Goodsol Solitaire Blog

Google Logos, Google Misses, Great Design

Create your own Google style logo: Google Logo Maker

And speaking of Google, Google's stock is getting killed tonight in after hours trading because earnings were not as good as expected.  Read all about it on the Internet Stock Blog.

And finally, some great reading from Joel on Software:

Introduction to Great Design

My problem with cell phone design is that I can't figure out which button to press to answer a call.  Sometimes I wind up turning off the phone.

What is Design?

Design, for my purposes, is about making tradeoffs.

Design is something you only have to pay for once for your product.

What Makes It Great?

So this is what I'm talking about when I say "Great Design." It's that ineffable quality that certain incredibly successful products have that makes people fall in love with them despite their flaws.

And I love this paragraph:

"Every time I read Jakob Nielsen," I wrote in 2000, "I get this feeling that he really doesn't appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone's number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr. Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you'd never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there; they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other."

Trust Your Customers

This post originally appeared on the old site on February 5, 2005.

Eric Sink's latest MSDN article is out and Eric has outdone himself.  This is a truly marvelous article.

Read it:  Tenets of Transparency (link fixed - see comments).

Summary: Eric claims that if ISVs are unwilling to trust their customers, then they won't have any.

This article should be read by all shareware developers. Eric's point is that when you are selling software, your customers have to be able to trust you. Software isn't tangible. People have to trust that it works and will continue to work. But if you want people to trust you, you have to trust them.

Transparency is an ISV's way of trusting your customers. By letting your customers see behind the corporate veil, you extend them your trust, making it easier for them to trust you in return.

Here in the Midwest there is a restaurant chain called Steak-n-Shake that seems to understand transparency. Their slogan is "In Sight It Must Be Right". The idea is that if you let your customers watch you prepare their food, you can't slip anything funny into the burger.

My favorite restaurant! They don't use that slogan much anymore, but back in the day it was important. People didn't trust restaurants because they didn't know how well the food was prepared. Steak-n-Shake dealt with this by making the kitchen open to view for the customers.

Too many software developers don't trust their customers. They spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to make their applications secure from people being able to cheat them by using them without paying.

The problem is, 95% plus of people are honest. If you spend most of your time dealing with trying to stop the remaining people, you are just wasting your time. You should spend 95% or more of your time dealing with the honest customers. I generally spend only a few hours a year on working on the system that deals with the cheaters. I spend the overwhelming majority of my time on the honest majority.

Eric gives 8 ways to make your software company more transparent.

1. Have a Weblog

Good idea, obviously I'm doing it.

2. Offer Web-based Discussion Forums

Another good idea.  It lets your customers interact with each other.  My forums have not really taken off as a community, but there is still a nice amount of activity, especially in the area of players helping each other out trying win the harder games in Pretty Good Solitaire.

3. Don't Hide Your Product's Problems

As I mentioned above, software customers usually want to know that a product will be steadily improved in the future.

There are exceptions to this rule of course. Last week I purchased a computer Scrabble game for about $20. In this case, future upgrades are not very important for me. I just want to play the game in its current form. Unless I find some horrendous bug, I don't really expect this vendor to ever provide me with an upgrade.

Actually, a lot of people expect free upgrades for a $20 game, and I give free upgrades for several years. That is becoming a rarity in the indie game business these days. Most games seem to be one shots, they are put out and then never improved. This applies even to top companies such as PopCap, which apparently just puts out a game and that's it. If they improve a game, such as Bejeweled, they make it Bejeweled 2. I don't know whether Bejeweled 1 users get Bejeweled 2 for a reduced price, there's no indication of it on the PopCap site that I can find.

We continually improve our games.  I find that it takes several versions before a game really reaches it's potential.

4. Don't Annoy Honest People

Very important, you have to make your license enforcement procedure as easy as possible. Over the years we have continually improved ours. Note that Eric's SourceGear stopped using product activation.

5. Offer a Painless Demo Download

In shareware, this is a given.  But Eric has good advice about making your demo high-trust.

6. Offer a Money-Back Guarantee

Again, basic advice, but a lot of people don't do it. But if you are accepting credit cards over the internet, essentially you have a money back guarantee since it is a card not present transaction. You might as well get some marketing gain out of it.

