I'm sick of bushes that act as barriers. First off, I could probably jump over that bush in real life. But even if I couldn't, my character is carrying a chainsaw that he already used to cut a half dozen dragons into pieces. You mean to tell me that that same chainsaw can't cut through a few shrubs?
Uh oh, a wooden police barricades. No way I can get past that. I guess my character isn't flexible enough to crawl under it, or strong enough to just push it over. Nevermind the rocket launcher that I'm carrying.
I was there too in terms of social awkwardness, pretty bad up until college, where I started to figure some of it out. I'm not that much of a social guy now though. I don't much care for parties, I don't like crowds all that much. I find that interacting with large groups of people is exhausting work. But for other people, my mom for example, they find crowds to be incredibly energizing, and can't stand sitting by themselves and doing something quiet.
But the thing that I finally realized is that neither way is better than the other, just that one of those ways is better for me personally. The world is full of both kinds, and needs both kinds. And because of that, there are times when I'm going to have to deal with the opposite kind. So I've given it a go, and I've learned how to deal with a lot of it. Where I can fit in with it, what my limitations are. I can go out to a restaurant and sit at a table with 30 other people and be fine, because the fact that we're eating means I have something else to do, which helps me keep my mind focused, instead of thinking about how loud it is in the restaurant. But if those same 30 people and I were all standing around at a cocktail party just chatting, I feel pretty out of place. I guess I'm just more of a task oriented person.
Anyways, back to the sports issue, I can agree with a lot of what you said. Professional sports are generally becoming less and less about the game and more about the money, which is uninspiring at best. But that doesn't explain the irrational hatred of sports in general that I commonly saw among much of the geek crowd. I think it's along the same lines of some of the social aspects for some of those people, "these things are hard for me, so they're obviously bad." That's a bad attitude for anyone to have about anything.
I don't know him, so I can't comment on him specifically. But being an obnoxious brat isn't the only way that this sort of thing can happen. Just refusing to participate in social activities can be a symptom. Not to say that if you don't go to parties and get drunk and crazy that you're some sort of misanthrope, just that it's not impossible to have a disdain for "normal" people and be fairly quiet about it.
A example that I've seen often enough are techie type people who "hate all sports", and who believe that anyone who's a fan of a team that they don't play for is just being dumb. While you can certainly make an argument that hyper-competitiveness is having bad effects on our society, the blanket opinion that "organized sports are stupid" seems to me to be a byproduct of some sort of elitism.
But I am in no way trying to make judgements about this Crunch guy specifically. Never met him. Just a more general statement that some people choose to ignore/reject/ridicule the majority of the norms of our cultures, which is certainly their decision. But they shouldn't expect everyone else to bend over to integrate them into society.
Meh, if I were going to spend $600 on a video game console, I'd feel much better about it knowing that it was outselling all the other consoles 4:1, which would be a pretty good guarantee that it would see a ton of games in the future.
I don't think it's all over for the PS3 at this point, but things aren't looking great for them at the moment.
Well, there are people who like to think that they're smart enough that they don't have to pay any mind to "society's rules", that their extreme brilliance is all that they need. Geeks are notorious for that, although often unfairly stereotyped to the extremes. But in generally, things like "I'm going to wear t-shirts and sandals to business meetings, and they can go ahead and fire me if they don't like it" are basically symptoms of the same thing.
The problem is that in the end, technology is really only useful to the point that it interacts with people. While there are many who will appreciate technology for technology's sake, if you're really going to get anywhere, what you're doing has to satisfy people. And if your attitude pushes people away before they can appreciate what you're trying to do with technology, then you're just going to end up isolating yourself. As smart as you are, there are other people out there just as smart, who are also able and willing to have more normal social contact with others, and they'll get chosen over you.
If you want to make a technology based business, It's not enough just to understand technology. You should also strive to understand people as well. You'll never figure it all out, but the ways that individuals, organizations, and societies work are important, and pretending that it isn't won't make everyone else go away.
It's not false or a lie, but it could be construed as misleading, because it's not very informative. What you don't say is often just as important as what you do say.
If I had just read that headline and none of the summary and/or story, I would probably imagine that there was a competition the involved playing the Wii, and someone was flailing around and accidentally hit this woman in the side of the head or something. Even if the headline wasn't intentionally meant to make the Wii sound dangerous, it's not beyond the realm of possibility to think that someone might read it as such.
