* Let the public markets know there's something good in the pipeline to keep the stock price as a decent level
* Let the distributors / carriers know (+ no worries about leaks)
* In some ways, it's better than the alternative of a leak, where all the marketing messages come from some crappy blurry cam mixed with a bunch of fake images
I agree it's a little risky from the consumer's POV. Bear in mind a couple things though:
* Even for consumers, when it gets released, they feel more positive towards a product they've heard of previously
* It's possible that the interest will be maintained over that period, although this is a stretch for anyone that isn't amazing at marketing.
Unless you're busy making or avoiding patents, I'd argue that the innovativeness of a feature shouldn't be a factor unless it works better than the normal solution.
"If I were Samsung's CEO or on its Board of Directors, I'd suggest dumping the mobile unit and focusing on consumer tech in televisions, home appliances and cameras and hope to God that no one sues us over those."
This is probably the dumbest opinion I've read so far on this lawsuit.
Wow - I disagree that this is well designed. It also looks half finished (lot of links are dead, many others are unclickable when they should be) - I'm guessing this is a work in progress from an agency?
I hear where you're coming from, but I think different people just like different things about games, and my bias is towards games that have strong stories. Take Mass Effect an an example - for me personally, the most interesting part of the game is making decisions and seeing how the story progresses as a result. I like to pew-pew the aliens as much as the next guy, but I'm most interested in seeing how character X reacts to action A. I'm not alone - the reason so many people were annoyed about the ending was that they wanted to find out what happens to the characters that they'd grown attached to over the last three games.
Now you're right that they could absolutely release the story of Mass Effect as a (really really long) film, but I like to have choice in how the story progresses, and I don't want to watch lots of different movies with all the choices played out. Having that control makes me feel more engaged in the story than watching it passively.
Not everyone will feel that's worth the price of entry for a game - I do.
"If a game is so boring and forgettable that watching a Youtube video is an effective replacement, a player who purchases it will not be satisfied with the game."
This I disagree with - the same goes for great games that are heavily story oriented (perhaps something like Alan Wake or Dreamfall). I'm not saying you get the full experience watching the YT video, but I think the OP's point is that you get enough value that the delta from actually playing the game isn't worth $50.
I agree that's a lot, but we need to bear in mind that active can have a lot of definitions. From the article:
"active in this sense means the number of accounts that were modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower or tweeting"
Three months is a long time for activity - monthly / weekly / daily active user metrics are more common. Also, it (apparently) isn't counting a visit as activity, just these actions. That just makes this a weird metric to benchmark against.
I'd be pretty surprised if Nokia's marketing team haven't already some some price sensitivity analysis (maybe based on past promotions or variations in pricing across carriers or territories) to determine the expected change in revenue from this line. I would guess that you're right, and this level of price change as presented to the end consumer isn't going to drive sales to any meaningful degree. It's possible though that the promotional effect will have a bigger impact (i.e. some percentage people who haven't heard of or noticed the device before will purchase based on other factors).
Either this, OR some marketing director somewhere needs to be seen to be doing something.
I believe GE does also. If these kind of companies are employing the same system with better results, would this imply that the theory behind stack ranking is not the problem?
We discussed this a little on Reddit[1] a while back, some of us fired off emails to our local MEPs on the topic, there was a small demonstration, but frankly we didn't make a loud enough noise to be heard.
I used Sonic when I lived in SF. Dane himself tweeted back when I mentioned them, and their customer service has been super transparent (you can see on their support page [1] how many calls are on and waiting), extremely honest and helpful, even for a nerd like me.
Although you can argue that Gmail is taking away some of your valuable attention, they do provide a heck of a lot for free - web based, keyboard shortcuts, great spam protection, integration with many many services, and so on. Hard to find all that elsewhere.
Prey will track up to three devices with a limited number of reports for free. If you pay (http://preyproject.com/plans), you can hold more reports or track more devices.
Next line: "I mean, I don't see any other solution to begin the fair transition into opening name services that keeps them in line with their stated goals." Perhaps a dose of pragmatism would be good at this point.