Actually, American Idol is the most amazing example of intelligent marketing I've ever seen. You take a bunch of holefuls willing to do anything and throw them on TV, and wait for who everyone thinks is best. Then, you move on to the next one. It's like a Factory Pattern for creating celebrities that have no real content. Amaaaazing.
Teenage girls drive entire markets. Know American Idol? Brittney Spears? InSync? Backstreet Boys? You think only college aged kids are buying this stuff? No. The music industry is run by teenaged girls, has been since the Beatles / Monkees.
Ever hear a story of how your co-workers' (or your) girls have like four outfits for everything? Know a girl who works in a shop and says, "Yeah, I spend most of my paycheck right here."
Many teens are: 1) not set in your was as far as who you will buy from. 2) not responsible enough to think, "Should I save this for a rainy day if possible?" 3) not paying their expenses yet. 4) Capable of moving up to a decent salary within 10 years. 5) More "Herd-Motivated" than most people. (even though most Americans are pretty socialized anyways)
Those are just the reasons I can think of off the top of my head; companies market like rabid dogs towards teenagers. They just look so tasty as a market.
Making this particular claim a:) a fundamental logic error made by the biggest manufacturer of software in the world, or b) a completely unbased and silly statement based upon marketing.
Funny thing is, this is the first time I've ever hoped for a Microsoft statement to be FUD.
Local real estate prices in all of Oregon are climbing at an amazing rate. Those of us who grew up here are waiting for the bubble to burst so we can afford to live where we grew up.
I wish Google had built this in downtown Portland, but then real estate might cost a little more in the center of town, as well as power....
Additionally, in Oregon there is an Urban Growth Boundary - you can't develop on top of farmland. There are positive and negative effects that spring from this. One of them is the uber-burbs in the Dalles and other extreme satellite areas are becoming more expensive.
The salaries in the music industry are mainly going to the huge PR machine they run. The average CD costs 15-20$, the sound on it costs about 2$ to make. Packaging costs almost as much as if not more than the CD itself. The publisher gets as much out of each track on a CD as the artist. The writer gets a large cut as well. (This all true circa 1999, when I was in Internet music) The problem with the music industry is that somewhere along the line the other eight dollars before retail keystoning gets sucked up by (mainly) dumbasses wearing suits. All these dumbasses are making a steady salary and to get that steady salary they need to keep the business model working their way. Otherwise they become redundant. Now, they do things which are extremely important in the current industry- schmoozing, payola, schmoozing, payola, schmoozing.... - but if the industry changes they may not be as useful.
Where I worked during the.com's we had two offices - one in LA and one in Portland. The people in LA were generally 1) incompetent, 2) overpaid, 3) arrogant, and 4) touchy about the other three things being true. I have no reason to believe the rest of the entertainment industry is any different.
Hrm. Well, this is an interesting one. McAffee apparently got me here. But I did of course read it here, so I can't believe I didn't see the whole thing and take note of it. Man, am I lame. Point in fact, though, if you set up the USB drive to have EXE files that looked like images and launched sub-rosa Windows programs when you clicked on them in Exploder, it could be done.... Hidden registry changes before you launch Paint, or whatever.... Yeah, I'm backtracking. I suck for not doing all my research thoroughly. Point in fact, it could be done so that it LOOKED like an image but acted otherwise when you double-clicked easily.
I'm not sure they needed it to show up as an executable. They probably just laced the image files with spyware, which is apparently possible now.
This is Cooooollllld. Interesting thing is that five of the twenty were contractors / non-bank employees / someone else who had access to bank PC's... Wonder if they made it through the ensuing furor.
America colonizes the world with media. Since we were in control of most major international media producers at the right point in history, and English is so easy to get a basic grasp of for so many different types of people, English will be the language of choice for international communication / interaction at least a century to come. Now, does that mean that the language is going to be appreciated by all the people that speak it? No. Does it mean that those people will be more highly skilled? No. It really means that there will be a higher base level of competency for English than any other language when people are even mildly interested in learning a second language. It's an invalid comparison to knock on Americans for not speaking Russian, unless you're talking to them after they've lived for years in Moscow.
