That's actually an excellent point. At that price point there is not a whole lot of wiggle room, although I would bet even Amazon would be willing to sweeten the deal on a $0.99 book for an author that had already sold 1 million copies of a $0.99 ebook.
Of course, the easiest way to get a larger percentage of the profits would be to simply charge more for the next book. Baen.com has an whole pile of books that they give away for FREE. It is very common for books these days to be part of a series, and at the very least many readers tend to become fans of a particular writer and purchase everything written by the author. The publishers know that if you like the free samples you are very likely to come back and *buy* more. If you are not an established writer what you really need are fans, not a bigger piece of a microscopic pie.
If you sell a million copies of a book, chances are very good that you can get a much higher percentage of the profits on the *next* book. The real problem that most authors face is that no one has any idea who they are. I've happily paid up to $20 for a pre-release copy of an ebook from an author that I enjoy in a series that I just *had* to finish. However, I started that series with a free ebook on Baen's website (The Belisaurius Series, in case you are interested).
Writing is no different from any other profession. While skill and talent are important, marketing trumps almost everything. Giving away a sample at a discount is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing play book.
Heck, the linked article even includes a set of charts showing where Netflix plans to lose customers. Yes, Netflix will lose 200K streaming only customers and 800K DVD only customers. On the other hand it expects to have roughly the same amount of users that use both services (12 million). The difference, of course, is that now these 12 million customers (roughly half of Netflix's users) will be paying twice as much as they were previously.
And somehow the idiots on Wall Street think that this is a *bad* sign. Netflix just doubled the revenue that it extracts from nearly half of its userbase. The cost to the company was less than 5% its userbase, and 8 out of 10 of the customers Netflix lost were the DVD-only customers that are more expensive to service anyhow.
It almost makes me want to rush out and buy stock in Netflix tomorrow. Eventually the boneheads that do financial reporting are going to do the the math, and realize that the folks running Netflix are *much* smarter than they are.
Microsoft has no choice but to compete on merit at this point. They have already tried to lock people in with Silverlight, but they did not get any takers. Heck, even with Microsoft working on its browser as hard as it can it is still shedding millions of users each month.
The HTML5/CSS apps will likely have to wait for Google and Mozilla to port their web browsers to Windows/Arm. Internet Explorer on Arm is not likely to be a compelling choice for applications that rely heavily on the web browser.
It used to be that the embedded marketplace was full of odd hardware with its own oddball C compiler. These days you wouldn't touch a platform with a ten foot pole that didn't have a port of gcc. Likewise, there was a time, back when Posix was fairly new, when it was not clear that Posix was going to become an important standard. Part of the reason that it succeeded was that GNU decided to emulate it. However, it did not do so slavishly. For interesting reading Google for POSIX_ME_HARDER, for some examples of cases where GNU software is not Posix-compatible on purpose.
I do agree that the Free Software people are not trying to be mean, but the exact same things happen when Free Software becomes ubiquitous as when proprietary software becomes ubiquitous. Alternative software that does mostly the same thing gets crowded out of the market.
Linux's success makes it hard for the BSDs to gain traction. GNU's implementation of Posix tools makes it hard for non-Posix systems to gain traction, etc.
It would appear that Brett Glass is running lariat.net. I sort of miss him too.
That being the case, gcc is a good case of a Free Software project becoming ubiquitous enough that it begins to extinguish the chances of other projects--even other Free Software projects. Likewise Linux itself makes it difficult for other Free Software kernels, and GNU makes it difficult to write a non-Posix userspace.
Microsoft only extinguishes competition in that its products become ubiquitous. You can still purchase WordPerfect, but if you send people WordPerfect files, you are likely to get complaints. The exact same thing when Free Software projects become ubiquitous, alternatives start to become somewhat unworkable due to network effects.
Now, it certainly is true that Microsoft is unique in that it actively tries to subvert and sabotage standards, and Free Software doesn't generally do this, but there are cases where Free Software deliberately breaks standards compatibility. For an amusing example google the case of df and du and POSIX_ME_HARDER. I am not sure what df or du output on Solaris or another commercial UNIX but I would be surprised if they used 512 byte blocks, whatever Posix might specify. I wouldn't know though. I primarily use Linux.
Once upon a time there was a much larger market for compilers than there is today. To a very large extent gcc has sucked the air out of the room. Even clang, its relatively new Free Software competition has to support a lot of gcc-isms, because quite a bit of real life software these days assumes it is going to be compiled by gcc.
