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Companies are already looking to place products in reruns of older shows, going as far as to insert digial products. Video-technology company Princeton Video Image has for years used digital imaging to insert virtual first-down lines (with corporate logos) in football games and completely photorealistic but nonexistent "signs" behind home plate at baseball games. Now it wants to move into reruns, with technology that can seamlessly insert 3-D objects into video footage-a Pepsi on a desktop, a Lexus at a curbside, a box of Tide on a countertop-where there was nothing before. PVI is negotiating to do placements in reruns of Law & Order and hopes to strike deals with other syndicators and even first-run shows. "You could sell a box of cereal in the kitchen one [airing]," says PVI vice president Paul Slagle, "and dish soap in the next." PVI's Holy Grail: customizing insertions using interactive-TV technology-which is still distant and speculative-that would store viewer information (demographic details, even interactive purchases) as Web browsers do. Your TV would figure, Slagle says, "whether you're riper for a Cadillac or a Saturn." http://www.time.com/time/pacific/magazine/20010625 /tv.html

Also the whole Tivo increasing product placemnet is nothing new. Here are a few articles from as far back as 2001:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/TV/02/18/apontv.ad s.everywhere.ap/
http://webserve.govst.edu/users/ghrank/Advertising /Pitch/1-hi/product_placing.htm
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,5 29039,00.html
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=176 457&seqNum=2
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0124-02.ht m

And here is Buisness Week's product placment hall of fame from 1998: http://www.businessweek.com/1998/25/b3583062.htm

(Here's a copy of a comment I made the last time this story was posted.)

SpaceX is one of the private launch firms mentioned in the article and considered by many alt.spacers as the foremost contender for the ISS commercial crew & cargo contracts. Businessweek just published a pretty informative article on them, The Final Frontier At Costco Prices. Here's some relevant quotes from the article:

If SpaceX succeeds in lofting its rocket and an Air Force Academy research satellite into orbit, Musk will vindicate his vision and his investment. Financed almost entirely out of his own pocket, the company is the South Africa native's attempt to carve out a lucrative niche in the wildly expensive launch business. Musk believes that he can blast military and commercial satellites into space at Costco prices -- $6.7 million for a small payload and $38 million to $78 million for a heavyweight launch. By comparison, the Air Force's total cost for a Boeing or Lockheed Martin launch of a big payload comes to about $230 million, up from an inflation-adjusted $95 million in 1998. ...

So far, satellite customers have rewarded Musk's optimism with $200 million in advance launch contracts. The company faces just two problems. While SpaceX, based in El Segundo, Calif., has fired off plenty of press releases, it has yet to get a rocket off the ground. Its first launch, already two years behind schedule, was scrubbed on Nov. 26 because of a balky computer and a liquid-oxygen leak from a valve inadvertently left open. The company expects to try again in mid-December. ...

    Such rock-bottom fees -- and a belief in the reliability of SpaceX's gear -- have attracted a range of clients, from an unidentified U.S. intelligence agency to the Malaysian government to Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. The startup is betting that companies will want to do research on the inflatable space stations it plans to put into orbit. ...

    Musk says he has overcome many technical hurdles by simplifying launch hardware. For example, SpaceX uses the same engine on all its stages instead of different units. Its electronics are on chips instead of circuit boards, which reduces wiring glitches. To slice costs, most SpaceX rocket stages are reusable instead of expendable. And SpaceX intends to save money by recovering sections from the ocean instead of rebuilding an entire rocket. Musk also brought a Silicon Valley business model to Southern California, forming a small, innovative, 150-employee company, a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic legions who toil on launches for Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. In an age of outsourcing, SpaceX makes its engines and boosters in-house to avoid high-priced suppliers such as Pratt & Whitney (UTX ), General Electric (GE ), and Rolls-Royce. If he used those manufacturers' components, Musk says, he would be trapped in "the high-cost culture of the space industry." ...

For Musk, beating the big guys out of a share of the launch market is just the start. His ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a highflier by making launches so cheap, easy, and common that humans will become, in his words, "a space-faring, multiplanet species." Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet because Earth is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters. Beachfront property on the Red Planet? Maybe someday. But first, Musk has to get off the beach at Kwajalein and show the doubters that his rockets can soar as high as his rhetoric.

