Windows on OS/2 was awesome. It added another incentive to develop for Windows. I suspect that Android on BB will end up just being another incentive to develop for Android.
This is what totally confuses me. Blackberry built their entire company on secure messaging and associated infrastructure. How could that company release a tablet that doesn't work with their own infrastructure? It would be like Apple releasing a music player that doesn't sync with iTunes.
My "too little, too late" comment was with respect to the PlayBook. That product would have been fantastic if it came out before the iPad. Now, it's just another lame tablet with very little developer interest. Your iPod comparison is actually quite good. The iPod didn't really take off until the entire iTunes ecosystem was put into place. Do you really think RIM could pull off a similar move? I would say PlayBook is to iPad as Sensa is to iPod.
RIM is capable of deploying great new products (likely ones they acquire with their cash), but for some reason, they aren't. They have the stink of death on them and are losing more talented engineers than they are acquiring.
The dual-platform strategy didn't work for OS/2 and I don't think it will work for RIM either. I think they would have better luck getting out of the hardware business and go software-only. Build on top of the successful mobile OS's.
Playbook is a disaster. It's neat and is built on the best (IMHO) embedded OS out there, but it's too little, too late. It would be interesting if they were able to ship a tablet with a better display, longer battery life, and less expensive than the iPad, but they didn't. RIM doesn't have enough talent and capital to pull this off.
I predict somebody (Microsoft or Dell) will buy them soon for their IP.
Have you seen what Microsoft is trying to hand them? They don't really deserve much credit for turning that down. Besides, I think they are selling a Windows tablet already.
It's a shame that nobody other than Apple seems to give a damn about build quality or battery life.
Steam sales do cannibalize some future sales for sure. But I would guess that they do far more to expand their market. Most of the games I've bought on Steam sales I would never have bought at full price, so from me, they are getting money they wouldn't have otherwise. A few of the games have sucked, but when I've only paid $5 for them, I don't really care and am not discouraged from buying in the future.
I think we are arguing the exact same thing here. The marginal cost of producing an additional copy of software *is* zero. So if a company spends $100 producing and selling a game, then their profit is revenue - $100. That's why I was saying it's all about raising their revenue number. You say it's about making more profit. When your costs are fixed, the two are really the same thing.
I posted a link somewhere else in this thread where Valve released numbers to show what happens when they put games on sale. Slashing the price of a game by 75% resulted in 15% more revenue.
If your game includes advertising (like Angry Birds on Android) or you can purchase virtual items for the game, you may very well be able to make it up through volume.
That doesn't make any sense. The marginal cost of another copy of a video game is very close to zero. Increasing revenues is really what it is all about.
So, if I go into a store and buy something, should they be required to ask where I live, then collect and remit the taxes for my state, county, and city?
That's what publishers are afraid of. So far, I think all pricing experiments have shown the reverse to be true.
AAA games are like blockbuster movies. Formulaic, expensive, risky, and usually money losers. All the innovation is happening in mobile right now with some notable exceptions (like Kinect). It's easy to take chances trying something new on a game that will sell for a few dollars. If you need to charge $50 for it, you end up going the safe route with Hockey 2012 which is almost the same as Hockey 2011 which is very similar to Hockey 2010.
It's only small relatively speaking. The mobile games market is now larger than the console market and the momentum is solidly behind mobile at the moment. There are a lot of reasons for that, price being one of them.
Did you see the recent interview with the former Sony chief who launched the original Playstation in '96? In it, he projected that unless something changes, Apple devices will be *the* video game market in the relatively near future. It's killing everything else.
"Core gamers" is a small market, but I think they are chasing it because that's the market that is willing to pay $50 for a game. I really don't understand the reluctance by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to drastically lower prices. If new games were $20 instead of $50 or $60, I'm pretty certain my game library would be more than 3x as big.
I've been burned by too many crappy $50+ games that I'm very reluctant to buy any more. I've been pretty happy picking up bargains on Steam and playing games on my phone.
The hubub for me, is security. Every single plugin has bugs in it that give an attacker access to your computer. Something massive like Silverlight, Flash, or Java is going to have lots of bugs because companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle simply don't pay enough attention to code quality and secure design. Microsoft is especially bad at trading security for convenience.
The absence of iOS and Android is huge. These are the fastest growing platforms right now and this alone is driving down Silverlight's install rate.
I think by focusing on HTML5 and dropping Silverlight on the desktop (which they haven't done yet, but there is a lot of suspicion about this inside Microsoft as well) they could end up helping to unseat Flash. Microsoft is decent at tools and if they come up with a great HTML5 toolchain, Flash will start looking much, much less appealing. Especially since it runs so terribly on mobile devices.
Being unafraid to move on when they need to doesn't imply that they always move on when they should.
Plus one could argue that IE6 was critical to far, far more people than Silverlight currently is. If they wanted to kill Silverlight or relegate it to just mobile development, they could do so and it would only be disruptive to a pretty small segment.
They left out a couple of pretty big operating systems: iOS and Android. This is weird considering they listed Symbian and Windows Mobile. The real percentage is going to be significantly less than that. But for the sake of argument, pretend it's accurate. That means that it isn't on 25% of internet browsers.
