Michael, you've missed the point. The problem was not that "too big to fail" meant that banks were too interconnected with the economy.
The problem was the asymmetry created when huge banks knew that they could take significant risk, and if it turned out well they'd see huge profits (and, not incidentally, management bonuses), but that they were essentially insured on the downside by the government.
The only reason the free market works is that people play with their own money. The too-big-to-fail phenomenon is like sending me to Vegas with the deal that if I win, I split the money with you, and if I lose, you cover my loses. From my point of view, I'd be crazy not to maximize risk in that scenario.
So yes, it's good that the banks are recovering. It is not good that the fundamental TBTF problem has not been addressed. Any bank (or other company) that's going to be failed out of trouble should also be regulated to limit the risks it takes. Otherwise the asymmetry will continue.
First, most of the "wealthy elite" are that wealthy and elite because they've focused their lives on maximizing returns. Any "rah rah America" stuff you hear is from the very few who venture into the political arena.
Second, why do bonuses HAVE to be more reasonable? Where do you want that profit to go? Is it better for society and the economy if GS leaves it around as excess and unused capital, or if they pay substantial bonuses to a lot of people, each of whom (presumably) is going to look to parlay it by investing?
Third, your Madoff reference makes you seem like a kook. Are you suggesting GS' profits are fictional and that they keep two sets of books? Or was that a random and bizarre outburst?
Anyways, I agree that the system could be improved. But unless we're willing to scrap the market or do weird stuff like having the government regulate all compensation, reforms are going to have to be shareholder and market driven. No amount of "it SHOULD be different" will do a thing.
So shoot -- make a proposal for how change could be effected.
Well, since 75% of GS profits were from trading, mostly in foreign currencies, on their own account... um, yeah, the AIG bailout seems kind of tangential. Unless you want to argue that the entire system would have collapsed, which certainly would have hurt GS quite a bit.
But if you're going to argue that, then we're all in the same boat. I didn't earn my consulting fees last quarter, because without the AIG bailout, my clients would likely have been in real trouble and would have spent less money (and no, my "consulting" is not financial at all, and I'll never see money like we're talking about here, so I'm not an interested party).
Seems like a lot of handwaving there. Tell me again why Warren Buffet, who made $1B in three months from investing in GS, is being shortchanged by these bonuses? Or, if you want to be really out there, why the government is being shortchanged?
You know, I keep hearing people say this kind of thing, but I don't get it.
If the companies lose a lot of money, the management is corrupt and incompetent and doesn't deserve to be paid. If the company makes a lot of money... they still don't merit bonuses?
When, exactly, would be bonuses be merited? I'm not a financial guy, but making $3.4B in one quarter in this economy is kind of impressive to me.
The bonuses amount to 50% of the profit for the quarter. Sure, it seems steep, but you have to admit it was an impressive (or lucky) performance. Heck, Warren Buffet's investment alone gained $1B of value in the past quarter, for an annualized rate of return of 107%. The company's sitting on
Emotional dislike aside, why not pay big bonuses? What would you suggest they do with the money? Add it to the $160B of excess liquidity they're sitting on?
It's the classic accountability problem. Someone in their law department rode around on the "I'm defending the company's image!" horse to get attention and self-promote, either not knowing or not caring that their actions were against the long term interests of the company (in the form of bad PR and lending credibility to wacky conspiracy types).
You see the same thing with managers fighting for larger budgets; their self interest in being able to say "I managed a $5m budget" outweighs the company's long term goals of allocating resources efficiently.
First, because there's some confusion about who's sending and where links are being inserted:
Cosmetics giant Mary Kay has sued Yahoo for trademark infringement for allegedly inserting links to unauthorized retailers in personal email messages that Mary Kay sellers send to their consumers.
And you know what? I'm with Mary Kay here, and I think Mike's argument is kind of bogus. The issue isn't whether or not recipients will be able to distinguish between ads and "regular" links. The issue is whether the recipient will think that the ads were sent by the sender of the email.