7. Share a Little About Your Financial Standing

When I buy software from a small ISV, I usually wish I could know all kinds of things about the company's financials:

    * Is the company profitable?
    * How much cash does it have? How much debt?
    * What kind of corporation is it? Who are the owners?
    * Do they have outside investors?
    * Is the founder still involved? Does she still have a decent equity stake?

This is interesting. Very few companies talk about this stuff. We do make a lot of this stuff known. Yes, we are profitable. I like the company to have a lot of cash available in case something goes wrong. If something did happen, I could cut expenses down to a minimum and the company could run for several years with no revenue. This is a tremendous competitive advantage. If a big economic downturn were to happen, we'd be in a position to ride it out for a long time. The company has absolutely no debt. My wife and I are the only owners, no outside investors. Obviously, the founder is still involved.

8. Talk About Your Future Plans

World domination.

Just remember to always under-promise and over-deliver.

Oops. 

All Software is Shareware

There is a great post today on Guy Kawasaki's blog called The Art of Execution.

Read the whole thing, there is a lot of good advice there.  But what I noticed was this passage:

A good goal is relevant. If you're a software company, it's the number of downloads of your demo version.

There's an implicit assumption there.  The assumption is that if you are a software company, you have a demo version.  In other words, Kawasaki is implicitly saying that all software companies are shareware companies!

Heh.

20 Years Ago

So do you remember what you were doing 20 years ago today?

I was in the house I lived in with 7 other students at the University of Illinois.  I was back from a morning class and I was listening to a cassette tape of the latest Kate Bush album.  Then a housemate, Matt (he works for Intel now), came in to my room and said that the space shuttle had exploded.

I went to another class that day, but mostly I spent the remainder of the day in the TV rooms at the Illini Union student center (I wonder if they still have TV rooms there now?).

There's remarkably little about the 20th anniversary in blogs today, but Michelle Malkin has some links.  Most interesting is a post on the blog of the woman who was the Flight Surgeon that day.

Friday CatBlogging: Sneak Preview

It's Friday, time once again for a cat picture:

This is Ace sitting on our new couch.  She has taken to it.  She sort of blends in with the couch, but there is little danger of her being sat on since she is such a scaredy cat she would run if anyone approached the couch.

And now a sneak preview of next week's attraction:

Coming next week for Pretty Good Solitaire fans: our second Cat Card Set.  This one is even better than the first one, as the cards are very well designed and some of the pictures are great!  Thanks to everyone who submitted a cat picture.

The first Cat Card Set can be downloaded from our card set page.  The second Cat Card Set will be available next week.

As always, there are more cat pictures on the Friday Ark #71.

Klondike Strategy

This post originally appeared on the old site on December 14, 2004.

In the course of events I recently came across this site: Solitaire Strategy Guide.

This is an interesting page about strategy for solitaire, specifically for the game Klondike, which is referred to on the page as "solitaire", as if it is the only solitaire game (this is common). Klondike is, of course, the solitaire game that is bundled with Windows.

The 9 rules are interesting and are listed by order of importance (meaning the first rules always take precedence over the lower rules). I agree with most of these rules, although the terminology is a little weird.

The first two rules are straightforward.  The 3rd rule:

3. When faced with a choice, always make the play or transfer that frees (or allows a play that frees) the downcard from the biggest pile of downcards.

In general this is true, but I wonder if it is always the case. What if the first downcard in the smaller pile of downcards allows you to make more plays to uncover more downcards than the other card? It can happen. Of course, the only way to really know is to use undo and try both alternatives. This brings up the question of whether in strategy rules you can be allowed to check each alternative - strictly speaking, that's probably not allowed for a strategy but in practice it is what everyone does (at least, if you are playing with a game like Pretty Good Solitaire that has multiple undo).

In rule 7, what he refers to as "next card protection" is actually what is known as "safe autoplay", which has been in Pretty Good Solitaire since forever. Safe Autoplay means that you don't move up cards to the foundations if that card may still be needed in the tableau as a spot to park a lower ranked card on. It's the situation when, for example, you could play the 4 of Hearts to the foundations but the 3 of Clubs hasn't come out yet and there's no place to put it if it did. In that case, you want to leave the 4 of Hearts in the tableau so you can play the 3 of Clubs on it when it comes out. When AutoPlay is turned on, Pretty Good Solitaire will not automatically play the 4 of Hearts up to the foundations in this situation, which confuses some people who don't realize the importance of this. I get an email or two every week about this from people who think that the AutoPlay in Pretty Good Solitaire has a bug in it because it isn't playing everything up.