Microsoft licenses TTS technology from Lernout & Hauspie. (Now Nuance, like you said.) Microsoft has their own Speech Recognition engine. However, that engine can be replaced by third parties via the SAPI. Microsoft had an 8% share in the company at one point, though I don't know how much of it they currently hold.

SpaceX is one of the private launch firms mentioned in the article and considered by many alt.spacers as the foremost contender for the ISS commercial crew & cargo contracts. Businessweek just published a pretty informative article on them, The Final Frontier At Costco Prices. Here's some relevant quotes from the article:

If SpaceX succeeds in lofting its rocket and an Air Force Academy research satellite into orbit, Musk will vindicate his vision and his investment. Financed almost entirely out of his own pocket, the company is the South Africa native's attempt to carve out a lucrative niche in the wildly expensive launch business. Musk believes that he can blast military and commercial satellites into space at Costco prices -- $6.7 million for a small payload and $38 million to $78 million for a heavyweight launch. By comparison, the Air Force's total cost for a Boeing or Lockheed Martin launch of a big payload comes to about $230 million, up from an inflation-adjusted $95 million in 1998. ...

So far, satellite customers have rewarded Musk's optimism with $200 million in advance launch contracts. The company faces just two problems. While SpaceX, based in El Segundo, Calif., has fired off plenty of press releases, it has yet to get a rocket off the ground. Its first launch, already two years behind schedule, was scrubbed on Nov. 26 because of a balky computer and a liquid-oxygen leak from a valve inadvertently left open. The company expects to try again in mid-December. ...

  Such rock-bottom fees -- and a belief in the reliability of SpaceX's gear -- have attracted a range of clients, from an unidentified U.S. intelligence agency to the Malaysian government to Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. The startup is betting that companies will want to do research on the inflatable space stations it plans to put into orbit. ...

  Musk says he has overcome many technical hurdles by simplifying launch hardware. For example, SpaceX uses the same engine on all its stages instead of different units. Its electronics are on chips instead of circuit boards, which reduces wiring glitches. To slice costs, most SpaceX rocket stages are reusable instead of expendable. And SpaceX intends to save money by recovering sections from the ocean instead of rebuilding an entire rocket. Musk also brought a Silicon Valley business model to Southern California, forming a small, innovative, 150-employee company, a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic legions who toil on launches for Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. In an age of outsourcing, SpaceX makes its engines and boosters in-house to avoid high-priced suppliers such as Pratt & Whitney (UTX ), General Electric (GE ), and Rolls-Royce. If he used those manufacturers' components, Musk says, he would be trapped in "the high-cost culture of the space industry." ...

  For Musk, beating the big guys out of a share of the launch market is just the start. His ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a highflier by making launches so cheap, easy, and common that humans will become, in his words, "a space-faring, multiplanet species." Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet because Earth is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters. Beachfront property on the Red Planet? Maybe someday. But first, Musk has to get off the beach at Kwajalein and show the doubters that his rockets can soar as high as his rhetoric.

Level playing field. Any bets on that?

SpaceX is actually in the middle of a court battle right now with Boeing & Lockheed to try to keep them from locking competitors out of the Air Force's $32 billion EELV launch program. From this Businessweek article:

The Defense Dept. may soon sign off on a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture that critics fear could lock up the Air Force's $32 billion heavy-payload launch program, known as Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (EELV), until 2011. That would freeze SpaceX and other entrepreneurs out of a huge chunk of the military market.

SpaceX is fighting hard to block the monopoly in the courts and at the Federal Trade Commission, which must approve the deal. ... But SpaceX fears it may not get a chance to offer the government its bargain blastoffs. To block the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, the company is spending as much time in the courtroom as in the cleanroom. While SpaceX lost its first court challenge, the opposition apparently compelled the Air Force to back off its plan, laid out in an internal memo, to shut out everyone but the two giants for launches through 2011. ...

Even then, Boeing and Lockheed Martin will have a competitive edge: The Air Force is footing the bill for their infrastructure costs.

So where's the XBox 360?

On EBay, which currently accounts for 10% of all 360 sales. Looks like prices from $550 to $1000. I kept wondering why the XBox was being manufactured for shortages, when M$ wasn't taking advantage of shortage pricing, but instead pricing under cost*. One article raises the speculation that the secondary market might be intentional.** Maybe M$ decided it prefers an auction economy, perhaps to dodge allegations of price gouging, which are apparently all the rage, for better or worse.

