A great product doesn't need to pay for advertising because its customers readily see its value. Building a community can happen organically, but it goes better when you have an evangelist and a marketing budget to support community building. Having great Product Managers and QE testing is everything.
Thailand's rapid modernization and giving up 40% of its territory gave it time to embrace guns and a modern military. Sadly the widespread adoption of guns during this time period has a lasting impact today. Thailand has the highest number of gun deaths per capita of any asian country today. Resisting colonization in Thailand and overthrowing colonization in the US have embracing fire arms in common.
Back in the day I supported Aldus Persuasion which was a competitor to Microsoft PowerPoint along with Harvard Graphics. The industry was moving from having service bureaus rasterize slides onto film slides to using computer screens.
When Microsoft started bundling Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the Mac platform where we dominated we realized we couldn't compete against a product that was basically being given away for free. The experience with slide and text animation lead to the purchase of Cosa After Effects which is still around and took full advantage of animating Photoshop and Illustrator files after the Adobe merger.
Trust is a valuable commodity that once lost is very hard to regain. LG's big brother installs has me questions buying anything LG to bring in my home.
Asha Sharma is managing the Xbox team like a hotel. Cut costs and boost profits. It works in the short run, but this is surely no way to run innovative game studios. Hopefully spinning these talented folks out will result in gaming innovation outside of Microsoft, because the vision inside Microsoft sure looks bleak.
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