This weekend has seen some very intersting news announced: not just Intel's problems in India, but Microsoft's attempt to bully the Korean authorities.
I find it hard to believe that mighty MS can't create a version of Windows without media-player, particularly when they have also been asked to do this by the EU. In fact, I'm sure I recall that they released some sort of version in Europe that is media-player free.
I'm also fairly sure that the Koreans will not respond well to that sort of pressure. The whole affair should probably go some way to demonstrating publicly that MS has not really taken the comments of the US anti-trust settlement on board.
MS continues to bundle additional and somewhat unnecessary features into their operating systems, while failing to innovate in key areas of reliability, security, patch application, remote management and monitoring, etc.
Really, the last thing I want from MS is a new OS release full of fancy graphical bells and whistles, that achieve nothing other than destroy any hope of a consistent user interface for applications, slow down my computer and introduce security vulnerabilities. Whatever improvement goes on under the hood, to the home user that it what it is going to seem like. Server 2003 made great strides forward, but not much of that benefits, or could benefit the home user, who is still stuck running Windows XP, SP2 at best.
If Windows Vista were to be smaller, faster and more secure, I'd be cheering, but somehow I don't think that's what we're going to get. Pretty graphical effects have been available on the Mac and in X Windows etc. for years, but they haven't really done much to pull in masses of users for those platforms.
While it's not going to be in the intial Vista release, I'm also, not really fond of having the OS turn my file system into a database. I can already run a database if I want one. Surely, the OS should support applications, not be one? I don't feel at all comfortable with a database founded, searchable filesystem that doesn't offer absolutely rock solid security.
The idea of some script kiddie exploiting a vulnerability in the filesystem and then being able to perform quick and accurate searches on all my data is terrifying. There is no way I can take that risk, for myself, my customers, or their data.
I'd feel a little better about the indefinitely postponed database filesystem if the whole thing didn't look like a cynical ploy to attack Google and force users to use MSN search. They killed Netscape by bundling IE, and it seems they want to kill Google by pushing MSN search in your face from the moment you start your OS. This time they might not succeed, but the whole attitude leaves a bad taste: it's not innovation, it's repetition and duplication.
For now, I'm not very comfortable with where Microsoft is headed.
I was somewhat cheered to see that Intel have made a mess of their development schedule and in theory at least will be unable to match AMD in performance for at least another four years.
While I do feel some sympathy for the people working on development at Intel in India, it's hard to feel bad for Intel as a whole when they have historically been so good at maintaining their leading position through aggressive business practice.
An increase in the opportunity for AMD to capitalize on their current performance lead can only lead to benefits for consumers. Intel are still getting away with charging more for less than their competitors, and I for one am not buying their product.
It will be interesting whether Dell remain comitted to their 'special relationship' with Intel, or whether they finally crack and begin supporting AMD. It will probably depend on whether they think they will lose sales. I expect that even as I write, Intel is furiously reassuring Dell that they will pull something out of the bag to fix their wrecked release schedule. Whether Intel will actually manage it is another matter.
If I was choosing server hardware, I'd probably pick Sun anyway - but I have nostalgia for Suns so... I'd choose Sun not just for the fantastic remote monitoring, but also for Solaris. Linux is fine, but Solaris does offer a little more, and you do get the whole package properly supported. On the other hand it's probably easier to find s/w that builds under Linux more reliably than under anything else, so I do qualify my choice with a probably.
There always has to be a first post, and this one has the dubious honour of that role. I've created this blog partly as a place to grumble on about stuff that I've done for NetInvent, and partly just to vent my slightly eccentric views on IT, web design, games development and other assorted and vaguely related topics: like international issues, Doctor Who, speed cameras, Victorian roads, and the people who rule our world today.
I'm in Victoria, Australia, and right now I'm in my in-law's garage because I'm still waiting for the keys to my house. As garages go, it's quite decent, but after a few weeks I have found myself longing for somewhere else to do my work. No offence to mechanics everywhere, but a patio table in the corner of a garage is not the best place to do web design and coding.
