Morgan Wick

How Windows 8 Changes Everything, Part I: The Rebirth of Microsoft

by

What you have seen and heard should leave no doubt that Windows 8 shatters perceptions of what a PC now really is. We’ve truly reimagined Windows and kicked off a new era for Microsoft and a new era for our customers…With a glance, you will always know what’s going on in the world and with the people who count in your life…The experience is really magical. You log in just once and you see your device light up with your life. Buy a new computer, it lights up with your life.
-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows 8 launch event, October 25, 2012

I don’t like Windows Phone.

Oh, I liked it in theory – the notion of simplifying and bringing together so many ways of communicating with the same people, of simplifying the very concept of a smart phone, made me put it at the top of my list of desired operating systems should I ever get a smart phone. I haven’t jumped on the smartphone bandwagon yet, though not for lack of wanting to – I may have said in my very first post that I tend to shy away from the stuff everyone else finds popular, but when the likes of Instagram and Angry Birds become household names almost entirely off the back of smartphones it’s clearly become more than a passing fad – but I suspect Mom quite rightly doesn’t trust me with something that leaves me connected to the Internet no matter what she does.

So like I said, I liked the concept of the Windows Phone, until I actually tried it and found the interface clunky, not for me, and missing its greatest opportunity. The most useful source of unification was the unification of social networks, yet they seem to be consigned to the “People” tile, which just flashes images of the people therein without reporting new messages like the others; calling people not in your address book is a major pain, and it seems to assume you have a personal connection to everyone in your address book. Maybe that’s how some people work, but it wasn’t for me. With the iPhone being tiny (and thus hard to be precise with), coming off as very basic, and being so simple as to have a seemingly inconsistent interface, my preferred smartphone OS shifted to Android.

I’ve also never understood the appeal of tablets – they’re basically bigger, heavier smartphones that can’t call anyone and don’t fit in your pocket. This one I understood more after trying out smartphones – while a bigger screen for watching video wouldn’t move my needle much, being able to type on a keyboard where I don’t accidentally hit the wrong key every other letter would. But I was very surprised when Windows 8 was announced – as much as I liked the idea of Windows Phone, that Microsoft would make the most radical change to the Windows interface since at least Windows 95 over 15 years ago to bend the bedrock of the company’s success to match their johnny-come-lately product sitting a distant third in the smartphone wars, a product that only adopted its “live tiles” gimmick because neither Apple nor Google would, seemed damn near unthinkable. I couldn’t even imagine how it could possibly work on an actual computer. As it happened, Windows 8 seems to have gone over so poorly that it’s started to elicit comparisons to the infamous Windows Vista – which it’s actually doing worse than. Now that I’ve put in more time on the Surface than I reasonably should have, are the critics right? Is Windows 8 the New Coke of computing, or does it represent a true revolution?

When the Surface first came out, many people wondered whether Microsoft was really putting its best foot forward, what the point was behind the “lite” version of Windows 8 the Surface shipped with, Windows RT. Ostensibly it was the “tablet” version of Windows 8, but Intel has been making chips that save enough on battery life that the full version can be and has been used to power tablets as well, with no evident disadvantages (but, in my experience, at higher prices than the equivalent RT devices), so many tech commenters saw it as essentially Windows without the ability to run old-style desktop apps.

Let me state upfront that I consider this a red herring. I felt it was inevitable that makers of most old-style desktop programs would quickly rush to fill up the Windows Store with new app versions of their programs if enough people bought Surfaces, meaning almost any desktop application you might miss would have a version fit for Windows RT sooner or later. Admittedly this might not include the programs commenters usually chose as specific examples, iTunes and Adobe Photoshop, in the former case because Apple doesn’t want to support Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the iPad (and Microsoft would rather you use their Music app anyway), in the latter case because Photoshop is too heavy-duty for touchscreen use and might seem to require a desktop, as with most PC games, though I could be proven wrong on this (more on this later). More to the point, I felt that regardless of its other problems, Windows RT came with a killer app that would help make sure people would buy Surfaces: free Microsoft Office. And if that doesn’t sound impressive to you, you’ve never had to pay over $100 for Office.

Admittedly the version of Office that comes with the Surface is licensed only for individuals, meaning companies – the main purchasers of Office – would have to buy a group license anyway, and if they do that they might as well shell out for the Surface Pro. So what sort of person would benefit from free Office on an individual basis, perhaps a group chronically challenged for money and with a tendency for early adoption of technology? College students. I imagined college campuses littered with people carrying around Surfaces to do their work, connect to the Internet, and whatever else they wanted to do.

But I said earlier that almost any desktop program would soon have a version for Windows RT, and there is one big exception to that group: web browsers. Microsoft has effectively blocked browser makers from important resources that would allow them to make their own browsers, so you won’t be able to install Firefox or Chrome on a Windows RT machine (though you can on Windows 8). The EU, which has long hounded Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, allowed this anticompetitive move on the grounds that as a tablet OS, Microsoft is entering a field already contested by Apple and Google, not really protecting its traditional-PC OS hegemony.

For the record, I agree with them; in fact, limiting browser competition for Windows RT might actually backfire on Microsoft and may already be hurting the sales of RT machines (sales of Windows 8 machines in general haven’t been as strong as I would have otherwise predicted), as I would be more willing to buy a Windows RT machine and be limited to IE as my only option if the Metro version weren’t so clunky and bare-bones. For example, I have to swipe down from the top (or up from the bottom) to show the tab bar (which contains unnecessary thumbnails of each tab), when it’s always visible on the iPad browser and most Android tablet browsers; combine this with the inability to open multiple windows and it’s almost like a return to the pre-IE7 days before Microsoft embraced tabbed browsing, when you had to open multiple windows to have multiple pages open at the same time. (And near as I can tell, I can’t even use Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn to switch tabs – I have to pull down the tab bar every single time.)