In this case, not having a lot of friends who send me Yahoo email, I would very likely believe that my Mary Kay rep had resorted to spamming me with ads along side their normal communication unless there was some *very* clear "ads inserted by Yahoo" indication prominently displayed.
In fact, I think that if this case goes very far, discovery will turn up Yahoo documentation that makes it clear that the intent is for recipients to believe the links were intentionally included by the sender.
I've been in too many meetings like that (not at Yahoo!): someone says "well, sure, you're not going to click on an ad for facial cream when you're looking at Yahoo! Finance, but what if your Mary Kay rep sent you a thank you note and 'facial cream' was hyperlinked? Wouldn't you be much more likely to click it then, if you thought the sender meant for it to be there?"
So yeah, Mike's immediate dismissal seems a little odd. I wonder what he'd think of an ISP that inserted ads in email sent via SMTP? Or additional text like "Before you read my email, check this out: _stupid link_" at the top of each email?
What our cowardly friend here seems to be saying is that it's not copyrighting a number if some work went into producing them number, because then the number is (as the Colorado judge found) a form of expression. At least, that's my best guess from the anonymous post while amounts to little more than "YOUR WRONG!!1"
It is a simple fact that Wine Spectator rated a particular wine 92 points. Their editorial writings justifying the number are clearly copyrightable. Use of their logo in reporting that may or may not be a trademark issue. But god help us if we ever get to the point where the fact of a rating becomes a copyright issue.
Fairly obvious unintended consequences:
- Anybody giving ratings will be able to "license" the rating to the products they review. Reviews are already a notoriously dodgy business; add the profit motive that positive reviews generate more licensing revenue and they get even worse
- If ratings are copyrightable by this logic, it seems pretty clear sports scores are. 49ers 50, Cowboys 3 becomes a compilation of the per-quarter scores, and therefore copyrightable.
- Really, you can extend this to any fact that is produced or deduced from any other fact. Got a new physics formula? Well, it's probably a compilation of observations and other formulas.
Our anonymous and cowardly friend's opinion notwithstanding, I'm with Mike and Eric on this one. The only potential positive outcome for anyone comes at huge expense and zero benefit to society.
You realize that Apple is about profit first, consumer benefit second. If they found that they were losing money from Pre users (since profit from music sales is near zero, and some percentage of current and future Pre purchasers will now buy iPods/iPhones), why wouldn't they take this move?
See, this is where the whole "economics of free" argument breaks down. Apple makes money from hardware sales, not iTunes. Sure, they'll lose some non-paying users. Why would they care?
Apple makes very little money from iTunes itself, except the app store. Most of the revenue from music goes to labels; iTunes exists to sell iPods and iPhones.
Apple has both an interest in and a right to protect that closed ecosystem. Within certain parameters, Palm and other have a right to try to hook into that system so they don't have to develop it themselves.
This is a basic competitive question, playing out in the technical sphere. You can argue the business intelligence of one side or the other, but calling it "petty" is missing the point, and going off on paranoid tangents about what Apple *might* be doing that *could* be similar to what *someone else* did on a *different platform* under *different circumstances* is, well, just silly.
As a developer, I assure you it is a whole lot easier for Apple to simple tweak the iTunes USB/iPod interface to check for an Apple device than it would be to write some kind of weird Pre rootkit and, well, whatever the tinfoil hat "and" would be.
Hey, does anyone know a search engine with results as good as Google's that I can pay for? I've decided that I'm sick and tired of this free stuff and I want to pay for search results the way I pay for e-books from Amazon or music from Apple.
Hmm, nope. I really tried to believe it there, gave it my all. But it's still farcical.
I figured I'd email it to a bunch of my friends. 2,147,483,647 of them, to be exact (I've got a lot of friends).
So sure, $322,122,547.05 seems like a small price to pay to send such great info to so many friends. Sadly, their site 500'd on me.
