After watching how the various regimes running (and buying, and selling, and outsourcing) my company feel about programmers, I don't think I would ever go into it as a young person today. But a strange thing has happened. Of all the people that have been there all this time, I'm one of the few that has survived all the M&A shenannigans and outsourcings. It seems that those who moved up into management roles were more replaceable than those of us who stayed technical. Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.
This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it. So far, every manager who's engineered the next sell-off of the company has been richly rewarded. The company's for sale again, and I can't imagine anybody being stupid enough to buy it. But fools abound, and I'm sure the current crop has their golden parachutes in order...
If WinRT contained desktop mode, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But as it stands, the Surface is not a merger of tablet and PC - it just pretends to be. The Surface Pro may be... but at the wrong price point. You'd be better off with a cheap laptop + a Nexus tablet. Really.
The Windows store (if it succeeds) will have a bunch of phone/tablet apps and the expectation of having all the desktop apps in the world, which it never will have. There is so much bait and switch marketing around Windows 8 that I'm surprised anybody knows what they're getting. It reminds me of the Romney campaign. You'll get Windows 8 when you buy a new PC. You might even like it - though it's case of multiple personality disorder is not going away any time soon (if at all)
And if the playing field were level, WinRT would never catch on, so it's locked down browser wouldn't be much of an issue. But Microsoft is counting on its other monopoly to make this thing a success. Currently, there is no reason at all for anyone to buy one of these over an iPad or an Android tablet. The applications just aren't there. And any other competitor would be in a deep chicken-and-egg hole. But because these things come with MSOffice, and because so many people are tied to MSOffice through work (or just not knowing that there are viable alternatives), Microsoft thinks it can do an end run around its lack of apps by virtue of including this one 'must have' app that nobody else can include. Might just work. And if somehow WinRT becomes the dominant tablet OS, then WinRT/IE lockdown will definitely matter in a way that iOS/Safari lockdown doesn't. Apple doesn't come near dominating the desktop, so there is no Safari-only segment of the Internet. But there still is a lot of IE-only stuff out there. The success of iOS and Android has done a lot to blunt that, but beware of possible back to the future scenarios. Avoid WinRT unless you absolutely must run MSOffice. And if you absolutely must run MSOffice, you might ask yourself if that's a wilse place to be.
Your argument applies pretty well for operating systems. But for word processors and spreadsheets, Microsoft wasn't the first to 'allow users to be productive'. WordPerfect and Lotus were there first and best. MS responded to Lotus and WordPerfect with me-too products and then bundled them with the OS (via OEM contracts) to gain a monopoly market share. Eventually these me-too products did surpass the originals in features, but that was largely to stoke the upgrade mill once dominance was achieved.
What determines a patent on a standard requiring RAND licensing? It would seem that 'pinch to zoom' and 'slide to unlock' have become de-facto standards for touch-screen devices. How is it that trivial patents like those can be used to block sales of a device when a patent that controls the basic functioning of a device must be licensed to precisely those competitors that are abusing the trivial ones? And you can't even block sales of the devices when the infringer refuses to strike a RAND deal...
It's not just binary compatibility that's lacking. The entire API has been changed, so existing windows desktop apps will never be built for the RT version. Some of them will be completely rewritten, I suppose, but essentially the Surface is an iPad with very few applications and no huge pool of 'ready to convert' stuff waiting in the wings. It's kind of a marketing bait and switch. People may end up buying the Surface because they think it's Windows and will run their office apps, but it won't - unless all they care about is MSOffice. The X86 version will, but that's a whole other animal.
What Microsoft really wants to do is leverage their desktop monopoly to mobile. They tried to do this by marketing 'Windows Familiarity' as a plus for WinPhone 6. But that didn't work, because as you stated, the desktop is a lousy metaphor for a phone. So now they're remaking their desktop into a clone of their phone so that they can tout the similarities between their desktop monopoly OS and their mobile offerings. This time it's the new desktop interface that's inappropriate for the form factor, but this time, they've got a captive audience and don't care.
