“My Name Is Elizabeth Warren, And I Will Fix This S%#t Myself If I Have To”

Posted on October 12, 2011

I love this:

That is all.

Everything You Need To Know To Understand Netflix, In One Picture

Posted on October 11, 2011

My friend Ginger left a comment on my post last week:

Did you hear about Qwikster? Are you gonna blog about it? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN.

I always yield to requests from my teeming millions of fervent admirers, so here is what it all means.

Everything you need to know to understand how Netflix has behaved over the past few months is contained in the chart above.  Notice how, three months ago, the company’s stock was trading at around $300 per share.  Then in July they announced two big changes to take effect for existing customers on September 1: DVD and streaming rentals would be separated into two plans rather than one plan containing both, and the cost of subscribing to both plans would be 60% than the previous unified plan had been.  This kicked off a slow slide in the stock price, as the market tried to price in the expected loss of customers.

By the time the price hike actually took effect, the stock had dropped down to a little under $250 — nearly a 20% drop in value, which in most circumstances would be bad enough.  But the real bloodbath didn’t come until two weeks later, when Netflix announced that its pricing changes might have cost it more customers than it had originally projected — and that those higher-than-expected losses would turn the third quarter of 2011 into only the second quarter in its history when Netflix would end up losing money.

That announcement sent the stock off a cliff.  When trading closed for the week the next day, it had sunk to $155 per share; that’s half of what it had been trading at in July, and $70 less than it had been trading at two days before. And there was no obvious reason to believe that the tumble would not continue when the stock market reopened on Monday.

This put Netflix management under the gun — they needed to come up with something that weekend that would calm the markets on Monday, or lose the confidence of the company’s shareholders (and their jobs). I wasn’t there, of course, but I imagine they spent the weekend furiously trying to come up with something, anything, they could do that would serve that purpose.

Late that Sunday, they announced what they’d come up with: Qwikster.

In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”…

Qwikster will be the same website and DVD service that everyone is used to. It is just a new name, and DVD members will go to qwikster.com to access their DVD queues and choose movies…

A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated. So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places. Similarly, if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice-versa.

My guess is that they thought the DVD-by-mail business was a drag on Netflix’s stock performance, and therefore shunting it from Netflix into an outside enterprise would stop the slide. That turned out not to be the case, though; the move was widely derided as confusing and customer-unfriendly.  The reaction was so fierce that Saturday Night Live even joined in the mockery, in a sketch they aired on their Web site:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/284938/saturday-night-live-netflix-apology

More importantly, the Qwikster announcement didn’t stop the stock from falling further; when the markets reopened on Monday it tumbled down to $130, where it’s more or less stayed ever since.  Which is probably why Netflix announced yesterday that they actually wouldn’t be spinning out Qwikster after all: the whole point of Qwikster had been to keep the stock from dropping further on Monday the 19th; once it failed to do that, there really wasn’t much point to it anymore.

I’ve spent so much time in this account focusing on when things happened because that’s the key thing you need to understand to understand Netflix’s behavior.  If the Qwikster decision seemed irrational to you, I would argue that that is because it was irrational. It wasn’t the product of reasoned, long-term strategic thinking; it was the product of panic. Netflix management spent the tail end of the week of September 12 watching everything they’d built over a decade collapsing underneath their feet; they had just two days to find a way to shore it up; Qwikster was their Hail Mary pass, a play born out of desperation. And like most Hail Mary passes, it didn’t succeed.

I’ll have more to say in a future post about the long-term forces that threaten Netflix’s business, which are part of the reason why they made the initial decision to separate their DVD and streaming services — the decision that kicked off the whole chain of events that led to the abyss.  But to answer the question “what does it all mean?”, you don’t really need to know any of that stuff.  All you need to know is that Netflix is running scared; and scared people make bad decisions.

As Lists Of The Five Best Things In The World Go, This Ain’t Bad

Posted on October 7, 2011

The Unbearable Lightness Of Minecraft

Posted on September 1, 2011

I tend to come late to popular enthusiasms, and so it has been with Minecraft. The blockbuster indie game has been out for a little more than two years and has sold more than a million copies, but I didn’t dive in until just recently.  The reason was simple: from what I could see of it, I had never been able to really “get” why the game was so popular.  But eventually I decided that Minecraft had become such a phenomenon that I needed to check it out regardless, so I plunked down the registration fee and gave it a whirl.

First, though, some backstory. Minecraft is a computer game originally written by a single Swedish programmer, Markus Persson, a.k.a. “Notch.” It sets you down in a randomly generated world rendered in a chunky, retro graphics style.  The two things you can do in that world are right there in the name: you mine resources, and use them to craft items.  (“Mining” in this case is a somewhat inaccurate term, since not all the resources you can gather are found underground; you can “mine” wood from trees and water from lakes, for example.)  When you start out and don’t have a lot of resources mined, the things you can craft are fairly simple; but as you gather more resources the scale of the things you can build grows, all the way up to buildings.

And crafting buildings is important, because of the other aspect of Minecraft’s gameplay.  The world you’re dropped into comes complete with a day/night cycle; as you wander around on the first day, you see the sun inching across the sky, until it dips down toward the horizon and the moon rises.

Which is bad news, because in Minecraft, night is when the monsters come out.

New players generally learn this the hard way.  You’re poking around the landscape, chopping down trees and scooping up sand and earth, and then suddenly it’s night.  And then you notice that the friendly cows and chickens that had dotted the landscape during the day are nowhere to be seen; in their place are new creatures that you can’t quite make out, until they get up close and you realize that they are skeletons, or zombies, or “creepers” — suicide bombers that scuttle up to you, hiss, and then blow up, taking you (and a huge chunk of landscape) with them.

Game Over.

