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Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of "Free"
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
Summary, n.: a comprehensive and usually brief abstract, recapitulation, or compendium of previously stated facts or statements.
That is exactly what this slashdot post isn't.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Could anyone understand that mess? Is this a book review? If I didn't know that "outliers" was a book, I'd be clicking past.
I'm done tinkering with Windows and am ready for something easier that makes more sense.
Linux - Because your time isn't free.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Does Gladwell also have a problem with the Wikipedia articles that Anderson plagiarized for the book?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...it just wants to be anthropomorphized.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Here's the thing, I worked hard in school, went to a great college, and now I earn more than 95% of the population. I can live wherever I want, and I have lots of disposable income that I can afford to spend less-than-wisely. If the price I have to pay for medical insurance, useless gadgets, and getting to fuck vapid but beautiful trust fund whores, is an online tongue-lashing from some red-state moron(who's feeling like a badass because Comcast finally strung some fiberoptics underneath his cornfield), then I'll just have to drown my sorrows with the $15 drinks at my favorite overpriced bar ;)
p.s. Reading The New York Times would make you a laughingstock among the social circles I run in.
FACT: Chuck Norris is the only one who can read Malcom Gladwell without losing brain cells.
But even he loses one.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I love how this guy discovers the obvious and then gets people to buy his books. What is it? His hair cut fools people into thinking he is smart?
The biggest point, in my opinion, that Gladwell makes, is that you still need to find a way to make money. Both sides use the example of youtube, which gives away everything for free. However, they have infrastructure costs of somewhere around $300 million a year, which they haven't been able to cover with advertising. Will they be able to find a way to cover their costs, or not? I don't know the answer to that, maybe eventually.
I think Anderson is kind of stumbling upon a point an MBA told me once, that given enough time, all new technology becomes a commodity. There are a dozen word processors you can choose from, a dozen different types computers, a dozen types of memory to choose from, hundreds of flash game sites (which are free, but 20 years ago people paid real money for games just like those). So for the most part, things will get sold for a little more than the cost to create them (the MBA then went on to tell me a number of different techniques to 'lock in' customers to your product: trapping users with file format was one, there were many other more devious methods, and Microsoft uses many of them. I don't underestimate quality MBAs anymore).
What Anderson is saying is that more and more, marketers will use freeness to suck users in. This is actually common knowledge among marketers, they've been playing with 'free' for years, and they are really excited about it, and talk about it amongst themselves, and to anyone else who will listen. Basically Anderson is right.
What Gladwell is saying is that you still need a way to cover your costs. Basically he is right as well.
They are both right, and what's more, if you asked an MBA about this, they might wonder why you are arguing about such basic ideas. And if you ask nicely, they'll tell you tons more about things you never even thought of.
Qxe4
I hate every operating system, each for its own special reasons.
Throwing your computer off the roof - Because your time isn't free
Did it appear to anyone else that we may have temporarily slahdotted wiki? This may be the first time that that anyone's ever actually had to click the links to find out whats going on, so it seems plausible. At least its working again now.
The item is reporting a Times article, along with some related links. The issue is a familiar one and the language perfectly grammatical. What's the problem?
I piss off bigots.
Windows 7 RC -- because your time is free to Microsoft, and your data is less important than your Ballmer fanboi suckass score.
It doesn't change the fact that, deep down inside, you're just another Anonymous Coward...on.
They're both a bit wrong. Info on the net isn't free. I pay for an internet connection. People pay for computers to connect to the internet, or pay the travel cost (which still takes time, although public transport, fuel costs or even food to power their legs/arms also have costs) to a library or other free location.
The reality is that the cost to access information and collect information has changed dramatically. This is true for the newspaper producers, their access to info from reporters etc. is less costly now. It's also true for the consumer. The information people used to be happy to buy from newspapers is easier to get in other ways now. That's just the way things are.
I can understand newspaper people who complain about their lost revenue and whine about people who think the information isn't worth as much as it used to be. The business model for manure haulers and buggy whip makers changed too. That's life. Propping up failed business models with taxpayer funds or new laws to keep prices high for something that just isn't worth the old price, seems like the wrong thing to do. It just encourages large corporations to not worry about being economically viable.
