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October 22, 2006
Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #7: Social grease in India and America
India's social grease—that is, anything that can be used to induce people to perform random acts of kindness not immediately beneficial to them—is respect towards family, people and institutions. America's is guilt.
Posted by Vishy at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2006
How open source has benefited software tools
Good software tools are an essential part of any productive software engineer's arsenal. They deliver key insights into enterprise-grade code and highlight issues that engineers may have missed upon an initial review. Software tools are highly appropriate for code instrumentation and tuning, although they perform essential functions in build and release management as well. We will compare these two kinds of tools separately on open source and proprietary platforms to infer the effects open source has had on software tools.
Code instrumentation tools
Proprietary platforms like Microsoft Windows have had excellent instrumentation features for a while now because they are the only way of introspecting into a system that does not come with source code. There is strong support at the programmatic level for building high quality software instrumentation tools. Perhaps to keep from stepping on Microsoft's toes, not many tool vendors have exploited this support to the fullest extent possible. Microsoft itself, being a software behemoth, focuses on a number of business priorities other than software tools. Barring a few excellent offerings from Compuware and SciTech, software engineers are limited to offerings from Microsoft itself. Thankfully, drawing from the strong client side tradition on Windows, these tools are heavily visual and greatly boost developer productivity. To sum up, proprietary platforms offer a few high-quality tools for code instrumentation.
Open source platforms have the opposite problem: a wide selection of tools that are sometimes lacking in quality. To their credit, most open source platforms permit highly granular examination of how a process behaves, down to the system calls it generates. The trace family of tools on Linux and the truss tools on OpenSolaris enable this kind of deep examination. Unfortunately, because of their checkered history on the client side, there aren't many visually impressive performance tuning tools. True to the Unix tradition, however, the statistics these tools produce can be integrated into larger reports relatively easily. Another factor that might impede the development of high quality code instrumentation tools on open source platforms is the pervasive availability of source code. A software engineer does not need sophisticated instrumentation tools if merely examining the underlying source is enough to diagnose a performance problem.
Build and release management tools
Open source has been highly beneficial for build and release management tools. New ideas have debuted successfully in open source settings and have later been emulated on proprietary platforms.
After decades of build tools hailing from the make tradition, the Apache Foundation's XML-based build system, Ant, took a brave new approach to the problem of generating ready-to-deploy software builds. The prolific Apache community refined this approach into the network-ready Maven. Maven can intelligently compute the right versions of a project's dependencies and download them from a central repository. The key differentiator in Maven's approach is that it confers first class status on a software project using its Project Object Model. The excellent Eclipse development platform and its flexible plugin architecture have been instrumental in integrating these tools into the software engineering experience.
For some time now, Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE has been the primary gateway to development for the Microsoft platform. The Microsoft developer population of old was fragmented: the technically savvy minority of Visual C++ developers had different needs from the Visual Basic developers that formed the majority. Visual Studio's build system was opaque and command line alternatives like nmake were available but not very well supported. The arrival of Microsoft .NET alleviated the first problem but not the second. The proliferation of XML-based build and release tools on Java led to analogous open source efforts like NAnt for Microsoft .NET. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't taken to the open source projects around its platform as well as Sun has around Java. It took Microsoft some time before they picked up on the importance of XML build systems; they announced their own take on an XML build system, MSBuild rather than embracing and extending NAnt, which had accumulated a conspicuous user base.
MSBuild offers tight integration with Visual Studio and as such, offers a better software development experience than NAnt. NAnt continues to thrive, but will probably be driven underground as MSBuild continues to gain traction on Microsoft's official build environment. Although Microsoft has considered open source models fundamentally antithetical to its own business model, its recent overhaul of Visual Studio's plugin architecture to make it easier to develop for might stimulate the development of tools outside Microsoft. Microsoft also supports command-line use of MSBuild, which is an unorthodox measure for a company that has heavily favored Visual Studio as a gateway for platform development in the past. Perhaps build and release management outside the Visual Studio IDE will come into its own after PowerShell, Microsoft's first fully scriptable commandline is released. However, unless Microsoft truly supports software development outside Visual Studio and encourages open source projects, the Microsoft developer community will be limited to Microsoft's offerings alone.
