The reason why they won't license their OS is because it would be self-destructive businesswise for them to do so. They're making money off of the iPhone via hardware sales. They've got the best hardware margins in the industry. There's no way they could license iOS for the same amount per unit that they make off of iPhone hardware sales, especially when their competitor (Android) is free. Had their been a usable, easily available, and free alternative back in the 80's, then Microsoft wouldn't have dominated the way that they did.
The lesson that Apple has learned in regards to marketshare is that it more marketshare does not always equal more profits. Their vertical integration, made possible by the control that you're so quick to dump on, is what allows them to differentiate their product and get away with profit margins that the rest of the industry can only dream of.
They went down this road with the MacOS clones back in the last 90's. The clone makers just undercut Apple's prices and drove the margins down to nothing. The PC market is that way, and much of the phone market is that way. Apple has no desire to participate in that part of the market, it's really hard to make money there.
Apple will keep on doing what they're doing, and even if they end up with 10% marketshare at the end of the day, it'll likely be the most profitable 10% of the mobile market, and they'll happily keep making truckloads of money. If they end up with higher marketshare than that, then that's just gravy.
Reddit users post a fair amount of original content to the website, of varying levels of quality. Of course, it can be hard to tell whether or not a particular piece of content is actually original as its submitter may claim. But plenty of people upload movies/images/etc. to wherever for the sole purpose of linking to it from reddit.
Fair enough, nothing's perfect, but overall I think the ADA does far more good than harm. As for your tower example, that's an issue that should've been settled before the thing was built. There's really no good excuse for an oversight like that on new construction.
I dunno, the story still sounds silly to me. Apparently there was only one guy in town stuck in a wheelchair, and since the number of people in the US that use wheelchairs is close to 1%, that must've been a rather small town. In a town that small I can't imagine a family owned shop that had been going for two generations got bullied out of business by an asshole code enforcement official. Small towns aren't exactly itching to shut down their local businesses.
I design buildings for a living, and so I'm fairly well versed in handicap ramps. The max slope is generally 1:12, which means for every inch of rise, you need a foot of run. And you usually need about 4' wide once you add in handrails and such. So the ramps certainly can end up requiring a good bit of space, which can make it hard to fit one in. But on the other hand that can make your argument that your existing building doesn't have the space for a ramp much easier.
And I'd also add that when you consider the type of stuff that hardware stores tend to sell, a ramp would likely be a very welcome feature even for the non-handicapped, because carrying heavy stuff up and down stairs sucks.
I find it amazing that a family that had run a hardware store for 2 generations couldn't just build their own ramp. A handicap ramp doesn't need to be made of titanium and carbon fiber, plywood and 2X6's will work just fine. If they didn't have the space due to the way the building was situated on the street/property line/etc, then there are various rules in the law to help deal with that/grandfather in older buildings. If the rules were ignored when they originally built the place, then it's hard to feel sorry for them. Although if it was a rented space, then shouldn't the landlord have been responsible for it?
This isn't political correctness, this is basic human compassion as well as practicality. We're talking about adding basic accessibility to some web services that are quickly becoming a practical necessity in our society. A blind person shouldn't expect to pilot a fighter jet, but it's not unreasonable for them to expect to be able to pay their water bill online.
Many people like gadgets. Some of those people are 16 year old geeks, some of them are 50 year old women. Some have graduate degrees, and some of them dropped out of high school. Some of them have to save up before they spend $500, and some of them can blow $500 without batting an eye.
Being elitist or being a sheep has nothing to do with it. It's just a somewhat different type of computer. It's not a philosophy.
It must be miserable life you live where some marketing guys in california that you've never met have so much power to make you angry. Or you're actually indifferent but have decided to complain because it's easy to do so and it makes you feel better about yourself.
There are a bunch of situations in which I use my iPad that I used to use my laptop for, but the iPad works 100x better. Mostly this has to do with the fact that you can hold an ipad in almost any position/direction and it doesn't care, compared to a laptop that has a big keyboard in the way, significantly more weight to it, and often has heat dissipation issues if it sits incorrectly or on a soft surface.
