Ensight - Jeremy Wright

Some more random thoughts for the day:

1. Amazon’s Kindle has officially been announced. Lots of Techmeme coverage. Steven Levy, Rafat and Matt Ingram have good coverage. Three key thoughts on this from me. First, b5media is providing a tonne of the blogging content to Kindle (about 10%). While I’m not personally convinced people will pay for blogs, Amazon asked us to join and we said fine, as long as we could actually produce exclusive content later. They didn’t mind that idea at all (understandably). Getting in early on a new platform, especially if it costs us nothing, is totally automated and potentially generates revenue is a total no-brainer. Second, I love the device. While we haven’t yet received ours to the office, I’ve seen other images besides Newsweek’s, and it’ll ge better over time. The features are great and, as Scoble intones, this is the first real step into the fundamental shift towards books dying. It’ll take 20 years, but it’ll happen. And, finally, what nobody seems to be talking about is that for a paper book retailer, this is a huge, huge strategic shift that I don’t think we’ll fully appreciate for another 5-7 years.
2. I’ve been hanging out a bit at SitePoint Forums the last day or so. No real reason. Just had some time last night and went around answering things I felt I had something to say on. Was an ass somtimes, was helpful other times. Still a great community, even if I only know like 2 of the leaders there anymore (used to be a Team Leader there).
3. I find it interesting how when your life is uber busy, you end up segmenting it (at least I do). Before BWE, meetings were either pre or post BWE depending on how urgent or important they were. Now the new delineating point is Le Web in Paris (I’ll be taking a few days with my wife) and then Christmas/New Year’s. So we’re fitting meetings in either pre-LeWeb (if we feel it needs done this year) or post LeWeb (if we really want to get it done, but couldn’t do it pre) and we’re even booking in meetings for next year. This is great, because increasingly b5 is becoming less reactionary and more forward-planning, but it’s also odd to say “yeah, I’d love to chat… talk to you next year!”
4. Thord over at Wisdump decided to take some shots at our theme. I’m okay with that, everyone’s entitled to an opinion. I just always find it odd when people criticize first and then think through things later. I’d challenge Thord to do a podcast so we can talk through the limitations of doing a theme for a network our size, and to see if he still holds the same opinions once he’s thought through the boundaries. Simply saying that not enough “time, money or talent” are spent is arrogant to say the least. So, Thord, if you’re up for it let’s have a chat. Once you understand the issues around doing real blog network design, I’d be more than happy to hear your specific suggestions. At this point, though, Thord’s suggestions amount to him telling Ford “get better fuel economy”. Easy to say, but doesn’t begin to understand the challenges/costs/talent/time required to make that happen.
5. Saw a piece yesterday that the 360 is expected to outsell the PS3 2:1 this holiday season (moving 2M units in the US, and more than 5M worldwide). This will push the 360 to nearly 20M units sold worldwide (no, let’s not get into sold vs shipped, alright?). Personally I wouldn’t be surprised to see the PS3 equal the 360 in sales, but even then it’ll still be 10M consoles behind, give or take. The Wii, on the otherhand is, as of this month, the console leader. Nintendo’s challenge is that people aren’t buying a lot of hardware, nor are the buying a lot of software. So even if Nintendo sells 100M Wii’s over the course of its lifetime… The Wii’s average hardware rate is 2 peripherals, and the software rate is 3.5 games (2 of which are bundled). Which gives Nintendo revenue of about 30B$ over the life of the system. Not bad. But over 7 years that’s really only 4B/year. Which, again, ain’t bad… The challenge is that the Wii only really has 3 revenue streams right now: system, peripherals, software. With low peripheral and software sales, Nintendo won’t be making much profit. Compare that to Microsoft’s 1B$/year in Xbox Live revenue, attach rate of nearly 10 now and hardware rate of 5, and Microsoft will pull in 3 times Nintendo’s revenue on half the install base (and do vastly more in profit). This generation of gaming is fascinating, if for no other reason than it’s the first time there have been 2 completely different styles of gaming being sold. The Wii will sell more consoles, but Microsoft will sell vastly more games. As far as Sony? They’re stuck between a rok (price) and a hard place (game library).