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Download Squad fails in the most hilarious way possible.

Can Apple really see themselves competing, with a minuscule desktop market share and 25% of the smartphone sector?

Desktop gaming? We’ll see. Obviously, Valve thinks that the Mac market is worth going after and they seem to know a thing or two about moving games. I’m glad that games have been returning to the Mac again for a few years.

Mobile gaming? The iPhone grosses the most games on any phone ever, including some that are by far the best mobile phone games ever. Nokia’s N-”Sidetalking”-Gage is the closest historical competitor and the only credible gaming phone predecessor and even it didn’t ever attract this level of attention, talent or quality. Windows Mobile has had forever to gain a stronghold, and while I have actually enjoyed playing Jawbreaker on a Windows Mobile device on occasion, I don’t see how this argument that you’re trying to make plays out. Regardless of their percentage of the smartphone or overall sector, I don’t see any other phone that competes with the iPhone with regards to gaming.

Steve Jobs has announced Apple’s intent to move into mobile gaming, but can you really see developers siding with the iPhone when Windows Phone 7 is just around the corner? The iPhone has an installed base of about 9 million users in the USA — would you like to guess at the combined figures of Windows and Xbox?

Wow. Do you even know yourself what you’re measuring? Did you switch the comparison halfway through when you realized that even Windows Mobile Classic is now behind iPhone OS in market share; slightly if you consider iPhone only, but by a mile if you also count iPod touch?

I won’t discount the possibility of Xbox and Windows making a difference. But the original Xbox hit the market eight years ago. If Microsoft wanted to parlay this onto the mobile games market, they’ve had five and a half years from the US launch of the Xbox to do so undisturbed, and yet another 18 months before the iPhone third-party apps market opened up. “Microsoft will crush Apple because Microsoft is huge” isn’t a convincing argument in the face of Microsoft having had that opportunity for the past decade, and in the face of Apple actually being huge in the market you’re flailing your arms around about.

Let’s wind down with a bit more level-headed analysis from Mr. Thurrott, in the light of today’s Steam announcement:

[quoting a Steam press release] “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Pfft. See my previous comments about Microsoft trying this as well.

Here, Paul links to some earlier sane analysis. There’s only one problem: Paul correctly took Microsoft to task for attempting this across their own platforms — Windows, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360. Valve’s approach involves two gaming computers; Microsoft’s approach involves several different tier devices. I may agree that a good gaming PC and an Xbox 360 could perform on par, but if you’re going to play on a Windows Phone 7 phone, that game is going to have to be svelte enough to run well on a 1 GHz ARM processor, which means that the game will be restricted to the smarts of a smartphone-level device on Windows and on Xbox 360 if it really is going to be the same exact game. You will also have bought that lowest-common-denominator for multiple platforms. Right.

If this is directly comparable to just switching between two different gaming computers and getting a free download of the game for the other computer, I’d like to see how.

Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems. (I can report as well that this inversion approach works on a less lofty level: Sing a country song in reverse, and you will quickly recover your car, house and wife.)

Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letter, penned by Warren Buffet, is a better read than most anything; brutally honest, interesting enough even if you don’t follow them or finance at all, and actually funny. This year’s entry is no exception. One more piece:

And now a painful confession: Last year your chairman closed the book on a very expensive business fiasco entirely of his own making.

For many years I had struggled to think of side products that we could offer our millions of loyal GEICO customers. Unfortunately, I finally succeeded, coming up with a brilliant insight that we should market our own credit card. I reasoned that GEICO policyholders were likely to be good credit risks and, assuming we offered an attractive card, would likely favor us with their business. We got business all right – but of the wrong type.

Our pre-tax losses from credit-card operations came to about $6.3 million before I finally woke up. We then sold our $98 million portfolio of troubled receivables for 55¢ on the dollar, losing an additional $44 million.

GEICO’s managers, it should be emphasized, were never enthusiastic about my idea. They warned me that instead of getting the cream of GEICO’s customers we would get the – – – – – well, let’s call it the non-cream. I subtly indicated that I was older and wiser.

I was just older.

Valve knows marketing. When was the last time you saw someone enter a new platform with that sort of cultural connection?

I am not particularly proud of Apple right now.

I will switch, immediately, to any mobile phone produced by a company that announces and follows this policy:

• They make a searchable catalogue of all their own patents, including information on where they believe the patented concepts are pertinent.
• They declare the techniques in the patents free for the taking, royalty free, in exchange for a line in the product acknowledgements.
• They declare the previous agreement void as soon as any legal action regarding alleged patent infringement is brought against the company.
• They truly only use the patents to protect themselves against other patent suits.

I was under the impression that Apple was more interested in continuing to think up new interfaces, new approaches and new implementations that might better serve us in the age of multi-touch and ubiquitous high-speed Internet access. That the value in Apple’s products is a cohesive and speedy experience that is easy to navigate, learn and use, and not the various isolated nuts and bolts or building blocks that mindlessly ported in isolation mean nothing but carefully assembled in aggregate mean everything. That the best way for Apple to counter, say, Chinese iPhone ripoffs was to move full speed ahead.

You’re established in a country with really fucked up patent laws, and I can understand that. You get hounded by a company that abuses those laws, and I can sympathize with defending yourself, even with unsavory attitude. But what I can’t forgive is using these same laws as a completely unwarranted bludgeon against someone who isn’t the worst offender while you sit on a 40 billion dollar war chest.

You can’t write your own laws, but being an asshole by abusing them is clearly your choice. I guess I wish you’d have thought differently.