Lounging on the couch and web surfing while watching TV, lazy saturday morning in bed paying silly little computer games with the wife, riding in the car and watching a tv show, etc.
Also the battery life is excellent. At my average usage level of a couple hours per day, I probably only have to remember to plug the thing in once a week.
I guess technically those aren't things that I couldn't do before, but I can do them so much more easily and comfortably now that it's really a different experience.
No kidding. I've spent years working on designs for some pretty standard buildings (condos/apartments/etc) that end up not getting built for whatever reason, and it sucks. When things do get built, there's always changes on the fly during construction, and usually some going back after it's "finished" to fix things or tie up loose ends. And while buildings are fairly complicated, they're rather crude and basic compared to particle accelerators and those awesome looking detectors.
Getting the LHC built and running at all was an amazing accomplishment. The fact that it's still got a ways to go to reach its maximum potential is just a small problem compared to the many they've already worked through.
Well if he's really the guy in charge, why doesn't he drop some of that crap? It'd be one thing if Ballmer got the job 6 months ago, but it's been 10 years. Look what Google's accomplished since 2000. Look what Apple's gotten done. If Ballmer was going to get microsoft anywhere near the cutting edge again, we'd have seen some of it by now.
If he feels somehow tied down by Gates' legacy projects, then he either needs to get over it or be replaced by someone who's not glued to the past.
To be fair, I think that computer-centric people tend to get asked for free work more often that most other professions. Probably for two reasons: 1. It usually involves minimal physical labor, which people are less likely to expect for free. 2. Many people apparently think doing anything on the computer requires but a few mouse clicks before the machine does all the work for you.
The correct response to this is not being an asshole, but still, I can understand the urge to be impolite.
Not on its own, we'll have to wait until some more of the old people retire/die. For high school/college age kids right now, having pictures from a party on the internet generally isn't a big deal. Even if there isn't a really stupid one of you, there's probably at least a few photos of your friends being dumb that you've seen, laughed at, and gotten over.
But that's a very unfamiliar phenomenon for people who grew up without the internet, and some people honestly just don't like things that are new to them, and don't much feel like changing their mind. Fortunately, those people get older and eventually no longer hold positions of authority, and progress slowly moves forward. We see this gradual change happening at almost every level of society, from serious things like tolerance of homosexuality, to more petty things, like dress codes at work. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty hard to stop.
The important thing to realize is not that the input types evolved to improve gameplay, but rather that the games evolved to fit the controllers that were commonly available. FPS's were born on the PC, so it's not surprising that they're best played with the keyboard/mouse. Platformers did most of their growing on consoles, and that's why they work better there.
Complain about it all you want, but it still exists and it can seriously influence the way the world works.
And for all the problems that oil is causing, it has also allowed our civilization to grow and advance at a completely mind-boggling rate. Oil hasn't been some horrible curse on humanity, it's enabled some amazing things. But times change, and certain tools become less useful. Oil is becoming less useful, and people are starting to realize that. You can whine ineffectually about how people can change their minds for no reason, or you can be grateful that people can learn and change their mind.
I agree that that is probably the business logic that is being used, but I think the assumption that option 1 becomes much more likely if you remove option 2 is false. The vast majority of those people are not going to become paying customers, they're just going to turn their attention elsewhere.
Well unfortunately I don't think you're going to win that battle. Even if that little punk-ass can't crack it himself, someone else will figure it out and post it online. The harder you try to stop them, the more it makes some people want to figure out away around it.
But hey if it helps you sleep better, then go for it.
Agreed. I'm at a point where I could probably afford to drop $60 on a game every two weeks, but it doesn't make sense for me to do so. Because there are so many games coming out, they tend to drop in price rather quickly, and if you don't mind being about a year or so behind you can save a ton of money.
And this works out doubly well for me, because I just plain don't have the time to plow through a game in two weeks anyways, so I'm perfectly happy lagging behind. Occasionally a game will come out that I'm so excited for that I get it at full price, but it's rare these days.
