The Refined Geek

It’s no secret that I’ve never been much of a fan of the OnLive service. Whilst my initial scepticism came from my roots as someone who didn’t have decent Internet for the vast majority of his life while everyone else in the world seemed to since then I’ve seen fundamental problems with the service that I felt would severely hamper adoption. Primarily it was the capital heavy nature of the beast, requiring a large number of high end gaming PCs to be always on and available even when there was little demand for them. That and the input lag issue that would have made many games (FPS being the most prominent genre) nearly unplayable, at least in my mind. Still I never truly believed that OnLive would struggle that much as there definitely seemed to be a lot of people eager to use the service.

For once though I may have been right.

OnLive might have been a rather capital intensive idea but it didn’t take long for them to build out a company that was getting valued in the $1 billion range, no small feat by any stretch of the imagination. It was at that point that I started doubting my earlier suspicions, that level of value doesn’t come without some solid financials behind it, but it seems that since that dizzying high (and most likely in a reaction to Sony’s acquisition of their competitor Gaikai for much less than that) that they only had one place to go and that was down:

We’re hearing from a reliable source that OnLive’s founder and CEO Steve Perlman finally decided to make an exit — and in the process, is screwing the employees who helped build the company and brand. The cloud gaming company reportedly had several suitors over the last few years (perhaps including Microsoft) but Perlman reportedly held tight control over the company, apparently not wanting to sell or share any of OnLive’s secret sauce.

Our source tells us that the buyer wants all of OnLive’s assets — the intellectual property, branding, and likely patents — but the plan is to keep the gaming company up and running. However, OnLive management cleaned house today, reportedly firing nearly the entire staff, and we hear it was done just to reduce the company’s liability, thus reducing employee equity to practically zero. Yeah, it’s a massive dick move.

We’ve seen this kind of behaviour before in companies like the ill-fated MySpace and whilst the company will say many things about why they’re doing it essentially it makes the acquisition a lot more attractive for the buyer, due to the lower ongoing costs. Whoever this well funded venture capitalist is they don’t seem to be particularly interested in the company of OnLive itself, more the IP and massive amount of infrastructure that they’ve built up over the course of the last 3 years. No matter how the service is doing financially those things have some intrinsic value behind them and although the new mysterious backer has committed to keeping the service running I’m not sure how much faith can be put in those words.

Granted there are services that were so costly to build that the initial companies who built them folded but the subsequent owner who acquired everything at a fire sale price went onto to make a very profitable service (see Iridium Communications for a real world example of this). However the figures that we’ve been seeing on OnLive’s numbers since this story broke don’t paint a particularly rosy picture for the health of the service. When you have a fleet of 8000 servers servicing at most 1600 users that doesn’t seem sustainable by any way that I can think of lest the users be paying out the nose for the service (which they’re not, unfortunately). It’s possible that the massive amount of lay offs coupled with a reduction in their current infrastructure base might see OnLive become a profitable enterprise once again but I’ll have to say that I’m still sceptical.

Apart from the monthly access fee requirement being dropped none of the issues that I and countless other gamers have highlighted have been addressed and their niche of people who want to play high end games without the cost (and don’t own a console) just isn’t big enough to support their idea. I could see something like this service being an also-ran for a large company, much like Sony is planning to do with Gakai, but as a stand alone enterprise the costs of establishing the require infrastructure to get the required user base are just too high. This is not even touching on the input lag or the ownership/DRM issues either, both of which have been shown to be deal breakers for many gamers contemplating the service.

It’s a bit of a shame really as whilst I love being right about these things I’d much rather be proven wrong, especially when it comes to non-traditional ideas like OnLive. It’s entirely possible that their new benefactor could turn things around for them but they haven’t done a lot to endear themselves to the public and their current employees so their battle is going to be very much up hill from now on. I’m still willing to be proven wrong on this idea though but as time goes on it seems less and less likely that it’ll happen and that’s a terrible thing for my already inflated ego.

I’m something of a collector of failed MMORPGs. Every since my addiction began with World of Warcraft it seemed I was forever doomed to roam the genre in search of that same feeling that World of Warcraft inspired in me. Let’s just say that in my travels I’ve seen nearly everything, from inventive PvP systems to epic grinds that required almost more time than I had invested in World of Warcraft just to reach the end game content. Over time I’ve started to notice the patterns of what causes some MMORPGs to carry on whilst others struggle to keep their users just months after release. The answer is quite simple but it seems some academics might have a different idea.

