A 30-second midday ad on a nationwide cable network in about 60 million homes runs only a few thousand dollars. Probably be seen in an average of 4 million homes, roughly.
Take a good look and see whose making money in Open Source.
Take a good look and see who is making money in software in general. I count about 30 companies, including the top seven game publishers.
Then there are companies like Looking Glass, who, despite a critically acclaimed, selling product, go broke, or even Purple Moon, who despite $4.7 million in sales (they only make girls games), have to lay off their staff and eventually be acquired by another company.
I wouldn't be so adamantly opposed to this book if the publisher didn't compare it to so many great books.
I wonder how often reviews such as this become "well, the publisher said something I didn't agree with" and so the book becomes "a mindless droning mish-mash of boring one-dimensional characters that nobody cares about, least of all the author. I found it to be distressingly dull, pointless, vapid, inane and an absolute waste of time. Didn't get past the first chapter. Don't waste your time."
Maybe I've just read too many of them, but these off-the-cuff gripe-fests re: any work of fiction (movie, book, whatever) are starting to sound like they are written with a Perl script.
blah blah blah not relevant blah blah blah not innovative blah been done better blah blah better example blah...
DMCA. Having a democrat for president would definately increase the chances of this bill getting passed.
and it is for this reason that Capitol Hill should not be the only fax number being dialed. If the White House comes out against this bill, it is OVER, GONE AND DONE WITH.
There is only one signature required to turn this bill off like a table lamp, Disney or not.
You act like this is a democracy, as if every voice counts, surprise this is a republic, if every voice counted, BUSH would not be president right now, after all he didnt win the popular vote,
I think this would qualify as the largest red herring in the history of discourse.
That's because every idea must now be in the form of an executive summary for a multi-million dollar business plan.
At work, they call it a "business case." No employee is allowed to do anything unless a "business case" can be made for it, and there is no such thing as a moderate success.
But, it may well be that big business is a dinosaur. Simply too big, and a brain too tiny to understand its own doom.
Great analogy, and quite accurate. lol.
I think you're right, we are going to see the rise of crafstmen (and small companies of them) dealing directly with their customers, and in the case of digital art, dealing en masse.
From the book (and memory):
"Big companies usually look over the trees at each other, considering only other giants such as themselves as worthy competition, but if they look down at their feet, they would see thousands of tiny ants gnawing away at their foundations. These small companies are willing to do battle for even a tiny fraction of the market. One company taking 0.01% of the market doesn't matter much, but 10,000 companies doing that will take it all."
(apologies if it was mis-paraphrased)
This is very important to big business. They do not know how to communicate with *anyone* anymore. Ever try to call a big company and have them respond meaningfully to anything except an offer to buy something (and rarely even then)? 99% of the time, it's voice-mail. The other 1% it's someone who hasn't the foggiest clue what they are doing.
Doing any kind of business with a big company is a mess, and this is the 21st century! High-tech communication! Computers! Efficiency! Less work is being done more expensively because big companies cannot get out of their own way.
Meanwhile, the cash register at the tiny little craft shop rings again...
The biggest mental block facing business today, both online and even with interactive TV companies, is to be unable to think of dealing with the market except as a collection of individuals.
I think this can also be read backwards. Business' mental block is also being unable to deal with people as individuals first. They still cling to the myth of the "mass market" when there is no such thing. Laundry detergent is a mass market product. Everything else is a niche.
The Cluetrain has this concept down cold: craftsmanship will return to the marketplace, and the customers will come to expect it, because craftsmanship is more valuable in the long run than mass produced generic brands, especially for creative products like art and books and software.
So instead of a handful of huge corporations building things on an assembly line (which worked REAL WELL with software lemme tell ya... *gag*), there will be a thousand tiny shops each serving a tiny but growing market and making the economy a thousand times more valuable.
For those businesses that are still chasing the elusive, non-existent "next big thing:" hear that sound? It's the customers you are ignoring knocking on the door and wondering why nobody answers, and then leaving for a much smaller competitor who *does* answer the phone, and on the first ring even.
"Can I print it out?" is the most oft-heard phrase in IT. Satellite images of the Pacific Northwest slowly fade from green to brown as the laser and inkjets churn out page after page after page of documents that nobody reads.