This doesn't seem nearly as bad as what Microsoft tends to do to, because it comes complete with source code, and the incompatibilities are *probably* not intentional, as Microsoft's failures to follow standards typical are. Still, there certainly are cases where GNU software uses its market share to help it compete.
It isn't stabbing anybody in the back until they drop support for the platform.
I would bet that Silverlight developers that have invested time and energy into the platform feel differently. Unlike a Free Software platform Silverlight developers can not extend Silverlight on their own. If Microsoft fails to invest in the platform, then the platform will stagnate, and eventually it will die. Sure, existing Silverlight applications will still work (for a while anyway). However, no one in their right mind is going to start new Silverlight development at this point, and those people that did jump on the Silverlight bandwagon are probably going to have to port their applications to a new platform. Silverlight developers are going to have to update their skills (and their resume).
You don't have to do it, and you should really try being less self righteous toward the people that do.
You are absolutely right. Saying that smoking stemmed from stupidity was the wrong thing to say. Like I said, I have mostly been acquainted with smokers that were trying to quit. They had gotten entangled with an addictive substance, and they felt trapped. That doesn't make them stupid. It simply means that they made a choice that they later regretted. In your case you apparently don't even regret that choice. So, good for you. I personally believe the choice should be yours to make.
You're not smarter than me because you don't smoke, you're just a religious fundamentalist whose parents forbid it. So, congratulations on believing everything every authority figure you've ever been exposed to told you.
I am very grateful to my parents for the guidance that they gave me while I was growing up. You are certainly correct, however, in that having good parents does not make me smarter than those around me, just luckier.
Stupid was the wrong thing to say, and I am sorry for that. People make poor choices all of the time. The difference is that with smoking once you are addicted it becomes very difficult to stop. My sincere apologies.
By the way, congratulations on your success giving up cigarettes. That's a big deal, and I have seen enough people try and fail to have a fair appreciation as to how difficult it is to quit.
I am not of the opinion that making marijuana illegal is good for our society. I think that people that use marijuana are making a very poor choice, but that's true for a lot of things.
On the other hand, we have historical precedents for what happens when drugs like cocaine (or worse heroine) are legalized. That was not a good idea. Marijuana, on the other hand, probably belongs in the same group as alcohol and tobacco. We'd probably be better off simply trying to control it, and not ban it outright. I personally think that the country would be a better place if we could stop using all of these substances, however, we have already tried prohibition of alcohol and it proved unworkable. My guess is that tobacco would fare similarly, and I personally believe that marijuana probably fits that list.
You are certainly correct that tobacco is currently legal primarily for historical reasons. I personally think tying race into the issue is a bit of a stretch, especially since a fair percentage of the early tobacco plantation owners were Indian (mostly Cherokee), but I can see your point.
Re-reading my post I think that the self-righteousness is more than mild, and for that I am truly sorry. I simply think blaming the *government* for the smoking problem is ridiculous, and I was trying to show that I am not the sort of person that anyone in their right mind could consider pro-tobacco.
Like I said, I have helped more than my fair share of people quit smoking, and tried to help many others. My experience tells me that if you attempt to help people quit smoking you have a good chance of ending up with a new friend that happens to be a smoker that can't quit. It doesn't make them a bad person. To be honest, it doesn't even make them a stupid person (I really shouldn't have said that). Everyone makes mistakes. Smokers have simply made a mistake that has caused them to get entangled with something very addictive.
All things considered you certainly could have a worse habit.
Perhaps a little background is in order. I am a Mormon. For religious reasons, my family has been telling their children (and anyone else that would listen) not to use tobacco since the mid 1800s. I personally served as a missionary in Chile where a fair portion of my time was spent trying to help people quit smoking. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. Apparently giving up smoking is very difficult. I never met a smoker that didn't want to quit, and yet few people actually are successful.
That's the problem. Smokers know that smoking is killing them, but they are addicted. We already have huge taxes on cigarettes. We control their sale to minors, and we control how they can be advertised. Heck, we even run advertisements extolling the many problems caused by smoking, and we force smokers to go to special designated areas to smoke. At this point about the only thing that we could do that we haven't tried is to make tobacco illegal. To be honest, I would not be surprised if that actually *increased* tobacco use. Marijuana manages to be quite popular while still being illegal.
