> at some point Samsung could simply say "no more"
I don't think it really works like that. Apple doesn't show up at the Samsung Shop every day and ask to buy the next day's components for their factory. They have long term contracts, a year or more in advance, often including huge co-investments in the factory toolings which will be involved in manufacturing them. Of course I don't know the details but I doubt Apple or the courts would look too kindly on Samsung suddenly declining to fulfil their multi-billion-dollar, multi-year supply contracts because they wanted to help their own competing products.
Samsung is very much wearing "golden handcuffs" in this situation.
This article is shockingly bad, from the very first sentence:
> There are only 3 enterprise-grade technology products I’ve ever seen that sell themselves. Two of them are from Apple
Huh? What "enterprise-grade" Apple product? XServe? Apple is nowhere in the enterprise, and thank god for that.
Here's some enterprise software that sells itself: Exchange. BES (well, used to). ProCurve. DRAC. Symantec Ghost. Did you see iTunes Group Policy Server anywhere in that list?
The article starts off stupid and only goes downhill from there. This guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
HR at some no-name start-up gets it into their head that some kid can make all their programming dreams come true. They made a blog post to lure him.
Later, HR at some other no-name startup makes a blog post proudly announcing that the kid in question applied there first, also making some annoying backhanded compliments about how their standards were too high or some lame shit.
Agreed. I thought the parent was ill served by editing the post and moderating the language, which for me more accurately described how I felt about the article and situation.
It seems to me that Nintendo was somewhat blindsided by the rapid consumer adoption of HD televisions. They've really dropped precipitously in price over the last few years, and as a consequence the Wii has aged very rapidly, perhaps more rapidly than expected. I for one would probably be in the market for a Nintendo system but the chance of my buying a non-HD console in 2012 is approximately zero.
I'm sure they are rushing to get the new system ready and when they do it'll be back onto the gravy train for Nintendo.
I think they were more blind-sided by the rapid consumer adoption of gaming on mobile devices that were not dedicated-gaming devices.
The Wii showed no sign of slowing due a lack of HD. It seemed to slow simply because it was an unexpected and wholly unprecedented mainstream success whose sales were simply not sustainable. It was always going to taper off and it's possible some of Nintendo's loss is attributable to not curtailing manufacturing quickly enough and having too much inventory.
But the loss story seems to be primarily a mobile one. Nintendo took a PS3-like approach with the 3DS, approaching a newly competitive landscape by trying to bury the competition with advanced technology. And, much like Sony, advanced technology alone wasn't enough to pull in consumers at higher prices. Things are definitely looking up as they've gotten more quality software onto the platform and prices have dropped.
But were I a stockholder I would be nervous about their plan to cut the 3DS price below-cost. Customers are ever-more price conscious with hand-held software and expecting revenue from $30+ mobile titles to make up for a loss on hardware is perhaps not a wise strategy. One would hope their manufacturing advances and thus cost cuts are not far behind the promised price cuts.
Similarly, the Wii U finds itself in a very different competitive landscape. It may well make Nintendo a solid profit even if it never achieves the breakout success of the Wii. But it may not start strong out of the gate, if the launch software can't make a compelling case for the technology. It's first-year profits may not be enough to offset another bad year from the 3DS.
I think that's only one factor. The major shift in gaming that's hit them has been consumers transitioning from purchasing £20-£40 shrink wrapped games to £0.69-£1.99 downloads with further revenue from in-app purchases.
I've not "yet" seen the signs that they are adjusting to this model on their next console. The one area they may be able to focus on that's not taken care of at the moment is the party/family type games that made the Wii so successful.
Nintendo is a very old company that has altered it's business many times, so there's not reason to believe they won't change themselves again.
I don't have high hopes for Nintendo; they have publicly stated they don't believe that $1-$3 downloads are where they should go and clearly they'd prefer to continue to sell that same content for $20-$50 in store. Nintendo will have to fail significantly before they change their business model.
Exactly, I don't under this "Nintendo will fail because they aren't offering games in the $1 to $5 range for the Wii like I see on my iPhone" attitude. We're not seeing any of the console makers considering such a thing. You can make a point like this for the DS market maybe but isn't it a success?
Plus I've seen talk of increasing mobile game prices to offset the increasing production costs.
When we see a game of the production and complexity level of Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, or Skyrim with a retail price of $3.99, only then will Nintendo fear for their console sales.
People didn't buy the Wii for those titles. The consumers wanting to play the "high gloss" AAA titles, played them on either the 360, PS3 or a high-spec PC. The Wii only got terrible ports of the MW series which I know of nobody seriously playing. The Wii sales figures for them are ridiculously low compared to the other platforms. As far as I can tell < 1 million sales.
