SteveStreeting.com

Watching the ebbs and flows of the game industry is simultaneously inspiring and outright depressing. As is usual for this stage in a console generation, we’re at the ‘consolidation point’ (pun unintentional)  - where the tech is pretty well understood, even if it is starting to look a bit dated compared to even a modest PC (how much hassle AA is on this console generation is a case in point), but that at least developers can crank out content in a more efficient fashion. This has led to some darned good games.

What’s depressing is what’s happening to the ‘official’ download channels – which were a bastion of independent content a year or two ago, and now are turning more and more into just another channel for the same mainstream developers & publishers we see at retail. XBLA has been the trend maker here, it was first to really embrace and promote downloadable games to a ‘core’ market, and has done extremely well. Now, however, we have a limit of 2 games per week, and all too often those 2 slots are being assigned to either major developers (Shadow Complex, Alien Breed Evo) or shovelware ports with brand recognition but little quality or innovation (I’m looking at Taito in particular: Bubble Bobble and Qix remakes were incredibly lazy, uninspiring affairs). It’s very clear that the team behind choosing which developers are published in XBLA has changed in recent years, and not for the better from my perspective. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Shadow Complex and Alien Breed Evo, but if they’re using up the slots it means that publishing route is rapidly being cut off for small developers who are big on ideas and talent, but short on funds and established brands. Alien Breed Evo’s budget was supposedly around $2.5m for goodness sakes – although it’s looking like that’s going to backfire anyway since sales have been poor. Trials HD, ‘Splosion Man and Peggle are pretty much the only games from small studios with modest budgets that I can think of that made a splash on XBLA in 2009 – the rest just read like a whos who of regular retail channels. Indeed many developers who have had games published on XBLA are no longer welcome there, such as PomPom (interview) and Llamasoft. Clearly the message is ‘win big, or get your coat’. This isn’t the right environment for an indie scene to flourish, where experimentation and mistakes are part of the process.

Yes, I know there’s XBL ‘Indie Games’ but that’s the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, hobbled with a niche development environment that’s incompatible with the most established dev libraries and every other platform a developer might want to deploy on (barring PC), and so far almost totally lacking any way for a decent game to effectively ‘rise above the noise’, except via external review sites like XNPlay, which doesn’t work at all for targetting the majority of game players with information.  It’s just not a very good target for those I would call ’serious indies’ and actually acts as a false argument for not opening primary download channels more; there’s nothing wrong with the concept, it’s just implemented completely wrong.

PSN got started later so has been earlier in the curve of promoting independent content, but they’re going that way too. I guess they’re all just ‘following the money’, and the games industry remains obsessed with hits because of its current top-heavy model. I’d hoped that the downloadable content channels would promote an equivalent to low-budget and art-house cinema, where content can survive and make a profit for the creators, without necessarily having to be the Biggest Thing Ever(tm), encouraging experimentation. But, the giant flaw in this plan is that independent cinema is able to be published and consumed anywhere – while most games consumers remain shackled to console platform holders, who just want to publish a limited number of the very biggest hits, everything else not being worth their time or risking ‘distracting’ the customer with choice. If you’ve read my blog before, you know my opinion of the effectiveness of closed platforms in the long term when it comes to broadening and deepening a medium, but I’ll say it again – closed platforms are bad for the industry in the grand scheme of things. Games will never be as big as film until this changes, they might compete on the blockbuster level, but that’s far, far from the whole story. But, until we’re further along the lifecycle of games when hardware and delivery becomes mostly invisible,  the vested interests aren’t going to allow that to change for a little while yet.

You really need to go to the iPhone/iPod Touch for more prolific indie content these days. But, how long will that last?

I honestly don’t know why platform holders find it so hard to manage an open publishing strategy. All you need is systems that:

• Allow users to rank content; and nominate ‘trusted reviewers’ such as those from major game review sites
• Allow wide marketing opportunities – both in-system and cross-site (such as to xbox.com, where you can buy in-browser too)
• Robust searching, on keywords, categories, user ratings, friends recommendations etc
• Cross-promotion, aka the ‘You might also like…’ lists

Hell, if Amazon can create a compelling buying experience with millions of products across a diverse range of departments, why on earth do platform holders think a console user can’t handle more than 2 game choices a week? It’s hugely patronising, and says more about the inadequacy of the platform to manage larger amounts of content effectively than about any limit on what consumers are willing to peruse. Saying “we can’t sell as effectively if we have more product available” actually means “we suck at organisation”. This argument stacks up at retail, where there’s a limited amount of shelf space, and customers don’t want to wander around a massive warehouse or to squint at shelves of tightly packed boxes looking for something, but not when you have unlimited shelf space and a cloud full of computers to index it in the blink of an eye for you (and make suggestions), and where a marketing campaign or friend recommendation can bring a customer instantly to the point of sale with the use of a simple link.