So where's the congratulatory hype?

Here's some, though we're probably not seeing a huge amount of post-release PR because they can't meet extra demand such PR would generate anyway. And they probably gave their PR department a holiday after all their pre-release work.

Or maybe they fired them after all their ads got banned from TV.

Where are our promo boxes?

The other comments have covered this pretty well. Really, if M$ sent a big heavy box in the mail to the editors of /., would any of them actually risk opening it?

Or maybe yours just got smashed uh... "in the mail."

*Another estimate of XBox cost/unit, from BusinessWeek.

**I don't actually think M$ planned to sell direct on Ebay to capitalize on created shortages, but it's still an interesting idea.

i don't think anyone said that. the point is, for a public company, the goal is to maximize profits, period. if the company's actions happen to match some philosophy, well that's nice, but it's only a side affect. if you have any doubt, read this as reported by slashdot some months or so ago.

"Now, as we all can see, pension and health care obligations are eating GM alive."

Washington Post

"The carmaker is saddled with a $1,600-per-vehicle handicap in so-called legacy costs, mostly retiree health and pension benefits"

Business Week

You need to grow up and realize that breaking the rules/law is wrong whether or not you get caught.

I would like to point out that it is the previous generation(s) who hold positions of influence in business and government routinely get away with henious crimes. (Take small sentences for destroying retirement funds for thousands of people, among other things.) We frequently see the wealthy and powerful get away with minor punishments that are effectively summed up as serving a prison sentence on a yaht in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, our society is replete with cases of minor offenses being punished beyond any reasonable severity. ($250,000 and larger fines for music swappers, or felony charges for young children reading passwords printed on their computers, for example.) If I was a young person, I would be extremely confused. Does this mean that the more serious your crimes are, the less serious the consequences? Does this mean I can do whatever I want if I am affluent? Given that getting into some trouble is part of youth, this makes for a dangerous influence. There are also plenty of cases where breaking the law is not “wrong”, so we cannot treat this as an absolute either. What Rosa Parks did was not wrong or unethical (quite the opposite), but it was most certainly against the rules.

So, you are absolutely correct that stealing is wrong, as is breaking most laws. However, I think we as a society need to do a few things (which come to mind) if we are to have any success in reducing crime. First, the punishments must fit the crime. Copying digital music should not have equal or worse consequences to stealing millions, perhaps billions from a corporation. Murder is a felony charge, not typing a password printed on the bottom of your laptop. You get the idea. Second, we must teach people how to properly evaluate laws and whether or not they are just. This is intrinsic to the continued operation of our democracy but it is hardly given any treatment. People must be able to determine which laws are reasonable insofar as the gravity of violations, and which laws must be disobeyed for the greater good. Third, we need to restore equal application under law irregardless of political, social, or economic standing. Today, the wealthy can afford good lawyers who are better versed in the law and thus finding loopholes. Meanwhile, the poor rarely have competent defense. This is very biased, and aside from being unfair and unjust, it also leads to further crime (these cycles are much more likely to be perpetuated in the lower classes).

Digg The Slashdot Killer

Digg Might Just Bury Slashdot

Slashdot, Digg.com, and the True Meaning of Design

My Slashdot Replacement

Goodbye, Slashdot, Hello Digg

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detail s?&range=1y&size= large&compare_sites=slashdot.org&y=t&url=digg.com

How Digg Uncovers The News

Why Slashdot Will Die

See what others are saying...

Digg is actually better. Slashdot is old and ugly. Its content is decided by editors, the layout looks like it was made in windows95's heyday and its a dinosaur. Digg on the other hand is new and "growing", they use a flashier, better looking layout, yet the site is still simpler then Slashdot. The content is decided by the submitters and you can get that content via audio and video podcasts.

I never could stand slashdot. The layout and just overall feel of that site was/is bad.

I don't like slashdot's layout. It's ugly and cluttered. The colors make me wanna puke.

Slashdot users agree that Digg.com's entries are a lot more current that the ones posted at Slashdot.

