Chris Lau

What's Wrong with the Gaming Industry?

iPhone app games are quietly gaining traction, because $1 games (and up to just $20) are attractive. The big gaming companies, EA, and ATVI, are still "milking" their core products. The consumer is beginning to feel wary of being nickel and dimed with them. Examples include buying more songs for guitar hero, and EA sports' releases that have little change year after year.

Windows Collapsing Under Its Own Weight - Gartner

Some major problems with MS:
[1] Operating system
Linux has come a very long way, and may grow when MS cuts off support for XP. Since Vista uptake has been very poor and well below its own expectations, MS will have to make a smart business decision about XP.

[2] Advertising
The yahoo acquisition reminds me of HPQ buying Compaq. It didn't really help HP but it did take out a competitor. Maybe this is what MS needs to do to gain market share

On the plus side:
[3] SQL 2008 - 2005 was already a very good release
[4] Visual Studio - MS is giving away the studio edition to students. I repeat, giving it away! They have taken a page out of open source and are trying to get young bright people to use this development tool.
[5] X-Box360
The growth is in gaming consoles. Halo 3 was a big win.