For Christ’s sakes platform holders, wake up to the opportunities of the channel. Stop being blinded by what works at physical retail, it’s really not the same. There are people out there already doing it leagues better than you (see pretty much any of the e-commerce leaders), and putting your fingers in your ears and saying it can’t possibly work  is both ignorant and doing a massive disservice to both customers and content creators.

So, I’ve been a little quieter than usual since the new year, and that’s because I’ve been in  a rather reflective mood as I plan out how I’m going to spend my time in 2010. That’s right – planning! Talk about the final frontier

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

Making a living from open source is hard. Correction – making a living from writing open source software is hard – it’s incredibly easy to make a living from someone else’s open source software of course, which is why that’s what most people do At one time the popular opinion was that pure-play open source companies could make a living from support services, which works to a degree but I know from both my own experience and from that of others that it doesn’t work that well. Again, the best chances of it working are if you’re providing support services for software that someone else writes, because you’re only able to monetise the service, not the development. This actually discourages people from investing in development, and instead merely in deployment and ancilliary services which isn’t actually a good thing for core product development.

The best cases of companies funding open source are where they’re using it to deliver some other product or service which is directly monetised, therefore the open source development comes under their general R&D budget. Google, IBM and others fall firmly under this category, and you can bet that the largest open source software projects are funded this way – Apache, Eclipse, Firefox all pay their core developers like this. But, it requires a fairly significant level of scale to be able to do that, hence why it’s usually the giant corporations that do it rather than smaller companies.

The next favourite option is dual-licensing; the general set-up if you come at this with a commercial hat on, is that you pick a license that a lot of commercial entities will have a problem with extending from (ie GPL), then you sell them an alternative license; the idea being that you get the adoption via the open source license and make money from the commercial license. But, it can be controversial, as most recently discussed by Greg Stein in the Oracle / MySQL case.  The argument is that if your commercial license is just a proprietary license, and can be revoked and otherwise monkeyed with by the issuing company (or perhaps more importantly, its acquirers), you have actually been lured into a honey trap – the lure being that open source comes with certain protections, but that if you rely on the availability of the commercial license you actually have none of those and might as well have bought from a proprietary software vendor.

So, what to do? If you’re a small development company, open sourcing your product will definitely bring more people in, but if you’re not in the hosting / cloud business and don’t want to rely on services to earn your keep (who can blame you), what can you do to earn your keep except abandon open source for your main products (maybe splitting your time between proprietary and open source), or dual-license and face accusations that you’re fibbing about the true nature of your product for your commercial users?

Well, I’ve been wondering whether the problem is that dual-licensing typically falls back on traditional licensing concepts, ie that your commercial license looks very much like a normal proprietary license, which has all the problems of ‘what if my vendor changes the license conditions’ etc – when in fact it really needs to be more like a permissive open source license, with a payment condition. One of the great powers of open source is that it is ‘detached’ from the producer and compeltely predictable and immutable – once the software is out there, it can’t be taken away from the receiver and is always ‘whole’ in terms of the source code so no-one is tied in. There are also cast-iron source & binary redistribution clauses that are known up-front, and are again immutable, which mean everyone knows where they stand, forever. Why can’t the commercial side of a dual-license continue to do this, while at the same time generating a revennue stream for the company?

