The consensus in the industry was that underpowered, gimmicky little DS strikethrough Wii was going to megaflop. Nintendo's stock price is up something like 40% since last August, and by August you had all the information you needed about the Wii's capabilities to forecast its future success *except* the sales numbers that gave proof of it. 40% was the uncertainty discount, and wow, thats a lot of uncertainty. Heck, I bought my Nintendo stock months after the Wii release and its up ~15% from then. People just keep getting amazed at how much they're owning this round.
Oh, keep buying your Wiis, people. I think I get about a millionth of a penny for every one sold. Whoo-hoo!
... when you can just track popularity? Let the cream rise to the top. If you want, give people ways to tell their friends about their favorite mods. People will anyway, of course.
Banks spend incredible amounts of effort getting people to use their online properties, since they're the most cost effective way to service retail customers (i.e. natural persons as opposed to businesses, institutions, etc). No bank is going to sink their brand investment in citi.com or bankofamerica.com just to head off a wee bit of fraud. The only thing fraud is to a bank is a cost of doing business, nothing more -- they'll make a dispassionate calculation that fraud is less expensive than launching a new nationwide advertising/customer education campaign and pass on this idea. Its the same way that they've decided that it is more important to be able to receive a credit card decision in 15 seconds than it is to verify the identity of the person submitting the request -- fraud stings, losing potential customers to your easy-to-apply competitors stings more.
... the rule that says all games have to be big budget extravaganzas which fail if they're not mega-blockbusters. Take a look at Wii Sports, Hazimete no Wii (sorry, don't know what the English version was called), or even the Wario game. These are not games with $20 million development budgets which have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies just to break even. Thus, they don't have to get bought by EVERYONE who owns the console -- even a slice of a slice of the gaming pie works for them. And if you look at the games-per-Wii attach rate rather than the sales-per-megahit rate, Wii is kicking some serious booty (probably has something to do with the fact that Wii + half dozen games is still cheaper than some of the other options). If there are five fun party games and everybody buys one to three, then each game individually sells a heck of a lot less than a system-making killer app like FFVII or Halo, but Nintendo still laughs their way to the bank.
... go pay extra for the guy who writes "This is a premium, European-style, luxuriously decadent chocolate" on his packages. Food snobbery (or connoisseurship, take your pick) doesn't need government imprimatur to work. Just like there are people who pay for fine wines (but you can still call the $5 a bottle, where the bottle is actually a paper box, wines) there are people who will pay for fine chocolate. And if there are people who will pay for it there are companies who will make it. If Hershey's isn't one of them, great, take your business elsewhere. I'll be quaffing down my Hershey's as I reserve my food snobbery for cocoa (the drink) and pizza, not chocolate.
I wrote something just yesterday about how somebody fouled up product activation and ended up alienating a previously deliriously happy customer, a subject which should be near and dear to the anti-DRM crowd here: http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/tr ust-your-customers/ .
My NTDOY stock is up enough to buy me a second Wii if I sold. (And I got in after Christmas.) I'm promising myself that I'll buy more stock every time I buy more games to keep myself from frittering away too much money. Ooooh, did somebody say Brawl is coming out soon? What was that brokerage password again...
I realize this was dirt cheap by space mission standards. A laptop encrusted with diamonds which costs $80,000 is dirt cheap by laptop-encrusted-with-diamonds standards. That *doesn't make it worth the money*. I know we waste far more than $40 million a year on many things -- and, logically, every one of them except one can be justified by "We waste more money on another program, don't cut *my* hobby horse!"
Its interesting that you draw the distinction between subsidies/entitlements and science, since NASA is a fairly naked subsidy directly to defense contractors, who make all of the really expensive bits. I'm all for giving Lockheed Martin money when its required, but lets be honest and get ourselves something which blows up in a suitably impressive manner when we do, OK? Similarly, I might even be persuaded that the US federal government should fund science projects -- great, then *fund science*! Don't blow $160 million just to accelerate a tin can out of the atmosphere to get a few close up pictures of rocks. $160 million could fund an awful lot of real science down here, much of which would produce actual results (or, alternatively, you could fund research gazing into the Clear Blue Sky, which is *still* cheap when you do it somewhere in atmosphere).
It worked for a decade at a cost of a piddling $220 million, plus $20 million a year in upkeep. At a hair over $40 million a year, thats much, much less wasteful than most NASA missions. (Yeah, I suppose you could consider whether the return was worth it. Heh, who are we kidding -- did YOU get $40 million a year out of those desktop photos? I didn't.)
