How does this not have anything to do with Americans
Because your original argument didn't mention it. You are bringing this up now.
The companies where we see this behavior are all American
What behaviour? Successful companies not so successful any more? Sony? Toyota* ? The many British companies that Volkswagen swallowed? Britain was the world leader in quality motorcycle manufacturing, and now it has come to the saying "All the parts falling from this car are of the finest British manufacture".
* not exactly a failure, but at the turn of the century, it was poised to beat VW and GM and had a huge lead on operating profits. It is a ghost of its former self.
It wasn't that long ago that IBM looked like it was about to go belly-up; did their CEO
Exactly. Companies go up and down. It has been a while, but even Apple was in trouble. They bounced back, and how. HP might bounce back too.
because not all the executives and board members are sociopaths
In fact it is personal profit that should lead stakeholders to rein in executives and board members. Nothing to do with not being sociopaths. You think Pfizer and IBM are excelling due to altruism of their board members?
Which is why I chose a variety of types of companies. I (almost) knew what your objection would be for Apple and Oracle and hence included IBM. Though HSBC and Volkswagen also could have suffered from the same problem but they didn't.
Not being American is not a defence. None of your arguments to which I am replying, had anything to do with Americans. You were wringing your hands with companies in general and lamenting that business can never be done. I just showed you business is being done - like HP is failing, many others are succeeding.
And what solution was that?
How IBM and Pfizer have avoided this, I don't know.
Haha. If you (or me) knew, we would be earning billions of dollars. Not wasting time on Slashdot. And if the solution could have been put in a Slashdot post, the world would be overflowing with trillionaires.
Well, stakeholders choose the board. That's a start.
Oracle , Apple, IBM, Volkswagen, HSBC, Pfizer (break-up or not) have all found a solution. Just because HP can't, you say the solution is impossible to find?
Why should the board do such a thing? The people on boards are all CEOs from other companies, and they all sit on each others' boards and cover for each other, so they can extract as much money from their companies as possible.
Stakeholders need to force the board to make upper management care for the company. This is because stakeholders lose when company profits / share prices go down.
I'm simply pointing out what's most important, which is the personal success of the CEO, not the corporation. For some reason, a lot of people have this weird idea that a company's success (especially long-term success) is somehow of importance, when that is simply not the case
Do you know the meaning of the word "important"? For the CEO, CEO's personal account is important. For stakeholders, stakeholders' own personal account is important. "Important" is not a universal value as you are saying. Important is for someone to do something. Because of this grave misuse of the word "important", this entire paragraph of yours becomes meaningless.
No one ever has an answer for this.
True. When elementary words are assigned arbitrary meanings, questions can be phrased which are difficult to answer. For example, "What are you sleeping?"
They shouldn't, the board and stakeholders have to make them care about the company.
My response was to your statement that HP is very successful, ask Leo Apotheker if he was successful. These are two very different things, and in this case opposite. HP is a failure, Leo is successful. There is no relation and you attempted to equate the two.
You are confusing the success of Leo with success of HP. The CEOs and higher management have been successful as you say.
HP, on the other hand, has lost lots of market capitalization, profits, customer trust and good will over last 5 years. NOT a defining attribute of "success".
While your point is almost right, and I look for a bit smaller than the largest phones myself. I also agree that Apple got the size right for most people (and battery life too).
But I totally disagree with all half-decent Android phones being huge. See Atrix 4G vs iPhone 4
Atrix 4G was one of the first dual core phones, nearly top hardware for its time except for Samsung Galaxy S2. It is lighter than iPhone 4 and only slightly (8%) wider. Length is the same (2% longer) and thickness doesn't matter for holdability, pocketability as long as it is less than about 20 mm.
Sony Ericsson has lots of models much smaller than iPhones, though not flagship products but close followers. Though there are other problems, ideological and practical with Sony Ericsson's phones so it is out for me.
They say so, but I don't think many developers trust them to do it honestly. You get the number of people who downloaded the app for free; from Amazon. Who don't have an incentive to tell you the truth, and an incentive to lie.
