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Max

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Everything posted by Max

  1. Football Season 2006/2007

    haha, wait till you see how ronaldo played today. officially boros most hated player.
  2. Football Season 2006/2007

    i really think arsenal will lose to spurs on saturday. and if they play like they did against fulham when it comes to chelsea, somone will take a hammering, hope you lot can pull something out of the bag to slow chelsea down.
  3. Football Season 2006/2007

    arsenals defence is non-existant, totally shambolic. it was clear against bolton and fulham. they struggle in every match and only manage to win the odd game. the table position reflects on their preformances. poor poor team. to improve they need better defence and a more solid midfield. and just to make things worse, their subs ench is probably worse than uniteds and we do have a bad bench line up.
  4. Pro Evolution Soccer 6

    Add me to buddy list anyone who wants a game on PS2. HashiMax and also, cant you play cross platform? there are PC rooms and a "cross platforms" on online settings.
  5. Wii in the Colbert Report

    Fiorentina were sponsered by nintendo till about 2002 or so where they played in the CL for the first time. the player is Gabrial omar batistuta, greatest argentinian goal scorer ever. might be able to find it on ebay.
  6. Wii in the Colbert Report

    great news, the Wii seems to getting well hyped up. im reading reviews and reports about it almost everywhere! heres a nice bussiness read. IN PRAISE OF THIRD PLACE Issue of 2006-12-04 Posted 2006-11-27 Fifteen years ago, the video-game industry was ruled by one player, Nintendo. The company had machines in a third of American homes, and it was Japan’s most profitable electronics company. The title of a 1993 book summed up the situation: “Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World.” Then the Sony PlayStation arrived, and everything changed. Today, Sony is the dominant force, and its chief rival is not Nintendo but Microsoft, which makes the Xbox. Two weeks ago, the début of Sony’s PlayStation 3 was greeted by crowds of hysterical consumers anxious to get their hands on the new console, billed as the most powerful gaming machine ever. When Nintendo’s new console, the oddly named Wii, appeared, a few days later, there were excellent reviews and expectations of good sales, but no more talk about world conquest. If Sony and Microsoft are the major-party nominees, Nintendo is more like a cool third-party candidate. You might expect, then, that Nintendo would be struggling to stay afloat. After all, the prevailing wisdom is that companies need to be market leaders, or face disaster. This approach was famously institutionalized by Jack Welch, who, when he took over as C.E.O. of G.E., laid down a rule that he described as a “central idea” of his tenure: the company would quit any business in which it was not No. 1 or No. 2. The lesson that people took away from this was clear—third place is for losers. “First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado,” Alec Baldwin’s character says in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross.” “Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” Nintendo, though, has not just survived out of the spotlight; it has thrived. It has five billion dollars in the bank from years of solid profits, and this past year, though it spent heavily on the launch of the Wii, it made close to a billion dollars in profit and saw its stock price rise by sixty-five per cent. Sony’s game division, by contrast, barely eked out a profit and Microsoft’s reportedly lost money. Who knew bringing up the rear could be so lucrative? Sony and Microsoft are desperate to be the biggest players in a market that, in their vision, will encompass not just video games but “interactive entertainment” generally. That’s why the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are all-in-one machines, which allow users not just to play video games but also to do things like watch high-definition DVDs and stream digital music. Sony and Microsoft’s quest to “control the living room” has locked them in a classic arms race; they have invested billions of dollars in an attempt to surpass each other technologically, building ever-bigger, ever-better, and ever-more-expensive machines. Nintendo has dropped out of this race. The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games. For instance, the Wii features a motion sensor that allows you to, say, hit a tennis ball onscreen by swinging the controller like a tennis racquet. Nintendo’s handheld device, the DS, became astoundingly popular because of simple but brilliant games like Nintendogs, in which users raise virtual puppies. And because Nintendo sells many more of its own games than Sony and Microsoft do, its profit margins are higher, too. Arguably, Nintendo has thrived not despite its fall from the top but because of it. Nintendo’s success is not an anomaly, either. The business landscape of the past couple of decades is replete with companies that have flourished as third wheels, and with companies that have struggled to make money despite being No. 1 in their industries. (Today, would you rather be Honda or G.M.?) And while it’s true that in many industries there is a correlation between market share and profitability, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. A recent survey of the evidence on market share by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten C. Green found that companies that adopt what they call “competitor-oriented objectives” actually end up hurting their own profitability. In other words, the more a company focusses on beating its competitors, rather than on the bottom line, the worse it is likely to do. And a study of the performance of twenty major American companies over four decades found that the ones putting more emphasis on market share than on profit ended up with lower returns on investment; of the six companies that defined their goal exclusively as market share, four eventually went out of business. The point is that business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else. Markets today are so big—the global video-game market is now close to thirty billion dollars—that companies can profit even when they’re not on top, as long as they aren’t desperately trying to get there. The key is to play to your strengths while recognizing your limitations. Nintendo knew that it could not compete with Microsoft and Sony in the quest to build the ultimate home-entertainment device. So it decided, with the Wii, to play a different game entirely. Some pundits are now speculating, ironically, that the simplicity of the Wii may make it a huge hit. Nintendo wouldn’t complain if that happened. But, in the meantime, third prize is looking a lot better than steak knives. COMMENT SECOND ACTS DEPT. OF PRESERVATION MARCH OF PROGRESS THE FINANCIAL PAGE — James Surowiecki
  7. How much would you sell yours for?

