Categories
Marketing/Business

Brand Identity Funniness

The Social Customer Manifesto has a post about Lego(R) putting up a notice if you go to legos.com that the name that people have commonly referred to its products might not be preserving the brand. We are not supposed to call them Legos. They are Lego bricks or Lego toys.

The comments also mention that the use of the word Google as a verb also apparently dilutes the Google brand.

Hah. Hahahahahaha.

Come on. It isn’t like someone will call a competing product legos (lowercase). It isn’t like I will tell someone to Google something and watch them bring up Yahoo! or MSN without a second thought. How does it dilute your brand when they use the name for YOUR products?

When people say want to eat Chef Boyardee, are we going to go find them and teach them to not dilute the brand because they are really eating a Chef Boyardee food product? What about when someone says “Check out my new Nikes” when they are referring to their Nike shoes? Doesn’t “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” dilute the Dell brand since you are really getting a Dell PC?

Of course, there are some concerns. People DO call competing products Legos even though Lego doesn’t make them. People do refer to all tissue paper as Kleenax. People xerox copies of paper on non-Xerox copiers. So maybe it isn’t so funny.

But I still think of them as Legos and I’ll still google.

Categories
General

Change in Hosting

I just found out that my webhost will be changing the server I am hosted on this weekend. I will have to basically shut off the blog so that no moving parts are running while everything is moved to a new machine. That means no comments, trackbacks, or posts until the move is finished and the DNS entry gets updated.

Hopefully it won’t take too long, but hey, it isn’t like I am selling anything on this site yet so it won’t be a huge interruption in service, right?

Categories
Marketing/Business Politics/Government

EFF on DRM: Customer Is Always Wrong

Thanks to Blue Sky on Mars, I found The Customer is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music, the EFF guide to Digital Resctrictions Management.

Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as “copy protection” — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you’re not making any illegal uses.

In other words, in this brave new world of “authorized music services,” law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.

This guide “translates” the marketing messages by the major services, giving you the real deal rather than spin. Understanding how DRM and the DMCA pose a danger to your rights will help you to make fully informed purchasing decisions. Before buying DRM-crippled music from any service, you should consider the following examples and be sure to understand how the service might limit your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.

Categories
Games Marketing/Business Politics/Government

Evil Games Or Misunderstood?

1UP reprinted an article from Computer Gaming World titled Pop Culture Pariah: Why Are Videogames The Favorite Demon of the Mainstream Media?

While it was informative, I really don’t like the idea that we just have to wait it out until people who are gamers grow up and take over society from the previous generation. It’s a new form of media, and the previous generation didn’t grow up with it so they don’t know what to make of it except from what they are being fed from the news headlines and pamphlets. In a sidebar, CGW interviewed Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, and he mentions that games today are so complex that it is hard to get people to discover them in the first place, which is one of the things I think game developers need to work on in order to not only get female gamers but all non-gamers into gaming.

I remember my mother could handle playing Atari 2600 games since all she had to worry about was a joystick and a single button. In fact, her favorite game was actually Breakout which made use of analog paddles with a single button. When I got an NES a few years later and tried to get her to play Super Mario Bros, she looked at the cross pad and four buttons on the controller and immediately decided that it was too complicated for her, yet, using those same buttons, she loved Tetris on the GameBoy.

In high school I remember people complaining that the Super NES had too many buttons and that’s why they liked Sega Genesis better. Funnily enough, some of these same people were first in line for a Playstation when it came out. Anyway, I think it is interesting that controller layouts can do much more to intimidate new players than anything else. I mean, driving a car is a complex activity, even with an automatic. You have three mirrors, four wheels, one steering wheel, and a number of settings such as Reverse, Drive, Neutral, and Park, plus an entire world that you need to pay attention to in order to get to your destination safely. Yet driving a car isn’t that intimidating to so many people as playing video games.

Sit down someone who plays console games in front of a keyboard and mouse and tell them these are their tools for playing a game, and they’ll freak out. I know that I felt weird playing SimCity on the computer after first playing for years on the SNES version. Today I find it difficult to play Goldeneye 64 even though I was awesome on it when it came out. I’ve been playing computer games for so long to the detriment of my consoles. But the controls don’t intimidate me. I’m used to overcoming new controller layouts.

What about the new gamer? Too much effort? Too much frustration? Too much confusion? It’s no wonder that solitaire sells so well compared to most games.

While I think a big part of the problem is that people need a scapegoat, I also think that the complexity of games for non-gamers only furthers to mystify what is great about games and gaming. With games like Bejeweled and Tetris being as popular as they are among otherwise non-gamers, wouldn’t you think that most people would understand that GTA:SA doesn’t necessarily represent video games?

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Cathedral and Bazaar…and Gaming?

In the latest Escapist, The Contrarian: Roll the Dice mentions ESR’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

I’m reminded of Eric S. Raymond’s essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote about the differences between top-down, monolithic software development and bottom-up, open-source development. But the metaphor applies here too.