On the other hand, giving someone who is traveling at all a whole bunch of credit for learning the dominant language, the one that many the movies released in their country were originally filmed in, the one that many educated people in any country will speak.... Well, that's a little weird. But whatever. Language is like anything else - most people only learn it when they have a real benefit for it as well as exposure. There's a huge benefit to the average Russian in learning English, and it's easy (comparatively) to get a high level of exposure. To go the other direction is an incredible effort in comparison.
That doesn't let idiots who can't form or comprehend a sentence off the hook though. Idiots will be idiots.
O'Reilly's post was well done. I'm happy. Of course, he's associating with a company that has actually registered the trademark on a conference called, "Software Development," which is more than a little stupid, but I'm not big on conferences in the first place.
What a bloody GREAT idea. "Hey, why don't you start using your computer for something non-productive DESIGNED to be addictive."
Been there. At my.com experience, the first thing they had me do was install Half-Life. And the rest, as they say, is history. This kind of attitude is silly - Skype is a better idea, IRC is a better idea, even Google Bloody Talk is a better idea.
MMORPG's can build teams, yes, but they are designed to suck people in so fast and hard that they don't even realise it when they don't come out. I have no problem with this post if it was meant as a joke, but "insightful" is the worst moderation I've seen in years.
I remember that fight as well. In fact, I remember asking in an interview at Intel when I'd be able to get a motherboard with normal DDR instead of Rambus crud. (yes, I was young and stupid)
In reality, I think the entire fiasco which involved Rambus giving Intel a huge chunk of stock and Intel not producing (for a while) a chipset which worked with normal DDR SDRAM hurt Intel tremendously in the end. There's no way AMD would have gotten a foothold in a market where you didn't have to pay almost double for RAM that was not as good. I know I put off building a new computer for an extra two or three years because I didn't trust AMD quality at the time (probably wrongly) and I didn't want to pay for the huge extra cost of Rambus RAM.
The whole thing seems to me to imply price fixing towards the high direction instead of the low - seeing as at the time Intel had a pretty solid lock on the Windows market. Tom's Hardware gave AMD a great shot at breaking into that, I guess...
See, he should just convince his boss to do it in LISP. I mean, the syntax isn't that bad, really, once you get around it, and GUI's are EASY in LISP. You just do paren-based dot-matrix representation.
Freedom Force was HILARIOUS. I played that game like four times laughing the whole way.
The Third Reich wasn't anywhere near as funny though:
Dungeon Keeper was almost as funny.... Then there's the concept games like Earthworm Jim and Sacrifice - Shiny's last great game...
I've quit gaming, or I'd be able to name one or two more... Evil Genius seemed to have potential, but it may not have lived up to it. Black and White had built in, I guess. Star control makes honorable mention for funny, certainly. But you're right, the gaming industry is less and less funny unless you consider Nintendo games and their bloopers.
The more I think about this issue the more complex it gets; As far as I'm concerned, O'Reilly should just request it@cork tack on a, "It@cork's Web 2.0 Conference" onto the thing and let it go at that.... It makes one wonder about this kind of thing; on one hand, what if a sports league had trademarked the terms, "Finals," then started sending C&D letters to State Athletic Associations around the country? (Yes, that's an ad absurdum, but that's what happens after precedents get set and one of the things that pisses me off about our legal system) On the other, you're right in that O'Reilly should have the right to hold their Web 2.0 conference without having it confused with others...
On a side note, while reading this it looks like this lawyer, despite having 18 or so years of education, has missed out on some basic grammar:( "It has come to my attention that you have scheduled conference entitled Web 2.0 for June 8, 2006." If you're gonna send a letter like this at least proofread it. Yes, your last post made me read the entire hooplah a second time with detail.
