Book 5 Service Pack 1?
June 26, 2003 at 2:33 PM ET
Cheeser
HPANA (via ZDNet UK)
JK Rowling's mammoth success has broken all records - but what if she'd adopted the tactics of the computer industry? Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet writes an hilariously absurd comparison
, Harry Potter and the Order of the Fees:
It's always sad to see someone fail to fulfil their potential. Take JK Rowling, whose name and face you may have noticed lately. Rumour has it she's published a book that's done rather well -- something like eight million copies sold in the past four days. Not bad going, you might think.
Yet consider this. She's only worth a quarter of a billion quid -- admittedly, that's a rate of £40,000 per thousand words, which means this column would earn her a nice cottage on the Scottish Borders. But on a global scale, it's chump change.
Clearly, she should re-engineer her business model to extract every last pfennig from the public. Enhance the user experience and guarantee optimal performance going forward. Let's take the book itself. Unless you drop it in the bath, it will do its job perfectly without any attention or maintenance for 50 years. Hopeless. Obviously it should reflect the continuing improvements in book technology brought about by massive investment in research and development, and be upgradeable.
Read the rest of this great column at the link.