Found via Jelena Misic. Click to see the source.
Yes, it’s an exaggeration, but a little trepidation about using “Reply All” will probably save a few headaches and even careers.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Over at Ars Technica, the always bang-on Cyrus Farivar has a great article titled How Zynga Went from Social Gaming Powerhouse to Has-Been. Zynga made their fortune — which eventually disappeared — by perfecting the moment of “The Pinch”, which is that point in time when you can make the switch from free to hitting up the customer for money.
I became terribly familiar with this concept during my days at OpenCola, which was during the Dot-com Bubble. A manager I used to work with there always talked about the importance of the moment when you yanked away “The Carrot” — the thing that lures customers — and switched to “The Stick”, which was your means of extracting money from them. Whenever you came up with a product idea, the first thing he’d ask is “Where’s The Stick?” “The Stick” ended up in our everyday vocabulary, and never to describe something nice. For instance, when we’d go catch a movie after work at the nearby Sony Metreon (as it was called back then), we’d look around and say “This place is all Stick“.
Zynga made its fortune by wholesale copying. FarmVille is a copy of Farm Town, and Mafia Wars is just Zynga’s own version of Mob Wars. It’s hard-coded into Zynga’s DNA. It’s through an ex-employee that we know that CEO and co-founder Mark Pincus infamously said:
“I don’t fucking want innovation. You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get your numbers.”
Games are — at least as far as sane people are concerned — supposed to be fun. The article has quotes from developers who remarked that fun wasn’t really part of the equation.
Here’s FrontierVille developer Slade Villena, describing the tension between making a game that made money and a game that was fun to play:
“During my five-month mark, it started turning sour when we were pushing a lot of code that was destroying the ecosystem—they were not fixing bugs,” he said. “At one time, I had 10,000 players trapped inside a quest. 10,000! The attitude was ‘Don’t worry about them.’ [Management] would rather grab new players, keep them for three months or so, get $5 to $10 from them, and those players would quit and leave.”
He was encouraged by management to make a certain item in FrontierVille more plentiful. The item would allow you to complete a quest directly, but you’d have to spend money to get the item. From the article:
“I wanted to lower the drop rate [the frequency with which the item appeared in the game], to make it statistically possible to get this item, to keep it scarce,” Villena said. “But then it started happening to every single item in FrontierVille. The main purpose of them putting [the rate] up so high was so people could spend the tokens, and the strategy for you to make a profit was to get players to spend those tokens as much as possible. You’re reinforcing a negative attitude, rather than reinforcing a positive attitude so people keep playing the game.”
Another developer quote in the article comes from Jason Pyke, who worked on Party Place and the never-released FarmVille 2 Mobile:
“You could always fight back, but ultimately what it came down to was: I could always argue that this would make the game fun, but I had a PM tell me—many times—that they ‘couldn’t get data on fun.'”
I’m not surprised by anything in the article. That’s all due to my participation in a panel discussion at the 2010 DIG Conference (DIG is short for digital and interactive gaming), a conference on videogames held in London, Ontario. I was a Microsoft developer evangelist then, and the panel was titled The New Social Gaming Paradigm Panel. One of my fellow panelists ran a company that not only made games like Zynga, but strove to emulate Zynga. My position was that Zynga epitomized a lot of what was wrong with the way people were making games. At one point, we had an exchange that went like this (I’m quoting from memory):
Me: But what about fun?
Evil, Zynga-worshipping soulless ghoul: Fun. Doesn’t. Make. Money.
Me: Of course it does! People buy Grand Theft Auto, and Rock Band and Angry Birds because they’re fun.
Evil, Zynga-worshipping soulless ghoul: You can make more from those games if you’d actually build it little poison pills into the game that you can monetize. Make them even more addictive. Make them viral.
Me: Look at the words you’re using. Poison. Addictive. Viral. In the world of medicine, these are all bad words. You never once used nice words like “fluffy” or “chocolate”. And you practically spat when you said the word fun. Games should be fun, and gamers should be treated with respect by game makers. [Turning to audience] I want the record to show that the Microsoft guy is the ethical one in this argument right now.
That’s one of my proudest moments as a Microsoftie.
Be sure to read Cyrus’ article, and learn from Zynga’s terrible example.