...but gravity is :-)
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Linux - Because your time isn't free.
In having experience as a casual user of Linux with several distributions over the last few decades, I don't really see how the left and right half of this statement go together. I've spent far more time digging through newsgroups and forum posts and google hits trying to find answers to my Linux problems than I ever did with Windows. And I'm a computer programmer by trade and a former help desk worker and hardware debugger.
Windows sucks, but Linux sucks, too. The thing about Windows is that it typically has far fewer rough edges in its GUIs than Linux does, and that's where you get hung up on when you're doing something for the first time. It also has far wider hardware support. And you've got to be kidding if you don't recognize that hardware troubleshooting is one of the biggest time sinks there is.
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Challenging the idea of "Free"?
I thought that was the job of "the chosen people".
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Throwing your computer off the roof - Because your time isn't free
There are other reasons for throwing your computer off the roof. In the early days of Apple we had a little commercial system based on Apple Pascal that ran on a ][+. It was a true blivit in the classical sense, something sort of written that ran a part of the business until it couldn't anymore.
When we took it to the roof of the building and threw it into the parking lot, someone remarked "That's the longest it's ever gone without a crash". We used 11/70's from that point until they couldn't do the job either, but they were too big to conveniently throw off the roof.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
wikipedia:
1000 times taller than the average human and still classed as a midget?
Troubleshooting hardware was my biggest timesink until I switched to linux. Then things just started owrking.
That's just my experience but no more hunting for drivers, dependency hell (well not since I left Windows & Fedora 4), no more installing this and that just to lockdown a system to barely usuable.
I don't claim to speak for all users, but linux has given me far fewer problems over the years.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Political analyst Matthew Yglesias over at CAP has a fairly good take on both the book and the review at the CAP web site.
sPh
To try and make a long story short, but not too short:
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson are, according to the Guardian newspaper, "Two of the world's leading thinkers". A title seemingly obtained from a long career of writing endless books about things no one really cares about, but everyone likes to have an opinion on.
Andeson is the author of a book called, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price", in which he argued that in an age where terabyte drives can be had for less than $100 , and megabytes of data can be whizzed around the tubes in seconds, a story or articles or other pieces of data only a few kilobytes in size can only be worth, well, nothing.
The spat began when , Gladwell, in his review of the book, became a bit, harsh, in his critques of Anderson, calling his arguments "pithy"(sic!) and "uncompromising", and generally regarded Anderson's arguments as lacking in substance(my word!).
Unfortunately, this rather vicious assault came at a time when Anderson was recently caught plagiarising material, and worse from Wikipedia, so he must have felt a need to defend his intellectual honor from Gladwell's slights. He therefore promptly responded with am open letter titled "Dear Malcom: Why so threatened?"
At this point everyone in the playground let out a collective "OOOUUUUHHHHHHHHH!!!" and someone was heard to yell "Fight!". Needless to say, this sort of hubbub is rarely seen in such great intellectual circles, and the social clubs are just brimming with gossip about the scandal.
The Guardian, ever the vigilant reporter of great matters of state, has dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the greater public. In addition, their great commentator Murad Ahmed, has already declared that Gladwell "wins this one on points", which is certain to stir things up a bit.
It's all so exciting! Wouldn't you agree?!
May the Maths Be with you!
Linux - Because your time isn't free.
Linux the operating system for people whom time has no value.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Guarantied to attract at least 8 fanbois since 1972.
As an added bonus, the above offtopic flamebait has people replying to it about the value of their time.
There is more unintentional comedy in this thread than in an average Turkish remake of a famous action movie.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Malcolm Gladwell is one of those people, not precisely stupid, but so shallow and lacking in insight that he makes Chris Anderson, who is simply a hack, look brilliant by comparison. Gladwell, lest we forget, specializes in gushing soft journalism pieces on people whom he has designated as "great". He's what I call a Mensa bottom feeder - he produces work for people who like to think about how smart they are, which is not how actually-smart people spend their time.