Take Ramin Shokrizade, a self proclaimed virtual economy expert who’s latest piece takes aim at Star Wars: The Old Republic’s decision to convert their MMORPG into a free to play model in order to try and get people back into the game. Whilst he does make some good points regarding how TOR felt like a massively single player game (as the campaign was arguably the best thing about it, even though it was a lot more fun to do with friends) the main point of his article, that the monetization strategy was the primary cause for failure, is ultimately only a side issue to the bigger issues at hand.

Shokrizade makes the point that the value players generated, judged by looking at auction house prices and the cost of purchasing credits from real money trading sites, decreased rapidly over the first month. He lays the blame for this specific decline at an instance reset exploit that allowed users to generate quite a lot of credits and whilst this might be a factor in the decline his analysis also fails to include the fact that in any new MMORPG in game currency attracts a high premium at the beginning, usually due to the fact that there isn’t that much of it in circulation. Indeed if you tracked the same statistic for other virtual worlds you would see identical declines as the currency generating capacity of the wider player base and the gold farmers increased significantly. This is not a new phenomena as I’ve seen it happen in nearly every MMO that I’ve played to date.

He also makes the mistake of saying that “As combat in SWTOR was balanced for PvE, PvP combat balance was never attainable”. Nearly all MMORPGs tend to focus on one of these two aspects in order to attract players to the game. SW:TOR focused heavily on the PvE aspect as that’s where BioWare’s strengths are and indeed by all accounts they succeeded at doing so. Whilst the PvP wasn’t as balanced in the beginning saying that because of the PvE focus PvP balance was unattainable is laughable as balance is an ongoing process that evolves with the game. Indeed when I left the PvP balance was far better due to the 50 only arenas, more people having better gear and vast improvements in game code to make the world PvP areas much more playable. The items were comparable to their PvE counterparts however they had PvP stats on them which meant for guilds who were tackling high end content on the hardest difficulties they were unfortunately useless as you couldn’t achieve the stats required.

However Shokrizade’s biggest blunder is when he lays blame at SW:TOR’s monetization scheme for its current troubles. He posits that the unlimited model, the one where you pay a monthly fee and get access to the entire game, encourages people to pay through all the content as fast as possible before dropping it for the next game. Now whilst I won’t discount the fact that there were many a hardcore friend of mine who took time off work to reach level 50 in the space of 4 days or so this was by far not the norm with many players taking at least a month to reach max level (I would know this, I was among them). Even then those who did reach max level would usually roll another character straight afterwards to level with the others who were still catching up mostly because the single player lines for each archetype are unique. He then goes on to peddle his ideal solution and then decries that the monetization scheme is the ultimate factor in deciding a MMORPGs success.

This is as far from the truth I’ve seen anyone get. Anyone who’s played MMORPGs knows that there’s one thing and one thing only that decides whether a game in this genre will be successful or not. That thing is the content.

Of all the failed MMORPGs I’ve played over the years the reason that they struggled can always be tracked back to problems with content. Age of Conan is probably the best example I can think of as it promised a large world, shaped by your actions, with content all the way up to a staggering level 80. This would have been all well and good except the fact that once you hit level 50 there wasn’t any content to speak of until level 80. Warhammer Online had the same issue as people quickly tired of the warzones and many servers locked themselves in a stalemate for the end game PvP, leaving them to turn away. Indeed the biggest problem that SW:TOR had was the fact that the end game content was just so gosh darn accessible, meaning that within the first month or two anyone could see the entire game if they were so inclined.

This was the exact reason why so many people decided to leave SW:TOR when they did. My guild mates and I managed to blast through all the end game raids in just under a week once we were all level 50 thanks to the normal level of difficulty which made the encounters quite easy by end game standards. After that point it’s hard to motivate people to redo content they’ve done before especially when the rewards are only incremental upgrades. Then the only thing left is to grind PvP or flash points in order to get better gear and only the hardcore will keep on doing that after a month or so.

So why does Shokrizade believe that monetization, above all else, is the key to MMORPG success? At the risk of stumbling into ad-hominem territory the reason seems pretty obvious: he’s a self proclaimed expert on virtual economies even though his only experience in economics comes from playing EVE Online (and I’m struggling to verify his claims of leading a 5000 strong corporation in there). It’s then prudent to take what he says with a grain of salt as he has a vested interest in saying things like this, even if they don’t gel so well with reality.

