As it turns out, having an “$” in your name makes it a whole lot easier to be generous in paying for your mistakes, as evidenced by “Micro$oft”‘s latest in a series of costly apologies to customers. When called out over a bug which disabled the split-screen multiplayer feature of the 360 release of Minecraft for some users, Xbox corporate offered affected users a full refund. Say what you will about the Microsoft company history, but their Games Division’s ability to guilt trip their higher-ups into doing right by their mistakes continues to impress me.
As a soon-to-be-former RIT student(!), I’ve interacted with Microsoft’s games division on multiple occasions. Far from representing the cutthroat corporate culture the company became synonymous with in the 1990’s, these Microsoft guys were relaxed, fun, innovative, creative… the total antithesis of the Microsoft I grew up with.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in their reaction to the homebrewing cottage industry which sprang up in the wake of Kinect’s release. 90’s Microsoft would’ve responded with Cease-and-Desist’s; last year’s Microsoft cheered on when a tech company put out a bounty to the first person or group to successfully create open-source drivers for the peripheral (although to be fair, they did flip-flop a bit first). 90’s M$ would have bought out all the startups working with their licensed tech, and gutted them; today’s MS houses several companies working on Kinect apps.
They may not be perfect, but I think Microsoft deserves a decent amount of credit for trying to change their ways, and for giving the Xbox division the freedom it needs to earn the trust and respect of this generation of gamers.
…And I’m not just saying that because I’ve applied for their developer program. The LEAP Motion system sits in front of you on your desk, plugs into a USB port on a PC or Mac, then basically functions as a knocked-over Kinect- gestures and motions are recognized from below and translated via the included Motion software.
The kicker is that instead of an expensive, top-heavy, motorized setup (the Kinect), the Leap uses proprietary technologies to achieve much more accurate gesture and motion tracking, from a much closer distance. What’s more, the Leap will retail for 70 bucks- markedly cheaper than other products on the market.
Assuming I get approved for Leap’s developer program (and I don’t need to sign any NDA’s), I’ll be sure to document my experiences working with it in my own projects, hopefully culminating in a review of the final product ahead of its anticipated release date this winter.
via LEAP Motion.
This is a great article, right here. The author, Richard Gaywood of TUAW, raises a very interesting and tense issue in regards to software licensing: does removing the features from an app already paid for by the customer, and moving them to a more expensive “Pro” version, constitute “double dipping”? Do the legal implications of software ownership, outweigh the ethical implications of being a scumbag? Fascinating. No, wait- the other thing. Shitty.
Look, I get that Instacast could very well be within their rights by removing said features from their paid app, as outlined by software licensing agreements. But that still doesn’t make what they’re doing okay, as evidenced by any one of the myriad 1-star reviews the app is now being avalanched with on the App Store from angry customers.
The argument of actual software ownership versus perceived software ownership doesn’t really matter here- at the end of the day, this is an issue of doing right by customers. Shazam did it right when they changed their app’s pricing model: they grandfathered loyal customers of their app into the new feature set, free of charge. Did they technically have to do that? Probably not. Did they see a firestorm of 1-star reviews on the App Store as a result? Absolutely not- in fact, they saw the opposite, receiving a swell of high praise from customers who appreciated the respect shown to them.
And that’s really what this issue is about: respect. In this digital age, people are very, very protective over their perceived ownership of software, since there isn’t such a thing as a “boxed copy”, or any sense of tangible ownership that comes with a physical product. Pulling the rug out from under your own customers may not break any laws, but it violates the hell out of the law of common sense.
I want all of these for my new apartment.
I love hearing about this kind of horror story from successful past projects- especially from a company as legendary as Pixar. Just goes to show that even the best of us make terrible, terrible mistakes once in a while (not counting Cars 2).
What Is?
Hey! I'm Mike, this is my blog. and my dream is to use my middling tech skills to make the world a better place (not in the techno-libertarian, "the world is a better place if I get mine" sense, but in the actual, "I want to help" sense).