A more useful, and less ambiguous title would be along the lines of "Woman competing for a Nintendo Wii killed by water intoxication." It's much more clear and informative. Plus I'd imagine the fact that plain old water can be toxic is actually more interesting to most people than the fact that she was trying to win a Nintendo.
what? Yeah, their success rate is rather high right now, but that's kind of the whole point of what I was saying. In the 90's, they had way more projects going on, and shipped way more products, but the overall quality of them in regards to the rest of the industry was not particularly impressive.
At the risk of sounding incredibly fanboy-ish, I'd say that you could accurately call Apple a leader in the computer hardware market, the OS market, as well as the MP3 player market and the online music market. While they only are at the top of sales for two of those markets, they still manage to produce computers and software that are highly regarded, and they make money doing that as well. If you look at the term "market leader" purely in terms of units shipped, well Apple is certainly not putting up the kinds of numbers that Dell or Microsoft do. But I think you can make a good argument that Apple has pushed the world of computing along an awful lot when you consider their size compared to some of their competitors.
And in regards to another one of your points, I fail to see how Apple would benefit from splitting into multiple companies. They seem to be one of those operations where the different parts benefit from being part of a greater whole. The iPod/iTunes "user experience" takes a whole lot from what Apple had already learned/developed making Macs for a couple decades. Their hardware and software tends to play together so very nicely. And all of their entertainment systems are going to need to talk to computers, and it's much easier to get that right when you've got a bunch of computer/OS designers right down the hall.
What I think is most important for a company like Apple is focus. And that focus needs to come from the top. Perfectionism is a double edged sword, and not really all that hard to find. It can enable you to make some really great things, but the nature of working that way means that you can only make so many great things, because perfectionism takes time.
Before Jobs returned, Apple still made some cool stuff, and I'd imagine there were still plenty of smart, perfectionist engineers and such working there. But they were producing about 12 billion different projects, and there's just no way to get that many things right. The old Apple may have had all the technical and design oriented staff they needed to design the iPod, but it never would've happened, because an mp3 player project would've been competing with too many others for resources and talent.
Steve Jobs' cult of personality and RDF are certainly a benefit. It gets them a good bit of free advertising and makes following Apple that much more fun. But his best contribution to Apple is his ability to focus the company's efforts in just a few directions, and usually in the right directions.
If Jobs was out tomorrow, and they replaced him with a guy who was as boring as a stump in the ground, they'd still do alright as long as the replacement kept the company on task. There'd definitely be a short-term stock slump as investors got worried, and Macworld keynotes would probably be far less amusing, but Apple could survive, and continue to churn out cool stuff.
If the iPhone fails commercially, Apple cancels the project, and goes back to just making computers; I'll still consider it a success if the random access voicemail becomes standard for all cell phones. Cripes, the current system just sucks so hard it's not even funny.
Send me 20 million dollars to fund my campaign, and if I have any cash left after a 6 year vacation, I'll see about filling out whatever paperwork is necessary to run for office.
That will likely happen, although probably after the iPhone is available, so that all the people frothing at the mouth for this thing spend as much money as is possible, and so that the iPod version doesn't cut the legs out from under the iPhone before it gets going.
In a couple years, I'd expect there to be a range of iphones similar to the ipod now. There likely won't be an iphone shuffle, though.
Yeah, but if there's one thing that makes it much easier to make money, it's money. It's certainly possible to start your own business with nothing, and build it all from scratch and be successful. But you're not guaranteed success, you're going to have to work very hard, and probably get a little lucky.
Working somewhere else and saving some money before heading out on your own is no guarantee of success either, but it's likely to put you in a better position, as not being on the verge of starvation can be less stressful. Many businesses do not start out making money on day one.
Finally, there are just some fields where you cannot just go it alone from the very beginning. The reasons may be practical, or they may be legal, or both. You can't just decide one day that you're going to be a doctor and open up your own hospital in your extra bedroom. You can't suddenly decide that you want to be an architect and start designing office buildings.