99% of slashdot users have self-diagnosed themselves as suffering from Asperger's Syndrome. Most slashdot users consider themselves "smart" when in fact they are simply of average intelligence, but have more free time and a higher sense of ego. This can be seen in the forums where spelling and usage errors are prevalent in condescending, arrogant rants, identified by containing the phrase "people are stupid" at some point in the post.

I prefer Digg for my tech news and I've found some really nice sites that way.

I prefer Digg. I used to check /. but I didn't like it as much

I like Digg better anyway, much more and more interesting news.

What I can't stand, even less that the site and the proseltyzing editors, are Slashdot's users- overweight, effeminate cubicle shit. At least I don't have to wear a goatee and suck linux dick to participate on Digg I cant stand Slashdot, I will only Read it when its linked from somewhere else

Learn More

I work at a bank and the concept of customer behavior is a rich one for data mining and whatnot. Surprise: Most customers do not behave "rationally" from the bank's perspective. And you can put a number on it. I'm not sure what the breakage ratio is for rebates, but I am guessing well around half. A Business Week article puts it at 40 percent, but I imagine it depends on the product, cost, etc. etc.

actual, 60% of rebates are claimed. Higher at staples where they have made it easier to do so. No great surprise.

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/nov2 005/nf20051123_4158_db016.htm

quote:
" Why the rage for rebates? The industry's open secret is that fully 40% of all rebates never get redeemed because consumers fail to apply for them or their applications are rejected, estimates Peter S. Kastner, a director of consulting firm Vericours. That translates into more than $2 billion of extra revenue for retailers and their suppliers each year. What rebates do is get consumers to focus on the discounted price of a product, then buy it at full price. "

How the Adobe-Macromedia Merger Could Impact PDF
Interview of both CEOs
Staff's comments
Article with a bit more bulk on the subject (The article linked about is quite small)

Digg The Slashdot Killer

Digg Might Just Bury Slashdot

Slashdot, Digg.com, and the True Meaning of Design

My Slashdot Replacement

Goodbye, Slashdot, Hello Digg

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detail s?&range=1y&size= large&compare_sites=slashdot.org&y=t&url=digg.com

How Digg Uncovers The News

Why Slashdot Will Die

See what others are saying...

Digg is actually better. Slashdot is old and ugly. Its content is decided by editors, the layout looks like it was made in windows95's heyday and its a dinosaur. Digg on the other hand is new and "growing", they use a flashier, better looking layout, yet the site is still simpler then Slashdot. The content is decided by the submitters and you can get that content via audio and video podcasts.

I never could stand slashdot. The layout and just overall feel of that site was/is bad.

I don't like slashdot's layout. It's ugly and cluttered. The colors make me wanna puke.

Slashdot users agree that Digg.com's entries are a lot more current that the ones posted at Slashdot.

99% of slashdot users have self-diagnosed themselves as suffering from Asperger's Syndrome. Most slashdot users consider themselves "smart" when in fact they are simply of average intelligence, but have more free time and a higher sense of ego. This can be seen in the forums where spelling and usage errors are prevalent in condescending, arrogant rants, identified by containing the phrase "people are stupid" at some point in the post.

I prefer Digg for my tech news and I've found some really nice sites that way.

I prefer Digg. I used to check /. but I didn't like it as much

I like Digg better anyway, much more and more interesting news.

I cant stand Slashdot, I will only Read it when its linked from somewhere else

Learn More

As long as there are "old people" there will always be newspapers.

Newspaper circulation is in decline. Evening newspapers (popular for closing stock information) have declined the fastest, but the overall trend is not encouraging. Since 1970 the number of us households has approximately doubled, but newspaper circulation has decreased slightly. This coupled with recent drops of 2.6 percent in the last six months paint a bleak picture.

It is naive to say that there will always be newspapers. It is like saying there will always be record players. Digital technology will eventually destroy newspapers. Even if someday they get replaced by high res flexible digital "paper", the traditional model of a printed paper that has to be distributed is doomed. It is simply too expensive.

Sorry but it seems Business Week is still caught up on Dos. The correct link without the extra 'l' is http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2005/tc20051118_179356.htm

URL in post does not work.

