A few months ago, I decided to take a leap and move out of the toy business over to our virtual worlds group making social games on the Internet. I come from a software background and have done lots of websites and apps before moving into electronics and then into toys. So while I have a lot of adjacent experience and I've worked with video game companies in the past, I can't say I'm a video game guy. Its a really fun gig and I'm learning a lot.

One of the things that's really interesting is how its making me think about the last few years I spent in toys and how it applies to the world of games. Both are types of play, but the people, the approach, and the philosophies are very different. 

While there's always a danger in generalizing, I think its safe to say that games have inherited a lot of their mental model from their software roots. Many game designers have backgrounds as engineers and so its natural for them to think in terms of mechanics and systems. And a lot of times, the mechanic is where game designers start.

Toy making is kind of a blend of high concept filmmaking and consumer packaged goods. It tends to be very marketing driven in its mindset. The reason for that is that toys, unlike games which have a lot of tech behind them, generally don't do very much. To be fair to my toy inventor friends, there is tons of innovation in the toy space and toy designers are constantly coming up with new creative ways for toys to entertain. But fundamentally, most toys are molded pieces of plastic with a few clever magic tricks and even the highest tech ones don't often come close to the power of your first iPod.

Because of this, most of the value of a toy is the emotional content that is invested into it. And that emotional content is what transforms the toy into more than molded plastic. My friend Tom McGrath is very eloquent in his insistence that the key to most toys is aspiration and certainly you see that play out in the toy aisle every day. Kids fantasize themselves as a superfast race car like Lightening McQueen, or as a superhero who saves the day, or as a fashion model with an endless closet. Through toys, kids play out their dreams and through their play, try to understand the world around them. If Spiderman can take on the bad guys and overcome adversity, maybe I can too. 

And kids don't need a lot of context for their imaginations to come out. Give a kid a cardboard box and within minutes they will build a little house or a fort. Give a boy a used cardboard tube and within seconds, its a pirate sword. These are not the uses for which these things were intended, but kids invest them with the emotional content that transforms them into tools of fantasy. What toy makers often do is just give kids a little more context and a running start.

If you Google me, you will find lots of links on tech toys - robots or toys that connect to the Internet - a genre with which I am closely associated. But the dirty secret is that the best selling things I have been involved with in my career, the things that touched the most people and were an indelible part of their childhoods, had no technology in them at all. No circuits. No code. Together, the Cars die cast, the Disney Princess fashion dolls, and the Toy Story action figures have sold more units than anything else I have done or maybe ever will do. People like to say that toys are dead, that iPads and game consoles are going to dominate play. While I am a huge proponent of the technology-based play - heck, I changed careers to get closer to it - I am here to tell you that the traditional toy is alive and well and is never going out of style because nothing satisfies the desire to, for example, style hair like a doll. It ain't complex, but its powerfully satisfying.

I used to tell my Toymorrow group - the team I set up to look at the merger of physical and digital play - to remember that the most powerful technology a kid has at their disposal is their own imaginations. Any time a technology has tried to replace that and automate the play for the kid, it has failed.

If you go back to John Nash's game theory that has heavily influenced a lot of modern games, its not about fun, its about behavior. Its really a big sociology exercise that has been coopted and turned towards amusement. Through games, we, in a sense, hack ourselves and the other playing with us. But that hack is fundamentally a mental hack based heavily on who we are, how we see ourselves, what our value set is, and who we are prentending to be. In other words, the game assumes our emotional content as a variable in its equation.

If I took Halo, and took out all the space soldiers and guns and cool alien settings, and gave you the same game with a bunch of gray boxes doing the same stuff, it would probably be the biggest video game failure of the year. But why? Its the same game right? Its all that context, all that stuff that immerses you and makes you project yourself into a different situation as a different person, a person you aspire to be, that makes the game have meaning. 

So the lesson that I am taking from my years in toys is that emotional content - how something makes us feel, what it means to us, how it represents our hopes and dreams - is just as important as what it does. And its given me a stronger appreciation of how toy makers pull off that mental hack oftentimes without the aid of technology so defty. 