MMORPGs are hard things to create and maintain and it’s a testament to companies like Blizzard and BioWare who’ve managed to actually release one and not go bankrupt in the process. Whilst SW:TOR might be struggling to keep people going so are nearly all MMORPGs, even the mighty World of Warcraft is back to 2008 subscription numbers (is their monetization strategy the problem, Shokrizade?) and that shows just how hard it can be to get people coming back time and time again. The one secret though is the content and there is no doubt that Blizzard has mastered that art and for all it’s successes with the campaign missions BioWare unfortunately missed the mark and they’re paying the price for it now.

There’s no denying the success Apple has enjoyed thanks to their major shift in strategy under Steve Jobs’ reign. Before then they were seen as a direct competitor to Microsoft in almost every way: iMacs vs PCs, MacOS vs Windows and at pretty much every turn they were losing the battle save for a few dedicated niches that kept them afloat. That all changed when they got into the consumer electronics space and began bringing the sacred geek technology to the masses in a package that was highly desirable. There was one aspect of their business that suffered immensely because of this however: their enterprise sector.

Keen readers will note that this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned Apple’s less than stellar support of the enterprise market and nothing has really changed in the 8 months since I wrote that last post. Apple as a company is almost entirely dedicated to the consumer space with token efforts for enterprise integration thrown in to make it look like their products can play well in the enterprise space. Strangely enough it would seem that this token effort is somehow working to convince developers that Apple (well really iOS) is poised to take over the enterprise space:

In the largest survey of its kind, Appcelerator developers were asked what operating system is best positioned to win the enterprise market. Developers said iOS over Android by a 53% to 38% margin. Last year, in its second quarter survey, the two companies were in a dead heat for the enterprise market, tied at 44%.

In a surprise of sorts, Windows showed some life as 33% said they would be interested in developing apps on the Windows 8 tablet.

Now there is value in gauging developer’s sentiment regarding the various platforms, it gives you some insight into which ones they’d probably prefer to develop for, however that doesn’t really serve as an indicator as to what platform will win a particular market. I’d hazard a guess (one that’s based on previous trends) that the same developers will tell you that iOS is the platform to develop for even though it’s quite clear that Android is winning in the consumer space by a very wide margin. I believe there’s the same level of disjunct between what Appcelerator’s developers are saying and what the true reality is.

For starters any of the foothold that iOS has in the enterprise space is not born of any effort that Apple has made and all of it is to do with non-Apple products. For iOS to really make a dent in the enterprise market it will need some significant buy in from its corporate overlords and whilst there’s been some inroads to this (like with the Enterprise Distribution method for iOS applications) I’m just not seeing anything like that from Apple currently. All of their enterprise offerings are simplistic and token lacking many of the features that are required by enterprises today. They may have mindshare and numbers that will help drive people to create integration between iOS products and other enterprise applications but so does Android, meaning that’s really not an advantage at all.

What gets me is the (I’m paraphrasing) “sort of surprise” that developers were looking to Windows 8 for developing applications. Taken in the enterprise context the only real surprise is why there aren’t more developers looking at the platform as if there’s any platform that has chance at dominating this sector it is in fact Windows 8. There’s no doubting the challenges that the platform faces what with Apple dominating the tablet space that Microsoft is only just looking at getting into seriously but the leverage they have for integrating with all their enterprise applications simply can’t be ignored. They may not have the numbers yet but if developer mindshare is the key factor here then Microsoft wins hands down, but that won’t show up in a survey that doesn’t include Windows developers (Appcelerator’s survey is from its users only and currently does not support Windows Phone).

I’ve had my share of experience with iOS/Android integration with various enterprise applications and for what its worth none of them are really up to the same level as native platform applications are. Sure you can get your email and even VPN back in to a full desktop using your smartphone but that’s nothing that hasn’t been done before. The executives might be pushing hard to get their iPads/toy dujour on the enterprise systems but they won’t penetrate much further until those devices can provide some real value to those outside of the executive arena. Currently the only platform that has any chance of doing that well is Microsoft with Android coming in second.

None of this means that Apple/iOS can’t do well in the enterprise space, just that there are other players in this market far better positioned to do so. Should Apple put some focus on the enterprise market it’s quite likely they could capture some market share away from Microsoft and their other partners but their business models have been moving increasingly away from this sector ever since they first release the iPod over a decade ago. Returning to the enterprise world is not something I expect to see from Apple or its products any time soon and no developer sentiment is going to change that.