1: As soon as the lawyers get involved, I'm grumpy. Forgot it was a C&D letter, but the difference is miniscule. A C&D letter is like an intent to sue letter. As far as I'm concerned it's approximately the same thing with only a slightly different place in an ugly chain...
2: This is a double edged sword. The real problem I see here is that O'Reilly wants to own what they are trying to make into an industry standard term they are currently manufacturing through various PR. I guess business-wise it makes perfect sense to do it this way from the company's standpoint. O'Reilly didn't produce all these technologies, but they have created and applied a label to a particular array of packages they want to consider a new type of business application. So I see a dichotomy between a: wanting to create an industry standard, and b: wanting to own that industry standard. That's my beef; trademark is, certain to say, a necessary thing in many cases, but if the goal is to create a label for a particular type of technology, that label should be general purpose rather than limited in use to the few with blessings from on high thanks to some multinat.
Interesting point. However, I don't think "blind mob justice" would be the best way of putting it. The value of trademarks as a whole I find extremely questionable. They're ad gimmicks, and ad gimmicks are generally designed to create limited monopolies of a particular kind; the artificial value kind. I don't believe O'Reilly has need of something cheap like 'Web 2.0' to achieve this. The black, white, and pastel motif has done them extremely well; I haven't known many in the tech industry who haven't owned at least one book of theirs.
I like to think of them as doing such high quality work that they don't need to do a lot of advertising. I personally find it disgusting that they are forced (/believe they are forced, whichever it is) to push themselves forward in this particular manner and to drag it into an already overburdened legal system for what I consider no valuable cause. Really, I believe this kind of suit and trademark costs everyone funding public services quite a bit of money in the end, while providing virtually no benefit to the whole. Yes, I'm a bit of a commie. I only exonorate them on the grounds that a) I've been a happy customer, b) I'm paying in partial for the system that they're using to drag someone else into court over, (twice- once as a customer and again as a citizen) c) I see no actual value in O'Reilly or anyone else having 'dibs' on one more bloody stupid technical term, and d) Because they're playing the stupid game, they are now more of a part of it, and this pisses me off.
I bought the Head Start books because they were well reviewed and attempted to teach me something in a way I hadn't seen before. That, and I'm grumpy as hell about what I'm doing for a living these days.
(I was trying to be funny, really.... It's not like I know anything about trademark law.)
I just wish the company I buy so many books from was slightly more understanding of the fact that were it not for a certain open-minded approach to business they would not be anywhere near as dominant as they are now. O'Reilly's empire's cornerstone was originally a book with PERL written on the front of it. The source was distributed for free, and people could probably have gotten most of the content - were they willing to look around for it and archive it - online for absolutely nothing. But because of this open mindset and the, "Be useful as possible to as many as possible" I have five or six feet of O'Reilly books. And I'm gaining more as I need to update / upgrade / whatever my skills.... But this kind of thing makes me think twice before buying another volley (I just bought a few Head First books for idle reading) of their product.....
Dunno why you got modded troll on that. It's a valid point - O'Reilly seems to think they now have the rights to Web 2.0, which implies rights to {Web 2.1, Web 2.2, Web 2.3... Web 105423421.12235453axZ4}..... That's pretty funny, if you ask me.
Intelligent first posts are now a 'subscriber bonus,' really. If you give/. a bunch of cash they let you see stories a few minutes early, and if you happened to have previously requested a mildly inappropriately labeled iPod from Apple (or known where to get text of an order like this) you're suddenly five steps ahead of everyone else.
As long as you know how to use a text editor, that is.
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Actually, American Idol is the most amazing example of intelligent marketing I've ever seen. You take a bunch of holefuls willing to do anything and throw them on TV, and wait for who everyone thinks is best. Then, you move on to the next one. It's like a Factory Pattern for creating celebrities that have no real content. Amaaaazing.
Then you're an idiot. Go skullf* a shark.
