GE just moved HQ into the city of Boston, article seems to be cherry picking through history and unfairly picking on Apple, HP was pretty innovative and started in the suburbs. The interstate system and WW2 as a source of innovation seem to be also overlooked in the time period examined.
As HP's ability to innovate in technology (as opposed to business operations and cost-cutting) waned, it primarily put engineers in lower cost of living areas like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. This pattern is consistent with almost all has-been tech employers that steadily transition more into traditional sales-driven cultures. Conversely, just because you start moving your company back towards a major metro area with more talent doesn't necessarily mean that they'll start an upward trend either.
I might suggest that Wave and Vista are obvious projects Google and Microsoft wrote and below a standard of quality, and akin to a bad movie from WB. Google+ and Windows 8 could be considered bad sequels.
I don't think either Wave nor Vista were poor quality products, same way I don't think Glass nor Phone were poor products. The engineering on all of these is fine for the most part. Sure, there are bugs, but not really any more than usual. The real problem is that nobody really wanted these products in the first place.
For Wave, most users didn't seem to figure out what Wave was actually useful for (and it didn't help that Google wasn't sure either). For Vista, people liked XP and dragging them kicking and screaming into a software upgrade turned out to be really hard. Vista set the architectural foundation for future Windows releases, and Microsoft had an obligation to take people off of what was then a 5-year-old operating system - much like OS X 10.0 attempted to do. Nobody seems to pay much attention to the fact that 10.0 was incredibly buggy and took quite some time to bring up to a usable state.
Vista was just bad marketing. After that whole fiasco Microsoft did market tests where they presented consumers with a "new version" of Windows that was actually just Vista, and they got a positive response. And even if you don't believe that story completely, the fact that Windows 7 wasn't all that different from Vista and yet got just as popular as XP was says a lot.
>the fact that Windows 7 wasn't all that different from Vista
Say what now? I don't know if you remember but Vista had really high hardware requirements. When Vista came out, it was fundamentally unusable for me. Hardware requirements is literally the first section of criticism in Vista's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#Hardware_require...):
>For example, Mike Nash (Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management) commented, "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine" because his laptop's lack of an appropriate graphics chip so hobbled Vista.
Windows 7 made substantial performance improvements in comparison to the widespread hardware incompatibilities that Vista had.
Hi, I just looked into it and the check to Tommy and Edmund from Canonical is in process for the 77 copies of Super Meat Boy. We have been working together since November to get it resolved, no piracy here just some miscommunication.
77 copies in a year? The same game sold 20.000 copies on Launchday on the Xbox360.
Seems like Linux gaming still has a long way to go. Steam isnt doing it for direct profit reasons either, they just want to push the software platform of their new console!
But dont get me wrong, i like the direction, its just that linux gaming is totally irrelevant from a market perspective.
First we're talking about a potentiel market restricted to ubuntu users, the small portion that would give money for a piece of software.
Then we're talking about a game added to the ubuntu store when it was released in a pay what you want bundle.
Then again the dev is known for having a poor opinion of linux and its communities.
The port itself has a few bugs.
Not exactly the recipe for success here.
As an example, I'm a linux gamer, I own a copy of the humble bundle including super meat boy and after using it for a couple years, I for sure will stay away from ubuntu for technical, personal and ethical reasons. So don't expect my money showing up on the ubuntu store.
It was put in the store way after its initial release on most platforms. And I'm pretty sure anyone who got it in the humble bundle got a direct download.
Trying to infer something about the state of Linux gaming from this single statistic is just kinda silly.
I did directly compare it to another closed plattform store, which is Xbox Live Arcade. When a very successfull game sold 77 copies in a year when the same game sold 1 million copies (on xbox alone) in a timeframe of similar length (0.0077%) that still says something. I am very certain that SMB still sells alot more than 77 copies on XBLA per day!
Of course you cant compare the Ubuntu Store with something like XBLA but still, its helps bringing stuff into perspective.
Technically I believe any company that is less than 2 years old is a startup, they have a limited operating history. VC funded startups that are supposed to grow hyper fast but lots of statistics we see also count every new small business.
Connectedness, globalization and the number of books, movies, music, that we publish today is amazing; it's an impossible task to build a personal library like it might have looked like you could in the 70s or 80s
I like taking Seth's concrete way of looking at customers through both Steve Blank's customer development model or Simon Sinek's people buy why you do something.
I would add two other mindsets of your customers. First customers care about your product, second customers care about your company and the biggest third set customers just care about themselves and in the end you have our oldest consumer good, clothing.
With the integration of the Ubuntu Software Center both Humble and Canonical work really hard to make sure that does not happen anymore. Right now we have two games ready and the others should be live tomorrow, I can't promise zero problems but they are well tested and if you let us know we will get to the bottom of any problems, high profile Ubuntu debuts are great.
