From: dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: I am NOT making this up, OK?  (was Re: Closed ... <ho hum>)
Date: 22 Dec 92 05:50:03 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.ai.mit.edu

In article <1992Dec21.194623.23026@news2.cis.umn.edu> davidli@simvax.labmed.umn.edu writes:
>In article <1h00msINNaou@life.ai.mit.edu>, dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>>And, as you answered for yourself, it's because we were too stupid to
>>make sure the right people would be in the meeting.  Our fault.
>>Right?
>
>Well, in one sense, that is as good an answer as any.  

I couldn't disagree more.  I suppose if we'd walked on water at the
meeting you'd say we'd obviously blown it because "Atari wanted to be
sure we could swim!"

Sorry, but your defense of Atari in this matter is, as far as I can
tell, purely contentious.  They screwed up, big time.  Wheter or not
we spent too much on the trip, blah, blah, blah is irrelevant.

>The $3,000 you estimated it cost you is not small money for a software
>development firm.  Unless you were VERY clear on who you were going to
>speak with and what you could expect to happen as a result of the
>meeting, there was little justification for spending that much to meet
>Atari's wishes.

You TOTALLY are not getting the picture here.  NO business deal works
like you've described here if you're working with trade secret hardware
and are under nondisclosure.  Atari was going to tell us about their
Falcon plans at the meeting -- that was part of what it was for -- and
not earlier.  That's the way companies do business.  Again, you are
utterly naive if you think that when a big company like Atari says,
"Hey, we like what we've seen of this; come talk to us about bundling
it with our new machine" you start laying down all sorts of conditions
that you'll walk away from the meeting if you don't get.  When you get
an offer like that, you assume the company isn't jerking you around.
(Why should you assume they are?)

It's a matter of leverage.  In a situation like that, you have
everything to gain, and they don't really need you.  So you comply with
their terms to the greatest extent possible; if you bitch and threaten
to walk out, and they say, "OK, you lose," then what have you gained?
Nothing.  You can't be big man on campus when you're dealing with
a company that's got a million times your resources.

If you come into deals with the attitude you've described above, then
you'll regularly blow deals.  And key deals come only very rarely, even
for the lucky.  You have to seize the good ones and not blow them.
Sucking up his pride and dealing sycophantically with IBM eventually
allowed Bill Gates to build a software company big enough to later tell
IBM to go screw themselves.  Whether or not you like Bill personally,
the example shows clearly why your approach doesn't work and his does.

Your demeanor suggests that you believe you know what you're talking
about, but I think you should read more about business, and about the
software business in particular, if you plan to do any serious
negotiating with big computer companies like Atari.  Your notions
about much of the process are very idealistic.

This kind of idealism is quite common in this group, from the whole
"software should be free" thing to the "I just can't program a
segmented architecture, so I'll restrict myself to a shrinking,
unprofitable market instead" threads we've seen here in the past.

I thought that my post about my experience with Atari would help many
people see how unrealistic these ideals are in practice.  It wasn't
intended to be the nail in the coffin for Atari, or anything like
that.  Readers of this group are bombarded with so much hype and
disinformaton -- from Atari HQ, the Cheerleaders, and others -- that it
seemed like it was necessary to inject some unpleasant facts about the
"other side" into the discussion.  Lord knows it's hard to say anything
even slightly negative about Atari or their machines here without
getting jumped on (look at all the abuse you've heaped on me here in
this latest Atari Zeal vs. dmb@ai.mit.edu thread, for example), it's no
wonder the sobering truth about the Atari world is stifled.  You can't
even post prices out of a magazine without getting accused of
fabricating data.  Magazines that print negative material are slammed,
while the Atari party line rag is praised.

Your assessment that $3,000 was too much to spend seems similar to
telling someone, "Yes, you were seriously injued when the drunk driver
ran over the median and hit you head on, but 65 mph was too fast to
have been going."  Who cares?  If Atari hadn't acted inappropriately, I
wouldn't care if it had been 1, 3, 10 thouand dollars; it would have
just been a lost investment, not a fee in a game of "I'd like to buy an
Argument ... Abuse is down the hall."

Had we paid the money for a real meeting with Atari, we wouldn't have
felt that the money was wasted.  But we didn't GET a real meeting with
Atari -- we got about 5 hours of non-stop abuse instead.  Have you ever
had someone tell you to your face, "Why did you work on that for 5
years, it's such a piece of shit, you've wasted my time showing it to
me?"  If you haven't, think about it how you might feel.  Hurt?  Mad as
hell?  Completely astonished?