The quote is and remains, "if it can't be described on a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper, it cannot be understood." I have an additional quote. "The only person who reads every page of a 50-page work of non-fiction is the person who wrote it."
But the more fundamental problem is this: the current group of GUIs for computers are terribly inefficient when trying to keep up with a time-limited multiple-task environment like air traffic control. Note that ATC displays are monochrome text and dots, not 50 fps, 3D-enhanced, voxel-textured, next-generation, quad-GPU multimedia extravaganzas.
Trying to get a lot of small items of information into multiple places with the current "desktop computers" is a task apparently best suited to an xterm. No mouse required, no navigating a little pointer all over the place, no looking for things, no browsing. Also, the GUI on Windows is a royal pain to use when trying to read from one application and type in another. Bah.
The original Blade was the essence of cool. By the time they got to the hospital and the cops tried to arrest him, it was on the all-time list.
[Cops fire, bullets bounce off]
"Are you out of your #%&@$ mind?!?!?"
[Cops run]
ROFL!
There were some genuinely great scenes in the first movie. The "he moved" line when they fry the fat vampire, the music starting when Blade catches the sunglasses at the end, the sword flourish in the final battle, Whistler's "catch you fellas at a bad time?" the car (any movie with a big block engine anywhere in it automatically gets a minimum of 5 on the 10 scale), etc.
Just a really cool movie. I might just go see the sequel. If Ebert liked it, it can't be all bad, right?
This was an idea of Maxis' that they have had ever since the days of the original SimCity, but were waiting until PCs got to the point where it could be done well.
Uh huh. What's so complicated about the Sims? It wouldn't have run on computers in 1999? or 1998? The Sims needs more resources than Win98? Come on...
And it was published by Electronic Arts. I GUARANTEE YOU that it took MONTHS and MONTHS of meetings and skeptical producers and budget negotiations and "yeah, but" people and bean counters and enough dogs and ponies to pull the Southwestern Flyer from Phoenix to San Diego to get this thing green-lighted.
The FIRST WORDS OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS were something along the lines of "who's going to buy a game about people doing chores in a simulated apartment?" That's as predictable as the Rose Bowl. Problem is, nobody ever gets to call them on it. There is probably at least one person probably still working at EA who flatly stated "it'll never work."
Well, they were WRONG, but they'll never admit it. They'll cash their bonus check the same day, though.
Now that it's a success, sure, everyone will backfill with "well, of course that was our vision from the beginning," but sorry, that dog won't hunt.
Of the top two best selling PC games of all time, with a total combined sales of approximately ELEVEN MILLION UNITS, one was an adventure game and the other was a simulation.
Hmmm.. maybe the MARKET IS TRYING TO TELL THE GAME INDUSTRY SOMETHING, YOU THINK????
But, but I thought all PC games were warezzzzzzzzzzzed!
I thought that rampant copying and wanton piracy were destroying the industry!
I thought that people would never buy something they could just rip and download for free!
I thought that games were a niche market!
I thought that games would never appeal to the mainstream!
I thought PC games didn't make any money!
Whaddya wanna bet whoever came up with the idea for this game had to perform the equivalent of giving birth to a washing machine in order to get it green-lighted by the publisher?
This game has made approximately Three HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in gross sales (if it was priced at $50).
This provides a two-word answer to any game publisher from this point forward who says:
"Ehhh, PC games can't make money" "Ehhh, ehhh, Piracy is damaging the industry" "Ehhhh, you need state of the art 3D graphics to sell" "Ehhhh, people only want to play action games"
Oh, well back on this day we've decided you were a monopoly. From this day forward the competitive practices you've been using were illegal. Maybe you should have recognized that you were a monopoly and immediately became non-competitive just in case. We're going to punish you now.
They signed a consent decree around that time. There is a long road from monopoly to the DOJ becoming a plaintiff.
sigh... another bright decision by some guy in a suit somewhere, probably talking on his cell phone right now in a 1200 square foot office with half a donut hanging out of his big mouth, calling meetings and planning to "leave for the day" about 1:15PM...
Which would seem to imply that MS makes the best software.
Well, the effect is greatly reduced in the case of MS because they have no competition, therefore there is no real incentive to do a better job since their product will sell anyway.
he will make sure that you need to apply to him for additional features, which he can sell you at an additional cost.