People don’t always get what the Cathedral and the Bazaar really represent, and it is weird because it isn’t like Raymond hid the meaning in metaphor and poetry. He says it up front: the cathedral represents software development by project leaders on high while the bazaar represents software development done by everyone. Both ways can be open source, not just the latter. It just depends on if the project moves in a direction on the whim of the few or with the natural developments of the many. That’s all it refers to.

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here; rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

Even so, people think the cathedral and the bazaar refers to open source vs proprietary software, Microsoft vs Linux, and all sorts of things. And apparently now it refers shallowness in video games vs the depth provided by tabletop gaming? Or the openness of a game as opposed to the rigidity?

I thought it was a good article, but the link to ESR’s work was a big stretch that doesn’t work.

Categories
Geek / Technical Linux Game Development Politics/Government

Blizzard Wins bnetd Case

Blizzard wins lawsuit on video game hacking. If you are not familiar with this case, basically Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden are two guys were fed up with Battle.net being unresponsive and decide to reverse-engineer their own version of it called bnetd.

My take? Just from the article, it sounds like if it wasn’t for the DMCA, the reverse-engineering wouldn’t have been considered that much of a problem. Of course, when you install Starcraft, you agree not to reverse-engineer anything anyway, so they are in violation of the EULA, but I think it is just another case of the DMCA being abused.

Blizzard obviously has a right to make sure that people aren’t playing with pirated copies, and they obviously have the right to dictate how people play online with their games. Apparently they have the right to tell people that they can’t find better service elsewhere. It wasn’t about piracy. The bnetd project had asked for assistance from Blizzard to make it possible to verify the copies used aren’t being pirated, but they were refused.

Power. Blizzard owns the copyright, and so they have the exclusive power to dictate what can be done with their copyrighted works. That’s fine. They want to control it and have the right to do so. But bnetd was not about allowing people to pirate the games. It was not about creating new games using Blizzard’s copyrighted works. It was about making it possible for people to play the game when they would otherwise have a high amount of lag. It was about a customer taking matters into his own hands to make it possible to enjoy the game he loves to play.

I personally think that bnetd was perfectly fine since it wasn’t software meant to facilitate copyright violations but to “interoperate” with Blizzard’s software. I mean, how is this situation different from the SAMBA project?

Some people have decided to boycott Blizzard games. I haven’t made that decision yet, but they don’t make Gnu/Linux games anyway so I guess I don’t have to worry about anything. I’m just getting tired of copyright owners thinking that they are also “customer owners”.

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Categories
Personal Development

Hearing Pavlina is Weird

I remember when Steve Pavlina started his personal development website, stevepavlina.com, and his picture at the top was kind of jarring. It’s like any online personality, I guess. When you read the words of someone online for any length of time, you might have some vague image in your head of what they look like, but when you see a picture of the person its…well, it’s kind of weird sometimes. I remember people on the indie gamer forums poking fun at how much of a nerd Pavlina is, and some noticed he looked a lot like the famous Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. Others just treated it like any of us would. “Cool, so that’s what you look like!”

It’s what I thought when hearing Steve Pavlina’s voice in his first podcast. “So that’s what he actually sounds like!” It’s not the voice I had in my head when I read his blog posts and articles!

Now, I’ll say that this is the first podcast I’ve heard. Ever. I don’t have a portable digital audio player so I would have to be in front of my computer to listen to them. I’ve also heard that most aren’t of good quality anyway. I thought it was kind of jarring how he paused mid-sentence a number of times at the beginning. Perhaps he was reading from a script? Idolizing Captain Kirk? Anyway, I am very pleased with it otherwise. I may have to start looking for more personal development podcasts.

It is an introduction to personal development, and he starts it by talking about how he was in jail for three days when he decided that he could grow to “lift the weight in front of him”. He talks about all the things he “went to work” on, such as his physical energy and his skills. In a matter of years he was able to completely rework his life. And he notes that there was no quick fix. It required thousands of hours of effort. And everything he is today is owed to the main in the jail cell years ago who made a decision to grow.

Finishing this blog post, I just heard it a second time. There is something infectious about a person who is enthusiastic and positive. Even if it is weird to hear their voice for the first time. B-)

Categories
General Personal Development

Goals for September

I had made up a plan for the next year or so that gets more vague and indefinite as the year goes on. It makes sense to me to do it this way since I have no idea what things will be like in a year, but I can have some very specific goals for the end of a year, such as having at least one game published and selling on my website. I had some very specific goals in August, but they didn’t all pan out. I will have to update my plans, but I’m not dejected. On the contrary, I am very pleased with my progress, even if it was slower than I wanted. I overestimated the amount of time I would have to dedicate to certain tasks, and now I have more experience when it comes to making plans.

One thing I wanted to do was make an actual website for GBGames. Currently, the main page is very sparse. I don’t actually have any games to put up yet, but I figure it would be nice to have something better than a text file with hyperlinks. I’d just prefer for it not to look so unprofessional and amateur.

