You misunderstood my statement. They "mirror" the DVD market not by being exactly like them but by offering various products and prices for what is essentially the same album. Off-hand, I know Beck, Radiohead, Weezer, Gwen Stefani, Spiritualized, and Nine Inch Nails have done this: offer a basic version of the album, and a deluxe one with a book or t-shirt or DVD. And older/disbanded artists can always put out box sets. Some people will only pay $5 for a CD. But some will pay $50. If you give the $50-consumer a reason to spend that much, then it's win-win.
All Wal-Mart needs to succeed with this is to have one record company break off and decide to join them and have $5 to $10 CDs. Which brings me to this point:
Maas referenced the DVD business as a model for tiered pricing. "(It) has been around for years and has worked very well," he said. DVDs weren't always so dirt cheap. Aside from dot-com era startups selling DVDs for $1, DVD prices were extremely high for a long time. Even in 2000, it was difficult to find a lot of DVDs for much under $15-$20 at your big-box discount stores like Best Buy, etc. I remember reading an article around that time that one of the executives at Warner Bros. wanted to make a DVD an impulse buy, with a price matching that of a magazine ($6 or so). At the time, it sounded insane. A few years later, it was a reality: bins of $5 titles at Wal-Mart. Two-for-$5 titles on Black Friday. Even at corner drugstores, $10 DVDs.
Record companies have done this. They usually repackage artists into a new "best of" and sell it for $11 or less. And Best Buy has had new releases of artists for $7 and below for many years, although that's usually limited to a single week and a handful of new untested artists.
If one of the majors breaks off and starts offering discs at below-iTunes prices, the others will have to follow. They can still follow what they've been doing by mirrorring the DVD market: sell the basic CD for peanuts, sell the enhanced CD+DVD with a t-shirt or a poster or more tracks for $20.
You're right. Profit is profit. The simplest answer is that having a Blu-Ray drive available for the Xbox 360 is simply not profitable. The initial HD DVD drive sold relatively poorly. I believe sales were about 500,000. There's no reason to think a Blu-Ray drive would sell any better.
Sure, it makes them money, but it doesn't make them enough profit. Otherwise, they would've done it.
Because it's happened to music? Convenience trumped quality. I still prefer to buy CDs as opposed to buying them on iTunes, but that has little to do with the "new format" and more to do with my problems with the iTMS. When I buy CDs, I rip them, organize them on my computer/player, and put the CD away.
Now, movies are much less portable. (Note I'm saying "movies" here, not video). Sure, some people like to watch movies on portable devices, but those people are "being cheated" out of the experience. When you watch Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone you're missing out on a lot. If you're listening to a song at the gym, you're probably not missing out on as much (as opposed to listening to it on your stereo).
There's two hurdles to streaming video: technology and price. The former will be fixed, and fixed soon. In a decade, portable storage will be measured in terabytes. Bandwidth problems will be solved, one way or another.
The question is price. It's something music companies still haven't completely figured out. Ten dollar DRM-laden downloads are not the answer. We'll see if someone comes up with something better.
Not only that, but the event is "6,500 light years" away; that's far, far in the future. According to my Kansas Board of Education approved science book, Judgment will come upon us before that time.
I thought I would be able to download a TXT file or a PDF of this book. Nope, no download. Instead I can browse it through the publisher's site, which is not only a bit slow, but also eye-straining. The images of the pages are so compressed it makes it unenjoyable to read. If only there was some way to rent books locally.
A family member of mine was a bank manager in Hawaii and he told me everyone wore aloha shirts.
I think it all depends on who your audience is. I can think of places where the shirts would be a fun icebreaker and others where you wouldn't get taken seriously. I would probably opt on the side of caution, since many people think Hawaiian shirts are gaudy, especially in a business setting. I would hate for you guys to not be able to get a client based on the type of shirt you wear.
So, to summarize, use your best judgment and err on the side of caution.
I've heard it mentioned before that Microsoft and Nintendo could make their next-gen consoles a bit less pirate-friendly if they adopt the HD DVD format for their media. It won't stop it (nothing stops it), but it could be a small roadblock.
I don't see the Xbox 360 coming out with a Blu-ray drive. There's maybe two or three years left in the 360, and by the time a Blu-ray drive comes out it will be too little, too late. What Microsoft can do is work on securing more rights to downloadable movies (i.e. other studios) and adding both movies-to-buy and movies-to-rent to their business model. I was under the impression that the PS3 would have something similar, but so far there's been nothing.
I'm not a huge fan of XBL's movies-are-rentals-only plan, but for something that is essentially free (requiring no incremental hardware or software purchase for me to watch movies on my TV, outside of the film itself), it's pretty convenient.