I propose that next time NASA spend $150 million on the construction phase, which is just a slush fund for defense contractors anyhow, and then issue the lethal command before launch. Then we'd save a decade worth of upkeep costs and the $65 million launch budget. NASA could even have a $10 million prize going to the person who most creatively identified a possible fatal error, since thats the only fun part of these missions for people who aren't rocket scientists and we wouldn't want to skimp on it.
Even before McCain-Feingold, which involves an unprecidented amount of speech restriction for the US in the political context (it has to be the only US law that makes it illegal to criticize the government during an election!), the US had this lovely little chestnut called the Fairness Doctrine, an FTC policy which essentially micromanaged the content of television and radio broadcasts when they were on issues of public importance during an election. That misbegotten regulation has since been slagged, but the "Oh noes, if we let people have soapboxes they will use them to influence folks!" censorial spirit lives on, even in respectable democracies like the US and Japan.
Lots of Japanese people I meet at my job (technology incubator in Japan) will go out of their way to stick a Mister on my name (or a close approximation thereof), because they think its polite. Even when they're talking in Japanese, which obviously lacks "Mister". Even when they're addressing me on a first name basis, for some folks. Many foreign businessmen who don't speak word one of Japanese will put a -san on everything in sight, because they think its polite. My policy is to accept both in the spirit they were offered.
Ditto the tiny minority of folks who request their name to be reordered, for whatever reason. Most Japanese people abroad adopt a Western name order, most Western foreigners in Japan keep their Western name odrer. A teeny sliver of people ask for the reverse. I think that, hey, its their name and thats a fairly reasonable request to be able to make, for whatever reason. (There are Japanese politicans who have asked foreign newspapers reporting on them to respect their culture and put the family name first, and there are foreigners resident in Japan who on principal do not want to stick out any more than they have to and so want a Japanese name order. Plus it results in less confusion when your bank thinks you are Mr. Bob instead of Mr. Smith because the data entry clerk put things in the way she always does, family name first.)
For a related example, how exactly is English supposed to treat the name N'Gai? I used to be an English teacher, and I don't recall a capitalization rule for that case. My untutored supposition would be that the g is lower case, but if he writes it with a capital G, then I'll take the hint, rather than saying "Hey punk, this is English, not Klingon. Drop the apostrophe and the screwy casing convention". Thats needlessly rude.
I work in a Japanese technology incubator, and one of our researchers has an image recognition program which can remove the human from this loop. The target market is convenience stores and the like, where the camera will watch everyone in the store and, if your movements look "shifty" (via comparison with a couple thousand tapes of people who were later determined to have shoplifted), the shelf will talk to you! Its like a loss-prevention Clippy! "Hello, it looks like you are trying to put that packet of razor blades in your pocket! Perhaps you meant to use the shopping basket, or would you like to speak to an employee?"
Its actually a lot easier than you think. There are 25.8 million businesses in the United States. About 17 million of them have only one employee. Those seventeen million business owners aren't ALL smarter, better educated, more savvy, etc. than you. They are, however, as a group a heck of a lot richer than you are. Two-thirds of American millionaires are self-employed. Some of them are in stereotypical "Oh, rich educated professionals only" jobs like law and medicine (not that all practioners in these fields are rich). Others, not so much.
I know one guy who thought moving garbage was easy enough for any idiot to do it, so he might as well start. He went to the construction companies in the area and said "Hey, I've got a truck and time. You've got money and trash. Lets trade." Apparently, you can make a lot of money driving a truck between two fixed points. Anyhow, he was making pretty good money for a guy whose job is getting from A to B, and then he had a brainstorm: wait a second, I make enough money to pay for the loan on TWO trucks. I can get a buddy to drive the second truck, pay him a quarter of what the company pays me, use the second quarter to pay for the truck, and keep half! Anyhow, fast forward a decade, he now owns about a couple of dozen trucks and drives a... darn, I don't know the brand (sorry, I'm a geek, not a car lover). Whatever. Its one of those Alienware of cars where you pay a lot to let people know you've paid a lot.
Heck, I started my own small business with approximately two weeks of planning, half of which was coding the software product which I sell. My capital investment was $60. That business takes about 2-4 hours of work to maintain a month and, in March, I profited about $620 from it (pre-taxes). Obviously, I'm not planning on leaving the day job (which I enjoy) immediately, but as I gradually develop more sales and more software its certainly an option on the table. Its got a lot to recommend it to -- I can't get fired, I can read Slashdot at work without feeling guilty, I never feel bored at the meetings, and my raise is always determined by merit.