Further, I’m not sure if it’s possible to search from the address bar at all, let alone change search providers on the fly from, say, Google to Wikipedia, which seems odd when most browser makers seem to be moving more towards address bars patterned after Chrome’s “omnibox”, including Microsoft itself in IE9 (while the iPad browser still has a separate Search box). I can’t access Favorites unless they’ve been pinned to (and thus clutter) the Start screen, meaning among other things I can’t pull up an entire folder of favorites at once as a ready-made tab set; between this and the aforementioned loss of multiple windows (not to mention the unchanging, bulky thumbnail-tabs), it’s clear IE makes it damn near impossible to have hundreds of tabs open like I’m used to with Chrome. The RSS reader seems to have gone out the window as well, and while I understand why they did it limiting Flash to pre-approved sites raises concerns for me about privileging content producers with resources at the expense of independent producers; already impossible on the iPad, it’s damn near impossible to read Homestuck on the Surface either (though thankfully Microsoft seems to have turned an about-face on this). Admittedly most if not all of these issues are irrelevant if I’m using the desktop version, but then, well, what’s the point?

On the other hand, some of these might be emblematic of larger issues with Windows 8 that fully Metro-optimized third-party browsers might not fix. As I worried, they may have made it harder to use with a keyboard and mouse, to the point that if your computer doesn’t have a touchscreen, don’t bother upgrading it to Windows 8, no matter how much it meets the other hardware requirements. But Microsoft embraced a “minimalist” design aesthetic in general for Windows 8, minimizing the constant presence of interface elements both in the OS in general and in most of its own apps, going against not only its own past habits but even iOS and Android precedents, but the end result pretty much just amounts to the interface feeling clunky even for touchscreen users and taking too many steps to do anything; the problem with the tab bar is only a specific case of the necessity to swipe from the top or bottom to reveal the “app bar”, which in some apps is necessary to do damn near anything. (You seriously couldn’t include a tappable “all apps” thing on the Start screen without using the app bar, Microsoft?)

Similarly, I usually end up accessing the Start screen by swiping from the side and pressing the Start charm, which feels like one step too many. The Windows logo on the Surface accesses the Start screen, but its location just above where the cover snaps in only means it’s awkward to reach for and easy to hit by accident when holding it vertically; I would have placed it on the right side (when it’s resting on the kickstand), which just so happens to mean iPad users holding it vertically, assuming they rotate it the way I do (admittedly I’m left-handed), will find it in a familiar place. (On some other machines, the equivalent button is almost completely hidden when docked, thus making me wonder what the point of its placement is.) I’m tempted to do the same with the other “charms” (the Surface re-appropriates the function keys for them, but I never used the Windows button to open the Start menu and the function keys are almost as awkward to reach for as the Windows logo on the Surface itself); the Search charm takes on the functions of searching in every single app, including the searching in IE I’m looking for (though while I can change apps on the fly, I’m still not sure I can change search providers – the Wikipedia app feels almost like a beta so it’s no replacement), making it too useful to be the two-step process it is.

That’s not all; the decision not to have actual folders on the Start screen, only “groups”, is completely mystifying regardless of what it means for Favorites, a backtrack from the hierarchical organization the Start menu has had since Windows 95 and that the iPad exhibits as well, forcing most users to have to scroll long distances to see many of their tiles and forcing less-than-ideal tile organization in many cases. Apparently Microsoft wants you to zoom out and then tap a group if it’s a problem for you, but once again that’s one step too many, I should have the option to start with it zoomed out if that’s the case, and it means there’s only one level of “group” and all tiles have to be within one of them, so if you want to look at or use any of the tiles, all the groups are displaying all their tiles as well. In this and other areas, I think this is something where the folks at Microsoft would have benefitted from actually using the iPad as opposed to apparently hearing about it secondhand.

The big innovation of the Surface is supposed to be its “Touch Cover”, but I actually prefer “typing on glass” on an iPad or Android tablet to the “typing on cloth” feel I get from the Touch Cover; at least on the iPad I’m actually typing on a hard surface that actually sounds and feels like an actual thing. Presumably the Touch Cover was made as it is (and hyped much more than the only marginally more expensive Type Cover) because if you fold the Type Cover back behind the Surface it feels weird having a back side of keyboard keys.

Yet despite all of this, I’ve fallen completely in love with Windows 8. Microsoft did not merely re-appropriate the Windows Phone interface for its regular Windows product. It’s completely overhauled our notion of what a computer is, merging the tablet and laptop, putting the final nail in the coffin of the desktop computer as we know it, and serving notice to Apple that they’re not going to renounce their second-class yoke so easily. When it came out, many tech commenters compared the Surface unfavorably to the iPad, in price and in general experience, which was perhaps inevitable but missing the point of what Microsoft was trying to do. In fact, I don’t consider even the Windows RT version of the Surface to be a tablet in any way at all; to me, a tablet has to be in some way connected to a cell-phone network. The Surface is a laptop that happens to have some tablet-like features, and in that sense it’s an absolute game-changer – or at least, what Windows 8 represents is.

There’s a book I’ve heard of but not read called The Innovator’s Dilemma, which attempts to explain a question I’ve long wondered about: why companies facing the advent of an innovation that threatens to undermine their business model so often attempt to kill it rather than adapt into a provider of the new innovation. The short answer seems to be that the new technology is rarely an actual improvement over the old one for customers used to the old one, at least at first, and so any move to embrace the new technology will inevitably alienate existing customers. This seems like a false dichotomy to me; most of the time, there are opportunities for synergy between the two that makes the product more enticing to the new customers and helps transition the old customers to the new paradigm.

For example, I appreciated that Blockbuster at least tried to compete with Netflix with its “Total Access” service, which was advertised as the same DVD-by-mail service as Netflix, at the same price, but with the additional option of returning old DVDs to a Blockbuster store and getting the new one instantly without having to wait for it in the mail; problem was, it didn’t offer streaming like Netflix was already offering, and I believe you had to pick store or mail ahead of time and stick to it. (In my opinion, Blockbuster probably could have done better in competing with Redbox, but it was already dying by the time that became A Thing.) Netflix itself became the impetus for my learning of The Innovator’s Dilemma in the aftermath of its failed attempt to rebrand its DVD-by-mail service as Quikster, because of a Slate article claiming it was Netflix’s attempt to better transition to a business based on streaming of content, but the fact a major reason the Quikster rebrand went over so poorly was the loss of the ability to manage streaming and DVD deliveries together suggests that’s not the whole story.

