Analysts have been making equally aggressive growth forecasts for VR for the past two years; as yet, this forecast growth has not materialized, and there is no sign that it's going to suddenly start happening anytime soon. I've noticed that Altimeter are now rolling AR and VR together into this number, which is probably wise considering that VR is not a thing, but there's no evidence yet of AR being ready for prime time, either. Not a good start. F.
When people with a vested material interest in something keep predicting that it's just about to happen, for years on end, with no sign of it actually happening, you should be very suspicious. Someone whose job title includes "of VR/AR" definitely falls into this category, as do Altimeter themselves, whose actual business is "providing research and advisory on how to leverage disruptive technologies." I'd recommend that you take any of their recommendations with a healthy pinch of salt, if double handfuls of salt weren't actually needed here. F.
Well, if I'm going to do this motherf*cking thing, then I may as well do it.
Devolver Digital's 2017 "press conference" was a thing of genius. A savage send-up of the entire E3 hype-fest, and a brutal critique of the worst of the videogame industry's anti-consumer practices, it also managed to announce a couple of the company's games along the way, and had me literally laughing out loud for most of its run time. As I sat down to watch their 2018 "presser," I wondered how they could possibly top that.
How else? They made a sequel. Literally.
Upping the ante on everything, including the profanity and gore, Devolver continued their savage satire of the entire E3 experience, with "Nina Struthers" returning to show all the world just how soul-less and mercenary the videogame industry could be.
Let's get one thing straight: I hate the hype cycle. I'm offended by all of the manipulative things which large corporations do to convince consumers to disregard rationality, common sense, and their own interests to buy absolute shit that they don't need, and probably wouldn't even want if they just thought about it for a second. It's like they're insulting our intelligence, insisting that we forget everything we know, and every shitty thing they've done to us, all so that we can mindlessly dump more money into their coffers for even less product, this time around.
Never believe the hype.
So, yes, I hate hype. This week, though, I'm learning new things about myself. I'm learning that, even more than the hype cycle itself, I hate poorly-executed hype. It's as if, not satisfied with the insult to our intelligence, these companies now can't even be bothered to make it look like they're trying. "Hype yourselves, suckers, and fuck you all," is the message they're sending, whether they intend to or not.
EA's E3 presser was shockingly incompetent, to such an extent that I don't even know what they were trying to achieve. Not to be out-done, though, Square Enix appear to have looked at that hype-less, lethargic mess, and decided to up the ante, as reported by Kotaku:
OK, I guess I can see the logic? Turning up at E3 to announce that the long-awaited game that you're supposed to be releasing this year won't actually be ready until next year would have been awkward, and bigfooting their own presser like this does obviate the need to show gameplay footage at the event itself. Since nobody's expecting anything of Square Enix anymore, I suppose that this counts as one way to effectively manage expectations.
Still, though... damn.
Having magnificently achieved the opposite of pre-show hype, Square Enix are now going to be playing to a tough room; they need to stage a show that blows everybody's minds, and based on the level of PR-fu they're showing so far, I have doubts about that happening. Last year's E3 was pretty lacklustre; this year's E3 is, if anything, off to an even worse start.
E3 is the single biggest event on the video games industry calendar. This is video gaming's Super Bowl. This is the one time of the year when everybody who gives a shit about video games is paying attention, willingly suspending their disbelief, literally begging to be hyped. If you've got a public relations A game, this is the time to bring it.
EA... did not bring it.
Yes, Sea of Solitude looks pretty cool, although it would have been better to be shown the game, rather than have an indie studio head with no PR-fu just stand there talking about it.
Long-time fans of Command and Conquer were not hyped to see the storied franchise turned into a mediocre mobile game.
Presentations for the oligatory FIFA and Madden offerings ran way too long, and showed nothing that fans of those games haven't seen before.
Speaking of obligatory, the latest Battlefield game will have a Battle Royale mode. Because of course it will. Because EA's execs have no imagination whatsoever. Never mind that BFV's devs were saying just a month ago that their game wasn't going to add a BR mode just to add it, but whatevs.
People who were hoping for more information about the upcoming Anthem were disappointed. It still looks like Destiny, though.
Worst of all, though, at least to me, was EA's ongoing failure with the Star Wars franchise.