Just because you leave a job doesn't doom you to a future of unemployment. I'm no HR guy, but being one of the early guys at Google probably doesn't look too bad on someone's resume. But besides that, these are likely talented and highly motivated people, and now that they've got some money in the bank, they can do their own thing and put their time and energy exactly where they want to. For some of those people, Google was still doing what they wanted to do, so they still work there. Others are using their money to try to start up their own businesses. Still others might be perfectly content to sit on a couch and play PS3 on a 80" TV all day.
I can promise you that a lot more than 100 people have made millions off of Google. Their stock has gone nuts, there's many billions of dollars to go around. Just one billion dollars divided by 100 people is 10 million each. A million dollars is a lot of money to an individual person, but for these big corporations, that is not an unsual amount of money at all.
No no no, it's all good. Her clients list has Apple Computer, Inc. but they just changed their name to Apple, Inc. A move Steve Jobs will surely regret once this crack legal team finishes burying him.
This is just a sudden thought, and actually kind of dumb, but I thought I'd throw it on out there. If Sony really wanted to make Blu-ray desirable, they'd have found a way to not use disc media. I understand that it's a higher density disc, and there's better quality on it, but the problems that I have with DVD's aren't really that the picture isn't nice enough.
The thing I hate about discs is that they're very fragile. I don't know what a cost-effective replacement would be, but I'm willing to bet that if Blu-ray used little iridescent cubes or something equally exotic as media, it would generate a whole lot more attention, just plain feel more high-tech, and make Blu-ray about a million times cooler.
Now, it's much easier for me to say that they should invent a whole new storage technology than it is for someone to actually go out and do it. But if they're expecting people to go out and repurchase all of their movies again, they need to at least have the appearance of the sort of jump that we experienced with VHS -> DVD.
That retarded idea out of the way, I think the sweet spot price for Blu-ray is going to be closer to $99 than $299. They're just don't offer that much over DVD players.
Yeah, Sony did not dominate with the PS or the PS2 because their system was so incredibly powerful compared to the competition. Infact, the PS2 has significantly less hardware than the Xbox or gamecube. They won by having tons of games, plenty of good exclusives, and the whole DVD player thing helped some too. (To a degree that Blu-ray won't. Seriously. Most people out there are perfectly happy with DVD's for now. VHS sucked, DVD doesn't.)
I'm not really sure where Sony got the idea that their future depends on them cramming all the technology they can find into a plastic cases. I mean, they used to hype the PS2 and the "emotion engine" as being some sort of computing miracle, but I didn't think they actually believed it.
While there are, no doubt, game developers out there that enjoy having lots of hardware out there, most of them also enjoy having lots of money, so their efforts are generally going to go where the market is.
Listen, the USA is not an entirely libertarian free-market, nor should it be. A completely free market is not a good idea in theory, nor would it be in practice.
The cable companies/phone companies/etc. are not currently existing in a free market. All corporate utility providers are subject to lots of government rules, and for good reasons. Many of those reasons are purely practical. Running utility lines requires a lot of wires and pipes and whatnot to be strung through our cities, or under the ground, through many different pieces of public and private property. Not setting some regulations for how all of that work would create huge logistic, safety, and performance problems. I wouldn't want six different power companies all stringing lines through my neighborhood, even if it did bring prices down some.
So why would any businessman want to get involved in this? Because when a company agreed to provide utility services under those restrictions, they were usually given a monopoly in that market, without all the work of crushing their competitors.
Technology, forever moving forwards, has led to some interesting circumstances, where digital technology is allowing some of those formally separate utilities to start to dabble in each others' markets. It's all turning to 1's and 0's, and our computers don't really care how that information gets into our house. Even the power companies are exploring bringing data to us over their lines. Add in the development of wireless, and all of a sudden these long-time monopolies are experiencing competition.
There are plenty of examples of how monopolies tend to act in response to competition. They often involve using their current power to exert influence on other companies, and force unfair deals. These deals are seldom beneficial for the consumer. The Net Neutrality movement is an attempt to head off one kind of these dealings before they become a problem.
To distill the point, let's put it this way:
The government gave many of these companies their monopoly position. And now the government is trying to keep them from using that monopoly position to unfairly limit competition and new technologies.
I guess a 100% free market argument would be that their never should've been any regulations on these utilities in the past. I don't think the argument for that is particularly strong, but even if you could, it doesn't change what has already happened, and getting rid of all regulation and pretending like it never happened is not a good solution.
