TenYears
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Ten years of BlackBerry
The year is 1999. Bill Clinton is the President of the United States, gas is 94 cents a gallon, Bondi Blue iMacs are a staple in dorm rooms across the country, and Microsoft is trying to bring the desktop Windows experience to the pocket, pushing its Palm-size PC concept (after Palm had quashed the original "Palm PC" branding) on a world still feeling jilted by the failures of the Apple Newton. 3Com subsidiary Palm and its heavyweight licensee Handspring have figured out something interesting about the still-nascent PDA market, though: people like simplicity. If an electronic organizer does what it says it's going to do, keeps your information in sync with your PC, runs for forever and a day on a single set of batteries, and does it all with a minimum of fuss, people will buy. It's an exciting, challenging, and rapidly-changing era in the mobile business.
Inside Blizzard's plans, past and future
Wandering Goblin has a cool piece up entitled "25 Things You Didn't Know About WoW." Now, it's not really titled correctly, because many Blizzard fans will at least know a few of the things, and the truth is that they're not all about WoW anyway. But it is interesting reading, especially if you aren't super familiar with the background behind the Blue.Fr'instance, when WoW released, Mike Morhaime says that every available employee was working on it. And production on Burning Crusade started about six months after that, when Blizzard determined that WoW was "stable." Other interesting tidbits (specifically from the recent WWI) include the fact that China is WoW's biggest market (people there pay by the hour, not by the month), and that Blizzard expects WoW to last them at least 10 years. So we may still be grinding murlocs in 2014.It's also interesting that Blizzard says they don't plan budget limits for games-- either they're going to make a good game, or they don't bother making the game at all. Most companies probably wouldn't have ditched Starcraft: Ghost so late in the process, but Blizzard seems totally and completely committed to releasing a great game or not releasing a game at all. Interesting tactic, but then again it's worked for them so far.[ via WorldofWar.net ]
