On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Ken Chang wrote:
> as we know, the Atari VCS market collapsed in 1982 just before
> Nintendo famicom released the next year. the disaster was because
> customers were disappointed by too many cheap low quality products
> in a over competed market. Nintendo concluded that open and free
> competition was not for anyone's good.
Uh...I'm not sure I buy this one. By 1982, Atari was producing some
really poor quality games for the VCS (Pacman, E.T.) and the third-party
game-makers such as Activision were producing some very good stuff
(e.g., Pitfall).
> 16 years later, DoCoMo behaved like Nintendo and succeeded. i-mode
> is a closed system and DoCoMo also takes tight control of content
> development to ensure high quality service.
From a web site developer's point of view, i-Mode seems to be a fairly
open system to me. Anybody can put up a web site and anybody can make
i-Appli and put them up for download. Sure, Docomo controls the first
menu that the user sees and does billing only for certain select sites,
but while that puts independent developers at a disadvantage, it's
hardly an insurmountable one.
Something like BREW, on the other hand, is a much, much larger hurdle to
overcome.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Mon Apr 5 12:53:08 2004