I don't know man... the local technical college was advertising some interesting courses on the radio this morning. "Owning ideas you'll never implement", "Children say the darndest things (that you can sue their parents for)", and my personal favorite, "Injuring yourself with every-day home objects for fun and profit".
I went to a real university and have a graduate degree, and I still have to work like, at least 40 hours per week! American Dream my ass!
This is pretty star trek geek of me, but I remember reading something about how in TNG they've got faster than light sensors somehow. But they didn't always. In fact, there's the so called "picard maneuver", which was developed before then. Basically how it worked is you'd approach an enemy ship, and they'd see you with their cameras or whatever, at a set distance away. Then you quickly go into warp drive, just for a split second, to get closer to the enemy. You warp to them significantly faster than the speed of light. So your ship comes out of warp right on top of them, and while they see you coming out of warp, they're still receiving the light your ship reflected before you warped, so it appears to them that there is a second ship. And while they try to figure that all out, you shoot the crap out of them I guess.
The switch to metric also allowed the shedding of some traditions that really didn't make any real sense beyond the inertia they had gained in the past. My favorite example (I'm an architect) is lumber sizes. Here in the US, a 2x4 wood stud is actually 1.5" x 3.5" x whatever length. The extra.5" has to do with wood shrinking as it dries. Back before technology and processes to control it were developed, the wood was cut to 2x4, and shrunk down to whatever. It was usually close to 1.5 x 3.5, but it was inconsistent. Even the cheaper lumber is fairly consistent today, but the old nomenclature remains.
But beyond the odd naming scheme, there's a more annoying aspect about 2x4's. If you put two 1.5" pieces together, but turned sideways (for example, a header over a door), and put that up against a vertical stud wall, you end up with a 3" block connecting to the 3.5" stud, and so you end up having to put a spacer in there. Not the end of the world, but annoying, and there are other details where it is not such an easy fix, and it just makes life more difficult. When the switch to metric was made by most of the rest of the world, they took the opportunity to adjust the standard lumber sizes. And they avoided this problem by often setting the actual dimensions of studs so that the shorter width is 1/2 the longer width. It's a minor change, but if it happened here, I'd probably spend at least a half hour doing a happy dance.
I think there a few reasons why it's only Cingular. A big one being that the phone companies make a lot of money by charging their users for all sorts of extra little features, and so they've kept very tight control on the features that their phones and networks offer. Giving up that control is a risky move for Cingular, and probably took a good bit of negotiation to work out. A period of exclusivity sounds like a likely concession that Apple had to make to get this deal to work.
But even beyond that, if this phone takes off and cements itself into the public the way the iPod has, then a couple years from now, the other phone companies could be begging Apple to offer the iPhone for their networks. Just like the success of the iTMS gives Apple some decent leverage for dealing with the music industry, they're hoping to have that leverage with the phone companies, so that they can work out better deals in the future.
Thirdly (is that a word?), this is Apple's first jaunt into the world of mobile phones. There's bound to be problems. Having just one provider to deal with while working through most of these issues will make things easier, and by the time they're ready to expand, a lot of the rough edges will have been smoothed out.
We've already waited years and years for Apple to release a phone. A couple more won't hurt.
Yeah, the price is pretty much a bummer. The upside is that both the iPod and mobile phones in general have a well established history of coming down in price pretty quickly. When the first iPod came out, there was just the one model, it only worked with macs, and it was pretty expensive. Fast forwards a few years, and you've got lots of different models/sizes/colors, at a bunch of different price ranges. Oh, and even the mid-range ones are packing way more features and hardware than the original top-of-the-line. When motorola released the Razr, it was a high-end, expensive fancypants phone. Now, just a couple of years later, they're cheap and common.
There's no reason to expect anything else from the iPhone. In a couple years, phones like this will be much more available at reasonable prices. Apple should have no problem selling this as fast as they can make them for a while, even at these higher prices.
Thank you, those are some very useful comments. I'm sure that all the astronomers out there, having read your post, are preparing their resignations, and will instead focus their time on solving all of the world's troubles. Thank you again, for bringing these issues to our attention.