Not really true. A failed Microsoft wouldn't stop anybody's existing systems from running. They're not really a services company (yet). Of course, security holes would eat away at the reliability of those systems, so companies would have to seriously start migrating stuff. Virus scanners wouldn't keep the current code safe forever...
But there'd be a lot of economic stimulus provided by that migration. Y2K on steroids.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away
Selective truth that is.
1. Because the Democrats don't want to be in Iraq - or invade Iran, they want to eliminate our military power? What? 2. Solyndra? Romney in the debate said that half the green energy investments failed. Nowhere near true. I imagine a failure rate comparable to or better than Bain Capital's typical rate. 3. Bullshit. Dems do believe in progressive taxation, and don't believe in letting people fall through the cracks. The horror! What's your solution? Oh, I forgot. Trickle down. Works great - for the rich.
To be fair, not even the Democrats have voted for a number of Obama's initiatives
That's a tired old saw. When 1 democrat doesn't join, the right comes out and says 'Obama couldn't even get his own party to vote for this stuff'. Meanwhile there were usually sizable majorities for the bills in question. Just not filibuster-proof 60 vote majorities. No president has ever had to meet the 60 vote 'standard' that's being applied routinely today.
You'd think Google could've gotten Apple to agree to patent detente in exchange for full map support with turn-by-turn and the works. Whether branded or not, Google would still get the search terms to use to improve their systems. I wonder whether this was even discussed. Then again, maybe both sides were so concerned about branding that they lost track of the bigger picture.
Required licensing might help. Part of the problem is that companies like Apple are using patents on minor features to lock out competitors' entire systems. Somehow, the patent office or the courts are going to have to figure out a way to put an actual dollar value on these innovations. Because the actual dollar values wouldn't be worth actually attempting to collect. As it is, these patents are being used to attempt to grab a monopoly on an entire category of device, simply because the holder 'owns' the most natural way to accomplish simple tasks on that category of device. That monopoly is not earned, and is causing real economic harm to competitors and users.
Microsoft, while not trying to sue competitors out of the market (yet) is still charging unreasonable amounts for patents on minor features, and extracting God knows what other concessions from OEM's.
50 cents per phone for all the Apple UI patents. 10 cents for FAT32. There. Problem solved.
Google really should've offered Apple full map access (including turn-by-turn) in exchange for patent detente. Who knows, maybe they did. But I can't see Apple, having just bought an alternative mapping service, taking that offer now. As it is, Google may have to sue to get their own app into the app store, and Apple will keep suing over pinch to zoom. Bad for everybody.
It all depends on whether Google actually has a monopoly. Does the fact that they're the only company that actually makes money off of search count - as long as there are other places that the public can go to search? Bing is currently a loss leader, but then again, so was Google in the beginning. Maybe if Microsoft simply gave up, Google would have a monopoly for access to users, but Bing has a fairly large (and largely unearned - based on monopoly tying that should've been more effectively dealt with) market share. Do we ignore that or not, just because advertisers aren't willing to pay for it (yet).
Except that nobody's forcing anybody to use Google. In fact, the real monopolist still forces every computer you buy to come with Windows and default you to Bing for searching. And they make it pretty tricky to change. I know, I know. When it works, it's pretty easy to change, but I've never actually seen anybody change the default search engine - even those that still use Google by typing www.google.com into the location bar. And I've seen cases where the search engine choice website hasn't worked at all.
Competition in Republican-speak means a race to the bottom between states to see who can provide the least coverage. It might help your employer find a cheaper policy, but it's not gonna save you a penny. Those cheap plans don't cover as much, so the rest comes from you.
So, either the 'UEFI must not be disablable' requirement no longer applies just to ARM-based systems, or this is an end run around the intel exception so that even if the bootloader is unlockable, there's no other system you can load on the thing anyway, rendering the 'unlockable on intel' argument meaningless. It's just the kind of crap Microsoft loves to pull. Sounds just like their support for ODF in Office. It 'works', but it doesn't work, based on a loophole Microsoft found in the spec that allowed them to build 'ODF support' that doesn't support anybody else's ODF docs properly.
