counternotions

Bungie has finally left Microsoft:

Founded in 1991, Bungie was at first a Mac-only game developer. It was snatched up by Microsoft in 2000. Its current release Halo 3 has become the fastest-selling video game ever, grossing over $300 million in its first week.

So why the divorce from Microsoft now?

“Working with Microsoft was great for us, it allowed us to grow as a team and make the ambitious, blockbuster games we all wanted to work on. And they will continue to be a great partner. But Bungie is like a shark. We have to keep moving to survive. We have to continually test ourselves, or we might as well be dolphins. Or manatees,” said Jason Jones, Bungie founder and partner.

This is not a new theme at the world’s largest software company. In 1994 Microsoft bought SOFTIMAGE, one of the most respected 3D/animation software outfits in the world. Only four years later it sold SOFTIMAGE to Avid Technologies for $285 million.

This is how Craig Mundie, then the senior VP of Microsoft’s consumer platform division characterized the sale:

“This deal is a win-win for all involved…Avid gains the benefit of rapid expansion into the 3D market, a video production solution which ideally complements its current offerings, and a stronger alliance with Microsoft. Microsoft gains a strategic ally for continued development on Windows NT and our digital media initiatives.” [Ed. emphasis added]

For Microsoft everything is and has always been about ‘alliance’ and ‘Windows’. The company has a very difficult time absorbing, integrating and maintaining creative teams. In fact, units within Microsoft chartered to have a creative bend are kept as far away from the core Windows blackhole as possible.

Its financially weak but high-visibility game device unit XBox is run practically as a separate company under J Allard. When Microsoft entered the digital music market with its own device, Zune was also placed in the XBox division.

Leaving aside the financial ramifications of the Bungie deal, this is yet another indication of Microsoft’s inability to manage the content side of its creative and entertainment related operations. Its aspirations a decade earlier to become a content/creative player through MSN and various other initiatives also went nowhere.

Now that we know creative sharks can’t survive in Windows-tainted Microsoft waters, will the company give up trying to lure them in?

National Design Week is upon us (Oct 14- 20). In celebration, you too can vote for Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s “People’s Design Awards” online. There are currently 202 nominees and you can nominate your own as well. Voting ends Oct 16.

NewScientist.com reports:

A computer program that emulates the human brain falls for the same optical illusions humans do [Ed. like the White's Illusion example above where the two gray areas actually have the same value].

It suggests the illusions are a by-product of the way babies learn to filter their complex surroundings. Researchers say this means future robots must be susceptible to the same tricks as humans are in order to see as well as us.

Obviously this has certain implications in designing systems that mimic human vision:

Most creators of machine vision try to copy human vision because it is so well suited to a variety of environments. The new findings suggest that if we want to exploit its advantages, we also have to suffer its failings. It will be impossible to create a perfect, superhuman robot that never makes mistakes.

Why do I feel this is somehow reassuring?

At Slate, Witold Rybczynski has a nice slideshow In Praise of the Anti-Icon:

Painter Paul Klee once wrote that while painters could make wheels square, architects had to make them round. Not any more. In the past, public and institutional buildings were expected to convey a sense of solidity and order; today they can just as easily suggest collapse and disharmony. In his forthcoming book, Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber takes aim at architects such as Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, and Daniel Libeskind, who, in a desire to create iconic architecture, frequently make their wheels square.

No article that has this gem from Robert Venturi (with whom I interned in Philadelphia a long time ago) could be uninteresting:

“It is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.”

This is exactly why I never take on a design project if I’m not in charge of the architecture as well. Because, in the end, design doesn’t add value, it creates it. Architecture is what frames the problem space for design.

Sometimes I’m ambivalent about what frames Frank Gehry’s architecture.