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I'm sick of bushes that act as barriers. First off, I could probably jump over that bush in real life. But even if I couldn't, my character is carrying a chainsaw that he already used to cut a half dozen dragons into pieces. You mean to tell me that that same chainsaw can't cut through a few shrubs?
Uh oh, a wooden police barricades. No way I can get past that. I guess my character isn't flexible enough to crawl under it, or strong enough to just push it over. Nevermind the rocket launcher that I'm carrying.
I was there too in terms of social awkwardness, pretty bad up until college, where I started to figure some of it out. I'm not that much of a social guy now though. I don't much care for parties, I don't like crowds all that much. I find that interacting with large groups of people is exhausting work. But for other people, my mom for example, they find crowds to be incredibly energizing, and can't stand sitting by themselves and doing something quiet.
But the thing that I finally realized is that neither way is better than the other, just that one of those ways is better for me personally. The world is full of both kinds, and needs both kinds. And because of that, there are times when I'm going to have to deal with the opposite kind. So I've given it a go, and I've learned how to deal with a lot of it. Where I can fit in with it, what my limitations are. I can go out to a restaurant and sit at a table with 30 other people and be fine, because the fact that we're eating means I have something else to do, which helps me keep my mind focused, instead of thinking about how loud it is in the restaurant. But if those same 30 people and I were all standing around at a cocktail party just chatting, I feel pretty out of place. I guess I'm just more of a task oriented person.
Anyways, back to the sports issue, I can agree with a lot of what you said. Professional sports are generally becoming less and less about the game and more about the money, which is uninspiring at best. But that doesn't explain the irrational hatred of sports in general that I commonly saw among much of the geek crowd. I think it's along the same lines of some of the social aspects for some of those people, "these things are hard for me, so they're obviously bad." That's a bad attitude for anyone to have about anything.
I don't know him, so I can't comment on him specifically. But being an obnoxious brat isn't the only way that this sort of thing can happen. Just refusing to participate in social activities can be a symptom. Not to say that if you don't go to parties and get drunk and crazy that you're some sort of misanthrope, just that it's not impossible to have a disdain for "normal" people and be fairly quiet about it.
A example that I've seen often enough are techie type people who "hate all sports", and who believe that anyone who's a fan of a team that they don't play for is just being dumb. While you can certainly make an argument that hyper-competitiveness is having bad effects on our society, the blanket opinion that "organized sports are stupid" seems to me to be a byproduct of some sort of elitism.
But I am in no way trying to make judgements about this Crunch guy specifically. Never met him. Just a more general statement that some people choose to ignore/reject/ridicule the majority of the norms of our cultures, which is certainly their decision. But they shouldn't expect everyone else to bend over to integrate them into society.
Meh, if I were going to spend $600 on a video game console, I'd feel much better about it knowing that it was outselling all the other consoles 4:1, which would be a pretty good guarantee that it would see a ton of games in the future.
I don't think it's all over for the PS3 at this point, but things aren't looking great for them at the moment.
Well, there are people who like to think that they're smart enough that they don't have to pay any mind to "society's rules", that their extreme brilliance is all that they need. Geeks are notorious for that, although often unfairly stereotyped to the extremes. But in generally, things like "I'm going to wear t-shirts and sandals to business meetings, and they can go ahead and fire me if they don't like it" are basically symptoms of the same thing.
The problem is that in the end, technology is really only useful to the point that it interacts with people. While there are many who will appreciate technology for technology's sake, if you're really going to get anywhere, what you're doing has to satisfy people. And if your attitude pushes people away before they can appreciate what you're trying to do with technology, then you're just going to end up isolating yourself. As smart as you are, there are other people out there just as smart, who are also able and willing to have more normal social contact with others, and they'll get chosen over you.
If you want to make a technology based business, It's not enough just to understand technology. You should also strive to understand people as well. You'll never figure it all out, but the ways that individuals, organizations, and societies work are important, and pretending that it isn't won't make everyone else go away.
It's not false or a lie, but it could be construed as misleading, because it's not very informative. What you don't say is often just as important as what you do say.
If I had just read that headline and none of the summary and/or story, I would probably imagine that there was a competition the involved playing the Wii, and someone was flailing around and accidentally hit this woman in the side of the head or something. Even if the headline wasn't intentionally meant to make the Wii sound dangerous, it's not beyond the realm of possibility to think that someone might read it as such.
