Spytap

Ask Australia if they'd like to download one game a month and max out the allowed data on their internet connection. Data caps are still common, and for every marketplace that has them, a digital-only marketplace is DOA.

> How is it different than Steam...?

The short answer is that the digital aspect of the two is similar, if not the same: digital games are sold once and can be used anywhere the user can log in to the account. That seems to be the same both before and after Xbox's 180.

The biggest difference is in the analog aspect of Xbox One. Steam doesn't have a physical sales component - it was created specifically to avoid that scenario. Xbox does though, but because it forces analog sales into a digital construct (via forced installs of games - not a bad thing necessarily, just a design decision they made) it forces the analog component to function by the same rules as the digital sales component.

Going all digital was always a choice with clear positives and negatives. You could avoid the negatives (one being no resale, for example) by sticking with physical discs for certain games. It was always a decision. However with that design decision to force the analog into the digital construct, Xbox one wanted to remove that choice.

With Xbox One's prior rules, physical copies of games could only be sold once. That's it. Then it would require an additional secondary sale to Microsoft to function. And the primary sale could only happen to select retailers. That's breaking what's understood and expected from that optional analog construct due to design decisions, without providing any additional value to the consumer.

Yes, forced installs allows mimicry of the all-digital experience and adds a certain amount of convenience, but doesn't allow any advantages beyond the all-digital experience. Certainly not enough to make up for the lack of choice in forcing consumers into a suboptimal construct.

The key here was subverting customer expectations and taking what used to be a choice and trying to A) force it into what MS preferred, and then B) trying to monetize that. It reeked of a money grab because it added no new value beyond what was already available via digital sales while removing established value for consumers.

tl;dr: It's different than Steam because Steam is one all-digital service while Xbox One tried to force all physical and digital sales into following the same ruleset as an all-digital marketplace.

Ah yes - I remember the great Pownce invite economy of 2007. Meanwhile, Jaiku was where we all threatened to move whenever twitter went down (again, some more.)

The biggest issues I have with AIT are as follows:

1) How much longer they make security lines due to how much slower they are, and having to funnel two metal detector lines into a single AIT machine.

2) How much more expensive they are than metal detectors.

3) How they don’t actually work any better than the cheaper metal detectors.

4) How those longer waits and compressed lines actually make a much more dangerous “soft target” outside of the screening areas. When you pack so many more people into a security situation and take longer to screen them, you have a lot of innocent people at risk.

The privacy concerns are less of an issue to me, as I choose to opt-out every time I fly (which is rather frequently, and unavoidable.) But given the overall cost, ineffectiveness, increased wait times, and increased risk as a passenger, AIT is a completely unacceptable solution.

The "lesson" is that the WiiU was sold out and on sale for less than two weeks. It's noncomparable data for any conclusion other than "the WiiU found its price point for the consumers who find it interesting."

What SOME successful people happen to do with the first hour of their day. Correlation != Causation.

Since I only have experience working with American broadcaster, my answer will come from that POV.

Realistically, neither of the two biggest reasons involves the protection of the dwindling home video market. Broadcasters make a lot of money off of their local affiliates (who pay them for the privilege of running their programming) and cable providers (who pay a subscriber fee for the ability to carry that network.) Each of these existing revenue pipelines brings in a lot of money - orders of magnitude more than any torrent site would. Now you may say "why would a torrent site disrupt their existing streams?" and the answer is that while it wouldn't, those existing streams are very protective of their domain, and would likely consider it an immediate breach of their exclusivity, and in the long term would use the existence of a "competing" product to lower their fees on renegotiation. So it's a lose/lose for any network or cable providers at the moment at least in the US.

That being said, it's their job to have their business model compete in the modern world - it's not the job of the modern world to adapt to their business model. Either they'll figure out a method to do so, or they'll die in 6-8 years and we'll build something better.

I wonder what the likelihood is of this being a solution for Augmented Reality contact lenses. The article mentions the possibility of it being used to build displays for eyeglasses, but that depends on a number of factors like pixel density that I can never tell whether reporters take into account.

The short answer is "it depends, but it's most likely transparent." In this case, yes - it's transparent. In theory, it depends on a number of factors.

It's an interesting theory though: critical mass matters less to users (in a business sense - obviously it matters from the expectations of community standpoint) than it does to other potential partners. The user expectation of Twitter is that it will remain free, but maybe it's worth something to Tumblr and FB to have access to that mass. If successful, it can get very interesting from a business perspective.