Conclusion
Different classes of software tools have benefited to different degrees from open source. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that open source has been and will be a boon to the software tools business.
Posted by Vishy at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2006
The end of IT in small and medium businesses
Why do small and medium businesses (SMB) have internal IT departments anymore?
Several person-centuries spent in the iterative development of technology stacks have led to the emergence of well understood, reproducible best practices in enterprise IT. A number of hosting providers are now able to channel this expertise adroitly into building complete plug-n-play stacks and hosting them. In many cases, the business models of these managed IT stack providers have the wealth of mature open source software as their cornerstone. The collaboration of hundreds of open source developers on these projects has resulted in powerful network effects on quality and functionality. If you are in the SMB segment with a primary function other than IT, you probably just want to get connected and going. There is little competitive advantage to having an internal IT department put together a complete technology stack, against the proven work of hundreds, when the results of this work are ripe for the picking.
Reliable broadband connectivity is widespread in the North American enterprise context. A completely managed IT stack is not an outlandish proposition even for the most paranoid of SMB owners. The fine tuning of high-availability capabilities and the emergence of high quality administrative and reporting tools have assuaged many an SMB owner's worries that a hosting solution might lead to too little control. Moreover, a hosted solution might even prove to be better for a risk averse proprietor, given the recent emphasis on regulatory compliance in practically every major industry. The ease and uniformity with which it can be applied in a hosted situation as well as the spreading out of liability make hosting only more attractive. In cases where there is no getting around keeping records and IT operations on the premises, we are very near realizing the dream of trailer park computing. Providing a managed service atop these compute cubes would be an easy value add.
It is worth pointing out that large enterprises—especially those for whom IT lies in the critical revenue path—might still maintain enough of a competitive advantage using an internal IT department to justify the costs and upkeep of a homegrown stack. Businesses with large existing technology investments may already have critical business processes centered around them, which would make it harder for them to just switch to outsourced IT. Yet, as adoption of outsourced IT increases, the average total cost of ownership is sure to go down as economies of scale kick in. Then perhaps even non-SMB owners might reëvaluate their technology solutions.
Read the writing on the wall: if you are not in IT, then get out of IT.
Posted by Vishy at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2006
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: fourth seat
[The following piece of writing predates this blog. Like this other piece, it's adapted from something I had originally written for the addictive marvel of chaos that is Everything2.com.]
fourth seat./forthseet/. (chiefly Mumbai) The fourth person to sit on a seat built to seat three people. This term is used to refer to the unlucky person who gets to seat half their ass when traveling on a local train, Mumbai's term for its commuter railway. It is the commuting equivalent of a third wheel.
Mumbai's local trains serve areas that lie as far as 60 km away from the city center. They are filled woefully beyond capacity, even during non-rush hours. The sheer number of commuters on these local trains at all hours means that you can pretty much count on not having a seat when you travel. When you do get a chance to sit, you frequently end up as the fourth seat.
The fourth seat is an ignominious position indeed. You have to constantly push the seated half of your ass against the three others that rightfully belong on that seat and feel bad for doing so. At the same time, a nagging doubt gnaws on the corner of your soul as you wonder if you're really better off for putting in all this effort.
Homophobes make for worse fourth seats, because Mumbai's local trains have sex-segregated carriages. Then again, personal space is not nearly as big an issue in India as it is in the United States or elsewhere in the West.
[A much more detailed account—thanks, Tapan!—is available, complete with descriptions of the resulting circulatory impairment and other phenomena unique to Mumbai's local trains.]