Eventually, either through trial and error or by consulting the wiki, you learn how to protect yourself at night.  They can’t hurt you if they can’t reach you, so you build a shelter to hide in while the monsters roam.  They hate bright lights, so you learn how to craft torches and put them up around your shelter to ward the monsters off.  You learn to craft armor and weapons from leather, wood and metal.  Not all your measures work, but after a while you find a combination that gets you through the night — and when the sun comes up, the monsters either burst into flames and die or scramble off to hide in their caves until it goes back down again, leaving the world to you once more to mine and craft in, at least while the sun shines.

So that’s Minecraft. But while the above gives you a general idea of how it works, it doesn’t really give you an idea of why it works — why so many people find it so compelling.  For that, we turn to this strip from the webcomic Penny Arcade:

That’s the reaction that hundreds of thousands of gamers have had to Minecraft: a sort of initial puzzlement, followed by an “aha!” moment, followed by hours and hours and hours and hours of play, building things like Hogwarts and the starship Enterprise and a complete 16-bit computer out of Minecraft bricks.

But after I spent a while working my way through three Minecraft worlds, I only had one question:

Why isn’t this more fun?

I mean, it’s a worldwide sensation, easily the most important indie game of the last few years, if not the last decade.  It seems like it should be fun. But… it’s not.

Wait; I should qualify that statement.  Minecraft is actually a lot of fun when you first start playing it. The problem is that the fun tails off rather quickly. My typical game of Minecraft goes something like this:

• Day One: Scramble to build a rudimentary shelter before night falls
• Day Two: Flesh out your shelter into someplace where you can ride out the nights in comfort, with doors, windows, and a bed
• Day Three: OK, I’m safe.  So what the hell do I do now?

And that’s where the fun stops; at least for me.

I think this is because Minecraft can’t really decide what kind of a game it wants to be; there’s actually four games shoved together under its hood.  The first is a construction game, where the fun comes from building new things out of raw materials.  The second is an exploration game, where the fun comes from roaming the game’s randomly generated world.  The third is an adventure game, where the fun comes from completing a quest to meet an objective, like “find gold” or “clear the monsters out of that cave.”  And the fourth is a survival game, where the fun comes from trying to stay alive through the creative use of limited resources.

These are all completely viable things for a game design to attempt to do.  The problem with Minecraft is that it tries to do all four simultaneously, with the result that none of them really feel fully baked. The survival game, for example, basically ends by the third night; if you make it to that point, you’ve got a safe shelter built, so there’s no more risk, and overcoming risk is what makes a survival game fun.

And what’s worse, sometimes the things the game has to do to satisfy one of the genres it aspires to reduces its own effectiveness in another.  To make the exploration game more fun, for instance, Minecraft worlds are huge; you can wander for hours just enjoying the scenery. But after you’ve been wandering for a while, you realize that you have no idea how to get back to your shelter — which is where you’ve stashed all the tools and materials you need to enjoy the construction game.  To make the survival game more fun, the nights are filled with deadly monsters; but that pours cold water all over the exploration game, since you can’t wander too far from the safety of your shelter for fear of getting caught out of doors at night.  And so forth.

In fairness, Minecraft isn’t officially “done” yet — it was in alpha for most of its two-year lifespan, and only recently got upgraded to beta —  Notch (and the company he founded with the proceeds from all those million+ sales, Mojang) seem to be trying to fix some of these problems.  They introduced a craftable map and compass to cut down on the “uh oh, I’m lost” problem, and the next version as of this writing (1.8) will supposedly include a free-building “Creative” mode that strips out the monsters and lets you fly so you can just play the construction game by itself if you want to.  But I’m not sure if there will ever be a really elegant way to merge all four of the games inside Minecraft together seamlessly, since they pull the design in such different directions.

I don’t mean to be too hard on Minecraft here; clearly lots of people enjoy the hell out of it, and even I find myself popping back in every now and then.  But I rarely stay long, because what brings me back is the game I dream it could be, rather than the game it actually is. Potential is great, but at some point it has to be realized, or it loses its shine. And I just can’t join the Minecraft fan parade unreservedly until it starts being less about potential and more about realization.

Amazon $5 MP3 Deals for August 2011

Posted on August 31, 2011

I haven’t forgotten!  It’s still August 2011!  For 24 hours, anyway.  So that means you’ve got 24 hours to get in on this month’s DRM-free $5 deals.

To wit:

	Ophelia Natalie Merchant
	Ocean Rain Echo & the Bunnymen
	Kind of Blue Miles Davis
	Moon Safari Air
	On Avery Island Neutral Milk Hotel
	Himself Bill Cosby

I know what you’re saying on that last one — “A Bill Cosby album? Really?” Yes! Himself is one of the all-time great comedy albums — every track is gold. If you haven’t heard it before, buy it now, you can thank me later.

Your Macabre Thought For The Day

Posted on August 23, 2011

Those of you who don’t live on the East Coast have probably heard that we had a wee bit of excitement today:

A rare, powerful 5.8-magnitude earthquake rattled the eastern third of the United States on Tuesday afternoon, damaging older buildings, shutting down much of the nation’s capital and unnerving tens of millions of people from New England to the Carolinas.

It was not a killer quake, nor even a particularly injurious one. But if it didn’t add up to a natural disaster, it was still a startling geological event, the strongest East Coast tremor in 67 years, and it effectively blew up the workday in Washington.

I don’t have a lot to say about the earthquake itself.  When it hit where I was, it was more puzzling than terrifying. The walls of the building were swaying a bit, and some books fell off the bookshelf, but that was about the extent of it.  It wasn’t until it was nearly over that I realized it was an earthquake rather than, say, a piece of heavy machinery run amok, and while I’m no seismologist I’m pretty sure that in a serious earthquake you have no doubt that that is what you are experiencing.  So we were pretty fortunate, all things considered.

What struck me, though, was how quickly people started turning to social media — first to confirm that what they thought happened actually did, and then to swap notes. When the quake hit, I stepped away from my desk to take shelter in a door frame — which it turns out is not really what they recommend you do in an earthquake anymore, though since we don’t really get earthquakes out here I didn’t know that at the time — and by the time things had settled down and I had returned to my desk Twitter, Facebook and Reddit were already all lit up about it.