Gladwell wouldn't know what to do with an actual idea if he had one (I envisage a dog with a great piece of artwork, sort of chewing on it.) Now, Anderson's piece is competent hackery, which is better than most people could do I don't mean this critically, but something about it intersects with the sort of faux-highbrow pablum that Gladwell thinks he understands. This is very threatning to Gladwell - going back to the dog analogy, it's like he's got some glimpse of a world of ideas and there's a threat to him there that he can't really understand. Gladwell is getting good money to stick his nose up Bill Gates' behind and there's an army of other dogs willing to do that for free. So he lashes out in a rage, and since he can dimly percieve Anderson (but not the more interesting and provocative people whose work Anderson has extended), Anderson becomes his target.
Again, I have nothing against a competent hack. But I do have some real criticism for Anderson - seriously, you admire Gladwell?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
In my experience, Linux is usually either very simple or very complicated. Like, you boot a computer and if it autodetects everything then wow is that much easier than Windows. When it doesn't work though, on Windows it's usually a CD/download and next/next/finish away. On Linux there's usually some f-ugly reason it's not in the kernel, almost so my first thought is "can this be solved with an addon card?"
What ends up being the endless timesinks for me though is when I try to use stuff primarily designed for Windows. Like for example all the various forms of embedded video, I hope to god that the HTML5 <video> element takes off bigtime. There's so many other variations apart from flash, and flash itself has been hell to tweak too. And I don't know how often I've messed with kopete/pidgin but they never ever work well with MSN - I get messages yes but offline messages, custom icons, picture sharing and tons of other stuff plain old does not work. I still have to deal with websites that are IE only - fortunately I can do that through a VirtualBox (probably WINE too). In short, Linux is great as long as you can live in the Linux-bubble but the moment you have to interact with the Windows world it's a huge timesink.
I've grown more and more pragmatic with time - instead of fiddling with trying to make stuff work I try to:
a) Buy Linux-friendly hardware
b) Deal with all stuff Windows through VirtualBox
c) Eliminate b) instead of trying to tweak WINE
It's not really the complex apps like Photoshop I miss... it's the really "simple" stuff like browsing the web and chatting with people like a normal person. As an absolute #1 on my hit list would be MSN - please find a way to make an open standard popular (yes, I know of IRC and Jabber - welcome to geekland), it's really not working very well today.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, this is not a book review. And yes, in his books Gladwell does state the "obvious" and isn't always on point with his assertions. But in this critique of Anderson's ideas, Gladwell makes his point with one phrase: Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion; $26.99) Yes, for all of Anderson's extolling of the virtues of free content, he's still selling his book for money.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
...and it was basically a verbal blowjob for KIPP. When he wasn't doing that, he was praising Japanese models while poo-pooing different levels of ability, while Japanese models are super differentiated to the point that you have to earn your way into high school. Just a hodgepodge of inconsistencies that made his speech (pun intended) an outlier.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
The summary reads like gay flame fest.
That's funny. Paying $15 for a drink would make you a laughingstock in the social circles I run in.
Sing it with me now!!
"'Cause I've got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away
And I'll be okay
I'm not big on social graces
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis
Oh, I've got friends in low places
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Damn, you beat me to it. To your link, I'll add the abstract of his post:
Where Anderson goes off the rails is his suggestion that the "give it away" business model is actually a promising business model.
Competition is good for customers because it destroys profits. The way you make real money is by getting into situations where you're insulated from competition. Meanwhile, as market sectors turn to a Free business model, they're just going to become way less lucrative.
Example: YouTube loses money. But since Google as a whole can easily afford to cover YouTube's losses, it's hard to see Google management shutting down a market-leader. As the underlying technology gets cheaper the scale of the losses should get smaller, making it ever-more-realistic to run the business at a loss and thus ever-less-likely that a pay-to-play vendor can move in and charge monopoly rents.
That's the real lesson of Free. The combination of competition, the near-zero marginal cost of production, and the customer draw of zero pricing means that the market-leader in video is bound to lose money. To win the market, you need to make your product Free. But while your marginal cost is near-zero, it's not actually zero, so you're losing money.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It is common knowledge that has been confirmed by various higher-ups at Google over the past few years, that as far as Google is concerned, "What is good for The Web, is good for Google". Google spends hundreds of millions per year on various free giveaways that it will not now or probably ever recoup costs on - things like Chrome, supporting Firefox, YouTube, etc.
