Two Slashes

In accordance with my parents’ work, they often get recommendations for this service or that to make the redundant tasks a lot easier, or the company as a whole decides that everyone should be using this or that, and guides everyone into transitioning.  Such is any business, really, but for the sake of my post, I digress.

It was with one of these recommendations that I was stopped this morning by my mother asking me if their business PC had IE 5 or greater and “something called JavaScrip” (yes, she missed the ‘T’) installed.  This being a crappy XP rig running (and forever to my shame) AOL 9.1, naturally, it did.  She proceeded to go through a few more steps before the site decided she needed to install several random ActiveX controls to continue - something that never happened.

Running any of these sites through Firefox, or any other alternative browser, you’ll quickly find that they’re not particularly keen on you even visiting them with the “filth that isn’t IE.”  At times, they’ll even make up excuses (like the one displayed here about how JavaScript is a requirement, even though the error message is being displayed using a short user-agent-checking script) just to make sure you turn around, fire up Internet Exploder, and come back riding a piece of Swiss cheese.

You see, at least from my experiences playing with and setting up all of these services for my parents, I’ve found that there’s one thing they all have in common:  They all require Internet Explorer for “compatibility reasons” and each site comes with more effluent to install than AOL itself.  To be honest, it’s quite irritating having to diagnose issues with these, because they have a tendency to go AWOL (not to be confused with the ISP?) all the time.

Let’s take that “compatibility” notion for a moment, mix in the required ActiveX, and analyze it further.  Do you really want to know what a bunch of these controls are for?  Image uploading (and resizing), mere basic text editing…I could go on forever listing this stuff, but essentially it’s all things that could be taken care of in any other manner of more portable, usable manner…and without all of the bloat.  Heck, some of these are even uglier than Windows ME!

It’s pitiful that everyone needs to resort to some client-side browser helper to provide functionality that has long since been capable by more portable methods, such as the use of a Flash or Java applet.  With either of those, there’s plenty of room and cross-platform compatibility to spare, and it wouldn’t tax anything more than it already is.  Flickr, for example, has an excellent upload and management system; while I’m not expecting every little feature of Flickr to show up on in a business tool, it’s at least worth pointing out that there are working, real-life examples with the kind of portability and scalability that these costly services should be striving for.

One would think that, with the growing market share of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and increasing presence of nearly-fully-capable devices like the iPhone and other smartphones, businesses aimed at enterprises and the employees of those corporations would be falling head over heels to make sure that their platforms worked on as many devices and from as many points of accessibility as possible.  But apparently I’m thinking wrong.  Web 2.0?  Maybe for the personal side of life…but as far as I’m concerned, work is still a version behind.

Of course, it’s no suprise that I’m not a bigtime gamer by any means. I mean, I consider it a success if I can scrape off more than a few kills in Unreal Tournament GOTY, and I almost never play console games (yes, I suck worse). But locking the ones who do play more than me into a system so contorted and dismembered it’s like staring at a beheaded corpse in a fun-house mirror isn’t any fun. Why?

Well, let me set the record straight first. I’m not a big fan of cheaters. People who need to hack and mod their way through a deathmatch against a bunch of n00bs are just asking for themselves to be kicked around a bit. I don’t care what game it is, it’s just not right. (At least in a multiplayer setting; if you find yourself on a really hard level in a single-player game, and you use the codes sparingly, you end up restoring just a little bit of the lustre you lost when you got frustrated, right?)

But I still don’t see too many reasons why everyone needs to lock these consoles down so tight. In a world where decent home theater PCs still cost more than several of the current-generation consoles together (alright, one and a half if we’re counting in only PS3’s), it makes sense to give everyone something to muck around with. I mean, Sony abused the DVD capabilities of the PS2 to shove one into every home (hey, if it’s the cheapest DVD player at its launch…)

Some companies have played it smart and quickly embraced homebrew, both to draw customers and increase their revenue, and to encourage growth and enhancement of their product.  Rather than shutter everyone out, Cisco/Linksys extended their popular WRT54G line to cater to homebrewers when they made the generic router cheaper to manufacture and run.  TiVo regularly monitors the homebrew community for their products, and sometimes adds popular third-party hacks as features in the default TiVo system.  It seems that in just about every multimedia sector, you can find someone who offers open-source and homebrew aficionados the chance to show off their talent and extend the boundaries of the devices they hack.  Of course, in many of these cases, warranties are voided, but it is worth noting that many people are willing to sacrifice the possible cost of a new unit for the enhancements they gain as a result.

But as much as this happens in other industries, there’s absolutely no movement in the console market.  Partially, I can understand them.  They don’t want cheaters taking the fun out of games, and they certainly don’t want pirates making their games into a laughingstock of bits and bytes.  But they take it too far.

As a matter of example, take any recent cell phone.  Not really a smartphone, just your average, everyday cell phone.  Now, note that the firmware probably includes Java.  That’s right.  The cell phone manufacturer implemented Java, and left a framework which could be used for homebrew development.  To be reasonable, most of the applications you’ll see for a cell phone were probably coded with the idea that there is payment to be made somewhere down the line.  But the point remains that there is a sizable toolkit implemented on the phone itself, no problems required.

With such a toolkit already provided, it makes for little reason for anyone to resort to “exploiting” the device simply to get something that isn’t supposed to be running, well, running.  Third-party games on platforms like the PSP and iPod (aka free development and a reason for people to buy your product) only work when people find exploits that enable them in the first place.  Not only does it add value, the consumers will be able to add more functionality as they see fit.  All in all, an easy way to increase profits, the functionality of your product, and get privileged to see free market research as to what people are looking for and buying because of.

Why haven’t the console manufacturers realized that they’re giving up FREE DEVELOPMENT simply because they want to be a bunch of tightwads?  Wake up people, and realize that there are people willing to improve your products, whether you like it or not.  Maybe it’s in your best interest to embrace it, rather than hinder it.