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Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

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Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#61

Post by echelon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #50
echelon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve's products are 100% designed to punch a hole through Windows Store monopolization. It encourages developers to write for Linux. Microsoft has been trying to corner Valve. Valve is finding clever ways out by getting developers to finally make their games Linux compatible. If Valve's consoles become broadly successful, that's an added bonus. The real win is to outflank Microsoft. One of Microsoft's biggest mistak…

> One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to give up on Windows Phone. They had no other choice. The technical foundation of the prior WP versions (aka, Windows CE) was just too dated and they didn't have a Windows kernel / userland capable of performantly dealing on ARM, x86 performance was and still is utter dogshit on battery powered devices, they didn't have a Windows userland actually usable on anything touch ba…

It really doesn't help when Google repeatedly broke Gsuite and the YouTube apps and mandated their removal from Windows phones.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/...

This is the kind of shit regulators should stop. In the 90's, this would have gotten Microsoft broken up into several companies.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#62

Post by CuriouslyC »

fragmede wrote: post #59
phantasmish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’d need to improve desktop Linux a lot to threaten Apple. It’s far more tolerable on their relatively tightly-controlled and stable hardware platforms than it is elsewhere, but it’s still a features-weak jankfest compared to macOS. I mean user facing features relevant to any desktop user, not “docker is native on it” or other developer-only stuff—and for the record Linux was my main desktop OS for about a decade,…

> Home no-business-use-case (mostly gaming and maybe light web browsing) PC owners, and I suppose x-box? The former has got to be negligible at this point With the broader job market being not-great, and everyone trying some sort of side hustle with the aims of making it big, it's definitely the bubble I'm in, but the "home" case has a lot of Google free office suite business looking usage, and even if there isn't a…

You should check out the adoption curve for Linux desktops, it's actually starting to hockey stick, Windows 11 is a dumpster fire, Apple is stagnant and Arch based distros are getting crazy good.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#63

Post by ee64a4a »

glenstein wrote: post #7

>that this is actually Steam Machine 2.0. Valve already tried this a decade ago, and it flopped. I find this framing to be beyond maddening. Sure, it wasn't an iPod, and if you measure it against that kind of expectation, of course it's a flop, because it wasn't an overnight success. But I think it's more appropriately understood as a soft launch of an ecosystem, to strategically rebalance Valve away from the potenti…

>> that this is actually Steam Machine 2.0. Valve already tried this a decade ago, and it flopped.

> I find this framing to be beyond maddening [...]

> It was also a thoughtful partnering with hardware vendors

As numerous post-mortems (some of which I quoted in the article) recount, the hardware partners themselves largely consider their experiment back then a flop as well.

> But it was a thoughtful, intelligent long-term commitment to an ecosystem

With respect, I think you're overselling it. It's hard to call a machine that basically didn't play any of the at-the-time hits well "a thoughtful, intelligent" move. If you read some of those linked post-mortems, I think you might agree as well.

> I think it's best understood as a return on investment that begun those many years ago

I think there's nuance here, which is that Valve made lemonade from the lemon that was the flop of the Steam Box. They turned that failed move into an initial investment through diligence and effort. In a sense, that's part of what I'm trying to bring attention to -- Valve didn't just write off the failure and abandon the market, but took signal from it and tried again.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#64

Post by mschuster91 »

echelon wrote: post #61
mschuster91 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to give up on Windows Phone. They had no other choice. The technical foundation of the prior WP versions (aka, Windows CE) was just too dated and they didn't have a Windows kernel / userland capable of performantly dealing on ARM, x86 performance was and still is utter dogshit on battery powered devices, they didn't have a Windows userland actually usable on anything touch ba…

It really doesn't help when Google repeatedly broke Gsuite and the YouTube apps and mandated their removal from Windows phones. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/... This is the kind of shit regulators should stop. In the 90's, this would have gotten Microsoft broken up into several companies.

Apple darn well knew what people want - even the first iPhone, the one that didn't even have an App Store (which got invented as a concept by jailbreakers proving it was possible!), came with YouTube and Maps from the start.