The correct url is:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov 2005/tc20051118_179356.htm

I typed appropriate terms into Google and found a few articles:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar 2005/tc2005032_0932_tc119.htm
http://www.richardfrench.net/?p=4

It looks like the traffic flowing to Slashdot has continued to grow, but fewer people are following the links. I think the hypothesis that people use RSS to discover important updated stories before Slashdot picks them up is plausible, especially considering how late Slashdot often is in picking up major stories.

I haven't done any detailed analysis on the decline of comment quality, and if true that certainly would be a concern.

D

...business groups contend that the Patriot Act, as written, gives the feds carte blanche to rifle through corporate records. One worry: Like police searching a car trunk after a traffic stop, the feds could discover evidence of unrelated crimes or securities law breaches when they rummage through business records.

• EU music groups want the police to search through records for crimes unrelated to the law under which the records were obtained

• U.S. Companies are afraid the police will search through records for crimes unrelated to the law under which the records were obtained

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

Clearly this is a corallary move to what the Edward Whiteacre, CEO of SBC is doing.
See the interview here:
http://www.businessweek.com/@@n34h*IUQu7KtOwgA/mag azine/content/05_45/b3958092.htm

Quote:
How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG), MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

Ultimately, Rogers will be charging people extra to download "Content" like music, video clips etc. You know - the things they used to get from Usenet for free.

This is something of a disaster for MSFT, but not in anyway unpredictable. As someone who has worked closely with Microsoft for the last 10 years I've grown to understand how they make decisions: Its all about platform extension and repeat revenue streams. Very, very little thought tends to go in to creativity, design and consumer appeal. Microsofties tend to scoff at those things, holding instead to the belief that a superior business model leads to a superior product line. (What they forget is that they are now in the entertainment business and people could give a crap about their business model.)

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying the opposite and further than music companies are "greedy" for wanting this price flexibility.

I for one welcome flexible pricing because I think there is some music I would buy for less than $0.99 that I have not bought because of its current price. Pay more an a dollar for a single? That would have to be some great music, I doubt I would do it. Everyone has their price. mine feels like a dollar.

Not quite. BMW has been researching and promoting hydrogen cars for some time now. They installed a hydrogen refilling station in Munich in '99(IIRC) and more are on the way, some in the US. The interesting thing about the BMW hydrogen car is that it can burn either hydrogen or gasoline so you can burn hydrogen when its available but not be hampered by the current dearth of hydrogen stations. As for the source of the hydrogen, Electricity generated from solar power is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. . The range on the 750H is only 400 km right now. The other trade-off of course is that there is still combustion so it's not as clean as fuel cell cars. Nonetheless, it's a start and not a bad way to transition us into a hydrogen economy.

It looks like they didn't even have the name Riya as of August of this year. It was Ojos. Their main guy even has a blog where you can follow up on their Series B financing from the VCs. If this guy wants to make it big, their US and India teams should get the technology polished and then license it to Google for inclusion in their Google Desktop, with support for external media (e.g. DVDs full of photos).

Later, they could expand it out to search for the same faces in movies. Whoa! Hold on. You all are getting carried away. This is not recognizing everybody that passes by a security camera. The success of their codes depends on you having photographed the same individual multiple times. That's why facial recognition in security camera's is such a bad idea - you normally only get to train such a system on: one good photograph, or lots of terrible photographs. And then people want to pick out the bad guy as one of 5,000 people per camera per day???

If you tie this in to the running email address debate, you'll understand a little deeper. They do in fact keep track of the facial (and other) highlights, but there are too many to compare them to everyone ever scanned. Using an e-mail address significantly narrows the fields down, and then they reused the feature attributes. But otherwise, they statistically never reuse the patterns outside of your photo collection.

For a long time now this site has been falling but the editors won't listen. I've tried time and time again to get something going but the editors just won't listen. Even the slashbot groupthink here won't take it. For instance you've already been modded redundant and off topic as will I most likely. Like any entrenched bureaucracy they hate maverick thoughts and dissident opinions. For me, /. is the ultimate in hypocritical sites, they claim to be the bastion of free thought and open source philosophy but soon as you want to get things moving again, rather than stagnate, they'll come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Slashdot is slowly becoming more like Microsoft: conservative, slow and copying other peoples products (read: news). Whilst Digg is becoming what the open source movement is really about: speed, openess, wisdom of the crowds, and people empowered news reporting.