And by the way, the alternative is the Google Marketplace, which distributes 30% to the wireless carriers, and has to play nice because of their position with the software... so they happily ban tethering apps and other things the carriers don't like. On the other hand, EasyTether has been available on the Amazon App Store without interruption.
EasyTether, and scores of other tether applications are available for Google's Market too. Not only that, you don't need any application to tether - Android 2.2+ has wifi hotspot feature inbuilt. Now if your carrier has disabled this feature, your only complaint is from your carrier.
In fact, for Amazon app store you need to use "Unknown sources" checkbox. Once you have it, you could have installed the EasyTether (or any other "banned" application) anyway. So it is simply your carrier has done a poor job of blocking unwanted applications and tether - they left a huge loophole.
Vimperator fixes the awesomeness issues, and adds its own real awesomeness. Awesomebar pushed me to vimperator, but I regret I didn't find it sooner. Definitely recommended to try, though not everybody's cup of tea.
Not sure of trying in the US. US seems to be a horrible market for some purposes. Good point.
I was talking about cost to the manufacturer, not customers. As nokia sold excellent gsm full phones outright for 30$, I don't think adding a gsm chip on a non phone smartphone would cost more than 7-8$. What say? Under 10$ is just noise when we are talking about devices costing hundreds of dollars.
Apple's margin (overall quite high) might be very different for iphone and ipod touch, who knows? I guess ipod touch has less RAM too, though not sure.
Lack of android powered close substitute of ipod touch? 2 answers : 1. There are. Get any android phone and don't put in a sim card. No contract needed. I bought Samsung spica in july 2010 for equivalent of 220$ in my country. 600mhz processor,reasonably responsive screen, 256 mg ram, full google app support. Good replacement of ipod touch. I see even in the US you can get uncontracted phones e.g. on ebay, amazon etc.
2. Ipod touch is simply smartphone without phone. In these days of mass production, it doesn't cost much to add the gsm chip and it is actually cheaper to include the gsm chip if it gives larger scale rather than not adding it. It is like asking where can I get a good fast processor without floating point unit? Answer is buy intel / amd and don't use fpu.
Now, why Apple is selling ipod touch? Only Apple can sell lack of a feature. Rest all manufacturers sell features.
Yeah, but in tablet space, Apple has some advantages over Android tablets -
1. Target audience of Android tablets - relatively geeky, or at least able to consider a few tablet hardware options and choosing one; would rather use a netbook than a tablet. Similar reason as for the absence of an Android equivalent of iPod Touch.
2. No cyanogenability yet. The whole custom ROM scene is much much less vibrant than for Android phones. Cyanogen (or something like it) is a positive influence because serious geeks like it, and then recommend to the "non-computer" folks.
So a lot will depend on his Oct/Nov release of Ice-Cream-Sandwich.
it's WiFi only, so it doesn't really work in a public transit situation
While I too don't see the point of a tablet, but :
For this thing, you can run a wifi hotspot on your phone while on public transit as it is Android , keep the phone in your pocket/bag and use the tablet by connecting to your phone's AP.
(Only talking about phones as Android tablets suck).
From a user's perspective, all Android phones are in the same basket, only with different hardware. Switching between different Android phones is trivial, "expertise" learnt on one is applicable to another more than 90%.
From a application developer perspective, once he has made the relatively larger effort of making a generic Android software, all Android phones are his target market. To decide on whether to develop on Android, he has to look at whole Android market share - not Samsung Android market share, or HTC Android market share.
From the manufacturing company's perspective, yes, you are right. HTC can't be happy that together all Android phones are selling more than iPhone. HTC worries about its own sales only.
So, from Apple's perspective, iOS is doing the best job. From customers' and developers' perspective, Android is dong the best job.
You just said they have only have 1000 patents, however given that you can't even tell me where you came up with that from it seems you made it up. We all know they have many very valuable patents in search and analytics and that the number is irrelevant, it's the content that matters.
Yeah, I have to give an example to prove absence. Excellent. Secondly, this is not search and analytics market we are talking about so those patents don't help, no point harping on it. Thirdly, Bing doesn't violate PageRank patent.
