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Another corporation decides that saving a few dollars is more important than creating a stable work environment. I am sure CC will defend their actions by saying they need to be competitive, just like Wal-Mart in their similar policy of salary-capping their "associates" (which basically has the same effect as CC's action, the idea being workers will move on voluntarily once they hit the cap).

Why is it, then, that Costco is kicking Wal-Mart's (and Sam's Club's) in growth and profitibility? Costco pays their workers on average almost twice as much as Wal-Mart, and has generally employee-friendly benefits and policies. And they're making a ton of cash, too. Maybe, just maybe, it is actually GOOD for business to create a positive working environment, retain staff, and have good morale.

The Costco Way - Business Week (couple years old but relevant)

Oh please. You have no understanding of how Apple Care works.

1. I have never spoken with anyone located outside of the United States during AppleCare's normal business hours. Ever. I just had to call last week, and got someone speaking English, and during our conversation, it sound like they were located on the West Coast. I think one time I called after normal hours and was routed to Ireleand. But never to India. I don't even think they have a call center in India any longer.

2. AppleCare provides on site support for all customers with desktops. For laptops, you have the option of going to an Apple Authorized service center (which includes an Apple Store, if you have one) or mailing your laptop into Apple. No one is forcing you to wait in line at the Apple Store behind grandma.

3. Since this entire article is about Mac OS X Server, it would be good to note the extended service plans Apple offers under AppleCare for Mac OS X Server, which provides different levels of enterprise type support for Mac OS X Server products. A small or medium size business could subscribe to this service if needed.

Thanks for trolling. Have a nice day.

At the time people thought the Creative Nomad WAS a popular product.

Apple then released the iPod and now there are about 1 iPod for every 10 people.

As of March last year the ENTIRE market of DVRs was only about 9% penetration. Put another way, more people own iPods than DVRs, much less TiVos. There is still room for Apple to carve a niche, even if it is only 10% of the population.

You say TiVo is very easy to use. I've used it; yes it is easy, but compared to iTunes, not easy ENOUGH.
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/mar20 06/pi20060302_999595.htm

Yesterday's article in BusinessWeek would disagree with your version of a correction:
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/mar20 07/pi20070314_728884.htm

Yes, people reacted quickly to overseas markets, but the US stock market was already ripe for a correction. A correction it received on and since the date of the initial spike.

Read my source, and see if you still disagree. GP is broadly overstating his case, and is frankly wrong.

I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but here are some information:

Well, when MicroSoft announced that they're about to enter the console business they also noted that they won't make a profit on the first generation and that they knew it and that this was okay since their goal was to get into the peoples' living rooms. And I think for Sony, it's really important for them to push Blueray with the PS3, if that ship sinks like Betamax it'll really hurt.

A few links:

• Forbes: Xbox lost Microsoft $4 billion (and counting)
• Microsoft's Red-Ink Game (about XBox360)
• Is Sony eating hundreds of dollars on each PS3?

Research shows that Linux is gaining on Microsoft as of the year 2000 yet there doesn't seem to be any MS-Office for Linux.

The trend seems to be continuing in 2005 and I would guess 2006 as well if the numbers finally come in for 2006.

You don't persuade a business to do something by begging them to sell you something. You persuade them by buying that something from someone else who is quite happy to sell you that something.

Unlike Dell, which depends largely on the desktop and corporate markets for sales, HP is cashing in on high-growth areas, including emerging markets, the consumer area, and laptops.

In fiscal 2006, $25 million in hardware sales in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) were directly related to HP's Debian support.[...]HP support is set for the Debian Sarge release, which debuted in June 2005. Wade noted that HP is working toward certifying its hardware against the upcoming Debian Etch release, which is set for a 2007 rollout.

