Negative Approach

The PlayStation 2 received 30.2 percent of all console-gaming minutes in 2008 (January to October), according to the Nielsen Media Research.

(Credit: Sony)

That statistic is a bit surprising, until you consider that Sony has sold more than 140 million PS2s since its launch. With the largest footprint, the PS2 should have the largest usage base.

Top Console Usage (by percent of minutes played)
• PlayStation 2 (30.2 percent)
• Xbox 360 (18.3 percent)
• Wii (13.5 percent)
• Xbox (9.1 percent)
• PlayStation 3 (7.7 percent)
• GameCube (4.4 percent)
• Other (16.9 percent)

Admittedly, these PS2 numbers are surprising and very impressive. The PS3 is still struggling against the Wii and Xbox, and this data certainly doesn't let the PS3 off the hook, but it does show that there might be a long-tail effect in place for console games.

Even more impressive data from Nielsen is the fact that World of Warcraft, or WoW, players average 671 minutes (more than 11 hours) per week. In any given minute, "almost 1 percent (0.723 percent) of all PC gamers are playing WoW."

Nintendo announced in December that it was working with Japan's Dentsu to bring video to the Wii video game console. And not just any video, but cartoons and original programming. Strategically, this a great move--trying to get the Wii to become the center of the digital living room.

The Times Online reports "the Wiinoma channel is expected to deliver a family- oriented blizzard of cartoons, "brain-training" quizzes, cookery, educational and other lifestyle shows: all of it original content produced exclusively for Nintendo."

News of Nintendo's move into broadcasting is likely to fill executives of many traditional television companies with dread. One senior executive at Fuji Television, Japan's biggest commercial broadcaster, told The Times that if plans by Satoru Iwata, the Nintendo president, to make the Wii "the centerpiece of the living room" took off in a meaningful way, Nintendo's ambitions were "the stuff of television producers' nightmares".

The prospect of content deliberately tailored by Nintendo for its audience, he said, could cause a deep dent in prime-time viewing figures and comes as Japanese broadcasters are being pilloried for relying too heavily on repeats and celebrity formats.

While I am sure producers will initially be concerned, this would seem to be a huge opportunity for them to deliver content and advertising. The big question mark is whether or not Nintendo will open the Wii up to content outside of their own network.

I was in the early crowd of MacBook Air buyers and for the first month I absolutely loved it. I originally bought the Air after a trip to Japan where I lugged around the 15 inch MacBook Pro on all the trains and subways until my back couldn't take it. The Air's weight and form factor are near-perfect if you commute or travel and when I was in the office a USB hub and power supply were always available.

However, once I started hitting the road, the MacBook Air disappointed on many occasions. Hands down the biggest issue is the terrible battery life. Despite trying every setting, even custom configurations, I was never able to get more than two and one-half hours of battery and in some cases couldn't get more than one hour. I'm not going to dwell on the performance except to say it was weak. I knew what I was getting into with a low-horsepower processor and limited (2GB) memory.

Battery life is embarrassingly bad
My first really annoying experience was when I rented Lars and the Real Girl from iTunes and tried to watch it flying from SFO-NYC. However, watching it in full-screen mode made the machine die in about 45 minutes. The movie wasn't great so I figured I would wait until I got to NYC and charge the machine. But, by the time I got there my 24 hours had elapsed and I couldn't finish it.

I had a similar experience flying from San Diego to SFO trying to calm my crazed infant with videos. The damn Air died after 45 minutes of full screen Elmo, which was just ridiculous for everyone around us.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recently revisited a post titled 'Eventually Consistent' , about building consistency models for globally distributed systems and the trade-offs required to process trillions of transactions. It's a little heady, but definitely worth a read if you are trying to figure out how to architect applications for the Cloud or other large system architectures.

Whether or not inconsistencies are acceptable depends on the client application. In all cases the developer needs to be aware that consistency guarantees are provided by the storage systems and need to be taken into account when developing applications. There are a number of practical improvements to the eventual consistency model, such as session-level consistency and monotonic reads, which provide better tools for the developer. Many times the application is capable of handling the eventual consistency guarantees of the storage system without any problem. A specific popular case is a Web site in which we can have the notion of user-perceived consistency. In this scenario the inconsistency window needs to be smaller than the time expected for the customer to return for the next page load. This allows for updates to propagate through the system before the next read is expected.