GW is by far the most successful software project I've ever worked on.
(And I've worked on plenty.)  I remember back when we were doing
prototypes several years ago, we wondered whether it would even be
possible to do what we wanted and still retain the speed required for
professional games.  We were both skeptical about that.

But it worked out, and it worked out even better than we could have
hoped.  It is a revolutionary system, one that makes writing REAL games
orders of magnitude easier.   We knew that it would be, since our
design was ambitious, but we were really only sure it would all work
without major downsizing of the "requirements" towards the end.

Everyone who has used it loves it; you've read the notes from some of
the beta-testers -- we aren't paying them to write that stuff.  Friends
of mine who have been using versions of GW for the last three years say
that they can't imagine writing a game without it now.  (Which is why
they aren't busily writing games for their PC's now.)

It's a good system, and one I'm very proud of.  But despite my
confidence in its quality, the insults they threw at me for it were
very troublesome.  Though you love and believe in your child, it still
hurts to hear someone rip him apart verbally.

There was no excuse for it.  You're wasting your time trying to defend
that kind of behavior.  Even if GW *were* garbage, there'd have been no
excuse.  I don't fault Atari for not liking GW, or endorsing it, or
bundling it with the Falcon.  I *do* fault them for not even bothering
to let us tell them about it, and I *do* fault them for not having the
strength of character to be professionals (in the case of the peons and
Leonard), or enforce professionalism in their ranks (in the case of the
rest of the management).

>By the by, you failed to mention in your first posting that Atari asked YOU to
>come out .. just what was the objective of this 'meeting'?  

Look, there are dozens of things I "failed to mention in my first
posting."  That was intentional.  I focused on the major points and left
it at that.  The 25 page diatribe I *could* write about Atari would be
neither as interesting to readers of this group nor as incontrovertable.

I'm not going to give you every detail of our business plan, and I
don't have to, just like I don't have to email you phone numbers of
companies or post an ad for a clone manufacturer here.

There are reasons to keep many aspects of this whole affair in
confidence.  I have already given you a lot of information on which you
can form an opinion.  I see no need to further divulge information
personal to me to defend my position on the matter; none of the attacks
so far have really been substantive anyway.

>Atari hasn't promoted any third-party software in four years or so.

What the hell is MiNT?  Think of GW as the MultiTOS of games, OK?
I shouldn't have to spell this out.  Where GW would fit into the overall
Falcon picture is obvious, particularly given the fact that they told
us they wanted the Falcon to be a strong games machine.

They were excited about the Falcon; it was "coming out in August,"
they're were going to "turn things around" -- everything was going like
gangbusters there for a while.  It looked like it might work out for
Atari after all.  We thought GW would only help, but we had other plans
for it anyway, so we weren't betting the farm on Atari taking it on;
that was a bolt out of the blue anyway.  (One that ended up nearly
incinerating us, too.  But I digress.)

With perfect hindsight, I wouldn't have done anything different.
Despite the fact that it was an emotionally demanding several days, I
learned a lot from that meeting.  For example, I learned that even when
assaulted by a constant barrage of insults from a group of rude,
technically incompetent hecklers for several hours, I can still keep
from cracking and flying into a berzerker rage.  Since, chances are,
I'll never be treated as badly as that again in a professional meeting,
I've discovered something useful that I can rely on personally.  (I
think that being on Usenet for seven years helped too. :)

So things were gained.  Just not monetarily.

I only wish that we could trade places so that you could see the
absurdity of your analysis of the situation.  You don't know how good
GW is, how bad Atari is; and you have the benefit of both hindsight and
a complete lack of emotional investment in this.  I have the feeling
you'd be quick to say that the Allies should have stormed Germany in
1938 in anticipation of the coming war too.  The thing about history is
that it's a lot different when it's NOW than when it's THEN.  What is
reasonable in retrospect is often unrealistic or inappropriate at the
time.

>Given this basic understanding of Atari Corporation, why did you
>decide to go in the first place?

You go to such lengths to defend Atari and blame the whole thing on us,
yet you conclude by asking me why, given the fact that Atari is so
screwed up, we even bothered dealing with them at all!

Why?  Because the idea that GW could be made an integral part of the
Falcon was entertaining and potentially lucrative.  At that point,
despite having heard many bad things about Atari, I still thought
giving them the benefit of the doubt (and not, for example, totally
refusing to talk to them) was prudent.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
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