Quake's model was ok, nothing to stop you playing a pirated copy offline, but it didn't work online... I believe you could play on a LAN, which seems fair.. I remember a game on the amiga which explicitly stated you could run a temporary copy on another system in the same location for lan play purposes. It's certainly not worth buying a game for such a quick casual play anyway.
I also like eve's model, give the program away but charge a subscription for the online play - you're buying a service which costs money to provide, instead of a collection of bytes that costs nothing to copy.
Even worse, online activation ensures that the vendor can expire you're software whenever they want. Also if they go bust, you lose the ability to activate.
The license key itself is a pretty stupid way of trying to verify you bought the game... It only takes one to leak onto the internet, and every pirate can use it. Meanwhile legitimate owners who need to reinstall the game for whatever reason find that they lost the little piece of paper with the code on and thus cannot play the game they legitimately purchased.
I know many people who were bitten by this, and the original vendor was unwilling to help - if they don`t have the code they wont even talk to them, and told them to buy another copy. The solution presented to people in this situation is to obtain a pirated copy or a crack... Even the most die-hard of anti piracy zealots don't usually have an issue with this, since they bought a legit copy in the first place. But it also gives a fair few of these people a taster for warez... It blows away the often spread myth that warez copies are somehow inferior, and shows them that the opposite is true - warez copies are usually better, as they get rid of ridiculous restrictions like license codes and keeping physical media in the drive.
Not requiring the original media was a fairly significant driver for modding the first xbox, you can fit a larger HD and copy all you're games to it. Far more convenient than juggling a stack of physical media... Ofcourse, the high price of games do tend to keep the quantity of games people have down.
Looking for data being smuggled over the border? What a ridiculous idea... Who would go to the trouble of transporting data on physical media, when it can be transmitted over the internet?
Reducing any of the time periods is a bad idea... Sometimes buying from international sources takes a significant amount of time to ship, and yet paypal only give you a limited time to make a claim... Also some unscrupulous sellers will try to keep you waiting around for the claim or feedback period to expire.
The only 2 negative feedbacks i have on my ebay account were retaliatory, one seller sold me bad goods (google for fastmemoryman - he does it a lot), and another didn't like the fact i won a no reserve auction for less than he wanted, so he started making ridiculous demands (we had arranged a weekend collection in advance, but when i won at a low price he said i could only collect during working hours, and when i arranged to have someone else collect he started coming up with other excuses, like saying the item was at his company warehouse and he cant get in during the week, and he doesn't have access to a car to bring it home so i can collect it from him at the weekend - and then the next time i called him, his girlfriend answered and said he cant come on the phone because he's driving).
Well, a virtual world is actually much easier to monitor than a real one... If someone is communicating through a public system like second life, which has servers in a central location, you can get a court order and monitor those servers without the suspect having any idea it's happening. In real life, you need to physically plant bugging devices, which carries significant risks, not only of the devices being found but also of you're operatives being caught planting them. It's also considerably more expensive, paying someone to read text on a screen is much cheaper than paying someone to risk their life planting bugging equipment in a location known to be frequented by dangerous terrorists. Similarly sending an undercover agent, the anonymity of the internet allows an undercover agent to work with little risk, especially compared to the dangers of what might happen to a real life undercover operative if he's discovered.
4 years compared to 10+ years... Invites may not have been hard to acquire for people who knew about them, but it's a far cry from a heavily advertised service allowing open signups. How would an average end user obtain an invite? Unless he knows people who already have an account, it becomes more hassle than most people are willing to deal with. How many users did other services have after 4 years? I would say gmail is at least comparable...
You'l find also that as the profit margins or volumes of an item decrease, the more reputable manufacturers will move on to other things, and subcontract to cheaper suppliers who may produce inferior goods. I used to buy a pack or 10 floppies and expect them all to work, these days a couple are likely to be bad. Same thing with VHS tapes.. CDRs are going the same way, as are DVDRs... Some of the reputable CDR brands have farmed their manufacture out to noname chinese manufacturers, often you can even tell from the vendor code on the cd (i forget the true name, but cdrecord is usually able to work out the brand of cdr).