A more useful, and less ambiguous title would be along the lines of "Woman competing for a Nintendo Wii killed by water intoxication." It's much more clear and informative. Plus I'd imagine the fact that plain old water can be toxic is actually more interesting to most people than the fact that she was trying to win a Nintendo.
what? Yeah, their success rate is rather high right now, but that's kind of the whole point of what I was saying. In the 90's, they had way more projects going on, and shipped way more products, but the overall quality of them in regards to the rest of the industry was not particularly impressive.
At the risk of sounding incredibly fanboy-ish, I'd say that you could accurately call Apple a leader in the computer hardware market, the OS market, as well as the MP3 player market and the online music market. While they only are at the top of sales for two of those markets, they still manage to produce computers and software that are highly regarded, and they make money doing that as well. If you look at the term "market leader" purely in terms of units shipped, well Apple is certainly not putting up the kinds of numbers that Dell or Microsoft do. But I think you can make a good argument that Apple has pushed the world of computing along an awful lot when you consider their size compared to some of their competitors.
And in regards to another one of your points, I fail to see how Apple would benefit from splitting into multiple companies. They seem to be one of those operations where the different parts benefit from being part of a greater whole. The iPod/iTunes "user experience" takes a whole lot from what Apple had already learned/developed making Macs for a couple decades. Their hardware and software tends to play together so very nicely. And all of their entertainment systems are going to need to talk to computers, and it's much easier to get that right when you've got a bunch of computer/OS designers right down the hall.
What I think is most important for a company like Apple is focus. And that focus needs to come from the top. Perfectionism is a double edged sword, and not really all that hard to find. It can enable you to make some really great things, but the nature of working that way means that you can only make so many great things, because perfectionism takes time.
Before Jobs returned, Apple still made some cool stuff, and I'd imagine there were still plenty of smart, perfectionist engineers and such working there. But they were producing about 12 billion different projects, and there's just no way to get that many things right. The old Apple may have had all the technical and design oriented staff they needed to design the iPod, but it never would've happened, because an mp3 player project would've been competing with too many others for resources and talent.
Steve Jobs' cult of personality and RDF are certainly a benefit. It gets them a good bit of free advertising and makes following Apple that much more fun. But his best contribution to Apple is his ability to focus the company's efforts in just a few directions, and usually in the right directions.
If Jobs was out tomorrow, and they replaced him with a guy who was as boring as a stump in the ground, they'd still do alright as long as the replacement kept the company on task. There'd definitely be a short-term stock slump as investors got worried, and Macworld keynotes would probably be far less amusing, but Apple could survive, and continue to churn out cool stuff.
If the iPhone fails commercially, Apple cancels the project, and goes back to just making computers; I'll still consider it a success if the random access voicemail becomes standard for all cell phones. Cripes, the current system just sucks so hard it's not even funny.
Send me 20 million dollars to fund my campaign, and if I have any cash left after a 6 year vacation, I'll see about filling out whatever paperwork is necessary to run for office.
That will likely happen, although probably after the iPhone is available, so that all the people frothing at the mouth for this thing spend as much money as is possible, and so that the iPod version doesn't cut the legs out from under the iPhone before it gets going.
In a couple years, I'd expect there to be a range of iphones similar to the ipod now. There likely won't be an iphone shuffle, though.
Yeah, but if there's one thing that makes it much easier to make money, it's money. It's certainly possible to start your own business with nothing, and build it all from scratch and be successful. But you're not guaranteed success, you're going to have to work very hard, and probably get a little lucky.
Working somewhere else and saving some money before heading out on your own is no guarantee of success either, but it's likely to put you in a better position, as not being on the verge of starvation can be less stressful. Many businesses do not start out making money on day one.
Finally, there are just some fields where you cannot just go it alone from the very beginning. The reasons may be practical, or they may be legal, or both. You can't just decide one day that you're going to be a doctor and open up your own hospital in your extra bedroom. You can't suddenly decide that you want to be an architect and start designing office buildings.