Historically, I'm a games programmer of the PS1/PS2/Xbox/PC DirectX variety, but I've decided games development is a typified by hard work, stress and insecurity for rates of pay that often fall below the standard contracting rates for COM / ASP developers.
It pays very well if you are Sony, Square, THQ, EA, or Ubisoft, but if you happen to be an actual developer or development company, it doesn't pay so well. Yep, another year of massive record profits in the videogame industry, and another year of what seem to be record liquidations and redundancies in development. Meanwhile the overall quality and originality of games seems to decline.
With the massive resources that will be required to produce a PS3 or Xbox360 game, I forsee we will see a repetition of the pattern from before: products will converge on existing genres and patterns, publishers will be increasingly cautious about what they fund, the money made by the top few products of the year will increase, and the money made by all the other products will decrease. The people who went into games to be creative (such as myself) grow increasingly disillusioned as publisher caution strangles creativity tighter each year.
Chances are we'll see even more mediocre licensed titles, as cautious publishers decide that linking a movie license to a game is the best way to assure some sort of profit from a product.
Every year there are less games that make a decent profit: while the rest barely pay for themselves, or run at a loss, the few top titles take an even bigger share of the pie. This is not a good thing for publishers, developers or consumers. Consumer choice becomes an illusion and developers find themselves in an increasingly insecure position. Publishers become increasingly nervous: their security comes from spread betting, and the chances of a big win diminish every year, even if the jackpot is increased. The way the odds are headed, even a big publisher can go down if their (increasingly few) big releases for the year fail for some reason.
Of course, many people imagine that the life of a game developer consists of 'playing games' all day, and that it's light, easy work with low standards of expectation and slack discipline. Typically, it could not be further from the truth: developers often work outrageously long hours, with 70 or 90 hour weeks, no overtime pay, and continual aggressive pressure from slave-driver producers. Many of the artists are so badly paid that they would earn more money pushing a warehouse trolley, while QA and level builders may be even worse off. It's usually only the drive to be creative that keeps these people in their jobs, and yet creativity in the games business is always being stamped on by increasingly cautious publishers.
Not that the lot of the publisher is all rosy. They too have been squeezed hard over the last few years, and many badly run UK and European publishers are now gone. These companies were largely incapable of developing any good content for several reasons:
- they were frequently run by dilettante directors with little grasp of rigorous business practice who found themselves out of their depth when the game business scaled up;
- they were handicapped by a number of empire-building managers who were employed for the wrong reasons and had the wrong abilities (in other words nepotism was rife) - thus generally preventing any good work being done under them;
- they were unable to distinguish bad product from good (mainly because of the above points);
- they were unable to distinguish good developers from bad (guess why);
- if they found a good external developer, they might treat them so badly that they bankrupted them (because of point 4);
- they did little to help developers be better at dealing with technical, artistic, game-play or financial issues.
To what extent these problems afflicted any particular publisher (if at all) obviously varies, but there is scarcely any doubt that most publishers that folded up in the last decade had problems that descended from the top down.
It seems that even a decade ago we were seeing people in publishing complaining that publishers weren't really doing enough to help developers do a better job, and things haven't improved noticably since then.
The publishers that are still around are the least afflicted by these flaws, but may still cling to unsuccessful ideas from other industries and apply them without discernment. For example, there is still a tendancy for sales requirements to drive development management: a tragic disaster, as the sales departments often seem to live in a fantasy land where nonsense like feature lists and 'expected play duration' are relevant - despite these things being shown to be meaningless in creating a hit title, again and again. I'm also a little doubtful that they have any useful and reliable statistics about what makes a game successful. If they do, I fear they are not interpreting them well.
So, you probably have figured out that I'm not too happy with the state of the games industry. While I'd love to be developing games, I can't afford to self-finance such projects, and I don't want to be in a situation where I'm completely at the mercy of a single publisher. As the latter would be the only way I could even try to develop the games I'm interested in I've had to accept that I won't be doing it. If I do more games work, it will be, as before, work for hire, and they pay will have to be good for me to consider it.
For a few years now I've been thinking I should do web design and development, and that's what I'm involved in now. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on...