The little flaps on the top and front of the Wii fall off quite easily too... The box itself is fairly tough, due to being fairly small, and the controllers are pretty good (plenty have been dropped or swung into walls etc).
I had joystick wiggling games on the Amiga too (which incidentally was compatible with atari joysticks like the 2600)... Plugging a mouse into the joystick port used to feed it with data that seemed completely spurious to a game designed to read from a joystick, but it made those games quite easy.
Well, gmail hasn't been around anywhere near as long, and has even more recently permitted open registrations. Absolute user numbers are a fairly poor metric. How does gmail's user base for the first year compare to that of hotmail or yahoo? Tho that's also an unfair comparison, due to the greater number of users these days.
Also assuming that other services are mediocre or better, people won't go actively looking for alternatives. It's only if their current service is especially poor that existing users will consider switching.
It's not about being able to afford it... It's about spending money on something that should be a standard default feature. Paying an extra $20 for a car door isn't gonna break the bank, but you wouldn't expect a car to arrive without it's doors.
And it soon adds up, seems stupid to keep wasting small amounts of money.
Actually, It was the likes of Compaq who were responsible for the opening of the PC compatible hardware market. Microsoft are responsible for fighting tooth and nail to keep the software closed, while trying to benefit from the open hardware.
There are also far too many websites which are designed for narrow screen monitors at low resolutions, view them on a widescreen and you get big empty bars at either side. HTML is designed to scale to whatever resolution display you have, slashdot uses the full width of my screen regardless of resolution.
Yahoo has always been a portal site, it's supposed to be a clusterfuck of links... Their search option is merely for convenience, they always used to use third parties, i remember when they used altavista as their "search partner".
Yahoo is actually a lot more popular outside of the US... It's very big in Asia, And AOL's IM service is pretty much unheard of in Europe, it's all MSN or Yahoo with Gtalk & Skype slowly gaining ground.
Hotmail retains market share because it's well known and has been around a lot longer than gmail... However how many people actively use it, vs people who sign up for a spam-collector account...
And what the poster was talking about is more the quality of service, hotmail's interface used to be far less cluttered, and faster (even considering the lesser bandwidth connections of the day), and it used to allow pop3.
Actually from a business perspective lock-in is *better* than innovation, because it is cheaper, and harder to compete against, but it only works if you are sufficiently powerful.
That's called a price fixing cartel, and thus illegal. But there are many other things google/yahoo could do to decrease their own costs and thus profitability without having to increase prices...
Yahoo are mainly a portal, not a search engine, they always used to farm out their searches to another provider tho i'm not sure if they do anymore, they could easily farm out their search functions to google. Both companies provide mail services, some of this infrastructure could be merged to cut costs. Both companies provide IM services, these could also be merged to increase the total user base and reduce costs. Both companies buy huge amounts of power/bandwidth/servers, together they become a larger buyer and can demand lower prices (tho i think both companies are large enough individually to make fairly hefty demands anyway)... Both companies have internal technologies which may be useful to the other.
There are plenty of things Google/Yahoo can co-operate on without becoming an illegal cartel.
Well, if Google were to buy Yahoo they would surely have some antitrust complaints filed against them. They may not be large enough to have an out and out monopoly, but they're still the biggest player.
A lot of MSN users have it as their default page because that's how IE shipped, and they don't know how to change it (or dont care, many people enter a url as soon as they open the browser). Not sure about Yahoo, i think it might be the default page for a few isp's custom setups but nothing on the same scale. Google probably have more default visitors thanks to firefox.
MSN only ever had that position due to being the default site in IE, and people not knowing how to change the default. A lot of people never looked at it and just browse to another site immediately... And with the increase in Firefox usage, they're no longer the default... Netscape's "home.netscape.com" used to be fairly popular too, only because it was the default in netscape at the time. Yahoo and Google had to gain their popularity by offering good services people want to use, i don't think Yahoo has ever been the default site for any significant application (maybe the default site for some isp's) and Google only became the default for firefox recently.
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Quake's model was ok, nothing to stop you playing a pirated copy offline, but it didn't work online...