Just posted a link about how 10.10.10 (today) is the binary for the number 42 which in the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's books is the Ultimate Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Reminded me of a little story. When we were kids, Mike Cotton and I were obsessed with the Hitchhiker's Guide. One day, I was crashing at his house and we read in the paper that Douglas Adams was doing a book signing in Houston, about an hour away. We had almost no time to make it but we jumped in the car to race to the book signing to see our hero. We made it with 30 minutes to spare because Mike drove like a bat out of hell but when we got inside we found that Adams had not been feeling well (jetlagged) and went back to the hotel. We were crushed. We started to make the long drive home when suddenly Mike whipped the car around. Literally. It was like a 360 on the spot and we were nearly killed. (This how he always drove.) And he screamed "Dammit, I am Michael Cotton! I don't take this kind of defeat!" We stopped at the nearest phone booth and he started calling hotels. It took three or four before he found the right one. At that time, Mike worked at the Angleton Times part time doing paste up (I think) but he leveraged what minor credentials he could to the hilt. Mike always lived by the motto "Walk in like you own the place and no one will ever question you." I always think of him whenever someone tells Phineas "Aren't you young to be a blah blah blah." And he says "Why yes, yes I am." That's Mike right there. Anywho, back to the story. So, we find the hotel and he uses his press cred to get them to put him through to Douglas Adams for an "interview". Turns out Adams is asleep and Mike wakes him up. He was a little cranky about this but Mike convinces him to tell us when he will be doing another book signing in the lobby later and we stop by. Sure enough, there he is, we meet him, he signs our books, and I ask him a few questions about a paper I am writing on his works for my high school English class, which he graciously answers (helping me get an A). Then Mike says, "I am the guy who called you earlier." Adams gets a bit cross and says "You know I was fast asleep!" But we didn't care. We bounced out of there. We had a little adventure and met our hero. As we got back to Mike's Bug, I did a double take and noticed that we had parked in spot 42. I kid you not!

Being a Texan, I could not resist the Memorial Day tradition of BBQing glorious meat. Most people grill, but I smoke Texas-style brisket. I also wanted to do ribs, but I couldn't find a rack of beef ribs anywhere in town. Went to six grocery stores and no luck. All they had were precut, pretrimmed, scrawny miserable individual ribs ready for the grill.

As I went store to store, I realized something. A lot of these stores don't even have a butcher on site. These days, most grocery stores have central butcheries where the meat is cut down into individualized portions, packaged and sent out to the store. You seldom go to the meat counter any more. Most meat is in refrigerators all packaged up for you to throw in your cart. Only the higher end stores seem to have an onsite butcher these days. While this in some ways winds up being more economically efficient and convenient for most shoppers, there are also lots of downsides. Breaking down and packaging all the beef centrally means more packaging and more bulk from the central butchery to the store which is environmentally wasteful. Breaking down the meat on site is much more environmentally friendly because the meat is coming to the store in bulk broken down for customers at the last possible point in the supply chain.

But the other loss that I understand very personally is the loss of the neighborhood butcher. My grandfather and for a while my father were both butchers. In their day, it was a respected job that paid a living wage. My grandfather supported his family just off a butcher's salary and had a comfortable retirement. I doubt seriously that is the case today. But the butcher played an important role in the community. Everyone knew their local butcher. And long before Emeril or the Food Network, it was the local butcher that men turned to for grilling advice. 

So its sad to me on a couple of levels that the neighborhood butcher seems to be fading out of American life. A job that used to be reasonably compensated and respected role in the community has become yet another faceless job done in a factory somewhere for the lowest possible wage. And as a result, I can't have my rack of ribs for Memorial Day weekend because there is no butcher to get them from. But at least there's still brisket, which by the way, is harder to find than it should be too.

There has been so much analysis on iPhone OS 4.0 that I will not repeat it here. But if you want some really good insight, I would suggest checking out John Gruber's article on the subject at Daring Fireball. What I am interested in is what the iPhone OS announcement means for the Mac. You remember the Mac, don't you?

Its easy to forget that not so long ago, the Mac was Apple's flagship product. But with the monstrous rise of the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad, mobile devices have replaced the Mac as the engine that drives the company both financially, and one could argue, technologically. Mac OS and app development have been repeatedly delayed in the past few years as Apple diverted resources to the iPhone.