The reason this struck me is that this is a fairly new phenomenon.  Up until 5 years ago or so, publishing on the Internet was sufficiently complicated that people who weren’t paid to do so (i.e. reporters) didn’t really do it “in the moment” much. They were much more likely to use more private channels like text messaging, because they were easier and closer at hand.  But now it’s so easy to publish online that people do it almost as a reflex. So when something big happens — or even something not-really-that-big-but-still-spooky like today’s quake — it takes only seconds for the reactions to start piling up.  They progress from expressions of puzzlement (“What was that?”) to requests for confirmation (“Was that an earthquake?”) to attempts to share what the writer experienced (“Earthquake knocked all the stuff of my desk!”) extremely rapidly.

Or at least, they do when people have the chance to make it through each of those stages.  In something minor like today’s quake, which caused no deaths as far as I’ve been able to determine, everybody who experienced it does.

But what about when it isn’t something minor?

Think back, for instance, to the 9/11 attacks, almost ten years ago.  While the Web revolution was in full swing by then, it was still well before the age of social media immediacy.  The people who lived through those attacks, for the most part, were limited to sharing their experiences with family and close friends via channels like text messaging.  For everyone else — everyone who didn’t know somebody in the World Trade Center, or the Pentagon, or on one of the doomed airliners — the tragedy unfolded the way we’re used to seeing tragedies unfold: on the news.  Television, with its visceral impact, came the closest to communicating the horror of the moment, but even there the horror was mediated for us by news anchors and editors. It came to us pre-processed, at least in part. We couldn’t look directly into the maelstrom itself.

The next time a tragedy of that scale happens — and one will happen, if not by act of war than by act of God — we will be able to look into the maelstrom. As horrible as it is to contemplate, we will have front row seats. We will be able to watch individuals struggle to survive, each status update or tweet illuminating them briefly like a flash of a strobe light, capturing them for a fleeting moment before it fades.  Some will make it out and complete their stories with a tale of deliverance; others will not, their stories ending at the moment of their last communication before they were engulfed by catastrophe. Some will disappear before they even realize what happened to them, their last footprint on Earth being a message asking “What was that?”

Some will even die because they focused more on their posting or tweeting or whatever than they did on the need to escape. This may sound improbable — who would waste time futzing with their smartphone when their life is at stake? — but I guarantee you that it will happen.

It’s even happened already. When the Pacific Ocean tsunami that devastated Japan earlier this year finally hit our West Coast, it was so weakened by its long trip across the ocean that it posed no real threat to the people there. But one man died anyway, because rather than heading for high ground like you’re supposed to do in a flood situation, he headed towards the shore.

Why?

To take pictures.

When this happens on a large scale — when what bureaucrats dryly refer to as a “mass casualty event” hits the social media age — I have no idea how we as a culture will process it.  To some it will seem voyeuristic and gruesome. To others it will seem immediate and authentic: a tiny marker left behind by a lost soul reading “I was here.”

Eventually, of course, the immediacy of it all will dull, and it will decay into compost for historians’ doctoral dissertations. But for a long time it will feel like a punch in the gut, even to those whose only experience of the disaster was vicarious, sitting at a desk or behind a cellphone somewhere watching it all unfold, moment by terrible moment.

I have no idea what all this means.  Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.  Maybe it’s just the latest chapter in our long-ish history of struggling to come to terms with the technology we create; maybe six thousand years ago there was an Akkadian scribe looking at clay tablets with a similar sense of foreboding.  I don’t know.

All I know is that we’re never ready for the future until it walks up and introduces itself. And I’m not sure I’ll be ready for this aspect of the future even then.

HP: We’re Not Selling PCs Or Phones Anymore! Except When We Are

Posted on August 22, 2011

So just yesterday I wrote about the blinding incompetence of HP’s management, and now today come two stories with further evidence. It’s like they can’t help themselves.

From the Wall Street Journal, “H-P Unveils New PC Days After Disclosing Plans to Shed Unit”:

Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled a new desktop computer Monday, just days after the technology company disclosed plans to sell or spin off its personal-computer business…

H-P said the latest all-in-one Elite business model can deliver up to 15% faster hard-drive access, 40% better performance and less downtime as a result of remote information-technology management capacity. The computer, which is energy-efficient, also is equipped for remote face-to-face communications and online conference center capabilities.

And from AllThingsD, “HP: webOS Still Coming to PCs and Printers, Pre3 Launching in ‘Limited’ Markets“:

Even as the rest of the world is writing the obituary of webOS, Hewlett-Packard insists the software has a bright future. It’s just not clear what that future is…

The company still plans to put webOS on PCs and printers, for example.

“We are continuing with our webOS-on-Windows work,” [webOS chief Stephen] DeWitt said, adding that the company will honor its previous commitments, but declining to say when we will see the software show up on PCs and printers. “We’ll announce exactly what the rollout is when we are ready to.”

HP also plans to issue further updates for both its Veer phone and for the TouchPad.

The company is also doing a “limited” launch of the Pre3 phone.

“Pre3 is being launched in very selective areas,” DeWitt said. “We’re not broadly launching Pre3.”

Guys. Let me make this really simple for you:

Either you’re in the PC business, or you are not.

Either you’re in the tablet business, or you are not.

Either you’re in the phone business, or you are not.

You just told the world you were getting out of the PC business. Why on earth would you roll out a new model PC after saying that?

You just told the world you were getting out of the mobile business. Why on earth would you do a launch of a new Pre3 phone — even a “limited” or “selective” one — after saying that?

Maybe you’ve had these things in the pipe for a while and now they’re sitting around a warehouse somewhere. Guess what — nobody will want them.  Maybe they might have wanted them a week ago, before you made your big announcements, but now, who would possibly buy them?  Who’s going to buy a device that’s orphaned at launch?

(Unless you’re planning on mega-discounting them like you did the TouchPad, that is. But you can only go to that well so many times before the HP brand starts looking like the dollar store of the tech industry.  Not exactly an image that will fetch top dollar from prospective buyers.)