I'd much rather have a hypothetical grandma calling up her friends and saying "Hey Gladys, how are the grandkids? Say, want to come over to my house for some bowling? Oh, that is bold talk girl -- I am a PRO Wii bowler! Bring it!" than sitting around watching Wheel of Fortune all day. The Wii combines light physical activity, which has obvious health benefits but won't shatter Gladys' fragile hips, with the emotional pick-me-up that hobbies, friends, and competition bring. That can only save on Gladys' trips to the doctor.
I'm as Republican as the day is long. That being said, if a study showed that a Wii Sports a day kept the doctor away, jack my taxes up a notch and give every senior one of them. A Wii and a game is $300. That won't even buy half a day in a hospital bed. If I have to pay for one of the two of them eventually, and I know I will, I want to pay for PREVENTATIVE medicine.
Note: if any government administrator takes this post seriously, please, do so AFTER I have bought my next round of Nintendo shares.
Maybe I'm cynical, but Gates isn't getting any younger or any poorer and the $22 billion endowment Harvard has doesn't mean they would turn down a "1% to my beloved alma mater" line item in his will.
It was created to solve a problem we had when everyone was using Hotbot and Altavista, but people are trying to introduce it into a world where everyone is using Google. (And Wikipedia. And all that Web 2.0 junk.)
I don't need you to mark "This page is a REVIEW of a CELL PHONE that has the NAME iPhone" anymore. All I need to do is Google "iPhone review" or hop on over to Amazon. Problem pretty freaking solved from my perspective.
... and operating systems, and encryption, and VoIP, and browsers, and tax preparation, and CRM, and video games, and instant message clients, and illustration/graphic design, and pretty much any other string which you can append "software" to. That we lead in malware is not a heck of a lot of suprise. We also probably are neck and neck with Japan for producing cars used by bank robbers in getaways.
Slashdot Mirror
The consensus in the industry was that underpowered, gimmicky little DS strikethrough Wii was going to megaflop. Nintendo's stock price is up something like 40% since last August, and by August you had all the information you needed about the Wii's capabilities to forecast its future success *except* the sales numbers that gave proof of it. 40% was the uncertainty discount, and wow, thats a lot of uncertainty. Heck, I bought my Nintendo stock months after the Wii release and its up ~15% from then. People just keep getting amazed at how much they're owning this round.
Oh, keep buying your Wiis, people. I think I get about a millionth of a penny for every one sold. Whoo-hoo!
... when you can just track popularity? Let the cream rise to the top. If you want, give people ways to tell their friends about their favorite mods. People will anyway, of course.
Banks spend incredible amounts of effort getting people to use their online properties, since they're the most cost effective way to service retail customers (i.e. natural persons as opposed to businesses, institutions, etc). No bank is going to sink their brand investment in citi.com or bankofamerica.com just to head off a wee bit of fraud. The only thing fraud is to a bank is a cost of doing business, nothing more -- they'll make a dispassionate calculation that fraud is less expensive than launching a new nationwide advertising/customer education campaign and pass on this idea. Its the same way that they've decided that it is more important to be able to receive a credit card decision in 15 seconds than it is to verify the identity of the person submitting the request -- fraud stings, losing potential customers to your easy-to-apply competitors stings more.
Stop smoking.
They should send a SWAT team to bust down the door of a guy who steals identities for a living. No POSSIBLE downside there.
... the rule that says all games have to be big budget extravaganzas which fail if they're not mega-blockbusters. Take a look at Wii Sports, Hazimete no Wii (sorry, don't know what the English version was called), or even the Wario game. These are not games with $20 million development budgets which have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies just to break even. Thus, they don't have to get bought by EVERYONE who owns the console -- even a slice of a slice of the gaming pie works for them. And if you look at the games-per-Wii attach rate rather than the sales-per-megahit rate, Wii is kicking some serious booty (probably has something to do with the fact that Wii + half dozen games is still cheaper than some of the other options). If there are five fun party games and everybody buys one to three, then each game individually sells a heck of a lot less than a system-making killer app like FFVII or Halo, but Nintendo still laughs their way to the bank.
... improving the world one Gamestop employee at a time.
... people turn up and try to vote. The nerve of them.