Unfortunately, some people are just stupid. They don't see the harm in trying tobacco until it is too late and they are addicted. It is easy (and comfortable) to blame the politicians, but for the most part politicians have gone out of their way to cast a stigma on tobacco use. It is even easier to blame the tobacco industry, and just about anyone would be forced to admit that those guys are slimy. However, tobacco has a long history of use in the U.S. and I think that it would be counterproductive to try and curtail the rights of individuals in this regard. Our society has done everything it can to curtail the use of tobacco short of throwing people in prison for growing it or using it.
The Kin was killed because it failed to sell. The fact that the Windows Phone guys had political issues with the phone does not change that all-important fact. If customers would have wanted Kins, Microsoft would still be selling them.
I do agree that, at least to a certain extent, Microsoft stopped selling Kins because it was afraid that the stigma from the Kin's failure would rub off on Windows Phones in general. However, at this point, Windows Phone 7 is out, and it is still getting trounced. Heck, the only reason that we even mention Windows Phones and Windows Tablets in the same sentence as Android and iOS is that Microsoft can afford to pour billions into R&D while still losing.
Microsoft's hardware partners, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. Nokia has already bet its future on Windows Mobile, but I don't see it making a tablet any time soon. The rest of the hardware manufacturers are not likely to get into bed with Microsoft. Android is a safer bet, and besides the OEMs know that even if they came up with a Windows design that sold well Microsoft would just turn around and help Nokia (or Dell) duplicate the device. At least with Android they have *some* design leeway. Heck, most of Microsoft's traditional hardware allies either already have an Android device, or (in the case of HP) they have their own mobile operating system.
If Microsoft really wants to get an Arm-based tablet made, they are likely going to have to pull an XBox and make it themselves.
Nothing personal, but you need to take a basic accounting class before you talk about this stuff. Really.
The division that includes the XBox has been profitable since the original XBox was retired because Microsoft went through a whole pile of accounting tricks to make sure that all of the large expenses happened before that arbitrary date. For example, Microsoft essentially pre-paid nearly $1 billion for promotion instead of paying for campaigns as they came up. Microsoft also wrote off another $1 billion for hardware returns.
The hardware return writeoff is especially interesting. Normal people, like you and I, know that Microsoft doesn't actually incur any costs until they have to fix your broken XBox 360. However, because of accounting tricks Microsoft could say (on the books) that it had already lost the money that it took replacing hardware. So the XBox division got credit for new sales, but it did not get dinged for returns. Instead of years of red ink, on paper Microsoft had a few *horrible* quarters and then moderate returns. This might make you feel better if you aren't very good at math, or if you are a fan of Microsoft's gaming system, but the end result is the same. Microsoft is still in the red overall on the XBox 360, and the best it could manage was a distant second place. Heck, Sony might even pass then for that honor.
Personally, I think that Microsoft had to do what it did, and it still could easily end up with a win, but talking about quarterly profits from the XBox division is just ignorance. Microsoft's investors have took a beating on both XBoxes, and I am sure that a lot of them are very wary about Microsoft making more hardware.
Microsoft has a long history of letting its hardware partners take all of the risks. That's a fine strategy if you want to sell a bog standard PC. It is a much less workable strategy if you want to make some sort of unique device. In the past, however, Microsoft has been the only game in town when it came to workable off-the-shelf OS software, especially if you wanted to play well with Windows.
So the OEMs took Microsoft's software and did all of the actual engineering to make it actually work. If the device was a flop they were left holding the bag with the unusable hardware and the bill for the engineering effort. If the device was a success, then it was a given that Microsoft was going to shop your ideas around to your competitors. After all, most of the software that made your device work belonged to Microsoft. Microsoft got paid per device sold, and so they were happy to encourage cut throat competition on the hardware side. This guaranteed that there was a disincentive to actually innovate as companies like Dell, that made their money by cloning other people's ideas and squeezing the supply chain until it bled, dominated. Why innovate if Dell and Microsoft are going to make all of the money borrowing your ideas? Every once in a while someone would come up with a new device based entirely on their own software (Palm, Rim, etc.), but they invariably faced lots of pressure and competition from Microsoft and its OEMs.
The combination of Apple's design prowess and the emergence of Google's android have broken this cycle. Apple has the design genius to create entirely new devices that people want, and the existence of Android means that Apple's competitors have a ready-made OS that doesn't require that they work with Microsoft. Now Microsoft realizes that it needs to get into these new markets, but none of its traditional allies are willing to risk working with Microsoft's software. Heck, HP even has its own software for these devices. Nokia is allied with Microsoft now, and in fact, it has bet the business on Microsoft's software, but they are too busy trying to make a Windows phone to be relied on for a tablet.