And where's the indemnification
There is none, and I didn't say there was. Diversionary tactics. I just don't see the immorality of it when it is clear to all parties that there won't be any indemnification.
... or even an intent to
Motorola deal. On a related note, I don't see an intent in you to understand what you are replying to, because :
For the third and final time : You said Google did nothing to "acquire" patents in spite of having resources. I pointed out that the Motorola deal is acquisition of patents.
I don't see a point of continuing when I have to repeat things thrice with no hope of an intent from you to understand it.
No, where is this figure presented, what are these patents?
In your last post, you were so confident Google has all the patents necessary to "defend" Android and its hardware partners. Now you don't know what Google patents are ?
I don't to be told they don't, im not ignorant,
Congratulations for don'ting to be told (whatever it means). As for you ignorance , whether you don't to be told or you don'tn't,:-
They have the resources to acquire patents to protect their product but they don't
Who told you they don't? That is exactly what they are doing the Motorola deal for.
... i can see masses of lawsuits over Android and Google doing nothing to protect its customers from lawsuits brought against them because of its product.
You say Google did nothing to "acquire" patents in spite of having resources. I pointed out that the Motorola deal is acquisition of patents. Which you ignored, or couldn't understand. Not ignorant indeed.
Thanks captain obvious, all IP cases are done on a case by case basis.
Yes
Are you incapable of reading what was written? I said 'IP' laws (you even quoted it and still failed to comprehend it),
The context is, what you cleverly omitted to quote, about patents. You gave an example of trademark law in China in response to my statement about patents in China. Not applicable.
So in spite of trademark law being honoured in China, there is no risk of being sued for USPTO patent violations in China. China protects patents of Chinese patent office, that too laxly. Clubbing them under IP doesn't make trademark examples applicable to patents.
You mean the part where Google asks for you phone number to let you sign up for Google services (e.g. gmail) ? That part is waived when you sign up for Google services from within an Android phone. This Google account can then be used as any other Google account outside of Android too.
In addition to what other replies say : Google says Software patents (with a few exceptions) are evil. They lobby legislators for this, they gather public sympathy by this. Buying software patents after this (from the Nortel deal, or elsewhere) would reduce the force of that argument.
Instead, they go and buy Motorola, which has mostly hardware patents. These can be used to counter-sue anyone in mobile phone industry, plus Google gets to keep saying Software patents are evil. I guess a price for "do no evil", or at least for being perceived so.
In as much as infringing on patents is "breaking the law"
Well it is, in the current legal system if you infringe on patents then you are breaking patent laws.
Well, I said "In as much as", because not all countries recognize all kinds of patents.
Of course it's immoral, it's google's product, they have the patent portfolio to back their product and defend their product
Absolutely false. In the context in which this story appeared (Google had not bought Motorola by then), Google is extremely patent poor by its own admission. It has a totality of 1000 patents, many internet, ads and search related.
Obviously if you don't have a huge patent portfolio you cannot afford to use Android, because the company who made it takes no responsibility for anything illegal in it
Yes. Though, there is another category of companies which can afford to use Android - those which operate outside the software patent world. E.g. Chinese companies using Asia as the major market. EU countries as a market on a case by case basis could be evaluated, but EU too, is much less affected than US and highly US influenced countries.
From your refusal to acknowledge the existence of the world outside the US, you seem to be an American.
Slashdot Mirror
How does this not have anything to do with Americans
Because your original argument didn't mention it. You are bringing this up now.
The companies where we see this behavior are all American
What behaviour? Successful companies not so successful any more? Sony? Toyota* ? The many British companies that Volkswagen swallowed? Britain was the world leader in quality motorcycle manufacturing, and now it has come to the saying "All the parts falling from this car are of the finest British manufacture".
* not exactly a failure, but at the turn of the century, it was poised to beat VW and GM and had a huge lead on operating profits. It is a ghost of its former self.