Posted by Vishy at 10:51 PM | Comments (1)
October 11, 2006
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: communal
communal./kuhm·YOO·nuhl/. Of, or relating to one's affiliation with a community, particularly a religious one. In American English, the same word is used in the sense of common property—'communal cookware' in a college dorm—or in the sense of relating to a commune. In Indian English though, it is rooted in community and has historically been used to describe relationships among the many religions that make up India. Although there is nothing inherent in the word that makes it most appropriate for religious affiliations, it is rarely applied to other kinds of affiliations in Indian society, such as caste. In recent memory, communal riots in India occurred between Hindus and Muslims in 2002, at Godhra in Gujarat. The Indian English sense of communal also occurs in the Singaporean cultural matrix.
Posted by Vishy at 09:56 PM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2006
Five myths of open source
The open source movement today is a lot more than a motley crew of hobbyists hacking in their free time. Based on the simple but rigorously applied principles of technical openness and freedom to tinker, it has become a force to reckon with even where serious money-making businesses are concerned. Major technology companies are committed to open source and are starting to build strategic and tactical business models around it.
Open source (OSS) projects have come to be identified with the values of individual freedom and democracy that arise out of leveling the playing field among users and contributors. This thinking in the geek community is rooted in two factors: a sense of relief that credible, technically sound alternatives to proprietary software are finally cropping up and an instinctive reaction to Microsoft's bullying and anti-competitive practices over the years. Although the birth and evolution of OSS projects is unequivocally a step forward for computing technology, these perceived values are not always borne out by actual experience. Enough negative experiences can alienate prospective user and contributors. Here's a list of myths about OSS projects, which, if dispelled, will help set more realistic expectations about them in prospective users and contributors:
- Myth #1: An OSS project is a democracy.
- An OSS project is not a democracy but a meritocracy. Anybody is entitled to have ideas, but is not entitled to recognition and wide adoption of those ideas. Ideas compete on their value to the influential people in a project. Successful OSS projects assess the value of an idea upon the right mix of technical and non-technical considerations, such as value to the user community. Linus Torvalds, who leads the development of the Linux kernel, has gone on record that the Linux project follows the model of a benevolent dictatorship. Although the inner circle of Linux developers (yes, there is one) makes every effort to listen to as many voices as it can, ultimately it alone makes executive decisions that influence the project.
- Myth #2: Any user of an OSS product can change its direction.
- Somewhat paradoxically, new users of an OSS project are best positioned to offer useful feedback on its biggest holes in functionality, because they haven't adapted to its idiosyncrasies. If a novice user suggests to a project that a feature is missing, however, a common retort they hear back is 'write it yourself'. It is not always practical for just anyone to write a feature themselves. The code base of a successful OSS project is often complex; it may take some time before a new user learns its internal conventions and is able to contribute working code. Sometimes they may be just offering a suggestion as a helpful user without having an interest in developing it themselves. If the requestor has enough money (say it was an organization), they may be able to hire enough labor to make their request come to fruition and contribute it back to the community. One benefit of giving a feature back to the community is that the community will often help support and maintain it. Even if an independent user effort does succeed, there is no guarantee that their feature will be merged into the principal distribution of that project (see #1 for why), which would only leave them with an additional support and maintenance burden on their hands.
- Myth #3: Contributors work on an OSS project purely on volunteered time.
- This may have been true 10 years ago, but isn't the case anymore. As commercial adoption of open source increases, key developers of several successful open source projects are on the payrolls of major corporations. These corporations have an explicit interest in making a project they sponsor succeed by entrenching it, which means that ordinary users simply cannot be ignored. The products ordinary users like best are those that get out of their way and "help them kick ass." If a user complains about some aspect of an OSS product and asks for a fix, they are frequently told that they should have no such expectation because hacker time is donated, or that nobody is forcing them to use that product. These sanctimonious and demeaning responses are incredibly off-putting and ultimately detract from the overall success of a project. Moreover, it's just not true to say that all time on an OSS project is donated; corporations that sponsor an OSS project in particular almost have an obligation to listen to what users say (also see #2).
- Myth #4: Decisions regarding an OSS project's direction are made purely on technical merit.
