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The quote that spoke to me in the article > When you pay $199 for Fire, you’re not buying a gadget you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazon

The quote that spoke to me in the article > When you pay $199 for Fire, you’re not buying a gadget you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia. I know many people don't mind living in walled garden, especially if it's very pretty, but it seems unhealthy to me. Has this stopped being a scary thing to people?

patio11 15y ago
It was never a scary thing for people. The entire walled-garden-curated-experience versus open-standards-loose-confederation-of-providers generates heated discussion only among a small, small sliver of geeks. For most of the population, this is an irrelevant technical detail like what flavor the CMOS on the device is. Users lack the insight and vocabulary to even identify which world a particular device or ecosystem belongs to. (So do geeks, because this is primarily a matter of tribal affiliation rather than technical reality, but that's another matter entirely.) The underlying philosophy of your device matters not a whit to a 14 year old girl. She wants to listen to the same music, read the same books, and watch the same movies that her friends do. These are her core requirements for your device. The rest is boring geekery.
- ryanwaggoner 15y ago
  Off-topic: Patrick, you strike me as a geek's geek. And that's a compliment. So why is it that so many of your HN comments have you shrewdly observing the world as seen from the vantage point of non-geeks? About 80% of the time, I can tell I'm reading one of your comments because of this penchant you have for telling geeks that the things they're arguing about don't matter to normal people or to businesses. How did you develop your understanding of non-geeks? Bonus question: what do you think about QR codes :)
  - ericflo 15y ago
    I'm not patio11, but I have noticed something interesting about QR codes. All of the interactions with my tech/geek/entrepreneur friends seem to intimate that they think QR codes are kind of a weird thing that will never catch on with normal people so they don't use it. However, I recently saw my mom get out her phone and take a picture of one. Then independently I saw two more of my non-technical friends do it. Interestingly enough, I think QR codes are one thing that, at least anecdotally, are in the process of "skipping" geeks and going straight into the mainstream.
    - chrischen 15y ago
      QR codes are fun interesting magical fantastic amazing tech.
      - ericflo 15y ago
        The exception that proves the rule :)
  - patio11 15y ago
    So why is it that so many of your HN comments have you shrewdly observing the world as seen from the vantage point of non-geeks? A combination of bloody-minded contrarianism and having my monthly food budget be acutely dependent on my ability to successfully model the thought processes of 48 year old non-technical women. QR codes The US will learn what Japan has learned: QR codes are an inferior way to get people to visit a page compared to an interaction like "Google for 'Old Spice guy'", where 'Old Spice guy' is a keyword purposely chosen to uniquely refer to a page under your control.
    - tomjen3 15y ago
      But wouldn't that only work if you were certain you could win the seo battle for that particular keyword? On the other hand, you own and control that qr code.
      - rmc 15y ago
        Choose a unique keyword to target. Don't use a popular word with lots of SEO attention as your new brand name.
      - patio11 15y ago
        Yes, but given that the keyword isn't a real word but a purpose-created microphrase, you're going to ROFLstomp over everyone else on SEO for it. e.g. This post will win for [ROFLstomp SEO], probably within a day.
        dean 15y ago
        Just googled ROFLstomp SEO. This post is number one. Only took 6 hours.
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
  - r00fus 15y ago
    Patrick makes money, and runs a business. What normal users (which I assume form the majority of his customers).. what they want is high on his list of important things. Any geek selling (or wishing to sell) to non-geeks (i.e., the vast majority of people) should likewise endeavor to get wise about non-geek opinions tout de suite.
- fauigerzigerk 15y ago
  The question is this: Do non-geeks not care or are they just slower than geeks to find out that they care, or are there underlying economic dynamics that will inevitably lead to a point where they must care? I think the answer to that question is so varied in different situations that any regular-people-don't-care observation has very little predictive power. You could easily be wrong either way. Also, caring about something is sometimes very indrect. Sometimes you care about the price of something not knowing that it means to care about some obscure piece of proprietary technology.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    My personal concern with the walled garden is that a lot of the content I care about is niche 25 year old+ stuff (like old Amiga computer magazines). Ordinary users will learn to pick up on this as/when/if they start running into situations where they lose access to content because a provider stops providing access to something they care about or goes out of business. I have no idea what portion of regular users will ever even want to access content that is obscure enough at any point in time to not be offered by providers like Amazon, but my guess is it's never going to be all that huge, and as long as devices like the Kindle offers some way of getting user supplied content onto it, then it will likely never matter all that much to ordinary users. This is what it boils down to, I think: A walled garden is fine as long as there's a public park outside where you can do the stuff that's frowned upon in the walled garden. If I have to pick one or the other, on the other hand, I'd pick the public park any day. I'm getting more and more inclined to pick up a Kindle. My biggest issue is that I refuse to buy DRM'd content because of the walled garden issue, and so the content offering has not yet been compelling enough. It will never replace a more open device for me, but they're cheap enough that picking them up for the purpose of media delivery on rental plans of just stuff I don't care if I own would be attractive even if buying DRM'd content is not. After all, I pay a fortune in cable fees to add in all the available movie channels - if Amazon offered me an option with similar selections of content that'd cost me a similar amount every month (whether charged monthly or per download/view), then I'd have no real reason to care if it's a walled garden.
    - pnathan 15y ago
ollerac 15y ago
I think it's only scary if you can see the walled garden. There are a lot of people out there who can barely manage to get pictures off of their digital cameras. I think to some people the Kindle Fire will just make sense. They don't have the kinds of abstractions that most geeks have formed about digital information. They might not understand where the walls of the walled garden are. They just want something that works.
lukifer 15y ago
The majority of video games have been operating under the walled garden model since the days of the NES; while such limitations are annoying, I hardly consider them evil. (As a geek, the frustration is somewhat ameliorated by the knowledge that I can choose to trade time for additional freedom using various gray-hat methods.)