Admittedly the Wii did have AAA games in it's own right (Mario Galaxy 1 & 2, Zelda, Metroid), but these appeal to a very different demographic. The games that really made the Wii successful were Wii Sports (45 million sales), Wii Play (23 million sales) and Wii Fit (18 million sales).
How many Wii's did Nintendo sell at Christmas time every year on the basis of Wii Sports or Wii Fit alone? How many of these are now collecting dust under televisions with no additional software purchased for them? The major thing Nintendo got right last time was not making a loss on their hardware.
I wasn't saying a $3.99 MW3 on the Wii, I'm saying that price point for that game regardless of platform. The idea that console makers will quake with fear because people purchase crappy games on their phones for a few bucks will translate to poor sales for consoles and console games is an amusing notion to me.
But I have to say I agree with every statement you made about Nintendo. Everything you said is true. Therefore Nintendo did exactly what they set out to do, to make a profitable and successful console. This makes Nintendo a failure how?
Most of the people I see who complain about the lack of software on the Wii are most likely not Nintendo's market. I have a Wii and my two daughters will happily play it whenever we let them, which would be every day if we didn't restrict it a bit.
The problem they may have with supposed lackluster interest in their console is when they release the WiiU. The question is whether people who are unhappy with their Wii will update to the WiiU. I can't say for sure whether I will or not. But people said the same thing with the GameCube to the introduction of the Wii.
Not directed totally at you, but in my experience most naysayers have no idea what they are talking about.
Thanks for the agreement & sorry, maybe I wasn't very clear.. :)
I'm not a Nintendo naysayer at all or suggesting impending doom for them either. I have every Nintendo console going back to the NES with a large catalog of (much loved) games on each.
I wasn't saying MW3 for 3.99 on the Wii (or any other platform). I was more saying the market for MW3 doesn't/didn't exist on the Wii (almost at any price point). High value console games will be around for some time yet, this just isn't Nintendo's marketplace, nor has it been for sometime. Big blockbusters will still sell, just only on non-Nintendo platforms.
Nintendo had a great strategy (red ocean/blue ocean) with the Wii that paid off greatly. It feels a little like their blue ocean isn't really there anymore. I see all the kids now sitting around playing Angry Birds on iDevices and it just feels that with the European/US economy in it's current state, parents are more likely to fill their kids on $2 purchases rather than $20-$30 ones. Especially when there will be a $200-$300 barrier to entry as well.
Nintendo will succeed in their homeland, they always will - I just wonder if they will do so well in other territories in the next couple of years.
No, but they openly embrace digital downloads. Nintendo came kicking and screaming and with a pretty poor end result. The Wii pulled a Blackberry – alienate your base audience and fall short on expectations.
I was once what you'd consider a die-hard Nintendo fan, but like a Blackberry user, one day you have to shed the melon collie and realize you're endorsing a company that can't pivot.
I don't think Nintendo could swing the $1 model anyway. They don't have a ubiquitous cellphone. They're just selling game consoles to people who want to play games.
Nonetheless, I would imagine there are an awful lot of (older) gamers for whom the retail price of the game is basically irrelevant compared to even one hour spent playing it. Bluntly, I want an excellent quality game that is going to richly reward the time I spend in it and I couldn't give a shit how much it costs. Doubly so when it comes to my family. Hopefully Nintendo (and the other console manufacturers) continue to cater to us!
It's not that people weren't willing to pay for Wii games above mobile game prices, they clearly did. The problem is that mobile phones became more powerful than the Wii and DS faster than Nintendo probably imagined, and the value was lost. The other factor about the Wii which worried me was that 3rd party authors didn't have the success that Nintendo's own games had on the console. It seems that Nintendo have only themselves to drive game innovation.
I've owned nearly every Nintendo console and my memory seems to be that this has been true the entire time. The highly successful games for Nintendo consoles have been Nintendo games, despite a few exceptions here and there. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that most people purchase Nintendo consoles for the purpose of playing Nintendo games. I personally see nothing wrong with that as long as the buyer's are happy with it.
Too right. All those photo features are just bloating up Photoshop! In fact, not just the photo features. I use it exclusively for writing essays, so all those image functions are just useless.
To be fair, though, it does a better job with my novels than Autocad does with my taxes. You can be sure that piece of junk got a 1 star review on the App Store.
Funny. But I don't think you tackle the above poster's point.
Photoshop is the defacto standard tool for all kinds of image processing (not just photo-editing), and many (most?) of its day-to-day users actually don't use a significant portion of its features, which just clog up their systems.