I thought this too, initially, but there's some possible benefits for the customer and for the person(s) making money off the ad.
The customer (the company advertising) will have better metrics. Let's say you've got two banner ads (A and B) and a video ad (C). It turns out that out of all the combinations, having the ads viewed in B-C-A order is most succesful. Now the advertiser can model future campaigns on this one. In the past, they may have thought the "A" ad was the best, but they didn't realize it was because it was preceded by the B and C ads, which may not have even been clicked on.
With the amount of cookies that ad companies regularly store on computers nowadays, I can't imagine this would be too difficult to set up and execute. To some extent, I'm surprised it has taken this long.
For "content providers" this may balance out ad payments a bit more. Now you get money even if the ad doesn't get clicked on, as long as some ad eventually gets clicked on. I don't know what this will do to click fraud, since now fraudulent clicks may be helping people upstream that showed an earlier version of the ad.
I'm actually kind of glad that text ads have done so well. I really don't mind them (for the most part) and if they help support sites I go to, good for them.
There's a tax adage I've overheard a few times, that goes something like this: "You can make a tax system fair, or you can make it simple, but you can't do both."
Of course, many would argue that the current system is neither fair nor simple.
I supported the HD DVD format while it was viable (until WB pulled out). The silver lining is that the competition between the formats made hardware very, very cheap. Less than 18 months into the launch of both formats, we had HD DVD players go for ridiculously low sums. Blu-Ray backers didn't counter with matching prices, but they did drop the prices of their players (to sub-$500 levels). Software, too, became a bit cheaper. In-store, non-web pricing of high-def media was usually $29-$39, a good two- or three-fold increase over the regular DVD price. In 2007, especially in the summer and fall, there were numerous great deals on Blu-Ray discs. For every sale on HD DVD media, there were 4 or 5 on Blu-Ray: buy one, get one frees, etc. This was a smart move, as it lowered the cost of entry for people who had PS3s and honestly weren't too excited about the new formats. Now instead of paying $10 or $15 more at the store, the price difference would be $5 or less.
Of course, the counter-part to this was the whole confusion between the rival formats and a lot of people who cashed into a new format weeks before its demise. But, even if HD DVD is dead, the discs and players still work.
I never owned a Game Boy, but I did own a lot of other things that held up well over the years.
My first camera was a Canon Snappy 35mm. It held its own for many years. By comparison, the non-digital Elph2 I got afterwards made it through a single summer (of near daily travel and use).
The only phones that ever survived abuse were my old Nokias. I dropped them countless times and they always worked.
As much as I dislike a lot of Sony's corporate policies, their consumer products I've bought have been sturdy as hell. My Sports Walkman worked flawlessly for a decade, and the CD-Walkman I got afterwards made it through a summer of constant traveling unscathed.
It is too early to tell, but I think the 2nd-gen iPod shuffles will hold up well. There's not much to them, after all.
Something has to be said for hardware designed in the 80s. I think the new small, sleek, shiny designs lend themselves to not be as reliable over the long run; any cosmetic defects would be more apparent.
My parents have an old IBM XT. Ten years after they got it, I was using it for word processing, programming, and who knows what else. I booted it up a few weeks ago and it was running like I remembered it, over 20 years later. An old wood-paneled Kenmore TV also lasted about twenty years.
What I've heard is that in certain types of consumer electronics (especially ones where form factor, not software is likely to change), the first-generation products usually hold up extremely well. These are things like the $1000 CD players and $500 DVD players. They become cheaper as they reach a mass market due to economies of scale, but the components usually get cheaper too.
I almost want to say "Why bother?" because the responses were so short. I'm no Libertarian or Ron Paul supporter, but at least when Michael Badnarik answered Slashdot's questions, he wrote more than a short paragraph on each.
Well, Toyota is a bad example, since they're consistently near the top in quality surveys. But I've heard those claims from fans of other manufacturers now. Think American cars, Jaguars, etc.
I propose the following marketing message for Microsoft:
What about Mike Gravel? Is he automatically disqualified for being exactly what the people want? If he is what people want, he would be one of the main contenders. He's not.
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstood my statement. They "mirror" the DVD market not by being exactly like them but by offering various products and prices for what is essentially the same album. Off-hand, I know Beck, Radiohead, Weezer, Gwen Stefani, Spiritualized, and Nine Inch Nails have done this: offer a basic version of the album, and a deluxe one with a book or t-shirt or DVD. And older/disbanded artists can always put out box sets. Some people will only pay $5 for a CD. But some will pay $50. If you give the $50-consumer a reason to spend that much, then it's win-win.