I’ve long been of the mind that whilst we’re seeing a lot of new businesses being able to fully cloudify their operations, mostly because they have the luxury of designing their processes around these cloud services, established organisations will more than likely never achieve full cloud integration. Whether this is because of data sovereignty issues, lack of trust in the services themselves or simply fear of changing over doesn’t really matter as it’s up to the cloud providers to offer solutions that will ease their customer’s transition onto the cloud platform. From my perspective it seems clear that the best way to approach this is by offering hybrid cloud solutions, ones that can leverage their current investment in infrastructure whilst giving them the flexibility of cloud services. Up until recently there weren’t many companies looking at this approach but that has changed significantly in the past few months.

However there’s been one major player in the cloud game that’s been strangely absent in the hybrid cloud space. I am, of course, referring to Microsoft as whilst they have extensive public cloud offerings in the form of their hosted services as well as Azure they haven’t really been able to offer anything past their usual Hyper-V plus System Centre suite of products. Curiously though Microsoft, and many others it seems, have been running with the definition of a private cloud being just that: highly virtualized environment with dynamic resourcing. I’ll be honest I don’t share that definition at all as realistically that’s just Infrastructure as a Service, a critical part of any cloud service but not a cloud service in its own.

They are however attempting to make inroads to the private cloud area with their latest announcement called the Service Management Portal. When I first read about this it was touted as Microsoft opening the doors to service providers to host their own little Azure cloud but its in fact nothing like that at all. Indeed it just seems to be an extension of their current Software as a Service offerings which is really nothing that couldn’t be achieved before with the current tools available. System Centre Configuration Manager 2012 appears to make this process a heck of a lot easier mind you but with it only being 3 months after its RTM release I can’t say that it’d be in production use at scale anywhere bar Microsoft at this current point in time.

It’s quite possible that they’re trying a different approach to this idea after their ill-failed attempt at trying to get Azure clouds up elsewhere via the  Azure Appliance initiative. The problem with that solution was the scale required as the only provider I know of that actually offers the Azure services is Fujitsu and try as you might you won’t be able to sign up for that service without engaging directly with them. That’s incredibly counter-intuitive to the way the cloud should work and so it isn’t surprising that Microsoft has struggled to make any sort of in roads using that strategy.

Microsoft really has a big opportunity here to use their captive market of organisations that are heavily invested in their product as leverage in a private/hybrid cloud strategy. First they’d need to make the Azure platform available as a Server Role on Windows Server 2012. This would then allow the servers to become part of the private computing cloud which could have applications deployed on them. Microsoft could then make their core applications (Exchange, SharePoint, etc.) available as Azure applications, nullifying the need for administrators to do rigorous architecture work in order to deploy the applications. The private cloud can then be leveraged by the developers in order to build the required applications which could, if required, burst out into the public cloud for additional resources. If Microsoft is serious about bringing the cloud to their large customers they’ll have to outgrow the silly notion that SCCM + Hyper-V merits the cloud tag as realistically it’s anything but.

I understand that no one is really doing this sort of thing currently (HP’s cloud gets close, but I’ve yet to hear about anyone who wasn’t a pilot customer seriously look at it) but Microsoft is the kind of company that has the right combination of established infrastructure in organisations, cloud services and technically savy consumer base to make such a solution viable. Until they offer some deployable form of Azure to their end users any product they offer as a private cloud solution will be that only in name. Making Azure deployable though could be a huge boon to their business and could very well form a sort of reformation of the way they do computing.

I’m under no delusions that I’m some kind of highfalutin blogger who’s under constant bombardment by corporate suitors looking to peddle their wares through my site. I have however been privy to some things that I wouldn’t have had a chance at otherwise had I not kept on writing for all these years so I’m somewhat familiar with the usual process of how an initial email will turn into something concrete. However it appears that there’s a lot of people out there, some of them possibly genuine, who have no idea how to contact even low end bloggers like myself in order to get some coverage. Today I’m going to lay my cards on the table and detail the response you’ll get should you ignore them.

Firstly I have a public email address that I published on this site with the primary intention of giving people an easy access avenue to me should they want to chat, comment or approach me for some kind of business related venture. It was also something of an experiment to see just how much spam I’d get through it and for the record it’s basically none (current queue is 71, all handled well by Gmail). You can feel free to email me at that address with whatever it is you want to talk to me about and I’m pretty much guaranteed to respond to it within 24 hours. If you don’t get a response it’s likely you’ve violated one of my cardinal rules, ones that if broken I’ll at best ignore you and at worst make sure I waste as much of your time as possible.