- Forks and other schisms in an OSS project can occur because of differences of opinion of a non-technical nature or even personality clashes. The XOrg fork of the X server from the main XFree86 project arose from disagreements over license terms. The IceWeasel fork of Firefox arose from a push to develop a purely free version, untainted by any non-free artwork or plugins. The Wine project maintains a number of concurrent versions targeted at different user bases. It is conventional wisdom that forking a project is inconvenient from a technical standpoint and frequently results in a loss of focus and direction. Sometimes, however, a decision with demonstrably lower technical merit may still win out because it is the realistic thing to do or because of popular support.
- Myth #5: The principles of open source are important to users of an OSS project.
- This may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but it must be said out loud. Although the motivations and the initiative behind starting an OSS project may be laudable, average Joes care less about the philosophy behind a project and more about how well it works for them. OSS contributors, who frequently have an analytical bent of mind, love to argue about the correctness of their point, often to the point of acrimony. Their efforts will have been in vain, however, if their OSS product doesn't work well for their users. Functionality and correctness count for a lot more with users than infinite choice and conformance with a particular philosophy.
Posted by Vishy at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2006
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: gazetted officer
gazetted officer. /guh·ZET·ed·offi·suh/. Any civil servant, whose name, appointments and career movements are published in a periodic government-issued publication called a gazette. A gazetted officer performs functions similar to those performed by a notary public in the U.S., such as notarizing copies and verifying the authenticity of translations. Becoming a gazetted officer makes a bureaucrat a member of a fairly elite group—according to one source, the government's intent is to have one gazetted officer for every ten non-gazetted officers. Becoming a gazetted officer is a certain sign of having arrived amid India's teeming bureaucracy and an automatic disqualification from making statements like 'stick it to The Man'.
Posted by Vishy at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2006
The Indian vegetarian's rant
Like several of my fellow countrymen, I don't eat meat. I don't make a big deal out of it, but I get questions about it all the time.
Most of the time these questions are sincere -- the asker is just plain curious. Sometimes though, they are just a thinly veiled way of expressing contempt at the 'philosophy' of vegetarianism (can anybody tell me what that is? I didn't get the memo) and on some days, this bugs me. Giving the asker the benefit of doubt, I always answer them as I would a sincere question.
For a while now, I've meant to write up something that addresses all the questions I get, sincere or otherwise. I get so many different lines of questioning that I am going to present them all here as one conversation. For the purpose of this post, I'll invent a fictitious person with whom I am having this fictitious conversation. Let's call him, oh I don't know, Cosmo, taking inspiration from Kramer's annoying, no-holds-barred way of asking questions in Seinfeld. If he seems to lacking in, um, social graces and general awareness, it is intentional—he is the figment of my imagination conjured up precisely to ask me all these questions about vegetarianism, including the annoying ones.
[Cosmo is a friend of a friend. We've just had a long night of club hopping. I am sitting with him and a group of friends in a diner, looking over our menus.]
Cosmo: Hey, let's get some buffalo wings and calamari for appetizers.
Me: Can we get mozzarella sticks too?
Cosmo: What's the matter man? What's wrong with the ones I picked?
Me: Oh, I am vegetarian.
Cosmo (resisting the urge to roll his eyes): Oh! I didn't know. How about we get some fish and chips?
Me: I don't eat meat or fish.
Cosmo: Wai-duh-min-nit. Don't some vegetarians eat fish?
Me: There are some that call themselves pesceterians, but they are not really vegetarians. Vegetarianism is a more restrictive diet.
Cosmo: All right, all right. I guess we can get mozzarella sticks instead of the calamari.
Me: Great, thanks!
[We order the appetizers.]
C (suspiciously): So. You're vegetarian huh?
M: That's right.
C: What does your family think of your decision?
M: Well, everybody in my family is vegetarian, so I guess they must be supportive.
C: Wow, so is that for religious reasons?