... go pay extra for the guy who writes "This is a premium, European-style, luxuriously decadent chocolate" on his packages. Food snobbery (or connoisseurship, take your pick) doesn't need government imprimatur to work. Just like there are people who pay for fine wines (but you can still call the $5 a bottle, where the bottle is actually a paper box, wines) there are people who will pay for fine chocolate. And if there are people who will pay for it there are companies who will make it. If Hershey's isn't one of them, great, take your business elsewhere. I'll be quaffing down my Hershey's as I reserve my food snobbery for cocoa (the drink) and pizza, not chocolate.
It doesn't matter. The other guy took Australia. We're boned.
Seriously, have you ever seen a Risk game where the first guy to get a solid hold on Australia didn't win?
(Thats my blog.)
r ust-your-customers/ .
I wrote something just yesterday about how somebody fouled up product activation and ended up alienating a previously deliriously happy customer, a subject which should be near and dear to the anti-DRM crowd here: http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/t
My NTDOY stock is up enough to buy me a second Wii if I sold. (And I got in after Christmas.) I'm promising myself that I'll buy more stock every time I buy more games to keep myself from frittering away too much money. Ooooh, did somebody say Brawl is coming out soon? What was that brokerage password again...
Splendid, then we should have no problem privatizing the next probe and funding it with postcard sales.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog? sc=1996-062A
I realize this was dirt cheap by space mission standards. A laptop encrusted with diamonds which costs $80,000 is dirt cheap by laptop-encrusted-with-diamonds standards. That *doesn't make it worth the money*. I know we waste far more than $40 million a year on many things -- and, logically, every one of them except one can be justified by "We waste more money on another program, don't cut *my* hobby horse!"
Its interesting that you draw the distinction between subsidies/entitlements and science, since NASA is a fairly naked subsidy directly to defense contractors, who make all of the really expensive bits. I'm all for giving Lockheed Martin money when its required, but lets be honest and get ourselves something which blows up in a suitably impressive manner when we do, OK? Similarly, I might even be persuaded that the US federal government should fund science projects -- great, then *fund science*! Don't blow $160 million just to accelerate a tin can out of the atmosphere to get a few close up pictures of rocks. $160 million could fund an awful lot of real science down here, much of which would produce actual results (or, alternatively, you could fund research gazing into the Clear Blue Sky, which is *still* cheap when you do it somewhere in atmosphere).
It worked for a decade at a cost of a piddling $220 million, plus $20 million a year in upkeep. At a hair over $40 million a year, thats much, much less wasteful than most NASA missions. (Yeah, I suppose you could consider whether the return was worth it. Heh, who are we kidding -- did YOU get $40 million a year out of those desktop photos? I didn't.)
I propose that next time NASA spend $150 million on the construction phase, which is just a slush fund for defense contractors anyhow, and then issue the lethal command before launch. Then we'd save a decade worth of upkeep costs and the $65 million launch budget. NASA could even have a $10 million prize going to the person who most creatively identified a possible fatal error, since thats the only fun part of these missions for people who aren't rocket scientists and we wouldn't want to skimp on it.
Even before McCain-Feingold, which involves an unprecidented amount of speech restriction for the US in the political context (it has to be the only US law that makes it illegal to criticize the government during an election!), the US had this lovely little chestnut called the Fairness Doctrine, an FTC policy which essentially micromanaged the content of television and radio broadcasts when they were on issues of public importance during an election. That misbegotten regulation has since been slagged, but the "Oh noes, if we let people have soapboxes they will use them to influence folks!" censorial spirit lives on, even in respectable democracies like the US and Japan.
Lots of Japanese people I meet at my job (technology incubator in Japan) will go out of their way to stick a Mister on my name (or a close approximation thereof), because they think its polite. Even when they're talking in Japanese, which obviously lacks "Mister". Even when they're addressing me on a first name basis, for some folks. Many foreign businessmen who don't speak word one of Japanese will put a -san on everything in sight, because they think its polite. My policy is to accept both in the spirit they were offered.
Ditto the tiny minority of folks who request their name to be reordered, for whatever reason. Most Japanese people abroad adopt a Western name order, most Western foreigners in Japan keep their Western name odrer. A teeny sliver of people ask for the reverse. I think that, hey, its their name and thats a fairly reasonable request to be able to make, for whatever reason. (There are Japanese politicans who have asked foreign newspapers reporting on them to respect their culture and put the family name first, and there are foreigners resident in Japan who on principal do not want to stick out any more than they have to and so want a Japanese name order. Plus it results in less confusion when your bank thinks you are Mr. Bob instead of Mr. Smith because the data entry clerk put things in the way she always does, family name first.)