The most interesting thing about these rules is what he called "smooth". It took me awhile to understand what he meant by this (you have to read the part on the left side and continuing below the rules). I think a better term for this would be "flushing the pile" (borrowing the word flush in its poker sense). A pile would be flushed if the cards of the same color are also all of the same suit. If you think about it, it is clearly desirable that the cards in an alternate color pile be flushed as much as possible. It will make it much easier for the pile to move up to the foundations if this is the case.

What I don't understand is why he limits rule 8 to cards of rank 5,6,7, or 8. It's clear why you wouldn't want these restrictions on 2s or 3s, but why not include 4 and why stop at 8? I'm not clear on the reasoning behind why this rule is the way it is.

I've tried playing these rules on the game Gold Rush, my favorite Klondike type game, and they seem to work well. Although with Gold Rush, you have to make some modification for the fact that there are only 3 redeals. On the 3rd redeal, you will never see a card in the waste again so you had better play it if you can, rule 8 notwithstanding.

Happy solitaire playing!

Building High Traffic

Steve Pavlina has a interesting post today:  How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog).

He gives ten good rules to follow to build traffic to a web site or blog.  The most important rules are the first three, which could be summed up in the one sentence:

Create valuable, original, timeless content.

Of course, Steve being Steve he goes into great detail.  One thing was clear from the first moment he appeared in the Association of Shareware Professionals newsgroups years ago, Steve can write.

I need to create more content for my web sites, not just the blogs but the solitaire games web sites as well.  When the redesign that is in progress is complete, I will definitely be looking at ways I can apply these rules to create more content.

The Portal Bubble

This post originally appeared on the old site on October 13, 2004.  It's still true today, except the bubble has gotten bigger.

Dan MacDonald has written his impressions of the IndieGamesCon last weekend.  Mostly it was about how the people from the major gaming portals acted.

Last year, before the bubble really started to take off, the portal people were apparently helpful and interesting.

First a little background, last year there were a number of producers from the various channels, Shockwave, Real, etc. They were really nice guys, they were more then happy to take a look at your game give you advice on how to improve it so that it would sell better to their audiences etc. They seemed like normal human beings.

This year it was different.

This year, the mass market / casual games space is big business. PlayFirst was there, having just come off a first round of funding totaling 4 million. Of course PopCap was there with their millions, the dude from popcap was wearing clothes that had to have cost more then my car. (my ´89 firebird cost about $1700 and this guy was close). Basically there is this major shift in how things work for the mass market space. Distribution channels like Real, Shockwave, yahoo games, MSN etc. are tired of the overhead of dealing with hundreds of indie developers to get games. Not only that they are giving away less and less in terms of royalties, where it was once 40-50% for developers it´s now down around 20% and will continue to drop as the players get bigger and the developers loose leverage.

So now there are new portals and they are looking and acting more and more like retail publishers.

The general feeling I was getting from members of the panel was "hey guys, we are the gatekeepers now, time to bend over and take it." Gate keepers to what you might ask? well the mass market as they would describe it. Games like Zuma, feeding frenzy, or bejeweled that appeal to the majority of "casual gamers" out there.

This article has generated a lot of discussion on the IndieGamer.com discussion board. 

Primarily, there is a fear that the portals will become just like retail publishers. Royalty rates will continue to drop and eventually independent game companies will become totally dependent on the portals to survive (see Why Pyrogon Failed for how this can happen).

However, as long as game developers do not put themselves into a position of dependence on the portals, this simply cannot happen.

The reason it cannot happen is that there is a fundamental difference between retail publishers and the online portals. Retail publishers (and their distributors) control access to the space in retail stores. This space is limited in supply and it is also very expensive to fill. It takes a lot of resources to get software product into retail stores. A small number of companies can control this space because of the high barriers of entry. Now, it is certainly possible for new companies to come along and get their product into stores (in fact it happens often), but it is difficult. It takes a lot of work and a lot of financial resources.