    I would rather take his doughter (must be over +18)
  8. Football Season 2006/2007

    utd had the chance to win the game but werent attacking enough. chelsea came out the second half and dominated but had no potent attack. 1-1 is a fair results based on preformace.
  9. Football Season 2006/2007

    you must be rich
  10. Football Season 2006/2007

    ronaldo went up to him just before he took it and gave him a word, and he still went on to miss. everyone thought we would beat befica last year round and what happene?... still think we should have bagged it against copenhagen and fergi screwed up in that match. saha screwed up this match. who will screw up the next match?
  11. Football Season 2006/2007

    i think you should ask to meet the head of the refs association, just like chelsea requested 2 weeks ago.
  12. Football Season 2006/2007

    best preformace by far. who here agrees with me that united great defensive record is due to vidic? i really think he is the greatest defender we have.
  13. Do my Penguin for me

    also, "sahel" in arabic means coast if that helps in anyway.
  14. Football Season 2006/2007

    pure gold from roony, nice predictions on arsenal, hahha, typical gunners, win one, lose the next. still kinda sad that west ham couldnt get a point for their efforts, deserved something today.
  15. Do my Penguin for me

    will help with anything chemistry, biology, physics related.
  16. megadeath - breadline a very good song but gets boring after a while. 7/10
  17. Football Season 2006/2007

    haha, funny to see liverpool get humiliated (sp?). great win for us against blackburn, its one of them games where you dig deep to get a result.
  18. iron maiden - mother russia 8/10
  19. Saddam sentenced to death!

    its great to see the end of him and his people. killing him will bring an end to all those that see a symbol in him and have thoughts of a returning baath party. i think if you had people in you family killed or gone missing for no reasons then im sure you would be out having a party right now as i did today. plus theres is a big differance between him and the likes people who might be responsable for crimes. he carried them out against his own people like the kurds an dthe shia.
  20. The evolution of this forum

    do you know whats so great about these forums? im still here and always will be. from the ziek ---> apple ---> rockead----> uncle buckmen and all. its been good, soon we all mature and let the young ones take over slowly as we pass the tourch to the next generatin
  21. Pro Evolution Soccer 6

    online is propa piss taking!!! takes up to 15 mins to start game!!!
  22. Football Season 2006/2007

    is it me or do ITV love up chelsea and arsenal much more than utd and liverpool? i mean they ignored all the prolems caused on the pitch by drogba/essian and flamed marques/poyal/mutta.
  23. ok, just wonna know if there are any negatives to TP? can somone post all the negatives of the games that have been posted on the net by people who played the game? i say this to bring down my personal expectation to low so that i would still be amaized when the game is released and doesnt live up to the hype (not that it wont)
  24. Al Pacino appreciation thread

    carlitos way.... amazing
  25. One last secret - and its BIG!

    penis enlargement via wii-mote!
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