Well, that was quick: soon after the Windows Phone team posted a video meant to be a “light-hearted poke” at Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 5C and 5S, they took it down. The video may no longer live on the Windows Phone team’s YouTube account, but some people managed to grab a copy and post it on their own accounts. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here it is:
The ad had the title A Fly on the Wall in Cupertino? and features two Apple employee stereotypes bouncing between meetings with Jony Ive (where they’re wearing black T-shirts) and a CEO who’s an amalgam of Tim Cook and the late Steve Jobs (where they’re wearing grey T-shirts). The basic gist of the ad — Apple is out of ideas — is a good one to work with, but the execution is terrible; it’s “cringe-worthy” (to use The Next Web’s adjective), but even more important, it comes off as a little desperate.
Click to see the associated article and video.
Remember what’s going on at Microsoft right now:
Even Microsoft employees winced when they saw the video, and some even publicly disavowed any connection between it and them online. The only thing worse I’ve seen coming from the Windows Phone team was from when I was still with the company — remember the “funeral” for iPhone and Android when the not-quite-completely-baked Windows Phone 7 hit RTM?
The sad thing is that it is possible to poke fun at the other platforms and not come off as trying too hard, and that Microsoft and its partners have pulled it off a couple of times. The best example I can think of is the “Wedding” ad, featuring a wedding party getting into an out-and-out brawl over iOS vs. Android:
My favourite bits in this ad are the two Android fans doing the NFC bump and making a little sound effect at the same time, and this exchange between the two Nokia Lumia-using waiters:
“D’you think if they knew about the Nokia Lumia, they’d stop fighting all the time?”
“I dunno. I think they kinda like fighting.”
The ad’s so good that even the “making of” video for it has over 100,000 views:
Another good ad, this one from my time at Microsoft, is the “Really?” ad, which promoted Windows Phone’s “glance and go” design as the smartphone that would save you from your smartphone:
And finally, here’s the half-decent “the smartphone beta test is over” ad, which is a pretty good way of handling the fact that the move from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone made Microsoft seem as if it were late to the mobile party:
There you have it: historical proof that Microsoft can do better when it comes to promoting Windows Phone. The question is: will they?
I made the image above back when I was working at Microsoft and in the role of Windows Phone Champ. A number of people have recently asked for this graphic, so I thought I’d give it its own post here on Global Nerdy, with a search engine-friendly title so that it’s easy to find. Download and enjoy!
For those of you who don’t get the reference, it’s to a poster that hung above Fox Mulder’s desk in The X-Files:
Click the image to see it at full size.
With the announcement of the iOS 7 release date — Wednesday, September 18th — come the Golden Master (GM) releases of Xcode 5, the iOS SDK and iOS for developers. As Golden Master releases, they’re going to be the same as the ones being released to the general public via iOS’ built-in update function. As a registered iOS developer, you can get them ahead of the public so you can start writing (or rewriting) your apps for iOS 7. In this article, I’ll show you how to get and install them.
Point your browser at the iOS Dev Center. If you’re properly registered in the iOS Developer Program, you should have the options of looking at resources for iOS 6.1 and iOS 7. Naturally, you should select iOS 7 GM seed, after which the page should look like the screen capture below:
You can either click on Downloads or scroll down to get to the packages, namely Xcode 5 GM, iOS GM, and the beta of iTunes 11.1:
If you want to dive right into iOS 7 development, you’ll probably want to install Xcode first. On the other hand, if you want to play with iOS 7 on your iDevices, you want to install iTunes first, and then use it to put iOS 7 on them.
Xcode’s package is the biggest — about 2.5GB. Once you’ve downloaded it, double-click on it to mount the disk image, after which you’ll see this:
Drag the Xcode icon to the Applications alias to install it.
iTunes is the smallest of the packages, weighing in at about half a gig. The individual iOS 7 packages for the various devices — iPhones, iPads, and 5-gen iPod Touch — are about 1.5GB in size. Download iTunes and double-click on it to mount its disk image, after which you’ll see this:
Double-click on the Install iTunes icon to start the iTunes installer. Once iTunes is installed, launch it.
Download the appropriate packages for your iDevices. In my case, I downloaded the packages for the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 wifi-only model, and then double-clicked on both to mount their respective disk images:
With the package images mounted and iTunes running, hook up an iDevice and wait for iTunes to sync with it. Then click the button for your iDevice (near the upper right-hand corner of the iTunes window):
This will take you to the Summary page for the plugged-in device. You’re going to install iOS 7 for the device by restoring your iDevice using the iOS 7 package you downloaded. You can specify a package to restore from by holding down the option or alt key while clicking the Restore button:
This will bring up a “select file” sheet. Choose the .ipsw file from the disk image containing the appropriate iOS 7 package. Once you’ve done that, the installation process should take about 10 minutes, including the setup of your device.