For starters you need to address me in the email, not Admin or webmaster or TheRefinedGeek or whatever your spam program uses, just me. That’s my initial sniff test to filter for carpet bomb emails but I’ve also simply deleted other emails which were possibly genuine just based on the fact that they couldn’t take the 2 extra seconds to find the About page and find my actual name. To date everyone I’ve had a successful blogging relationship with has managed to find my name without issue so if you can do the same you’re guaranteed to not get thrown into the trash along with all the other spammers.

Most importantly, and pay attention here because violating this rule will get you on the “waste this sucker’s time” list, you have to actually understand what this blog is and how you might fit into its overall picture. It seems that after I put the magical words “guest post” into my long time friend’s Call of Duty review people think it’s open slather for writing something on here. I’m am most certainly open to people writing guest posts on here but I’ve turned every single unsolicited one down so far simply because they want to write something that’s just not what this blog is about, nor I think my current audience would find particularly interesting. What this says to me is that you’ve done some kind of Google search for blogs that have posts with a title containing the words “Guest Post” and then emailed them hoping you could peddle your wares to. Just read 2 weeks worth of posts here and you’ll figure out if the article you have in mind is a good fit for here and then ask yourself why you want it here and not on your own personal blog.

These rules aren’t particularly rigorous so if you’re a real person looking to make a connection or a blogger looking for a place to show your writing to a wider audience you’ll have no problem complying with them. The spammers and idiots however will continue to trip them up, usually failing at the first “say my name, bitch” step. I might not be a bigshot blogger but I have standards and respect for the work I do and if my standards are too high for you then I’m sure you can find a home among all the other spammy blogs that will welcome you with open arms.

I was a big believer in the typical corporate structure for a very long time, mostly because I wanted to be the one at the top of it. There’s something attractive about being the one at the top and for quite a long time I tried to position my career in such a way that I could become an executive in some nameless company at an undetermined point in the future. I didn’t realize how bad I was at the whole management thing after I killed my university project, no it took me another 2 years to figure out that being at the top of a corporate structure wasn’t for me. I needed to be the one building things.

That’s not to say I can’t succeed in such structures myself, far from it. Being in Australia’s capital city, a town that is basically a giant shrine to bureaucracy, I’ve come to learn how to operate within traditional management structures in a such a way so that I have an incredible amount of freedom whilst also staying within the confines of my designated role. Sure I might not be able to simply up and change my job whenever I feel like it but I’ve rarely felt my creative freedom restrained when it comes to solving the various problems that get thrown my way. Still I’ve always been fascinated with non-traditional management structures and yesterday I came across an incredibly novel one.

It was that of the game development company Valve.

Yesterday one of my long time friends linked me to Valve’s new starter guide book, a typical document you’d expect from pretty much any organisation. It made for some incredibly fascinating reading mostly because it’s unlike any other that I’ve read before. Where there’s usually pictures of organisational charts, links to company policies and reams of out dated information there was instead a comprehensive guide to how Valve functions as a company and how all the employees fit into it. Astonishingly the biggest revelation in there, for me at least,  was that there is in essence no organisational structure at all.

For someone who cut his teeth in a world ruled by bureaucracy such an idea seems incredibly foreign, so much so I initially struggled to figure out how it would work. I mean how does anyone get any work done if there isn’t someone controlling the whole process from the top? As it turns out the process mimics what I envision happens when a lot of talented people get together: ideas start circulating and once they reach a critical mass of supporters they form a cohesive group in order to achieve that vision. Valve in that sense is a kind of idea incubator that enables their employees to chase their passions and should those passions resonate with others it will find its way into reality.

That to me feels like an inspired way of creating a company. The guide admits that whilst this idea works for Valve they’re not sure it would work for everyone as rogue agents operating in such an environment can do incredible amounts of damage. However when you note that Valve makes more profit per employee than Apple or Google  then you have to figure that their process has some merit to it. Being fully privately owned also helps them quite a bit as I’m sure that share holders would be uncomfortable with a company that seems to be in a constant flux.

