Survival Mode vs. Creative Mode

Worldwide CAD users: about 44 million. Of those, 40 million are using Minecraft, and about 4 million are using everything else.

It could be because Minecraft is the only CAD system that includes a sword as a standard tool. It could be that at €20 (or free on a Raspberry Pi) Minecraft is very affordable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Dimensioned drawings, FEA, subtractive geometry, meshes, tolerances. A whole lot of really complicated stuff that grown-up CAD systems need to do that Minecraft can't do.

Can't do right now, that is. But who has the user base? People are doing real CAD with Minecraft right now. So it's not a question of if Minecraft will disrupt the CAD market, it's a question of whether Minecraft will disrupt CAD enough to be a dominant player there.

Minecraft has a Python interpreter. Not some ratty ad-hoc scripting language, a full-on programming language. Not easy to get at on all platforms, but it's there, with a 200-page textbook. And a sword.

And Minecraft has collaboration tools built in. And mobile. And monsters, of course, but you can turn the monsters off. Which would you rather have: (i) a collaboration tool 40 million people know how to use that actually works across the internet but lacks some key features, or (ii) a metastatic drafting tool with no collaboration features built in, and a totally separate collaboration tool you'll never use because you'll never get everyone you collaborate with to have it, and even if you did, it would cost a fortune and require a whole IS team to manage?

The war is over. The games won. The sword is mightier than the ribbon.

(Image: Stonehenge from the Minecraft Map of Britain by Ordnance Survey.)

Minimalism

First the bike with one speed. Now running without shoes. There is satisfaction in dispensing with an essential, and finding you don't miss it.

An Apple a day

I used to say life would be easier if I just wrote a check to Hugo Boss every month and a random sport shirt or suit in my size would show up periodically. Now I could say more or less the same thing about Apple. However, unlike products from some other companies (Dell, I'm looking at you and the laptop that needed three motherboards to make it out of warranty) every thing I have ever bought from Apple still runs. OK, I did need to get a $7 battery for my old Fat Boy iPod, but now it runs better than ever. Too bad I have more than 40GB of music. Snif. I'll just have to learn to love my new 120GB iPod classic Aki got me for my birthday. Thanks, Aki.