Just because you leave a job doesn't doom you to a future of unemployment. I'm no HR guy, but being one of the early guys at Google probably doesn't look too bad on someone's resume. But besides that, these are likely talented and highly motivated people, and now that they've got some money in the bank, they can do their own thing and put their time and energy exactly where they want to. For some of those people, Google was still doing what they wanted to do, so they still work there. Others are using their money to try to start up their own businesses. Still others might be perfectly content to sit on a couch and play PS3 on a 80" TV all day.
I can promise you that a lot more than 100 people have made millions off of Google. Their stock has gone nuts, there's many billions of dollars to go around. Just one billion dollars divided by 100 people is 10 million each. A million dollars is a lot of money to an individual person, but for these big corporations, that is not an unsual amount of money at all.
No no no, it's all good. Her clients list has Apple Computer, Inc. but they just changed their name to Apple, Inc. A move Steve Jobs will surely regret once this crack legal team finishes burying him.
This is just a sudden thought, and actually kind of dumb, but I thought I'd throw it on out there. If Sony really wanted to make Blu-ray desirable, they'd have found a way to not use disc media. I understand that it's a higher density disc, and there's better quality on it, but the problems that I have with DVD's aren't really that the picture isn't nice enough.
The thing I hate about discs is that they're very fragile. I don't know what a cost-effective replacement would be, but I'm willing to bet that if Blu-ray used little iridescent cubes or something equally exotic as media, it would generate a whole lot more attention, just plain feel more high-tech, and make Blu-ray about a million times cooler.
Now, it's much easier for me to say that they should invent a whole new storage technology than it is for someone to actually go out and do it. But if they're expecting people to go out and repurchase all of their movies again, they need to at least have the appearance of the sort of jump that we experienced with VHS -> DVD.
That retarded idea out of the way, I think the sweet spot price for Blu-ray is going to be closer to $99 than $299. They're just don't offer that much over DVD players.
The Walmart by my house has a nearly empty claw machine in the lobby near the garden center. It was truly a sad sight.
Yeah, Sony did not dominate with the PS or the PS2 because their system was so incredibly powerful compared to the competition. Infact, the PS2 has significantly less hardware than the Xbox or gamecube. They won by having tons of games, plenty of good exclusives, and the whole DVD player thing helped some too. (To a degree that Blu-ray won't. Seriously. Most people out there are perfectly happy with DVD's for now. VHS sucked, DVD doesn't.)
I'm not really sure where Sony got the idea that their future depends on them cramming all the technology they can find into a plastic cases. I mean, they used to hype the PS2 and the "emotion engine" as being some sort of computing miracle, but I didn't think they actually believed it.
While there are, no doubt, game developers out there that enjoy having lots of hardware out there, most of them also enjoy having lots of money, so their efforts are generally going to go where the market is.
Listen, the USA is not an entirely libertarian free-market, nor should it be. A completely free market is not a good idea in theory, nor would it be in practice.
The cable companies/phone companies/etc. are not currently existing in a free market. All corporate utility providers are subject to lots of government rules, and for good reasons. Many of those reasons are purely practical. Running utility lines requires a lot of wires and pipes and whatnot to be strung through our cities, or under the ground, through many different pieces of public and private property. Not setting some regulations for how all of that work would create huge logistic, safety, and performance problems. I wouldn't want six different power companies all stringing lines through my neighborhood, even if it did bring prices down some.
So why would any businessman want to get involved in this? Because when a company agreed to provide utility services under those restrictions, they were usually given a monopoly in that market, without all the work of crushing their competitors.
Technology, forever moving forwards, has led to some interesting circumstances, where digital technology is allowing some of those formally separate utilities to start to dabble in each others' markets. It's all turning to 1's and 0's, and our computers don't really care how that information gets into our house. Even the power companies are exploring bringing data to us over their lines. Add in the development of wireless, and all of a sudden these long-time monopolies are experiencing competition.
There are plenty of examples of how monopolies tend to act in response to competition. They often involve using their current power to exert influence on other companies, and force unfair deals. These deals are seldom beneficial for the consumer. The Net Neutrality movement is an attempt to head off one kind of these dealings before they become a problem.
To distill the point, let's put it this way:
The government gave many of these companies their monopoly position. And now the government is trying to keep them from using that monopoly position to unfairly limit competition and new technologies.