That being said, digital distribution makes it much easier for game companies to make money off of a consumer like me. They had that big summer steam sale a couple weeks ago, and I bought a whole bunch of older games, some of which I'll probably never find the time to play. But they were individually cheap enough to become impulse buys, and now I'm out another hundred bucks or so.
You're misunderstanding what I said. Say someone wants to play a game but doesn't want to pay for it, for whatever reason. Maybe they're a kid with no money, maybe they're just a cheap bastard, or maybe they think that by pirating games they're somehow 'sticking it to the man'. Whatever, doesn't matter, they've got three options. They can: 1)Decide to pay for it. 2)Decide to pirate it. 3)Decide to not play it.
If you take away option 2, then that does not force them to choose option 1. I would argue that they're much more likely to take option 3 before they take option 1. Factor in the fact that it's really hard to actually take away option 2, and as a developer/publisher, you're pretty much just throwing money away by trying to take away option 2.
So yeah. Some people are going to play your game without paying for it. Get over it, go worry about something you can actually control, life goes on.
I am not particularly familiar with the inner workings of Apple or any large company, but how could a recall cost 2 billion dollars? Say they've sold 5 million of these (I don't know what number they're up to now, but they were pushing 2 million at the beginning of the month, so let's just say 5 million to be on the safe side) and every single one got returned. That would mean it'd cost Apple $400 per phone to do this recall. I can't imagine that it'll cost that much, even if they replaced every single phone with a new one.
Maybe if you want to talk about potential lost sales, but I imagine that they've already crossed that bridge by now. Anybody who's interested at all about the phone has almost certainly heard some of the press about this issue.
But at the end of the day, your point stands. Apple can certainly afford to do a recall, they probably should.
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The reason why they won't license their OS is because it would be self-destructive businesswise for them to do so. They're making money off of the iPhone via hardware sales. They've got the best hardware margins in the industry. There's no way they could license iOS for the same amount per unit that they make off of iPhone hardware sales, especially when their competitor (Android) is free. Had their been a usable, easily available, and free alternative back in the 80's, then Microsoft wouldn't have dominated the way that they did.
The lesson that Apple has learned in regards to marketshare is that it more marketshare does not always equal more profits. Their vertical integration, made possible by the control that you're so quick to dump on, is what allows them to differentiate their product and get away with profit margins that the rest of the industry can only dream of.
They went down this road with the MacOS clones back in the last 90's. The clone makers just undercut Apple's prices and drove the margins down to nothing. The PC market is that way, and much of the phone market is that way. Apple has no desire to participate in that part of the market, it's really hard to make money there.
Apple will keep on doing what they're doing, and even if they end up with 10% marketshare at the end of the day, it'll likely be the most profitable 10% of the mobile market, and they'll happily keep making truckloads of money. If they end up with higher marketshare than that, then that's just gravy.
I'm curious to see some Android tablet sales numbers, but haven't seen much about that reported anywhere. Got any links?
Reddit users post a fair amount of original content to the website, of varying levels of quality. Of course, it can be hard to tell whether or not a particular piece of content is actually original as its submitter may claim. But plenty of people upload movies/images/etc. to wherever for the sole purpose of linking to it from reddit.
Fair enough, nothing's perfect, but overall I think the ADA does far more good than harm. As for your tower example, that's an issue that should've been settled before the thing was built. There's really no good excuse for an oversight like that on new construction.
I dunno, the story still sounds silly to me. Apparently there was only one guy in town stuck in a wheelchair, and since the number of people in the US that use wheelchairs is close to 1%, that must've been a rather small town. In a town that small I can't imagine a family owned shop that had been going for two generations got bullied out of business by an asshole code enforcement official. Small towns aren't exactly itching to shut down their local businesses.