It is widely reported that Microsoft makes its money on Windows and Office. The other products earn little or even lose money

No, it isn't reported, and no, other products do make (lots of) money. It's very easy to look it up too: the breakdown of earnings per division can be found here. You can see that out of 5 divisions, 3 are operating at a gain, and two at a loss. The Entertainment and Devices Division (XBox) and Online Services Business (MSN) are in the red. Windows, Office and SQL Server are in the black

The business division of interest for this particular article is Server And Tools, makers of SQL Server. Here's what Business Week says about this division here: Microsoft's server and tools business, long Microsoft's lone growth engine, had another blowout period, posting its 18th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Its SQL server database software posted particularly sharp gains, up 30% for the period. That helped the division's sales jump 17% to $2.9 billion

You don't argue for why you believe Linus shares your misconceptions, I haven't seen anything from him that indicates that.

On one side is Richard Stallman and his Free Software Foundation. When Stallman says "free" he doesn't mean price, he means freedom. He believes all software should be freely available to be modified by the public. And for him, this is nothing short of a moral fight.

On the other is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. He and others in his open-source camp believe that freely sharing code simply produces the best software, but if other people want to hide their code, that's fine, too.

: Linus Torvalds objects, with an irrational kind of stubbornness, to one of our goals. Namely, preventing tivoisation. He wants people to be able to tivoise the products that you use, and thus take away your freedom.

This should not be surprising. Linus Torvalds never supported the Free Software movement. He sort of accidentally drifted into making a contribution to the Free Software community, but not because he ever supported our goals. And so he has actually said that he is against our aims of defending freedom for all users. What can you do?

Well, he doesn't have to use it if he doesn't want to.

Um. True, I don't have to use it. I don't have to drive a car to work, either, but that doesn't mean that I therefore shouldn't discuss the merits of whether I should drive a car to work. And, yes, I imagine that if I was, say, negotiating a business contract or buyout deal with Google as so many companies hope to, I think that Google might actually find my files reasonably interesting.

If you're running your Win32/DX games on OSX, then it's an OSX machine that happens to be running Windows as a task or translation layer. The computer is not a Windows box.

MS is all about market share. Without that, they're nothing. That's why they perform stranglehold tactics on PC manufacturers, like this. If people can run to the store and buy a piece of software and run it anywhere, then what's the point of Windows?

Most of us already own an XP disc. With no reason to buy another one, the whole Windows revenue stream dries up.

This stinks of self-promotion.

Of course it's self-promotion. Why does the guy stick his picture on the front of the article?

Attention geek bloggers: You are not attractive. Stop posting pictures of your dorky looking selves at the top of your blog.

(Note: in case you're wondering how I got so many pictures to prove my point, I simply looked up the fud tag on Slashdot and started clicking away :)

Maybe IBM has delusions about software because it is the world's second largest software company?

No, no. If it weren't for the legal pressure brought by Netscape (back when it was a commercial entity), raising the spectre of legal action for anticompetitive behavior in developing and distributing a web browser of its own, Microsoft would be much further along in enhancing IE (in non standards-compliant but probably user-friendly ways) than it is today. The legal manouverings at that time encouraged the minds at Microsoft to entangle the browser with the OS as a defensive stragegy, reducing its rate of change to the release schedule of the OS (i.e, glacial), IMHO.
Anyway, can someone point us at an article listing the patents that Microsoft is known to be enforcing/defending/litigating, with special focus on ones not embodied in something they're shipping? That would provide some basis for evaluating the liklihood of the article at top of this thread.
I don't recall reading about MS acting on any patents beyond the ones they claim are used in products they ship. For reading about truly parasitic patent-trolls, see: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_17 /b3981070.htm and comments.

Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple in mid 1997, at a time when Apple's market cap was 2.2 billion. The stock consisted of non voting shares

Business Week is running a story about how the H1-B visa is ACTUALLY being used, and it seems it is used much more often than not to act as a conduit to offshore outsourcing, ie get the Indians or whoever over to the US, train them at a crappy salary(comparatively) and then send them home. While some firms certainly are using the visas to get foreign talent to the US, they are being crowded out by body dumpers. One suggestion proffered by the article is to only let US companies get H1Bs.

I was hoping to create a bit of controversy so that people might actually think beyond the great Jobs, and come to a realization about the intent of his comments, while also poking SlashDot for not covering the Gates comments in a headline post.

