Wait, I’m not done with financial euphamisms, this one is regarding Ouya:

Gaming company OUYA is on the auction block after tripping a debt covenant, according to a confidential email sent out earlier this month from CEO Julie Uhrman to company investors and advisors.

Investment bank Mesa Global — which recently managed the sale of music service Songza to Google — has been hired to manage the process. No word yet on asking price.

“Tripped a debt convanent”? What the fuck?

So Ouya raised money, pissed it away and now the company that originally raised $8 million on Kickstarter and was heralded by some as an open source savior of the gaming world is done-zo.

Nice work, guys.

At TechCrunch, Alex Wilhelm on Microsoft’s quarterly 10-Q document:

Microsoft made waves recently by disclosing in its quarterly 10-Q document that its Phone business, which generates billions in yearly revenue, isn’t performing as well as it expected. As Microsoft is carrying billions of dollars of goodwill related to the Nokia purchase on its books, the warning landed like a brick in a puddle of lukewarm slop.

What the hell is goodwill?

Good question. According to Investopedia, goodwill is “[a]n intangible asset that arises as a result of the acquisition of one company by another for a premium value.” Or, put more simply, it’s the value you doodle onto your balance sheet after you buy something and can’t count every dollar you paid for as resulting in material assets.

I guess when you reach the point when you’re working with billions of dollars (be it real or made up) you view as Monopoly money.

There are some real cocksuckers in the financial world.

The “Stupid manager theory of company failure” (and its corollary, the “Smart manager theory of company success”1) remains the most popular, perhaps even the most universally accepted theory of management. Book after book, thoughtful article after article alludes to this theory and whenever a company is perceived to be under-performing, all fingers point to the leadership with demands for blood letting.

This is not a new phenomenon. When catastrophe strikes, as a thoughtful species, we have always asked for leaders to be sacrificed. In Europe during the Iron age leaders were sacrificed when crops failed. In South and Central America leaders were ceremonially tortured for similar reasons.

Of course most crop failures were due to weather phenomena and the anointed leadership had nothing to do with these causes. Nevertheless ancient correlation analysis would have revealed the pattern that good leadership meant good weather and bad leadership meant bad weather.

There was a balance to the downside however. When times were good the leadership enjoyed luxuries and praise. This was the essential deal societies made: we’ll keep you in riches and allow you to be idle as long as times are good but ritualistically slaughter you when times are bad. We’ll declare you “chief magical officer” and place all our faith in you. But, of course, if you fail, we will will be vengeful.

—Horace Dediu, Haunted Empire

Over at Forbes, Ewan Spence on the pricing of the Samsung S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge:

Pricing details around Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge are starting to come out, with an expected street price in the UK of £550 for the SIM-free Galaxy S6 (and £650 for the Galaxy S6 Edge). While these prices are unconfirmed, they are higher than the entry-level competition of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Arguably the price difference could come down to Samsung running with 32 GB of storage compared to the 16 GB Apple has fitted to the iPhones, but I do like the idea of Samsung exploiting a higher price than Apple. If the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge handsets turn out to be more expensive than the Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, then Samsung will have some powerful arguments available to help sell the device.

Spence “likes the idea of Samsung exploiting a higher price than Apple.”

That’s cute.

Wait, Spence has more brilliance in his brain to share:

Now the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge have the advantage Samsung should push hard on the specifications battle. That will be helped by Apple essentially ducking the numbers fight, so Samsung should be able to play hard on the fact that the S6 is a more powerful phone with more features.

And the easiest way to say that a phone is ‘better’ than another phone is to be more expensive.

Is that the easiest way to say ‘better’? Just make it more expensive? Maybe Toyota should try that with their Corolla. Just add $10K to the price tag.

Premium pricing only works if your brand is perceived at premium and this perception is controlled by people who buy your products, not the company making them.

I don’t think this will prove a winning strategy for Samsung, but since they’re clearly in the game to copy everything Apple does, fuck it. Go for it, Samsung.

Microsoft reveals how it will make money giving away software:

Microsoft’s traditional revenue has primarily come from licensing software like Windows and Office to OEMs and businesses. Microsoft grew into the giant it is today thanks to this hugely successful strategy and a dominance of the PC market. With mobile altering the landscape, Microsoft is turning to new strategies for the future of its entire business. Speaking at Microsoft’s Convergence conference today, Chris Caposella, who is in charge of marketing at the software giant, revealed Microsoft’s freemium plans in full.