I design buildings for a living, and so I'm fairly well versed in handicap ramps. The max slope is generally 1:12, which means for every inch of rise, you need a foot of run. And you usually need about 4' wide once you add in handrails and such. So the ramps certainly can end up requiring a good bit of space, which can make it hard to fit one in. But on the other hand that can make your argument that your existing building doesn't have the space for a ramp much easier.
And I'd also add that when you consider the type of stuff that hardware stores tend to sell, a ramp would likely be a very welcome feature even for the non-handicapped, because carrying heavy stuff up and down stairs sucks.
I find it amazing that a family that had run a hardware store for 2 generations couldn't just build their own ramp. A handicap ramp doesn't need to be made of titanium and carbon fiber, plywood and 2X6's will work just fine. If they didn't have the space due to the way the building was situated on the street/property line/etc, then there are various rules in the law to help deal with that/grandfather in older buildings. If the rules were ignored when they originally built the place, then it's hard to feel sorry for them. Although if it was a rented space, then shouldn't the landlord have been responsible for it?
This isn't political correctness, this is basic human compassion as well as practicality. We're talking about adding basic accessibility to some web services that are quickly becoming a practical necessity in our society. A blind person shouldn't expect to pilot a fighter jet, but it's not unreasonable for them to expect to be able to pay their water bill online.
What the hell are you talking about?
Many people like gadgets. Some of those people are 16 year old geeks, some of them are 50 year old women. Some have graduate degrees, and some of them dropped out of high school. Some of them have to save up before they spend $500, and some of them can blow $500 without batting an eye.
Being elitist or being a sheep has nothing to do with it. It's just a somewhat different type of computer. It's not a philosophy.
And almost all market research is worthless. Interesting how that correlates.
sorry, but that original comment did not even begin to approach humorous. I trust you can see why I was confused.
It must be miserable life you live where some marketing guys in california that you've never met have so much power to make you angry. Or you're actually indifferent but have decided to complain because it's easy to do so and it makes you feel better about yourself.
There are a bunch of situations in which I use my iPad that I used to use my laptop for, but the iPad works 100x better. Mostly this has to do with the fact that you can hold an ipad in almost any position/direction and it doesn't care, compared to a laptop that has a big keyboard in the way, significantly more weight to it, and often has heat dissipation issues if it sits incorrectly or on a soft surface.
Lounging on the couch and web surfing while watching TV, lazy saturday morning in bed paying silly little computer games with the wife, riding in the car and watching a tv show, etc.
Also the battery life is excellent. At my average usage level of a couple hours per day, I probably only have to remember to plug the thing in once a week.
I guess technically those aren't things that I couldn't do before, but I can do them so much more easily and comfortably now that it's really a different experience.
No kidding. I've spent years working on designs for some pretty standard buildings (condos/apartments/etc) that end up not getting built for whatever reason, and it sucks. When things do get built, there's always changes on the fly during construction, and usually some going back after it's "finished" to fix things or tie up loose ends. And while buildings are fairly complicated, they're rather crude and basic compared to particle accelerators and those awesome looking detectors.
Getting the LHC built and running at all was an amazing accomplishment. The fact that it's still got a ways to go to reach its maximum potential is just a small problem compared to the many they've already worked through.
Owning a truck generally isn't a profession.
Thanks, that is pretty close to the response that I would've made.
Well if he's really the guy in charge, why doesn't he drop some of that crap? It'd be one thing if Ballmer got the job 6 months ago, but it's been 10 years. Look what Google's accomplished since 2000. Look what Apple's gotten done. If Ballmer was going to get microsoft anywhere near the cutting edge again, we'd have seen some of it by now.
If he feels somehow tied down by Gates' legacy projects, then he either needs to get over it or be replaced by someone who's not glued to the past.
To be fair, I think that computer-centric people tend to get asked for free work more often that most other professions. Probably for two reasons:
1. It usually involves minimal physical labor, which people are less likely to expect for free.
2. Many people apparently think doing anything on the computer requires but a few mouse clicks before the machine does all the work for you.
The correct response to this is not being an asshole, but still, I can understand the urge to be impolite.
