A Tree Falling in the Forest

I wrote this about a year ago because I did not like the commoditization of content going on in the iTunes store. As games creators started to build for the store, I saw the train and I saw the wall. I just did not know how much track was in between. There seems to be a false sense of creator liberation, leaving the indentured servitude of the evil publishing overlords for a life of rainbows, unicorns and green fields of "direct" publishing and direct contact with the audience . However, as I pointed out over a year ago, the iTunes store is not the haven for creator profitability, it is really an aggregation of stuff large enough to create a compelling argument for the purchase of a high margin piece of hardware. This picture is not so pretty, but it looks like the work of Ansel Adams relative to Google's impact. Through Google's admob's division's domination of the app market on both iOS and Android systems, Google has turned game developers from in...

A few posts ago I promised to write about metrics based design. The kind of stuff going on inside the social game companies who like to listen to the crowds over the designers. I was thinking and thinking and then I realized that even though it just does not feel right to me, I am a “suit,” not a game designer and I am not going to figure it out. But it led to me to think about a bigger issue. The power of the Internet and growth of social network brings an increased focus to the "Wisdom of Crowds." I've fallen for it too, writing about the hive mind and how quickly a group can come together to solve a given problem. It is easy to be seduced by the aggregated brilliance. I mean after all, how can you question the resource responsible for contributions like Metacritic, Cheez Whiz and Abba? The crowd wisdom concept did not start inside Zynga. It is attributed to Sir Francis Galton who held a contest at a county fair to guess the weight of a cow. While the guesses...

This morning we woke to news of President Obama heading to San Francisco to meet with these guys: *John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers *Carol Bartz, President and CEO, Yahoo! *John Chambers, CEO and Chairman, Cisco Systems *Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter *Larry Ellison, Co-Founder and CEO, Oracle *Reed Hastings, CEO, NetFlix *John Hennessy, President, Stanford University *Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO, Apple *Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO, Genentech *Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google *Steve Westly, Managing Partner and Founder, The Westly Group *Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, President, and CEO, Facebook They say he is going to talk about spurring innovation and the economy, but coming on the heels of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprising and with growing unrest throughout the Middle East, I would hope he is talking about something else. These are the leaders of the tools used to bring down the Egyptian Government. On the one hand let's hope he is trying...

I owned EA stock for a while. It happened to be wrong while for profit but a very good while for someone looking for a very good way to offset gains in the rapidly rising market. The stock flatlined since I sold it and I did not pay attention to it until I saw the "sell" articulated by Jeetil Patel of Deutsche Bank. Based on his past performance, this rating is a stronger buy indicator than the company's balance sheet could ever be. Forget the forecast he issued the day before the earnings release which was way off, and excuse him for not knowing EA would announce a USD 600 million stock repurchase - no one could anticipate that. These are only embarrassing. Focus on his reasoning. It is bordering on - I would really like to use the "R" word but it is so politically incorrect now and I do not want to say criminal because it really is not - fraud to hold oneself out as an expert and provide an analysis as stupid as Baron's reported him to provide. Patel’s ...