Maybe I’m being naive. But what about this sort of dual-license set-up for a library or toolset:

• Default is GPL (and obviously free)
• Commercial alternative license available, giving very permissive rights, but with these important rules:
  • The license is irrevocable once issued
  • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative binary works is included with Apache-style conditions
  • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative source to anyone under the GPL (for free) is included
  • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative source under the permissive commercial license conditions is also included, provided the same original license fee is paid per receiver. Critically, the price and conditions surrounding redistribution may not be altered unilaterally by the licensor at any time after the license is issued (so once you’ve bought it once, the conditions and price for non-GPL redistribution are set in stone and cannot be altered unless both parties agree – say if the price is reduced later)
  • All software reverts to the Apache license if the company folds without selling the rights to someone else

This would mean that those choosing to opt for the commercial license would have the same kind of cast-iron guarantee an open source user has that once software is out in the wild and being used under some conditions, that the originator cannot possibly change that, ie take it away or change their right to modify and redistribute under conditions they agreed to at the start. To me, this seems to give the same kind of certainty over not being screwed over in the future as open source does, thus blunting the accusations of proprietary lock-in by the back door, but while generating some revenue for the developer too. It is, in effect, the same as a permissive open source license with the one addition that redistribution of the source to a new party requires either payment to the originator, or reverting to the GPL.

Now, of course there is still potential uncertainty around new versions of the software, but this is no different from open source, where your only guarantee is over what is published right now, not what might happen in future versions.

Does anyone know companies that use this model? My experience is that commercial dual licenses tend to be as restrictive as proprietary licenses, which then can justifiably lead to accusations that the open source license has been used as a shill to get people into a lock-in scenario. Is there really a ‘third way’ or am I missing the point?

I picked this story up via Matt Asay and it pretty much summed up the frustrations I’ve had in the last 10 years when talking to certain people about open source – particularly when I was involved in business software. Peter Gyorgy, CIO of GE made this comment in a recent panel discussion:

“I think open source is great for own internal playground type of things but if it’s running vital mission critical applications – networks running on open source for example – then that is a huge, huge risk to the organisation,”

This would be incredibly funny if it wasn’t so damn indicative of so many CIOs, managers and other closed-minded, overly conservative IT people who have long since given up on trying to stay reliably informed and just believe what their vendors tell them. It’s especially amusing given that GE’s healthcare division runs its mission critical software on Linux, which their CIO seems oblivious of. And I would expect the New York Stock Exchange would be considered ‘mission critical’, and it runs on an open source platform (and interestingly the LSE is switching to Linux too) – so clearly not everyone thinks like this.

The one place where he does have a potential point, albeit skewed beyond all recognition is when he says:

“We are not here to be an IT shop, we are here to be the partner of a business and we shouldn’t put businesses operations into risk by running very low cost solutions,”

That’s a very valid point. However, it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the choice between open source and anything else! This is such a common misconception. Open source has matured – if you need enterprise-level open source there are companies that are quite happy to take your money to remove the hassle and worry of system stability. They’re really no different from the Microsofts and Oracles of this world, except that the software they’re running your system for you on is open source rather than closed. That gives you an additional bit of leverage because if they suck, or if they try to pull a fast one on prices, you can actually get that enterprise management from someone else without having to change your software too. Try doing that when you switch from Oracle to Microsoft or vice versa for services.

You also have the advantage of not having to wait for a central vendor to hear your pleas for feature A or B, or a bugfix that might be low priority for most people but is absolutely critical for you. Instead of hacking workarounds and seething in the wings while you wait for your vendor to get around to addressing something they think isn’t a priority because it’s not affecting that many people, you can pay someone to fix it for you and submit it upstream, where it will undoubtedly get accepted far quicker than it would have got fixed if only a central vendor was looking after it.

You don’t have to be running an IT shop – although if you do, you have the option of trading your own time for monetary savings and greater agility – your support options are just different. Sure, they can be slightly more complicated if you let them be – particularly if you’re looking to save money or drive things in an optimal direction for your company such as tailoring the software – but if you want to have a simple 1-vendor setup using only standard versions you can do that with open source too. Delegating all support to a third party will cost you more but the option is there. It’s all about choice, flexibility, and empowerment – all things a CIO should welcome, not be afraid of (otherwise he/she’s probably in the wrong job).

I think too many IT managers / CIOs have a mental block which prevents them from being really committed to optimising their IT delivery, in terms of both spend, alignment with the business and agility for the future, because they’re locked inside a box of their own making.

I always find Matt Asay’s blog an interesting read – even if I don’t always agree with him, his posts on open source are always thought provoking. Today he was talking about how Wikipedia’s contribution rate is falling and how that has parallels in open source; that the community is no replacement for a centralised, focussed team.