I know that there are a lot of people who've invested heavily in money-losing VR ventures, but their continued refusal to recognize the reality of that reality is just... pathetic. Take, for instance, Venture Beat's latest effort at VR boosterism:
One more time, for those in the cheap seats: It doesn't matter that prices are dropping; VR prices haven't dropped significantly since August, when Oculus dropped the price on the Rift; HTC followed suit shortly afterwards, but VR headsets did not start leaping off shelves, and are still not selling quickly enough to justify any amount of optimism. That's because VR's problem is not its price point; its VR's lack of perceived value, at any price.
Wanna bet that the new OS market share numbers show almost no movement, when they come out on Friday? Because I'm pretty certain that's our immediate future holds, here.
Microsoft’s Windows 10 has reached a new milestone: 600 million active monthly devices.
CEO Satya Nadella referenced the new number for the first time moments ago at the company’s annual shareholders meeting, where he is giving analysts and investors an update on Microsoft’s progress and strategy.
The number is up from the 500 million devices touted by Microsoft earlier this year, but it’s still well short of the company’s original goal of 1 billion Windows 10 devices
within two to three years of its 2015 release. The company acknowledged
previously that it wouldn’t be able to reach that original goal.
Quick rule of thumb: anything that a CEO says to his company's shareholders is pretty much guaranteed to be mostly bullshit. Sorry, accentuating the positive while downplaying the negatives, if not avoiding those subjects entirely. Satya Nadella is lying with statistics, here.
This 600 million number is no closer to being relevant to anything than the 500 million number that Nadella's been quoting until five minutes ago. It includes unsold devices; it includes Point of Sale terminals; it includes devices whose users rolled back to Windows 7 and 8; it includes a lot of things that nobody cares about, but that Nadella et al. will try to use in order to build hype for Windows 10, but nothing that an outside observer can actually use to assess the state of Windows 10 play for themselves.
Don't believe the hype. Wait for the data which supports it.
Microsoft's supporters have been quick to seize on StatCounter's version of the month's numbers, which show a much rosier picture for Microsoft, choosing to ignore NetMarketShare (and the Linux Shift that stubbornly keeps showing up in their data) almost entirely. Wayne Williams at betanews made an interesting comment about this phenomenon:
Before we get into it, it's important to note that StatCounter's numbers
are reported differently from NetMarketShare's, because they just break
down Windows's share, whereas NetMarketShare's numbers include other
operating systems, such as different flavors of macOS and Linux.
[...]
Taking an average of the last three months, StatCounter has Windows
10 overtaking Windows 7 in December, while NetMarketShare doesn’t have
that happening until next September.
Neither agree with Microsoft’s figures, which claimed the big event happened 10 months ago.
We'll know in a couple of months whether StatCounter is right on the money, or completely out to lunch; it's possible that Windows 7 could lose enough users to Linux to put them at parity with Windows 10, without Windows 10 actually growing much. This shift in the market is being widely reported as Windows 10 "catching up" to Windows 7, but it might be more a case of Windows 7 running out of gas, while Linux comes up quickly from behind to catch both of them.
When people tell you that Windows 10 is making huge gains in the marketplace, though, remember that there is no evidence yet to support that conclusion. It is, in a word, hype. Never believe the hype.
A couple of days ago, I blogged about Microsoft's imminent wave of layoffs. I was particularly nonplussed with the way that a lot of the coverage was unfolding; everyone seemed anxious to portray Redmond's fourth massive restructuring effort in four years as somehow normal, the sort of thing that successful companies do all the time. But I couldn't recall a single instance of a successful company laying off thousands of employees as part of a massive restructuring effort, let alone a company that had laid off thousands of employees in the each of the preceding three years, and was looking set to add significantly to that total in year four.
As companies tend to do, when delivering bad news, Microsoft softened the blow on many of these announcements by touting some kind of success; their cloud services division saw 3% growth in 2016, for example. They've carefully avoided talking about the overall health of the company, and their share price hasn't suffered too much, at least so far. But there's no way around the steadily mounting numbers, here, as Microsoft's massive structuring becomes an annual event.