Jobs is good at PR, but this whole DRM issue is self serving, no matter how it works out.

Here are some quotes from Business week that sum it up pretty well...

-----------
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb 2007/tc20070206_576721.htm?chan=technology_technol ogy+index+page_today's+top+stories

(I encourage everyone to check out the entire article.)

Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus, an ad-supported music subscription service, concurs with the view that Jobs' essay is an attempt to shift the heat from Apple to the labels. "This is a way for Steve Jobs to take the heat off the fact that he won't open up his proprietary DRM," he says. "The labels have every right to protect their content, and I don't see it as a vow of good partnership to turn the tables on the labels and tell them they should just get rid of all DRM.... He is trying to spin the controversy. More power to him as a public relations guru, but I don't see it as a viable solution to the problem. DRM provides a comfort zone for the rights holders to feel they are not simply opening up the spigot and letting all their content be distributed at a very low cost."

Forrester Research (FORR) analyst James McQuivey says that record labels are unlikely to go along with Jobs' suggestion for now. "I don't expect the record labels to move very quickly in this direction," he says. "It would be very hard for the music industry to walk away from all the lawsuits they have filed against individual consumers, some against 15-year-olds, and say digital rights management is not a big deal."

"Apple is a great partner," says one record company executive. "But to some degree it's ironic that the guy who has the most successful example of DRM at every step of the process, the one where people bought boatloads of music last Christmas, is suddenly changing his tune."

First off, this was reported in Business Week back in 2005, with some of the same quotes.

What's striking is that Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, is funding this. If they're funding it, it's not totally bogus; they will have done a due diligence and had some competent people look over the technology. There may turn out to be some reason it's not feasible, but if it was physically impossible, they wouldn't have obtained money from that group.

Yeah, and PC game sales seem to be increasing a bit: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan20 07/id20070122_804652.htm

Except that SS is not a funded "pay as you go" system. That's been a fiction since the beginning. Social Security is paid out to recipients based on current receipts, not current receipts plus a surplus set aside and saved for future benefits. The surplus has not been "saved" in some big bank vault. Thanks to Teddy Kennedy's bill in the 1970's, the money in the Social Security Trust fund is used to purchase government savings bonds (with a 0.5% ROI), effectively taking the money from Social Security and adding it to the General Fund. In fact, the Social Security Trust Fund is only solvent when you add in the eight trillion dollars of IOU's that the U.S. Congress has written to them.

When SS was created in 1933, the ratio was one recipient was being paid for by 10 payers. In 1980, the ratio was down to 6 earners paying in for each recipient. As of 2000, the number is three point five to one. By 2015 (when the last baby boomers are jumping on the system), the number will be two to one or less, and the "surplus" will be draining at over 400 billion dollars a year. That's 400 billion dollars that the Congress will now *have* to pay back to the Social Security Trust Fund.

Now, think about that. Not only will they have to pay $400B into Social Security, but the vast amount of money that Social Security used to pay into the General Fund via their savings bonds won't be there any more either. That's about $250 Billion more not going in. So we have an instant additional $650B deficit in the federal budget. Can you imagine coming up with an extra 2/3rds of a TRILLION dollars a year?

Do you really think that the government is going to stop spending money? What will they cut? Education, Health care, Social Services, the Military, the FBI, roads?

Or do you think there will be a new round of tax hikes on "the richest Americans", which, according to the definition of rich in the 1993 tax increase was, "Anyone earning over $32,800 a year."

By 2029, the Social Security Trust Fund is completely broke, and, with raising life expectancies, and fewer children per parent, the payout rate by 2035 is predicted to be 1 payer for each 3 recipients. The only way to support that system is an 80% tax rate. America was formed when the colonists rebelled against an appalling tax rate of... seven percent.

I don't think there's an American alive who would tolerate eighty cents of every dollar going to someone else who didn't plan for retirement.