For a related example, how exactly is English supposed to treat the name N'Gai? I used to be an English teacher, and I don't recall a capitalization rule for that case. My untutored supposition would be that the g is lower case, but if he writes it with a capital G, then I'll take the hint, rather than saying "Hey punk, this is English, not Klingon. Drop the apostrophe and the screwy casing convention". Thats needlessly rude.
I work in a Japanese technology incubator, and one of our researchers has an image recognition program which can remove the human from this loop. The target market is convenience stores and the like, where the camera will watch everyone in the store and, if your movements look "shifty" (via comparison with a couple thousand tapes of people who were later determined to have shoplifted), the shelf will talk to you! Its like a loss-prevention Clippy! "Hello, it looks like you are trying to put that packet of razor blades in your pocket! Perhaps you meant to use the shopping basket, or would you like to speak to an employee?"
Its actually a lot easier than you think. There are 25.8 million businesses in the United States. About 17 million of them have only one employee. Those seventeen million business owners aren't ALL smarter, better educated, more savvy, etc. than you. They are, however, as a group a heck of a lot richer than you are. Two-thirds of American millionaires are self-employed. Some of them are in stereotypical "Oh, rich educated professionals only" jobs like law and medicine (not that all practioners in these fields are rich). Others, not so much.
I know one guy who thought moving garbage was easy enough for any idiot to do it, so he might as well start. He went to the construction companies in the area and said "Hey, I've got a truck and time. You've got money and trash. Lets trade." Apparently, you can make a lot of money driving a truck between two fixed points. Anyhow, he was making pretty good money for a guy whose job is getting from A to B, and then he had a brainstorm: wait a second, I make enough money to pay for the loan on TWO trucks. I can get a buddy to drive the second truck, pay him a quarter of what the company pays me, use the second quarter to pay for the truck, and keep half! Anyhow, fast forward a decade, he now owns about a couple of dozen trucks and drives a... darn, I don't know the brand (sorry, I'm a geek, not a car lover). Whatever. Its one of those Alienware of cars where you pay a lot to let people know you've paid a lot.
Heck, I started my own small business with approximately two weeks of planning, half of which was coding the software product which I sell. My capital investment was $60. That business takes about 2-4 hours of work to maintain a month and, in March, I profited about $620 from it (pre-taxes). Obviously, I'm not planning on leaving the day job (which I enjoy) immediately, but as I gradually develop more sales and more software its certainly an option on the table. Its got a lot to recommend it to -- I can't get fired, I can read Slashdot at work without feeling guilty, I never feel bored at the meetings, and my raise is always determined by merit.
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/
I'd much rather have a hypothetical grandma calling up her friends and saying "Hey Gladys, how are the grandkids? Say, want to come over to my house for some bowling? Oh, that is bold talk girl -- I am a PRO Wii bowler! Bring it!" than sitting around watching Wheel of Fortune all day. The Wii combines light physical activity, which has obvious health benefits but won't shatter Gladys' fragile hips, with the emotional pick-me-up that hobbies, friends, and competition bring. That can only save on Gladys' trips to the doctor.
I'm as Republican as the day is long. That being said, if a study showed that a Wii Sports a day kept the doctor away, jack my taxes up a notch and give every senior one of them. A Wii and a game is $300. That won't even buy half a day in a hospital bed. If I have to pay for one of the two of them eventually, and I know I will, I want to pay for PREVENTATIVE medicine.
Note: if any government administrator takes this post seriously, please, do so AFTER I have bought my next round of Nintendo shares.
Maybe I'm cynical, but Gates isn't getting any younger or any poorer and the $22 billion endowment Harvard has doesn't mean they would turn down a "1% to my beloved alma mater" line item in his will.
Your wish is Pokemon Battle Revolution's command: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Battle_R evolution .
I'm sorry, I had to check when their acronym spells CATFUC.
It was created to solve a problem we had when everyone was using Hotbot and Altavista, but people are trying to introduce it into a world where everyone is using Google. (And Wikipedia. And all that Web 2.0 junk.)
I don't need you to mark "This page is a REVIEW of a CELL PHONE that has the NAME iPhone" anymore. All I need to do is Google "iPhone review" or hop on over to Amazon. Problem pretty freaking solved from my perspective.
... and operating systems, and encryption, and VoIP, and browsers, and tax preparation, and CRM, and video games, and instant message clients, and illustration/graphic design, and pretty much any other string which you can append "software" to. That we lead in malware is not a heck of a lot of suprise. We also probably are neck and neck with Japan for producing cars used by bank robbers in getaways.