Though Microsoft is laying off a massive number of employees, it doesn't come close to the biggest job cuts in corporate history. IBM (IBM, Tech30) cut 60,000 jobs in 1993 as part of a massive restructuring of the tech giant. During the Great Recession, Citigroup (C) slashed 75,000 jobs between 2008 and early 2009. And Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Tech30) laid off 27,000 employees in 2012.
At 28,600, the cumulative layoff total Microsoft's annual restructuring has has now surpassed Hewlett-Packard's 27,000 layoffs from 2012. But, while the numbers are slowly mounting, there is one clear difference between Microsoft's layoffs and the other examples cited by CNN Money: all of the other examples were one-time events. Only Microsoft seems to have turned this kind of restructuring into the way they start every fiscal year.
Do you remember when actual, physical books were dead, ebooks were the future of print, and ebook readers seemed like they might become a necessity for lovers of the printed word? Well, here's the thing about that... funny story... that turns out to have been not at all true. Not only are books not going anywhere, ebooks are actually in decline.
New data suggest that the reading public is ditching e-books and returning to the old fashioned printed word.
Sales of consumer e-books plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016, according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up by 7% over the same period, while children's books surged 16%.
The same trend is on display in the U.S., where e-book sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers. Paperback sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%.
"The print format is appealing to many and publishers are finding that some genres lend themselves more to print than others and are using them to drive sales of print books," said Phil Stokes, head of PwC's entertainment and media division in the U.K.
It's been pretty clear for years now that physical books were going to survive the ebook onslaught, but the convenience of ebooks seemed like it should be enough to at least sustain the ebook ecosystem. Apparently that's not the case; ebooks now appear to have been something of a fad, lacking the staying power of the simple printed word.
"E-readers, which was once a promising category, saw its sales peak in 2011. Its success was short-lived, as it spiraled downwards within a year with the entry of tablets," Euromonitor said in a research note.
According to the Pew Research Center, 65% of Americans reported reading a printed book in the past year, compared to only 28% who read an e-book.
As a lover of old-fashioned, printed books, and a hater of corporate hype, I have to say that I'm thrilled by this development on both fronts.
I own an ebook reader, but never use it; I prefer the experience of holding an actual book, turning its pages, losing myself in its text and its textures. Ebooks might be great for travelling, allowing you to bring several books with you at a fraction of the weight of a single printed work, but I do most of my reading at home, and in bed, where the last thing I want is another damn screen.
Also, books never need recharging, and touch interfaces generally kinda suck.
I like to think that while I do certainly criticize technology products and technology companies for any failings -- Microsoft forcing Windows 10 on to customers against their will last year, for example -- I’m fair. I still get as excited about a new phone, or a new version of Windows, as I did in the past, and I don't deliberately look for negatives. The same is true for all other BetaNews writers.
However, a new study finds that tech reporting is generally more pessimistic now than in the past, and for two very different reasons.
The new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), and based on textual analysis of 250 articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post from 1986 to 2013, highlights how the tone of tech reporting has shifted in the past 20 years.
In general, the ITIF found that in the 1980s and 1990s, coverage of technology was largely positive, but this changed from the mid-1990s to 2013, when more negative reports covering the downside of technology, its failure to live up to its promises, and potential ill effects, started to appear.
All righty then... Where to start..?
Perhaps I should start with the fact that tech coverage in the '80s and '90s included both the very beginnings of the personal computer as a thing, and the entire arc of the dot-com bubble? Yes, PCs were very exciting when they were shiny and new, rather than being ubiquitous and banal, and people were very excited about the potential of dot-coms before anybody knew anything about how dot-coms were actually going to work, but I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which triggered a recession, revealed that shady accounting and auditing practices had fuelled the bubble itself, and wiped out five trillion dollars in investors' pension funds and life savings, may be part of the reason why responsible journalists are little more cautious these days when reporting on the latest bit of hype from Silicon Valley. Just saying.
Then there's the tidbit that the ITIF is a pro-technology think tank, funded by (among others) Cisco, Google, eBay, and IBM? That it was established to "promote government support for innovation in many forms," i.e. to convince lawmakers that technology is the solution to every problem? Or that the report was compiled by sampling articles from only three publications (none of them specific to technology), and searching for the words “technology,” “worry,” “concern,” “progress,” or “potential?” Because that was their methology.