So I went back and trimmed my recipient list to a mere 100,000,000 people, at a cost of $150,000,000. Still no go. 10,000,000 of my closest friends, for a bargain basement $15,000,000? That seemed to be processing, but then 500'd.
I don't see the point of this service. Plus, it's unreliable.
Also note their bad math: it's $5 to send the article to 10 people, and $4.40 to send it to 11. It's $10 to send it to 25 people, and $7.80 to send it to 26. $15 for 50 recipients, $12.75 for 51.
I totally agree with the point and purpose of this article, and yes, companies are going to have to adapt to the increased exposure that unhappy customers may have.
However, to be fair, the correct equation for determining whether United made a smart (business) decision in refusing to do anything about the guitar is:
How much does the broken guitar cost?
vs.
How much does bad publicity from this incident cost? * What are the odds that this incident would get this much publicity?
If *every* broken guitar resulted in this much bad publicity, sure, it was a stupid decision. However, if one in a million incidents of (for instance) $5k worth of damage to baggage resulted in $1m worth of bad publicity, you're better off accepting the bad publicity.
Me, I say good business assumes that the morally right thing to do is also the financially right thing to do. But if we're taking it out of the moral and into strictly the financial analysis realm... well, we've got to get the equation right.
1. Because Google says so in their announcement. They're clear that Android is a full featured OS designed to run native apps, while Chrome OS is the bare minimum set of hardware drivers, kernel, and window manager needed to get a web browser up and running. They may share some bits, of course, but if anything Chrome OS is a stripped down version of Android. It'll be 1/10th the size. Or smaller.
2. Yes, those are cool features, but there will be no OS to carry those into. You'll boot to a browser window; there will be no other window. No start bar. No dock. The OS, such as it is, will exist solely to get the browser running.
3. Indeed. There won't be a mail client, because that will be web based. There won't be an office suite, because that too will be web based. If an app runs in a browser, it'll run in Chrome / Chrome OS. If not, like if you need Photoshop or something, Chrome OS won't be a suitable choice.
As others have noted, the reason the play doesn't make sense when framed Mike's way is that there are some basic misunderstandings in this post.
- Chrome OS will be *less* complete than Android. The reason not to use Android is that it is already overkill for just getting a browser up and running (it's X11 based, for instance)
- I've also had enough issues with Chrome to go back to Firefox, but we're talking about a "late 2010" release. I'm pretty sure the browser will be fine by then.
- This has nothing to do with turning a browser into an operating system. Chrome will not be any different on Chrome OS than it is on Windows. This is about stripping the operating system down to the bare minimum needed to run a browser, which provides 95% of the functionality people need today
- I'm really confused by the "why now" point. You won't even see Chrome OS; Chrome OS devices will boot directly to the browser. So yeah, OS functionality is less important today. Which is exactly "why now."
- Again, no confusion. Chrome will be a simple, functional browser. Nobody's talking about adding MS Paint to Chrome. The idea is that web apps, especially with offline capability like Gears creates, will replace desktop apps. This OS play is *about* that, not in conflict with it.
I hope Mike digs a little deeper into Google's announcements and updates this post, or writes a new one, based on what Chrome OS is actually going to be. It's not great for TechDirt to be so wildly wrong about something so important.
I would expect to have significant code differences between LAN and internet play. LAN is going to either be a P2P model or a "one of us is the server" model, and that's going to be very different code to support 10 people than the huge internet servers they'll use to support tens of thousands of users.
Those backend servers are almost certainly not remotely related to the code shipped in-game. So stuff like anti-cheat, timing, etc, is all going to be re-implemented for a local versus remote version.
I could be wrong there; I don't know Starcraft 2 in particular.
My guess is that they figured they could offer some kind of "virtual LAN" game whereby you all enter the same room and only see each other, but the game is managed by the internet servers.