So Microsoft gets to take its own risks now. It should be interesting. Microsoft learned a lot from the XBox. It is even possible that they won't lose billions of dollars this time.
At this point IE market share doesn't really matter that much. After all, in a bid to remain relevant Microsoft is finally embracing web standards. Instead of steering developers towards Silverlight Microsoft now putting its efforts into things like having a decent Javascript implementation, workable SVG support, etc. Even if Microsoft manages to maintain its current market share it is finally possible to code to web standards and create web sites that look and behave well across a wide array of browsers and devices.
Heck, not even the most rabid Microsoft fanboys can justify creating IE-only websites these days, and it wasn't that long ago that it was difficult to justify spending any time at all on non-IE browsers. Microsoft was nearly successful in tying the Internet to Internet Explorer (and to Windows), but it is abundantly clear that this effort has failed. The desktop (and Windows) is becoming less important all of the time.
I think that it goes without saying that Enderle calls more wrong than he calls right. However, in this case it is hard to argue with him. Microsoft is apparently going to release a version of Windows 8 with ARM support, and between tablets and smartphones people are doing more and more of their computing on devices without Intel inside.
Intel needs a low power processor that competes with ARM badly, and Atom is not getting the job done.
Thanks to the Mono people C# is essentially the only language that even pretends to be cross-platform to all of these devices. So I suppose I understand the theory, especially if you were writing the sort of game where the logic code comprised a major part of the project.
Still, unless MonoDroid and MonoTouch are documented far better and come with far more examples than Mono itself, I can't see how choosing C# could possibly be a win. Let's face it. XBox Live Indie is a ghetto on the #2 console (that might well soon be #3). Financially you'd probably be better off just to ignore it completely. MonoDroid and MonoTouch would allow you to use C# on most of the major platforms for logic code, but they force you into using their wrappings for the native APIs for the UI code. Not only are you at the mercy of Novell for updates to these APIs (and they just fired all of their Mono developers), but you are essentially blazing your own trail. Very few developers are taking this path, and that means that *you* get to find all of the bugs. You could wait for Xamarin to save you, but they have to re-write the whole thing from scratch, and then try and re-sell developers on the idea that C# is what they really want (again). The mobile and game space is likely to be really different by the time Xamarin has something to sell. Who knows, by then perhaps Android (or iOS) will be the only platform that matters. If Microsoft really wants C# to stay relevant in this space then it *really* needs to do something quickly. Microsoft has the money to make things happen. Unfortunately, the execs at Microsoft have pinned their hopes on Nokia's first WinPhone being so awesome that people flock to their platform. That seems like a *very* long shot to me, but it probably is enough that it will keep Microsoft from funding Xamarin's work, which is the only thing that is likely to keep C# relevant in this segment of the computing world.
From a practical standpoint, if you drop support for the XBox, you could write your core logic in C or C++ and use the native APIs for the UI on iOS and Android. I would bet that this is a far more popular choice than choosing C#. Most developers probably just write one app in Java, one in ObjC, and possibly one in C# if they really want to try their luck on the XBox, and call it good.
Thanks for the post, that was informative. In fact, it was informative enough that I actually did a little research. Yes, it appears that the XBox Live Indie Games is unique in the console industry. It also appears to be somewhat of a ghetto. Microsoft sets the price points, limits the playtest time, etc.
If you *really* want to put your game on a console Microsoft is the only game in town. The fact that your game would probably be easy to port to the PC almost certainly helps.
I suppose it is even theoretically possible that you might want to take your XBox Live Indie Game and try and port it to Android or iOS. If that were the case then the MonoDroid and MonoTouch tools might be useful. Of course, these are now Attachmate property and have nothing to do with Xamarin, but that's another story.
How important are XBox Live Indie Games really? XBox is basically the second most popular gaming console, and is behind by a large margin. Microsoft's phone stuff is so far behind that even Nokia is not going to be able to save it.
Besides, Mono doesn't help with either of these areas. If you want to develop for XBox Live or Microsoft's mobile OS you use Microsoft's tools, full stop. I suppose theoretically you could use Mono's non-free software to develop for iOS, Android, and Microsoft's platforms, but you would still have to learn three different APIs, and on the two most popular platforms (Android and iOS) you would have to use non-native tools.
It seems to me that you'd have to *really* like C# to go through that hassle.