It wasn’t obvious the iPad was such a threat to the entire PC paradigm, and thus Microsoft’s hegemony. Microsoft could have continued merrily along its way, with old-style PCs being completely separate from tablets, and it wasn’t obvious that status quo couldn’t hold forever. Yet Microsoft apparently saw the iPad as such a threat that they decided to completely destroy the PC as we knew it, effectively undermining their own monopoly and threatening to alienate their hardware (and software) partners, by aiming their new operating system for a new kind of device that would effectively attempt to merge the tablet and the laptop, by so wholeheartedly embracing the touch-screen ethos that a lot of what makes it harder to use with a keyboard and mouse might be unnecessary, much like the radical separation between Netflix and Quikster; there isn’t really any reason, in and of itself, why the desktop couldn’t have been outfitted with a traditional Start button. It seems Microsoft is sending a message: this is what Windows is going to be like from now on, we’re only including a desktop at all for the sake of people used to it or without touchscreens, and before long calling the operating system “Windows” will seem a misnomer.

Perhaps Microsoft saw the trajectory the computer business was headed down; you may recall that last year I predicted that the home desktop computer would become a thing of the past with laptops becoming more and more popular and powerful and with the potential ramifications of computers hooked up to the TV such as the Google TV and Apple TV. Perhaps Microsoft realized that it was fast becoming a maker of operating systems for laptops and that going forward, it would need to optimize their OS’s for them, that the computer of 2012 shouldn’t be running essentially the same operating system as in 1995 or even 2001. Perhaps, too, Microsoft saw the iPad as threatening many of the purposes people were still using laptops for, that if the iPad couldn’t replace the personal computer now, it was only a matter of time before Apple revamped the Mac interface to be closer to that of the iPad. (Indeed, Microsoft was pushing the notion of a “tablet PC” as early as a decade ago, when Windows XP was fairly new.)

Microsoft gets a bad rap for stealing ideas from other companies (especially Apple) rather than actually innovating themselves, but it would be more accurate to say that it’s made a business out of being Nintendo to other peoples’ Atari, of being the ones to refine other companies’ raw ideas into the forms that allow them to take over the marketplace. Regularly Microsoft can see some other company’s innovation in a bigger picture and fix some of the niggling flaws you didn’t even know existed. Windows 95’s interface was jeered as a ripoff of Mac’s, but it was substantially more user-friendly and included the taskbar that made multitasking substantially easier than it had been in either Windows or Mac. Windows Phone is an even more obvious example of this, and with Windows 8 Microsoft took the same notion of “live tiles” to the iPad while also beefing it up to the capability of a full-size computer.

In effect, Microsoft has made a business out of taking technologies that people saw as a threat to their business model, and not only embracing them, but doing so so wholeheartedly that they often become the ones to introduce them to the general public – embracing the challenge of The Innovator’s Dilemma like few other companies out there. Such may have been the case with the Internet itself when they introduced Internet Explorer and killed Netscape. Such was the case with cloud computing, which I might still be seeing hyperbolic spammy ads (from the Motley Fool, of all places) touting it as the downfall of Microsoft – yet for many people, it was Microsoft itself that introduced them to the notion of cloud computing with its Windows 7 “to the cloud!” ads, and between that, the introduction of Office 365, and how heavily Microsoft has pushed SkyDrive (there’s a reason Windows 8 ships with a SkyDrive tile on the Start screen but no first-party touch-based Explorer app), it’s clear Microsoft is alive and well, if not quite strong as ever. And with Windows 8, such might also be the case not only with the iPad, but the late-90s concept of the “network computer“, a computer with next to no hard drive that loaded all its software from the Internet, which Google finally brought to something approaching reality when it unveiled the Chromebook a few years back.

I don’t believe the touchscreen will ever replace the precision of a mouse pointer entirely, and all you have to do to figure out why is to think about the basic ways to manipulate a cell in Excel. To select a cell, you click on it. To select a range of cells, you click on one cell and drag until the cells you want are covered. To select an entire column or row, you click the column letter or row number. To move a cell, click on the border and drag it; to fill information in the cell into adjoining cells, you click on the little control indicator in the corner of the cell border.

Okay, so how do we translate this to a touch environment? Well, obviously you tap where it says click, and tap and drag where it says click and drag. So you tap on a cell to select it, and move your finger from one cell to the other to select a range. But wait, it’s kind of hard to select a border a few pixels wide with a finger. No problem; just tap and drag on an already selected cell or group of cells. Sure that makes it harder to start a new range from a currently-selected cell, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff. What’s that? You want tap and drag to move the display of the spreadsheet, not select a range of cells? What about the stuff you use the right mouse button for? And what about stuff you hold the control keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift) for? Ay-yi-yi-yi… The iPad’s Excel knockoff “Numbers” does an admirable job of trying to appropriate all these functions, but there are still some odd holes and quirks. Perhaps the stylus can finally come into its own as a replacement for this sort of precision, though it doesn’t provide the same sort of feedback as a mouse pointer – and I doubt it can replace being able to hover over a hyperlink to see where it leads without clicking it (something Microsoft didn’t try very hard to keep in its new browser).

Still, with Windows 8 Microsoft is firmly leaving behind not only those who are too used to a keyboard and mouse to take to a touchscreen, but also those with little use of touch because of their work’s large proportion of typing and inherent need for the precision of the mouse pointer, the sort of hardcore computer user that has long disdained Windows and may still be too attached to their desktop to consider adopting a laptop – a group that could potentially include most Photoshop users. To these people, Microsoft is saying: Tough. We have always strove to make the computer more user-friendly – it was us who ultimately brought the computer to the masses. If we haven’t done enough to make it crystal clear before, we’re now making it explicit that not everyone has the same needs as uber-nerds, and with Windows 8 we’re making a conscious decision to focus wholly on the consumer market and completely leave the uber-nerds behind. If you can’t face the prospect of a fully touch-based Windows in the future, you might as well move on to Linux now if you haven’t already, unless Apple never decides to iPad-ize the Mac.

