When I was younger a lot of my friends went to work in their family companies. Their parents often insisted that they start at the bottom and learn every job in the company so that when they took over they would have a full understanding of how everything works.
An extension of this is the manager who is expected to be able to do every job in his department better than the people who are doing it. This is absolute, complete and utter stupidity. It is a managers job to manage, not to do the jobs of his staff. A good manager always selects the best person possible for any job. And that person will always be better than the manager at that job. This is the route to success, only recruit people better than yourself.
Of course there is the exact opposite, the route to failure and something I have often seen in the game industry. This is where you have a weak manager who feels insecure, so never employs people who he perceives could be a threat to his own position. So he ends up with a company or a department full of distinctly average, under performing people. You would be amazed just how often this happens, I could give real world examples that I have witnessed first hand!
Michael Grade is the executive chairman of ITVplc, a huge British broadcasting conglomerate formed by merging Carlton with Granada. They own 11 out of 15 regional television broadcasters. And his job is similar to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I have written about him before on here.
ITVplc has five and a half thousand employees and in 2008 had revenue of over two billion pounds. But first half sales this year were about ten percent down on the same period last year and they lost £105 million. All part of the inevitable decline of linear, non interactive media.
Some people say that when radio came along it didn’t destroy books and newspapers and that when TV came along it didn’t destroy radio and the print media. So the lesson of history is that the advent of interactive media will be the same again and we will all live happily together. They are wrong. Interactive media will do to TV and print what the internal combustion engine did to the horse. The paradigm shift is so great that all the older media are obsolete, with the exception of radio (which can work as a background to other activities).
New media has the enormous technical advantages of interactivity, connectivity and non linearity. Gaming adds to that the powerful reward mechanism for the successful completion of tasks. Old media looks truly pathetic compared to this. So whilst new media grows from strength to strength they are doing so at the expense of old media. Old media is in big trouble and it is getting worse for them by the day.
But there is hope. The only thing that ITVplc have that is of any real value is their brands. They own a big pile of IP that is extremely well known in Britain. These brands can be scrubbed down, rejuvenated and adapted for the new media. It really isn’t rocket science. Gaming and social networking are the two obvious mechanics that are just sitting there waiting to be applied.
So here is the recipe. ITVplc need to set up a game publishing division. A small budget of perhaps £100 million should be enough to get this off the ground. Then they need to make a variety of games centred on their brands. All sorts of games. Social games, self development games, educational games, MMOs, casual games, telephone games. And across different platforms. Very rapidly indeed they would become Britain’s biggest game publisher. And more, because unlike broadcast, games are not constrained by geographic boundaries. With games the whole world becomes their oyster.
So the potential is there to make ITVplc far bigger as a new media company than it ever was as an old media company.
I am going away on a big holiday to strange and exotic lands.
A lot of time I will be travelling, a lot of time I will be where there is no easy interweb access and a lot of time I will be enjoying my holiday.
So I will have little, if any, time to look after Bruceongames. Which means comments may stack up for a while before being approved, but please still make them. Normal service should resume after 14 September.
To keep you happy I have written a whole pile of articles which should auto publish themselves to a schedule whilst I am away.
28 August: Some free advice for Michael Grade
31 August: About good management
2 September: Gran Turismo 5 (GT5) Vs Forza Motorsport 3 (FM3)
4 September: What do game publishers do and is there any need for them?
7 September: Will video gaming become the main form of human exercise?
9 September: How to manage fansites
11 September: The Great Flu
14 September: Microdigital in Liverpool
Obviously none of these can be news related. They are more industry background pieces. I hope you enjoy them.
I just thought that I would bring the Australian law to your attention, you seem to be threatening me without substance:
Defamation Act 2005 – SECT 9
Certain corporations do not have cause of action for defamation
9. Certain corporations do not have cause of action for defamation
(1) A corporation has no cause of action for defamation in relation to the
publication of defamatory matter about the corporation unless it was an
excluded corporation at the time of the publication.
(2) A corporation is an excluded corporation if-
(a) the objects for which it is formed do not include obtaining financial
gain for its members or corporators; or
(b) it employs fewer than 10 persons and is not related to another
corporation-
and the corporation is not a public body.
(3) In counting employees for the purposes of subsection (2)(b), part-time
employees are to be taken into account as an appropriate fraction of a
full-time equivalent.
(4) In determining whether a corporation is related to another corporation for
the purposes of subsection (2)(b), section 50 of the Corporations Act applies
as if references to bodies corporate in that section were references to
corporations within the meaning of this section.
