I feel like this would be a really interesting point to get Mr Hennessey's response to, but since he has comments disabled on his blog, I guess that's unlikely.
Serious question - is there any good way to record and edit podcasts on the iPad? That was the primary reason I went with a laptop rather than an iPad as my last tech purchase.
True. I'm also a little confused by the "every two weeks" part of his initial question that I quoted.
Would I buy a $5 special every two weeks? No, but I wasn't going to buy a $20 special every 8 weeks, either, and Louis made $250,000 PROFIT in FOUR DAYS. He doesn't need to do this every two weeks or every month or even every six months (nor could he; he edits it all himself). Would I pay $5 every year for a new special from Louis CK? I certainly would.
Now, I guess the more logical way to interpret what the author wrote is "what if, between all the comedians, these things were dropping every 2 weeks?", but that's no different than what you have now, except it's physical media, a higher price, and a slightly more spread out timeline. In both cases, people will buy the stuff from the people they really like and want to support, and prioritize their spending along those lines.
Though actually I would argue that if 4 comedians get $5 out of me, that's better for all 4 of them (assuming I'm part of a larger audience) than if one of them got some cut of $20.
"Imagine what would happen if Jimmy Carr, Dave Chappelle, Zach Galifinakis, Will Ferrell, and every other comedian in town started dropping specials every two weeks. Would you still be as willing to rush out and whip out your credit card for the sake of an ‘experiment’? Or would the medium’s novelty soon wear off and every new release will be greeted with the same response as a new release in the real, physical world?"
Well, I'd certainly be more willing to pull out my credit card for a $5 charge than I am for a $20 charge, which means it'd still be more successful with me than it is on the shelves at Walmart. And since I've never purchased a comedy DVD from anyone but threw down $5 without hesitation for Louis CK's special, it's infinitely more successful than the physical model in my case already.
How often would I do that? No idea. Depends how many comedians I really wanted to support, how often they put stuff out, and how my finances were looking at the time. But all three of those factors equally impact their chances at my money in "the real, physical world" (which is an utterly stupid phrase in this context, btw - he made $250,000 very real dollars in 4 days), and I'm still more likely to spend $5 than $20.
The only variable here is exposure. Can Louis (or other people who want to try the same) reach enough people using non-corporate-media methods to make up the difference between a $5 sale and a $20 sale, or can't they? Obviously a brand new talent isn't going to have the success with it that Louis CK does, but a brand new talent, with the rarest exception, isn't getting shelf space at Walmart either.
This strikes me as a lot of doom and gloom over nothing. He paid for production costs with ticket sales for the live show. He made back his money on putting the thing online more or less instantly. Will it work for everyone? Of course not, nothing works for everyone. But I bet it'll work for him again the next time he does it.
It's worth mentioning that Minecraft has over 15 million registered players and almost 4 million sales, and it isn't even out yet. That's way better than a whole lot of "mainstream" games do.
The market is there, and the landscape is shifting. The reason $60 AAA titles from giant monoliths all feel like they're imitating each other is that they don't know how to do anything else. But small, innovative developers are finding a lot of success.
As someone who loves the indie scene, it's hard for me to think of a better time to have been a gamer, and I too have been playing since the days of 5.25 floppies.
I just loaded the tab with this article into a tab group in Panorama.
It felt GREAT.
Seriously, it's off to a really nice start. I very frequently mentally "put away" a set of tabs to use later (things to show my wife, or items to compare when shopping, or news stories I want to read) but then I have to remember which tabs in the 20 or 30 I have open they are so I can revisit them, and it takes up way too much mental space.
Being able to physically lay them out like paper piles on a desk and name them is a great way to approach solving the problem, and I'm already enjoying using it. There are some technical details I'm curious about (does it keep non-active tab groups in memory? That seems like it could become unmanageable, but I might want certain ones to still be "live", if they had updating info I cared about), but I'm impressed with what I see so far.
Oh man - until you said that I had entirely forgotten that there were once programs that did nothing but query the menagerie of search engines out there and show you a page of results so you could pray that one of them was what you wanted and open them all in your separate web browser of choice.
I walked it through (without registering) and thought it was interesting, but was surprised to not see any summary of my input at the end, or analysis provided, or anything other than to be dumped back to the start page.
I mean, a certain amount of the point is self-evident by its asking you to re-evaluate your original statements and feelings, but I feel like it's an exercise I would do once, learn or discard, and then never need the website again after that. What further functionality is planned?
Someone tried that at my office and was actually told by management that they weren't allowed to have it, as there was a concern that if she were to fall off it and hurt herself, she would sue the office.
Strangely, her counter-argument that it's no more ridiculous to think that she would sue for spinal problems relating to sitting in the standard provided office chair wasn't given much attention.
An admirable piece, as it was when it was written in 2007, but it's worth noting that in part a verdict has already been passed on the idea; Manifesto Games, which it touts as its success story, was shut down in June of this year because it wasn't profitable.
Excerpt: "...Clearly, we haven't succeeded in realizing that vision. There are a host of possible reasons why; perhaps we launched with an excess of naïve optimism, through of course a surfeit of optimism is an entrepreneurial necessity. We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available. We failed to raise substantial venture money, despite engaging with many VCs over time. And of course, the recession doesn't help."
I'm with logjam on this one. I double-majored in Computer Science and Theatre, and while I do now use my Computer Science degree to make money, I don't believe I learned almost anything in my computer science classes that I couldn't have learned - and mightn't have learned better - either (a) on the job somewhere out of high school or (b) on my own through books and online resources.
The creative and teamwork experiences I got on the theatre side of things, however, are absolutely tangibly valuable to me now in my day-to-day dealings with coworkers (current and potential). Did a humanities degree "teach me how to think"? No. Did it provide me with several different ways of thinking, and help me appreciate better how different my natural thought processes might be from those of other people? Absolutely. I'm sorry, but there are in fact a lot of very narrow, closed off, fit-the-stereotype maladjusted computer professionals out there, and yes, they're unpleasant to work with. Becoming more socialized is a perfectly valid thing to expect out of an education, and a humanities degree certainly puts focus there that doesn't exist in more technical degrees.
Of course, the fact that my particular theatre program was filled with enthusiastic, smart, engaging professors who encouraged lively participation, debate and creativity while the computer science program was nearly lifeless has probably colored my perceptions, but I imagine that paradigm is not limited to the university I attended.
I managed to snag Grid PC for about $16 ($20 - 20%) and a UMD case for PSP games for about $9 ($13 - 30%), but the vast majority of the stuff in there was still horribly overpriced.
Luckily, thanks to the internet, it's a lot harder for stores to call something a "deal" when in fact it is higher than actual market value and get away with it.
Or maybe that's just an illusion, since there were plenty of people in there still running around grabbing stuff as though it were a super bargain, but I have to believe there were less folks suckered by it than there would've been 10 years ago.
Sidenote: I suspect that once a store starts sliding downhill, it's much harder for them to recover than it once was thanks to the same basic effect. Once upon a time, a store whose stock was starting to slide could send out a bunch of flyers, get some people in their doors, sell some merchandise and turn things around. Now, though, we all know within a day that the reason the flyer is in the mail is that the store is tanking, and so we stay away.