It wasn't that long ago that IBM looked like it was about to go belly-up; did their CEO
Exactly. Companies go up and down. It has been a while, but even Apple was in trouble. They bounced back, and how. HP might bounce back too.
because not all the executives and board members are sociopaths
In fact it is personal profit that should lead stakeholders to rein in executives and board members. Nothing to do with not being sociopaths. You think Pfizer and IBM are excelling due to altruism of their board members?
Which is why I chose a variety of types of companies. I (almost) knew what your objection would be for Apple and Oracle and hence included IBM. Though HSBC and Volkswagen also could have suffered from the same problem but they didn't.
Not being American is not a defence. None of your arguments to which I am replying, had anything to do with Americans. You were wringing your hands with companies in general and lamenting that business can never be done. I just showed you business is being done - like HP is failing, many others are succeeding.
And what solution was that?
How IBM and Pfizer have avoided this, I don't know.
Haha. If you (or me) knew, we would be earning billions of dollars. Not wasting time on Slashdot. And if the solution could have been put in a Slashdot post, the world would be overflowing with trillionaires.
I chose the vaguer word, almost to avoid such pedantry on this part of the statement, but this is Slashdot, so ....
Well, stakeholders choose the board. That's a start.
Oracle , Apple, IBM, Volkswagen, HSBC, Pfizer (break-up or not) have all found a solution. Just because HP can't, you say the solution is impossible to find?
Why should the board do such a thing? The people on boards are all CEOs from other companies, and they all sit on each others' boards and cover for each other, so they can extract as much money from their companies as possible.
Stakeholders need to force the board to make upper management care for the company. This is because stakeholders lose when company profits / share prices go down.
I'm simply pointing out what's most important, which is the personal success of the CEO, not the corporation. For some reason, a lot of people have this weird idea that a company's success (especially long-term success) is somehow of importance, when that is simply not the case
Do you know the meaning of the word "important"? For the CEO, CEO's personal account is important. For stakeholders, stakeholders' own personal account is important. "Important" is not a universal value as you are saying. Important is for someone to do something. Because of this grave misuse of the word "important", this entire paragraph of yours becomes meaningless.
No one ever has an answer for this.
True. When elementary words are assigned arbitrary meanings, questions can be phrased which are difficult to answer. For example, "What are you sleeping?"
They shouldn't, the board and stakeholders have to make them care about the company.
My response was to your statement that HP is very successful, ask Leo Apotheker if he was successful. These are two very different things, and in this case opposite. HP is a failure, Leo is successful. There is no relation and you attempted to equate the two.
You are confusing the success of Leo with success of HP. The CEOs and higher management have been successful as you say.
HP, on the other hand, has lost lots of market capitalization, profits, customer trust and good will over last 5 years. NOT a defining attribute of "success".
While your point is almost right, and I look for a bit smaller than the largest phones myself. I also agree that Apple got the size right for most people (and battery life too).
But I totally disagree with all half-decent Android phones being huge. See Atrix 4G vs iPhone 4
Atrix 4G was one of the first dual core phones, nearly top hardware for its time except for Samsung Galaxy S2. It is lighter than iPhone 4 and only slightly (8%) wider. Length is the same (2% longer) and thickness doesn't matter for holdability, pocketability as long as it is less than about 20 mm.
Sony Ericsson has lots of models much smaller than iPhones, though not flagship products but close followers. Though there are other problems, ideological and practical with Sony Ericsson's phones so it is out for me.
Do you have source for this information?
thanks
after that they pay YOU to give your app away.
They say so, but I don't think many developers trust them to do it honestly. You get the number of people who downloaded the app for free; from Amazon. Who don't have an incentive to tell you the truth, and an incentive to lie.
And by the way, the alternative is the Google Marketplace, which distributes 30% to the wireless carriers, and has to play nice because of their position with the software... so they happily ban tethering apps and other things the carriers don't like. On the other hand, EasyTether has been available on the Amazon App Store without interruption.
EasyTether, and scores of other tether applications are available for Google's Market too. Not only that, you don't need any application to tether - Android 2.2+ has wifi hotspot feature inbuilt. Now if your carrier has disabled this feature, your only complaint is from your carrier.