For that matter, why did you say anything at all before you had a buyer lined up? Why go public with your desperation to make a deal before the deal is done? Now every prospective buyer knows you need them a lot more than they need you.  There’s not much negotiating leverage to be had from that position.

What a circus.  Unbelievable.

The TouchPad Fiasco, Or HP Perfects The Art Of The Own Goal

Posted on August 22, 2011

It’s hard to believe if you live in the good old U.S. of A, but soccer is the world’s most popular sport. And there’s a soccer term that’s been stuck in my mind as I’ve watched HP flounder over the last week as to the future of webOS — the “own goal.”

An “own goal” is exactly what it sounds like.  It’s when a player kicks the ball into his or her own team’s goal, thereby scoring a point for the opposition.

In other words, it’s about the dumbest Goddamn thing you can do on a soccer field. Which is a pretty good metaphor for how HP has been managing its mobile portfolio over the last week.

For those who haven’t been following this story, here’s a brief recap…

FAILURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In 2009, ailing handheld organizer king Palm tried to reinvent itself by launching a new operating system for mobile devices called “webOS” to compete with Apple’s iPhone.

webOS won acclaim for its easy-to-use interface, but the hardware of the devices Palm sold it on didn’t match the quality of the software, and the turnaround bid failed. After a year Palm put itself, and webOS, up for sale. They were purchased by HP for $1.2 billion.  The world waited to see what HP would do with its new toy.

And waited. And waited. And waited some more.  It took HP almost a year to get a device using webOS on the market (the under-achieving HP Veer), but even as they rolled that first device out HP was telling the world that the real show would be coming with their next device — a tablet, called “TouchPad”, that would take Apple’s iPad head on.

Six months later, the TouchPad finally came out. And it sort of sucked — the kiss of death for a device priced at the same level as the market-defining iPad.  Sales were poor, with Best Buy in particular reportedly being stuck with hundreds of thousands of unsold TouchPads. The TouchPad was shaping up to be an historic lemon.

It was clear to anyone with eyes to see that HP needed to change its webOS strategy.  When the change came, though, its shape proved surprising: in a dramatic shift of priorities, HP abandoned webOS altogether, along with its entire PC division. Overnight, webOS went from the key to HP’s mobile strategy to an item in a yard sale. Driving that point home, HP announced that in order to get rid of those unsold TouchPads it was cutting their prices to fire-sale levels: $99 for the 16GB model, $149 for the 32GB. They might has well have put a sign up in the webOS window: Going out of business. Everything must go.

DEAD MAN WALKING

And that’s when something interesting happened.

As word of the deep discount spread, the TouchPad suddenly became… in demand. Lines started forming at retail stores to snap them up. Online outlets ran out of stock. HP’s own online storefront crashed under the sheer number of people lining up to buy one.

Suddenly everyone wants to take HP’s lemon and start making lemonade.

This seems to have shocked HP, but it shouldn’t be particularly surprising. While it has its issues, the TouchPad is still a fairly competent tablet.  At the original retail price — $499/$599 — “fairly competent” isn’t good enough. But for $99/$149, “fairly competent” starts to look a lot more attractive; especially when the primary competition, the iPad, starts at $300 more.

So: HP cuts its loss and gets some of that unsold inventory off its hands, and consumers get a cheap tablet. Everybody wins, right? Not really. Both ends of that deal could have won substantially more if HP had simply launched the fire sale before discontinuing webOS.

THE FIRST STEP IN SELLING SOMETHING IS TO MAKE IT SEEM TO BE WORTH BUYING

Think about it. HP wants to find somebody who will take webOS off their hands.  Currently they are not likely to get much in exchange for it, because of their flat-footed announcement that webOS is dead.  They’ve been backpedaling all week, insisting that what they meant was that HP webOS devices are dead, but they plan to continue to invest in developing the software itself. Even if that’s what they really meant, though, their communication of that message was so ham-fisted that the world came away with the impression that HP was putting the ecosystem to sleep.

That message is deadly, because it instantly killed whatever remaining interest app developers had in building on webOS.  Nobody’s going to invest time and money building on a dead platform, and that was the message everybody got from HP. So what remained of developer interest — a key ingredient to determining the value of an operating system — vanished overnight.

Now imagine how things would have gone had HP run the fire sale, but simply said nothing about the future of webOS. Seeing the TouchPad discounted that deeply would have been a warning sign to some, but in the absence of a definitive statement from HP it’s not hard to imagine other scenarios that could result in such a move. (Channel-clearing to make way for a new, better device, say.) And developer concerns would be at least partially alleviated by the sudden increase in webOS market share. Suddenly there are hundreds of thousands of new potential customers for them out there! That would merit a closer look, even if the future of the platform seemed cloudy.

And HP could have taken those developments and used them as negotiating levers to get a better price for webOS. Rather than trying to unload a dead system, they’d be selling a system with a lot of new users and a new degree of developer interest. That’s worth more money than a dead system is.

That’s why this whole fiasco feels a bit like an own goal. Strategically, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea for HP to unload webOS; it doesn’t fit with their new focus on enterprise software, and it’s become abundantly clear since the acquisition that they have no idea how to manage and execute on an asset like webOS anyway.  But tactically speaking the way they’ve gone about handling that unloading has been terrible, because it has made it less likely than ever that they’re ever going to find a buyer.  They’ve effectively put a toe tag on the platform, and that limits the range of potential buyers to those with a taste for necrophilia.

All of which is a big part of why HP lost nearly a third of its market capitalization last week. It isn’t so much because of webOS itself — mobile is a tiny part of HP’s overall portfolio — but because of the incompetent, Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight quality that HP management has displayed in handling it.

That’s one hell of an own goal.

Tim Pawwenty Is Wunning For Pwesident

Posted on August 10, 2011

At Slate, David Weigel flags this excellent card Tim Pawlenty supporters are passing out in Iowa, presumably to boost his cred with the huntin’ and fishin’ crowd:

Maybe it’ll even work, I dunno. But I can’t be the only one who saw that and thought of this:

… which I sort of doubt is the effect the card was shooting for.

