkien's books. Of those, Elendor MUSH is probably the best one. I remember playing it some years ago...
Check out this neat site. It has all the info you need about computer-based Tolkien games. LotR for Super NES is probably the only one I've tried so far, and it didn't quite meet my expectations
Oh, and didn't someone announce a MMORPG a few years ago? I wonder what happened to it
Here's what I know about the game:
This game was programmed by Parker Bros a long time ago, and was pretty much finished (I'm not sure what (if anything) they left out... it looks finished to me). However, there are two parties that apparently own the rights to the LOTR stuff, and there were problems getting the liscensing rights and other legal mumbo jumbo. As a result, the game couldn't be released because the two sides couldn't come to terms on things.
As for what to do in the game, the other goons at AtariAge and I have figured out this much:
1. You have to get to Rivendell, the city at the top of the map. To do this, you basically run up and to the left. When you find the path, follow it. It's much faster. If you need to look at your map, duck into the forest (or a town) and press the button.
2. You can pick up other party members along the way. I'm not sure exactly where they all are, but one is for sure in the city on the left.
3. The birds don't seem to do anything (we haven't figured that part out yet), and the only way we know of to get the horseman off your back is to dodge into the forest. He won't follow you. As for turning white when you press the button? I have no idea what that does either.
4. Eventually, if you get far enough along the path, you'll come to a river (It's flashing for some reason). There's a bridge across it if you look for it.
By the way, AtariAge is back up... sort of. You can view the LOTR article and associated material, and you can get to the forums... but everything else is offline until their MySQL server is put back online.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
I used to work with a fellow who was in Parker Bros. during the Atari heyday and even into the PC gaming arena for a short while. What he says makes a lot of sense and it does lead me to believe it to be true...
For each new game that came out, four were actually made. The reason for this was that it cost $250,000 to produce a game and about $3-4M to actually market and sell the damn thing. Thus, it was crucial that they picked winners. Looking at the type of games that Parker Bros. was coming out with, you can easily see how these games were not destined to be classics... The loss of developing 3 losers for every winner was covered in the returns made on the one game that was released. While it may still sound like a weird way to do it, the return on investment proved it to be the correct thing to do. They were able to release new games on a regular basis without worrying about a single game bogging down their cycle.
Note for those who dispute development costs: The ratio of marketing costs to development costs still holds true for a lot of development that happens today for a variety of different products. A dozen cubicals of programmers is a lot cheaper than TV spots, magazine ads, distribution, packaging, art work, product placement in stores, etc...
So we can see how it was entirely possible for a LOTR game to not be selected because by comparison to the other games coming out at the time, it sucked. How could such a classic suck? As someone mentioned earlier... How exactly are you going to get a 1,000 page book filled with rich imagery into a 4k cart running on a 2600? The people who would buy such a game (LOTR fans) would have held it up to a higher expectation and been disapointed. The rest of the world would have said "Lord of the who?" and ignored it. And *click*... There goes $4M down the drain...
Ebay has just taken the traditional auction and used the internet to automate much of the process.
Really, most internet businesses are just innovations, taking a new technology and using it to replace or suppliment an existing medium. The problem with most internet businesses in the dot com era was they didn't understand this and/or fell into the trap of "This is compeltely different" and it wasn't.
Now the internet has helped reduce cost in industries like mail order because it is possible to reach billons with one site unlike say a traditional catalog that would have to be mailed out which costs a lot of money in print and postage. However, there is no secert method to business models. Its still breaks down to: provide a product or service to fulfill a need. Do it well, keep down costs, and hopefully make a profit.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
... Dell and Walmart. They don't do anything
rare, unique, hard to duplicate or hard to substitute...
Au contraire.
Both companies are extremely adept at taking cost out of their respective supply chains. Consequently they are profitable at price points their competitors cannot easily match.
Commodore: Entered an industry well penetrated by apple, IBM, Tandy (back then) and company and tried to play along, didn't make it....
sorry but commodore Business Macines were in the mix BEFORE apple was even a thought and Tandy was anything but a leather company.
Commodore was a HUGE player.
In the 70's, 80's and early 90's, we had a proprietary unix system which we sold to a customer that was about 80% of their business system. This system wasn't too flexible but it was the defacto business model for centralized order and business transaction processing. We had to provide the user everything from the hardware to the network to the software. It was a turnkey solution for the most part but it wasn't as flexible in providing revenue streams.
In the mid 90's we developed a windows application solution. Now we provide the application CD and tell them the requirements (SQL server, windows network, recommended hardware requirements). Everything except our software is a commodity on their network now and so we extract ourselves from the costs of having to work on buying it. We allow the customer to pick their own or they can pay our consultants to help them out. We negotiate contracts for how much an hour they would have to pay for consulting. Everything is driven by consulting, custom work, training, services. Our software is the only hard good we produce any more, and its questionable if you want to call that a hard good these days. In fact we aren't worried too much about piracy, because our main source of income is the customer paying on the contracts we sign for purchasing the software (which requires a huge amount of setup) and for supporting the software, which is a percentage of their initial purchase contract.
Expertise is never a commodity and as companies find a way to make hardware construction cheaper, people move to providing quality by just having a bunch of knowledgable people sitting around who know how to provide some kind of technological help (read: billable consulting, not tech support) to a specific market space.
I also see the tech support outsource trend swinging back to the US a bit as US companies demand better quality of support. Between the cookie cutter, script reading mentality of overseas operations and some unintelligible accents, customers, especially businesses, will demand a change. They already are.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Ok when you are looking at losses and profits, your really not getting the whole picture. I smart company never makes profit, unless it worries about it's stock going up. The less profit you make the less taxes you pay. Amazon has a lot of assumed costs, that aren't necessarilly real, these include depreciation and some other things that are set as standards by the IRS. For instance I buy a machine for 200,000$ the IRS says it depreciates at 40,000$ a year. Whichi means that for five years I have to right off a depreciation of 40,000 dollars, keeps my taxes down, but to the bottom line it looks like a cost, I didn't actually spend 40,000 dollars, that is just the assumed cost of replacing said item. It will be fully depreciated in 5 years even though I may not replace it for 10 years, do you see what I mean? Trust me amazon is doing very well.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
It's a bit hard for me to comment since I have no idea who Suzy Orman is -- but I did a google search for `Suzy Orman', and result #8 was www.suzeorman.com, which says that `Suze is pronounced Suzy'. So maybe you got the spelling wrong? If I search for `Suze Orman' instead, her site is the #1 hit (seems pretty good to me!).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
No, you didn't actually spend $40,000. You spent $200,000. Of real money. It's just that the IRS doesn't let you write it off as an expense all at once. Instead, you have to depreciate it over its useful lifetime, which was 5 years (absurdly long) for computers last time I checked. That means a $40,000 deduction for each of 5 years, as you noted. But it's not a "free" way of lowering your taxes.
What is a free way of lowering your taxes is writing off nonsense losses like reduced "goodwill". Accountants have tried to tell me why this is supposed to be real, but it always sets off my bullshit alarms.