M: Well, I was raised vegetarian for religious and cultural reasons...
C: All Hindi people are vegetarian?
M: You must mean Hindu people. Hindi is a language—in fact, India's most common language. So yes, I was raised in a Hindu family. Even though I am not that religious anymore, I never really found a reason to start eating meat. It has become a part of how I live.
C: Have you tried meat?
M: Not really, no. I have eaten it one or two times by mistake and when I found out later, I didn't really care for it that much anyway.
C: Dude, that's really too bad. You're really missin' out on a lot of good stuff.
M: Maybe, but it doesn't bother me. Let's see... are you straight, gay or bi?
C (indignant): What the hell man! I am totally straight. I don't need any of that gay stuff in my life.
M: Well, if you're not bi, does it bother you that you're missing out on half of all the sex you could be having?
C: All right, all right. Point taken. But how can you skip eating meat after its delicious smell hits you?
M: Some meat does smell good to me, but most of it doesn't smell too pleasant.
[The wings and mozzarella sticks arrive. The waiter is taking entrée orders.]
Me (to the waiter): I'll have a mushroom-spinach omelette with muenster cheese. Can you get me a strawberry milkshake as well? Thanks!
C: Wait a second. I thought you were vegetarian. And you just got a cheese omelette and a milkshake?
M: I am vegetarian, not vegan. Vegans eat no animal products whatsoever—it's they who skip dairy and eggs. Suffice it to say, they have a slightly harder time at diners like this.
C: Oh, cool. So you're actually somewhat normal. But doesn't it bother you man that we're eating wings?
M: No, of course not. Why would it?
C: I don't know man. You said you don't like the smell.
M: Oh, don't worry about it. I have no problems if someone else at the table is eating meat. Most of my friends are actually not vegetarian.
C: But surely it must bother you that we're eating these poor delicious chickens?!
M: Not really, no—that's your choice. Like I said, I was raised vegetarian. I never decided to 'go vegetarian' when I was 12, to save the animals, so I tend not to be ideological about it. Just like you are not forcing me to eat yours wings right now, I would never require you to be vegetarian.
C: Okay, to each his own I suppose. But you must surely run into all these health problems?
M: I've had absolutely no health problems because of my diet.
C: But you can't get all the nutrients your body needs by being vegetarian! Where do you get your protein?
M: Actually, studies show plant foods alone can supply all the essential amino acids the body needs. What's more, as you just saw, I eat eggs and dairy. I get all the protein I need from all these sources.
C: Dunno how you keep it up. Hey Elaine, weren't you vegetarian too at some point?
Elaine: Oh yeah, for a summer, when I was 15. I was the only one in my family who decided to stop eating meat. I started eating a lot of junk food and actually put on some weight. Then one night soon after Labor Day, my mom made this amazing meatloaf. The smell filled the house and drove me mad. That's when I realized being vegetarian was not for me. I ate meatloaf that night as if nothing had happened before and then never looked back. It's a distant dream now.
C (with self-satisfied grin on his face): See? Told you so.
M: If you keep telling yourself you're missing out by being vegetarian, it's not very surprising that you can't keep it up.
[Cosmo's Philly cheesesteak sandwich arrives.]
C: Mmmm... you sure man that you don't want a bite?
M: Thanks but no thanks. I don't eat beef or any other meat.
C (mouth full of beef, bread and cheese): Yeah, but this cow didn't eat any meat either! Heh heh, heh heh heh... just kidding.
...
C: So let me ask you this, do you eat shrimp?
M: No, I don't eat seafood either. One rule of thumb is, if it has a face I won't eat it.
C: Aha! Then what about oysters? They don't have a face. They probably don't feel any pain when you cook them either.
M: But I think they stink to high heaven. The if-it-has-a-face rule is only a rule of thumb. It's not like you eat all animals either. In the end, I decide if I want to eat something or not.
C: Have you tried caviar? It's not exactly an animal.
