This is just simply too, too funny. And sadly, completely right on.
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Doug
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Doug
…and since I forgot to mention it, isn’t one of the big selling points behind .Net and Hailstorm the fact that it’s not Windows-specific? Kinda blows up Nielsen’s whole argument about MS getting developers to ship Windows-specific solutions over other operating systems, doesn’t it?
So, which is it? Did Nielsen fail to actually read any of the MS press material about Hailstorm and therefore doesn’t understand it, or is MS lying about the cross-platform accessibility of .Net?
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Doug
Jakob Nielsen proves he’s a monolithic dinosaur who fails to understand what made the web work in the first place.
Uh, hey Jake, has it dawned on your larcenous lil heart yet that the vast majority of frequent web users would be incredibly happy to see less commercial crap online?
I was particularly struck by this contention:
“So far, Microsoft has not been particularly successful in getting developers to ship significantly more Internet solutions for Windows than for other platforms. But HailStorm could change that, since it presents a simple choice: launch a service for HailStorm and get paid money, or target alternative platforms and get paid eyeballs.”
“Money is a powerful attractor, so I know what the answer will be.”
Okay Jake, please then explain Open Source to me. What’s clear from your article, Jake, is that for an incredibly well-paid consultant, you don’t understand developers very well at all, do you?
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Doug
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Doug
The scary thing is, I’m sure there’s someone ready to invest in this
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Doug
…someone with design and production experience, particularly someone who has experience designing and producing online games. If you have these skills, and are looking for something new and interesting, contact me. We might have something to discuss!
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Doug
Moonfarmer links to this Salon article about the rise and fall of iconoclastic gaming company Wizards of the Coast, now owned by Hasbro. I have to admit that I missed pretty much all of the Magic:The Gathering phenomenon. I’m an old-school gamer/grognard who remembers Dungeons & Dragons as three soft-bound pamphlets, recalls Steve Jackson Games from before the Secret Service raid, and still has an entire chest full of board and paper counter war games made by companies like Avalon Hill. The card game aspects of Wizard’s games just never appealled to me, and I jumped straight from board games and RPG’s to computer games. Still, reading the article made me a little sad, as well as a little introspective.
Reading this chronicle of the birth of an idealistic company, a place where geeks ran the show and anything seemed possible, but where the realities of corporate life and greed transformed the entire thing into a company no longer recognizable to the original staff surely resonates with all the recent dot-com refugees, let alone anyone who has ever started a business and seen it fail, for whatever reason. What made me really think, though, was, well just how ridiculous the entire thing sounded, how utterly juvenile and inane all the behavior seemed to me. It wasn’t just the horny, free-for-all of the early days, or the growing obsession with management speak that gave me this feeling, either. It was the whole thing. It was how absurd the company became as it embraced “accepted” business practices like branding and business planning and made lucrative stratic alliances like the whole Pokemon thing. Most of all, it was how damned important the entire thing became to the people involved, and how bitterly disappointed they became when it was clear that the game company they started just wasn’t going to change the world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that people can’t, or shouldn’t try and change the world. The world sure as hell does need changing, and I hope the young and the young-at-heart never give up railing against the status quo to try and create something better. It’s just struck me that it’s sort of silly to think that a company, however cool it might be, is going to really, significantly, change things. However, it just simultaneously struck me how incredibly inane and stupid so much of what we accept as “good business practices” are.
I guess I just saw so much of my own development mirrored in what happened at Wizards of the Coast: the transition from being so very passionate about trying to start a business that was different, and really stood for something, through the process of loss and disillusionment that led to being concerned with “process” and other trivialities that really had nothing to do with business in reality, to the eventual paring away of all of that and being concerned mostly with trying to use common sense to generate the highest financial return for the least effort in the shortest time so I could get the fuck out of the whole rat race and do what I want.
When examined, it’s a somewhat disheartening process. It seems to smack of what I would have once called “selling out.” It certainly feels like getting old. Most of all, though, reading the article made me wonder how any of our companies would fare if someone were to write a similar chronicle. If they’re all like that (and I suspect they are, in one form or another) it really makes me wonder just what in the hell we’re all doing…
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Doug
It seems a bit of a stretch, but I suppose it’s possible. Microsoft has certainly pulled off comparable stuff in the past.
Having said that, I prefer to apply the 1st Law of Conspiracies in cases like this: Never attribute to malice what can more easily be accounted for by stupidity. A lack of solid business plans and non-existent profits combined with the normal business cycle seems a more rational explanation.
Via evhead
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Doug
I’ve started playing around with Lucid Fried Eggs again. Lucid is a web application somewhat similar in function to The Brain by Natrificial. It makes a hellish good personal information organizer if your brain happens to work by doing a lot of synthesizing seemingly unrelated facts into new conclusions. If you tend to see systems as more organic and less mechanistic, then you might want to look at Lucid.
Lucid is an Open Source project, and I contributed a minor bit of code to it a few months ago. The project has advanced a bit since then, and I think I may be doing some more work on it. One of the things I like about it is that I can access it wirelessly with my Palm VII, so I may work on a layout template for it that is optimized for small Palm and WAP screens to start with.
All in all, Lucid is a very cool thing. Definitely worth taking a look at if you’re at all interested in interfaces and how to organize information in some manner different than hierarchical trees.
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Doug
Wow. I finally broke down and upgraded the video card in my desktop system today, and the difference is amazing. I had been holding off, limping along on my old TNT card, but this morning I decided enough was enough. I didn’t want to put a lot more money into this system since I plan on upgrading soon, but the upgrade date keeps moving back and when my wife inherits this system, she could still benefit from having the better graphics card.
So, I sucked it up and bought a GeForce 2 MX card today, 32 Mb and 4x AGP. This was by far the smoothest video upgrade I’ve ever done; there’s a whole lot of good to say about Nvidia’s unified driver architecture for their chipsets. A little minor editing of XF86Config and I was off to the races in Linux; Windows asked for the driver disk, but all it replaced was the AGP driver since I was already running a recent set of Detonator drivers. I was really dreading the upgrade under Windows; it’s generally not a big deal to upgrade in Linux, but Windows tends to create a huge mess. Not this time.
After things were running, I did grab the latest Linux drivers from Nvidia and installed them, and it made an even bigger difference. Not only is everything hugely faster now, but X in particular looks way, way nicer.
I happened to run across an Apple guy doing a demo of OS X while I was in the computer store today, and I had my first chance to actually play with it a bit. It was strange because it looked very X-ish, but very much felt like a Mac. There was a crowd of people standing around looking at it and I really wanted to freak them out by bringing up a command shell and typing bash commands, but I couldn’t find any easy way to do it in the couple of minutes I played with it. I’m also pretty sure the Apple guy didn’t appreciate my comments about how it looked like NeXT with little jelly-bean eye-candy.