Not on its own, we'll have to wait until some more of the old people retire/die. For high school/college age kids right now, having pictures from a party on the internet generally isn't a big deal. Even if there isn't a really stupid one of you, there's probably at least a few photos of your friends being dumb that you've seen, laughed at, and gotten over.
But that's a very unfamiliar phenomenon for people who grew up without the internet, and some people honestly just don't like things that are new to them, and don't much feel like changing their mind. Fortunately, those people get older and eventually no longer hold positions of authority, and progress slowly moves forward. We see this gradual change happening at almost every level of society, from serious things like tolerance of homosexuality, to more petty things, like dress codes at work. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty hard to stop.
The important thing to realize is not that the input types evolved to improve gameplay, but rather that the games evolved to fit the controllers that were commonly available. FPS's were born on the PC, so it's not surprising that they're best played with the keyboard/mouse. Platformers did most of their growing on consoles, and that's why they work better there.
Complain about it all you want, but it still exists and it can seriously influence the way the world works.
And for all the problems that oil is causing, it has also allowed our civilization to grow and advance at a completely mind-boggling rate. Oil hasn't been some horrible curse on humanity, it's enabled some amazing things. But times change, and certain tools become less useful. Oil is becoming less useful, and people are starting to realize that. You can whine ineffectually about how people can change their minds for no reason, or you can be grateful that people can learn and change their mind.
I agree that that is probably the business logic that is being used, but I think the assumption that option 1 becomes much more likely if you remove option 2 is false. The vast majority of those people are not going to become paying customers, they're just going to turn their attention elsewhere.
Well unfortunately I don't think you're going to win that battle. Even if that little punk-ass can't crack it himself, someone else will figure it out and post it online. The harder you try to stop them, the more it makes some people want to figure out away around it.
But hey if it helps you sleep better, then go for it.
Agreed. I'm at a point where I could probably afford to drop $60 on a game every two weeks, but it doesn't make sense for me to do so. Because there are so many games coming out, they tend to drop in price rather quickly, and if you don't mind being about a year or so behind you can save a ton of money.
And this works out doubly well for me, because I just plain don't have the time to plow through a game in two weeks anyways, so I'm perfectly happy lagging behind. Occasionally a game will come out that I'm so excited for that I get it at full price, but it's rare these days.
That being said, digital distribution makes it much easier for game companies to make money off of a consumer like me. They had that big summer steam sale a couple weeks ago, and I bought a whole bunch of older games, some of which I'll probably never find the time to play. But they were individually cheap enough to become impulse buys, and now I'm out another hundred bucks or so.
You're misunderstanding what I said. Say someone wants to play a game but doesn't want to pay for it, for whatever reason. Maybe they're a kid with no money, maybe they're just a cheap bastard, or maybe they think that by pirating games they're somehow 'sticking it to the man'. Whatever, doesn't matter, they've got three options. They can:
1)Decide to pay for it.
2)Decide to pirate it.
3)Decide to not play it.
If you take away option 2, then that does not force them to choose option 1. I would argue that they're much more likely to take option 3 before they take option 1. Factor in the fact that it's really hard to actually take away option 2, and as a developer/publisher, you're pretty much just throwing money away by trying to take away option 2.
So yeah. Some people are going to play your game without paying for it. Get over it, go worry about something you can actually control, life goes on.
I am not particularly familiar with the inner workings of Apple or any large company, but how could a recall cost 2 billion dollars? Say they've sold 5 million of these (I don't know what number they're up to now, but they were pushing 2 million at the beginning of the month, so let's just say 5 million to be on the safe side) and every single one got returned. That would mean it'd cost Apple $400 per phone to do this recall. I can't imagine that it'll cost that much, even if they replaced every single phone with a new one.
Maybe if you want to talk about potential lost sales, but I imagine that they've already crossed that bridge by now. Anybody who's interested at all about the phone has almost certainly heard some of the press about this issue.
But at the end of the day, your point stands. Apple can certainly afford to do a recall, they probably should.