E3MR Report: Greasy Kids' Stuff
Electronic Entertainment Expo, Los Angeles -- After a harrowing weekend at the L.A. Convention Center, our Roast correspondent can rest easy, knowing that ever-smiling PR people won't be hounding him to have pictures taken with scantily clad booth babes while playing the latest 3D Sensurround, real-time, VR, multiplayer (over the Net) action shoot-em-up martial arts fighting game demo (set for Christmas release). Sure, the Nintendo "booth" was large enough to house a family of 18, feed them lattes, and give them enough twitch action games to keep them comatose for months.
But this whole Expo is built on the premise: games are for kids. While there were signs outside each exhibit hall saying "no one under 18 admitted," there were plenty of tykes being wowed by blood-spurting Mortal Kombat rip-offs, and eyeing the aforementioned bikini-clad booth bimbos. The so-called "adult" games find their way to plenty of kids, and kids' games have hooked curious grown-ups as well -- there's lots of crossover.
In the interest of kids' rights, you can open the SF Chronicle to find that the technology reporter's son gets to give the final word on Nintendo's N64 system, not Pops. Enough, already. The whole Kiddie Power movement has gone too far. 7-year-olds crashing fighter planes...er...Cessnas? What's next? Chelsea Clinton appointed to an education post? Macauley Culkin directing movies? Marc Andreessen running Netscape? Stop the prepubescent madness, before our lives become one big 3D shoot-em-up.
Rumble Down 101
If Microsoft v. Netscape is the heavyweight prize fight, Macromedia vs. Adobe is shaping up as a pretty nice undercard. In case you missed it, Adobe recently tried to save their collective Wall Street butts by finally announcing an Internet strategy at a lunchtime schmoozefest extravaganza. While we're sure the world will be a much better place because of Adobe's new initiative, the fun started when Adobe announced a new authoring program, dubbed Vertigo, that would make multimedia easy to author and deliver. In short, the gloves are off.
In the past year Macromedia hired away Adobe's Premiere guy for $5 mil, acquired FreeHand, then Fauve xRes, then brought out a suite of Web authoring tools -- direct shots at Adobe. Adobe countered with a me-too version of Illustrator that caught up with FreeHand, and the good but technologically underwhelming PageMill (but big sales), but mostly they just sat and watched their stock fade last year. Well, the sleeping giant finally woke up, and now we get to watch the war unfold. After Adobe's big announcements, Macromedia released a paranoia-ridden press release to remind the industry that they've actually beaten Adobe in just about everything they're trying to do. But really, they're running scared.
Macromedia's strategy has been to bundle their products -- buy Director, get xRes. So if you've got xRes, why use Photoshop? If Adobe follows the same strategy, Macromedia is dead. If Adobe bundles a cheap, easy-to-use, high-quality authoring program sans programming, with Photoshop, they won't necessarily take away the Director market, but they might eat into it. The numbers are simple: Director's got about 200,000 legal users, Photoshop -- 2 million. Adobe's the third or fourth biggest software company in the world, Macromedia's.....not. Adobe's got their own skyscraper in San Jose, Macromedia recently slapped their name onto the side of the building they share South of Market. This could be more fun than any 3D fighting game...
Alta Vista Celebrity Name Search-Off, Round 1 (cont.)
While we continue our search for the most popular name on the Web, we must pause to give respects to a (yuck) Top 10 list put out by Infoseek: most common names searched using their engine. 1. Pamela Anderson, 2. Anna Nicole Smith, 3. Jenny McCarthy, 4. Cindy Crawford, 5. Brad Pitt, 6. Sharon Stone, 7. Demi Moore, 8. Jennifer Aniston, 9. Teri Hatcher, 10. Alyssa Milano. (How long before Net-happy PR agents start doing multiple searches for their client to pump up numbers?)
This week's matchup: Macromedia's Bud Colligan vs. Adobe's Charles Geschke While Bud's a nice enough guy, and a real marketing whiz with a knack for good acquisitions, Geshke is a pioneer from Xerox PARC who helped invent PostScript, making him one of the 20 most important people in the history of modern computing, so sayeth Byte magazine. Let's let Alta Vista be the judge.
The Tally:
Bud Colligan: 200 matches
Charles Geschke: 51 matches
Looks like Adobe's late-blooming Internet strategy left them a step behind everyone's Bud.
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