M: I haven't tried caviar mostly because I haven't wanted to try it badly enough. It does involve cutting open 'pregnant' fish, so it is not generally considered vegetarian. I dunno, perhaps it might be interesting to try someday, with some good champagne.
C: Wait a minute—I thought vegetarians don't drink? I had a friend from Pakistan who didn't drink.
M: Your friend probably didn't drink 'cause he was Muslim. Also, if he was from Pakistan, I doubt he was vegetarian.
C: Are all Indians vegetarian?
M: Hardly! In fact, most Indian households are not vegetarian. There is a subtle guilt complex that some Indians have about eating meat, but if that were a big problem then most of India would be vegetarian.
[It's time to pay the bill and leave.]
M: Hey, here's $12 if we split the bill evenly among the six of us.
C: It's okay man. Your food cost only $6. Just put in $8 so it includes tax and tip.
M: Thanks man. See? Here's one mixed blessing about being vegetarian. Your food costs less but if you just split the bill evenly, you end up overpaying.
C: It's the tax you pay for being weird.
M: Hey, 6-10% of Americans say they are vegetarian, which is about the same percentage of college-educated Americans who couldn't find the U.S. on a world map. Have a good night!
Posted by Vishy at 05:46 PM | Comments (1)
October 04, 2006
Is Ajax appropriate for the enterprise?
Ajax, the catchy moniker coined for Asynchronous Javascript and XML content rendering technologies, is de rigeur in the Web 2.0 wave of online innovation. The more savvy users on the Web today are close to expecting Ajax as a given in the Web services they use. When they go to work and interact with Web applications on their corporate intranets, they may start expecting to see Ajax there as well. Is Ajax as appropriate for the enterprise as it is for hundreds of consumer-facing Web services? The answer: except for a few cases, it won't take the enterprise by storm.
Before we examine why, it is a good idea to take stock of the Ajax development scene today. After a heady 18-month period of growth, which has seen the release of tens of self-styled Ajax development frameworks, some winners are beginning to emerge. Enterprise adoption lags consumer-facing adoption by a little because Ajax frameworks for enterprise-grade environments are coming out of the woodwork only now. ICEFaces for Java Enterprise Edition was released in July this year, whereas Microsoft's Atlas framework is slated for an end-of-year release. Once a few Ajax bindings are available for the most common enterprise development environments, enterprise decision makers will be less guarded about Ajax adoption.
Ajax, unsurprisingly, is particularly suited for the majority of intranet applications that are delivered over the Web today. These typically include firmwide applications with a significant self-service component, such as employee performance evaluations or corporate travel booking. Portals too are suited for eventual conversion to Ajax. Not all enterprise applications, however, are suited to delivery over the Web (notably time-sensitive applications such as a real-time securities pricing and trading system, or multimedia applications, where a rich design and visualization experience is key). If these applications are wrongly delivered over the Web today, adapting them to use Ajax might prove to be a needlessly complex endeavor.
Ajax applications can lead to improperly authorized information disclosure in an enterprise environment. Many enterprises where the flow of information must be strictly controlled operate, for better or for worse, on a doctrine of security through obscurity. If an employee doesn't even know about the existence of resources they are not authorized to see, it is less likely they will see them. Ajax applications may thwart this objective because they are easy to reverse-engineer, thanks to the browser's pesky View Source function. Unless the Javascript source code in the browser is well obfuscated, sensitive details may well be downloaded and captured by insufficiently authorized roving eyes. The solution? Concentrate as much logic as possible on the server.
Wouldn't it then be a shame to move to a model dominated by thin-client Ajax applications, as desktop computers continue to gain processing power in their multi-core motherboards? There is something about concentrating logic on a server that seems to run counter to the spirit of virtualization, a direction in which a lot of enterprises are moving today.