Agreed this has become the practice of many businesses. It used to be "repeat customers," but now it's either "never quite sell them the whole product, but do it in pieces" or "get them on a monthly payment plan for as long as possible."
For some reason it's just never quite enough to sell your product to more customers. They either have to buy again and again, or buy every month, or pay an exorbitant price. I think this has left a lot of customers with a feeling they are being taken advantage of.
Which is one of the reasons that many closed source programs do not evince any pride in craftsmanship, but merely slick marketing glitz.
That's partly a function of incompetence among management. There is a 10 to 1 ratio of "people making money off of product" to "people designing and building product" in almost every business. The torrential flood of marketing is there because those other people need something to do, I guess.:)
Guess what, folks: games must break out of the upgrades per second rut or they will never be economically viable. There are perhaps 10 projects per year that are good investments. The rest are "throw all the money in the air and hope we can catch most of it before it blows away." Those are the facts.
The retail box model is horribly broken and will likely never be fixed. Game budgets must be reduced, or the game industry *will* become Hollywood, and in 10 years, choice will have been crushed and there will be three companies at most making clones and sequels that everyone must gladly line up and pay $199 each for. (heh, for that matter, what's the game industry doing these days?)
These kinds of technologies are a step in a better direction where *gasp* we might actually make games for someone other than the couple million people who play fps games all day. That's why it is important. A Java game platform does not seek to solve the problem of faster frame rates, or more polygons, because THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MAKING A BETTER GAME. The sooner the game industry gets past this myopic "cram another vertex" mindset, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "all men" wasn't explained?
Good idea. Just FYI:
A 30-second midday ad on a nationwide cable network in about 60 million homes runs only a few thousand dollars. Probably be seen in an average of 4 million homes, roughly.
Just a thought.
Take a good look and see whose making money in Open Source.
Take a good look and see who is making money in software in general. I count about 30 companies, including the top seven game publishers.
Then there are companies like Looking Glass, who, despite a critically acclaimed, selling product, go broke, or even Purple Moon, who despite $4.7 million in sales (they only make girls games), have to lay off their staff and eventually be acquired by another company.
I wouldn't be so adamantly opposed to this book if the publisher didn't compare it to so many great books.
I wonder how often reviews such as this become "well, the publisher said something I didn't agree with" and so the book becomes "a mindless droning mish-mash of boring one-dimensional characters that nobody cares about, least of all the author. I found it to be distressingly dull, pointless, vapid, inane and an absolute waste of time. Didn't get past the first chapter. Don't waste your time."
See? Anyone can gripe.
Maybe I've just read too many of them, but these off-the-cuff gripe-fests re: any work of fiction (movie, book, whatever) are starting to sound like they are written with a Perl script.
blah blah blah not relevant blah blah blah not innovative blah been done better blah blah better example blah...
Couldn't it just be "I didn't like it?"
This is a third rate set of novels by a second rate author.
Isn't this particular gripe getting just a little cliched at this point?
...to be the 4,374th person to say...
ROFL!!!!
Not a chance.
A veto means 90-95% republican support, and that guarantees at least the House. Result? Lightly singed bread on a plate.
Game over.
DMCA. Having a democrat for president would definately increase the chances of this bill getting passed.
and it is for this reason that Capitol Hill should not be the only fax number being dialed. If the White House comes out against this bill, it is OVER, GONE AND DONE WITH.
There is only one signature required to turn this bill off like a table lamp, Disney or not.
You act like this is a democracy, as if every voice counts, surprise this is a republic, if every voice counted, BUSH would not be president right now, after all he didnt win the popular vote,
I think this would qualify as the largest red herring in the history of discourse.
That's because every idea must now be in the form of an executive summary for a multi-million dollar business plan.
At work, they call it a "business case." No employee is allowed to do anything unless a "business case" can be made for it, and there is no such thing as a moderate success.
Well, we'll start by filming the Titanic on the 12th, and then we'll be ORBITING JUPITER BY THE WEEKEND!!
But, it may well be that big business is a dinosaur. Simply too big, and a brain too tiny to understand its own doom.
Great analogy, and quite accurate. lol.
I think you're right, we are going to see the rise of crafstmen (and small companies of them) dealing directly with their customers, and in the case of digital art, dealing en masse.