Slashdot Mirror
That's actually an excellent point. At that price point there is not a whole lot of wiggle room, although I would bet even Amazon would be willing to sweeten the deal on a $0.99 book for an author that had already sold 1 million copies of a $0.99 ebook.
Of course, the easiest way to get a larger percentage of the profits would be to simply charge more for the next book. Baen.com has an whole pile of books that they give away for FREE. It is very common for books these days to be part of a series, and at the very least many readers tend to become fans of a particular writer and purchase everything written by the author. The publishers know that if you like the free samples you are very likely to come back and *buy* more. If you are not an established writer what you really need are fans, not a bigger piece of a microscopic pie.
If you sell a million copies of a book, chances are very good that you can get a much higher percentage of the profits on the *next* book. The real problem that most authors face is that no one has any idea who they are. I've happily paid up to $20 for a pre-release copy of an ebook from an author that I enjoy in a series that I just *had* to finish. However, I started that series with a free ebook on Baen's website (The Belisaurius Series, in case you are interested).
Writing is no different from any other profession. While skill and talent are important, marketing trumps almost everything. Giving away a sample at a discount is one of the oldest tricks in the marketing play book.
Heck, the linked article even includes a set of charts showing where Netflix plans to lose customers. Yes, Netflix will lose 200K streaming only customers and 800K DVD only customers. On the other hand it expects to have roughly the same amount of users that use both services (12 million). The difference, of course, is that now these 12 million customers (roughly half of Netflix's users) will be paying twice as much as they were previously.
And somehow the idiots on Wall Street think that this is a *bad* sign. Netflix just doubled the revenue that it extracts from nearly half of its userbase. The cost to the company was less than 5% its userbase, and 8 out of 10 of the customers Netflix lost were the DVD-only customers that are more expensive to service anyhow.
It almost makes me want to rush out and buy stock in Netflix tomorrow. Eventually the boneheads that do financial reporting are going to do the the math, and realize that the folks running Netflix are *much* smarter than they are.
Microsoft has no choice but to compete on merit at this point. They have already tried to lock people in with Silverlight, but they did not get any takers. Heck, even with Microsoft working on its browser as hard as it can it is still shedding millions of users each month.
The HTML5/CSS apps will likely have to wait for Google and Mozilla to port their web browsers to Windows/Arm. Internet Explorer on Arm is not likely to be a compelling choice for applications that rely heavily on the web browser.
It used to be that the embedded marketplace was full of odd hardware with its own oddball C compiler. These days you wouldn't touch a platform with a ten foot pole that didn't have a port of gcc. Likewise, there was a time, back when Posix was fairly new, when it was not clear that Posix was going to become an important standard. Part of the reason that it succeeded was that GNU decided to emulate it. However, it did not do so slavishly. For interesting reading Google for POSIX_ME_HARDER, for some examples of cases where GNU software is not Posix-compatible on purpose.
I do agree that the Free Software people are not trying to be mean, but the exact same things happen when Free Software becomes ubiquitous as when proprietary software becomes ubiquitous. Alternative software that does mostly the same thing gets crowded out of the market.
Linux's success makes it hard for the BSDs to gain traction. GNU's implementation of Posix tools makes it hard for non-Posix systems to gain traction, etc.
It would appear that Brett Glass is running lariat.net. I sort of miss him too.
That being the case, gcc is a good case of a Free Software project becoming ubiquitous enough that it begins to extinguish the chances of other projects--even other Free Software projects. Likewise Linux itself makes it difficult for other Free Software kernels, and GNU makes it difficult to write a non-Posix userspace.
Microsoft only extinguishes competition in that its products become ubiquitous. You can still purchase WordPerfect, but if you send people WordPerfect files, you are likely to get complaints. The exact same thing when Free Software projects become ubiquitous, alternatives start to become somewhat unworkable due to network effects.
Now, it certainly is true that Microsoft is unique in that it actively tries to subvert and sabotage standards, and Free Software doesn't generally do this, but there are cases where Free Software deliberately breaks standards compatibility. For an amusing example google the case of df and du and POSIX_ME_HARDER. I am not sure what df or du output on Solaris or another commercial UNIX but I would be surprised if they used 512 byte blocks, whatever Posix might specify. I wouldn't know though. I primarily use Linux.
Once upon a time there was a much larger market for compilers than there is today. To a very large extent gcc has sucked the air out of the room. Even clang, its relatively new Free Software competition has to support a lot of gcc-isms, because quite a bit of real life software these days assumes it is going to be compiled by gcc.