I guess a 100% free market argument would be that their never should've been any regulations on these utilities in the past. I don't think the argument for that is particularly strong, but even if you could, it doesn't change what has already happened, and getting rid of all regulation and pretending like it never happened is not a good solution.
I don't know man... the local technical college was advertising some interesting courses on the radio this morning. "Owning ideas you'll never implement", "Children say the darndest things (that you can sue their parents for)", and my personal favorite, "Injuring yourself with every-day home objects for fun and profit".
I went to a real university and have a graduate degree, and I still have to work like, at least 40 hours per week! American Dream my ass!
This is pretty star trek geek of me, but I remember reading something about how in TNG they've got faster than light sensors somehow. But they didn't always. In fact, there's the so called "picard maneuver", which was developed before then. Basically how it worked is you'd approach an enemy ship, and they'd see you with their cameras or whatever, at a set distance away. Then you quickly go into warp drive, just for a split second, to get closer to the enemy. You warp to them significantly faster than the speed of light. So your ship comes out of warp right on top of them, and while they see you coming out of warp, they're still receiving the light your ship reflected before you warped, so it appears to them that there is a second ship. And while they try to figure that all out, you shoot the crap out of them I guess.
The switch to metric also allowed the shedding of some traditions that really didn't make any real sense beyond the inertia they had gained in the past. My favorite example (I'm an architect) is lumber sizes. Here in the US, a 2x4 wood stud is actually 1.5" x 3.5" x whatever length. The extra .5" has to do with wood shrinking as it dries. Back before technology and processes to control it were developed, the wood was cut to 2x4, and shrunk down to whatever. It was usually close to 1.5 x 3.5, but it was inconsistent. Even the cheaper lumber is fairly consistent today, but the old nomenclature remains.
But beyond the odd naming scheme, there's a more annoying aspect about 2x4's. If you put two 1.5" pieces together, but turned sideways (for example, a header over a door), and put that up against a vertical stud wall, you end up with a 3" block connecting to the 3.5" stud, and so you end up having to put a spacer in there. Not the end of the world, but annoying, and there are other details where it is not such an easy fix, and it just makes life more difficult. When the switch to metric was made by most of the rest of the world, they took the opportunity to adjust the standard lumber sizes. And they avoided this problem by often setting the actual dimensions of studs so that the shorter width is 1/2 the longer width. It's a minor change, but if it happened here, I'd probably spend at least a half hour doing a happy dance.
I think there a few reasons why it's only Cingular. A big one being that the phone companies make a lot of money by charging their users for all sorts of extra little features, and so they've kept very tight control on the features that their phones and networks offer. Giving up that control is a risky move for Cingular, and probably took a good bit of negotiation to work out. A period of exclusivity sounds like a likely concession that Apple had to make to get this deal to work.
But even beyond that, if this phone takes off and cements itself into the public the way the iPod has, then a couple years from now, the other phone companies could be begging Apple to offer the iPhone for their networks. Just like the success of the iTMS gives Apple some decent leverage for dealing with the music industry, they're hoping to have that leverage with the phone companies, so that they can work out better deals in the future.
Thirdly (is that a word?), this is Apple's first jaunt into the world of mobile phones. There's bound to be problems. Having just one provider to deal with while working through most of these issues will make things easier, and by the time they're ready to expand, a lot of the rough edges will have been smoothed out.
We've already waited years and years for Apple to release a phone. A couple more won't hurt.
Yeah, the price is pretty much a bummer. The upside is that both the iPod and mobile phones in general have a well established history of coming down in price pretty quickly. When the first iPod came out, there was just the one model, it only worked with macs, and it was pretty expensive. Fast forwards a few years, and you've got lots of different models/sizes/colors, at a bunch of different price ranges. Oh, and even the mid-range ones are packing way more features and hardware than the original top-of-the-line. When motorola released the Razr, it was a high-end, expensive fancypants phone. Now, just a couple of years later, they're cheap and common.
There's no reason to expect anything else from the iPhone. In a couple years, phones like this will be much more available at reasonable prices. Apple should have no problem selling this as fast as they can make them for a while, even at these higher prices.
Thank you, those are some very useful comments. I'm sure that all the astronomers out there, having read your post, are preparing their resignations, and will instead focus their time on solving all of the world's troubles. Thank you again, for bringing these issues to our attention.