In an earlier article, I wrote that Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer doesn’t lock her phone with a passcode. She’s breaking a cardinal rule of corporate smartphone IT, and she’s not alone. I’ve talked to a number of executives during consulting sessions, asked for shows of hands at speaking gigs, and simply asked people at meetings over drinks if they lock their phones with passcodes, and a lot of them simply don’t. Even those who use passcodes often go with terribly simple, easy-to-guess ones like this one from Spaceballs:
The story has stayed pretty much the same over the past couple of years, according to various surveys:
It’s the classic trade-off of security vs. convenience, or as Meyer puts it: “I just can’t do this passcode thing 15 times a day.” It’s annoying, and a lot of people see security measures as just another way that the IT department’s role is to obstruct anyone from getting anything done with technology, as shown in this Dilbert comic from 2007:
A number of people store their passwords in the “Notes” app on their mobile device, but the number source of information leakage is the smartphone’s killer app for execs: email. You can find out a lot about a company through an employee’s email, and the high-ranking the employee, the more valuable the email is. A number of companies — some you’d never expect — hinge all their planning on a handful of spreadsheets that get emailed around between a small group of high-ranking people; I’m aware of at least one Fortune 50 company with a division whose finances hang from a single emailed-about spreadsheet (which often goes “out of sync” because different people often edit it at roughly the same time). Email, accessed through a stolen phone, can prove to be the keys to the kingdom.
Someone from Yahoo’s IT department probably had the unenviable task of trying to suggest to Meyer that she lock her phone with a passcode. Perhaps s/he even cited the relevant line in Yahoo’s IT policy. I’m gld I’m not that person.
It sounds as though Yahoo’s IT department will breathe a little easier once she gets an iPhone 5S, which sports a fingerprint reader in its Home button. Like any other authentication system, it isn’t perfect. The “gummi bear hack” of 2002, in which fingerprint sensors were fooled by fingerprints embedded in gelatin in a reasonably well-known trick that’s been effective at countering previous generations of fingerprint readers. There are conflicting reports on whether or not it would fool Apple’s sensor, which was designed by AuthenTec, one of Apple’s 2012 acquisitions. At this point, flawed or not, I’m sure that Yahoo IT are counting the days until Meyer gets her new phone.
One of the realities of office life is that the “C-suite” and any other employees with a certain rank or “pull” at the company will be exempt from the rules that apply to the rest of us mere mortals. When these exceptions concern IT security, the best you can hope for is to limit the consequences of a security breach and make sure your ass is covered. Here are my suggestions, culled from actual practice at real companies where I’ve either pitched or done some mobile device consulting, if you’re dealing with an exec who refuses to use a passcode to lock their smartphone or tablet:
What if phones could be assembled out of detachable blocks held together by a base, like Lego? That’s the idea behind Phonebloks, Dave Hakkens’ concept and social media campaign for a modular phone that would allow users to customize their phone using the components they want. In order to turn this dream into a reality, Hakkens is rallying people to lend their social media reach by the end of October in order to convince hardware and software vendors to get behind the Phonebloks concept. As of this writing, he’s reached over 147,000 of the 150,000 supporters he’s seeking, and he’s still got over a month left!
i don’t know which hardware vendors will buy into the idea, but I think it’s an opportunity for Ubuntu Touch to shine.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer doesn’t lock her phone with a passcode, and to make matters worse, everybody knows it now. At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, she said “I can’t do this passcode thing 15 times a day.” I’ve heard similar from other “C-suite” people, whose rank often gets them exempted from IT rules that the rest of us mere mortals must follow. Unfortunately, these are the people who get the most sensitive email, from simple messages to spreadsheets with sensitive financial information and presentations outlining confidential plans and initiatives, and an unlocked phone is the gateway to all those goodies. As Tom Cochran, CTO of Atlantic Media (which owns the site Quartz) puts it, the leak of information through a smartphone is like a car accident: it may be low probability, but the cost is high enough to merit protection, whether it’s a seatbelt or a passcode.
The iPhone 5S’s thumbprint scanner is Meyer’s favourite new feature, and Yahoo’s IT department will probably breathe a sigh of relief when she gets hers.
Speaking of the iPhone 5S, here’s yesterday’s keynote featuring both it and its cheaper sibling, the iPhone 5C:
If you haven’t got time to watch the whole keynote, here’s The Verge’s “Under 4 Minutes” summary of the keynote:
And with these announcements, came the jokes:
