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Yet another reminder that Gizmodo is little more than a haven for jackasses:
“CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop.”
Powering off a few static-display panels? Mildly amusing. Lets be honest.
Repeatedly killing off actual presentations, interrupting interactive sessions and generally wasting everyone else’s time, to then brag about not really being sorry at all? Just plain stupid.
It’s always funny until you’re the one at the receiving end. I doubt the Gizmodo team would have found it quite as comical if one of their party was ejected from CES, then another, then another.. the organisers just not able to stop.
Jeff Atwood fires a shot across-the-bow of the online content distribution model, via his take on The Sad State of Digital Software Distribution:
“Instead, I find that download options for commercial software are quite rare. Even when the download option is available, you end up paying the same price as retail or even more.”
This is a point-of view that crops up every so often, typically backed up by a small number of examples where a retail price (on sale) is less than the online option. On the face of it, that’s a pretty damning indictment of the online e-tail model, right? Surely it should be cheaper to procure a product via electronic download, rather than shrink wrapped? Of course. To a point.
Given pressing a DVD in a big run is typically counted in cents, with packaging and documentation costs substantively reduced on big runs the costs to actually manufacture a product typically pale in comparison to delivery and display costs. We pay for the convenience of being able to walk into a store and uplift a product. Why would the convenience of immediate delivery be any different? Doesn’t that have value, too?
And what is also frequently missed is that a great many products sold via the electronic model are not only available before they hit the store shelves but often launched, or pre-launched, at a reduced price. Which is totally unlike the typical retail model, where pricing starts off as high as the market will stand and then starts to drop as the distributor switches gears to try and offload as many units as possible.
Jeff picks out Steam as a good example of where price parity has taken a nose dive — because one or two titles are more than a retail sale price — title yet The Orange Box, one of the higher selling titles for Steam, can actually retail for more than the electronic download.
Don’t take my word for it, here it is in black and white. Other than Amazon — who continue their survival strategy by undercutting everyone else on principle — the pricing is at the very least on par (freight costs can cancel out online sale savings). If you take the walk-in-store approach, you will frequently pay more.
If you’re one of the many millions of potential customers not currently residing in the US of A, then digital delivery orders can result in massive savings. The very same Orange Box sold in the US for $49.95, retails for a good deal more here.
Jeff is highlighting that there are exceptions to any rule. Which is true. Just as one can pay three different prices for the same product at three different locations, online ordering may not always work out cheaper for every single instance of n at any single moment of time.
It’s not a perfect model and there can be both very good and very bad times to drop some coin. However.. the convenience, potential speed of delivery, reduction in packaging waste and early release offers, combined with frequent discounts both at-launch and on-going e-tailer sales, do still make them just as much a valid avenue as visiting the local electronic game store.
Jeff ends his article thusly:
“It seems to me that, in the area of digital distribution efficiencies, commercial software still has a lot to learn from the open source world– where everything is downloadable by design. I hope they can adapt before they’re forced into extinction.”
This is a great ethic to relate to. If we didn’t live in a world where capitalism is the order of the day. But we do. And this last comment seemingly ignores the trend where an every increasing amount of software is available and maintainable online.
It should also be noted that retailers want the electronic model to fail — and they’ll try real hard to crack pricing on a few select titles to make it look like it has. Scratch the surface though and typical higher-than-download shelf pricing belies that the old bait-and-hook retail model is still just as prevalent.
Like any purchase choice, shop around and find the deal that best suits you. Many options are infinitely preferable to none and ignoring the purchase-and-download model on the principle that there is still a price tag involved only serves to further limit options.
Jesper takes another cracking shot at why stuff keeps staying broke, despite constant development marching forward:
“Okay, stop. Guys working on larger capacity hard drives, flash drives, cheaper memory, better power supplies, fundamentally different CPUs and cures for cancer, you can keep going. The rest of you, spend five years fixing the fundamental issues.”
The problem is that fixing issues just isn’t sexy. Oh, sure, you can make debugging sound sudo pseudo-sexy, Joyent’s
constant
spruiking
of
dtrace to all who will listen is proof of that.
Fixing problems has always been the Achilles Heel of any software or hardware platform, because it’s often easier — both up-sell and manage — to build something new than fix the old one. The entire software and hardware industry is entirely geared up to consume and burn, not rebuild.
And that won’t change until the consumer and the market embrace the concept of “green” re-use and re-cycle concepts. Ironically it’s just as much our fault — for demanding change over improvement — as those controlling the product cycles. Makes you think, doesn’t it.
Michael Gartenberg opinions the following on the recent HD DVD pricing plunge:
Notably the fact that we’re seeing HD-DVD players at much lower prices, as low as $99. At that point, it’s not a competition between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray, it’s a competition (correctly so) between HD-DVD and DVD.
The format war is going to be won in the retail sector. The feature count, or potential benefits of one over the other really ceases to gain traction when market forces take over. This will spill over to affect Blue-ray sales if that format can’t deliver similar cost reductions, despite suggestions this is just a HD-DVD versus DVD battle.
Blue-ray may find it’s the next Betamax. A superior format to VHS that simply lost out in the inevitable price war.
Joyent's David Young has a conviction that the days of the operating system are numbered, as part of his
Joyent Manifesto - Quo vadis, Computing he writes:
“The operating system is dead. Long live the operating system. If the future is network applications, the past is the operating system.”
I think David has oversimplified the concept of […]
"Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a Time" — this is my kind of resource. Make sure you check out the Cylon jack-o-lantern for nerdery at it’s finest.
".. there are no “new” privacy issues raised by Google’s acquisition of Jaiku; it’s simply the same old ones over and over again that we seem unable to deal with in any kind of open dialogue in the mainstream press." — why the NY Times got it wrong.
"NASA is extending, for a fifth time, the activities of the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity." — the use-by dates have long since past, yet the little rovers that could continue to defy the odds, rolling across the unforgiving face of Mars.
"There’s no reason we can’t have both a great surfing experience on an iPhone as well as one on assistive technologies. I’m just asking for more balance." — whilst it has revolutionised development and the way web apps are built, it shouldn’t be at the expense of standards or accessibility - a little balance isn’t a crazy thing to ask for.
There is something I have been listening to of late that is entirely reminiscent of the early days of podcasting, before it became the “new voice of radio” complete with corny jingles, endlessly long intros, fast talkers with wares to sell and the production values of a top-notch recording studio.
The Talk Show, featuring roughly thirty […]
One of the greatest joys in disabling comments, is an immediate and somewhat blunt end to spam.
I no longer have to concern myself with cleaning up the mess left by others, scrubbing away textual graffiti that wastes time and money, in the form of wanton bandwidth waste.
It’s bad enough the would-be viagra and porn […]