All this raises interesting questions about what we can expect from WWDC in June. It is always a tentpole event in Apple's year and is consistently used to make news. With the iPhone OS 4 cat now out the bag - presumably so that the iPad can be in fighting shape for Christmas - I think we can expect that something else will be Apple's big unveil. iPhone OS will still be a major push at WWDC and get its fair share of stage time, but it won't be the big news. Apple's big news could be the rumored new iPhone hardware, but that is really hardware news, not developer news, and Apple usually uses WWDC to unveil something meaningful to developers. Gruber in his Daring Fireball posts says that his sources claim that Apple was planning to take the wraps off the Mac OS X 10.7 developer preview but that these plans have been put on hold as resources have been diverted to iPhone OS. It wouldn't surprise me if that were the case, but it would be uncharacteristic of Apple to go into WWDC with no news, so I am going to argue that they will take the wraps off OS X 10.7 after all.

This raises the question - what will OS X 10.7 look like? It seems that Apple has some unfinished business on the Mac. Apple's last "major" upgrade took the bold approach of introducing no new end user features and instead focused on overhauling the underpinnings of Mac OS to better make development of multi-processor apps easier and for the OS to more seamlessly route tasks between various CPUs and GPUs via its Grand Central technology. I believe that Grand Central was fundamental to all the things we are seeing with iPhone and iPad now and that it was just as much about the mobile devices as the Mac. But having released an OS with no features, the Mac is overdue for some newness. The question is where does Apple have to go from here on the Mac?

I think we have already seen the future and its the iPad. With multitouch becoming de rigueur on mobile devices, it seems odd that we are still confined to the mouse and keyboard on the Mac and I think consumers are going to demand these natural interfaces on the desktop too. I think we will soon be seeing multitouch iMac and Macbooks. It just makes sense. I would guess that Apple has been waiting for smaller devices like the iPhone to drive down the cost of multitouch so that it could be affordable on larger displays but that we are close to a serious multitouch upgrade. With that will come an overhaul of the Mac interface for multitouch. I don't think that Apple will go all the way to closing off the Mac the way they have the iPhone/iPad, but I do think we will see a Mac future that is heavily informed by what we see in those devices today. And from a development standpoint, the iPhone/iPad are the Mac's trojan horse. The mobile platforms now have a bigger and more vibrant development community. But those developers are already using Apple's development tools and APIs. Its really a complier difference if Apple wants to enable it, for those iPad apps to migrate back to the Mac. All this will culminate in a long overdue Mac app store which will bring a more financially viable model back to Mac app development.

Now I am really going out on a limb in making this prediction. I could be wrong and Gruber could be fully right. But I think Apple is going to want to blur the lines between the Mac and the mobile devices. Apple has lost the desktop OS wars, but it hardly matters, because Apple is going to change the game and kill the PC. Apple has long used design similarity as a means of transition. During the Intel transition, they chose not to make radical changes in the design of the Mac to prove to people that these Intel machines were every bit the same Macintosh, just with a different CPU. That transition is over and Apple is on to its next one. Now we are transitioning to a new generation of super-mobile always connected devices that make a radical change in the price, portability, and ease of use of computing. Apple in my opinion is going to want to slowly blur the lines between the PC and these mobile devices to better position mobile as a PC alternative. Mobile will unmistakably be the engine that drives the Apple train. If the Mac doesn't get onboard, it runs the risk of being further marginalized, but if it does get onboard, it might find a new life. I think we will emerge in a place where the difference between Apple's mobile devices and the Mac is really more of a distinction in terms of processing power than a difference of experience. But again, I could be wrong. If so, I worry for the Mac.

"A time to be born, a time to die" - Ecclesiastes 3:2; The Bird's Turn, Turn, Turn

Over the last 24 hours, I've had a lot of people ask me what I thought of the iPad announcement from Apple yesterday, so I thought I'd write a post about it. The iPad is an incredibly amazing device and I will be buying one right away. But I think something bigger happened yesterday - the death of the PC.

It was bound to happen. When you think about it, PCs suck. Even the Mac sucks. Files and folders suck. The desktop sucks. They were great when people couldn't understand this new fangly computer things and you only had a few k of data on a floppy. But with the average person now storing GBs of data, that old model just doesn't work anymore. And then the PC is afflicted with all kinds of other problems - incompatibilities, crashing, etc, etc. Hardware doesn't work with software. Its a mess. A huge part of the IT industry is dedicated to servicing PCs because they just don't work very well.