That may be true - you can't count on the cheapo hardware vendors to fix the problem. But Google has to know this, and if they want devs to target the latest API's, they need to build them in a way that can be implemented on existing hardware (whether they work the same there or not). It's not a problem that my Nexus One can't be upgraded beyond gingerbread, but it's a problem for devs that it can't run apps that use the latest API's. Android needs to present a single platform for devs. And that means they need to put out a gingerbread-compatible 2.4 release that is binary compatible with most (if not all) 4.0 API's. Otherwise, Android is gingerbread for most things. Maybe that's not all that important for whole classes of apps that can work reasonably well everywhere targeting gingerbread - but how's a dev even supposed to know that? Does Google at least put out a 'do I need to target ICS?' document to help out?
Of course, if they make Jelly Bean multi-user, I'll forgive them and just go out and get a Nexus 7;-). Maybe the ICS features are only important for tablet-targeted apps. Anybody out there know enough to comment on that?
Depending on what you 'need' a stripped down Windows for, WINE might serve you pretty well. Sure it's not perfect, but it does a lot.
My company has a Windows app that occasional Mac users wanted to use. The standard answer was 'install Parallels', but I know it worked fine under WINE for Linux. It also worked fine under Crossover Mac. But I recently found the 'wineskins' project that lets you bundle your app with a full WINE setup (customized however your app needs it). Yeah, it's a big first-time install (~30MB zipped, ~140MB installed), but app upgrades can be simply dropped into the 'virtual C drive'. And end users love it. It launches instantly (as opposed to Parallels, where you have to actually boot Windows), and it integrates nicely with the Mac desktop (I have it set up to launch native Mac stuff for all external apps it wants to integrate with). Oh, and it's also free.
What's 'killing' Microsoft (and Microsoft is far from dying) is that Wall Street long ago cooked into the MS stock price the assumption that Windows would eventually displace all other operating systems. As recently as 2001, the brilliant morons responsible for selling the AIX server-based product I work on told me 'we can't sell it - it's not NT-based'. Didn't happen, and the MS stock price has been drifting back down to earth ever since.
Largely, the reason for this is Linux, which achieved huge success in the server space and re-legitimized Unix as a server OS. In fact, Apple's success is also largely tied to the success of Linux (and OSS in general). Had the server gone all Microsoft and had KHTML not come along for Apple to turn into Webkit, the iPhone may never have been viable. Even though apps rule today, a smartphone without a viable web browser might never have taken off (though I guess the original iPod might still have sold).
More recently, Linux and Android have shown the value of open source. There'd likely have been no Kindle without Linux (hell, there might not have been an Amazon for that matter). Smartphone form factors would've been limited to Apple's vision (assuming they survived to build the iPhone), or Blackberry's. And there'd have been no Winphone7 (or 8) had Microsoft not lost so badly in that arena. All due to that 'failed' OS, Linux.
Let 'em trade as fast as they can, but add a small transaction fee per share to weed out the traders that are gambling on the second-to-second fluctuations. Problem solved.
It's bad enough that poorly considered opinions posted to the internet live forever. Hideous that they show up whenever someone googles your name.
It's one thing to post a blog article anonymously - there should be no need for that. But another for a site that encourages feedback to enshrine off the cuff comments in perpetuity.
The 'Reardon Metal' case illustrates pretty well the difference between physical and software inventions. The IP to the metal apply only to the metal. There's no patent on 'building train tracks out of Reardon metal'. Just on producing the raw material. Presumably, Reardon would sell his metal to anyone at the same price; otherwise, that would be problematic.
