These edgy Indian print ads for the Playstation 2 turn the stereotype of the gamer who’s so into games that he doesn’t have a girlfriend upside-down: the tag line for these ads is “PS2: Because your girlfriend bores you shitless.”
Click to see the ad at full size.
Click to see the ad at full size.
An unsuspecting customer drinking Jakob Nielsen’s kool-aid.
After reading Jakob Nielsen’s rather self-satisfied and smug Write Articles, Not Blog Postings and Robert Scoble’s counterpoint, I have these three things to say:
Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.
I remember first reading Bluff Your Way in Japan in 1992, and one of the bits of the book that stands out in mind is the bit about interpreting answers from the Japanese. “If they say ‘yes’,” said the book, “they actually mean ‘no’. If they say ‘maybe’, they mean ‘yes’. If they say ‘no’, they’re not Japanese.”
If only interpreting statements by vendors was as simple.
On Friday, Sony President Ryoji Chubachi announced that Sony had no plans to cut the price of the Playstation 3. The quote attributed to him is “We have no plans”, and he attempted to dispel concerns about the PS3’s slow start in the market race by citing the slow start of the PS2, which initially had a poor library (some games publishers complained that it was a difficult machine to program), and was expensive for the time.
Later that day, Engadget reported the sighting of a leaked Circuit City circular (say that quickly three times if you can) that showed the PS3 marked down by US$100 to US$499. On Satuday, they reported that some Target stores were also selling PS3s at the reduced rate of US$499.
Today, we have the official announcement from Sony: the PS3 will get a price cut of US$100 to US$499. The reason? They’re introducing a new deluxe model, which comes with an 80GB hard drive (the PS3 currently comes in a “bargain” version with a 20GB hard drive and the “high end” model with a 60GB drive) and a free-but-you-paid-for-it copy of MotorStorm, which will retail for the 60GB unit’s old price, US$599.
In addition to having to deal with that say-one-thing-then-do-the-opposite issue, Sony will also have to rationalize the fact that in a time when even external hard drives, complete with USB interfaces, power supplies and their own packing are cheap like borscht, the additional 20GB for an extra US$100 seems a bit stingy. They’ll also have to contend with the fact that the XBox 360 is still US$100 cheaper, has a better library, a well-established online system and a lot of momentum.
Scoble’s got a sweet job: he’s the only person outside the Bush Administration who can be wrong a lot of the time and still reap the rewards from it. He’s also more likable.
The latest evidence of this is his post titled Why Microsoft Outplays Apple Long-Term. In the post, he talks about an independent developer event in which 300 people — mostly programmers — got together at iPhoneDevCamp, an independent, free-of-charge BarCamp-style event where developers got together from July 6th through 8th to workshop on developing apps for the iPhone. He points out that although he met people from Microsoft, Yahoo! and Verisign at the event, he didn’t see anyone who clearly identified himself or herself as being an Apple employee.
From this observation comes the thesis of the post: by not having an obvious presence there, Apple is telling developers to, in his own words “go pound sand”.
He contrasts this with Microsoft, who in contrast, looooove developers:
Where’s Apple? Microsoft is here.
If this were a Microsoft event the evangelism team would be here in force with T-shirts, stickers, free dev tools, tons of geeks who could help people figure out technical issues, and more. Look at how Microsoft dealt with Maker Faire, they sent the guy who builds Bill Gates’ keynote demos to help out. THAT is how Microsoft got 90% market share.
The answer to Scoble’s questions lies in his talking about how hard-working the Microsoft Evangelism team is. I’ll counter with this: these days, Microsoft works hard at getting developer love for the same reason that people sign up for hokey courses at the Learning Annex on how to flirt: because they have to.
The fact that three hundred developers, with no funding or prompting from Apple, started their own BarCamp-ish event on iPhone development is a sign that Apple have, to borrow a Kathy Sierra-ism, created passionate users. They didn’t need to be there in an official capacity; they just needed to stoke enough interest in their product to turn their own customers into evangelists. Surely you’ve heard of Kathy’s blog, Scoble!
To get the same level of interest in a Microsoft event takes a lot more work. Consider the hoops that Microsoft has jumped through here in Toronto. In spite of the fact that we’ve got an active BarCamp scene here in Toronto thanks to events like DemoCamp, CaseCamp and VizThink, in order to get developers to get together and talk about Microsoft tech, it takes either a Microsoft-organized conference like the recent EnergizeIT or its local PR company to organize smaller events with free booze and food. They had to book the “rock star suite” at the Gladstone Hotel and hold a party afterwards to get us to look at Microsoft Live, but the upcoming gathering where we’re going to workshop the Facebook API grew out of a suggestion on a mailing list.
Although there’s a lot of passionate Mac fanboy-ism on the web, there is hope for Microsoft. There is one fanboy out there who praises Microsoft even though he’s not on their payroll: it’s Scoble.
I’ve got to run right now, so I’ll continue later ’cause I ain’t done yet. If you’d like to make any comments in the meantime, please do so!
I know lots of people who started out as programmers, then developed a successful business and never touched a line of code again, even recreationally (and in a couple of cases, a couple refused to lift a finger to help an old customer, simply because the help involved answering questions about code).
That’s why I’ve got to tip my hat to Dave Winer, who’s still noodling with code even though I don’t think he has to do it to pay the rent. TechCrunch reports that he’s got a nifty little project called TwitterGram that mashes up the Twitter API with his own application that lets you upload small (about 200K) MP3 files. The end result: a system that lets you use Twitter to make short audio postings.
Although I think my need for such a system might be fulfilled by my Pownce, I’m still on Twitter and will give TwitterGram a try. Kudos to Dave for keepin’ on coding, experimenting and sharing!
Based on a ten-page (!) confession by a former Geek Squad member in which he wrote that Geek Squad agents scour your computer for those porn and personal pictures and videos and copy them onto their thumb drives, Consumerist set up a string operation in which they rigged a computer to record all user activity and brought it in to a number of Best Buy stores to have Geek Squad install iTunes on it.
They report:
We took it to around a dozen Best Buy Geek Squads and asked them to perform simple tasks, like installing iTunes. Most places were fine, sometimes doing the job right on the counter, sometimes even for free.
Click here to see their blog entry and (work-safe) video, and be sure to read these follow-up articles:
There remains one question that I’m sure a lot of guys are asking: Where’d they get that desktop wallpaper image, and could they please share it?
If my post about the “Please don’t use Comic Sans” dialog box got people chatting in the comments, yesterday’s edition of Chris Onstad’s popular webcomic Achewood should really stir the pot:
Hang on guys, I’m putting my steel-toed boots on! Click the comic to see it on its original page at full size.
I love that Lyle wants to give the guy a “curbie” (that’s the way Edward Norton killed that guy in American History X).