Why does it do this? Because the more people utilize the web, the more it becomes the center of their daily lives, they more they will rely on Google as the librarian of all of that knowledge - which means they will get more money from their ads.
Google does not have to make money any project it launches, as long as whatever it is doing is going to cause you to use the web more in one way or another, because they know if you are using the web, then you are probably going to be searching it with Google.com.
Gladwell just doesn't get it. Chris Anderson IS finding ways to make money off of giving things for free.
No really, he took something free (wikipedia) and charged money for it.
How dare you reply my first post with rubbish like this? You deserve to be slated a thousand cuts
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
Man, it's not exactly clash of the intellectual titans, is it?
My take is that Gladwell is post-peak and he knows it.
IIRC his last book got kind of panned, and I don't know if the one before that was super well received, either, and the last thing he wants is someone else with "big, revolutionary & daring ideas" shoving him out of the spotlight.
I mean, if that happens, he's just another loudmouth with an iPhone and a bunch of opinions.
Gladwell's "big" ideas and how-smart-am-I delivery I think will be non-starters in a world of 15% unemployment. They may keep going over big among the faux intelligentsia still capable of affording $6 lattes and Kindles, but won't mean shit to those of us sharecropping the back yard.
... is that measured with chairs?
Well, my most recent experience with linux and hardware was actually less time consuming than usual. It was basically "Q: So, how do I get this pcmcia ethernet card to work on this laptop? A: You don't. There is zero driver support for it in linux." So yeah, that was pretty quick. Prior to that, on another laptop, the kernel simply locked on boot. This was also quickly solved as I realized that it just wasn't worth it. As much as I'd rather be using linux for various ideological reasons, my time had become valuable that I could stomach just installing the "inferior" Windows, which would work right out of the box.
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I think Anderson is kind of stumbling upon a point an MBA told me once, that given enough time, all new technology becomes a commodity. There are a dozen word processors you can choose from, a dozen different types computers, a dozen types of memory to choose from, hundreds of flash game sites (which are free, but 20 years ago people paid real money for games just like those). So for the most part, things will get sold for a little more than the cost to create them (the MBA then went on to tell me a number of different techniques to 'lock in' customers to your product: trapping users with file format was one, there were many other more devious methods, and Microsoft uses many of them. I don't underestimate quality MBAs anymore).
Commoditization is usually a surface phenomenon. When you start using things you always find little niggles and poor design choices that you have to learn to live with, because you didn't have the knowledge and time to choose a more suitable product.
There is so much potential for marketers to make their products stand out, and even deserve a premium, by giving their potential customers more help, rather than just agenda-pushing ads and blurb.
This help can be provided by independent consumer advisors. There are ways for product makers to encourage and reward the people who help their customers, without compromising the independence of these advisors.
no one is gonna care.
Well put. Would have used my mod points, but I had already comments on how painful it is to read Gladwell, especially knowing people take him seriously.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Laugh all you want, as long as you don't spit in my fries.
^_^
It's not strictly true to talk about the kinds of economic models Anderson is talking about (if I understand this correctly) as "free". They just involve transactions on the consumer end that are too small to bother collecting money for -- from the consumer. That's not anything particularly revolutionary. Television ran for years that way with advertising revenues.
But if you look at television news, you see the Achilles heel of these models when it comes to journalism. The three national networks for many years had news shows which were produced to serious journalistic standards. But local news was a practically a by-word for cheap sensationalism. "If it bleeds it leads". It's not that it is impossible to have high quality local news, newspapers did it for years. It just wasn't economical to put the effort in for local markets unless the consumer ponied up dough.
The secret of "free" information is that those tiny increments of consumer value -- usually eyeball time on an advertisement, but it could possibly be other thigns -- can be aggregated on an enormous scale into packages that are valuable enough to pay for things like journalism. Under Internet models, local news gathered to journalistic standards is not economical.