In this, Windows 8 represents a milestone in the history of computing, one so momentous it could be considered the climax of the computer’s evolution from an expensive tool for highly academic settings to a device so simple anyone can use it. The advent of Windows and Mac OS was a revolution in user-friendliness for the computer, introducing a level of abstraction between the internal level of the computer’s programming and the user-interface level through the mediator of the mouse-controlled graphical user interface. Now, almost 30 years later, Windows 8 marks the turning point in a revolution just as massive, one started by the iPhone and iPad that makes user-friendliness the first consideration over any underlying assumptions of the hardware or even the most basic assumptions a programmer might have about a keyboard. Before, everyone was still using a “computer”, the same device a programmer used to create the software running on it, something an engineer might use to solve important problems. Now, computing technology has reached the point that for most people, it has transcended the notion of using a “computer” entirely.

The problem for Microsoft is, the more I play with the Surface, the more I find that Windows 8 itself kind of feels like a raw idea inviting refinement by some other company. Microsoft took a massive risk with Windows 8, and for it to pay off they had to leverage their existing advantages to create something extraordinary, and I’m not convinced they did. (Hopefully Microsoft won’t make us wait for Windows 9 to work out the kinks, because they might not have that long if Apple and Google are already hard at work on their own refinements – though apparently Microsoft is moving Windows to the same incremental-update schedule as Firefox and Chrome, with an update to Windows 8 potentially coming as soon as August.) But even if Microsoft is, for once, the Atari to someone else’s Nintendo, they’ve introduced or at least accelerated the most revolutionary change to our lives since the popularization of the personal computer and Internet themselves.

The Death of Google Reader: Not the End of the World

by

I have used Google Reader as my source for RSS feeds since adopting Chrome as my main browser four years ago. The reasoning was simple: Chrome, unlike IE and Firefox, didn’t have a built-in RSS reader, and it made sense to use Google’s own service for the purpose.

Today, Google announced that I won’t be able to use Google Reader after July 1. The Internet has reacted as though it were the coming of the Mayan apocalypse. But honestly, I’m not that broken up about it; if anything, I miss the ability to nest folders I had in IE and Firefox, and I’ve complained in the past about Reader’s idiosyncrasies like setting viewing order by feed but viewing of read items globally, when the two are inextricably linked.

Why are people so worked up about Reader? Part of it appears to be that Reader was a social RSS reader, one that allowed users to share feeds and articles, and discover feeds they might enjoy based on what others are following. Google has since moved most of Reader’s social functions to Google+, and theoretically they could have integrated Reader into Google+ pretty easily, potentially gaining a big leg up over at least Facebook in the social media wars – though the lukewarm reaction to the social-function shutdown suggests it wouldn’t have been a sure thing. But Google may not have ever really known what they had with Reader, only that its team knew social and thus were a valuable resource to help them build their more explicit social pursuits. Another reason is Reader’s sheer simplicity and no-frills approach, but it’s hard to get more no-frills than IE’s RSS reader.

On the other hand, Google’s stated reason for shutting down Reader – the declining usage of the service – has introduced me to the notion that RSS is obsolete in the age of Twitter. It’s true that I’ve removed several feeds from Reader when the same feeds became available in Twitter form, if the rest of what was on the relevant tweeters was sufficiently interesting to me. But there’s quite a few where I did not and don’t expect to anytime soon. Twitter lacks nuance: if you follow someone, you’re subjected to every little thing they post on there, even if they’re the dreaded “what I’m having for breakfast” tweeters. I can’t imagine myself following more than 20 or so people on Twitter, and I’m very suspicious of people who claim to follow hundreds or thousands of accounts, or feel the need to follow everyone who follows them as though Twitter were just like Facebook. (More on this later this year.) I’ve actually added RSS feeds that weren’t even linked to by knowing the URL structure of popular blogging providers, because I only wanted to follow certain categories of a blog.

Ironically, another big leg up RSS has over Twitter is something the lack of which some people have cited as one of their favorite parts of Reader: the ability to read articles without clicking a link. Not all web sites do this, which is understandable in an age where hits are king and advertising revenue must be maximized, but I find it incredibly useful to read content from several different web sites, one at a time, without leaving a given page, only clicking through if I felt the need to leave a comment or save a page for later. As it stands, this is impossible on Twitter, and I suspect it’s a big key to the popularity of Tumblr, which could best be described as a “social blogging” platform, or Twitter without the character limit.

RSS might eventually become obsolete, but it’s going to take a number of advances in other areas to replace it entirely. On a note more related than you might think, I guess this means I’m setting July 1 as a target date to get a new computer (you wouldn’t believe the problems this one has developed) so I can move my RSS feeds to a Windows 8 app. More on both of these next week.

Some Quick Thoughts on the Future of Webcomics

by

Last week John Allison of Scary Go Round and more recently Bad Machinery fame wrote a blog post expressing his fear that, as more and more webcartoonists took to social networking sites like Tumblr, it would be harder for them to make money off their work because even if their work went viral, it would get lost in the shuffle of people’s Tumblr feeds and no one would make the connection to them as the creator of that work. As a result, he fears the decline of the sort of “community” that has so characterized webcomics up to this point.

Personally, I think his fears are overblown; for one thing, I find it hard to compare Tumblr cartoonists with other webcartoonists, in part because most blogging platforms that aren’t modified WordPress make poor places to put up webcomics anyway, mostly due to archive management. As such, I suspect most Tumblr cartoonists aren’t very interested in fame and fortune anyway, and are more of the David Morgan-Mar frame of mind, of just wanting to share their creations with the world. In any case, the question is, would, say, Kate Beaton still have attracted a large following if she’d started out on Tumblr instead of LiveJournal? (After all, the former is essentially an evolved version of the latter.) Since most webcomics got their start through word of mouth, I find it hard to believe that the boom in social networking is anything but good for them (though whether it’s good for the quality of content that becomes popular is another matter, if it means the most popular comics essentially become nothing but meme factories).