I believe you could play on a LAN, which seems fair.. I remember a game on the amiga which explicitly stated you could run a temporary copy on another system in the same location for lan play purposes. It's certainly not worth buying a game for such a quick casual play anyway.
I also like eve's model, give the program away but charge a subscription for the online play - you're buying a service which costs money to provide, instead of a collection of bytes that costs nothing to copy.
Even worse, online activation ensures that the vendor can expire you're software whenever they want. Also if they go bust, you lose the ability to activate.
The license key itself is a pretty stupid way of trying to verify you bought the game...
It only takes one to leak onto the internet, and every pirate can use it. Meanwhile legitimate owners who need to reinstall the game for whatever reason find that they lost the little piece of paper with the code on and thus cannot play the game they legitimately purchased.
I know many people who were bitten by this, and the original vendor was unwilling to help - if they don`t have the code they wont even talk to them, and told them to buy another copy. The solution presented to people in this situation is to obtain a pirated copy or a crack... Even the most die-hard of anti piracy zealots don't usually have an issue with this, since they bought a legit copy in the first place. But it also gives a fair few of these people a taster for warez... It blows away the often spread myth that warez copies are somehow inferior, and shows them that the opposite is true - warez copies are usually better, as they get rid of ridiculous restrictions like license codes and keeping physical media in the drive.
Not requiring the original media was a fairly significant driver for modding the first xbox, you can fit a larger HD and copy all you're games to it. Far more convenient than juggling a stack of physical media... Ofcourse, the high price of games do tend to keep the quantity of games people have down.
Looking for data being smuggled over the border? What a ridiculous idea...
Who would go to the trouble of transporting data on physical media, when it can be transmitted over the internet?
Reducing any of the time periods is a bad idea...
Sometimes buying from international sources takes a significant amount of time to ship, and yet paypal only give you a limited time to make a claim...
Also some unscrupulous sellers will try to keep you waiting around for the claim or feedback period to expire.
The only 2 negative feedbacks i have on my ebay account were retaliatory, one seller sold me bad goods (google for fastmemoryman - he does it a lot), and another didn't like the fact i won a no reserve auction for less than he wanted, so he started making ridiculous demands (we had arranged a weekend collection in advance, but when i won at a low price he said i could only collect during working hours, and when i arranged to have someone else collect he started coming up with other excuses, like saying the item was at his company warehouse and he cant get in during the week, and he doesn't have access to a car to bring it home so i can collect it from him at the weekend - and then the next time i called him, his girlfriend answered and said he cant come on the phone because he's driving).
Well, a virtual world is actually much easier to monitor than a real one...
If someone is communicating through a public system like second life, which has servers in a central location, you can get a court order and monitor those servers without the suspect having any idea it's happening.
In real life, you need to physically plant bugging devices, which carries significant risks, not only of the devices being found but also of you're operatives being caught planting them. It's also considerably more expensive, paying someone to read text on a screen is much cheaper than paying someone to risk their life planting bugging equipment in a location known to be frequented by dangerous terrorists.
Similarly sending an undercover agent, the anonymity of the internet allows an undercover agent to work with little risk, especially compared to the dangers of what might happen to a real life undercover operative if he's discovered.
4 years compared to 10+ years...
Invites may not have been hard to acquire for people who knew about them, but it's a far cry from a heavily advertised service allowing open signups. How would an average end user obtain an invite? Unless he knows people who already have an account, it becomes more hassle than most people are willing to deal with.
How many users did other services have after 4 years? I would say gmail is at least comparable...
You'l find also that as the profit margins or volumes of an item decrease, the more reputable manufacturers will move on to other things, and subcontract to cheaper suppliers who may produce inferior goods.
I used to buy a pack or 10 floppies and expect them all to work, these days a couple are likely to be bad. Same thing with VHS tapes..
CDRs are going the same way, as are DVDRs... Some of the reputable CDR brands have farmed their manufacture out to noname chinese manufacturers, often you can even tell from the vendor code on the cd (i forget the true name, but cdrecord is usually able to work out the brand of cdr).
The little flaps on the top and front of the Wii fall off quite easily too...