He’s right on the core point – at the heart of every successful open source project there’s always a core team (or individual), and in the really influential ones, that team is usually funded – Mozilla is famously bankrolled almost entirely by Google, the Apache foundation has many, many sponsors including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Eclipse has IBM, and so on. Many of the big projects that don’t have more general sponsorship still have a core team funded by a dual-license or other premium software model: MySQL, RedHat/JBoss, Qt etc. Such guidance & direction at the core is crucial – at OGRE we have a core team too, except that we’re not directly funded by anyone in terms of developer time (we have several generous sponsors who cover the majority of our hosting needs); we guide it because we want to, and because we use OGRE ourselves too. My company is probably the closest thing to a core development sponsor, in that I’ll allocate “work time” to doing OGRE development that could otherwise be spent making commercial products or doing consultancy, but it’s by necessity small beer compared to the likes of Mozilla and Apache.

But I do think he underplays the changes that have taken place in the software development world. He asserts that because most headline software development is still focussed at big influential companies, we’ve mostly just rearranged the chairs a bit at the same banquet. I don’t agree with that at all – by nature it still makes most sense to concentrate much of the development in a small team for quality, consistency and organisational purposes, but the point is that where precisely this centre is determined primarily by merit, not by the boundaries of a company’s org chart. While the core team is doing a good job, and accepting reasonable patches and such, people are happy for the show to be run there. The community is still definitely involved in the development, and certainly adds considerably to the end result. Yes, proportionately the central team does more, but crucially, should anything go badly wrong – such as the core going in a direction a lot of people don’t like, or the product being sidelined, if there’s enough of a community a fork will emerge, with another core team to lead it. That’s a critical safety valve that keeps companies more “honest” than they had to be in the past, and is a vital insurance policy for anyone investing their own resources in a piece of software. Matt claims the ‘Command and Control’ setup of software vendors is still in place; I think his view is clouded by the fact that he’s solely focussed on enterprise software, and enterprise customers move at such a glacial pace that any change is largely imperceptible – to the extent that ‘community’ maybe does look a lot like the ‘customers / partners’ relationship of old. But that would be a bad call, completely ignoring the difference in the level of control that is ceded to a community versus the customers of old – sure, many enterprise customers may not wish to leverage that control, and would take a long time to move if someone else chose to do so, but that option is still always there. And not everyone in the world is an enterprise customer – the enterprise usually follows the grass roots eventually.

In practice, it’s really all about balance, the middle ground. Yes, we still need focii of development just to make sure things get done in a reasonable fashion – no-one likes chaos in their software. Yes, it makes most to have that focus funded, in a traditional company model, if that piece of software gets beyond a certain size / popularity. But that doesn’t for a second undermine the value of community participation; in fact the two are deeply interdependent – one without the other is just not sustainable in a sizeable project.

So, people certainly shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that random crowds of people on the internet will create great software without some organisation (the infinite monkeys creating Shakespeare fallacy), but they also shouldn’t think that community is disposable and that we’re in the same situation we were before but with a different label. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ve been pushing quite hard to get this done before I head off to Qt DevDays next week, and luckily it all came together in the last few days:

Some of the notable back-of-the-box (if there was a box) items:

• Upgrade to SpeedTree v5 – supporting all the great new features. See the SpeedTree site for more details on this release.
• More lighting options – Ambient Occlusion, Ambient Contrast, Specular Lighting, Transmission Lighting, Global Light Scalar, HDR.
• Improved LOD fading – LOD transitions are now implemented via less perceptible techniques thanks to SpeedTree v5.
• Dynamic soft self-shadowing via depth shadowmaps – (was also demonstrated on SpeedTree 4.2 in OgreSpeedTree 1.1.0)
• Improved alpha to coverage support – alpha to coverage rendering has been significantly improved and is now enabled by default (you must render with at least 2xMSAA to see the effect), resulting in significantly smoother foliage edges and smoother fade transitions.

I’m just really, really glad to have got this done. SpeedTree v5 was quite a big change to handle, but hugely worthwhile, the guys at IDV have done a great job. I made the choice from v1 to do a ‘deep’ integration (ie all objects are first-party Ogre objects, everything uses Materials and RenderQueues properly, etc), which made the transition considerably more time consuming than using the higher level pass-through interfaces, so this took some effort. I like it this way though, it means it’s a ‘real’ integration as far as I’m concerned, not just a simplistic bolt-on.