But Allison’s broader fear is the notion that, for many, “social media ARE the Internet”, making it harder for web sites like his to catch anyone’s notice. I think this too is overblown, but mostly because of a far larger force reshaping the Internet that’s both largely responsible for that notion and that could end up sweeping both visions of the Internet under its feet, one that does pose a tremendous challenge, but ultimately a tremendous opportunity, for webcomics. I’ll have more on that next week.

A very, VERY belated sports graphics roundup.

by

I probably should have done this before the baseball playoffs started. I definitely should have done this before basketball season started, I certainly should have done this before the NHL lockout ended, and I sure as hell should have done this before the Daytona 500. I probably should do this before spring training really gets going.

It was only a few months after going logo-only on its baseball graphic that Fox pulled a surprising and disappointing about-face, debuting a football graphic that hearkens back to the very earliest incarnation of the Fox Box. Fox went from being a pioneer of the logo-only approach to the only NFL partner not to use logos at all, at least on the constant version of the graphic, and from having perhaps the best integration of timeout indicators to the worst.

I guess this is part of Fox’s preparation for the launch of Fox Sports 1 – the same graphic also appeared on FX’s and FSN’s college football coverage, introducing more NFL-college consistency than existed last year, and a similar graphic debuted during Fox’s coverage of the NLCS, complete with pitch count (once a pitcher has thrown about 40 or so, that is, which leaves an odd space below the diamond before that). But if that’s the case, it surprises me that FSN’s basketball and certainly hockey coverage continues to use the old graphic. Hockey in particular seems perfectly suited to this new graphic.

Fox’s move looks especially bad in the wake of what CBS trotted out during the Super Bowl. In the past, I might have thought this graphic was a one-time deal because of the Super Bowl, but not only do I expect it to start taking over CBS’ other sports full-time, I’d actually prefer if this was the basis for the graphic used during the NCAA Tournament, instead of the abomination CBS and Turner trotted out last year (and was still present on truTV during the Coaches v. Cancer Classic).

CBS adopts the same font ESPN and several other places have been using, and should make Fox the only major sports entity not to use the two-line box for player information in some sport. Furthermore, its use of timeout indicators goes from worst in the league to at least on par with the primetime partners.

I trust Turner to improve on last year regardless, judging by their new NBA graphics. It’s a bit bulky (especially in SD widescreen), and I could do without the massive tab showing whether a team is in the bonus, but even that is miles better than what Turner graced us with during the Tournament.

Although maybe Time Warner Cable SportsNet managed to come up with what TNT’s graphics should really look like, with one of the best implementations of not only timeout indicators, but even the bonus indicator, I’ve yet seen.

Now let’s take a quick trip through the league-owned networks, shall we? Sticking with basketball, NBATV seems desperate to suggest their games aren’t just ripped from local broadcast partners with their own graphics slapped on, but the end result ends up playing distracting animations a bit too often, though it is a more professional graphic otherwise. Though I do have to ask what those extensions below the team names are for; unlike NBC with Sunday Night Football, NBATV doesn’t have the excuse that timeout indicators haven’t come along yet.

It’s not quite as professional, though, as the NHL Network, which manages to almost completely hide its ripped-from-the-RSN nature. Unfortunately, I can’t find a video of it…

NFL Network, meanwhile, moved to a more conventional banner, and as always there’s not much I have to say about it.

And of course, we have a new player in the sports network landscape, the Pac-12 Networks, and with it a new graphics package. It’s a serviceable package that you can tell really stresses the Pac-12 logo shape. It’s very good considering the Pac-12 was launching a new network from scratch without a partner.

The basketball version, though, is oddly asymmetric, with the team names always on the left side of the score despite the graphic itself being centered. The result is that the bonus indicator is under the team name for the road team but under the score for the home team. The fact that it’s italicized for the double bonus only only adds to the distraction.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention NBC’s Olympics graphics, as well as the new graphics introduced for the world feed, which I don’t particularly like. I see what they’re trying to do, but the slant on the flags seems too cutesy for something that’s going to be seen all over the world, the font is surprisingly generic, and graphics for showing scores for head-to-head sports just look ugly:

Meanwhile, NBC decided to make only minor changes to its new post-NBCSN graphics package for the Olympics.

Michael Phelps Talks With Bob Costas (July, 1… by ananula
Comcast SportsNet has been updating its own graphics packages to match that of the rest of the NBC Sports family… but the actual score graphics are basically straight template swaps of the old ones, with a slight exception for baseball I’ll get to next time (hint: CSN has adopted pitch count).

Of course, I’d much prefer NBC itself adopt these instead of the bulky numbers they have now, but I’m not feeling how it looks for a box on basketball.

Root Sports has added logos to its Penguins hockey coverage.

Finally, in the middle of last year NESN changed graphics again, to something not entirely unlike ESPN’s baseball graphics. It might be the best graphics package in baseball right now.

Hopefully the next roundup will come in less than half a year’s time!

Also, I could have made an obvious Monty Python reference instead of a forced comic book reference.

by

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized Black Lantern creation.)

After teasing us with the resolution of one death prophecy, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to see Rich actually resolve the other one.

While it’s a bit earlier than when I thought it might happen, I have less of a problem with Durkon’s death coming here than with Belkar’s. As I mentioned in my last post, what really hammers this home is the fact that Durkon and Malack were so chummy earlier, only to see them turned against one another and for Malack to ultimately be responsible for Durkon’s demise – as well as the fact that this sequence represents Durkon’s biggest time in the spotlight in the entire comic. (On the other hand, it loses some impact because we don’t really know what caused Durkon to leave the rest of the group, considering he was still with them when last we saw them… and rereading that strip now could cause you to tear up all over again.)