From the book (and memory):
"Big companies usually look over the trees at each other, considering only other giants such as themselves as worthy competition, but if they look down at their feet, they would see thousands of tiny ants gnawing away at their foundations. These small companies are willing to do battle for even a tiny fraction of the market. One company taking 0.01% of the market doesn't matter much, but 10,000 companies doing that will take it all."
(apologies if it was mis-paraphrased)
This is very important to big business. They do not know how to communicate with *anyone* anymore. Ever try to call a big company and have them respond meaningfully to anything except an offer to buy something (and rarely even then)? 99% of the time, it's voice-mail. The other 1% it's someone who hasn't the foggiest clue what they are doing.
Doing any kind of business with a big company is a mess, and this is the 21st century! High-tech communication! Computers! Efficiency! Less work is being done more expensively because big companies cannot get out of their own way.
Meanwhile, the cash register at the tiny little craft shop rings again...
Brilliant, but one observation:
The biggest mental block facing business today, both online and even with interactive TV companies, is to be unable to think of dealing with the market except as a collection of individuals.
I think this can also be read backwards. Business' mental block is also being unable to deal with people as individuals first. They still cling to the myth of the "mass market" when there is no such thing. Laundry detergent is a mass market product. Everything else is a niche.
The Cluetrain has this concept down cold: craftsmanship will return to the marketplace, and the customers will come to expect it, because craftsmanship is more valuable in the long run than mass produced generic brands, especially for creative products like art and books and software.
So instead of a handful of huge corporations building things on an assembly line (which worked REAL WELL with software lemme tell ya... *gag*), there will be a thousand tiny shops each serving a tiny but growing market and making the economy a thousand times more valuable.
For those businesses that are still chasing the elusive, non-existent "next big thing:" hear that sound? It's the customers you are ignoring knocking on the door and wondering why nobody answers, and then leaving for a much smaller competitor who *does* answer the phone, and on the first ring even.
...there will never be a paperless office.
"Can I print it out?" is the most oft-heard phrase in IT. Satellite images of the Pacific Northwest slowly fade from green to brown as the laser and inkjets churn out page after page after page of documents that nobody reads.
The quote is and remains, "if it can't be described on a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper, it cannot be understood." I have an additional quote. "The only person who reads every page of a 50-page work of non-fiction is the person who wrote it."
But the more fundamental problem is this: the current group of GUIs for computers are terribly inefficient when trying to keep up with a time-limited multiple-task environment like air traffic control. Note that ATC displays are monochrome text and dots, not 50 fps, 3D-enhanced, voxel-textured, next-generation, quad-GPU multimedia extravaganzas.
Trying to get a lot of small items of information into multiple places with the current "desktop computers" is a task apparently best suited to an xterm. No mouse required, no navigating a little pointer all over the place, no looking for things, no browsing. Also, the GUI on Windows is a royal pain to use when trying to read from one application and type in another. Bah.
Just some rambling thoughts.
The original Blade was the essence of cool. By the time they got to the hospital and the cops tried to arrest him, it was on the all-time list.
[Cops fire, bullets bounce off]
"Are you out of your #%&@$ mind?!?!?"
[Cops run]
ROFL!
There were some genuinely great scenes in the first movie. The "he moved" line when they fry the fat vampire, the music starting when Blade catches the sunglasses at the end, the sword flourish in the final battle, Whistler's "catch you fellas at a bad time?" the car (any movie with a big block engine anywhere in it automatically gets a minimum of 5 on the 10 scale), etc.
Just a really cool movie. I might just go see the sequel. If Ebert liked it, it can't be all bad, right?
This was an idea of Maxis' that they have had ever since the days of the original SimCity, but were waiting until PCs got to the point where it could be done well.
Uh huh. What's so complicated about the Sims? It wouldn't have run on computers in 1999? or 1998? The Sims needs more resources than Win98? Come on...
And it was published by Electronic Arts. I GUARANTEE YOU that it took MONTHS and MONTHS of meetings and skeptical producers and budget negotiations and "yeah, but" people and bean counters and enough dogs and ponies to pull the Southwestern Flyer from Phoenix to San Diego to get this thing green-lighted.
The FIRST WORDS OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS were something along the lines of "who's going to buy a game about people doing chores in a simulated apartment?" That's as predictable as the Rose Bowl. Problem is, nobody ever gets to call them on it. There is probably at least one person probably still working at EA who flatly stated "it'll never work."