Ajax toolkits in an enterprise setting might even prove too restrictive. Enterprise environments tend to be controlled, which means that application developers can make many more assumptions when developing applications for internal use. Security restrictions commonly associated with downloading and executing code external to a host are relatively lax inside an enterprise environment, due to a clearer demarcation between trusted and untrusted sources. These additional assumptions can be exploited judiciously to provide a computing experience that can be at once rich and effectively distributed between clients and servers. A Web browser's standard code execution safeguards are more likely to encumber a rich user experience than facilitate it.
Ajax applications may generate pages that are harder to index and discover in an enterprise search engine. As we have seen before, nowhere is the need for search bigger than within an enterprise full of information workers. Because they are more responsive to user actions, pages generated by Ajax applications are likely to fall under the purview of the Deep Web, an area in which current search engines publicly acknowledge their shortcomings.
Ajax frameworks undoubtedly have their place in an enterprise setting, especially in those applications that resemble consumer-facing Web services where Ajax is used successfully. Before latching on to Ajax to be buzzword-compliant, enterprise architects and decision makers would be well-advised to examine whether Ajax is really right for their situation.
Posted by Vishy at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)
October 03, 2006
In-game advertising: ready for prime time?
Video gaming is slowly but surely growing into an activity that cannot be ignored. Even Washington lawmakers are taking note of this phenomenon that is sweeping families throughout the United States, with assertions about how video game violence could influence violent behavior in real life. Meanwhile, having long outgrown its traditional young male demographic, video games now command the attention of nearly half the population of 35 to 54-year old women, who play video games with their children. All these are favorable indicators for a play that can yield major returns if executed well: in-game advertising.
The in-game advertising industry is projected to reach more than $400 million by 2009. There are a number of reasons advertisers may want to sit up and take notice of this advertising medium. Video games are no longer computer programs running on isolated devices. Many of the most popular games today, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy and Second Life are played in hosted, online environments. Being linked with a gamer's experience so intimately provides plenty of opportunities to throw in advertising. Advertising in games may also stand a chance of actually being noticed, because it has a better shot at integrating with, and indeed, appearing as content. Generation Y expects high standards in marketing messages targeted at its members. These messages have to be distinctive and engaging. How much more engaging would an apparel ad be in the context of dressing up a video game character, than as a TV ad that might well be skipped over during a time-delayed viewing?
Currently, Microsoft is the only online advertising player that also has its fingers in the gaming pie. If the XBox Live and MSN teams aren't talking, they might want to look each other up soon. The highly successful online experience offered by XBox Live is something Microsoft has on its competitors in new-media advertising, and can exploit to great profit. Google (or the more media-savvy Yahoo) might still gain by linking up with video game industry players like Sony and Nintendo, whose next-generation consoles, the PS3 and Wii respectively, will debut at the end of this year.
In-game advertisers would also do well to consider the mobile angle to their advertising strategies. Multiplayer mobile gaming is on the uptick, especially with devices like the PSP/mylo and Nintendo DS Lite entering the market. If Microsoft's Zune doesn't do well as a media player, it might make sense to reposition it as a personal gaming console—the four way button can be largely grandfathered into a gaming function. In-game advertising for these consoles can be trickier because they are not connected constantly to a network. This obstacle can still be overcome by skinning a video game with a particular brand, or by downloading a cache of in-game ads on to the device when connectivity is available.
In-game advertising networks like Rivals Massive, Inc. and inGamePartners have been around for some time now, but major new-media advertising networks have yet to leverage their expertise via meaningful link-ups. In-game advertising is still far from attaining the glory lavished on online advertising, but this is exactly when media players might want to start thinking about how they will get their game on.
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|
| In-game advertising can be very engaging if done well, and stands a much better chance of integrating with true content. | The true impact of in-game ads may be hard to quantify because responding to in-game ad content can sometimes detract from actual game playing. |
| Opportunities | Threats |
| Next generation game consoles, in both handheld and stationary form, are about to hit the market. Moreover, the gaming demographic is a lot wider than it used to be. | Game publishers may view collaborating with in-game ad networks as a compromise of their game's artistic integrity. |
Posted by Vishy at 10:57 PM | Comments (0)