Another thing I want to do is finish Oracle’s Eye, but judging from my progress over last month, I wonder if it would be too optimistic to think I can have it completed in a second month. I have to schedule certain days as development days and not deviate from it. Certain days of the week are already taken up by meetings, and some meetups are already scheduled for this month, such as the Chicago Indie Game Developer Club Meeting being held on Tuesday, September 27th, at 7PM at Dave & Buster’s. I’m also attending the Grand Rapids Schmooze on the 15th, 16th, and 17th, and since I don’t have a laptop, those days are definitely not programming days. I can, however, doodle, write up designs, and otherwise do things that require only pen and paper.

I’d also like to incorporate by the end of the month, which I don’t think is too ambitious at all. I’ve been looking into it, and at a recent seminar an entrepreneur I met suggested that I should meet with the SBA to ask for all the information I need since they give it out freely. My university has an entrepreneurship center that can help point me in the right direction for the resources I need. There are even places to go to get free legal advice.

There are other things I would like to do for the month, but the point is that I need to get a plan on paper so that I am not wasting cycles trying to figure out what to do next or what has to be pushed off to next month. By the end of the first week of September I hope to have the month’s goals specified and fleshed out. Set some goals, make a plan to achieve those goals, and then execute the plan.

Categories
Personal Development

The Ocean Is My Limit So It Must Be Yours, Too

After Blog Day introduced me to some new blogs. I started reading through The Master Smiled and found Crossing the Ocean.

In this one, the Master points out that those who sailed the oceans first had to ignore the warnings of those who told them they couldn’t do so. He then wonders what it is that the naysayers actually were really saying.

The Master thought for a while, than he continued: They were saying: The ocean is my limit, and so it has to be yours too.

How many times has a person been told, “No, you can’t do it. No one has every done it before” and then listened? How many people wanted to become artists or poets but were convinced that they should take business courses? How many people wanted to start their own businesses but were warned away by how “insecure” and “hard” it would be?

Fewer responded to “You can’t do that!” with “The hell I can’t!”

Categories
General Marketing/Business

A Business Practice I’m Not Liking

I was on a student health insurance plan up until July. Since I am no longer in school, I can’t take advantage of it anymore. I started to look for a new insurance plan earlier that month, and I figured I would cancel my plan once I knew I had a replacement. Unfortunately the search and application process took a bit longer than I expected and so I was forced to cancel it before I had anything.

No big deal. I just sent an email to eHealthInsurance.com, my “agent”, and asked them to cancel my Fortis Health Insurance plan. Simple.

I did end up sending it a bit later than the expiration date, but I made an assumption that I had a grace period. You know, because good companies don’t terminate your plans without saying, “Hey, we haven’t received your payment, so we’re letting you know that your plan is danger of being terminated.” In fact, they did send me such letters.

So I was surprised to find a letter yesterday telling me that they cancelled my plan on July 27th, 2005. Um, it’s frickin’ September, and you are telling me this fact NOW?!? A whole month later you decide to inform me of this decision? The letter’s purpose was to inform me that they cancelled it because of non-payment. Huh?! I CANCELLED it, and obviously they should have received the cancellation since they didn’t send this letter until a couple of days ago. I cancelled weeks ago.

The best part? The letter informs me that this reason can be used when I finally do apply for new insurance from any company.

Why not inform me that the plan was cancelled, oh, I don’t know, when you cancelled it?

Recently I had a similar problem with my cell phone bills not getting paid. I received a bill that didn’t mention that my last month’s payment was received, but I assumed this bill might have been sent a bit earlier. After all, my payments were handled by the phone company since I had a payment plan that allowed them to take what I owed them out of my account every month. Up until the situation I describe below, I was very happy with their customer service.

I forgot that I received a new debit card from my bank and didn’t think to update the expiration date on record with the company. When I noticed that my bank statement didn’t match what I thought I should have paid out, I called them and found out about this situation.

You know what would have been frickin’ useful? Getting notice in some form saying, “We tried to collect payment, but your expiration date on your card is not correct.” Or if they don’t have that information, how about just, “There was a problem trying to get payment. Please call us.”

But no. I had to find out myself. I didn’t get charged a late fee, but I was wondering if I would have been if I had waited longer to call them.

Both of these situations are my fault in the end. I made bad assumptions. I forgot to update my information. I admit that these were my problems.

But what kind of a business forgets that its customers might be human and make mistakes? These two companies aren’t the only ones either. In the past few months, I’ve been getting the feeling that companies don’t WANT to do business with me. Seriously, why do I have be the one who finds out what the situation is? Why can’t the business be proactive and inform me about what I need to do if I need to do anything?

Imagine if I would have been sent a letter the day that they cancelled the plan. I would have been better prepared to do something about it, especially if it potentially has such a huge effect on my application to other insurance providers. Imagine if T-Mobile would have told me that they had a problem collecting payment THE DAY THEY TRIED TO DO SO. The problem would have been resolved then and there. Instead a month went by before I knew about it.

I’m 24 and haven’t been working with services and businesses for too long. Up until a number of years ago, I wasn’t in charge of my finances. I’m disgusted with the level of service I receive at some places. Has this been the status quo, or is it a new trend with businesses? Why do businesses think that they are better for upsetting me about completely preventable things? After all, wouldn’t they get paid sooner? Wouldn’t they keep business from going to their competitors?