I imagine the typical responses though: "Don't let the door hit yourself on the way out" or "If you don't like it leave." This is the level of rhetoric and moderation that /. has become.

Taking questions here, prior Gamespy interview referenced in the Article and I happened to see this almost simultaneously:

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov20 05/id20051109_602467.htm

Actors do all the Oprah's and Letterman's they can before their movies are released to drum up publicity, seems this is a similar tactic.

We already know Wal-Mart is bad for small business, merchant exploitation, competition, and even larger suppliers, so I am in favor of anything that might allow good companies like Vlasic retain their ability to meet profit margins and pay their workers. I personally abhor and refuse to visit any of the Wally World constructs (or any of the other Mega-Lo-Marts) in favor of internet shopping and my wife's constant pursuit of the 1/2 price grocery store trip via coupon and sale shopping (not there yet, but getting closer). I also encourage anyone I work with or hang with to do the same, pointing out the examples above and following with the straight-forward explanation of how our family manages to avoid the ninth level of Hell.

Yeah, and one company is "too much of a one-trick pony", while the other isn't. So comparing them was doomed from the start.

Why? Because every company wants money. To get money they have to have some appealing quality.

Dell, creates cheap computers, sells a lot of cheap computers, and when many customers* get what they pay for they call tech support which, due to the cost of computers, does not have the funding to properly support the number of incoming calls. Have you ever had to tell someone that their brand new laptop needs to be replaced? I can tell you that it's not pretty.

Apple* on the other hand is no saint either, they will justify any action in the name of high quality. To better service their customers, they'll open up an apple store, shutting the local apple store out of business.

*I own both products from both companies (this is being typed on an iBook, for instance), and have worked tech support for dells.

"[Dell is] too much of a one-trick pony," says a former high-ranking Dell executive. "They're not innovating, or building enough new businesses. They've executed flawlessly for 10 years, but that's kind of an impossible thing to continue." Many customers have complained that Dell's once-acceptable customer service has slipped (see BW, 10/10/05, "Hanging Up on Dell?").

In truth, I'd rather have recognizable, defendable, and sustainable differentiation in the market, combined with engineers that can develop new products (and proven experts to market them). Operational efficiency (Dell's primary, and perhaps only, mode of differentiation) isn't a good mode of differentiation (it was against the existing players, but new entrants can learn from Dell and eliminate Dell's advantage). From that perspective, Apple is in a better long-term position. On the other hand, Dell's scale and cash flow (both better than Apple) provides it ample opportunity to adapt and make necessary changes. IMHO, Gateway isn't the issue; nor is HP. Lenovo could be a challenge, but it depends on how that card plays out (and I doubt Lenovo wants a price war with Dell, so I doubt Lenovo is a core threat to Dell's current business). I expect Dell's largest threat is not one of the players we would think of as the potential challenger today.

Dell's problem is that their slowing growth and trouble hitting targets is indicative of their lack of differentiation that they can convert into profits. It is also indicative of the main problem in many technologies: People buy what is 'good enough'... and frankly, a $500 PC is 'good enough' for everyone except the die-hards. Ironically, Dell is now performing the same actions everyone uses when they complain about IBM (getting profit growth through expense cutting). The problem in Dell's case is that they are sacrificing customer service in the process of growing profits, which (as the article points out) could snowball into further problems for the company.

The net of all of this is that it depends... and in the cases of stock, depends on what you're paying for the profits (or what the companies invested to produce the profits, or however you'd like to phrase it to have the appropriate perspective).

This Apple worshipping has gone a bit too far...

Here are listed most valuable brands in 2005. Apple is on 41. place. Following technology companies are before Apple in the list:

2. Microsoft
3. IBM
5. Intel
6. Nokia
13. HP
17. Cisco
20. Samsung
21. Dell
27. Oracle
28. Sony
35. Canon
38. Google

Pixar wasn't even on top100 list.

To put this figure into perspective, Nokia sold 7.1 million smartphones (which includes the N-series) worldwide in Q3. And Nokia is the leader in smartphone market by a long shot.

Source: http://www.tekrati.com/T2/Analyst_Research/Researc hAnnouncementsDetails.asp?Newsid=6002

Source for the 1100 data:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_45 /b3958061.htm

Businessweek has a good article regarding Novell's current difficulties.