If you are building for the web, that's a huge number to ignore. Especially when there are competitive technologies available with far better numbers. Why would you chose Silverlight for anything but the intranet?
Microsoft isn't afraid to move on when they need to. There are still a lot of people who rely on VB6. I bet there were a lot more VB6 developers when they dumped it for.Net than there are Silverlight developers today. I think it's pretty clear that HTML5 is much more important to the tech sector than Silverlight and it would be silly for them not to fully embrace HTML5.
Now they need to get rid of their XPS document format and use HTML5 or at least PDF.
Because the passwords stored in the cloud are encrypted, they aren't in the clear. A service like LastPass cannot send you your plaintext password. All they have is the encrypted version. If they are hacked, all the hacker will get is a bunch of random looking data.
The downside is that if you lose your master password, you are screwed.
The upside is that the passwords that LastPass generates are very strong. Much stronger than what people typically use (like "pa55word"). And because you don't have to remember the password, there's no reason to reuse one password among sites.
People who move a lot will do this. I've move fairly frequently and a few moves ago I got sick of boxing up all the things I've collected. So, I digitized everything I could (mostly music, movies, and photos) then got rid of everything that I now held digitally. Since that time, I've pretty much only been buying ebooks and I've since shed most of my former collection. I'm down to one bookshelf.
It's worked out remarkably well for me and I have no regrets. If I could trade in my remaining books for digital versions, I would do it in a heartbeat.
If you are going to look at it as a pyramid, then it's an incredibly flat, broad pyramid. The amount of Bitcoins that trickle in at the top is minuscule compared to the number being traded around by everybody else. I would agree with you if the rate of creation were significant, but it really isn't.
I would wager that the people making the most money are those who buy and sell Bitcoins with traditional currency. I really don't think the mining part of the economy is worth as much scrutiny as it gets.
People get really hung up on the mining part of Bitcoins. In the beginning, I can understand that. Once Bitcoin reaches some critical mass (and some argue that it has), then mining doesn't really matter anymore for most of the players. The likelihood of winning Bitcoins gets to be similar to the chance of winning a lottery. Much easier to either work for Bitcoins (ie accept it as payment) or buy them with conventional currency.
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Windows on OS/2 was awesome. It added another incentive to develop for Windows. I suspect that Android on BB will end up just being another incentive to develop for Android.
This is what totally confuses me. Blackberry built their entire company on secure messaging and associated infrastructure. How could that company release a tablet that doesn't work with their own infrastructure? It would be like Apple releasing a music player that doesn't sync with iTunes.
My "too little, too late" comment was with respect to the PlayBook. That product would have been fantastic if it came out before the iPad. Now, it's just another lame tablet with very little developer interest. Your iPod comparison is actually quite good. The iPod didn't really take off until the entire iTunes ecosystem was put into place. Do you really think RIM could pull off a similar move? I would say PlayBook is to iPad as Sensa is to iPod.
RIM is capable of deploying great new products (likely ones they acquire with their cash), but for some reason, they aren't. They have the stink of death on them and are losing more talented engineers than they are acquiring.
It didn't save them. I loved OS/2 and ran it until Windows 95 came out. By then it was clear that it was a dead end.
The dual-platform strategy didn't work for OS/2 and I don't think it will work for RIM either. I think they would have better luck getting out of the hardware business and go software-only. Build on top of the successful mobile OS's.
Playbook is a disaster. It's neat and is built on the best (IMHO) embedded OS out there, but it's too little, too late. It would be interesting if they were able to ship a tablet with a better display, longer battery life, and less expensive than the iPad, but they didn't. RIM doesn't have enough talent and capital to pull this off.
I predict somebody (Microsoft or Dell) will buy them soon for their IP.
WEP is worthless. If your password is random characters, you could likely crack it faster than you can type it in.
I flew on Southwest yesterday and received peanuts on both legs of my flight.
Have you seen what Microsoft is trying to hand them? They don't really deserve much credit for turning that down. Besides, I think they are selling a Windows tablet already.
It's a shame that nobody other than Apple seems to give a damn about build quality or battery life.
Steam sales do cannibalize some future sales for sure. But I would guess that they do far more to expand their market. Most of the games I've bought on Steam sales I would never have bought at full price, so from me, they are getting money they wouldn't have otherwise. A few of the games have sucked, but when I've only paid $5 for them, I don't really care and am not discouraged from buying in the future.
I think we are arguing the exact same thing here. The marginal cost of producing an additional copy of software *is* zero. So if a company spends $100 producing and selling a game, then their profit is revenue - $100. That's why I was saying it's all about raising their revenue number. You say it's about making more profit. When your costs are fixed, the two are really the same thing.
I posted a link somewhere else in this thread where Valve released numbers to show what happens when they put games on sale. Slashing the price of a game by 75% resulted in 15% more revenue.
If your game includes advertising (like Angry Birds on Android) or you can purchase virtual items for the game, you may very well be able to make it up through volume.