In fact, for Amazon app store you need to use "Unknown sources" checkbox. Once you have it, you could have installed the EasyTether (or any other "banned" application) anyway. So it is simply your carrier has done a poor job of blocking unwanted applications and tether - they left a huge loophole.
Vimperator fixes the awesomeness issues, and adds its own real awesomeness. Awesomebar pushed me to vimperator, but I regret I didn't find it sooner. Definitely recommended to try, though not everybody's cup of tea.
Not sure of trying in the US. US seems to be a horrible market for some purposes. Good point.
I was talking about cost to the manufacturer, not customers. As nokia sold excellent gsm full phones outright for 30$, I don't think adding a gsm chip on a non phone smartphone would cost more than 7-8$. What say?
Under 10$ is just noise when we are talking about devices costing hundreds of dollars.
Apple's margin (overall quite high) might be very different for iphone and ipod touch, who knows? I guess ipod touch has less RAM too, though not sure.
Lack of android powered close substitute of ipod touch? 2 answers :
1. There are. Get any android phone and don't put in a sim card. No contract needed. I bought Samsung spica in july 2010 for equivalent of 220$ in my country. 600mhz processor,reasonably responsive screen, 256 mg ram, full google app support. Good replacement of ipod touch. I see even in the US you can get uncontracted phones e.g. on ebay, amazon etc.
2. Ipod touch is simply smartphone without phone. In these days of mass production, it doesn't cost much to add the gsm chip and it is actually cheaper to include the gsm chip if it gives larger scale rather than not adding it. It is like asking where can I get a good fast processor without floating point unit? Answer is buy intel / amd and don't use fpu.
Now, why Apple is selling ipod touch? Only Apple can sell lack of a feature. Rest all manufacturers sell features.
only your finger should be punished for murder
Yeah, cyanide injection in the finger.
Yeah, but in tablet space, Apple has some advantages over Android tablets -
1. Target audience of Android tablets - relatively geeky, or at least able to consider a few tablet hardware options and choosing one; would rather use a netbook than a tablet. Similar reason as for the absence of an Android equivalent of iPod Touch.
2. No cyanogenability yet. The whole custom ROM scene is much much less vibrant than for Android phones. Cyanogen (or something like it) is a positive influence because serious geeks like it, and then recommend to the "non-computer" folks.
So a lot will depend on his Oct/Nov release of Ice-Cream-Sandwich.
Interesting that you say Apple only POSSIBLY STOLE and yet Google STOLE... has anything gone through courts yet?
Because I haven't seen the Google patents HTC paid for in this discussion.
So without having seen the patents, you are certain that Google "stole" ? But even having seen the Apple patents Apple has only "possibly stole"?
Wow! Have they promoted you to , at least , Senior Apple Shill ?
What use is a slashdotter boyfriend if he can't do this ?
it's WiFi only, so it doesn't really work in a public transit situation
While I too don't see the point of a tablet, but :
For this thing, you can run a wifi hotspot on your phone while on public transit as it is Android , keep the phone in your pocket/bag and use the tablet by connecting to your phone's AP.
(Only talking about phones as Android tablets suck).
From a user's perspective, all Android phones are in the same basket, only with different hardware. Switching between different Android phones is trivial, "expertise" learnt on one is applicable to another more than 90%.
From a application developer perspective, once he has made the relatively larger effort of making a generic Android software, all Android phones are his target market. To decide on whether to develop on Android, he has to look at whole Android market share - not Samsung Android market share, or HTC Android market share.
From the manufacturing company's perspective, yes, you are right. HTC can't be happy that together all Android phones are selling more than iPhone. HTC worries about its own sales only.
So, from Apple's perspective, iOS is doing the best job. From customers' and developers' perspective, Android is dong the best job.
You just said they have only have 1000 patents, however given that you can't even tell me where you came up with that from it seems you made it up. We all know they have many very valuable patents in search and analytics and that the number is irrelevant, it's the content that matters.