There’s still more to do, not least of which a demo that’s more interesting than just a technical performance test But at least I can tick off one of the major things on my TODO now. I’d been putting in quite a few extra hours to try to handle this, and my Qt presentation preparation, and Ogre, and consultancy, and it has taken its toll a bit – I’ve been spending more time at the desk and think that was a contributing factor to me straining my back at the gym last weekend. Hopefully that’s just temporary, I’ve been a lot better these last few months.

Hope you like the shots anyway. I know, I’m pimping them all over the place in my Twitter, here and on the Ogre site, but a guys gotta make a living, right?

I reported a few months ago on how pleased I was that Qt was changing license to the LGPL, something I saw as a watershed for Qt adoption. I already had an awful lot of respect for Qt, but the previous GPL/commercial license did mean that adoption was in two quite widely separated camps – those who were already making GPL software, and those that could afford to license it for other cases. Great though Qt is, the price of the commercial license is really quite steep ($3,695 per-developer, per-platform), and that was hard to justify for a small developer.

So, the LGPL move is a big change and opens up a huge opportunity for Qt to be adopted in the ‘middle ground’. But beyond just adoption, Qt are clearly pushing for much higher levels of community participation going forward. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from someone in their strategy group, who is looking to reach out and build relationships with other open source groups & companies in related fields, to see how we might help each other in the future, and that sounded really promising. Today I received an email from the Qt mailing list outlining how they’re structuring their new public code repositories, and how they’ll be accepting external contributions. It all looks well thought out – they’re using Git to make patch submission easier on a large scale for example (something I’ve considered in the past, it’s only unfamiliarity and the lack of good Git UIs that puts me off doing it).

It’s great to see big companies making such solid moves into true open source participation like this, as opposed to some other companies which use open source licenses, but still operate a 100% ‘push’ model of development. Ultimately I’m sure it will pay huge dividends both for them and for the Qt user community. Obviously before the Nokia aquisition, Qt had to generate all its revenue from licensing so it had less scope or impetus to explore openness like this, but still I think there’s scope for many organisations to explore this approach with some aspects of their software products; specifically those parts that underpin the ‘premium’ side of its business or provide other infrastructural elements on which it builds its higher-margin offerings. As more companies explore these kinds of opportunities to blend open source and commerce, both as providers and consumers (and open source offers benefits on both ends of the relationship), I think we’ll see an acceleration of iterative innovation in the industry.

Yes, I got back from FMX/09 last night, after the usual pain-in-the-ass shuttling between London airports to make my connections and the inherent waiting around that entails. I’m constantly disgusted by the amount airports charge for internet access so I left writing this post until today.

I really enjoyed FMX – it was the first graphics conference in which I’d been officially on the speaker bill, so I’m not sure how well other conferences treat their speakers, but at FMX I thought they did a fantastic job; everything was really well organised and went very smoothly. I actually enjoyed FMX more than Siggraph to be honest; it’s smaller and I found it a bit more manageable, and people seemed to have more time to talk. The speakers dinners were great for meeting & talking with various random people – such as having a quick chat with Ken Perlin, creator of the ubiquitous Perlin noise, and who had already heard of Ogre, which was nice.

My presentation went well, I was fussing over and tweaking the content right up to the last minute – was there enough for the time, was there enough technical detail, or too much, and so on – but in the end the feedback I received suggested I got it right. There was theory and arm-waving, I dove into code for a few minutes to illustrate how you build up a simple demo, I showed screenshots of Torchlight and OgreSpeedTree, videos of Venetica, ZeroGear and Dangerous Australians, and ran a real copy of The Book Of Unwritten Tales (and in the presentation tradition, my machine choked on the DVD the first time). In the end the hour flew by and I had to speed things up a bit, leaving 5 minutes for questions, which was just enough, so not bad on a timing front.

The room was also packed, people were standing at the back and sides of the room due to lack of available seating – I had no idea what to expect in terms of interest levels so I was very pleased with the turnout in the end. I also collected quite a few business cards and contacts from people using Ogre or thinking of doing so, which is always good, especially for a free agent such as myself!