Would I start a company with a mantra like Valves? I definitely believe in some of the core principles (like hiring people smarter than you) and I do tend to favor less management than more so I could see some form of it working for a company that I’d like to start. Maybe it’s just the residual “I need to be at the top” mentality inside me that’s having trouble letting go of the idea but Valve’s way of doing business seems a lot better than the way I’ve been thinking about it.

Long time readers will know that for a good chunk of my working teenage years, in fact the majority of them now that I think about it, were spent predominantly at the Dick Smith Electronics store in Fyshwick here in the ACT. For what its worth it out of all the jobs I had (I was working up to 4 at times) it was the best of the lot but that could have easily been due to my seniority at the place. In my time there though I was privy to many of the behind the scenes activities that the vast majority of the public are unaware of and it seems recently some of those activities have been called into question again.

The events I’m referring to was the massive game clearance sale that took place just last week. Due to consumer regulations the sale was not allowed to be made public, due to the stampede it would create, but a price list inevitably made its way online and the calamity that ensued had people wondering just what the hell was going on. A major part of this was the apparent disdain for the employees who managed to snag some of the bargains before the public were allowed to have a go at them, something which one current employee has gone a long way to address.

I figured that I might just throw my hat in the ring here as well.

Way back in the day you might remember the little bastard child of a gaming handset cross mobile phone that was the Nokia N-Gage. Dick Smith stocked them and I had the mixed pleasure of trying to sell them to potential customers. It was an incredibly hard sell, one that only worked on the few uber nerds that would seek it out and the cashed up parents who bought their kids the phones they wanted (rather than the ones they needed). Of course one day Dick Smith decided to have a sale on the handsets via a coupon for a modest discount. The wording of the coupon was kind of lax and the system allowed multiple coupons to be used against a single handset, dropping the price to a tantalizing $100.

It was bedlam,the instant that word got around our store was swamped with people looking to pick up on the bargain. We kept the store open well past its closing time in order to service the last few of the orders and nearly every customer walked away with the device they wanted. The benefit for us was that a few of us got to get one of these handsets as well, many of us who then used it as our primary handset afterwards. Indeed the vast majority of ones that we saw up on eBay came from customers who had just purchased them from us not hours before, not the staff who had put them aside.

I’d have more sympathy for the greater consumer market if a couple things weren’t the way they currently are. When I started Dick Smith employees got an amazing staff discount: cost price + 10%. Whilst it didn’t make everything cheaper (games and computers being chief amongst them) it was amazing for many of the things that a budding geek like myself lusted after. About 3 years after I started working there the discount was scrapped, changed to be in line with the greater Woolworths employee discount scheme of a flat 5% off (which we got as well, but could not use in conjunction with our other discount).

There’s also the fact that for the most part this was a clearance sale, I.E. a run out of current stock lines that have either failed to move during their regular sales run or are the last of a dwindling few remaining. The fact that the price list was leaked online prior to the event meant that everyone got the impression that there would be enough stock to satisfy everyone when that was clearly not the case. Had this been a regular run of the mill sale I might have sung a different tune but it wasn’t and, I shudder to say this, sounds like a lot of people acting like entitled little bitches.

Honestly I believe the staff are entitled to have first stab at these things (much like they were for the recent WoW Sight and Sound fire sales, hear anyone whining about that?) because they work there, plain and simple. Retail employees aren’t that well compensated and it’s little perks like these, which are few and far between, that keeps them working there. If you’ve got a problem with staff having first go at sales like these then you’re more than welcome to take up a casual role in order to get the same level of “privilege” that they do. That or you could admit your value proposition for the items in question is so far below the regular retail price that you probably don’t need nor want said item.

This has gotten a lot more ranty than I thought it would so if you’d like a more level headed opinion from a consumer perspective then this piece from Matt Williams is probably more up your alley.

The idea behind Kickstarter is a great one: you’ve got an idea and you’ve got the fixins of a potential business going but the financial barrier of bringing it to market are keeping you from seeing it through. So you whip up a project on there, promise people rewards or (more commonly) the actual product you’re intending to sell and then wait for backers to pledge some cash to you. For the backers as well its great as if the project doesn’t get fully funded then no one has to donate any money, so your potential risk exposure is limited. Of course Kickstarter take their slice of the action, to the tune of 5% (plus another 3~5% for the payment processing) so everyone comes out a winner.

It’s a disruptive service, there’s no denying that. There are many products that wouldn’t have made it through a traditional venture capital process that have become wild successes thanks to Kickstarter. This of course gets people thinking about how those traditional systems are no longer needed, I mean who needs venture capitalists when I can get my customers to fund my project? Well whilst I’d love to believe that all we need for funding is crowdsourcing tools like Kickstarter I can’t help but notice the pattern of most of the successful endeavours on there.