So anyway — if you run into him in Iowa, be sure to be vewy, vewy quiet. He’s hunting wadicals!

Apparently Challenging The Reader’s Masculinity Is An Excellent Advertising Strategy

Posted on July 27, 2011

Seen on Facebook today:

“This is a browser game for MEN! Are you MAN enough to defeat it? Most MEN try and fail! Play now and prove that you do not have a TINY PENIS! RAAAARGH!”

I’m trying to imagine what sort of copywriter would be inspired to write this sort of thing…

Amazon $5 MP3 Deals for July 2011

Posted on July 25, 2011

Eight recommendations from Amazon’s virtual bargain bin this month, including two year-named albums and one from a completely fictional band. You’ve got a week left to grab these before they go back to full price. So what are you waiting for?

	Disintegration The Cure
	Funeral Arcade Fire
	1999 Prince
	1984 Van Halen
	Murmur R.E.M.
	Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? The Cranberries
	Hail to the Thief Radiohead
	Dethalbum II Dethklok

In Which I Become The Only Person In The Entire World Disappointed With Spotify

Posted on July 19, 2011

Spotify, the music-streaming service that’s been huge in Europe for several years now, has finally come to the US.  By all accounts it is pretty awesome, so I was excited to get an invite (as it’s currently in invite-only mode) and check it out.

Which led to the following reactions:

1) You have to download a client application? The hell? What is this, 1998? When I turn this thing on is it going to start playing Third Eye Blind at me?

2) They have versions of the client application for Windows and Mac, which I don’t use; but not for Linux, which I do.

3) But wait! There actually is a version of the client application for Linux. Only it doesn’t work with free Spotify accounts; it’s for paid accounts only.  And since it’s a “preview”, it’s full of rough edges and doesn’t come with technical support. (Wouldn’t that be an argument for just throwing it out there for free users, then? Don’t for-pay users generally expect things like finished software and technical support? Hey Spotify — you could even make it open source and let us fix it for you, for free! We’re Linux users, we’re used to having that kind of BDSM relationship with the services we love.)

4) For Linux users who can’t use their Linux application, they suggest using their Windows client by running it under WINE. Like every other time I’ve tried to run a non-trivial Windows app with WINE, when I tried it, it crashed. Awesome.

5) You can use Spotify on your phone, too! And there’s even a client app for webOS phones (mirabile dictu!). But it’s only available for paid accounts as well. And not just any paid accounts, but only the most expensive paid accounts.

So basically my shiny new Spotify account is completely useless, unless I pony up some cash. Which I’m not necessarily averse to doing — I’m a happy Pandora One subscriber, for instance.  But the problem here is that I have to pay on faith alone that (1) having a paid account will solve my access problems, and (2) I’ll find the Spotify service compelling enough to justify the fees, since there’s no way for me to try the service sufficiently before paying to give me confidence on either point.

The amazing thing is that going with a Web application rather than building individual clients for every OS would solve 99% of these problems. Which is kind of why the download-our-client-software model has been dead on the desktop for a long time. I guess the popularity of native apps on smartphones has brought it back from the dead, zombie-style.

Too bad.

UPDATE (July 21): Progress! I finally got Spotify’s Windows client running under WINE. However, to do so, I had to nuke my entire .wine directory (in which all my old preferences were stored) and create a new one.  So if you’ve been having trouble with Spotify + WINE, you might want to try setting up a clean WINE profile and trying it with that before giving up on it entirely.

The HP TouchPad, Or, HP Shows How To Ruin A Good Thing

Posted on July 11, 2011

So HP has finally released their first major device based on webOS — the cool mobile operating system they acquired when they bought Palm, Inc.  It’s called the HP TouchPad.  And by all accounts, it kind of sucks.

Well, sucks may be a little too harsh.  It isn’t that it sucks, really; it’s that it doesn’t stand out in any significant way when set alongside its primary competition, Apple’s iPad.  And since the iPad and the TouchPad both cost about the same, and Apple indisputably has the larger application ecosystem, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why anyone would actually buy a TouchPad.

Which makes me sad.  I bought the original webOS device, the Palm Pre, back in 2009; partly because I needed a new phone, having dropped my last one into the Shenandoah River the weekend before, but partly because I had heard a lot of good things about the Pre being a particularly easy-to-use and developer-friendly device, and I wanted to try it for myself.

It turned out that most of those good things I’d heard were true, mostly because of webOS, which surprised me with how compelling a system it turned out to be.  Unfortunately, there were also a fair share of annoying things as well, mostly due to the original Pre’s hardware being of mediocre quality at best. I still have my Pre, and use it every day happy with my purchase, but I could understand why others chose to go for iPhones or Android devices instead.

That mediocre hardware was a sign of things to come; Palm had pinned their hopes for survival on the success of the Pre, but it never really caught on — the hardware was one reason why, along with poor developer relations and lousy marketing — and so Palm floundered for a while before being bought by HP last year.

When that acquisition was made, it seemed like it had some real potential.  Palm may not have been able to make solid hardware, but HP has a good reputation in that line, and HP has the budget to do real marketing that Palm never did.  So, the thinking went, maybe Palm going under would end up being a Good Thing for webOS, if the result was a wider range of more reliable devices running it.

Well, we’re now a year out from HP’s acquisition of Palm, and it’s pretty clear now that this thinking was deeply mistaken.  Jean-Louis Gassée has a good run-down of HP’s baffling decisions about how to manage webOS as an asset since the acquisition, but they all boil down to basically the same thing: HP, to be blunt, seems to have no idea what it wants to do with webOS. Which is essentially suicide, since developers — who are already going to be deeply skeptical of betting their futures on a platform with marginal market share — aren’t going to touch a platform with a ten-foot pole if the platform vendor seemingly can’t get their act together even far enough to decide whether their platform belongs on tablets, phones, or printers (!).