Now take 'swipe to unlock'. First of all, 'invention'? If ever there were a patent on a pure idea, this is it. On a touchscreen device, you need to have a purposeful gesture to say 'I want the device to unlock - this is not just a case of the device bumping around in my pocket'. A left-to-right swipe on an icon is the simplest most obvious gesture to accomplish that. Anyone would have thought of it. But beside that, there's no way to place a reasonable price on rights to use it. It costs exactly 0 to produce a 'swipe to unlock' thingy. You can't just say, okay Apple produces 'swipe to unlocks' and everybody has to buy them from Apple. Microsoft has actually attempted to set a price on their patents, and the pricing is ridiculous. They charge about 30% of the cost of WP7 for the right to have a progress bar on the web brower, and to support SD cards, which use FAT32 filesystems in order to be compatible with desktop computers.
In the smartphone market, apparently, once one of the big guys (Microsoft and Apple, who already have a MAD patent sharing pact) gets a 'do this, but do it on a smartphone' idea, they can hold the whole industry hostage. Maybe John Galt would've been okay with that, but I doubt it. In the fantasy world of 'Atlas Shrugged', monopolization of industries wasn't the objective of its heroes. It was more of 'let the best inventor win' - not let nobody else compete.
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After watching how the various regimes running (and buying, and selling, and outsourcing) my company feel about programmers, I don't think I would ever go into it as a young person today. But a strange thing has happened. Of all the people that have been there all this time, I'm one of the few that has survived all the M&A shenannigans and outsourcings. It seems that those who moved up into management roles were more replaceable than those of us who stayed technical. Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.
This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it. So far, every manager who's engineered the next sell-off of the company has been richly rewarded. The company's for sale again, and I can't imagine anybody being stupid enough to buy it. But fools abound, and I'm sure the current crop has their golden parachutes in order...
If WinRT contained desktop mode, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But as it stands, the Surface is not a merger of tablet and PC - it just pretends to be. The Surface Pro may be... but at the wrong price point. You'd be better off with a cheap laptop + a Nexus tablet. Really.
The Windows store (if it succeeds) will have a bunch of phone/tablet apps and the expectation of having all the desktop apps in the world, which it never will have. There is so much bait and switch marketing around Windows 8 that I'm surprised anybody knows what they're getting. It reminds me of the Romney campaign. You'll get Windows 8 when you buy a new PC. You might even like it - though it's case of multiple personality disorder is not going away any time soon (if at all)
And if the playing field were level, WinRT would never catch on, so it's locked down browser wouldn't be much of an issue. But Microsoft is counting on its other monopoly to make this thing a success. Currently, there is no reason at all for anyone to buy one of these over an iPad or an Android tablet. The applications just aren't there. And any other competitor would be in a deep chicken-and-egg hole. But because these things come with MSOffice, and because so many people are tied to MSOffice through work (or just not knowing that there are viable alternatives), Microsoft thinks it can do an end run around its lack of apps by virtue of including this one 'must have' app that nobody else can include. Might just work. And if somehow WinRT becomes the dominant tablet OS, then WinRT/IE lockdown will definitely matter in a way that iOS/Safari lockdown doesn't. Apple doesn't come near dominating the desktop, so there is no Safari-only segment of the Internet. But there still is a lot of IE-only stuff out there. The success of iOS and Android has done a lot to blunt that, but beware of possible back to the future scenarios. Avoid WinRT unless you absolutely must run MSOffice. And if you absolutely must run MSOffice, you might ask yourself if that's a wilse place to be.
Your argument applies pretty well for operating systems. But for word processors and spreadsheets, Microsoft wasn't the first to 'allow users to be productive'. WordPerfect and Lotus were there first and best. MS responded to Lotus and WordPerfect with me-too products and then bundled them with the OS (via OEM contracts) to gain a monopoly market share. Eventually these me-too products did surpass the originals in features, but that was largely to stoke the upgrade mill once dominance was achieved.