I'm not sure it'll increase piracy, at least measurably. I can't see someone saying "I *would* buy it, and I still want to play it, but now I don't want to pay." Sure, out of sheer petulance and spite *somebody* will do that, but it's probably a tiny percentage of their sales.
It certainly won't decrease piracy, though. I don't even see the argument for how it could. If the concern is phone-home, they could just build that into LAN games anyway.
Absolutely agreed. I think it's a defensible and potentially reasonable decision, but the framing is reminiscent of the "if anyone was offended" non-apologies that are popular these days. It's dishonest, but worse, it's transparently dishonest.
Right, we're talking about extreme cases where *either* game dev *or* revenue maximization are pursued to the exclusion of all else.
The problem is that good games sell, but bad management produces such low returns that investors (aka owners) apply pressure to deliver slightly less good games at higher margins.
That's why these companies get bought by EA, Activision, etc. And why subsequent games aren't as good, in the eyes of gamers. And, yes, why companies like EA lose their way and become so business-centric that they forget they have to deliver very good games, just not perfect ones, to maximize revenue.
But a company run by game designers sounds like a terrible investment, because the vast majority of game devs don't have the business skills to do all of the other stuff a company has to do: raise capital, market a product, operate customer support, and so on.
All I'm saying is that poor management will sink a company, and as an investor I'm more optimistic about EA's ability to improve revenues than I am about small studios' ability to produce any ROI at all... until they sell to one of the big guys.
Tell me, as an investor: would you buy stock in a company driven by game designers without regard to profit, or in a company driven by MBA's focused on maximizing returns by developing very good games (but stopping short of perfectionism) while charging what people will pay, not what they would like to pay?
To be fair, Blizzard is removing a feature that nobody has bought yet. This is more of a design decision (possibly a poor one), and not really the same as the Emusic issue where they changed the rules for existing, paying customers.
And as a veteran of software dev, it's not at all implausible that this is just triage. This is a game that's been in development for six years... it's possible they either found that LAN support was turning out poorly, or that they realized they had to cut *something* to make it to market.
And, on the piracy angle, it may be that they found that as much as some people loved LAN parties, the number of people refusing to buy the game without that feature is tiny compared to the cost of developing and supporting the feature. That's a totally reasonable economic decision to make.
I'm not defending them, and I agree that the "for your own good" canard is so tired and transparently false that it damages the brand. I'm just not quite ready to say that deciding not to bring a feature to market is the same as removing an existing feature from existing users who have already paid.
On the post: The Good And Bad Of Banks Too Big To Fail Getting Bigger...
Hey, wait a minute
The problem was the asymmetry created when huge banks knew that they could take significant risk, and if it turned out well they'd see huge profits (and, not incidentally, management bonuses), but that they were essentially insured on the downside by the government.
The only reason the free market works is that people play with their own money. The too-big-to-fail phenomenon is like sending me to Vegas with the deal that if I win, I split the money with you, and if I lose, you cover my loses. From my point of view, I'd be crazy not to maximize risk in that scenario.
So yes, it's good that the banks are recovering. It is not good that the fundamental TBTF problem has not been addressed. Any bank (or other company) that's going to be failed out of trouble should also be regulated to limit the risks it takes. Otherwise the asymmetry will continue.
On the post: Goldman Sachs Caves Against Gripes Site; Money Doesn't Buy Bogus Trademark Lawsuit Wins
Re: Re: Re:
First, most of the "wealthy elite" are that wealthy and elite because they've focused their lives on maximizing returns. Any "rah rah America" stuff you hear is from the very few who venture into the political arena.
Second, why do bonuses HAVE to be more reasonable? Where do you want that profit to go? Is it better for society and the economy if GS leaves it around as excess and unused capital, or if they pay substantial bonuses to a lot of people, each of whom (presumably) is going to look to parlay it by investing?
Third, your Madoff reference makes you seem like a kook. Are you suggesting GS' profits are fictional and that they keep two sets of books? Or was that a random and bizarre outburst?