I kind of wish I’d been able to post on the previous comic, the one with Durkon’s actual death, which I could have done if I’d started writing just a few hours before – not just because that’s the important moment in the sequence, but Durkon’s eventual resignation and ultimate acceptance effectively harkens back not only to Durkon’s initial reaction to the prophecy, but also the death of the previous most important character to remain dead at the moment (not counting Xykon), Miko. Malack isn’t really much of a threat to the gates, and things still aren’t looking up for Belkar, but it’s still, all things considered, a rather fitting way for Durkon to go out.

At least, temporarily. Because the comic I’m actually posting on completes the other half of what I thought might happen to Belkar, with Malack raising Durkon as a vampire, and suggesting a rather disturbing origin for Malack’s former “children”. While Malack clearly has some respect for Durkon that goes above and beyond what he had for almost anyone else, and we’ve already seen an image of a vampified OOTS member, even in black, that keeps some semblance of their former personality, the consensus on the forums seems to be that the Durkon we knew isn’t there anymore, and given his initial reaction to being raised it’s hard to disagree… not to mention the other prophecy surrounding Durkon from one of the prequel books.

It’s hard for me to take this as the fulfillment of that prophecy, though; this would seem to be a short-term threat for the OOTS to have to deal with, and it’s hard for me to see Durkon going very far in his current state. At the very least I would have to imagine we’d end up at the next gate as soon as the next book for this to tie in. Regardless, the OOTS is now finding itself in very dangerous territory… and given the circumstances, Xykon and company would seem to be overdue to show up.

Now THAT’S what I call Lawful Evil.

by

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized planning ahead.)

Well, this is hardly the first time I’ve jumped the gun on a comic – after Rich teased us with the prospect of Belkar’s death, along came Durkon to save the day, at least temporarily (and potentially setting up his own demise). The result has perhaps been Durkon’s biggest spotlight moment in the entire comic; he had enough of a story arc in the first prequel book to get the cover, had a side-plot in the first book, and had a chance to shine in battle in the third, but none of those have been as effective at pulling Durkon out of his status as the OOTS’ “forgotten” member as this sequence.

To be fair, the groundwork for this was laid much earlier in the book, with how chummy Durkon and Malack were earlier, but I may have missed the other important development, and ultimately the only one, from the last comic I posted on: Malack’s status as a vampire. After Durkon saves Belkar, the two of them have a heart-to-heart discussion on how this revelation changes their relationship and Durkon’s feelings of betrayal as a result, in a brief sequence more than a little reminiscent of Enor and Gannji, before ultimately deciding their differences are now irreconcilable and turning their spells on each other.

This allows Durkon to show off his combat skills for an extended period against a real threat in a sense we’ve rarely if ever seen in the comic before, forcing Malack to retreat and use more stealthy tactics. That leads to this strip, where Durkon, low on options, begins taunting Malack verbally in an attempt to sniff out where he is, at which point Malack starts going on about his long-term plan to outlive his former adventuring cohorts, hoping to inherit a unified empire from the three empires they control.

Ultimately, it stands as a marked contrast to Redcloak’s stance on the status of undead. 45 comics ago, Redcloak told Tsukiko that all undead, no matter how powerful or seemingly free-willed, are ultimately tools for the living, claiming that as much as Xykon may appear to control Redcloak, it is really Redcloak who controls Xykon, however subtly. If this were the case Durkon would be more spot-on with his original query than he thinks, but instead when he hears Malack’s plan he sees it as, effectively, the relationship between Redcloak and Xykon, only with the roles of undead and living reversed, and Malack would then stand as a towering counterargument to Redcloak’s conviction. Instead, Malack and Tarquin’s relationship is contrasted with Redcloak and Xykon only for the genuine friendship between them and how open they are with their planning – miscellaneous disputes on tactics (or Tarquin’s own vision for the end of his reign) aside.

But Malack’s final answer is ultimately a somewhat sublime response to Redcloak’s position: “Living or dead, we are all of us marching to our orders – you no less than I, Durkon. It does not matter whence these orders come, be it man or god. Our place is an obedient slave to those who command us. Through service, we are rewarded. That is the true natural order.” Considering Redcloak’s own personal story arc of loyalty to the Dark One, those words must hit especially hard for him were he to hear them. Of course, they take on a different meaning in a comic where the gods are known quantities that interfere directly in the lives of mortals, but even then Malack’s words are an interesting lens to view the whole comic through.

To take some of the candidates for the “nine sides” I haven’t covered already: The OOTS marches to the beat of Roy’s drum, who initially put together an adventuring party to fulfill his father’s Blood Oath, which Eugene put him up to because the powers that be won’t let him into his ultimate reward. Malack cites Nale as a “fool” who “resists” this “natural order”, but he might not even be successful at it, ultimately controlled without his suspicion by Sabine as the IFCC’s representative. There’s quite a bit of evidence that the Order of the Scribble were duped, willingly or unwillingly, into doing the gods’ bidding, and the Sapphire Guard was so hamstrung by their oath that it ultimately hindered the planet’s fate (though Shojo’s attempt to “resist” ended with Miko’s sword through his body, as Rich points out in the commentary for that book). The whole comic could be seen as a great drama staged by the gods through their creation of the rifts (and possibly other interference in the lives of mortals); indeed, Malack’s words might hint at future comic developments, such as the real reason the Order of the Scribble broke up and the nature of the “planet within a planet“. (Considering the comic seems most sympathetic to its Chaotic Good characters, I doubt Rich actually agrees with Malack, but whatever.)

Ultimately, that one penultimate panel may be one of the more critical ones in the comic. I’ve spoken before about OOTS‘ literary merit, and it’s possible that this comic may be critical to a literary appreciation of it, at a time when I’ve doubted Rich’s continuing storytelling ability given the ups and downs of this book. (And how long it’s running; do you realize that previous books were 120, 180, 184, and 188 online pages long… and this one has crossed the 200 mark without the end in sight?) That it would come between two clerics, whose entire job revolves around service to their god, and would serve as such a strong contrast to the position of another cleric, only makes it all the more fitting.

Because my dad told my mom he feels disconnected from me when I don’t post on here, an Eric Burns(-White)-esque comeback.

by

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized rebirth.)

