I read today over on Engadget that InstantAction announced their new technology for streaming games to any web browser and I feel sickened.

For me, this is the third time in my life that I have created a technology, showed it to companies and people,and had them be disinterested in it. It really is disheartening at times.

The first time was in 1990, developing technology for the creation of fruit machines for the European market, reducing the development time from over three months (and that was fast) to less than two weeks, with less testing and Q/A. Nobody was interested. I showed it to a number of companies. Not a single nibble.

The second time was back in 1994/1995 when demonstrating a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, the original was coded in C, which was later re-written in Java, which at that time was utterly brand new and still in Beta, because I wanted the system to be instantly cross-platform. I remember standing in a nightclub in Hollywood around 1995, drunk off my arse, explaining the technology to the lead guitarist of Aerosmith. That technology formed the basis of what later became many of the peer-to-peer technologies today.

In the middle of 2007 I demonstrated a game streaming technology, oddly enough called “GameStream” that I had created, to Activision, that streamed the game, at that time Shrek the Third, to your local machine. It broke the game up in to chunks, analysing the file access pattern of the game to get the pieces used first to you as quickly as possible. The software ran in any web browser that had Java installed, which is about 95% of every web browser out there. In 2008 I stood in the THQ offices and the Take-Two Offices and demonstrated Crysis streamned over my 3G cellphone in real-time. Click the link in the browser, and within 3 minutes, the Crysis game starts up. Instant dismissal of the technology and the concept of streaming games to player’s computers in real-time.

In 2008 I also showed the technology to a major MMORPG publisher (mentioning no names *cough* rhymes with Wizard *cough*) and I got the impression I was speaking an alien language. “Why would we want to stream the game to them when we can just have them buy a retail box?” was the response from the Executive Producer.

I even talked to my company attorney about patenting this technology, but because we felt it was so obvious, and because nobody showed the slightest bit of interest, we let it fall by the wayside, moving on to other projects to work on.

So frustrating.

If any company out there feels like taking a look at this technology, feel free to drop me a line. I’ve still got the technology demo, which works on 95% of all web browsers on all desktops, still on my laptop. Crysis streamed over a cellphone, to your local machine? Fucking brilliant idea!

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What happens when your message isn’t congruent with your actions?

I just got around to installing Windows 7 (an absolutely terrible operating system if you do anything more than email and web browsing) on one of the workstations at the office and I needed to read through a PDF document but didn’t yet have Adobe Reader installed. I know Adobe Reader is a slow piece of bloated, bug-ridden nonsense and thought it might be time to look for alternatives. Googling around I find out about Foxit and have heard good things from a few people so thought I would give it a quick whirl.

And I got slimed.

Installing the software just feels like a nasty, slimy experience as you click through all of the “No, I don’t want a new toolbar. No, I don’t need you to re-write my homepage bookmark. No, I don’t need eBay stuck on my browser either.” By the time I hit the “would you like us to stick bookmarks to trusted websites you already have in your browser?” I was done and it was time to stop the install process.

The wording of each option is very forked tongue. I had flashbacks to the 1990’s with the beginnings of the Internet and my first encounters with “behind your back, let me fuck your machine up” software installations. AOL strangely comes to mind. The phrasing of each option is done in such a way that you either aren’t sure if you need the toolbar for the software to work, whether you’re turning it off, turning it on, or are just asking to be bent over and taken without any kind of lube.

Okay, let’s stop this installation. Yeah, but there’s no “Cancel” button, no “Back” button. Another incongruity. ”We’re so convinced you’ll love our software and all of the bloat that we bundle with it that we don’t need to provide you with the option to cancel.” I quickly decide to bring up Task Manager and just kill the install process before this goes any further.

Here’s someone else who had the same issues with the software installer I did. http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2009/05/why-i-flushed-foxit.html

The marketing message states one thing, the actions of the software, and the company behind the software, are clearly something else.

So what other products does the company behind Foxit produce and sell?

I don’t know.

I don’t care.

I will never find out because through a single experience of dealing with a slimy piece of software that left a bad taste, I won’t ever consider using any of their software in the future.

This is what happens when you have an incongruent message, you switch off your potential customers. You destroy a future relationship.

How much money are you making by bundling distasteful practices in to your free software, to make a quick buck? You louse up potential future sales because the user is no longer interested enough to look at what other products you create.

At least with Adobe Reader I know how to turn off what I don’t want and the registry patches you need to apply are clearly documented on various websites.

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Look, I need you to listen to this very carefully because your future career as a software developer or domain expert relies on you not doing this stuff.

I know it is really difficult to come up with your own content at times, and really, why bother when anything you want to say or write has already been, but the Internet these days has opened up a whole new vista for douchebaggery (does douchbaggery have one g or two g’s? Is douche bag one word or two?) but if you are going to plagiarise another person’s work, I have two really important tips for you:

1. You can actually write your comments and prose as well as you can write your “original” article so that it isn’t quite as obvious that you are actually, in fact, a douchebag.
2. Fix the typographic bug in the original code that you so expertly copypasta in to “your” article to prove what an expert you are in your chosen subject.

Here’s to moronic douchebags everywhere! Allowing entrepreneurs and software developers the world over to quickly and effectively discount you as a possible employment candidate due to your inability to comprehend the code you ripped off from somewhere else.

The original article:

http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc/tutorial-09-cs.aspx

The copypasta douchebag:

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/dhananjaycoder/HtmlHelperMethod02222009235703PM/HtmlHelperMethod.aspx

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