Or perhaps we should talk about the self-congratulatory tone of Williams' piece, praising his (and his BetaNews colleagues') fairness, while complaining that other reporters "have less time and fewer resources to dig deep into technology issues," while being incentivized to "pursue alarmist stories that generate clicks" in a way that borders on "technophobic." Because anyone must be technophobic to say e.g. that VR is a shit product that costs way too much considering that it's not useful for anything much, I guess?
Also, BetaNews apparently have more resources, and fairer journalists, than The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and/or The Washington Post. Not kidding; those are the three publications whose articles ITIF scanned for their analysis. Apparently those scrubs just don't know, but don't worry! BetaNews is here to set them straight. Seriously, what the actual fuck?
Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Williams, after all, wasn't exactly making those claims directly. He was just quoting Daniel Castro, ITIF’s vice president and the report’s co-author, in a way that implied that BetaNews was journalistically superior to the NYT, the WSJ, and/or the Post. Because that's what you're doing, when you talk up your own fairness, and then quote a think tank spokesman saying that the rest of the new media is understaffed, underfunded, ethically compromised, and technophobic, to boot.
The rule of thumb here is pretty simple: unpleasant news isn't necessarily erroneous, and reporting inconvenient truths is perhaps the most essential role of journalism. Many tech writers basically repeat press release copy, often word-for-word, with very little by way of fact-checking or analysis; it's not so much journalism as it is stenography. Williams is better than many at calling out the bullshit, but that's not saying much when you consider how low the bar has been lately.
I've been pretty critical of tech writers in the past, something which, honestly, is becoming increasingly awkward as my intended-to-be-about-gaming blog has come to be dominated by my writings on Windows 10, VR, and other tech-specific issues. Awkward or not, though, there's no way around the fact that I did the minimum work of checking Wikipedia to learn about the source of this report, and skimmed the report itself to see what their methodology actually was... two things which Williams apparently didn't do.
As luck would have it, Idea Channel has a pretty decent video this week on a related topic, which I highly recommend:
Yes, technology does have its uses; it just pays to be skeptical about some of the claims of tech companies, is all, and those of their lobby groups and think tanks... or any self-congratulatory tech writers you may come across who are too busy patting themselves on the back to do the actual fact-checking which is indispensable to effective journalism.
I'm not a journalist. I'm not trained as one, and I don't work as one; this blog is done entirely in my spare time, any isn't monetized in any way. But if you are a journalist, and you're still being out-done by an amateur like me when it comes to basic journalistic integrity... then I'm sorry, but you're doing it wrong.
It's just about the end of the month, which means we're only days away from seeing new OS market share stats from the likes of StatCounter and NetMarketShare. And, true to their form of the past year, Microsoft are trying to preempt the actual stats with their own version of these numbers, apparently hoping to keep the hype train rolling, regardless of what reality has to say about Windows 10's actual adoption rate. MS's stats have always been rather... generous, shall we say? to Windows 10, but their latest pronouncement has at least one tech blogger just straight up calling them bullshit. From Wayne Williams at betanews:
While NetMarketShare’s OS usage share figures show the new operating system doing fine, but lagging some distance behind Windows 7 (as you'd expect), Microsoft’s figures paint an entirely different picture.
Five months ago, the software giant showed Windows 10 hitting 50 percent in the US, and two months ago, it had the new OS overtaking Windows 7 globally. Today’s update though stretches the believability just a little too far.
[...]
So why do I say the numbers are fake?
Well, the growth of Windows 10 and the decline of Windows 7 is just way too neat to be real. According to the Windows Trends figures, Microsoft grew by exactly one percentage point a month, every month from July to November (42 percent, 43 percent, 44 percent, 45 percent, 46 percent). At the same time, Windows 7 declined by exactly the same amount.
And if that doesn’t sound unlikely enough, Windows 8.1’s share went up one percentage point in August (to 13 percent) and hasn’t changed since. Windows 8’s share (2 percent) hasn’t wavered either. And that's ridiculous. Windows 8.x is an OS in decline.
It’s possible the new numbers are just placeholders, and Microsoft has dropped them in while awaiting the real figures (although why it would do that I have no idea). But if that's not the case, then I call BS. Microsoft’s Windows share numbers have been raising eyebrows for a while, but this latest lot smacks of just being made up.