They’re all done by people who were already successful in the traditional business world.

Take for instance the latest poster child for the success of Kickstarter: The Double Fine Adventure. For gamers the Double Fine name (and the man behind it, Tim Schafer) is a recognizable one, having worked on such cult classics as The Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango and releasing others such as Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. Needless to say he’s quite well known and made his name in the traditional game developer/publisher world. Kickstarter has allowed him to cut the publishers out of this particular project, putting more cash in his pocket and allowing him total control of it, but could someone without that kind of brand recognition pull off the same level of success?

The answer is no.

For all the successes that are seen through Kickstarter only 44 percent of them will ever actually get the funding they require. Indeed in the Video Games category the highest funded game (there are a lot of projects in there that aren’t exactly games) before the Double Fine Adventure managed about $72,000. Sure it’s nothing to sneeze at, it was almost 6 times what they needed, but it does show the disparity between relative nobodies attempting a to crowdfund a project and when a well known person attempts the same thing. Sure there are the few breakout successes, but for the majority of large funding successes you’ll usually see someone who’s already known in that area involved somehow.

Now I don’t believe this is a bad thing, it’s just the way the process works. Nothing has really changed here, except the judgement call is shifted from the venture capitalists to the wider public, and as such many of the same factors influence if, when and how you get funded. Name recognition is a massive part of that, I mean just take a look at things like Color that managed to pull in a massive $41 million in funding before it had even got a viable product off the ground just because of the team of people that were behind the idea. Kickstarter doesn’t change this process at all, it’s just made it more visible to everyone.

Does this mean I think you should keep away from Kickstarter? Hell no, if you’ve got a potential product idea and want to see if there’s some kind of market for it Kickstarter projects, even if they’re not successful, are a great way of seeing just how much demand is out there. If your idea resonates with the wider market then you’re guaranteed a whole bunch of free publicity, much more than what you’d get if you just approached a bank for a business loan. Just be aware of what Kickstarter does and does not do differently to traditional ways of doing business and don’t get caught up in the hype that so often surrounds it.

I like to think of myself as a good customer, having spent a good 6 years on the other side of the consumer equation. Whilst I might be ruthless in my product selection once your product is past that hurdle you’re guaranteed a whole bunch of free marketing from me, usually in the form of recommendations to my friends and sometimes even here on this blog. It’s not much but I’ll be damned if I haven’t swayed dozens of people to products that I’ve bought solely on my recommendation. It goes both ways though so if your product (or business practices) are terrible then you can be assured I’ll be voting with my wallet and encouraging others to do so.

Today, I’m going to do exactly that.

So for my birthday last year my loving wife bought me one of the TRON keyboards from Razer. It’s a very pretty keyboard but it’s unfortunately not all that great for gaming thanks to the extraordinarily large keys and tendency for the keys to get stuck in the on position when several are pressed together. Figuring that it would make a great keyboard for either my spare test machine or media PC I set about looking for a potential replacement keyboard, something more suited to my main purpose of gaming.

I had heard good things about the Razer series of mechanical keyboards. These are preferred for gaming due to their distinct actuation points rather than the rubber domes that are common on most keyboards today (including the TRON keyboard I have now). They’re also renowned for being quite loud due to their mechanical action and the keyboard I had my eye on, the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate  is known for having some of the loudest keys around thanks to Cherry MX Blue¹ type switches. Razer does make the same keyboard in a stealth option which uses the quieter MX Brown switches, something that I’d prefer to have so I don’t get driven insane by the loud clicking.

So of course I started looking around for somewhere to get the keyboard. Strange though all my usual sites don’t seem to stock it, but they do stock every other keyboard. Frustrated I check Razer’s store and it’s available through there for US$139.99. Googling around reveals that the stealth version is exclusive to the Razer online store. Fair enough I thought, the price is a little on the high side but it’s one of those things that you buy once and don’t replace for a good while. Attempting to follow the order screen through to see how much the total would be lead me to a brick wall, not being able to ship it to Australia.