Via All Things Distributed

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece illustrating why the PS3 is floundering in the contest with Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360. PS3 sales are on the decline while the competition is rising at a dramatic rate.

So, what are some of the main issues with the PS3?

It's overpriced
Microsoft dropped prices on the Xbox 360 to gain market share, and it worked. Sony is intent on becoming profitable (the right motive) but is doing so at the sake of building momentum. A console that starts at $400 (with only one controller and usually zero games) puts you over $500 before it's much fun.

According to the WSJ article, "U.S. sales of the PS3 fell 19 percent last month from a year earlier, while sales doubled for the Wii console and rose 8 percent for the Xbox 360, according to research firm NPD Group. Analysts say they expect PS3 sales for this month to be flat or lower than last year, while sales for its rivals are likely to rise."

I got a lot of questions about a recent post on "freemium" business models asking what Web 2.0 companies dependent on advertising revenue can do to weather the storm.

The short answer: generate revenue from the service you provide.

To clarify: if your company provides an online service that people use consistently and you are dependent on advertising for all of your revenue, you should figure out a way to directly monetize the user base. That is, charge for something that is perceived to be valuable to the user.

This advice is no different for Web 2.0 than it is for open source. If you are a business, you exist to make money. Adoption is not enough in a down economy. You need to get revenue traction in conjunction.

So, how can Web 2.0 or other ad-driven businesses make money?

Soocial.com running on Amazon Web Services

(Credit: Soocial.com)

Examples of architectures designed to run on Amazon Web Services are a great way to illustrate the necessary design changes and patterns associated with a cloud deployment methodology.

Soocial.com, a "one address book solution to contact management" runs entirely on AWS and uses some interesting technologies to make their service work, including RabbitMQ, an open-source implementation of AMQP, the emerging standard for high-performance enterprise messaging. (I've written about AMQP and RabbitMQ here, and here in the past.)

One of the most interesting things is how the architecture isn't dramatically different than it would be if you were to build an on-premise version--except that Soocial is able to take advantage the Amazon Web Services EC2's scale, hot-standby, and backups. It's definitely worth learning more about if you are interested in the cloud.

Via Amazon Web Services blog.

One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.

I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.

Most open source vendors have tweaked their business models to include some kind of additional value only available as part of a subscription. This has brought various cries of derision suggesting that the code is no longer good as the community doesn't get to do QA, along with welcoming arms from investors and developers who want to monetize the code.

Without a doubt, the cloud and all its forms and meanings were big news in 2008. Besides the huge growth of Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, we saw Salesforce launch Force.com, a true platform-as-a-service.

My picks for the most interesting software of 2008 are Hadoop and Eucalyptus.

Hadoop is an Apache project, the "open source implementation of MapReduce, a powerful tool designed for the detailed analysis and transformation of very large data sets," which basically means you can process a ton of data on commodity hardware.

Hadoop is going commercial through Cloudera and while details are not publicly available, let's just say there are some very important and interesting foundations being laid for the way that people deal with computing and processing power.

Last week Oracle and Amazon Web Services held a webinar to outline how Oracle works on Amazon's EC2, including database backups to the Cloud.

Running Oracle on EC2 is not too thrilling, though it's likely welcome for many organizations. Oracle database licensing fees are similar to on-premises pricing with no immediate way to leverage an on-demand usage model. Basically, if you want/need to run Oracle in the Cloud you can. But you aren't looking at a huge cost advantage.

More interesting is the ability to run backups to the Cloud and take advantage of Amazon's S3 low-cost storage. Backup and disaster recovery are a notorious enterprise burden and anything that alleviates risk and system administration is a welcome relief.

One could argue that backup is the killer app for the Cloud. The Cloud offers a higher degree of reliability and accessibility than tapes with faster time to recovery. It removes some of the human intervention required for a recovery and overall makes it easier for companies to back things up on a regular basis.