I for one use photoshop every second day in my line of work, and 98% of what I need it for I could have done in photoshop 5, 10 years ago.
From my experience too many people are using Photoshop for areas where they should be using Illustrator. In collateral such as logos or signage, vector-based files are infinitely easier to work with, yet I can't tell you how many times I've been given .psd files by designers tasked with such projects.
I'm probably the same as you. I think Photoshop 6 has enough of the features I require (bar the new content aware stuff).
I would be great to be able to switch off a whole bunch of the features and filters and god-knows-what-else-it-loads-at-startup stuff and only load them if I actually need them, or be able to switch them off completely with some sort of custom profile. If i need some hardcore editing then I'll go into advanced mode or something.
This video is fake, that has been established beyond doubt. But CGI, even "prosumer" CGI like this, is really getting better. Even at this level, people are relying on "hints" that a CGI transition has taken place - camera looks away, is obscured, or the picture is blurry.
Give it a couple of years and those distracting-from-transition tricks probably won't be necessary any more. Then what?
That's not the interesting part. Interesting is when you can do indistinguishable CGI replacement in real time. And then from there, when you can do it in the camera (or on a smartphone). Then what, indeed.
- How about broadcasting this image to the entire world?
- There is not point in that, images don't have value as evidence anymore, it'd just end up as an entertaining image that came from an unknown source at an opportune time.
I once read an account of an extended animal test of a toxic chemical compound on a number of monkeys. While most died, one demonstrated amazing resistance to the toxin and I remember being shocked when the result was simply noted as anomalous and the animal put to death without further investigation. It was only after I had read the whole thing did I finally realise the whole account was fictional. I can't find it now but that really opened my eyes to the suggestive power of authentic-sounding text.
Speaking of which, the Severed Heads' "Dead Eyes Opened" (1) is another effective example of authentic-sounding historical text.
What kind of business are you talking about? Your comment sounds very "labour vs. capital", is it relevant to the kind of start-up commonly discussed here?
If I started a business in Singapore (and I have been considering it) I would be hiring employees that I liked and respected, and I'd pay them fairly. I can't imagine that I'd fire them "at will" because I found someone a few bucks cheaper, or that they'd abandon me for a few bucks more. I can't imagine high-value knowledge workers playing these kind of games. Maybe discount supermarkets poach each other's check-out workers but rails programmers?
And even if you were hiring relatively blue collar workers, eg if you were setting up a factory, it seems to me that the fact of being in a hands-off regulatory environment would make employees respond even better to being treated well.
Just because in theory you can get away with acting like an asshole, doesn't mean you have to, or it is wise for you to do so.
You will find that sticking to your principles of paying fairly will be difficult, because Singapore is quickly becoming one of the most expensive cities to live in.
What you save in taxes, you will pay back many folds in rental and transportation costs. If you have never been to Singapore, you will not be able to imagine how much it costs to own a car in Singapore. Most expensive in the world, by far.
And because of the ease of hiring foreigners, you will find that there will be plenty of cheap rails programmers available... may not be the type you want, but you will find pressure from elsewhere questioning why you overpay your staff when cheaper ones are available.
And for a population conditioned to ill treatment, you will find that you will not be able to change the cynical culture overnight.
Lastly, if your competition is also based in Singapore, then you will be competiting with assholes with asshole level productivity and cost structures. Over the long term, you will win. But over the short term, you will be choked to death by the assholes who can promise more and cost less.
Thanks for your response. I didn't see it earlier, I try not to look at HN too often..
I've been to Singapore many times, and am fully aware of how much it costs to own a car. I live in Sydney, which if anything is more expensive than SG except for the car taxes. I do not consider Singapore to be expensive compared to Australia.
You refer often to appearances to others - investors, perhaps, comparing your costs of labour to other companies? What other oversight would you be experiencing?
Honestly I hadn't really thought about hiring cheap natives. Singapore is something of a hub for expats and I was thinking I would just invite anyone I needed.
If you have exeperience with running a startup style business in singapore I would love to hear about it.
I don't think it really works like that. Apple doesn't show up at the Samsung Shop every day and ask to buy the next day's components for their factory. They have long term contracts, a year or more in advance, often including huge co-investments in the factory toolings which will be involved in manufacturing them. Of course I don't know the details but I doubt Apple or the courts would look too kindly on Samsung suddenly declining to fulfil their multi-billion-dollar, multi-year supply contracts because they wanted to help their own competing products.
Samsung is very much wearing "golden handcuffs" in this situation.