The effervescent John Tynes emailed me a link to a fantastic dot-com era recollection: a dissection of what went wrong with Money, Microsoft's Quicken-killer:
This blog entry is by a guy who was on the development team of Microsoft
Money for a couple years during the dot-com boom. It's a horrifying tale,
including the revelation that because Money fell under the MSN organization,
its success was judged on *web metrics*, such as length of time the user
spent in the application. They were actually told to make users SPEND MORE
TIME balancing their checkbook, because the Money app included MSN-funneled
banner ads.
The blog entry in question is here.
Tynes also talks about Spider-Man 2 in his blog today, and I agree with his comments--it's a wonderful film that actually starts moving the genre toward something like maturity and real emotional stakes. I also though Doc Ock's origin story was ridiculous, but I challenge anyone--how do you make it NOT crazy? If you want a compassionate guy who is turned murderous (which the story cries out for) then he has to be subverted somehow--and I have to say that I appreciated how damn cool the fusion sun looked.
Okay, okay--why do you need 4 mechanical arms to control a fusion reaction? Search me. But I loved the way the arms turned against him, and spoke to him...that scene where he loses control was so much better than all the scenes of the Green Goblin losing his shit in mirrors from the first film. So for me, I was willing to suspend some disbelief.
3:17 PM
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