All Wal-Mart needs to succeed with this is to have one record company break off and decide to join them and have $5 to $10 CDs. Which brings me to this point: Maas referenced the DVD business as a model for tiered pricing. "(It) has been around for years and has worked very well," he said. DVDs weren't always so dirt cheap. Aside from dot-com era startups selling DVDs for $1, DVD prices were extremely high for a long time. Even in 2000, it was difficult to find a lot of DVDs for much under $15-$20 at your big-box discount stores like Best Buy, etc. I remember reading an article around that time that one of the executives at Warner Bros. wanted to make a DVD an impulse buy, with a price matching that of a magazine ($6 or so). At the time, it sounded insane. A few years later, it was a reality: bins of $5 titles at Wal-Mart. Two-for-$5 titles on Black Friday. Even at corner drugstores, $10 DVDs.
Record companies have done this. They usually repackage artists into a new "best of" and sell it for $11 or less. And Best Buy has had new releases of artists for $7 and below for many years, although that's usually limited to a single week and a handful of new untested artists.
If one of the majors breaks off and starts offering discs at below-iTunes prices, the others will have to follow. They can still follow what they've been doing by mirrorring the DVD market: sell the basic CD for peanuts, sell the enhanced CD+DVD with a t-shirt or a poster or more tracks for $20.
You're right. Profit is profit. The simplest answer is that having a Blu-Ray drive available for the Xbox 360 is simply not profitable. The initial HD DVD drive sold relatively poorly. I believe sales were about 500,000. There's no reason to think a Blu-Ray drive would sell any better.
Sure, it makes them money, but it doesn't make them enough profit. Otherwise, they would've done it.
Yes, but their executive powder at least really soothes the burn.
Because it's happened to music? Convenience trumped quality. I still prefer to buy CDs as opposed to buying them on iTunes, but that has little to do with the "new format" and more to do with my problems with the iTMS. When I buy CDs, I rip them, organize them on my computer/player, and put the CD away.
Now, movies are much less portable. (Note I'm saying "movies" here, not video). Sure, some people like to watch movies on portable devices, but those people are "being cheated" out of the experience. When you watch Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone you're missing out on a lot. If you're listening to a song at the gym, you're probably not missing out on as much (as opposed to listening to it on your stereo).
There's two hurdles to streaming video: technology and price. The former will be fixed, and fixed soon. In a decade, portable storage will be measured in terabytes. Bandwidth problems will be solved, one way or another.
The question is price. It's something music companies still haven't completely figured out. Ten dollar DRM-laden downloads are not the answer. We'll see if someone comes up with something better.
Not only that, but the event is "6,500 light years" away; that's far, far in the future. According to my Kansas Board of Education approved science book, Judgment will come upon us before that time.
"Gary Gygax has passed away? I'm--"
* rolls dice *
"very sad to hear that!"
(With apologies to the writers of Futurama).
I thought I would be able to download a TXT file or a PDF of this book. Nope, no download. Instead I can browse it through the publisher's site, which is not only a bit slow, but also eye-straining. The images of the pages are so compressed it makes it unenjoyable to read. If only there was some way to rent books locally.
A family member of mine was a bank manager in Hawaii and he told me everyone wore aloha shirts.
I think it all depends on who your audience is. I can think of places where the shirts would be a fun icebreaker and others where you wouldn't get taken seriously. I would probably opt on the side of caution, since many people think Hawaiian shirts are gaudy, especially in a business setting. I would hate for you guys to not be able to get a client based on the type of shirt you wear.
So, to summarize, use your best judgment and err on the side of caution.
I've heard it mentioned before that Microsoft and Nintendo could make their next-gen consoles a bit less pirate-friendly if they adopt the HD DVD format for their media. It won't stop it (nothing stops it), but it could be a small roadblock.
I don't see the Xbox 360 coming out with a Blu-ray drive. There's maybe two or three years left in the 360, and by the time a Blu-ray drive comes out it will be too little, too late. What Microsoft can do is work on securing more rights to downloadable movies (i.e. other studios) and adding both movies-to-buy and movies-to-rent to their business model. I was under the impression that the PS3 would have something similar, but so far there's been nothing.
I'm not a huge fan of XBL's movies-are-rentals-only plan, but for something that is essentially free (requiring no incremental hardware or software purchase for me to watch movies on my TV, outside of the film itself), it's pretty convenient.
I thought this too, initially, but there's some possible benefits for the customer and for the person(s) making money off the ad.
