Moeses - Slashdot User

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 15 2010, @07:18AM
from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.

Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."

Why does Code tend toward Convolution? 2

Submitted by

ToPAz3in6

on Saturday May 03 2008, @04:40PM

ToPAz3in6 writes "This is for more than just Programmers to answer. Management might say poor code is due to programmer inexperience or laziness. Programmers often believe it's due to lack of resources or specs that change after-the-fact. Researchers might think convoluted code is unavoidable due to the organic nature of expanding programs and data. So, regardless of your profession in I.T. or I.S., please share your experience or voice your opinion. Why do You think code tends toward Convolution?"

Comment: Re:Screens slipping out of synch (Score 1) 680

by Moeses on Wednesday November 01 2006, @03:09PM (#16677045) Attached to: More Voting Shenanigans in Florida

How about taking that idea one further and modeling the voting machines after well tested technology, both for usability and security...ATMs. They have an interface that works, plus most people are already familiar with it. They have a paper trail in addition to digitally stored state (redundancy should be a no-brainer for this machine). Plus they are secured against tampering.