Anyways, I agree that the system could be improved. But unless we're willing to scrap the market or do weird stuff like having the government regulate all compensation, reforms are going to have to be shareholder and market driven. No amount of "it SHOULD be different" will do a thing.
So shoot -- make a proposal for how change could be effected.
On the post: Goldman Sachs Caves Against Gripes Site; Money Doesn't Buy Bogus Trademark Lawsuit Wins
Re: Re: Re:
But if you're going to argue that, then we're all in the same boat. I didn't earn my consulting fees last quarter, because without the AIG bailout, my clients would likely have been in real trouble and would have spent less money (and no, my "consulting" is not financial at all, and I'll never see money like we're talking about here, so I'm not an interested party).
Seems like a lot of handwaving there. Tell me again why Warren Buffet, who made $1B in three months from investing in GS, is being shortchanged by these bonuses? Or, if you want to be really out there, why the government is being shortchanged?
On the post: Goldman Sachs Caves Against Gripes Site; Money Doesn't Buy Bogus Trademark Lawsuit Wins
Re:
If the companies lose a lot of money, the management is corrupt and incompetent and doesn't deserve to be paid. If the company makes a lot of money... they still don't merit bonuses?
When, exactly, would be bonuses be merited? I'm not a financial guy, but making $3.4B in one quarter in this economy is kind of impressive to me.
The bonuses amount to 50% of the profit for the quarter. Sure, it seems steep, but you have to admit it was an impressive (or lucky) performance. Heck, Warren Buffet's investment alone gained $1B of value in the past quarter, for an annualized rate of return of 107%. The company's sitting on
Emotional dislike aside, why not pay big bonuses? What would you suggest they do with the money? Add it to the $160B of excess liquidity they're sitting on?
On the post: Goldman Sachs Caves Against Gripes Site; Money Doesn't Buy Bogus Trademark Lawsuit Wins
You see the same thing with managers fighting for larger budgets; their self interest in being able to say "I managed a $5m budget" outweighs the company's long term goals of allocating resources efficiently.
On the post: Mary Kay Sues Yahoo For Inserting Ad Links In Emails
And you know what? I'm with Mary Kay here, and I think Mike's argument is kind of bogus. The issue isn't whether or not recipients will be able to distinguish between ads and "regular" links. The issue is whether the recipient will think that the ads were sent by the sender of the email.
In this case, not having a lot of friends who send me Yahoo email, I would very likely believe that my Mary Kay rep had resorted to spamming me with ads along side their normal communication unless there was some *very* clear "ads inserted by Yahoo" indication prominently displayed.
In fact, I think that if this case goes very far, discovery will turn up Yahoo documentation that makes it clear that the intent is for recipients to believe the links were intentionally included by the sender.
I've been in too many meetings like that (not at Yahoo!): someone says "well, sure, you're not going to click on an ad for facial cream when you're looking at Yahoo! Finance, but what if your Mary Kay rep sent you a thank you note and 'facial cream' was hyperlinked? Wouldn't you be much more likely to click it then, if you thought the sender meant for it to be there?"
So yeah, Mike's immediate dismissal seems a little odd. I wonder what he'd think of an ISP that inserted ads in email sent via SMTP? Or additional text like "Before you read my email, check this out: _stupid link_" at the top of each email?
On the post: Court Says You Can Copyright Numerical Ratings
Re:
It is a simple fact that Wine Spectator rated a particular wine 92 points. Their editorial writings justifying the number are clearly copyrightable. Use of their logo in reporting that may or may not be a trademark issue. But god help us if we ever get to the point where the fact of a rating becomes a copyright issue.
Fairly obvious unintended consequences:
- Anybody giving ratings will be able to "license" the rating to the products they review. Reviews are already a notoriously dodgy business; add the profit motive that positive reviews generate more licensing revenue and they get even worse
- If ratings are copyrightable by this logic, it seems pretty clear sports scores are. 49ers 50, Cowboys 3 becomes a compilation of the per-quarter scores, and therefore copyrightable.