Now various crowd source models such as twitter have their place in the information ecosystem. They may beat journalism to the punch in many instances, or correct mistakes journalists make. But we need journalists to correct the mistakes the crowd makes even more. You can't use a model like Wikipedia as proof that quality journalism is possible with volunteers. Journalism is much more difficult than holding forth on a topic you might know a little (or a lot) about. Suggesting that something like Wikipedia can replace journalism is like suggesting it can replace science.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A well-crafted post, sir!
It's amazing to me how the description of this article in no way describes what it is actually about!
Most notably that Anderson bases most of his argument on the idea that there is an enormous difference between 'extremely cheap' and 'free' ("the magic of the word 'free' creates instant demand among consumers" that is vastly higher than the increase in demand seen between charging $0.10 and $0.01) but, as Gladwell points out, at no point does Anderson say that information/data storage is actually free, just that it is heading that direction asymptotically. As such, it is still, always, $0.01 or thereabouts, and not actually 'free'. So by Anderson's own argument, all the advantages that you get from free information and a post-scarcity society, don't ever happen.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Oh, you're from Crete? I'm not, so I suppose I must be allowed into the fancy clubs... :-)
I think the word you're probably looking for is "cretin", i.e. "a stupid, vulgar, or insensitive person : clod, lout" (Merriam-Webster). "Cretan", properly capitalized to boot as it is in your comment, means "someone from Crete".
But if you are indeed a Cretan, then I suppose I must be a cretin. Doh!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The lower the price of production gets, the more valuable IP gets. Consider cars for instance (this is Slashdot after all). The basics of building a car cost far less today than they did in 1950. Put another way, if you wanted to build a 1950-level car today, you could sell it for a lot less (in real dollars) than you could then. Manufacturing technology and management is just far more efficient now.
But do cars cost a lot less now than they did in 1950? No. The reason is that today's cars are far more complex and capable machines than cars were in the 1950s. A greater percentage of a car's value today is IP than it was in 1950.
Pharmaceuticals are an even better example. It is not that expensive to manufacture pharmaceuticals. What makes them expensive is their design, and the knowledge of how to use them safely. If you pick up any given pharmaceutical pill, a huge portion of its value is the IP is represents.
Finally consider the pure-IP products like software and music. The cost to reproduce a hit game or album is very, very low. But it is no easier to produce the ORIGINAL of a hit game or album now than it was decades ago. It's not like every band blows up like the Beatles today. If anything the cheaper reproduction has made it even harder to create truly stand-out IP that sells widely. In a world where every song is free, we still have only so much time to listen. Without price the only basis for competition is how good or catchy the song is itself--the pure IP. And the Pirate Bay does not help produce that.
A big failing of Anderson and others (he's certainly not the first to play the "free is inevitable" game), is a failure to take into account the role of law in markets. The law places limits within which the free market operates, including with respect to IP. If it is against the law to freely copy IP, with fines or jail at stake, there will be a deterrence to "free" and copies of IP will retain a price within the official, legal market.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is pretty much where this debate was during the IT bubble 10 years ago. Everyone was wondering how all the .coms were planning on making money when everything they sold was "free."
Of course, those services that truly were free didn't last, and those that actually weren't free and had many strings attached didn't last either, except the latter pissed a lot of people off in the process. Some managed to IPO and raise money successfully, but raising money and making money are different things, and in the end everyone lost except those who knew when to get out.
They should require by law that every company disclose how they make their money and how they cover their costs. This used to be obvious. Only recently has this become convoluted with all the "innovation" in the financial sector and with contracts. They should also require "simple commerce" without any non-upfront, opt-out type of fees.
Manipulation is not innovation. It is manipulation.
Gladwin said Anderson "forgets the plants and the power lines". I think such positions are one-dimensional, shallow. They assume that costs, in this case power distribution, are static.
The very act of reducing the cost of the power generation by 20% may iteratively reduce the costs of other business, wages, and of living itself, ultimately reducing the costs across the board. One example may be that, if fuel was cheap, or free, it may be cost effective and more imperative to reduce or eliminate the much higher distribution costs, maybe by installing smaller local reactors like the Toshiba. If the cost to heat your home dropped by 20%, your distribution costs dropped, and your purchased goods were made with cheaper energy costs, you may take a certain percentage less in wages to live. Iterate many times across all business and society to reach equilibrium.
