Conceptually, I love every bit of bad Zynga news. I like to be reassured that a company will, in the long term, fail when its products are cynically designed to manipulate. That a company will fail when their strategy assumes it's okay to blatantly, consistently, continuously lift design from other firms and products.

Practically, though, bad Zynga news feels terrible. Because the guys who architected this repugnant exploitation machine already got paid. They made millions selling their stock before the market truly understood what a shit business they were running. Meanwhile, front-line employees sat with their plummeting stock locked up.

So any bad Zynga news is nothing more than notice that yet another group of hardworking folks is, somehow, getting fucked over, despite their leadership enjoying tremendous rewards.

Very frustrating to watch.

With the lifetime account fiasco still ongoing [1], they should probably shut up.

[1] Joyent/Textdrive sold lifetime shared hosting accounts for a one time payment in the beginning. Those accounts would exist "as long as we exists". A couple of months back they sent an email that they are "discontinuing" lifetime accounts. After uproar from the community they offered refunds. Many people (including me) agreed to the refund, but then they decided to make another 180 degree turn, not paying out the refund. Instead they are now spinning off a new "Textdrive" that is supposed to "take over" the lifetime customers. No details about funding/general outlook/etc. of this new company has been provided so far. Questions to this end are shrugged off as "everything is perfect, just trust us, ..."

Incidentally, the new Textdrive Forum (discuss.textdrive.com) seems to be down at the moment...

There is no obvious reason this product isn't going to sell in huge quantities.

Less conceptually fragile, less expensive, more portable, same software stack, same media stack, same OS, same UX, same premium experience, same monstrous manufacturing and distribution reach, same monstrous advertising and product awareness engine.

Every single one of the children you see in restaurants working an iPad so mommy and daddy can eat in peace will have one of these by January.

Schools will buy in by the hundreds of thousands, regardless of actual utility or how successful digital textbooks eventually become.

This is the new travel iPad. This is the status gift for the developing world. This is the throwaway iPad if you're rich or the first one you look at if you're less so.

It's priced to make Apple the margins they want while still inviting comparisons with less expensive and similarly sized tablets. It's going to suck the oxygen out of the $300-$500 price range for anything with a screen.

And it's cheap enough to substantially distinguish itself from the main iPad line, which is selling millions a week. That's all it had to do, pricing-wise.

I don't want or need this, and I don't think it was particularly necessary for the health of the iPad line, but they dotted all the Is and crossed all the Ts when designing this product.

So moral of the story? Make sure you have a blog with significant readership if you want good customer service?

I say this with absolutely no judgement regarding the value of the iPad Mini, but I'm struck by the similarity between this criticism and the criticism leveled against the original iPad ("it's just a giant iPod Touch!").

If this is gloating about the EC2 outage, then ugh. I can't find out if it is because the whole of joyent.com is actually down for me (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT)

I guess you could argue that Zynga employees have been dancing with the devil for the past couple of years. Any Zynga employee I ever talked to was very open about how they aren't really making games. They are just cynically generating revenue over flaws in the human condition.

I think if you work for a screwy company like Zynga you should be very paranoid about cashing out of the company. If they have such a low opinion of their customers, who is to say they won't have the same sentiment towards their employees.