- Really, you can extend this to any fact that is produced or deduced from any other fact. Got a new physics formula? Well, it's probably a compilation of observations and other formulas.
Our anonymous and cowardly friend's opinion notwithstanding, I'm with Mike and Eric on this one. The only potential positive outcome for anyone comes at huge expense and zero benefit to society.
On the post: Apple Does As Many Expected: Kills Palm Pre iTunes Syncing
Re:
See, this is where the whole "economics of free" argument breaks down. Apple makes money from hardware sales, not iTunes. Sure, they'll lose some non-paying users. Why would they care?
On the post: Apple Does As Many Expected: Kills Palm Pre iTunes Syncing
Um
Apple has both an interest in and a right to protect that closed ecosystem. Within certain parameters, Palm and other have a right to try to hook into that system so they don't have to develop it themselves.
This is a basic competitive question, playing out in the technical sphere. You can argue the business intelligence of one side or the other, but calling it "petty" is missing the point, and going off on paranoid tangents about what Apple *might* be doing that *could* be similar to what *someone else* did on a *different platform* under *different circumstances* is, well, just silly.
As a developer, I assure you it is a whole lot easier for Apple to simple tweak the iTunes USB/iPod interface to check for an Apple device than it would be to write some kind of weird Pre rootkit and, well, whatever the tinfoil hat "and" would be.
On the post: Odd Argument: Google Will Lose Out Once Everyone's Comfortable Paying For Stuff
Need recommendation
Hmm, nope. I really tried to believe it there, gave it my all. But it's still farcical.
On the post: Dear AP: The Point Behind A Data Format Is To Make The Data Easier To Use, Not Harder
Not scalable enough
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BUNNY_LADY?SITE=NYMID&SECTION=HOME&TEMPL ATE=DEFAULT
I figured I'd email it to a bunch of my friends. 2,147,483,647 of them, to be exact (I've got a lot of friends).
So sure, $322,122,547.05 seems like a small price to pay to send such great info to so many friends. Sadly, their site 500'd on me.
So I went back and trimmed my recipient list to a mere 100,000,000 people, at a cost of $150,000,000. Still no go. 10,000,000 of my closest friends, for a bargain basement $15,000,000? That seemed to be processing, but then 500'd.
I don't see the point of this service. Plus, it's unreliable.
On the post: Dear AP: The Point Behind A Data Format Is To Make The Data Easier To Use, Not Harder
Re:
On the post: In A Connected World, Where Everyone Has A Voice, Customers Win
The right equation
However, to be fair, the correct equation for determining whether United made a smart (business) decision in refusing to do anything about the guitar is:
How much does the broken guitar cost?
vs.
How much does bad publicity from this incident cost? * What are the odds that this incident would get this much publicity?
If *every* broken guitar resulted in this much bad publicity, sure, it was a stupid decision. However, if one in a million incidents of (for instance) $5k worth of damage to baggage resulted in $1m worth of bad publicity, you're better off accepting the bad publicity.
Me, I say good business assumes that the morally right thing to do is also the financially right thing to do. But if we're taking it out of the moral and into strictly the financial analysis realm... well, we've got to get the equation right.
On the post: Why Is Google Turning Chrome Into An Operating System?
Re: Umm...
2. Yes, those are cool features, but there will be no OS to carry those into. You'll boot to a browser window; there will be no other window. No start bar. No dock. The OS, such as it is, will exist solely to get the browser running.
3. Indeed. There won't be a mail client, because that will be web based. There won't be an office suite, because that too will be web based. If an app runs in a browser, it'll run in Chrome / Chrome OS. If not, like if you need Photoshop or something, Chrome OS won't be a suitable choice.
On the post: Why Is Google Turning Chrome Into An Operating System?