Undeterred I saw that they had an Australian version of the store and the keyboard was available in there. The price, however, was no where near what I expected being a whopping $90 greater than its USA counterpart. Now Australia is renowned for getting gouged on pretty much everything, including in places where distribution doesn’t matter like Steam, but I still don’t tolerate companies that do it. Frustrated I tweeted at Razer about it, hoping for some kind of response but alas I got nothing. I could use a remailer service to get the keyboard here but then I’d be giving my money to a company that obviously doesn’t respect its customers enough to price their products fairly.

So instead I went looking elsewhere for a similar product and not 5 minutes later did I come across the Corsair K90 which ticks all the same boxes and has the better Cherry MX Red switches to boot. It might be more expensive than the stealth Razer in the USA but it’s available here from pretty much everywhere. Corsair also have a history of not treating their customers like crap either, I’ve sent several sticks of faulty memory back to them only to get better memory in return. I’m more than happy to give them my money, especially when it means not giving any more to Razer.

Will Razer respond to this post? Probably not, but it needs to be known that Razer have no respect for Australian consumers if it’s trying to pull crap like this. I’m doing the only thing a consumer can: voice their discontent and then vote with their wallet. If enough people don’t put up with these kind of shenanigans then maybe one day we’ll be able to buy products in Australia at fair market prices rather than at the garbage, price gouging levels we get today.

¹If you’re wondering what the hell I’m on about here check out this guide to mechanical keyboards on overlock.net to get the low down on the different types.

There’s little doubt in my mind that the National Broadband Network will be a major benefit to Australia, way past the investment we’re making in it. It’s one of those rare pieces of legislation that will almost certainly outlive the government that started it and the Labor government should be commended for that. Indeed something like the National Broadband Network is almost a necessity if Australia wants to keep pace with the rest of the world in a technological sense as otherwise we’d be stuck on aging copper infrastructure that really doesn’t have any legs left in it. Still whilst anyone in the IT or related sectors would agree that the NBN will be good for business it’s not entirely clear what those benefits will be.

News.com.au ran a story this morning that pointed to research showing only 30% of Australian businesses had a “medium to high” understanding of the benefits available to them through the NBN. Making a few assumptions here I’m guessing the survey didn’t ask actual questions to gauge their true understanding so it’s likely that that number is actually a lot lower than the survey lets on. I’ll admit that for a non-technical person, who was likely the one answering the survey, the benefits of ubiquitous high speed Internet for your business are not entirely clear especially when the Internet they have now is probably doing them well enough.

The businesses geared to make the most of the NBN are ones with multiple offices spread throughout Australia. Right now getting a good inter-office connection, whether a full WAN or just some trickery using VPN tunnels and a regular ADSL, is either an expensive or complicated affair. The NBN will provide high speed interconnects at prices that many businesses will be able to afford. This means you’ll be able to get almost 100MB connections between offices giving you LAN like speeds between disparate offices. It might not sound like much but even small government agencies currently struggle with this (I’ve worked for more than one) and the boost in productivity from better connections between regional offices is very noticeable. This would also extend to remote workers as well, since it’s highly likely that they’ll have NBN access as well.

Having a large connection also enables businesses to move services out of expensive hosted data centres and onto their own premises. Right now it’s nigh on impossible to host client facing services internally unless you want to shell out a lot of money for the business type Internet plans. The NBN will bring data centre level speeds to almost every home and place of business in Australia enabling current businesses the opportunity to migrate inwards, saving on rental and administration costs. Sure the facilities they have might not be as good as what they can get elsewhere but the cost savings of not using a co-located service (believe me, they’re not cheap) would be more than worth it.

There’s also a host of services that are currently infeasible to operate, due to their high bandwidth use, that would become feasible thanks to the NBN. Such services won’t be available immediately but as the NBN reaches a threshold of active users then we can expect either local innovators to create them or for current Internet giants to localize their services for Australia. Predominately I see this taking the form of cloud based services which are accessible from Australia but have yet to have local nodes due to the lack of supporting infrastructure. This would also help cloud providers crack into that ever elusive Australian government sector which has remained resistant due to the restrictions placed on where their data can be stored.

The NBN will also bring about many other ancillary benefits due to the higher speed and ubiquitous access that business will be able to take advantage of. Indeed the flow on effects of a fully fibre communications network will have benefits that will flow on for decades for both businesses and consumers alike. Realistically this list is just the tip of the iceberg as over time there will be numerous services that become available in order to take advantage of our new capabilities. I personally can’t wait to get onto it, enough so that moving to one of the fibre enabled locations is tempting, albeit not tempting enough to make me move to Tasmania.