Online portals, on the other hand, only control space on their own web sites. This space is not limited and it is not expensive to create your own web site and compete with them. All they really have, when you come right down to it, is internet traffic. They have customers coming to their site.

But internet traffic is extremely fickle. Think of the sites that were big with internet traffic in 1999. How many of those are around today? Not many. Internet traffic comes and goes quickly. People only come to your site and come back if there is something interesting there. The portals only have traffic and customers as long as people are finding interesting games there. Once a person buys a game from a portal and it turns out not to be as good as they were expecting, that traffic is gone. In the end it will come down to the portals having to have good products with good customer service in order to keep the customers coming back.

What is going to happen to these portals is the same thing that happened in the internet bubble in 1999-2000. Things are going to look great and the market will look like it will expand forever, and then suddenly it won't. The weak companies will get hit first and a lot of the portals will fail. The market for these games will crash and when it is finally over only those who have the best games and the best business strategy will survive. Those developers who are dependent on the portals alone for their income will find themselves in a world of hurt.

I have nothing against the portals and wish them luck, but I'm not going to get dependent on them. I have one game (Pretty Good Solitaire) on one portal (Real), so I get a small amount of money from them. But I still make far more from my own site (in fact I also make far more from retail publishers), so that portals are only a tiny fraction of my income. I'd put my games up on other portals if a deal came along (as the car dealerships say, no reasonable offer will be refused), but again I'm not going to get dependent on portal income. In the end, the best sales are always the sales from your own web site. Developers should be spending most of their time trying to increase traffic and sales to their own sites. Bringing traffic to your own site is still not that difficult or that expensive and a good game with a well designed site will bring in visitors and make money.

Performancing Jotzel

If you have a blog and use Firefox as your browser, check out Performancing for Firefox 1.1.  It's a Firefox extension that gives you a little blog editor down at the bottom of your Firefox window.

I'm writing this post in Performancing, so if you are reading this, then it works :)

And if you are not using Firefox, you should.  Download it here.  Also, Firefox is best used with the Tab Mix Plus extension.  This extension lets you configure tabbed browsing the way it should be done, similar to Netcaptor for Internet Explorer.

Also, there's a new business blog site called Jotzel.  It's a blog aggregator site for business related blogs, but with a difference.  Instead of just picking up RSS feeds from a bunch of blogs and aggregating them, users submit posts to the site and vote on submissions and the posts with the most votes show up on the main page of the site.  Very cool. Jotzel is done by the same people who created the Carnival of the Capitalists. The latest Carnival is at Patent Baristas.

Risk Management

There was a great article this weekend called The Rules of Trading.  While this article is about stock trading, there is a lot in here that can be applied to running a business.

R U L E # 1
Never, ever, under any circumstance, should one add to a losing position ... not EVER!

This means, never buy more of a stock that you own and you have a loss in.  For a business, this rule would be to never spend more money on something that is already losing you money.  Don't send good money after bad.

R U L E # 9
Trading runs in cycles; some are good, some are bad, and there is nothing we can do about that other than accept it and act accordingly.

Business and the economy runs in cycles too.  You need to prepare during the good part of the cycle for the coming bad part of the cycle.  You need to have capital stored away to get through the bad times.  When the bad times come, don't panic and have the patience to wait for the good times to roll around again.

R U L E # 12
In trading/investing, an understanding of mass psychology is often more important than an understanding of economics.

In the indie games industry, a lot of developers get confused between what they think is a good quality game and what sells in the market.  They are making games that they like, not making games that the mass of people who buy games like.  Because they don't understand the mass psychology of their market, they fail.

And the best rule of all:

R U L E # 13
Do more of that which is working and do less of that which is not.

This is a simple rule in writing; this is a difficult rule to act upon. However, it synthesizes all the modest wisdom we've accumulated over thirty years of watching and trading in markets. Adding to a winning trade while cutting back on losing trades is the one true rule that holds--and it holds in life as well as in trading/investing.

This simple rule is how you can build success.  Try a bunch of different things.  Do more of what works and do less of what didn't work.  Eventually, you will be doing mostly what is working.  Note that this does require that you try doing new things occasionally (if you don't, you won't know if they work or not).