This doesn't seem nearly as bad as what Microsoft tends to do to, because it comes complete with source code, and the incompatibilities are *probably* not intentional, as Microsoft's failures to follow standards typical are. Still, there certainly are cases where GNU software uses its market share to help it compete.
It isn't stabbing anybody in the back until they drop support for the platform.
I would bet that Silverlight developers that have invested time and energy into the platform feel differently. Unlike a Free Software platform Silverlight developers can not extend Silverlight on their own. If Microsoft fails to invest in the platform, then the platform will stagnate, and eventually it will die. Sure, existing Silverlight applications will still work (for a while anyway). However, no one in their right mind is going to start new Silverlight development at this point, and those people that did jump on the Silverlight bandwagon are probably going to have to port their applications to a new platform. Silverlight developers are going to have to update their skills (and their resume).
Nice graph. Thanks.
You are absolutely right. Saying that smoking stemmed from stupidity was the wrong thing to say. Like I said, I have mostly been acquainted with smokers that were trying to quit. They had gotten entangled with an addictive substance, and they felt trapped. That doesn't make them stupid. It simply means that they made a choice that they later regretted. In your case you apparently don't even regret that choice. So, good for you. I personally believe the choice should be yours to make.
I am very grateful to my parents for the guidance that they gave me while I was growing up. You are certainly correct, however, in that having good parents does not make me smarter than those around me, just luckier.
Stupid was the wrong thing to say, and I am sorry for that. People make poor choices all of the time. The difference is that with smoking once you are addicted it becomes very difficult to stop. My sincere apologies.
By the way, congratulations on your success giving up cigarettes. That's a big deal, and I have seen enough people try and fail to have a fair appreciation as to how difficult it is to quit.
I am not of the opinion that making marijuana illegal is good for our society. I think that people that use marijuana are making a very poor choice, but that's true for a lot of things.
On the other hand, we have historical precedents for what happens when drugs like cocaine (or worse heroine) are legalized. That was not a good idea. Marijuana, on the other hand, probably belongs in the same group as alcohol and tobacco. We'd probably be better off simply trying to control it, and not ban it outright. I personally think that the country would be a better place if we could stop using all of these substances, however, we have already tried prohibition of alcohol and it proved unworkable. My guess is that tobacco would fare similarly, and I personally believe that marijuana probably fits that list.
You are certainly correct that tobacco is currently legal primarily for historical reasons. I personally think tying race into the issue is a bit of a stretch, especially since a fair percentage of the early tobacco plantation owners were Indian (mostly Cherokee), but I can see your point.
Re-reading my post I think that the self-righteousness is more than mild, and for that I am truly sorry. I simply think blaming the *government* for the smoking problem is ridiculous, and I was trying to show that I am not the sort of person that anyone in their right mind could consider pro-tobacco.
Like I said, I have helped more than my fair share of people quit smoking, and tried to help many others. My experience tells me that if you attempt to help people quit smoking you have a good chance of ending up with a new friend that happens to be a smoker that can't quit. It doesn't make them a bad person. To be honest, it doesn't even make them a stupid person (I really shouldn't have said that). Everyone makes mistakes. Smokers have simply made a mistake that has caused them to get entangled with something very addictive.
All things considered you certainly could have a worse habit.
Thanks for the Youtube Muppets link. That made me smile.
What do you suggest?
Perhaps a little background is in order. I am a Mormon. For religious reasons, my family has been telling their children (and anyone else that would listen) not to use tobacco since the mid 1800s. I personally served as a missionary in Chile where a fair portion of my time was spent trying to help people quit smoking. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. Apparently giving up smoking is very difficult. I never met a smoker that didn't want to quit, and yet few people actually are successful.
That's the problem. Smokers know that smoking is killing them, but they are addicted. We already have huge taxes on cigarettes. We control their sale to minors, and we control how they can be advertised. Heck, we even run advertisements extolling the many problems caused by smoking, and we force smokers to go to special designated areas to smoke. At this point about the only thing that we could do that we haven't tried is to make tobacco illegal. To be honest, I would not be surprised if that actually *increased* tobacco use. Marijuana manages to be quite popular while still being illegal.