Beyond bad leadership, though, HP has also failed on execution.  There was a lot of new interest in webOS when HP bought Palm; people were genuinely curious to see what HP would do with its new toy.  Rather than capitalize on that attention by laying out a vision for its place in the mobile world, though, HP proceeded to say absolutely nothing (except for occasional mentions by HP CEO Leo Apotheker, which frequently contradicted each other)  for ten months — and then, when they did say something, it was only that they wouldn’t have any webOS products on offer until four or five months later.

That just doesn’t cut it.  In the mobile world, where there’s a major new Android device coming out every month, that’s too slow to be competitive. By the time the first HP-branded webOS product (the HP Veer) made it out the door, the devices it was competing against were leaps and bounds ahead of it.  The TouchPad seems to have similarly suffered from its even lengthier gestation; it looks a lot more compelling when compared to the original iPad than it does against the iPad 2.

webOS is beginning to feel like a classic geek tragedy; a brilliant product, doomed to obscurity by poor management, first at a cash-strapped underdog and then at a global behemoth.  Even the team that created it has been dismantled; design lead Matias Duarte went to Google to work on Android, and Rich Dellinger, who designed webOS’ cleverly unobtrusive notification system, got snapped up by Apple.  So while the good thinking that made webOS so interesting will likely prove to be quite influential in mobile software design, it’s unlikely that it will do so as part of webOS.

Indeed, if webOS feels like anything today, it feels like Commodore’s groundbreaking AmigaOS — another product that managed to inspire a generation of software developers while simultaneously failing to make any kind of dent in the marketplace. I don’t know how HP shareholders feel about the idea of their money going to make HP the 21st-century version of Commodore.  But if I was one of them, I wouldn’t be too happy about it.

Actual Conversation Overheard In The DVD Department Of Best Buy

Posted on July 5, 2011

Above: not a ventriloquist

(Editor’s note: I swear this conversation took place right in front of me.)

CUSTOMER (to CLERK): Excuse me, could you help me find a movie that stars a particular actor?

CLERK: Sure!  Which actor?

CUSTOMER: Jeffrey Dahmer.

(Pause, then:)

CLERK: Excuse me?

CUSTOMER: You know.  Jeffrey Dahmer.

CLERK: …

CUSTOMER: Jeffrey Dahmer! He mostly does comedies.

CLERK: Comedies?

CUSTOMER: Yeah. He’s a ventriloquist, I think.

CLERK: A ventriloquist?

CUSTOMER: Yeah.

(Pause, then:)

CLERK: Ma’am, I think the person you’re thinking of is Jeff Dunham.

CUSTOMER: Who?

CLERK: Jeff Dunham, not Jeffrey Dahmer.  Jeff Dunham is a ventriloquist. Jeffrey Dahmer ate people.

Amazon $5 MP3 Deals for June 2011

Posted on June 23, 2011

Not a whole lot going on this month in the Amazon bargain bin, unfortunately, especially since this blog doesn’t do “Greatest Hits” albums.  But there’s a few good picks to be had, including Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York, which in my opinion is one of the all-time classic alternative albums, and Radiohead’s The Bends, which is right up there too.  Oh, and the new Death Cab for Cutie album, also.  So not a completely bad month.

Without further ado:

	Unplugged in New York Nirvana
	The Bends Radiohead
	Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo Devo
	Codes and Keys Death Cab for Cutie
	Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace Foo Fighters
	Mellow Gold Beck

“This Is Bob Costas. You’re An Asshole”

Posted on June 14, 2011

New-ish ESPN sports site Grantland has a great behind-the-scenes story on the rise and fall of The National Sports Daily, a wild attempt by a Mexican billionaire and an American publisher to build a new type of newspaper built around sports coverage that lasted for just 18 months in 1990 and 1991. The story is built as an oral history, told by the people who lived it.

It’s an interesting read even if you don’t care about sports, because it goes into lots of great detail about the operational challenges of starting a media organization right at the dawn of the computer age — a moment when technology seemed to open incredible new horizons, but which required you to deal with cranky 9600 baud modems and $2,000 fax machines to get there.

Plus, as a short guy myself, I cracked up at this anecdote about famously short (and famously touchy on the subject) sports journo Bob Costas:

David Granger (Executive Features Editor): I edited Norman [Chad]. He did a piece about Bob Costas, and every time he’d mention him he’d refer to him as “the 5-foot, 5-inch Bob Costas.” NBC called complaining we’d gotten Costas’ height wrong.

Norman Chad: I told the publicist, if I run this correction — The National misreported Bob Costas’ height, he’s 5-8, not 5-5″— at the end of the column, I don’t think it looks good for Bob.

Granger: Every time Chad wrote about Costas in a column for The National after that he would talk about “Bob Costas, who was not 5-feet, 5-inches tall.”

Chad: One morning my phone rang. I go, “Hello?” And I hear, “Norman Chad?” I go, “Yes.” The voice goes, “This is Bob Costas. You’re an asshole.”

The Stupid, It Burns

Posted on June 3, 2011

Saw this ad from Sony in Facebook today:I guess the copywriting geniuses at Sony’s ad agency haven’t figured out yet that life is already in 3D.

And there’s not even any special glasses required!

Amazon $5 MP3 Deals For May 2011

Posted on May 18, 2011

Well, another month has passed, and so we have a new batch of $5 albums in Amazon’s digital bargain bin.  And this month, the bin’s gotten much larger — there’s more than 1,500 albums on sale!

Which sounds awesome, until you start digging through them and realize that the vast majority are crap.

There’s some decent ones in there, of course — statistically speaking, it’d be surprising if there weren’t a few good records out of a sample of 1,500+ — but generally speaking, this month’s selection is a vast, howling wasteland.  Even the few good albums are a letdown; most of them have been part of a previous month’s selection of discounted albums, so there’s a distinct feeling of déjà vu. And the ones that aren’t good are really, really bad; I’m talking complete-discography-of-New-Kids-On-The-Block bad.

Kind of a disappointment, in other words.  But in spite of all that, we soldier on, so that you don’t have to!