Despite what some forumites have thought, I never believed Belkar’s little encounter with Malack was in any way leading to the former’s death; it seemed like it would be too anticlimactic for me. The sequence itself hasn’t been particularly well-done; I feel like Rich has been a bit rusty since his return from thumb-injury-forced break (the first strip back from it was at least the second time in recent memory OOTS‘ penchant for metahumor worked against it), and while I’m normally willing to put up with Rich’s nonexistent update schedule these comics have been too mediocre for me to put up with just one or two a week. Belkar’s vow in the previous comic seemed overwrought and irrelevant, and Malack’s realization in this one similarly seems to come from out of nowhere (even if it might be a reference to a previous comic I’ve forgotten).

I think most people felt – certainly I did – that whenever it happened, Belkar’s death would be the climax of a thread of character development stretching back throughout the book and ultimately reaching back to his conversation with Lord Shojo. But while Belkar has gone through some character development, it hasn’t been much more than what’s described in that post, and that may have been intentional; after all, having “something to fight for” may have only had the effect of changing the nature of Belkar’s assholery. As such, I think I wouldn’t have had as much of a problem with this sequence if Malack had actually been a threat to Mr. Scruffy, yet it seems like it’s a big part of the point of the sequence, and of Malack’s character, that he doesn’t really have a beef with Mr. Scruffy or Belkar. If anything, this is more a result of Belkar being too quick to jump into a fight he can’t win, especially when neither of them really has a reason to fight the other.

I also continue my exasperation regarding Rich’s penchant for confirming wild forum theories, and the notion that Belkar would become some sort of undead was the ultimate wild forum theory, one that was extant in various forms as far back as the oracle’s “last breath” prophecy. Yet here we are, and I’ll admit it will be interesting to see whether Belkar becomes a full-on servant of Malack’s, or will remain free-willed enough, and retain enough of his previous personality, to continue adventuring with the OOTS in undead form. (Given Malack’s thought process in the previous comic, it may well be both, at least in the short term.)

Of course, if Belkar does continue adventuring with the OOTS, we do still have one more death prophecy to potentially permanently reduce the OOTS’ numbers…

Was… was Marten originally going to ask Tai to join him?

by

(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized exit, stage left.)

By the middle of last week, I was fully expecting to write a post expressing my severe trepidation at a storyline that would clearly serve the purpose of teasing a Marten/Claire relationship, which I’ve already gone on record as opposing. Besides teasing a relationship that would make me uncomfortable on multiple levels, it’s also becoming abundantly clear that Claire is the new intern that’s becoming most fully integrated into the larger QC cast, which I suppose is better than if it were Emily, but which I’d be more comfortable about if it weren’t for Claire’s secret.

I’m a little more okay with it since it looks like Marten and Claire are probably in primarily for some Wacky Roadtrip Hijinks(tm) that would more happen to them than in any way involve the relationship between them; at the most it would probably serve to highlight Claire’s personality and little beyond that. That’s not to say we’re entirely out of the woods yet; besides the potential for a road trip to serve as a “bonding experience”, there’s also the potential for Claire to be mistaken for Marten’s new girlfriend left and right at the wedding itself, and the mere fact this is the next storyline Jeph is putting Marten and Claire through is not a good sign for his thought process regarding their relationship being the same as mine. I’m hopeful that even those two possibilities could be used to further Claire’s storyline down the track I thought and would prefer it go down, especially since this is a gay wedding, but I will certainly be reading this storyline guardedly.

(Hey, cut me some slack, this is my first real webcomic post of the new year. I still haven’t caught up with what’s happened in Homestuck since, what, the very start of Act 6 Act 5? Let’s just say my Comic Rocket/Archive Binge experiment is… not going as well as hoped, though it may actually produce better webcomic reviews than I otherwise would produce.)

2 years of the Sports TV wars, and the coming Year of Fox

by

Year Three of the sports TV wars will be when they start to kick off in earnest with the pending launch of Fox Sports 1, and not only is Fox making a huge push for the launch, they’re not giving up their regional sports network hegemony without a fight. Over the past month and a half, Fox has bought portions of the YES network and SportsTime Ohio, the RSN run by the Cleveland Indians.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about Fox no longer having any presence whatsoever in any market larger than Dallas should Time Warner Cable win the rights to the Dodgers (though TWC SportsNet’s chances are still very much alive at the moment), about the launch of Fox Sports 1 representing the final abandonment of the FSN concept and that Fox would cannibalize FSN’s national programming to fill time on its new national networks. Now Fox has an owned-and-operated presence in the top two media markets, and if they win Dodgers rights they’ll be very hard to kick out of either one.

What might be sustaining FSN’s continued interest in acquiring existing RSNs, including a rumored bid for the MASN network co-owned by the Orioles and Nationals? It may be a clause in Fox’s new baseball contract that only recently came to light: apparently, Fox can fill up its lineup of games on FS1 by cannibalizing them from RSNs it owns – a clause that might be a remnant of the early days of the national FSN experiment when FSN would air a “national” game every Thursday. Owning a piece of YES allows Fox to fill up FS1’s lineup of games with far more Yankees games than, say, Mets games.

This suggests Fox might also be thinking about making a run at NESN and its associated Red Sox rights, and why Dodgers rights will be far more valuable, at least to Fox, than has already been suggested. As much as basketball can move the needle, baseball’s lack of a salary cap and some quirks in its revenue sharing model have made the local sports TV wars especially competitive regarding, and lucrative for, baseball teams, long higher-rated as a whole than basketball games anyway (notwithstanding national interest). If Fox has this added motivation driving them to acquire baseball rights specifically, don’t be surprised to see the values climb into the stratosphere, especially in competitive markets. In particular, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Fox absolutely break the bank on the St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves, and Detroit Tigers in their next contracts, even without obvious competition; even the Florida teams could rake in the dough if Fox fears Comcast or Bright House coming calling.