But you don't have to believe me. The Social Security Trustees don't say it survives until 2056. In fact, they've had to repeatedly move the bankruptcy date up, now to 2029. In fact, over history they've been hopelessly optimistic about the future, and have been repeatedly slapped by reality showing that things are much worse then they claimed. Here, here, here, and here. The first one is the trustee report from 2004. The rest are articles from various sources. I intentionally picked articles from all sides of the political spectrum. There is a broad bi-partisan acknowledgement that the system is in horrible trouble -- President Clinton's own committee recommended privatization as the only alternative to higher taxes or lower benefits. The only people denying it are the ones running on "keeping social security safe". People like Barbara Boxer and the like who continuously say there's no problem with the system, even as it racks up 12 digit shortfalls year after year. ($200,000,000,000+ in 2004).

So, I've been putting my own money away (401Ks, IRAs, etc) because I know I can't count on Social Security to give me anything. In fact, more people under the age of 30 believe that we'll make contact with aliens in the next 30 years than believe that Social Security will still be available for them.

Here are the official sales numbers. Not shipped units.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8MJF FDO0.htm

As for the languishing on shelves I still have not seen one in a store in my town. To get mine my wife had to camp out. She would show up each day when the truck came with the other people in line and see if she could get one. If there are some in stock in other areas then good. I seen stock as well. Just because something is in stock does not mean nobody wants it. Seeing as th ePS3 is selling at twice the rate as the 360 did when released I wouldn't say it's a failure so far. I wouldn't doubt if MS had to release a new version of the 360 just to keep up.

In comparative terms - yes it is low skilled. It requires only minimal education and not specific skills.

I look forward to it - providing cheaper surgury will make it easier for more people to get life saving surgery. How is this a bad thing? Sure some doctors will suffer - but everyone else benefits, thats the nature of innovation and progress.

There are still plenty of entry level jobs at high end firms. Microsoft, Intel, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc, etc, etc still hire thousands of people straight out of college. I have never worked for a company that didn't have entry level positions - and we are only talking about high tech. The outsourcing is primarily happening at large firms (which are a small percentage of total jobs). Smaller firms still have plenty of jobs in house where it is possible to learn and aquire skills in order to get ahead.

"And Ford has been a tough customer: It once gave Delphi a big order instead of Visteon to save 3 cents apiece on car stereos that cost several hundred dollars each, says a Visteon executive." -- BusinessWeek

When one corrects someone, one should make sure that the correction is not itself incorrect.

BTW, I posted the comment that you replied to. THPT.

Examining the source of funding is very important in studies. Not that the study has no value but that they have their own inherent perspectives (biases). Every manager you ask today talks about the difficulty to hire good talent... irrespective of the country they are in. But then what is "good" talent? .. we always want better than what we have now.

The bottom line is: The 'globalization' of industries and labor pools is going to cause upheavals in certain areas. No one complained when local industries in developing countries were destroyed due to the manufacturing and market power exerted by large western conglomerates. Similarly we are not going to see too much sympathy for programmers here that do run of the mill jobs that can be done anywhere else in the world. How many HTML programmers do we see today? I think the US has always been creative and must remain so in order to draw the wages they do today. If you stagnate, you lose.

Here is a report about another study conducted at Duke University about outsourcing:
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec20 05/sb20051212_623922.htm

Didn't anyone check the paperwork? This was reported in 'Business Week' of all places: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec 2006/tc20061218_465203.htm?chan=technology_technol ogy+index+page_today's+top+stories

I think the Reg picked it up as well.

If you google "+iphone +trademark" you will come up with a number of citations.

Did Apple gamble and lose that they could get the TM from Cisco? Or is this more proof of the saying 'the larger the organization, the dumber it gets' (i.e. regression to the mean in term of intelligence).

When GM can make $6,000-$10,000 profit on every SUV sold, why wouldn't they make them? Its not like they forced anyone to buy them. If people were so concerned about the enviornment and foreign oil, they could just as easliy bought a (cheaper) more fuel efficient vehicles like a minivans, wagons and mid-size sedans and GM would have poured all their money into developing those becasue that is what people will buy. I like people who believe the myth that corporations are out there to do you a favor or save the universe. They exist to make money and do so soley buy selling things people want.

