I have figured out the secret to the success of the Wii. Women like it. People have been talking about the elusive "woman gamer" for some time. Nintendo finally found them. Last weekend some guys from my office went to a party that featured a Wii. They played various Wii games with a group of woman until past midnight. One guy even scored. That would not have happened with an Xbox 360 party.
The price is a little high (okay, a lot high). That, and the lack of compelling new features, means that most individuals won't feel the need to run out and drop several hundred bucks. People will "upgrade" to Vista when they buy a new computer and it comes pre-installed - the same way they upgraded from 9x to XP. That has worked for Microsoft in the past. The big question in Redmond is: When will the big IT contractors and consultants start pushing Vista to their corporate customers? Those guys are getting more and more conservative. I work in an organization that uses Windows 2000. It took quite a while to get all the bugs worked out and now it basically functions and nobody really wants to mess with it. At our last IT planning meeting (read "contractor sales pitch") the lead contractor never mentioned the word Vista.
I had a similar experience recently. The code I was running was starting to stress my hardware. I had considered upgrading some of my gear until I had a more experienced guy looked at my code. He suggested I change the data structure I was using. I did it and got a 4x improvement in performance. My older hardware now performs better then ever!
Slashdot Mirror
I have figured out the secret to the success of the Wii. Women like it. People have been talking about the elusive "woman gamer" for some time. Nintendo finally found them. Last weekend some guys from my office went to a party that featured a Wii. They played various Wii games with a group of woman until past midnight. One guy even scored. That would not have happened with an Xbox 360 party.
The price is a little high (okay, a lot high). That, and the lack of compelling new features, means that most individuals won't feel the need to run out and drop several hundred bucks. People will "upgrade" to Vista when they buy a new computer and it comes pre-installed - the same way they upgraded from 9x to XP. That has worked for Microsoft in the past. The big question in Redmond is: When will the big IT contractors and consultants start pushing Vista to their corporate customers? Those guys are getting more and more conservative. I work in an organization that uses Windows 2000. It took quite a while to get all the bugs worked out and now it basically functions and nobody really wants to mess with it. At our last IT planning meeting (read "contractor sales pitch") the lead contractor never mentioned the word Vista.
If Adobe would just kill flash it would do a lot to restore public good will.
I had a similar experience recently. The code I was running was starting to stress my hardware. I had considered upgrading some of my gear until I had a more experienced guy looked at my code. He suggested I change the data structure I was using. I did it and got a 4x improvement in performance. My older hardware now performs better then ever!