I'd tell you to grow some balls, too, but I think the two are mutually exclusive.
Okay.
No.
Teenage girls drive entire markets. Know American Idol? Brittney Spears? InSync? Backstreet Boys? You think only college aged kids are buying this stuff? No. The music industry is run by teenaged girls, has been since the Beatles / Monkees.
Ever hear a story of how your co-workers' (or your) girls have like four outfits for everything? Know a girl who works in a shop and says, "Yeah, I spend most of my paycheck right here."
Many teens are: 1) not set in your was as far as who you will buy from. 2) not responsible enough to think, "Should I save this for a rainy day if possible?" 3) not paying their expenses yet. 4) Capable of moving up to a decent salary within 10 years. 5) More "Herd-Motivated" than most people. (even though most Americans are pretty socialized anyways)
Those are just the reasons I can think of off the top of my head; companies market like rabid dogs towards teenagers. They just look so tasty as a market.
Yes.
Yes it would.
Making this particular claim a:) a fundamental logic error made by the biggest manufacturer of software in the world, or b) a completely unbased and silly statement based upon marketing.
Funny thing is, this is the first time I've ever hoped for a Microsoft statement to be FUD.
"Me so Hooorney. Me drool you long time. Computer Fixey Fixey five minutes."
Aww. :(
What if I promise to ask you the same question nine times without ever even thinking about writing down the question?
Local real estate prices in all of Oregon are climbing at an amazing rate. Those of us who grew up here are waiting for the bubble to burst so we can afford to live where we grew up.
I wish Google had built this in downtown Portland, but then real estate might cost a little more in the center of town, as well as power....
Additionally, in Oregon there is an Urban Growth Boundary - you can't develop on top of farmland. There are positive and negative effects that spring from this. One of them is the uber-burbs in the Dalles and other extreme satellite areas are becoming more expensive.
The salaries in the music industry are mainly going to the huge PR machine they run. The average CD costs 15-20$, the sound on it costs about 2$ to make. Packaging costs almost as much as if not more than the CD itself. The publisher gets as much out of each track on a CD as the artist. The writer gets a large cut as well. (This all true circa 1999, when I was in Internet music) The problem with the music industry is that somewhere along the line the other eight dollars before retail keystoning gets sucked up by (mainly) dumbasses wearing suits. All these dumbasses are making a steady salary and to get that steady salary they need to keep the business model working their way. Otherwise they become redundant. Now, they do things which are extremely important in the current industry- schmoozing, payola, schmoozing, payola, schmoozing.... - but if the industry changes they may not be as useful.
.com's we had two offices - one in LA and one in Portland. The people in LA were generally 1) incompetent, 2) overpaid, 3) arrogant, and 4) touchy about the other three things being true. I have no reason to believe the rest of the entertainment industry is any different.
Where I worked during the
Hrm. Well, this is an interesting one. McAffee apparently got me here. But I did of course read it here, so I can't believe I didn't see the whole thing and take note of it. Man, am I lame. Point in fact, though, if you set up the USB drive to have EXE files that looked like images and launched sub-rosa Windows programs when you clicked on them in Exploder, it could be done.... Hidden registry changes before you launch Paint, or whatever.... Yeah, I'm backtracking. I suck for not doing all my research thoroughly. Point in fact, it could be done so that it LOOKED like an image but acted otherwise when you double-clicked easily.
I'm not sure they needed it to show up as an executable. They probably just laced the image files with spyware, which is apparently possible now.
This is Cooooollllld. Interesting thing is that five of the twenty were contractors / non-bank employees / someone else who had access to bank PC's... Wonder if they made it through the ensuing furor.
America colonizes the world with media. Since we were in control of most major international media producers at the right point in history, and English is so easy to get a basic grasp of for so many different types of people, English will be the language of choice for international communication / interaction at least a century to come. Now, does that mean that the language is going to be appreciated by all the people that speak it? No. Does it mean that those people will be more highly skilled? No. It really means that there will be a higher base level of competency for English than any other language when people are even mildly interested in learning a second language. It's an invalid comparison to knock on Americans for not speaking Russian, unless you're talking to them after they've lived for years in Moscow.