Unfortunately, some people are just stupid. They don't see the harm in trying tobacco until it is too late and they are addicted. It is easy (and comfortable) to blame the politicians, but for the most part politicians have gone out of their way to cast a stigma on tobacco use. It is even easier to blame the tobacco industry, and just about anyone would be forced to admit that those guys are slimy. However, tobacco has a long history of use in the U.S. and I think that it would be counterproductive to try and curtail the rights of individuals in this regard. Our society has done everything it can to curtail the use of tobacco short of throwing people in prison for growing it or using it.
The Kin was killed because it failed to sell. The fact that the Windows Phone guys had political issues with the phone does not change that all-important fact. If customers would have wanted Kins, Microsoft would still be selling them.
I do agree that, at least to a certain extent, Microsoft stopped selling Kins because it was afraid that the stigma from the Kin's failure would rub off on Windows Phones in general. However, at this point, Windows Phone 7 is out, and it is still getting trounced. Heck, the only reason that we even mention Windows Phones and Windows Tablets in the same sentence as Android and iOS is that Microsoft can afford to pour billions into R&D while still losing.
Microsoft's hardware partners, on the other hand, do not have that luxury. Nokia has already bet its future on Windows Mobile, but I don't see it making a tablet any time soon. The rest of the hardware manufacturers are not likely to get into bed with Microsoft. Android is a safer bet, and besides the OEMs know that even if they came up with a Windows design that sold well Microsoft would just turn around and help Nokia (or Dell) duplicate the device. At least with Android they have *some* design leeway. Heck, most of Microsoft's traditional hardware allies either already have an Android device, or (in the case of HP) they have their own mobile operating system.
If Microsoft really wants to get an Arm-based tablet made, they are likely going to have to pull an XBox and make it themselves.
Nothing personal, but you need to take a basic accounting class before you talk about this stuff. Really.
The division that includes the XBox has been profitable since the original XBox was retired because Microsoft went through a whole pile of accounting tricks to make sure that all of the large expenses happened before that arbitrary date. For example, Microsoft essentially pre-paid nearly $1 billion for promotion instead of paying for campaigns as they came up. Microsoft also wrote off another $1 billion for hardware returns.
The hardware return writeoff is especially interesting. Normal people, like you and I, know that Microsoft doesn't actually incur any costs until they have to fix your broken XBox 360. However, because of accounting tricks Microsoft could say (on the books) that it had already lost the money that it took replacing hardware. So the XBox division got credit for new sales, but it did not get dinged for returns. Instead of years of red ink, on paper Microsoft had a few *horrible* quarters and then moderate returns. This might make you feel better if you aren't very good at math, or if you are a fan of Microsoft's gaming system, but the end result is the same. Microsoft is still in the red overall on the XBox 360, and the best it could manage was a distant second place. Heck, Sony might even pass then for that honor.
Personally, I think that Microsoft had to do what it did, and it still could easily end up with a win, but talking about quarterly profits from the XBox division is just ignorance. Microsoft's investors have took a beating on both XBoxes, and I am sure that a lot of them are very wary about Microsoft making more hardware.
Microsoft has a long history of letting its hardware partners take all of the risks. That's a fine strategy if you want to sell a bog standard PC. It is a much less workable strategy if you want to make some sort of unique device. In the past, however, Microsoft has been the only game in town when it came to workable off-the-shelf OS software, especially if you wanted to play well with Windows.
So the OEMs took Microsoft's software and did all of the actual engineering to make it actually work. If the device was a flop they were left holding the bag with the unusable hardware and the bill for the engineering effort. If the device was a success, then it was a given that Microsoft was going to shop your ideas around to your competitors. After all, most of the software that made your device work belonged to Microsoft. Microsoft got paid per device sold, and so they were happy to encourage cut throat competition on the hardware side. This guaranteed that there was a disincentive to actually innovate as companies like Dell, that made their money by cloning other people's ideas and squeezing the supply chain until it bled, dominated. Why innovate if Dell and Microsoft are going to make all of the money borrowing your ideas? Every once in a while someone would come up with a new device based entirely on their own software (Palm, Rim, etc.), but they invariably faced lots of pressure and competition from Microsoft and its OEMs.
The combination of Apple's design prowess and the emergence of Google's android have broken this cycle. Apple has the design genius to create entirely new devices that people want, and the existence of Android means that Apple's competitors have a ready-made OS that doesn't require that they work with Microsoft. Now Microsoft realizes that it needs to get into these new markets, but none of its traditional allies are willing to risk working with Microsoft's software. Heck, HP even has its own software for these devices. Nokia is allied with Microsoft now, and in fact, it has bet the business on Microsoft's software, but they are too busy trying to make a Windows phone to be relied on for a tablet.