Yeah, I have to give an example to prove absence. Excellent.
Secondly, this is not search and analytics market we are talking about so those patents don't help, no point harping on it.
Thirdly, Bing doesn't violate PageRank patent.
And where's the indemnification
There is none, and I didn't say there was. Diversionary tactics. I just don't see the immorality of it when it is clear to all parties that there won't be any indemnification.
Motorola deal. On a related note, I don't see an intent in you to understand what you are replying to, because :
For the third and final time : You said Google did nothing to "acquire" patents in spite of having resources. I pointed out that the Motorola deal is acquisition of patents.
I don't see a point of continuing when I have to repeat things thrice with no hope of an intent from you to understand it.
No, where is this figure presented, what are these patents?
In your last post, you were so confident Google has all the patents necessary to "defend" Android and its hardware partners. Now you don't know what Google patents are ?
I don't to be told they don't, im not ignorant,
Congratulations for don'ting to be told (whatever it means). As for you ignorance , whether you don't to be told or you don'tn't, :-
They have the resources to acquire patents to protect their product but they don't
Who told you they don't? That is exactly what they are doing the Motorola deal for.
... i can see masses of lawsuits over Android and Google doing nothing to protect its customers from lawsuits brought against them because of its product.
You say Google did nothing to "acquire" patents in spite of having resources. I pointed out that the Motorola deal is acquisition of patents. Which you ignored, or couldn't understand. Not ignorant indeed.
Thanks captain obvious, all IP cases are done on a case by case basis.
Yes
Are you incapable of reading what was written? I said 'IP' laws (you even quoted it and still failed to comprehend it),
The context is, what you cleverly omitted to quote, about patents. You gave an example of trademark law in China in response to my statement about patents in China. Not applicable.
So in spite of trademark law being honoured in China, there is no risk of being sued for USPTO patent violations in China. China protects patents of Chinese patent office, that too laxly. Clubbing them under IP doesn't make trademark examples applicable to patents.
You mean the part where Google asks for you phone number to let you sign up for Google services (e.g. gmail) ? That part is waived when you sign up for Google services from within an Android phone. This Google account can then be used as any other Google account outside of Android too.
In addition to what other replies say : Google says Software patents (with a few exceptions) are evil. They lobby legislators for this, they gather public sympathy by this. Buying software patents after this (from the Nortel deal, or elsewhere) would reduce the force of that argument.
Instead, they go and buy Motorola, which has mostly hardware patents. These can be used to counter-sue anyone in mobile phone industry, plus Google gets to keep saying Software patents are evil. I guess a price for "do no evil", or at least for being perceived so.
Where do they have a total of only 1000 patents?
They might have the patent certificates in some offices / warehouses. But patent itself is intangible, so exists nowhere in particular.
They have the resources to acquire patents to protect their product but they don't
Who told you they don't? That is exactly what they are doing the Motorola deal for.
Rubbish, look at the way a Korean company (Samsung) has been pummeled by Apple IP lawsuits in those very markets.
"Case by case basis"
Just look at how counterfeit Apple stores were taken down in China - one of the most lax regions for IP laws.
When are you planning to learn the difference between patents and trademarks?
In as much as infringing on patents is "breaking the law"
Well it is, in the current legal system if you infringe on patents then you are breaking patent laws.
Well, I said "In as much as", because not all countries recognize all kinds of patents.
Of course it's immoral, it's google's product, they have the patent portfolio to back their product and defend their product
Absolutely false. In the context in which this story appeared (Google had not bought Motorola by then), Google is extremely patent poor by its own admission. It has a totality of 1000 patents, many internet, ads and search related.
Obviously if you don't have a huge patent portfolio you cannot afford to use Android, because the company who made it takes no responsibility for anything illegal in it
Yes. Though, there is another category of companies which can afford to use Android - those which operate outside the software patent world. E.g. Chinese companies using Asia as the major market. EU countries as a market on a case by case basis could be evaluated, but EU too, is much less affected than US and highly US influenced countries.
From your refusal to acknowledge the existence of the world outside the US, you seem to be an American.