April 24th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: apple, corporate strategy, google, judo economics, microsoft, nintendo
A few years ago I took what must have been one of the most entertaining courses of my graduate career: Business Game Theory. It was run using the Harvard Case method, but with no supporting textbook and no explanatory lectures before a case was assigned- we simply received a problem and were expected to solve it by the next lecture. The problems themselves were simple: we were given a situation and asked a fairly straightforward question. Should Company B enter a particular market, how will a competition play out, can you predict the next step in a competition given certain parameters, things like that. Most of us got the first problems blatantly wrong- the tacit requirement to do our own research didn’t sink in until after the first discussion- yet after that reality check it became one of the most engaging classes ever: The problems were challenging but not beyond rational analysis, and though I spent hours at a time bending my brain around decision making in a risky environment and other situations, I can still name the topics and methodologies for every case.
As a result I was practically giddy when I recognized a real world example of Judo Economics, a situation where a player uses the strength of their opponent against them. Consider a simple case: There exist two markets for a single product and two companies that can produce said product. The first market is large, however serving it comes with a high cost and therefore a low margin. The second market is small, but serving it is cheap and therefore comes with a high margin. The first of the companies must serve both markets, has deep pockets, while the second is considering market entry, but can only serve one of the two. Each company can only set one price against both markets. The question posed is: What will happen?
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April 18th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Libraries
Tags: actionscript, flex, localization
One of my many and varied tools from my localization sandbox, the StringsProxy is a generic object proxy container intended to simplify the management of large sets of application strings with little investment from the developer. It’s effectively an implementation of the Proxy object that includes propertyChange event dispatching so that Data Binding works properly.
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April 7th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: News
Today is Flex Camp Cleveland, an educational seminar targeted at someone starting out in Flex. If you’ve had some experience doing software development and are interested in building RIA’s, the entire Flex Camp series are really useful to attend.
The lineup of speakers is pretty impressive, including Ben Forta and Adam Lehman from Adobe, Kris Schultz and myself from Resource Interactive, Doug Pierce and Curtis Gayheart from WonderLab and Scott Andrews from DimpleDough. I’ll be giving a more detailed event report when it’s over, however for the time being I will post my presentation assets here for download.
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April 5th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Libraries
Tags: actionscript, air, flex, seamlessinstallbadge
One of the nicest features of AIR is the seamless install provided by the installer badge available from Adobe. Unfortunately, it takes a little digging to pull out exactly how it works, and I’m not someone who wants to rewrite things on a regular basis. Additionally, the seamless installer badge is build in Flash, something us hard-boiled Flex developers find hard to swallow.
The goal of this particular package is to provide a simple reusable component that handles all the seamless install features, and gives the developer skinning control over the entire component.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This control requires Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115 or later.
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April 4th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Libraries
The cairngormDesktop controller is the core controller for a Cairngorm/AIR application. It contains application specific commands, but should contain nothing above and beyond window and app control. In essence, it is an effective way of applying cairngorm style events and commands to simple application interface interactions: Opening windows, closing windows, dragging windows and the like.
Given how much AIR work I’m doing these days I needed a very rapid way of handling application and windowing commands without having to rewrite a lot of code. Encapsulating this functionality allowed me to easily include this library externally for anything I needed to do. Future functionality will likely include application manipulation events such as drag/drop, copy/paste, and file access, though whether I can properly generalize and/or encapsulate them remains to be seen.
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