The box itself is fairly tough, due to being fairly small, and the controllers are pretty good (plenty have been dropped or swung into walls etc).
I had joystick wiggling games on the Amiga too (which incidentally was compatible with atari joysticks like the 2600)... Plugging a mouse into the joystick port used to feed it with data that seemed completely spurious to a game designed to read from a joystick, but it made those games quite easy.
Get one with passive cooling - no fans to jam with dust, no airflow to draw the dust in...
Or a dumb terminal, less parts = less to go wrong.
Well, gmail hasn't been around anywhere near as long, and has even more recently permitted open registrations. Absolute user numbers are a fairly poor metric.
How does gmail's user base for the first year compare to that of hotmail or yahoo? Tho that's also an unfair comparison, due to the greater number of users these days.
Also assuming that other services are mediocre or better, people won't go actively looking for alternatives. It's only if their current service is especially poor that existing users will consider switching.
It's not about being able to afford it...
It's about spending money on something that should be a standard default feature.
Paying an extra $20 for a car door isn't gonna break the bank, but you wouldn't expect a car to arrive without it's doors.
And it soon adds up, seems stupid to keep wasting small amounts of money.
Actually, It was the likes of Compaq who were responsible for the opening of the PC compatible hardware market. Microsoft are responsible for fighting tooth and nail to keep the software closed, while trying to benefit from the open hardware.
There are also far too many websites which are designed for narrow screen monitors at low resolutions, view them on a widescreen and you get big empty bars at either side.
HTML is designed to scale to whatever resolution display you have, slashdot uses the full width of my screen regardless of resolution.
Yahoo has always been a portal site, it's supposed to be a clusterfuck of links...
Their search option is merely for convenience, they always used to use third parties, i remember when they used altavista as their "search partner".
Let's hope they move them to 4.4.4.4, even less typing.
Yahoo is actually a lot more popular outside of the US...
It's very big in Asia, And AOL's IM service is pretty much unheard of in Europe, it's all MSN or Yahoo with Gtalk & Skype slowly gaining ground.
Hotmail retains market share because it's well known and has been around a lot longer than gmail...
However how many people actively use it, vs people who sign up for a spam-collector account...
And what the poster was talking about is more the quality of service, hotmail's interface used to be far less cluttered, and faster (even considering the lesser bandwidth connections of the day), and it used to allow pop3.
Actually from a business perspective lock-in is *better* than innovation, because it is cheaper, and harder to compete against, but it only works if you are sufficiently powerful.
That's called a price fixing cartel, and thus illegal.
But there are many other things google/yahoo could do to decrease their own costs and thus profitability without having to increase prices...
Yahoo are mainly a portal, not a search engine, they always used to farm out their searches to another provider tho i'm not sure if they do anymore, they could easily farm out their search functions to google.
Both companies provide mail services, some of this infrastructure could be merged to cut costs.
Both companies provide IM services, these could also be merged to increase the total user base and reduce costs.
Both companies buy huge amounts of power/bandwidth/servers, together they become a larger buyer and can demand lower prices (tho i think both companies are large enough individually to make fairly hefty demands anyway)...
Both companies have internal technologies which may be useful to the other.
There are plenty of things Google/Yahoo can co-operate on without becoming an illegal cartel.
Well, if Google were to buy Yahoo they would surely have some antitrust complaints filed against them. They may not be large enough to have an out and out monopoly, but they're still the biggest player.
A lot of MSN users have it as their default page because that's how IE shipped, and they don't know how to change it (or dont care, many people enter a url as soon as they open the browser).
Not sure about Yahoo, i think it might be the default page for a few isp's custom setups but nothing on the same scale. Google probably have more default visitors thanks to firefox.
MSN only ever had that position due to being the default site in IE, and people not knowing how to change the default. A lot of people never looked at it and just browse to another site immediately...
And with the increase in Firefox usage, they're no longer the default... Netscape's "home.netscape.com" used to be fairly popular too, only because it was the default in netscape at the time.
Yahoo and Google had to gain their popularity by offering good services people want to use, i don't think Yahoo has ever been the default site for any significant application (maybe the default site for some isp's) and Google only became the default for firefox recently.