I also met up with the guys from Filmakademie (who run the conference) who are developing some really cool tech using Ogre, such as procedural facial animation systems and non-photorealistic rendering. The editing framework they’ve built for these kinds of projects to sit on top of is looking really slick (it reminds me a bit of Houdini), and the good news is that they’re going to be releasing it as open source (LGPL) very soon, so I’ll be sure to link that both here and on the OGRE site when it’s available, because I think a lot of people are going to like it. All in all it was great to meet them and we intend to stay in contact in the future.

I’d like to thank everyone at Filmakademie (Constanze, Volker, David, Stefan, Nils, Simon and Thomas) for inviting me, and making it such an enjoyable visit.

[edit]Oh, and please bear with me if you’re waiting for a reply to something – I did manage to keep up with email somewhat whilst away, but more significant things will have to wait for me to catch up with them in the coming days.

A few days ago, Yahoo! announced that they would be shuttering the venerable GeoCities this year. “So what?” you might well ask – GeoCities is after all an ageing service from a bygone era, and apart from some nostalgia and perhaps some data that some people might have had parked there for a while, most people won’t really notice it’s passing.

But nevertheless, it’s important, and people who get carried away with putting a dollar value on the current favourite websites of the day (e.g. Facebook) should take careful note. GeoCities was huge, really a sensation at the time, before many of the people raving over Facebook now were online, or perhaps even born (scary). It was easily as big culturally as Facebook at the time, which is why Yahoo bought it for almost $3 billion. I bet they regret that, because what happened was exactly what will continue to happen in this sort of space – things changed. New technology comes along, new techniques, new fashions, and the old sites are abandoned like burning ships incredibly quickly, until as happened this week (perhaps a little overdue in fact), the charred, lonely hulk sinks beneath the waves.

The issue is that these sites are not really ’sticky’ on an individual basis. There’s really very little investment needed to use them, so getting up and moving somewhere else really isn’t much of an issue. Sure, with social networks the main ‘index of stickyness’ is your friends list, so people tend to stick where their friends are, but really, I don’t see this being a major barrier in practice, because by nature most of the stuff on there is non-critical and for fun, and these things are often follow generational ‘clusters’ – the students in the 90s were all on GeoCities, now they’re all on Facebook. Where will the next set be? I wouldn’t for a second assume they’d stay in the same place; they’ll want sites for their own generation, not the last one.

The eventual destiny of GeoCities should be a significant warning to anyone thinking of paying top-dollar for web companies that have no business model beyond casual eyeballs, and rely on fashion to drive that attention. Fashion changes, and you really don’t want to be stuck with $3bn worth of brown corduroy flares (assuming that they’re not fashionable right now – I can’t keep up! )

I picked up on this via Gringod’s twitter: Windows 7 will have an XP Mode, a virtualised environment but with the added bonus that it doesn’t create a new desktop, just virtualised application windows inside Windows 7 that are actually running on an XP SP3 VM.

At first it all sounds pretty damn good, paving the way for MS to ‘do an Apple’ and redesign things more fundamentally without having to worry about being backwards-compatible forever. However, there’s a catch – XP Mode will only be available to licensees of the Professional edition of Windows 7 or above, it will be missing from the entry-level versions. Gah.

Rant mode: all these versions of Windows are bloody stupid. It’s a client operating system for feck’s sake, it’s not an enterprise application where people have wildly different requirements. It sits on a bloody desk doing work for one user at a time, how realistically do you imagine that those tasks are highly partitionable? You know the argument that with Linux, things are too complicated because of the fragmentation? Well, then why are MS deliberately doing the same thing to their own product? It beggars belief.

The argument may be that only businesses and professional users need this backwards compatibility, to which I say total hogwash. I just can’t believe you would come up with basically a silver bullet for finally breaking away from the legacy of poor Windows OS design, and then say you won’t include it in every box, thereby leaving a class of users without the option to rely on that facility as a bridging point. You think only businesses have legacy apps? As a software guy, it seems a stupid decision motivated by the bean counters who want to find new and inventive ways to upsell to customers. The baby is most definitely surfing away on the bathwater.

For God’s sake MS, make this a standard feature. It looks excellent, but locking some customers away from it totally undermines it and just looks like greed. And really, think seriously about unifying your client OS offering into one product and limiting your bizarre urge to partition everything into 20 confusing editions to your higher-end server / developer products.  A client OS should be a standard, simple affair.