They still draw more power than a flat screen of either type, and more importantly, a 60" CRT... well, it doesn't exist and if it did it would weigh a quarter-ton. "The $2,499, 40-in. Sony (SNE ) WEGA XBR, the biggest CRT made, weighs a staggering 304 lb. and is 26 in. deep." That's only a 40" display and it's 13 times thicker than an LCD television. A 60" plasma (easier to find than LCD, sorry) weighs around 135 lb, less than half the weight. There are lots of reasons to go LCD. Personally I'm going projector since that's even smaller and lighter and I'm not home during the day when it's suboptimal anyway. I currently have a big ol' lame-ass VGA-res Sharp LCD projector the size of a large shoebox and the weight of a PC, but it was $5. I'll use it until it dies and then probably get something XGA-res since HD is way the hell too expensive still.

So would it help to remove the campaign id in the link?
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec20 06/sb20061221_267151.htm

Or is it based more on the time period, assignment of articles to specific individuals, or some other criteria?

Maybe, maybe not. According to this http://www.businessweek.com/technology/tech_stats/ cell060223.htm Motorola and Nokia still own the biggest chunk of the market and could still sway adoption of standards. Still, who doesn't want to sell in China?

As a former employee of Pac Bell who watched the takeover by SBC, and lived through a couple of other SBC mergers, one of the things I lerned was that acquisitions are driven primarily by CEO Ed Whitacre's ego, not the finical result. His public comments about Internet companies using "his pipes" makes clear (to me, anyway) that this is personal, not business http://www.businessweek.com/@@n34h*IUQu7KtOwgA/mag azine/content/05_45/b3958092.htm In the same article from last Nov, he was saying that ATT acquiring BellSouth want's very likely, it was then announced in March http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=ne ws&newsarticleid=22140 and now it's almost a done deal. His "business face" will never tell you what he's going to do, especially when he says stuff about "creating value": he's hidding something else that he dosen't want you to know about. As I read through the article with this in mind, I'm almost certain ATT is not telling what it's really doing, but it looks like people are starting to figure that out.

Or perhaps better put:

Buy, Resell, and Disenfranchise.

My sad tale....

In the 1990's there was a company called Resnova Software which made the NovaLink Professional Information Server. It was a fantastic product, where an experienced tech could fashion an AOL-like experience thus producing a mini-online service.

Well, my business was built around this technology, and having designed school networks for some time I invested a lot of time and money (Along with other people) in creating a nice safe little internet service for kiddies in school. They had a pretty user interface, access to Gopher, the k12 newsgroups, teacher assignments, class materials- all accessible from either in the school, through a standard ppp dialup account, or a local dial-in number to our NOC- same pretty GUI.

My customers loved it. So did the kids.

And along comes Microsoft. As I understand it, they wanted another technology ResNova created called "Personal Web Sharing". They made Res Nova an offer they couldn't refuse, the purchase was approved by the FTC, and Microsoft walked away with the whole company.

But what the FTC didn't consider, or didn't know enough to consider was this:

Microsoft walked away with the tech it wanted, killed the Nova Link Professional Information Server, and sold the rights to use personal web sharing to at least one other company- and that would be Apple Computer Inc.

So we lost our shirt.

http://www.businessweek.com/1997/02/b3509221.htm

It's not just customers that lose when the FTC doesn't do it's job.

They don't have to engage in price fixing technically. They can play the same game that other services and retailers do and just play the one-up game on costs. Cable already does this with satellite.

Oh, here's your price hike Verison customers. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8LRI M5G1.htm

Sony may put together the parts themselves but unless they're employing magic elves in their production facilities they have to get those parts from somewhere.

Most of the cost analysis comes from looking at the separate components, seagate HD, IBM processor, ATI processor, Samsung RAM, etc.. and looking at the associated costs with either purchasing the part or licensing the design, and even includes volume discounts. These costs are relatively stable and well known. The guesstimating comes in when trying to calculate the SONY only parts but even there they can use some similar items to come up with ball park figures. So while you can argue with a person who is claiming to know exactly what the system cost is, when the rough estimates puts the cost in the multiple hundreds above purchase price you can bet that they are not making up the difference with innovative production techniques.