It involves four parts: acquire, engage, enlist, and monetize. Acquire is Microsoft’s way of getting people to use a product for free, like Office for iPad. Engage is Microsoft’s plan to get them hooked on the product and leverage other parts of its ecosystem to keep someone using the service. Enlist is simply finding fans to keep the circle going, and then monetizing is figuring out who will pay for subscription versions of the service they’re hooked on. It sounds simple, but it’s something Microsoft hasn’t traditionally succeeded at. Google has thrived at offering free services in return for your data or ads, but Microsoft’s approach assumes people are willing to spend money on apps and services they’re addicted to.

Good luck with that strategy.

Bill Gurley predicts ‘dead unicorns’ in startup-land this year

Bill Gurley, the prominent investor behind Uber and Snapchat, has been sounding the tech bubble alarm for months now. He’s preached about the dangerous appetite for risk in the market, the alarmingly high burn rates and the excess of capital sloshing around in Silicon Valley.

What’s that, Alan?

How big is Apple?

This big:

Apple Inc. Closes At $775 Billion Market Cap via Twitter

—Derek Sivers

Headline on Flavorwire:
Moviegoing Hit a 20-Year Low in 2014. Is the Death of the Movie Theater Inevitable?
Will theatres die? No.
Seriously reduce in number? Very possible. I say we start closing the disgusting ones, where you’re afraid you might catch bed bugs.
One a related note: Vinyl record sales in 2014 were the highest they’ve been since 1993

Headline at The Verge: Almost every single Xbox executive we profiled in this video last year has left the company
It’s no secret I dislike everything Microsoft does (save for hardware, ironically). This is partly because I don’t think they understand making consumer electronics, partly because I don’t think they understand selling consumer electronics and partly because I think it’s quite possible (likely?) they’ll abandon it like they’ve done with the Zune, PlayForSure and many other initiatives. Oh,and despite efforts in recent years, I still agree they have no taste.
The XBox is no exception. It’s far from leading a “revolution” in the living room and Kinect has proven to be a flop. Turns out people don’t want to flail their arms and legs around in their living room, they just want to sit the fuck down and relax. To be clear: I feel the same way about the Playstation and Nintendo Wii/Wii U being “living room devices”. They’re not.
Let’s also not forget XBox brings in chump change for Microsoft relative to Windows, Office and Enterprise.

Verge headline: Uber allegedly tracked journalist with internal tool called ‘God View’
A company that tracks all their drivers via GPS has a ‘God View’ they can enable.
Fucking shocking. Next thing you’re going to tell me is Google could read my email if they wanted to, or Facebook sells my data.
The fact that Uber has this feature at their disposal is not surprising, it’s how they’re using it that matters. In light of all the bad decisions they’ve been making lately, this story isn’t helping.

Things aren’t looking good for Samsung:

What is Samsung’s “nightmare scenario,” you ask? That it will become just another low-margin Android vendor. For years, Samsung has literally been the only Android smartphone vendor to consistently turn a profit. Indeed, Samsung and Apple for a long time have accounted for all of the smartphone industry’s profits as smaller players have had to force themselves to fight over scraps.

But two things are happening right now that are sucking the life out of Samsung’s smartphone profit machine: It’s getting squeezed at the high end by Apple, which has finally released a phablet capable of taking on the popular Galaxy Note, and it’s getting mauled at the low end by vendors such as Xiaomi that are cranking out phones with strong specs that sell at rock-bottom prices.
Maybe if Samsung keeps copying Apple things will turn around?

Andreessen is completely right: Startups are overvalued, stuffed like Christmas ducks with cash they don’t really need, and since they’re staffed by inexperienced kids with no oversight, they’re spending that cash. This is a big problem, a big and obvious problem, and Marc Andreessen is right: We should worry.

But what he’s not saying is that all of these worrisome things are happening because he has made them happen. Marc Andreessen is warning us, essentially, about Marc Andreessen. It’s not a good sign when a man, no matter how large it would appear his brain is, tries to distance himself from his current agenda.
—Sam Biddle, Valleywag