The iPod and the iPhone have really changed the way we think about computing devices. Hardware and software are tightly integrated with none of the driver and other hardware compatibility problems of the PC. There's no messy desktop with files all over the place because files are shown in the context of the applications that use them. Apps are more simple without all those ridiculous tools bars. And they were made for the 21st century because internet services and cloud based storage are seamlessly built in. In short, the iPhone was what computing aught to be. But meanwhile, the busted ol' PC just kept chugging along. Mostly a replacement industry now, but for all their glitzy UIs, the smartphones just weren't powerful enough or frankly big enough to replace the PC. Apple changed that yesterday. When Steve Jobs showed iWork running on the tablet, he might as well have put a stake through the heart of the PC as we know it. The iPad can do 80% of what most people need to do on a computing device, and it can do it faster, easier, and with a way better interface.

In 5 years, most companies won't even buy employees PCs anymore. They'll just have tablets. Printed paper all over your desk? That's dead too. We'll have all our work and our lives accessible on tablets and stored in the cloud. These devices will be cheaper than PCs and have much much lower TCO.

The bloated desktop OS and the OS wars. Those are dead too. Companies won't compete on OS anymore and you'll never see a shrinkwrapped OS again. From now on, OSes will be lean enablers that stay out of the user's way not get in their face with all kinds of crufty self-aggrandizing features.

I also want to say a word about the A4 chip that powers the iPad. This cannot be understated. Intel has been doing some amazing things the last few years, largely at Apple's prodding, but the fact that the A4 is NOT an x86 processor sends a big message. I have been saying for a few years that we were headed for a collision of the ARM and x86 worlds and those worlds smashed right into one another yesterday. One of the most telling things that Steve said yesterday is that he can get 10 hours of battery life on iPad watching video. The only way that can happen is hardware accelerated video with dedicated on die support and even the consolidated 2-chip architecture of the new Atoms doesn't get you there. Hate your battery life on iPhone? Apple does too and that's why they are making their own chips. Nothing off the shelf delivered the integration, the power, or the battery life they needed. Apple will continue to stay one or more steps ahead of the
competition because their silicon will stay ahead and they no longer need to worry about the competition drafting off their innovations two weeks later. That Intel marriage sure didn't last long. For 80% of people, it will be ARM from here on out. Intel will punch back, but to do it, they are going to need to stop protecting the PC and let it die. Not sure if they are ready to do that. BTW, don't buy an iPhone over the next few months because Apple will surely put some version of the A4 in the iPhone soon and the performance and the battery life will be a lot better.

It is interesting to me that Apple, the company that really invented the personal computer just killed it. But with 10% market share for the Mac, Apple was never going to unseat Microsoft without changing the game. But make no mistake, the game just changed, big time, and if I were Redmond, I would be quaking in my boots.

So in summary - the PC is dead, the desktop is dead, files and folders are dead, the mouse is dead, printed documents are dead, OS wars are dead, and x86 may be dead. Long live the iPad! Welcome to the future....

Okay, I was going to let "The End Of Time" go with a Facebook post. But I just can't. Too many thoughts.

I agree with a lot of what io9 said in their review, so I won't repeat it.

http://io9.com/5438793/this-is-how-well-remember-tennant-and-davies

What I want to stress before I get critical is that I really think we owe a debt to Russell T Davies for resurrecting the series. There are a lot things that he introduced that made it a better TV show and enriched the franchise. But he also had some of the strongest episodes of Who ever with two of the best Doctors, one of whom many people will think of as the best. When Davies was at his best, it was always with character stories. He was totally crap at sci fi writing but terrific at human drama and we got to see a lot of ways in which he pushed the Doctor to new places. He made the Doctor much more of a real character with real feelings and less of a cartoon and we should all thank him for that.

However, what always bugged me is how over the top he was with the finales. It bugs a lot of people. And I suppose saying that is to let off the hook a lot of people (I'm looking at you John Nathan Turner) who did a lot worse.

Nevertheless...

I have televisual blue balls from the "Time War". We've been talking about this war for what? Six years? And what we get is a few minutes of speechifying?

Why did the war start? Why did it get so out of control that the Time Lords couldn't handle it? Why got so bad that the Doctor decided to kill everyone? And did he kill everyone or just lock them in a time lock from which they will conveniently escape at some point? And BTW, why should we care about anything that happens in the Doctor's universe when there are no consequences and everything can be do easily reversed?

