« But sometimes bigger is better... | Main | Parallels and Ubuntu 6.0.6 Server LTS »
November 30, 2006
And what is good, Phaedrus?
Two apparently unrelated articles follow - but consider the following when you read them:
Apple and Nintendo are both companies that have eschewed choices that would lead directly to market dominance. Even Apple’s now-market-dominating iPod wasn’t created to attack an existing market (unlike, say, the Zune). The essential point - as a deeply religious person told me - isn’t what’s being done, but why it’s being done. Arno asks the question, “Is the result good?”. Nintendo’s Wii seems an attempt to answer the question, “what makes this fun?”
All while the ones whose “why” is “to be the #1 seller” are crippling themselves.
The Design of Mac OS X Shutdown Feature
Arno Goudal – MacOS X Finder Lead from 1999 to 2001 - weighs in on the discussion of shutdown menu design in Vista. “The success of Mac OS X has been due in part to an ability for Apple to successfully manage a project this complex to the point where full builds of the OS could be done reliably every week. To that extent, considering the issues described by Lettvin, shipping Vista at all is quite a feat, indeed.”
James Surowiecki of The New Yorker discusses Nintendo’s very lucrative position at third place in the video game console market. “[Nintendo] has five billion dollars in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony’s game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft’s reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative?”
Posted by jim at November 30, 2006 12:08 PM