patio11 15y ago

It was never a scary thing for people. The entire walled-garden-curated-experience versus open-standards-loose-confederation-of-providers generates heated discussion only among a small, small sliver of geeks. For most of the population, this is an irrelevant technical detail like what flavor the CMOS on the device is. Users lack the insight and vocabulary to even identify which world a particular device or ecosystem belongs to. (So do geeks, because this is primarily a matter of tribal affiliation rather than technical reality, but that's another matter entirely.) The underlying philosophy of your device matters not a whit to a 14 year old girl. She wants to listen to the same music, read the same books, and watch the same movies that her friends do. These are her core requirements for your device. The rest is boring geekery.

ryanwaggoner 15y ago
Off-topic: Patrick, you strike me as a geek's geek. And that's a compliment. So why is it that so many of your HN comments have you shrewdly observing the world as seen from the vantage point of non-geeks? About 80% of the time, I can tell I'm reading one of your comments because of this penchant you have for telling geeks that the things they're arguing about don't matter to normal people or to businesses. How did you develop your understanding of non-geeks? Bonus question: what do you think about QR codes :)
- ericflo 15y ago
  I'm not patio11, but I have noticed something interesting about QR codes. All of the interactions with my tech/geek/entrepreneur friends seem to intimate that they think QR codes are kind of a weird thing that will never catch on with normal people so they don't use it. However, I recently saw my mom get out her phone and take a picture of one. Then independently I saw two more of my non-technical friends do it. Interestingly enough, I think QR codes are one thing that, at least anecdotally, are in the process of "skipping" geeks and going straight into the mainstream.
  - chrischen 15y ago
    QR codes are fun interesting magical fantastic amazing tech.
    - ericflo 15y ago
      The exception that proves the rule :)
- patio11 15y ago
  So why is it that so many of your HN comments have you shrewdly observing the world as seen from the vantage point of non-geeks? A combination of bloody-minded contrarianism and having my monthly food budget be acutely dependent on my ability to successfully model the thought processes of 48 year old non-technical women. QR codes The US will learn what Japan has learned: QR codes are an inferior way to get people to visit a page compared to an interaction like "Google for 'Old Spice guy'", where 'Old Spice guy' is a keyword purposely chosen to uniquely refer to a page under your control.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    But wouldn't that only work if you were certain you could win the seo battle for that particular keyword? On the other hand, you own and control that qr code.
    - rmc 15y ago
      Choose a unique keyword to target. Don't use a popular word with lots of SEO attention as your new brand name.
    - patio11 15y ago
      Yes, but given that the keyword isn't a real word but a purpose-created microphrase, you're going to ROFLstomp over everyone else on SEO for it. e.g. This post will win for [ROFLstomp SEO], probably within a day.
      - dean 15y ago
        Just googled ROFLstomp SEO. This post is number one. Only took 6 hours.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
- r00fus 15y ago
  Patrick makes money, and runs a business. What normal users (which I assume form the majority of his customers).. what they want is high on his list of important things. Any geek selling (or wishing to sell) to non-geeks (i.e., the vast majority of people) should likewise endeavor to get wise about non-geek opinions tout de suite.
fauigerzigerk 15y ago
The question is this: Do non-geeks not care or are they just slower than geeks to find out that they care, or are there underlying economic dynamics that will inevitably lead to a point where they must care? I think the answer to that question is so varied in different situations that any regular-people-don't-care observation has very little predictive power. You could easily be wrong either way. Also, caring about something is sometimes very indrect. Sometimes you care about the price of something not knowing that it means to care about some obscure piece of proprietary technology.
- vidarh 15y ago
  My personal concern with the walled garden is that a lot of the content I care about is niche 25 year old+ stuff (like old Amiga computer magazines). Ordinary users will learn to pick up on this as/when/if they start running into situations where they lose access to content because a provider stops providing access to something they care about or goes out of business. I have no idea what portion of regular users will ever even want to access content that is obscure enough at any point in time to not be offered by providers like Amazon, but my guess is it's never going to be all that huge, and as long as devices like the Kindle offers some way of getting user supplied content onto it, then it will likely never matter all that much to ordinary users. This is what it boils down to, I think: A walled garden is fine as long as there's a public park outside where you can do the stuff that's frowned upon in the walled garden. If I have to pick one or the other, on the other hand, I'd pick the public park any day. I'm getting more and more inclined to pick up a Kindle. My biggest issue is that I refuse to buy DRM'd content because of the walled garden issue, and so the content offering has not yet been compelling enough. It will never replace a more open device for me, but they're cheap enough that picking them up for the purpose of media delivery on rental plans of just stuff I don't care if I own would be attractive even if buying DRM'd content is not. After all, I pay a fortune in cable fees to add in all the available movie channels - if Amazon offered me an option with similar selections of content that'd cost me a similar amount every month (whether charged monthly or per download/view), then I'd have no real reason to care if it's a walled garden.
  - pnathan 15y ago

ollerac 15y ago

I think it's only scary if you can see the walled garden. There are a lot of people out there who can barely manage to get pictures off of their digital cameras. I think to some people the Kindle Fire will just make sense. They don't have the kinds of abstractions that most geeks have formed about digital information. They might not understand where the walls of the walled garden are. They just want something that works.

lukifer 15y ago

The majority of video games have been operating under the walled garden model since the days of the NES; while such limitations are annoying, I hardly consider them evil. (As a geek, the frustration is somewhat ameliorated by the knowledge that I can choose to trade time for additional freedom using various gray-hat methods.)