Yeah, but you have to remember that those names will affect the perception of similar names. The Wii, for example, being a monster hit is going to affect the way people perceive names.
In a time when VC money is scarce, fewer can play the "accumulate users and charge in the unforeseen future when all your competitors have died". In this type of market, freemium is a tough play.
Which is nice. I prefer old-fashioned biz models where you put out a product and quickly find out if people are willing to pay for it.
Seeing if people are willing to pay for it is still a great metric. But until (if ever) the advertising bubble actually pops, extremely few web products will be best served by freemium.
I can count web freemiums that made more money than their free counterparts on half a hand.
The real genius of bittorrent is how it brings together many people who are interested in sharing the same file all at once so you get great download/upload speeds. This mostly isn't even due to the protocol itself but in the way that torrent sites tend to present the torrents chronologically.
Plus there is no bandwidth wasted on sharing content other than what you are interested in. Almost every other client wants to make you share all kinds of other stuff to even use the network: emule, freenet, tor, i2p, gnutella, etc.
Finally, pure luck has allowed the laws to progress in a way that hasn't resulted in the immediate shutdown or blocking of popular torrent sites. It should be noted that in certain countries this isn't the case and bittorrent has been a total failure there.
Also, on the majority of American college campuses today, bittorrent is a huge failure because it is easily fingerprinted and will get you banned from the network. Maybe they have finally added some stenography to protect against this but not that I know of. Then, there are the large ISPs that are degrading or blocking bittorrent now.
Of course, everyone knows that the real reason bittorrent beat freenet is because bittorrent was python and freenet was a big steaming pile of java:)
The use of torrent files as a universal link to the downloadable material is also genius. It removes the need for implementing a costly peer-2-peer search mechanism (Gnutella and Kazaa spent quite a lot of resources on search), and a potentially cluttered GUI. Instead, the torrent files can be distributed in any way people find convenient, eg. www, e-mail or RSS.
On top of that, including the tracker-URL transparently in the torrent file is a huge usability improvement. No more searching for lists of super-nodes to enter the network, as was the case with Gnutella.
This was really what took him out. Nobody at the time thought to use a file to share all the meta information. It was always about urls or ip addresses or so on. He did not try to reinvent the world, he just took things that worked and put them together.
Very true. On the web, it's not uncommon for free vs paid users to be 1,000,000 to 1. For desktop apps it may be different, but online, way over-hyped.
Just to add, the guys have it far worse in this situation.
-Clonk.-
Yes, the guys have it worse if you view it primarily as a dating situation. But viewing it primarily as a dating situation is a large part of what makes it so uncomfortable for the women in the first place.
Consider this very crude quantitative model: There is a group of 10 (straight) male hackers who spend workdays together. They would prefer to spend 95% of their day working, and 5% flirting. So they spend 5% of their time frustrated, and 95% satisfied.
A female hacker joins the group. She's no celibate saint - she, too, would like to spend 5% of her time flirting and 95% working. But, because she's the only woman around, 50% of her time is occupied by her coworkers trying to flirt with her. So, despite a much better position in the dating situation, she spends 45% of her time being frustrated by the constant romantic attention when she'd far rather be working.
Do you see how we could end up with a situation in which "normal" behaviour, or "just treating someone like you would anyone else", can make someone feel very uncomfortable indeed?
It's certainly much more serious than the minor inconvenience of being unable to meet potential romantic partners at work.
Wow, interesting. The only shortcoming is that you made this all up.
People in PLENTY of more evenly paired occupations flirt all day long. If flirting is something a woman hates then go right ahead into programming! You can easily avoid human interaction almost entirely.
I don't know what that means, but it might be interesting to note that you're one of the first people to mention this phrase on the internet:
http://ri.ms/notime
(Edit: HN didn't like quotes in the URL, so used URL shrinker)
I'm sure that there are some colleges where other factors have greater influence on the behavior of the college. But for the vast majority, all that I've seen, the schools are operated exactly as you say.
The other factors are just a marketing trick. You know higher quality is a niche on its own --- and you have to seemingly ignore sales and concentrate on high ideals alone, to generate good sales in this niche. At least that's what works for industries other than education.