Garth Brooks on Slashdot?
Holy shitsville!
Probably depends how long you've been running it, which in your case I'd guess is less than 5 years. (People using it 15+ years ago generally have sufficient historical awareness to realize that it was new then, and that nobody could have been using it for "the last few decades".)
As you said, the time-consuming aspects of Linux were digging through the internet learning stuff. With Windows, you spent insane amounts of time doing stuff. The difference is that learning scales much better; if you run a half-dozen machines, you might spend twice the time learning stuff. You'll spend 6 times as long doing stuff; Linux comes out way ahead. Likewise, if you actually stick with it, you roll through the learning curve and end up spending less time on it.
As for hardware, a particularly nasty time I once had with Win2K and a couple PCI modems is at least double the time I've ever spent on a Linux hardware issue. To be sure, there's a substantial amount of hardware that simply doesn't work with Linux, so installing it on an existing machine (or randomly buying new hardware without looking at compatibility) may not go smoothly, but it doesn't take much time to go buy new hardware. When it does work, it usually just works, so hardware troubleshooting tends not to be a big time sink for me, on either OS, and I've had more and worse pathological exceptions on Windows.
Then things just started owrking
Except your spellchecker possibly ?
I look at it slightly differently. Both Windows and Linux take time to set up. The thing is once I have them set up then I don't have to worry about Linux. Windows I need to update the anti-virus, scan for malware, and might still get something. Having to defrag the disk is just bloody annoying. Linux just gets turned on and does its job. The usual reason Linux gets changed at all is because I change to another distro. The downfall of Linux is that I like to play with computers and the bloody thing works so well it gets boring.
[Windows] also has far wider hardware support.
I'd just like to point out that this is patently false.
RTFM
The usual reason Linux gets changed at all is because I change to another distro.
This is only true if your machine is not connected to the outside world.
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Quit wasting my entropy, you insensitive clod!
I installed my first linux machine about 15 years ago, so yeah, I was exaggerating. It really did seem like longer. And yes, it was a fairly new thing when I did. I went to TAMU and I remember attending a demo they did for their own distribution. I can't remember now if I ever installed the TAMU distribution or if my slackware install was my first. I later installed Redhat, Gentoo (very shortly), Debian and some others I can't remember. My last serious installation was a Debian (potato or woody) laptop that ran fine for years. But that was because I just wanted it to be an http/smtp server. Even so, getting some of the hardware to work was quite frustrating. I finally turned off that machine about two years when I moved to Google Apps for Domains. At that time, dselect would crash on me and the system wouldn't even let me do security updates anymore.
I'm sure part of my issue is that I wanted to install it on laptops (work often gave away old clunky laptops that were being replaced by newer shiny ones). Linux lagged Windows by years on laptop support. I can't say I know the state of that lag now since I haven't installed another. But I have also had real issues with desktops, too. Wireless PCI network cards have been a particular bane of mine. Linux also greatly lagged on the wireless front by quite a few years. Again, can't speak to that now. Another fun failures was a cheapo SATA controller card.
And yes, I fully agree that if you have the time to dedicate to really learning the system, I would be much more of an expert at Linux and would probably be able to figure out issues a LOT quicker. To some degree, my greater experience with Windows puts me in that category. If I were an admin of a network, I would love for that network to be all-Linux and hate for it to be all-Windows. But again, I speak as a casual user, not as a network admin. I do know that at the place I work, we have a particularly unskilled and uninquisitive network admin. All the machines are Windows machines, including all the servers. He manages to make it work, even though he is clueless. And when I have to try to figure out something rather than ask him to do it, I can usually navigate the GUIs enough to get it done. I can't even imagine all this being true for a linux shop with the same admin.
The thing about troubleshooting is that we're all anecdotes. Unless someone has spent a great percentage of their time purely troubleshooting both systems, their data is skewed. And if you've spent that much time, you've moved yourself into the expert user category and that's a different discussion. I fully admit that my experience may not be the same as your (speaking of all posters on this thread) experience. Nevertheless, it is my experience.
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[Windows] also has far wider hardware support.
I'd just like to point out that this is patently false.
I'd just like to point out that you are completely wrong.