What I don't know however why Microsoft insisted on the ability to not show ads and download videos when copying that concept. They had to know that they were directly cutting into Google's bottom line.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#65

Post by ee64a4a »

teddyh wrote: post #32

> (2011, proxied quote from The Cambridge Student via The Escapist; the link in that article is dead, and a search on the site for “Newell” turns up no results) Here’s the latest copy of the original article in The Cambridge Student: https://web.archive.org/web/20220924191721/https://www.tcs.c... >

Thanks for turning that up; edited into the article with credit to you!

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#66

Post by ee64a4a »

potatolicious wrote: post #35

Are they actually running the Apple playbook in reverse? It seems to me that they're actually running Apple's playbook pretty squarely, just in another domain. First-gen product that seemed to not know where it's going? Check. Continued quiet iteration behind closed doors despite first-gen being a flop? Check. Sticking with the product line over many years, where most other companies would have written off and thrown…

The "in reverse" framing was largely in reference to the fact that Apple built the software ecosystem after getting loyal hardware consumers, whereas Valve got loyal software users first and is now selling hardware to them.

Otherwise, I do think a lot of what you say is true, and some of it is in the article (e.g. the software "just works").

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#68

Post by ZeroConcerns »

ee64a4a wrote: post #51
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #5

Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago, since that could have reduced the stranglehold of Steam on the gaming marketplace. Turns out that the usual Microsoft incompetence-and-ADHD have kind-of eliminated that threat all by itself. Also: turns out that, if you put enough effort into it, Linux is actually a quite-usable gaming platform. Still: are consumers better off today than…

> Well, Valve got seriously concerned about the Windows Store, like, a decade ago... Yeah, I briefly addressed that concern in the article as a comparison to Facebook; probably could've expanded on it, but it was already quite long and didn't feel like it fit naturally into the topic at hand

That wasn't meant as a criticism, more like some additional context. With how irrelevant the Microsoft Store is these days, I can't blame anyone for skipping over it...

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#69

Post by echelon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #64
echelon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't help when Google repeatedly broke Gsuite and the YouTube apps and mandated their removal from Windows phones. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/aug/15/... This is the kind of shit regulators should stop. In the 90's, this would have gotten Microsoft broken up into several companies.

Apple darn well knew what people want - even the first iPhone, the one that didn't even have an App Store (which got invented as a concept by jailbreakers proving it was possible!), came with YouTube and Maps from the start. What I don't know however why Microsoft insisted on the ability to not show ads and download videos when copying that concept. They had to know that they were directly cutting into Google's botto…

> What I don't know however why Microsoft insisted on the ability to not show ads and download videos when copying that concept. They had to know that they were directly cutting into Google's bottom line.

There's a long backstory here.

Microsoft tried everything to get YouTube on Windows Phone. At one point, they negotiated with Google and Google said they were going to work on an app. That didn't happen.

Microsoft tried to use the proper APIs, but Google kept shutting them off:

https://www.windowscentral.com/youtube-access-and-windows-ph...

"Downloading" the videos was Microsoft trying to work around API limitations and shut offs.

Imagine Microsoft's customers getting angrier and angrier that YouTube kept breaking. For years. This was a deal breaker for lots of people, especially young early adopters.

Microsoft tried really hard here.

What Google did was abuse their market position to cripple Windows Phone. Customers abandoned Windows Phone because it didn't have YouTube.

Google had to play nice with Apple in the early days because Apple had all the patents Google needed to continue with Android. It wasn't until they purchased Motorolla that they had a MAD patent strategy.

Re: Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse

#70

Post by viktorcode »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #48
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #9

It will be interesting to see if they can answer a question better now than with the original Steam Machines ten years ago: what problem do consumers have that Steam Machines solve? Their original answer was a resounding "nothing" - Steam Machines solved a problem for Valve (fear of an impending "Windows Store" being added by Microsoft that would steal the battlefield from Valve), but very little for the customer. I…

> what problem do consumers have that Steam Machines solve? It fixes a lot of issues for me (I will buy a steam machine upon release): I used to prefer consoles for the living room - put the disk in, and go. But nowadays consoles have the same issues: Giant downloads, patches, tweaking GUI settings and fear of not getting the best performance (PS5 Pro variants, Xbox S/X etc., performance vs. quality mode settings). P…

> But nowadays consoles have the same issues: Giant downloads

At least for PS5 the opposite is true: if a game uses kraken texture compression, and many do, PS5 variant will be the smallest.

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