Well, they were WRONG, but they'll never admit it. They'll cash their bonus check the same day, though.
Now that it's a success, sure, everyone will backfill with "well, of course that was our vision from the beginning," but sorry, that dog won't hunt.
So that invalidates the whole point, right?
Of the top two best selling PC games of all time, with a total combined sales of approximately ELEVEN MILLION UNITS, one was an adventure game and the other was a simulation.
Hmmm.. maybe the MARKET IS TRYING TO TELL THE GAME INDUSTRY SOMETHING, YOU THINK????
ahem...
But, but I thought all PC games were warezzzzzzzzzzzed!
I thought that rampant copying and wanton piracy were destroying the industry!
I thought that people would never buy something they could just rip and download for free!
I thought that games were a niche market!
I thought that games would never appeal to the mainstream!
I thought PC games didn't make any money!
Whaddya wanna bet whoever came up with the idea for this game had to perform the equivalent of giving birth to a washing machine in order to get it green-lighted by the publisher?
This game has made approximately Three HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS in gross sales (if it was priced at $50).
This provides a two-word answer to any game publisher from this point forward who says:
"Ehhh, PC games can't make money"
"Ehhh, ehhh, Piracy is damaging the industry"
"Ehhhh, you need state of the art 3D graphics to sell"
"Ehhhh, people only want to play action games"
"The Sims"
I can see that not much of the slashdot crowd really likes the current generation of online games.
You're kidding, right? A few weeks ago, an Everquest story had people falling over each other to claim they had spent the most.
Ironic that the same group says "if you publish it, we will copy it, and you will not be allowed to profit"
Oh, well back on this day we've decided you were a monopoly. From this day forward the competitive practices you've been using were illegal. Maybe you should have recognized that you were a monopoly and immediately became non-competitive just in case. We're going to punish you now.
They signed a consent decree around that time. There is a long road from monopoly to the DOJ becoming a plaintiff.
Might the young man have parents?
sigh... another bright decision by some guy in a suit somewhere, probably talking on his cell phone right now in a 1200 square foot office with half a donut hanging out of his big mouth, calling meetings and planning to "leave for the day" about 1:15PM...
Which would seem to imply that MS makes the best software.
:)
Well, the effect is greatly reduced in the case of MS because they have no competition, therefore there is no real incentive to do a better job since their product will sell anyway.
he will make sure that you need to apply to him for additional features, which he can sell you at an additional cost.
Agreed this has become the practice of many businesses. It used to be "repeat customers," but now it's either "never quite sell them the whole product, but do it in pieces" or "get them on a monthly payment plan for as long as possible."
For some reason it's just never quite enough to sell your product to more customers. They either have to buy again and again, or buy every month, or pay an exorbitant price. I think this has left a lot of customers with a feeling they are being taken advantage of.
Which is one of the reasons that many closed source programs do not evince any pride in craftsmanship, but merely slick marketing glitz.
That's partly a function of incompetence among management. There is a 10 to 1 ratio of "people making money off of product" to "people designing and building product" in almost every business. The torrential flood of marketing is there because those other people need something to do, I guess.
Wahhh it won't run Quake 47!
Wahhh it won't go 950 frames/sec!
Wahhh it'll only work for puzzle games!
Wahhh too slow!
Wahhh graphics!
Wahhh budgets!
Wahhh what's the point?
Guess what, folks: games must break out of the upgrades per second rut or they will never be economically viable. There are perhaps 10 projects per year that are good investments. The rest are "throw all the money in the air and hope we can catch most of it before it blows away." Those are the facts.
The retail box model is horribly broken and will likely never be fixed. Game budgets must be reduced, or the game industry *will* become Hollywood, and in 10 years, choice will have been crushed and there will be three companies at most making clones and sequels that everyone must gladly line up and pay $199 each for. (heh, for that matter, what's the game industry doing these days?)
These kinds of technologies are a step in a better direction where *gasp* we might actually make games for someone other than the couple million people who play fps games all day. That's why it is important. A Java game platform does not seek to solve the problem of faster frame rates, or more polygons, because THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MAKING A BETTER GAME. The sooner the game industry gets past this myopic "cram another vertex" mindset, the better.