Neat, we can both contradict each other!
Seriously, though - the market is around 90% of the market. Most hardware simply isn't made without at least Windows support. If it doesn't have Windows support, it gets taken back to the store. Now, there are some pieces of hardware that are crap and don't work right in any OS (I'm looking at you, Creative Labs), but that's not really germane to this discussion. There are also specialized components made for servers or other special situations that may be more likely to have Linux support than Windows, but again, that's not really germane to a discussion of the casual user (which is what you replied to).
These simple facts transcend either your or my anecdotal experiences.
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Whats the matter, Free not working out for you and now you get the hairs on your back in a raise because someone dares to challenge your Free Idiotocracy?
If you need a book to explain that everything you are, have, done and will do in your miserable lives was the product of NOT FREE, then you are a fucking TOOL of the highest order. That should lead you to conclude that FREE means SLAVE dumbasses. But you have been manipulated since you came out of your moms rotten hole.
If you cling to your Free Idiotocracy you will effectively code yourself out of work and a future dummy. Wake Up fools.
FREE = a Randian outcome in which you are the slave
Now run to your precious internet to find "links to truth" just as you did when you pulled the lever for Obama who is now ushering in your collective demise in ways you cant even begin to understand since there are no links to lay it all out in a way you can understand, your a fucking mind slave.
I have been railing here for years, I am a troll, not because I live under a bridge but because moderation here deems my viewpoint so. I can see now, I was right as usual as more and more of you are pumping gas and yet are still clinging to your marxist delusions of FREE.
Enjoy the slippery slope for you are doomed
PS Fuck You and your Mods and Score you fuckwads
Disregarding that the 90% figure is dubious at best outside of the U.S.... Disregarding that Linux supports ARM, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, x86_64, S/390, SPARC, PowerPC, VAC, and a bunch of others that Windows does not... Disregarding both of those points, it's still nearly impossible I am incorrect on this point.
Try getting support for your ISA modem on Windows. Not the Windows that came with the hardware, mind; the most recent Windows. Try getting drivers for Windows Vista on a motherboard made by a company that went out of business a decade ago. Try getting bugfix drivers for your Voodoo 3 these days. Hell, just try putting the newest Windows on computers that are more than four years old (something "casual" users are very good at) and you'll probably run into trouble. While it's nice to say "at least Windows support" doing so implies that every Windows is the same and that the support base is ever-increasing. Reality isn't that kind: Hardware generally has drivers in the Linux kernel that stay there more or less forever and drivers for the current generation of Windows at the time.
I'm not trying to beat you down or anything; it's just one thing to relate your experience casually and quite another to make sweeping generalisations that you're not qualified to make. :)
RTFM
I think that something to keep in mind is the "Free Beer" vs. "Free Speech" aspects. Anderson/Gladwell/Yglesias are focusing on the Free Beer side. For instance:
- Google is giving away a video sharing service, free beer.
- RedHat sells a product that can be copied, modified, and sold or given away by customers, free speech.
Google elected to give away the video service, but isn't dependent on serving free video.
RedHat's business stands upon contributing to and selling a product that others contributed to and sold.
RedHat's customers are free to do with that product just about whatever they want with, as long as the customer's don't turn around and market themselves as RedHat (ergo, CentOS doesn't get sued). YouTube users are limited by the copyrights on the uploaded material, and Google's willingness to fund the service.
In either case, competition has destroyed potential profit that would accrue to a monopolist. However, there is money to be made in Free Speech, provided one adds value of some sort. There is no money in Free Beer, other than to deny potential competitors a market, or as just another form of marketing overhead.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Again, you're completely missing the context of my post. None of those situations fall within it.
So yeah, you can pull a quote of mine out of context, put it in a different context and claim I'm wrong. Can't really stop you on that. But if you actually want to have this discussion within the context of where I made that statement, let me know.
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Whoa there, you use so much name calling that a rational person is forced to disregard your perceptions.
This is false because the next version of Chrome is going to ship with extensions, and one of the first extensions to be ported is AdBlock.
The composer Brahms responded to a review of his latest symphony: "Dear sir: I am seated in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me, and very soon it will be behind me."
Which was recently posted on /. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.