The customer (the company advertising) will have better metrics. Let's say you've got two banner ads (A and B) and a video ad (C). It turns out that out of all the combinations, having the ads viewed in B-C-A order is most succesful. Now the advertiser can model future campaigns on this one. In the past, they may have thought the "A" ad was the best, but they didn't realize it was because it was preceded by the B and C ads, which may not have even been clicked on.
With the amount of cookies that ad companies regularly store on computers nowadays, I can't imagine this would be too difficult to set up and execute. To some extent, I'm surprised it has taken this long.
For "content providers" this may balance out ad payments a bit more. Now you get money even if the ad doesn't get clicked on, as long as some ad eventually gets clicked on. I don't know what this will do to click fraud, since now fraudulent clicks may be helping people upstream that showed an earlier version of the ad.
I'm actually kind of glad that text ads have done so well. I really don't mind them (for the most part) and if they help support sites I go to, good for them.
"Tide Titanium sweaters! Now with 45% more bleach fumes!"
I think I'll stick with washing stuff with soap and water. I do see this being useful maybe for tents and the like.
This explains why set-top Blu-ray players were less expensive.
Wait, no it doesn't. Because they were consistently twice the price.
There's a tax adage I've overheard a few times, that goes something like this: "You can make a tax system fair, or you can make it simple, but you can't do both."
Of course, many would argue that the current system is neither fair nor simple.
And here I was using a coal-powered mechano-arm to move the weight back up to its original position.
Of course, the robot malfunctions if you happen to be dreaming of electric sheep. It can't interpret the signal.
Social lives existed before cellphones.
I supported the HD DVD format while it was viable (until WB pulled out). The silver lining is that the competition between the formats made hardware very, very cheap. Less than 18 months into the launch of both formats, we had HD DVD players go for ridiculously low sums. Blu-Ray backers didn't counter with matching prices, but they did drop the prices of their players (to sub-$500 levels). Software, too, became a bit cheaper. In-store, non-web pricing of high-def media was usually $29-$39, a good two- or three-fold increase over the regular DVD price. In 2007, especially in the summer and fall, there were numerous great deals on Blu-Ray discs. For every sale on HD DVD media, there were 4 or 5 on Blu-Ray: buy one, get one frees, etc. This was a smart move, as it lowered the cost of entry for people who had PS3s and honestly weren't too excited about the new formats. Now instead of paying $10 or $15 more at the store, the price difference would be $5 or less.
Of course, the counter-part to this was the whole confusion between the rival formats and a lot of people who cashed into a new format weeks before its demise. But, even if HD DVD is dead, the discs and players still work.
I'm still waiting for the Ariel-Atom-based Wrightspeed X1.
No, no they won't. Not if everyone's favorite ex-SEAL chef Casey Ryback has anything to say about it.
It'll store all the internet?
Wonderful. Then, just like my computer, I estimate the data it contains to be about 70% porn.
I never owned a Game Boy, but I did own a lot of other things that held up well over the years.
My first camera was a Canon Snappy 35mm. It held its own for many years. By comparison, the non-digital Elph2 I got afterwards made it through a single summer (of near daily travel and use).
The only phones that ever survived abuse were my old Nokias. I dropped them countless times and they always worked.
As much as I dislike a lot of Sony's corporate policies, their consumer products I've bought have been sturdy as hell. My Sports Walkman worked flawlessly for a decade, and the CD-Walkman I got afterwards made it through a summer of constant traveling unscathed.
It is too early to tell, but I think the 2nd-gen iPod shuffles will hold up well. There's not much to them, after all.
Something has to be said for hardware designed in the 80s. I think the new small, sleek, shiny designs lend themselves to not be as reliable over the long run; any cosmetic defects would be more apparent.
My parents have an old IBM XT. Ten years after they got it, I was using it for word processing, programming, and who knows what else. I booted it up a few weeks ago and it was running like I remembered it, over 20 years later. An old wood-paneled Kenmore TV also lasted about twenty years.
What I've heard is that in certain types of consumer electronics (especially ones where form factor, not software is likely to change), the first-generation products usually hold up extremely well. These are things like the $1000 CD players and $500 DVD players. They become cheaper as they reach a mass market due to economies of scale, but the components usually get cheaper too.
I almost want to say "Why bother?" because the responses were so short. I'm no Libertarian or Ron Paul supporter, but at least when Michael Badnarik answered Slashdot's questions, he wrote more than a short paragraph on each.
Well, Toyota is a bad example, since they're consistently near the top in quality surveys. But I've heard those claims from fans of other manufacturers now. Think American cars, Jaguars, etc.
I propose the following marketing message for Microsoft:
"Vista with SP1: Now sucks less!"