That doesn't make any sense. The marginal cost of another copy of a video game is very close to zero. Increasing revenues is really what it is all about.
So, if I go into a store and buy something, should they be required to ask where I live, then collect and remit the taxes for my state, county, and city?
That's what publishers are afraid of. So far, I think all pricing experiments have shown the reverse to be true.
AAA games are like blockbuster movies. Formulaic, expensive, risky, and usually money losers. All the innovation is happening in mobile right now with some notable exceptions (like Kinect). It's easy to take chances trying something new on a game that will sell for a few dollars. If you need to charge $50 for it, you end up going the safe route with Hockey 2012 which is almost the same as Hockey 2011 which is very similar to Hockey 2010.
It's only small relatively speaking. The mobile games market is now larger than the console market and the momentum is solidly behind mobile at the moment. There are a lot of reasons for that, price being one of them.
Did you see the recent interview with the former Sony chief who launched the original Playstation in '96? In it, he projected that unless something changes, Apple devices will be *the* video game market in the relatively near future. It's killing everything else.
Valve has shown that lowering prices increases revenues.
If the problem is that you can't sell for less because there are too many middlemen to pay, then it's obvious what your problem is.
"Core gamers" is a small market, but I think they are chasing it because that's the market that is willing to pay $50 for a game. I really don't understand the reluctance by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to drastically lower prices. If new games were $20 instead of $50 or $60, I'm pretty certain my game library would be more than 3x as big.
I've been burned by too many crappy $50+ games that I'm very reluctant to buy any more. I've been pretty happy picking up bargains on Steam and playing games on my phone.
What about the compositing window managers (like Compiz)?
The hubub for me, is security. Every single plugin has bugs in it that give an attacker access to your computer. Something massive like Silverlight, Flash, or Java is going to have lots of bugs because companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle simply don't pay enough attention to code quality and secure design. Microsoft is especially bad at trading security for convenience.
The absence of iOS and Android is huge. These are the fastest growing platforms right now and this alone is driving down Silverlight's install rate.
I think by focusing on HTML5 and dropping Silverlight on the desktop (which they haven't done yet, but there is a lot of suspicion about this inside Microsoft as well) they could end up helping to unseat Flash. Microsoft is decent at tools and if they come up with a great HTML5 toolchain, Flash will start looking much, much less appealing. Especially since it runs so terribly on mobile devices.
Being unafraid to move on when they need to doesn't imply that they always move on when they should.
Plus one could argue that IE6 was critical to far, far more people than Silverlight currently is. If they wanted to kill Silverlight or relegate it to just mobile development, they could do so and it would only be disruptive to a pretty small segment.
They left out a couple of pretty big operating systems: iOS and Android. This is weird considering they listed Symbian and Windows Mobile. The real percentage is going to be significantly less than that. But for the sake of argument, pretend it's accurate. That means that it isn't on 25% of internet browsers.
If you are building for the web, that's a huge number to ignore. Especially when there are competitive technologies available with far better numbers. Why would you chose Silverlight for anything but the intranet?
Microsoft isn't afraid to move on when they need to. There are still a lot of people who rely on VB6. I bet there were a lot more VB6 developers when they dumped it for .Net than there are Silverlight developers today. I think it's pretty clear that HTML5 is much more important to the tech sector than Silverlight and it would be silly for them not to fully embrace HTML5.
Now they need to get rid of their XPS document format and use HTML5 or at least PDF.
Because the passwords stored in the cloud are encrypted, they aren't in the clear. A service like LastPass cannot send you your plaintext password. All they have is the encrypted version. If they are hacked, all the hacker will get is a bunch of random looking data.
The downside is that if you lose your master password, you are screwed.
The upside is that the passwords that LastPass generates are very strong. Much stronger than what people typically use (like "pa55word"). And because you don't have to remember the password, there's no reason to reuse one password among sites.
This interview with one of the LastPass guys lays it out fairly well:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/lastpass-is-it-the-password-manager-for-you/3291
People who move a lot will do this. I've move fairly frequently and a few moves ago I got sick of boxing up all the things I've collected. So, I digitized everything I could (mostly music, movies, and photos) then got rid of everything that I now held digitally. Since that time, I've pretty much only been buying ebooks and I've since shed most of my former collection. I'm down to one bookshelf.
It's worked out remarkably well for me and I have no regrets. If I could trade in my remaining books for digital versions, I would do it in a heartbeat.
If you are going to look at it as a pyramid, then it's an incredibly flat, broad pyramid. The amount of Bitcoins that trickle in at the top is minuscule compared to the number being traded around by everybody else. I would agree with you if the rate of creation were significant, but it really isn't.
I would wager that the people making the most money are those who buy and sell Bitcoins with traditional currency. I really don't think the mining part of the economy is worth as much scrutiny as it gets.
People get really hung up on the mining part of Bitcoins. In the beginning, I can understand that. Once Bitcoin reaches some critical mass (and some argue that it has), then mining doesn't really matter anymore for most of the players. The likelihood of winning Bitcoins gets to be similar to the chance of winning a lottery. Much easier to either work for Bitcoins (ie accept it as payment) or buy them with conventional currency.