That said, I personally aim for mediocrity.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a leader in everything you do?

Everyone took a hit after Enron. It's called a "chilling effect".

And THIS sort of behaviour won't fly under Sarbanes-Oxley ...
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb200 2/nf20020215_2956.htm

At issue is the firm's work for both Enron and those controversial debt-shielding partnerships, set up and controlled by then-Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow. On two occasions -- in August, 1999, and May, 2000 -- the world's biggest accounting firm certified that Enron was getting a fair deal when it exchanged its own stock for options and notes issued by the Fastow-controlled partnerships.

Investigators plan to question the complex valuation calculations that underlie the opinions. Enron ultimately lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the deals. A PwC spokesman says the firm stands by its assessment of the deals' value at the time.

OVERLAP. Perhaps more significantly, Pricewaterhouse was working for one of the Fastow partnerships -- LJM2 Co-Investment -- at the same time it assured Enron that the Houston-based energy company was getting a fair deal in its transactions with LJM2. In effect, PwC was providing tax advice to help LJM2 structure its deal -- the first of the so-called Raptor transactions -- while the accounting firm was also advising Enron on the value of that deal.

Pricewaterhouse acknowledges the overlapping engagements but says its dual role did not violate accounting's ethics standards, which require firms to maintain a degree of objectivity in dealing with clients. The firm says the work was done by two separate teams, which did not share data. PwC's spokesman says LJM2's tax structure wasn't a factor in its opinion on the deal's valuation. And, the spokesman says, each client was informed about the other engagement. That disclosure may mean that the firm's actions were in the clear, says Stephen A. Zeff, professor of accounting at Rice University in Houston.

EVeryone has their ass exposed to some extent.

Re: The only reason Apple made a video iPod is the idea comes basically for free The video feature is not free. There is an extra Broadcom chip for video in the iPod. My guess it is in the $5-10 range. IIRC, in the last quarter Apple sold about 4M ipods (HD based). So, this "free" feature is costing Apple $20M - $40M per quarter. http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/o ct2005/tc20051021_937792.htm

"Tech Companies Swimming in Lawsuits!!!"

turns out to be a survey taken by Fulbright & Jaworski Lawfirm.

I bet they just felt horrible when they figured this out. "Time to stop litigating, we've become TOO successful."

The fact that it was written by a bunch of lawers explains why Olga had such a hard time blogging it.

The fact that her blog made it into slashdot is still a mystery.

"Here's whats really going on. The US probably, as a part of trade talks or talks over military matters, mentioned to various groups, including the EU (forget the UN, thats an arena, not an entity, its like blaming the whitehouse lawn for the actions of Bush), that their internet is looking mighty fragile, and whoops, wouldn't it be a shame if someone accidentally knocked it over, as a leverage tool. So, after going away and pondering their options, aforementioned governments tell the US to go hump a pineapple, and set up their own redundant system."

That's an interesting conspiracy theory. Here's another one:

Let's say that Iran, China, Libya and some members of the EU as part of trade talks with the US mentioned to US Representatives that the current root DNS servers look mighty fragile and whoops, wouldn't it be a shame if someone accidentally knocked them over similar to the events back in October 2002:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct 2002/tc20021030_3147.htm/

It would be good karma to share the DNS power/control otherwise one might never know what unfortunate events may fall upon the "USA" Internet. Oh and by the way Mr. USA...we got world opinion (EU/UN) on our side...blah, blah...so you will share the power...won't you. So, after going away and pondering their options, the US leadership tells those aforementioned governments to go hump a pineapple.

"That they are doing it publicly (no need to) should tell any observer all they need to know about what's really going on."

I'll agree with you there.

With the recently announced purchase of Innobase, Oracle has shown it's intention to further support open source.

It doesn't take too much gray matter to realize that soccer moms outnumber gaming advocates by a pretty wide margin
I'm not sure about this

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct20 05/id20051007_999151.htm

Businessweek seems to think that Video Games are the future of entertainment, not just technologically, but in terms of marketshare, as well.

AFAIK, The Video Game Industry (TM) is bigger than The Movie Industry (TM).