(5) subsection (1) does not affect any cause of action for defamation that an
individual associated with a corporation has in relation to the publication of
defamatory matter about the individual even if the publication of the same
matter also defames the corporation.
(6) In this section-
corporation includes any body corporate or corporation constituted by or under
a law of any country (including by exercise of a prerogative right), whether
or not a public body; public body means a local government body or other
governmental or public authority constituted by or under a law of any country.
Also you quote Gutnick v Dow Jones, this is a false precedent as you are probably aware. The damage to Gutnick’s reputation occurred in Victoria when subscribers in Victoria to the online magazine published by Dow Jones read a defamatory article about Gutnick. So Victoria was the correct jurisdiction. In this case the overwhelming number of readers of my blog are not in NSW and Evony is not in NSW, so NSW is not the correct jurisdiction for hearing the case.
Also everything I have written is either easily proven truth or fair comment. Which you would know if you looked at the facts.
I am just about to catch a plane and will be back in the UK on 14th September.
As you know I have had a threatening letter from Warren McKeon Dickson, a firm of Australian solicitors, because they object to some articles about Evony on this blog. You might be wondering why a Chinese company is threatening a British blog using an Australian solicitor. They can do this because the libel is supposedly committed anywhere that the blog is read. And that is pretty much everywhere on earth.
By using an Australian solicitor Evony make it very difficult for me to defend myself. I have to fly myself and my legal team halfway round the world for every hearing and bringing witnesses in would be extremely expensive. Also Australia has a very old fashioned libel law where the person who thinks they are libeled doesn’t have to prove anything. They can make all the accusations they want and the onus is on me to bring evidence to disprove every one. This is why Warren McKeon Dickson have listed so many silly and obvious things which everyone knows aren’t libel in their letter. For instance they claim that “Evony sends massive amounts of intrusive and offensive spam as part of its advertising the game Evony” is libellous. But everyone has seen the adverts. And in this thread you can read how Evony spammed the Google advertising system.
It is the same with virtually all their claims. Anyone reading my articles and following the links can see the evidence to back up what I say. But still, even though what I say is obviously the truth, I would have to fly all the witnesses to Australia to prove every point.
Libel is incredibly expensive to defend in court. Many people in the UK end up spending over a million pounds. So the idea of me being able to defend this in court in Australia is a non starter. But some gold farmers are earning as much as half a million dollars a day, so to Evony going for me like this is petty cash. So you can see what Evony are doing. They are using Warren McKeon Dickson to try and suppress fair criticism about them on the internet. They are using the expensive steamroller of the Australian legal system in an attempt to stop free speech.
And it is not just me that they have gone for, Warren McKeon Dickson have also threatened the Guardian and presumably other people who have fairly criticised their activities. If we back down and remove our fair criticism from the web then it is a blow for human freedom. Anyone will be able to get away with anything knowing they can use Australian lawyers to stop criticism of their activities. And everyone will have to be immensely careful about what they say anywhere on the internet. It doesn’t matter if you write the truth, the Australian trap can still get you.
It is surprising that Evony are using Warren McKeon Dickson. Libel is a very specialist area of the law with specialist and very highly expensive legal practices who do nothing else. But Warren McKeon Dickson are small town general solicitors more accustomed to helping people buy and sell property, they don’t even list libel as an area of expertise on their website. So it looks like Evony have gone to a less expensive lawyer so as to be able to cost effectively carpet bomb their critics.
So what can I do? If I remove the articles it is a victory for censorship and oppression. If I leave the articles Evony will bring a case against me that I cannot defend, even though I have told the truth. The only answer is the Streisand effect, where an attempt at censorship backfires because the resultant publicity brings the story to an even bigger audience. This is already happening as Warren McKeon Dickson’s heavy handed bullying has received far more publicity than the original Evony story.
If you want to help beat these people you can. Just cut and paste anything I have ever said about Evony on here and put it anywhere and everywhere on the web. You don’t even have to credit the source if you don’t want to. They cannot threaten everybody! The more that the truth about Evony is propagated the better the Streisand effect will be.
It looks like a fairly standard netbook with an Intel Atom (though we don’t know which one yet) processor and Windows 7. Most netbooks are let down by their support and graphics chipsets. Nokia seem to have overcome this with HD graphics capability and a 12 hour battery life. Maybe something to do with Nokia’s technology collaboration with Intel.
The telephone heritage shows up with the integrated GPS and integrated 3G phone modem, so it doesn’t need a dongle. It also has Wi Fi and Bluetooth. And a webcam.
So a netbook with several features that give it a competitive advantage and which show its telephone heritage. Another big step on the convergence road. And a potentially massive gaming machine.