So without further ado, here’s the best of a bad crop:

	We, The Vehicles Maritime
	18 Moby
	The Queen Is Dead The Smiths
	The Suburbs Arcade Fire
	The King of Limbs Radiohead
	Odelay Beck
	Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Spoon
	Moon Safari Air
	Mezzanine Massive Attack
	Sound of Silver LCD Soundsystem
	Neon Bible Arcade Fire
	Monster R. E. M.
	The Downward Spiral Nine Inch Nails
	News of the World Queen
	Paul’s Boutique The Beastie Boys
	OK Computer Radiohead
	Magnolia: Soundtrack Aimee Mann, Various Artists
	Holy Diver Dio
	Funeral Arcade Fire
	Appetite For Destruction Guns ‘N Roses
	Gimme Fiction Spoon

Jason Recommends: Back To The Future: The Game

Posted on May 10, 2011

Everybody knows that adventure games are dead. Right?

Yeah, that’s mostly right.  Certainly they’re nowhere near as prominent in the marketplace as they were in the late ’80s and mid ’90s, when Sierra On-Line (King’s Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Gabriel Knight) and LucasArts (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Grim Fandango) were in their glory.

Over the last few years, though, Telltale Games has been quietly pushing back on this bit of conventional wisdom. They’ve built a nice little niche for themselves in the gaming marketplace by making classic-style adventure games with modern 3D flair, based both on original stories of their own and on clever adaptations of familiar properties.  They deliver their games in bite-sized “episode” chunks, and give them a nice price — individual episodes are usually around $9, with a full 5-6 episode “season” running from $25-30.  (And if you buy one episode and then later decide you want the whole season, they’ll usually knock $5 or so off the full season price.)

Lately I’ve been playing through one of Telltale’s newest series, Back to the Future: The Game, and it’s good enough that I wanted to recommend it to you. Based on the hit movie trilogy, the game follows Marty McFly and Doc Brown through five new adventures along the space-time continuum.

Normally games licensed from popular movies are mediocre cash grabs at best, but in this case, Telltale really went the extra mile to make the new game feel like a real, bona-fide set of Back to the Future stories.  They worked with Bob Gale, producer and co-writer of the movies (he wrote Part 2 and Part 3, and co-wrote the original film with director Robert Zemeckis) to develop the story.  They licensed the movie’s memorable score and soundtrack, right down to the ’80s Huey Lewis tunes.  And they got Christopher Lloyd to reprise his role as Doc Brown.

While Michael J. Fox wasn’t able to voice Marty McFly (for obvious reasons), he gave Telltale the permission to base their in-game model of Marty on his likeness — a big deal, because he’s generally been very protective of these likeness rights to avoid having his face plastered on a ton of cheap junk — making it possible for the Marty McFly in the game to look like, well, Marty McFly. And the big surprise is the voice actor that Telltale found to step into his shoes as Marty: a young actor named A.J. LoCascio, who absolutely nails it. It’s really kind of spooky how accurate his Marty voice is.  Here, have a listen:

Heavy.

Anyway, I’m about halfway through the season so far, and it’s been great fun — the writing is sharp, the puzzles are clever, and overall it’s a great example of true adventure gaming in the classic style.  You should check it out.

But you won’t, because you’re cheap.  Right?  Of course.  I know you too well.

However! Turns out that Telltale’s taken away your last excuse — you can now download the first episode completely free.  Just go to Telltale’s BTTF site and click the big “get it free” button to download it for PC or Mac. (Or you can also get it for your iPad from the App Store, though it’ll cost you $6.99 there, presumably because if you can afford an iPad you have no right to be whining about games being expensive.)

So, if you remember the grand old days of adventure games, or just enjoy a good story and a good puzzle, give Back to the Future: The Game a spin.  You won’t be disappointed.

Mother’s Day

Posted on May 8, 2011

I miss you, Mom.

Advertising: Not Quite Personalized Enough

Posted on May 3, 2011

My mother’s dead, you insensitive bastards.

But thanks for the automated annual reminder. You have no idea how much it makes me want to buy a freaking iPod.

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead

Posted on May 1, 2011

… killed today in a raid by U.S. special forces on a mansion in Pakistan, 3,520 days after his attacks on September 11, 2001 killed thousands of Americans.

Good riddance.

Let his death be a lesson to all those who would strike at the United States.  It may take time. We may suffer setbacks. But America will never forget your crime.  And America will never stop coming for you.

Until we get you.

Ubuntu 11.04: Everything Old Is New Again

Posted on April 29, 2011

So the latest version of my OS of choice, Ubuntu, came out yesterday.  Most of the updates Ubuntu 11.04 (development codename “Natty Narwhal”) introduces are pretty pedestrian (Firefox gets bumped to 4.0, for instance), but there’s one really major change: an entirely new desktop environment, called Unity.

Unity is intended to merge the desktop interfaces of desktops, netbooks, and touch-based devices like tablets into a single experience that works great on all types of machine.  To this end, it introduces several big changes to the GNOME user interface, two of which I’d like to focus on in particular.

The first of these is the “Launcher.”  The Launcher is a vertical ribbon that runs down the left side of the screen and contains icons for all your most frequently used applications, tasks and locations.  It replaces the familiar menu options in the top panel that are typically used to start applications in GNOME.

The second is the “Dash.”  The Dash provides an alternate, less mouse-oriented way to launch applications and open documents — rather than mousing through a series of menus, you just invoke the Dash and start typing the name of what you’re looking for.  The Dash shows you a list of everything on your system that matches what you’ve typed, and the list narrows down with each new letter you type. It usually only takes three or four letters to find what you’re looking for.

There’s been a lot of grumbling in the Ubuntu community about these changes (as happens any time anyone ever changes anything in a much-used software package), but I think that conceptually they’re both good ideas; they simplify the UI and make it easier to find the things that you use most frequently, which is a good thing. In a traditional menu bar, every menu item has the same prominence, so it’s easy for the few things you really need to get buried in lots of stuff you don’t.  The Launcher and the Dash help cut through the cruft.

