Facebook Indie Games

The same goes for any business that relies completely on one particular platform or channel, governed by a single company.

How can you be really independent?

If any one of the platforms you build your business on could disappear and your business would still function then you are independent. If you have 60% of your business on iOS, 30% on Android and 10% on Windows Phone then even if iOS shuns you you have a business left -- albeit one that's 60% smaller.

If you really want to be independent build relationships with customers through as many channels as possible. The best option of all is to have a direct relationship that's not mediated by any single big company. That is you want to be able to communicate through email or through a web site that you host yourself.

Failing that communicate through multiple channels: an iPhone app, a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page. The more channels of communication with customers you have the less dependent you are on major companies that would as soon stab you in the back as look at you.

That's right. 98% of people who view the above game in iTunes don't bother to install the game. Why not? What would you do to decrease that percentage and get more people to install?

The full article suggests that the icon is too passive (it is -- the most successful iPhone game icons include faces. Find an excuse -- any excuse -- to include a big smiley face in your game icon.). The description is also passive: it doesn't give any indication of what the game is like to play.

Here's my tips on how to give game descriptions an overhaul.

Apple’s radical notion is that touchscreen personal computers should make severely different tradeoffs than traditional computers — and that you can’t design one system that does it all. Windows 8 is trying to have it all, and I don’t think that can be done. You can’t make something conceptually lightweight if it’s carrying 25 years of Windows baggage.

Windows is nearly 30 years old. Its long history and need for backward compatibility (from both an application and usability perspective) is holding it back.

Consider what Microsoft did last time its OS business was under threat from Apple. They kept MS DOS as the conservative option, continued to release new versions, and launched a new and exciting operating environment -- Windows -- that ran on top of it and yet completely transformed it. This is what Microsoft needs to do again. Maintain Windows as a safe, dull, and practical mass market operating system -- and pour the innovation into a completely new operating environment that does what Windows used to do well: copy the most important parts of rival systems but do it cheaper and on a much bigger scale.

Read Gruber's full article. Remember to wash your hands afterwards.