Yep
- Chrome OS will be *less* complete than Android. The reason not to use Android is that it is already overkill for just getting a browser up and running (it's X11 based, for instance)
- I've also had enough issues with Chrome to go back to Firefox, but we're talking about a "late 2010" release. I'm pretty sure the browser will be fine by then.
- This has nothing to do with turning a browser into an operating system. Chrome will not be any different on Chrome OS than it is on Windows. This is about stripping the operating system down to the bare minimum needed to run a browser, which provides 95% of the functionality people need today
- I'm really confused by the "why now" point. You won't even see Chrome OS; Chrome OS devices will boot directly to the browser. So yeah, OS functionality is less important today. Which is exactly "why now."
- Again, no confusion. Chrome will be a simple, functional browser. Nobody's talking about adding MS Paint to Chrome. The idea is that web apps, especially with offline capability like Gears creates, will replace desktop apps. This OS play is *about* that, not in conflict with it.
I hope Mike digs a little deeper into Google's announcements and updates this post, or writes a new one, based on what Chrome OS is actually going to be. It's not great for TechDirt to be so wildly wrong about something so important.
On the post: Blizzard The Latest To Kill Features, Call It An Upgrade
Re: Re: Well, sort of
Those backend servers are almost certainly not remotely related to the code shipped in-game. So stuff like anti-cheat, timing, etc, is all going to be re-implemented for a local versus remote version.
I could be wrong there; I don't know Starcraft 2 in particular.
My guess is that they figured they could offer some kind of "virtual LAN" game whereby you all enter the same room and only see each other, but the game is managed by the internet servers.
I'm not sure it'll increase piracy, at least measurably. I can't see someone saying "I *would* buy it, and I still want to play it, but now I don't want to pay." Sure, out of sheer petulance and spite *somebody* will do that, but it's probably a tiny percentage of their sales.
It certainly won't decrease piracy, though. I don't even see the argument for how it could. If the concern is phone-home, they could just build that into LAN games anyway.
On the post: Blizzard The Latest To Kill Features, Call It An Upgrade
Re: Re: Well, sort of
On the post: Blizzard The Latest To Kill Features, Call It An Upgrade
Re: Re: Re: Let me...
The problem is that good games sell, but bad management produces such low returns that investors (aka owners) apply pressure to deliver slightly less good games at higher margins.
That's why these companies get bought by EA, Activision, etc. And why subsequent games aren't as good, in the eyes of gamers. And, yes, why companies like EA lose their way and become so business-centric that they forget they have to deliver very good games, just not perfect ones, to maximize revenue.
But a company run by game designers sounds like a terrible investment, because the vast majority of game devs don't have the business skills to do all of the other stuff a company has to do: raise capital, market a product, operate customer support, and so on.
All I'm saying is that poor management will sink a company, and as an investor I'm more optimistic about EA's ability to improve revenues than I am about small studios' ability to produce any ROI at all... until they sell to one of the big guys.
On the post: Blizzard The Latest To Kill Features, Call It An Upgrade
Re:
Tell me, as an investor: would you buy stock in a company driven by game designers without regard to profit, or in a company driven by MBA's focused on maximizing returns by developing very good games (but stopping short of perfectionism) while charging what people will pay, not what they would like to pay?
On the post: Blizzard The Latest To Kill Features, Call It An Upgrade
Well, sort of
And as a veteran of software dev, it's not at all implausible that this is just triage. This is a game that's been in development for six years... it's possible they either found that LAN support was turning out poorly, or that they realized they had to cut *something* to make it to market.
And, on the piracy angle, it may be that they found that as much as some people loved LAN parties, the number of people refusing to buy the game without that feature is tiny compared to the cost of developing and supporting the feature. That's a totally reasonable economic decision to make.
I'm not defending them, and I agree that the "for your own good" canard is so tired and transparently false that it damages the brand. I'm just not quite ready to say that deciding not to bring a feature to market is the same as removing an existing feature from existing users who have already paid.
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