On the other hand, giving someone who is traveling at all a whole bunch of credit for learning the dominant language, the one that many the movies released in their country were originally filmed in, the one that many educated people in any country will speak.... Well, that's a little weird. But whatever. Language is like anything else - most people only learn it when they have a real benefit for it as well as exposure. There's a huge benefit to the average Russian in learning English, and it's easy (comparatively) to get a high level of exposure. To go the other direction is an incredible effort in comparison.
That doesn't let idiots who can't form or comprehend a sentence off the hook though. Idiots will be idiots.
O'Reilly's post was well done. I'm happy. Of course, he's associating with a company that has actually registered the trademark on a conference called, "Software Development," which is more than a little stupid, but I'm not big on conferences in the first place.
What a bloody GREAT idea. "Hey, why don't you start using your computer for something non-productive DESIGNED to be addictive."
.com experience, the first thing they had me do was install Half-Life. And the rest, as they say, is history. This kind of attitude is silly - Skype is a better idea, IRC is a better idea, even Google Bloody Talk is a better idea.
Been there. At my
MMORPG's can build teams, yes, but they are designed to suck people in so fast and hard that they don't even realise it when they don't come out. I have no problem with this post if it was meant as a joke, but "insightful" is the worst moderation I've seen in years.
Alright, who called this guy a troll?
I remember that fight as well. In fact, I remember asking in an interview at Intel when I'd be able to get a motherboard with normal DDR instead of Rambus crud. (yes, I was young and stupid)
In reality, I think the entire fiasco which involved Rambus giving Intel a huge chunk of stock and Intel not producing (for a while) a chipset which worked with normal DDR SDRAM hurt Intel tremendously in the end. There's no way AMD would have gotten a foothold in a market where you didn't have to pay almost double for RAM that was not as good. I know I put off building a new computer for an extra two or three years because I didn't trust AMD quality at the time (probably wrongly) and I didn't want to pay for the huge extra cost of Rambus RAM.
The whole thing seems to me to imply price fixing towards the high direction instead of the low - seeing as at the time Intel had a pretty solid lock on the Windows market. Tom's Hardware gave AMD a great shot at breaking into that, I guess...
I wonder how much they paid for that.
See, he should just convince his boss to do it in LISP. I mean, the syntax isn't that bad, really, once you get around it, and GUI's are EASY in LISP. You just do paren-based dot-matrix representation.
Freedom Force was HILARIOUS. I played that game like four times laughing the whole way. :
The Third Reich wasn't anywhere near as funny though
Dungeon Keeper was almost as funny.... Then there's the concept games like Earthworm Jim and Sacrifice - Shiny's last great game...
I've quit gaming, or I'd be able to name one or two more... Evil Genius seemed to have potential, but it may not have lived up to it. Black and White had built in, I guess. Star control makes honorable mention for funny, certainly. But you're right, the gaming industry is less and less funny unless you consider Nintendo games and their bloopers.
The more I think about this issue the more complex it gets; As far as I'm concerned, O'Reilly should just request it@cork tack on a, "It@cork's Web 2.0 Conference" onto the thing and let it go at that.... It makes one wonder about this kind of thing; on one hand, what if a sports league had trademarked the terms, "Finals," then started sending C&D letters to State Athletic Associations around the country? (Yes, that's an ad absurdum, but that's what happens after precedents get set and one of the things that pisses me off about our legal system) On the other, you're right in that O'Reilly should have the right to hold their Web 2.0 conference without having it confused with others...
:( "It has come to my attention that you have scheduled conference entitled Web 2.0 for June 8, 2006." If you're gonna send a letter like this at least proofread it. Yes, your last post made me read the entire hooplah a second time with detail.