Most speculation on national networks beyond Fox Sports 1 has settled on Fuel becoming Fox Sports 2, with Fox Soccer remaining as is, which has never made much sense to me given Fuel’s smaller reach and Fox Soccer’s loss of its best, most consistent programming. But Fox may have in mind transitioning Fox Soccer out of the sports market entirely. The LA Times reported earlier this week that Fox is considering relaunching Fox Soccer into a general entertainment network, effectively an “FX2”. That seems a substantially riskier move than turning it into Fox Sports 2; if your company runs multiple entertainment networks, it’s usually critical to make sure they have their own identity so as not to cannibalize one another (for example, TBS being all about comedy while TNT stresses its dramas), especially when the channel is starting with relatively little distribution – Fox Soccer is in about 50 million homes, better than a lot of startups but not enough to launch a big-time network and vulnerable to cable company defections, especially when many cable operators currently put it on sports tiers. To explicitly market it as a “lesser” channel to FX smacks of borderline suicide, and something no general entertainment channel I know of does.

If Fox is going to do this, I would suggest either marketing it as a comedy network (FX is primarily known for dramas though it does have more than a few comedies), marketing it towards women, or create a kids network powered by the old Fox Kids block that entertained so many kids during the 90s (though the rights to many of those cartoons may be owned by other entities). Fox could also market to niche genres, like with NBC Universal’s Cloo and Chiller channels, or pick up the geek crowd disenchanted with the state of SyFy and G4. An outside-the-box possibility could be to convert Fox Soccer into an international version of the Fox News Channel; Fox Soccer already occasionally airs the general “Sky News” from Britain. Ultimately, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fox decided that turning Fox Soccer away from sports risked losing too much existing distribution for too little gain to be viable and the only feasible option would be to convert it, not Fuel, into Fox Sports 2, getting that network off the ground that way. (I continue to maintain that Fuel doesn’t feel like a sports channel in the same way as the others to me; it may be about “extreme” sports beyond its UFC coverage, but, well, those are marginally “sports” at best.)

In any case, if Fox only creates two networks that means the chances are borderline at best that it shuts down Fox College Sports entirely, but recent events have still suggested it should rethink what role FSN takes when acquiring college rights – people in the Bay Area have been scrambling to watch Cal and Stanford basketball games FSN holds the rights to since the area’s Comcast SportsNet networks aren’t showing FSN programming.

I haven’t spoken about conference realignment in a while (partly because the whole thing has just gotten too depressing for me), but Fox is also the reported leader in the clubhouse for the rights to the so-called “Catholic 7”, the non-football-playing members of the Big East who finally figured out that the depleted remnants of the football half of the conference weren’t going to command a contract anywhere near as good as what commissioner Mike Aresco was trying to make them believe, especially with the Big East losing its privileged BCS status. (Once Tulane became a viable Big East member, it became clear that this was essentially Conference USA 2.0, with only UConn being a true “Big East” school – and they, not Louisville, probably should have been the school the ACC called when Maryland left for the Big Ten.) Fox has been reported to be offering something in the neighborhood of $300 million, an astonishing number for a non-football conference and hopefully a wake-up call for all the other actors in conference realignment that football itself is not what powers the money machine, but sports people want to watch.

Fox is a rather odd choice to go after the Catholic 7, but unless its existing Big 12 and Pac-12 contracts have limited at best basketball inventory for FS1 their only other option to truly establish their basketball bona fides is the Big Ten contract in a few years, which admittedly I’d be shocked if they don’t snag. But until purchasing YES Fox had very little RSN presence in the Catholic 7 territory; RSNs in Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio, but Marquette might be the only school in any of those states. YES puts them in St. John’s backyard, and the Catholic 7 might be going after the likes of Butler, Dayton, Xavier, and Saint Louis (and Virginia Commonwealth, which might bring FS South/SportSouth into play as well), so they have that going for them.

But considering how much the Big East and ESPN have meant to each other, and the fact that the Catholic 7, to me, are the true inheritors of the Big East’s legacy regardless of whether they actually win the name (a basketball conference with the likes of Memphis, Temple, Cincinnati, and UConn may be a very good mid-major, but still a mid-major), I cannot believe that ESPN would let them blithely walk away to Fox so easily. I have to imagine ESPN will make a big run for at least a piece of the Catholic 7, probably sublicensing some games to CBS – the first real competition between ESPN and Fox since the World Cup rights came up. (Pre-split, NBC was considered a favorite to snag Big East rights and a major reason Aresco kept hyping how much money the conference would make from the sports TV wars – but at this point, which half they go after depends on whether NBC wants to keep piling up mid-majors in football or establish their basketball bona fides. Considering the Mountain West was literally the only FBS conference at their disposal last season, I would lean towards the latter at this point; the only major football conference they have a shot at for several years at this point is the Big Ten, and that shot is very remote.)

Last year saw Fox establish the foundation for Fox Sports 1 with its baseball and NASCAR contracts, while NBCSN settled into a third-place groove (and potentially started to establish a niche for themselves) by acquiring the Premier League, driving the final nail into Fox Soccer’s coffin. While this year will see the fight for the Catholic 7 and the awarding of the other half of the NASCAR package, and the NBA rights might come up for negotiation as well, for the most part the stage for the sports TV wars will move away from acquiring rights and towards what the contenders, especially Fox, do with them. FS1 is likely coming in August, and that is when the Wars will start in earnest.

Predictions for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2013

by

The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s selections are performed by a panel of 44 leading NFL media members including representatives of all 32 NFL teams, a representative of the Pro Football Writers of America, and 11 at-large writers.

The panel has selected a list of 15 finalists from the modern era, defined as playing all or part of their careers within the last 25 years. A player must have spent 5 years out of the league before they can be considered for induction into the Hall of Fame. Players that last played in the 2007 season will be eligible for induction in 2013.

During Super Bowl Weekend, the panel will meet and narrow down the list of modern-era finalists down to five. Those five will be considered alongside two senior candidates, selected by a nine-member subpanel of the larger panel last August, for a total of seven. From this list, at least four and no more than seven people will be selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

My prediction for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2013 is:

Andre Reed
Jonathan Ogden
Michael Strahan
Aeneas Williams
Larry Allen
Curley Culp
Dave Robinson

Hall of Fame Game: Rams v. Giants