x’ing my fingers about xBox

No surprise I wasn’t invited to the big tent. Despite my recent venting of frustration on the state of xBox, I’m honestly crossing my fingers that the xBox-720/xBox-8/xBox-∞/neXtBox XBox One announcement goes well today and they have a successful launch this fall.

It will go well if they demo a game that blows our mind and that we want to play. It will go poorly if there is no unique game demonstration and we are instead shown a lengthy set-top-box-tv-app-platform-bullshit-bullshit demonstration.

Great must-have games, sell consoles. PacMan, Pitfall! and Asteroids moved the Atari 2600. Mario sold the NES and Super NES. Zelda, 007-GoldenEye and MarioKart sold the Nintendo-64. Tony Hawk, Metal Gear Solid, and Grand Turismo sold the Playstation 1. There was that Halo xBox thing that seemed to have worked pretty well, also. This isn’t a truism just about consoles – this is a truism for all computers and operating systems and phones and tablets and e-Readers and devices as well. PCs were originally mostly purchased for Multiplan – there’s always a “killer app” or set of apps or content which kickstarts the market. Since the new xBox and Playstation 4 aren’t going to be backward-compatible with their old titles… there had better be some very unique and must-have content ready for launch.

Sony’s Playstation 4 announcement event and PR did a good job focusing on games and game-tech, and everything about the event, the graphics, the PR was fine-tuned to gamers. This was solid and refreshing versus the guide-tv-movies-netflix focus that Microsoft has been spewing of late. I remain impressed that Sony are holding back on showing the physical console – this is terrific restraint and gives them strong opportunities to take back press coverage from Microsoft post xBox-announce today. But the games – inFamous Second Son, Killzone: Shadow Fall, Watchdogs, some others – while truly fantastic looking, did not look particularly approachable or compelling to me. I think Sony better have some very compelling games up its sleeve for launch. These are good but not buy-a-new-console good, in my opinion. And I don’t seem to be alone in this opinion.

Alex St. John (another former Microsoftie and, oddly, also an Alaskan) wrote an insightful post giving his perspective on the new xBox — it’s worth a read, I agree with quite a bit of it. His point that xBox is being run and guided by non-hardcore-gamers and old-dudes who think more about places to watch Sponge Bob and listen to music than they do about games is particularly spot-on. I also agree that technologically it’s good that Microsoft is returning to more of a PC architecture and hopefully more of a PC operating system kernel (likely since Dave Cutler is working on it these days). I was the original proponent of xBox using the Windows kernel so that we could share technology and improve the PC+Windows experience with everything we learned about stability, fast-boot and UI/UX from consoles. This goal took a bit of a back-seat in the original xBox and was completely tossed-out in xBox 360, and as Alex notes, it caused damage to the PC game ISV community, as they became fractured — DirectX was consistent between PCs and xBox, but everything else about programming them was different.

Like Alex, I’m not overly excited about the expected hardware. I do think it’s interesting that it will have HDMI-in as well as HDMI-out, there are cool things to do there — if done right (a big “if” given who we’re talking about) you could make the console the primary input and control point for the TV, as I pointed out in my post about what I’d want in an Apple TV device. This is a strategic point to own.

In any case, I’m looking forward to watching the live-blogs of the launch. If the device is quiet, small, and really fast and has at least one cool games, I will of course get one.

Actually, I’m lying. Even if it’s big, loud and slow, if it has a kick-ass unique game that looks playable and approachable and fun I will buy one and many others will as well, despite whatever horrific TV-guide and Blu-Ray and Netflix and lame third-party apps are announced and demonstrated in the big tent today.

(update: the announcement was almost the very worst of every horrible possibility I could have imagined. TV-focused. No live-game demos. Bad jokes. Horrible presentation. No game footage at all until 35m in – overall we saw more Price is Right footage than game footage. It’s not clear yet if the launch titles will be super-compelling, we’ll have to wait until E3.)

Morin Tastes Own Medicine

Last Friday Facebook blocked Path’s “Find Friends” feature over brewing spam complaints. Shortly thereafter Dave Morin, Path’s CEO, proudly stated that “Path does not spam users,” but the tactics he is defending today are the very same practices that he himself cracked down on as “spam” when he was running the Facebook Platform. I watched the crack-down from the front-row at iLike, an early Facebook platform partner.

Compare Morin’s description of Path’s “feature” to the Facebook policy that was put in place while Morin was the head of developer relations for Facebook Platform. The official Facebook policy was that apps were forbidden from doing exactly what Morin now calls “not spam”:

Here’s Dave Morin’s opposite opinion of spammy app behavior from Facebook’s 2007 anti-spam policy – pretty much the same policy that’s still in effect and caused Path to lose access: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/26/

Specifically, an app with a pre-selected (opt-out) checkbox sending messages to your entire address book if you simply pressed “OK” was what Facebook, under Morin’s oversight, considered to be a punishable violation of the terms of use. Let me say that again: the exact form of invitation interface Path uses was specifically called out and forbidden by Facebook under Morin oversight, in order to preserve the sanctity and user-experience of the Facebook platform ecosystem.

Obviously the tables are turned now that Morin is trying to build his business rather than regulating an ecosystem. The early Facebook Platform was so over-run with user-acquisition spam that it’s easy to understand why Facebook took the measures it took, to crack down on the incredibly aggressive techniques used by ethically challenged companies abusing the system to grow their user-base.

So it really doesn’t surprise me that Path’s access to Facebook friends was blocked, and in fact I’m glad as a user that Facebook is enforcing the rules. It does seem disingenuous at best and genuinely ethically questionable to me to spend your last job regulating such spammy activities and enforcing policy that forbade them, only to turn around and build a company based on just those activities. To then publicly defend your actions as “not spam” is just sarcasm.

Why do I care? I was CTO at iLike, and we were a launch partner on Facebook platform in 2007, at one point acquiring over 10M users in just 2 weeks. It was an amazing roller-coaster ride in engineering, operations, and business development. Although we used Facebook sharing and invites and we A/B-tested our notifications like crazy, we shied away from the extremely spammy tactics of the Slide‘s and RockYou‘s and others of that era, yet Dave Morin’s platform team punished good and bad apps alike. We watched the Facebook platform devolve into a sheep-throwing race to the bottom for users, and a cat-and-mouse game between aggressive apps skirting rules and the inconsistent Facebook enforcement of that time. We always aimed to keep iLike users’ best interest first and so focused our efforts on creating user value around music, concerts, and artists. Our viral user acquisition growth stuttered and suffered, but our artist and user happiness kept growing, just more slowly. Because I think we had a useful app with useful notifications and a company culture of respect for users and their privacy, I personally wish Facebook’s platform team had acted to block-out and shut-down aggressive apps and companies doing bad things rather than creating a treadmill of technical restrictions for all apps which hurt good apps while also punishing the bad. I wish they had early on implemented a simpler set of broad rules and used an active review and harsher enforcement policy more like Apple’s App Store. They’re doing better at this by shutting out Path over this kind of violation.

As for Path, I was skeptical but willing to give them a second chance after the egregious Apple address book issue last year. Now I think their M.O. is clear. It’s hard to imagine ever trusting Path to put users first when the CEO can so completely change the definition of “not spam” from one job to the other, depending on which side of the table he’s sitting on. What exactly do Dave Morin and Path believe is right for users and their product? Whatever works right now? Whatever they can get away with for growth?