On a side note, while reading this it looks like this lawyer, despite having 18 or so years of education, has missed out on some basic grammar
Good questions.
1: As soon as the lawyers get involved, I'm grumpy. Forgot it was a C&D letter, but the difference is miniscule. A C&D letter is like an intent to sue letter. As far as I'm concerned it's approximately the same thing with only a slightly different place in an ugly chain...
2: This is a double edged sword. The real problem I see here is that O'Reilly wants to own what they are trying to make into an industry standard term they are currently manufacturing through various PR. I guess business-wise it makes perfect sense to do it this way from the company's standpoint. O'Reilly didn't produce all these technologies, but they have created and applied a label to a particular array of packages they want to consider a new type of business application. So I see a dichotomy between a: wanting to create an industry standard, and b: wanting to own that industry standard. That's my beef; trademark is, certain to say, a necessary thing in many cases, but if the goal is to create a label for a particular type of technology, that label should be general purpose rather than limited in use to the few with blessings from on high thanks to some multinat.
Interesting point. However, I don't think "blind mob justice" would be the best way of putting it. The value of trademarks as a whole I find extremely questionable. They're ad gimmicks, and ad gimmicks are generally designed to create limited monopolies of a particular kind; the artificial value kind. I don't believe O'Reilly has need of something cheap like 'Web 2.0' to achieve this. The black, white, and pastel motif has done them extremely well; I haven't known many in the tech industry who haven't owned at least one book of theirs.
I like to think of them as doing such high quality work that they don't need to do a lot of advertising. I personally find it disgusting that they are forced (/believe they are forced, whichever it is) to push themselves forward in this particular manner and to drag it into an already overburdened legal system for what I consider no valuable cause. Really, I believe this kind of suit and trademark costs everyone funding public services quite a bit of money in the end, while providing virtually no benefit to the whole. Yes, I'm a bit of a commie. I only exonorate them on the grounds that a) I've been a happy customer, b) I'm paying in partial for the system that they're using to drag someone else into court over, (twice- once as a customer and again as a citizen) c) I see no actual value in O'Reilly or anyone else having 'dibs' on one more bloody stupid technical term, and d) Because they're playing the stupid game, they are now more of a part of it, and this pisses me off.
I bought the Head Start books because they were well reviewed and attempted to teach me something in a way I hadn't seen before. That, and I'm grumpy as hell about what I'm doing for a living these days.
(I was trying to be funny, really.... It's not like I know anything about trademark law.)
I just wish the company I buy so many books from was slightly more understanding of the fact that were it not for a certain open-minded approach to business they would not be anywhere near as dominant as they are now. O'Reilly's empire's cornerstone was originally a book with PERL written on the front of it. The source was distributed for free, and people could probably have gotten most of the content - were they willing to look around for it and archive it - online for absolutely nothing. But because of this open mindset and the, "Be useful as possible to as many as possible" I have five or six feet of O'Reilly books. And I'm gaining more as I need to update / upgrade / whatever my skills.... But this kind of thing makes me think twice before buying another volley (I just bought a few Head First books for idle reading) of their product.....
Dunno why you got modded troll on that. It's a valid point - O'Reilly seems to think they now have the rights to Web 2.0, which implies rights to {Web 2.1, Web 2.2, Web 2.3... Web 105423421.12235453axZ4}..... That's pretty funny, if you ask me.
Nah. We just need to go to 2.1, and open source the trademark on that. It's certainly a bigger upgrade than most releases.
Is anyone else more than mildly disappointed that they own a bookshelf full of O'reilly books after reading this?
Intelligent first posts are now a 'subscriber bonus,' really. If you give /. a bunch of cash they let you see stories a few minutes early, and if you happened to have previously requested a mildly inappropriately labeled iPod from Apple (or known where to get text of an order like this) you're suddenly five steps ahead of everyone else.
As long as you know how to use a text editor, that is.
Funny how people have been managing P2P sex for quite a while without all that paperwork and oversight, though.