The Sakro Degradations? (It gets more degraded than the Daleks?) The Horde of Travesties? The Could-Have-Been-King with his Meanwhiles and Neverweres? Come on!! How can you have villain with a cool name like The Could-Have-Been-King with hencemen called Meanwhiles and Neverweres and not go deeper into that?

Exactly why did I have to watch the Master run around for 45 minutes eating chicken when I could have been watching Could-Have-Been-Kings? Spend episode 1 on what really happened in the Time War.

And how? How? How? How? Can you throw Rassilon out there like that? Rassilon is the most important Time Lord ever! And you waste him in 15 minutes at the end of a special? Come on! He could have been a GREAT big bad. But since he's apparently Timothy Dalton, I am guess we will not be seeing him again. What a total freaking waste!

Come on Moffat! Make this right for us!

It struck me the other day that the two hottest items in the consumer electronics business, the iPhone (#1 phone) and the Kindle are not available at most/any retailers. They are offered almost entirely through direct stores (I included AT&T stores in this) and in the Kindle's case, only online. Think about that. When the top CE items are no longer to be had in Best Buy, Target, or Walmart - ANY of the top 3 CE retailers in the country - what does that say about the future of CE retailing?

There are several reasons for this, in my opinion, for this - The CE business has really moved from one of commodities to platforms. When I got into CE, the majors were selling off manufacturing assets to become "marketing companies". They wanted to own the brand and to a certain extent R&D but beyond that, they really didn't want to get their hands dirty and preferred to free up capital to diversify into all kinds of businesses like entertainment. We all know what happened. They got their clocks cleaned. The Chinese took their manufacturing knowledge and went private label directly with retailers and through a myriad of importer brands with razor thin margin like Memorex. On the other side, you had the Koreans who went vertical and invested big into core component R&D and manufacturing. Samsung in particular was able to leverage its dominance in flash memory and LCD parts into significant market share on the consumer side. The CE business heated up, prices crashed through the floor, and we all got a lot of new technology cheap. $20 DVD players. $10 CD players. $300 LCD TVs. In this competitive melee, it became more about price than quality and the competitive barriers to entry were very low. You didn't even need capital. If you had a good sales force, you could be a CE company.

But then Apple came along and transformed the industry with the iPod which made its mark not on price but on innovation, ease of use, and most significantly, vertical integration of software and internet services directly into the device. It turned the whole Wintel style horizontal model - where hardware and software guys stuck to their respective knitting and didn't cross the streams - on its head. Lots of competitors came along, a few of them even decent, and most of them cheaper, but no one has bumped the iPod off yet. And when Apple introduced the iPhone and subsequent to that the iPod Touch, it solidified their lead even more. In short, it no longer matters what the speed-and-feeds are or how sharp the price is in the Sunday circular. All that matter is that you are "the" platform, what apps you run and what content you have access to. And in this market, there can only be a few winners in each category. I have been struck recently when I go to Target or Best But how much space has been taken away from devices and given instead to accessories. Its a reflection that in many CE categories, someone has won, competition from other devices is irrelevant, and a whole cottage industry has emerged around the winner.

But as I said before, the "winners" are increasingly not available at chain retail. In large part, I think Dell was right when he said "Be Direct". (It is however with delicious irony that the biggest beneficiary of that has been Apple, a company he once suggested should liquidate itself and return the proceeds to its shareholders). The destiny of the CE business has always been closely linked to innovations in the supply chain and the quest for shorter and shorter supply chains has been unending. So just as has been the case in the PC business for many years, it was inevitable that CE companies would eventually cut out the middle man and go straight to the customer. CE devices are expensive and the more "hands touching the product" that can be cut out, the more affordable it can be to the consumer. Eventually, the pricing is going to reflect this as the value chains get tighter and it is going to get harder and harder for chain retailers, who add another step and all kinds of expensive terms, to compete.