So Microsoft gets to take its own risks now. It should be interesting. Microsoft learned a lot from the XBox. It is even possible that they won't lose billions of dollars this time.
At this point IE market share doesn't really matter that much. After all, in a bid to remain relevant Microsoft is finally embracing web standards. Instead of steering developers towards Silverlight Microsoft now putting its efforts into things like having a decent Javascript implementation, workable SVG support, etc. Even if Microsoft manages to maintain its current market share it is finally possible to code to web standards and create web sites that look and behave well across a wide array of browsers and devices.
Heck, not even the most rabid Microsoft fanboys can justify creating IE-only websites these days, and it wasn't that long ago that it was difficult to justify spending any time at all on non-IE browsers. Microsoft was nearly successful in tying the Internet to Internet Explorer (and to Windows), but it is abundantly clear that this effort has failed. The desktop (and Windows) is becoming less important all of the time.
I think that it goes without saying that Enderle calls more wrong than he calls right. However, in this case it is hard to argue with him. Microsoft is apparently going to release a version of Windows 8 with ARM support, and between tablets and smartphones people are doing more and more of their computing on devices without Intel inside.
Intel needs a low power processor that competes with ARM badly, and Atom is not getting the job done.
Thanks to the Mono people C# is essentially the only language that even pretends to be cross-platform to all of these devices. So I suppose I understand the theory, especially if you were writing the sort of game where the logic code comprised a major part of the project.
Still, unless MonoDroid and MonoTouch are documented far better and come with far more examples than Mono itself, I can't see how choosing C# could possibly be a win. Let's face it. XBox Live Indie is a ghetto on the #2 console (that might well soon be #3). Financially you'd probably be better off just to ignore it completely. MonoDroid and MonoTouch would allow you to use C# on most of the major platforms for logic code, but they force you into using their wrappings for the native APIs for the UI code. Not only are you at the mercy of Novell for updates to these APIs (and they just fired all of their Mono developers), but you are essentially blazing your own trail. Very few developers are taking this path, and that means that *you* get to find all of the bugs. You could wait for Xamarin to save you, but they have to re-write the whole thing from scratch, and then try and re-sell developers on the idea that C# is what they really want (again). The mobile and game space is likely to be really different by the time Xamarin has something to sell. Who knows, by then perhaps Android (or iOS) will be the only platform that matters. If Microsoft really wants C# to stay relevant in this space then it *really* needs to do something quickly. Microsoft has the money to make things happen. Unfortunately, the execs at Microsoft have pinned their hopes on Nokia's first WinPhone being so awesome that people flock to their platform. That seems like a *very* long shot to me, but it probably is enough that it will keep Microsoft from funding Xamarin's work, which is the only thing that is likely to keep C# relevant in this segment of the computing world.
From a practical standpoint, if you drop support for the XBox, you could write your core logic in C or C++ and use the native APIs for the UI on iOS and Android. I would bet that this is a far more popular choice than choosing C#. Most developers probably just write one app in Java, one in ObjC, and possibly one in C# if they really want to try their luck on the XBox, and call it good.
Thanks for the post, that was informative. In fact, it was informative enough that I actually did a little research. Yes, it appears that the XBox Live Indie Games is unique in the console industry. It also appears to be somewhat of a ghetto. Microsoft sets the price points, limits the playtest time, etc.
If you *really* want to put your game on a console Microsoft is the only game in town. The fact that your game would probably be easy to port to the PC almost certainly helps.
I suppose it is even theoretically possible that you might want to take your XBox Live Indie Game and try and port it to Android or iOS. If that were the case then the MonoDroid and MonoTouch tools might be useful. Of course, these are now Attachmate property and have nothing to do with Xamarin, but that's another story.
How important are XBox Live Indie Games really? XBox is basically the second most popular gaming console, and is behind by a large margin. Microsoft's phone stuff is so far behind that even Nokia is not going to be able to save it.
Besides, Mono doesn't help with either of these areas. If you want to develop for XBox Live or Microsoft's mobile OS you use Microsoft's tools, full stop. I suppose theoretically you could use Mono's non-free software to develop for iOS, Android, and Microsoft's platforms, but you would still have to learn three different APIs, and on the two most popular platforms (Android and iOS) you would have to use non-native tools.
It seems to me that you'd have to *really* like C# to go through that hassle.