So my beef with them isn’t that they’re bad ideas.  My beef with them is that they’re bad implementations.

See, I’ve been spoiled.  For years now I’ve used two add-ons that are so useful they’ve become must-have parts of my Ubuntu toolbox.  The first, GNOME Do, provides the same type-to-find interface as the Dash does:

Image by David Siegel.

But beyond that, what’s cool about GNOME Do is that it has a plugin architecture, so other developers can add hooks into it that connect it to all the applications you use every day — and lots have!  Which means that beyond just finding files and installed applications, GNOME Do can find anything. Start typing a person’s name and GNOME Do will pop up every context in which you know them.  Are they in your email address book?  GNOME Do can launch your email client and start a new message to them.  Are they in your Skype contacts?  GNOME Do can have Skype call them.  Did their crappy garage band cut a CD that they insisted on giving you a copy of?  GNOME Do can start playing it.  And all of these actions are equally easy to invoke — just press the down-arrow to scroll through the list of available actions and hit Enter to kick that action off. It’s really absurdly powerful stuff.

The second indispensable tool is Docky. Docky started life as a plugin for GNOME Do, but it eventually split off into its own application. As you might have guessed from the name on the tin, Docky provides… a dock:

Which is sort of the same thing that Unity’s Launcher does.  But what’s great about Docky is how configurable it is.  You can set it to be variable-width and centered, like the OS X dock, or fixed-width, like Windows 7’s taskbar. (I prefer the Windows 7 style myself, for the reason that Bruce Tognazzini identified ten years ago: when a dock or taskbar’s width is variable, as in OS X, the position on the screen of each icon in the dock will be different at different times depending on how many icons are in the dock at that moment.  A fixed-width dock with the pinned icons on one side means those icons will always be in the same place.)  Docky looks gorgeous, unlike the Launcher, which looks kinda meh. And like GNOME Do, Docky has a plugin architecture, so devs can build “docklets” and “helpers” to connect up Docky with your favorite apps.

All of which is why I disabled Unity when I updated my Ubuntu box to 11.04 — I already have a setup that does what Unity wants to do, only better. (Thankfully, while Unity is enabled by default in 11.04, you can easily disable it and continue to use other tools like GNOME Do and Docky if you wish.)

It’s good, I suppose, to see Canonical bringing these UI concepts to the general population of Ubuntu users; anything that has to be installed separately from the OS is never going to have the audience it would have if it came preinstalled, so this is going to introduce ideas that GNOME Do and Docky have been working on for ages to a whole new crowd.  It saddens me a bit, though:  first because Unity’s implementation of these ideas is currently not nearly as compelling as GNOME Do and Docky’s (though I’m sure it’ll get better in future Ubuntu releases), and second because Unity, by the simple fact of being preinstalled on the most popular desktop Linux distribution, may end up crowding out GNOME Do and Docky altogether, in much the same way that IE ended up crowding out Netscape. I would have been happier if Canonical had adopted and extended the GNOME Do and Docky projects, rather than competing with them.

UPDATE (1:49PM): GNOME Do and Docky developer David Siegel responds in the comments, with some context on how Unity and Do/Docky came to diverge. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who 1) built something as freaking cool as Do and Docky and 2) reads this blog is officially a rock star.

UPDATE (4:00PM): A commenter on Reddit says that Dash has a plugin architecture, too, called “lenses.” Which it turns out is true!  I’ve tweaked the text of the post to remove the implication that Dash can’t be extended. But there’s still one big difference between the extensibility of Dash and that of Do: there’s already a library of plugins written for Do that hook it up to all sorts of commonly used GNOME applications, where Dash is starting from scratch.

The Civil Wars, “Barton Hollow”

Posted on April 27, 2011

Have I told you guys how much I love the debut album by The Civil Wars yet?*  It’s titled Barton Hollow and it’s GOLD, I tell you, GOLD.

Here’s a couple of videos from the album…

“Barton Hollow”:

“Poison and Wine”:

If you want more freebies, they’ve put up a free downloadable album recorded at one of their live shows.

You can buy the album from all the usual places online; Amazon’s MP3 store has it for $7.99.  Or if you prefer you can buy it in both download and physical-media formats (including vinyl, for you damn hipsters out there) from the band’s Web site.

* Actually, I have. But I’m going to tell you again! Bwahahahahahaha!

Trove: Try Again

Posted on April 22, 2011

Longtime Readers know that I’m keenly interested in the idea of personalized news and content — see my posts on Newsvine and Hunch — so I was intrigued to see the Washington Post‘s online team semi-quietly roll out their own entry into that space, a new site called Trove, this week.

Trove is… meh.

The first thing you notice when you hit the site is a big thing called the “Channel Finder.”

(In Trove-speak, a “channel” is a subject you’re interested in, and your personal Trove is a collection of these channels.)

The idea of the Channel Finder, I think, is to help you build out your list of Channels by posing you a question along the lines of “which are you more interested in: paleontology, or Sarah Palin?”

At first I thought this was pretty clever, because it felt like a Hunch-style attempt to learn more about you and then deliver content tuned to your interests, using your expressed preferences as a guide to shape recommendations.  But then I used it and discovered it’s not nearly that smart.  Rather, it just takes the one you pick and assumes that you’re literally interested in that subject and that subject alone.

In other words, if you pick “paleontology” over “Sarah Palin,” Trove doesn’t take that to mean that you’re generally more interested in science and nature than you are in rock-stupid political Barbie dolls and start feeding you more stories on astronomy and physics and so forth and less on the political news of the day; it takes it to mean that you literally want to read stories about paleontology, so it creates a “paleontology” channel in your Trove that’s stuffed with nothing but paleontology stories.

As a result of this depressing literalism, after a few minutes with the Channel Finder, I now have a personal Trove that brings me the latest headlines from channels on “Typography,” “Mountaineering,” and “Cheese.”

Just what the world has been waiting for — a personal electronic newspaper that will bring you the hottest cheese news.

Not impressed.