You tell 'em, Wayne. It's great to see that some folks in the professional tech media are starting to tire of Microsoft's PR BS. Suddenly, I can't wait to see the reaction to the actual numbers, when they come out on Wednesday.
Either that, or VR just isn't the selling point that it seemed to be, a year ago. From TweakTown:
One of the main selling points of Microsoft's new high-end Project Scorpio--besides delivering "the highest res at the best frame rates without no compromises"--was its virtual reality capabilities; Microsoft was keen on pushing a higher-end VR experience that would eclipse what Sony offers with its PS4-powered PlayStation VR headset. Xbox General Manager of Game Publishing Shannon Loftis has said that Project Scorpio can deliver high-fidelity VR at 90 FPS.
But has this changed? Has Microsoft shifted gears away from premium VR gaming with its new console? All mention of 'high fidelity VR' has been erased from Project Scorpio's website. This is particularly interesting timing because Microsoft has recently hired many of the industry's top tech-makers like ASUS, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP to create Windows 10 powered VR headsets. I postulated that this move would help foster Project Scorpio's own ambitious VR plans, but it appears that instead of pushing things forward, these OEMs might have encountered a snag in the progress, thus affecting the console's VR-ready status.
One thing that's also different is that Microsoft no longer claims that Project Scorpio is the "first and only console to enable true 4K gaming." This is likely at the behest of its own community and Sony fans, especially considering the PS4 Pro can deliver upscaled 4K gaming as well as VR.
I doubt this development will affect Scorpio's reception much, one way or the other, but it is interesting. It either points to (a) VR having a much higher cost in graphical processing power that Microsoft expected, or to (b) VR being significantly less attractive as a selling point that Microsoft expected, back when Scorpio was first announced. Both of these may say more about the problems facing VR, than about the problems facing MS's new XBox model as they attempt to claw their way back into competition for the current "console" generation.
Remember when I was saying that Autos (i.e. fully autonomous vehicles) weren't going to be limited to self-driving cars, and that the ability to remove drivers entirely was going to have a huge impact on the future shapes they would take?
Well, you can change all the tenses in that statement from future to present.
Yes, that a massive, self-driving mining dump truck, and it's just the first piece in the creation of totally automated mining sites:
We are one step closer to being able to strip-mine the Earth on autopilot, with mine sites like this that won't need anywhere near as many humans to operate as mines do today. And this is just the beginning of the sort of full-scale, next-generation automation technology that's in the works.
BTW, if you want to see another, smaller-scale example of the possible shape of future autonomous vehicles... Nissan's got you covered.
Welcome to the actual Singularity, already in progress. #nohype
Beginning today, a select group of Pittsburgh Uber
users will get a surprise the next time they request a pickup: the
option to ride in a self driving car.
The announcement comes a year-and-a-half after Uber hired dozens of
researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics center to develop the technology.
Uber gave a few members of the press a sneak peek Tuesday when a
fleet of 14 Ford Fusions equipped with radar, cameras and other sensing
equipment pulled up to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Campus (ATC)
northeast of downtown Pittsburgh.
During my 45-minute ride across the city, it became clear that this
is not a bid at launching the first fully formed autonomous cars.
Instead, this is a research exercise. Uber wants to learn and refine how
self driving cars act in the real world. That includes how the cars
react to passengers — and how passengers react to them.
“How do drivers in cars next to us react to us? How do passengers who
get into the backseat who are experiencing our hardware and software
fully experience it for the first time, and what does that really mean?”
said Raffi Krikorian, director of Uber ATC.
If they are anything like me, they will respond with fascination followed by boredom.
Driver error kills thousands of people every year in the U.S. alone, so self-driving cars don't have to be perfect in order to make our roads much, much safer -- they just have to be better than us. And here's the thing: they're already better than us. The hurdles to getting self-driving autos on the road aren't technological -- the technology already exists, and it already works well enough to be an enormous improvement over the status quo.
No, the real hurdles to adoption of this technology are cultural -- matters of public perception, and the influence that perception can have on the politicians who will be called on to modify existing laws in order to allow fully autonomous vehicles to be rolled out in large numbers.