Soccer moms are actually a smaller demographic, but they may represent the same sort of small but noisy demographic that tends to get laws passed over the large but indifferent demographic.

this piece says that ms is trying to seed the indie ecosystem too. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct20 05/id20051014_827471.htm

You're talking about Microsoft and Apple, and then about Gates giving away "free money" etc. I don't see any of Founding Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) here. Didn't they get any "free stock" to blow away on charity? Would you donate your "free money" or lock it down as Apple guys or maybe spend it to please your precious ego? Is nearly $28 billion (58% of net worth) donated by Gates to date (2004) a "petty cash"? Killjoe, you're full of shit, pardon the language I never used online before.

Not only this, but it used be that the top executive at Fortune 500 companies 20 years age got something like 20X what a "normal" lay person gets paid (though I'm sure stock options were there aplenty to). These days it's ballooned to ballooned to 50x and up. And when they do get laid off, they have so many parachute clauses and termination pay-offs that being laid-off is the best thing that could have every happened to them - you don't even have to be good at your job - witness Carlo Fiorina at HP. Or Meg Whitman at Ebay - (she's a billionaire from heading ebay! And I was there from the beginning, DESPITE her blunders, it was going up anyway, if anything it was a free ride).

Sorry if it seems I'm picking on the girls, these just happen to be the companies I follow--.--, there are percentage wise also a lot of crappy guy CEOs - Darl McBride for one.

The CEO of Costco is one of those people I still look up to in business, most of the rest are ratbags willing to sell out the company in order to grab as much as they can in their short tenors as leaders. The Costco CEO (and co-founder, I believe) only pays himself 250,000 a year and insists on paying his workers a decent wage (something like 15-16 dollars/hour to start with) plus health benefits unlike Walmart.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_22 /b3885011_mz001.htm

Flamebait?!? Informative?!? Correcting my definition of "Theory"?!? Wow. I am astonished. OK, I know 99% of you got it, but for that "special" 1%, umm, it's a joke. Laugh. If you can't laugh at Intelligent Falling, you're taking it waaaaaay too seriously.

And if you're actually serious about the flamebait mod, and you're now thinking, "but it is serious, ID as scientific theory is a serious subject," you're wrong. It is not a scientific theory. I'm not saying it isn't true(*) so don't get your panties in a bunch. I'm just saying it is not science. Science is the search for natural explanations to non-intuitive phenomena. Scientific theories make predictions that are disprovable(**). ID is a supernatural explanation to a non-intuitive phenomena which does not make predictions and is not disprovable. As such, ID is philosophy of religion, or mysticism, or faith, or whatever term you feel is appropriate for the study of supernatural explanations to non-intuitive phenomena. Not a better field, not a worse field, not more true, not less true, just a different field of study than science.

So get over it. Laugh. Or are you afraid that the shared behaviour of laughing will betray your common ancestry with the great apes? Yes, ferchrissakes, that's a joke too.

Sorry about the "ferchrissakes" thing - I didn't mean to blaspheme. The editors of that paragraph have been sacked.

* Typically supernatural explanations are inherently not disprovable, and this is the case with ID. Any scientist worth his salt will not say that something is false if it can't be disproven. Listen closely next time, you'll not hear a serious scientist say "ID is not true." The scientists aren't trying to kill God, they're just working in a different field than philosophy of religion.

** For a great example of hardcore science-like research that is not science, check out game theory. It is a fascinating area of economic research, but since it can only be used to analyze and not predict, it is not science. There's a very good article on the topic here.

According to BW, the turnover is around 15% / year. I think this means an average lifespan of the order 7 years.

Coming up with catchy product names is a lot harder than the layman might imagine, especially in this Global Age, when a word that might inspire admiration in one country can just as easily inspire red faces or unintended guffaws in another

This is one of those times I wish I had mod points.

I'd also add that having a monopoly is not inherently illegal, but using your monopoly in one market to achieve a monopoly in another is. This strikes me as an interesting point today considering the buzz currently running around the "video iPod" and Apple selling downloadable movies. If Apple made this part of the iTunes Music Store, it might lead to monopoly issues. On the other hand, if Apple were to add this to, say, iMovie (and the Windows users had to wait a bit for iMovie for Windows) there would be less of a problem.

"Google shouldn't be the arbiter on languages. Just include anything considered legitimate by a third-party source, such as the CIA World Fact Book, she says. "We don't want to make a large geopolitical statement by accident."