But there is another reason that is linked to this evolution to platforms that I spoke of previously. Platforms don't sell well in chain retail. They don't have the staff to explain it. Hell, most mass retailers don't even have powered fixtures to demo electronic devices (apart from the TV wall) and even if they do, half the time the display units are busted or turned off. Best Buy does the best job of this but I dare you to get knowledgeable help in even a Best Buy store in a timely fashion. But look at the Apple Store. They have built the perfect environment for selling platforms. Knowledgeable staff - geniuses in fact - who are readily available to help you (and sell you with their side holstered credit card equipped iPods). Lots of available demos that are always working. Even a theater to train you in. You ain't getting that at the local Walmart. Apple is taking all that extra margin that it would be giving to a retailer and investing it into in-store experience that no one else can match. Its no wonder that Apple Stores have steadily grown their share of the Apple device market since they opened.

And of course Amazon takes all this to the next level because their hot device isn't offered in brick-and-mortar retail anywhere and likely will not be. And its not just these two devices. The hot Beats headphones from Monster have pretty limited retail distribution and a heavier focus online and are doing very well also.

This trend towards the direct retailing of CE devices should be scary for chain retailers like Walmart that have rated CE as a "must win" category. But what should scare them even more is that these devices are stores in and of themselves. To buy a iPhone or Kindle is to purchase the opportunity to purchase more stuff. Digital stuff. Digital stuff that brick-and-mortar retailers are really bad at selling. What happens to the the big boxes when you no longer go there for books, movies, music, or even CE devices? (I know the answer - food.) More important than the loss of the high revenue CE sale is the loss of all the other subsequent sales and the loss of the customer. This is the single most disruptive force out there for retail right now. Some retailers will try to respond with their own half hearted hardware efforts - Barnes & Noble's Nook, Best Buy's acquisition of Napster, Walmart's failed launch and shuttering of music and movies online - but they will also find how hard it is to be "the" platform.

In this end, I think this is good for innovation. The lower the barriers to retailing, the more innovation at better prices we will see. And chain retail has been really bad at understanding and supporting innovation. Name one major game changing CE innovation of the last few years that's started its life at a mass retailer. There ain't many. Chain retailers like to follow. But that will become an increasingly precarious position over the next few years. "Lead, follow, or get out of the way" is the old axiom. But I'm not sure "follow" will be an option in the future. When you think about it, you don't NEED to go to the store. You have to go to the store because that's where the stuff is. But if you didn't have to, you'd just as soon order from home and save yourself the trip. Its happened already in music - Apple is the #1 music retailer in the country. Its about to happen in video content. And I predict that we will see more of this in CE in the future, especially for retailers who are poorly equipped to offer the new class of CE devices that consumers expect.

I'm really liking the new Kindle I got for Christmas. Right now I am reading Walt Disney's biography, a huge book that I have never finished frankly because the only time I have to read is on the plane and it's hard to carry a huge book like that. The Kindle solves the form factor problem of books. It also has great battery life. It never shuts off because it only uses power when the screen changes. I have been using it on one charge pretty heavily for one week and the battery is still half full.

But there are some drawbacks and Amazon really needs to address them or leave itself vunerable to competitors like Apple and Nook (if they can get their shit together) - Hardware UI - blows. The keyboard is unusable, the nav stick is really touchy and does all kinds of things you don't want, and the placement of the fwd/back buttons is unituitive. This doesn't mean the Kindle sucks, but the hardware UI could have been much better thought out and will really feel antique compared to Apple's touch technology.

Selection - Lots of magazines missing. Not yet the replacement it should be for the airport newsstand. Lots of books missing too. Amazon is said to want 70% of the take on Kindle and at lower retails than print. Their greed is limiting the selection on the device and holding it back from being a print replacement.

Discovery - Takes a long time to find stuff and is not as good at suggestion as Amazon's website. I go there looking for something to buy and I have a hard time finding something.

That said I think Apple will have it's share of challenges with their tablet namely battery life. Apple will use a capacitive color screen and will never get the battery life of Kindle. I think there is a need for dedicated book hardware because you really need a high contrast/long battery experience and that is just a different technical solution than color LED/LCD screens that Apple likes right now...unless Apple starts using the Pixel Qi display. But Apple has a great store technology and if it holds to it's 30% take on content it can be more generous to content creators and get a wide selection quickly. One last thing, I think it's funny/ironic that the magazines not on Kindle are the tech rags like Wired and Fast Company because a) they sure trumpet the device in their print, but they aren't on it? And b) these are the same guys who have been so shrill about "old media" protecting it's business models and not moving quickly enough on new platforms. Shoe's on the other foot now.