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The Power of the Hacking Community
narramissic writes "In the world of business software, vendors routinely offer tools to help developers customize applications. Not so in the consumer space, where TiVo and Xbox are notable exceptions. This article offers and interesting look at what companies have to gain — and lose — by embracing the hacker community. From the article: 'One example is TiVo Inc., founded in 1997 to develop digital video technology that allows users to record TV shows. TiVo, based on Linux, is an extensible platform, and from its early days the company welcomed hackers and professional developers. "When we first came out no one knew what DVR was," said Richard Bullwinkle, vice president of products at entertainment networking company Mediabolic Inc., and formerly a senior member of TiVo's product marketing team. "So we made it hacker friendly."'"
Much like the modding community with Videogames, if you produce an excellent product that is highly 'hackable' you will benefit from higher sales based off of free work others have done for you; at the same time though, if you produce an average or bad product that is highly 'hackable' few people will notice it ever existed.
Basically, make your product good first then worry about whether you want people to modify it or not.
"When we first came out no one knew what DVR was.... So we made it hacker friendly."
Basically, they aimed it squarely at the "early adopter" segment so that they would spread the word.
I'm trying my best not to sound like a Microsoft hater, but the summary/article makes it sound like Microsoft embraces the hacking community with open arms. In the article, reference is made to XNA, which is a framework Microsoft released that allows developers to create games for Windows and the Xbox 360. However, in order to develop for the 360, you need to pay to subscribe to their "XNA Creators Club". XNA also comes with a bunch of restrictions pertaining to the distribution of games created with it.
I don't really see this as "hacking" compared to all the independent work that's been done on the original Xbox. There, you see things like Xbox Media Center, which is something I would consider a cool and useful hack, made by a community of like-minded hobbyists.
The Tivo part of the article was a much better example of the power of the hacking community.
I think another important aspect in this... and keeping with the TiVo/Xbox theme. TiVo embrased the hacking community, they made their product hackable, and that gained TiVo a lot of respect from the hackers. So while TiVo makes some money from the fact that you have to buy a subscription to their TV listings the hacking community has pretty much ignored trying to screw over TiVo by circumventing the paying for the service. TiVo is happy, and the hackers are happy and the consumer gets a powerful and customizable product.
On the Xbox, the Xbox Linux people pushed and asked nicely for an official distro so they could customize the box. Microsoft refused and as a result the security holes were all blown way out into the open. MS didn't embrace the hacking community, they resisted it and as a result not only is their product hacked it's also insecure and allows games to be pirated very easily. The hacking community satisfied themselves regardless of MS's blessing, and MS isn't happy because their console has been exploited. I'm sure customers would also be more satisfied with the Xbox if it allowed some of the hacked features to be available legally as well.
The moral of the story: Hackers will get their way regardless, if you resist them you'll only end up disappointed, but if you embrace them you might wind up with a superior product and it's not like you'd be loosing anything because your sh*t would get hacked regardless of your choice.
Collector's Edition
I agree that it's an insult to include Tivo as a hackable platform. Tivo gave rise to the term Tivoization and Tivo is *the* main reason for GPLv3. In comparison, Neuros is a much better example of a hackable platform than Tivo.
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