As for historical trends, you could look at Business Week or Cnet or just google it but you've managed to answered your own question with your last statement, "why the Xbox division lost billions over the life of the original Xbox?". Simply put, they could not overcome their loss leading system prices with adequate games sales. Add to that the R&D costs and advertising and they created too much of a hole to dig themselves out of with a 4.75:1 game to system ratio (the last number I could find). If the systems had been making a profit from the get go they may still have lost money overall, but unless their R&D costs were in the double digit billions they would not come out as far behind as they did.

Kind of how Failchild Semiconductor was the wellspring for many of todays semiconductor companies? This graphic (PDF warning) was the best thing I could find.

One thing I saw in the Dec 11 2006 BusinessWeek was a cell phone that is *just* a phone (although it does have a 12-15 number memory feature). It's called the Jitterbug from GreatCall.

Apart from articles like this ? http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2006/tc20061122_186502.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+ index_technology I can dig out more if you wish.

Yeah, you know, the car analogy fits like a glove. Look at the god-awful Pontiac Aztec POS !!!! You really think that they would seriously have sold that thing if there was *any* way they could have done another iteration, refactored, started from a blank sheet of paper etc., etc.

In that case, GM was practically bankrupt, and they had to take whatever shit the 'waterfall' car design process spat out on the first turn of the crank.

I was going to write a post critizing the Russian government's ability to mug, steal, kill and rob at will.

But really, Russia is no worse than the USA, thanks to global hegemony induced TRIPS.

Just one problem: It's not true, at least for many online retailers. Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn't nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It's not even the first big day of the season.

Just one problem: It's not true, at least for many online retailers. Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn't nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It's not even the first big day of the season.

There was a /. article on this two years ago!
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/nov200 5/nf20051129_9946_db016.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Monday

It's a marketing myth. Those "market reports" are press releases. Get your head in the game.

Louis Vuitton makes handbags in the same Malaysian factories that the knockoffs come from.

You're wrong.
A simple search returns this article, which states that Vuitton handbags are produced either in France or Spain.

For example, Sun Labs was in charge of the DARPA project at Sun. They have "invested" 3 years on that. My question is "what do they have to show?".

erh.... $50 million in cash from the last round of funding?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_23 /b3886007.htm

I'll let other people tell you why infrared photons have little to do with heat and instead point you to this that might be of interest.

in 2001, [In Search of Excellence Author] Peters admitted that he falsified the underlying data

For years, many assumed that the authors employed rigorous research and stringent financial screens to identify "excellent" companies. Peters now maintains that he and Waterman simply asked their McKinsey colleagues and other "smart people" for the names of companies doing "cool work." Then, they screened that initial list of 62 organizations for financial performance over a 20-year period. That whittled the list to 43 companies, ranging from Johnson & Johnson to Intel Corp.

Even more peculiar than Peters' confession of inventing data is the author's insistence that his published admission is actually untrue. "Get off my case," he grouses. "We didn't fake the data. It's called an aggressive headline."

Not to mention that the Japanese are very unlikely to buy an imported good that isn't from a Japanese-owned foreign interest anyway. I'm surprised that MS has any sales there at all.

You mean like the iPod?

Please, this constant repetition that the Japanese are xenophobic when it comes to electronics is terrifically boring, and worse, counter-productive. It's as bad as the auto makers who blame xenophobia for why they aren't able to sell the Chrysler Neon in Japan.

I think this 'new' trend actually started a few weeks ago with Google.
Curious that while revenues are falling for print media they've oversatured the online market to the point they're propping up a medium that is antiquated and only speaks with one voice.

Except that google already did this at the beginning of November. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2006/tc20061105_572061.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+ index_businessweek+exclusives

The second-generation zune will come in a new color, Golden Shower, which is sure to be much more popular with fans of watersports. New catchphrase: Do I Hear Rain?

Paging Steve "I want to squirt you a picture..." Ballmer. Mr Ballmer, please pick up the brown disgusting mental images telephone.