What determines a patent on a standard requiring RAND licensing? It would seem that 'pinch to zoom' and 'slide to unlock' have become de-facto standards for touch-screen devices. How is it that trivial patents like those can be used to block sales of a device when a patent that controls the basic functioning of a device must be licensed to precisely those competitors that are abusing the trivial ones? And you can't even block sales of the devices when the infringer refuses to strike a RAND deal...
It's not just binary compatibility that's lacking. The entire API has been changed, so existing windows desktop apps will never be built for the RT version. Some of them will be completely rewritten, I suppose, but essentially the Surface is an iPad with very few applications and no huge pool of 'ready to convert' stuff waiting in the wings. It's kind of a marketing bait and switch. People may end up buying the Surface because they think it's Windows and will run their office apps, but it won't - unless all they care about is MSOffice. The X86 version will, but that's a whole other animal.
What Microsoft really wants to do is leverage their desktop monopoly to mobile. They tried to do this by marketing 'Windows Familiarity' as a plus for WinPhone 6. But that didn't work, because as you stated, the desktop is a lousy metaphor for a phone. So now they're remaking their desktop into a clone of their phone so that they can tout the similarities between their desktop monopoly OS and their mobile offerings. This time it's the new desktop interface that's inappropriate for the form factor, but this time, they've got a captive audience and don't care.
Not really true. A failed Microsoft wouldn't stop anybody's existing systems from running. They're not really a services company (yet). Of course, security holes would eat away at the reliability of those systems, so companies would have to seriously start migrating stuff. Virus scanners wouldn't keep the current code safe forever...
But there'd be a lot of economic stimulus provided by that migration. Y2K on steroids.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away
Selective truth that is.
1. Because the Democrats don't want to be in Iraq - or invade Iran, they want to eliminate our military power? What?
2. Solyndra? Romney in the debate said that half the green energy investments failed. Nowhere near true. I imagine a failure rate comparable to or better than Bain Capital's typical rate.
3. Bullshit. Dems do believe in progressive taxation, and don't believe in letting people fall through the cracks. The horror! What's your solution? Oh, I forgot. Trickle down. Works great - for the rich.
To be fair, not even the Democrats have voted for a number of Obama's initiatives
That's a tired old saw. When 1 democrat doesn't join, the right comes out and says 'Obama couldn't even get his own party to vote for this stuff'. Meanwhile there were usually sizable majorities for the bills in question. Just not filibuster-proof 60 vote majorities. No president has ever had to meet the 60 vote 'standard' that's being applied routinely today.
You'd think Google could've gotten Apple to agree to patent detente in exchange for full map support with turn-by-turn and the works. Whether branded or not, Google would still get the search terms to use to improve their systems. I wonder whether this was even discussed. Then again, maybe both sides were so concerned about branding that they lost track of the bigger picture.
Required licensing might help. Part of the problem is that companies like Apple are using patents on minor features to lock out competitors' entire systems. Somehow, the patent office or the courts are going to have to figure out a way to put an actual dollar value on these innovations. Because the actual dollar values wouldn't be worth actually attempting to collect. As it is, these patents are being used to attempt to grab a monopoly on an entire category of device, simply because the holder 'owns' the most natural way to accomplish simple tasks on that category of device. That monopoly is not earned, and is causing real economic harm to competitors and users.
Microsoft, while not trying to sue competitors out of the market (yet) is still charging unreasonable amounts for patents on minor features, and extracting God knows what other concessions from OEM's.
50 cents per phone for all the Apple UI patents. 10 cents for FAT32. There. Problem solved.
Google really should've offered Apple full map access (including turn-by-turn) in exchange for patent detente. Who knows, maybe they did. But I can't see Apple, having just bought an alternative mapping service, taking that offer now. As it is, Google may have to sue to get their own app into the app store, and Apple will keep suing over pinch to zoom. Bad for everybody.
It all depends on whether Google actually has a monopoly. Does the fact that they're the only company that actually makes money off of search count - as long as there are other places that the public can go to search? Bing is currently a loss leader, but then again, so was Google in the beginning. Maybe if Microsoft simply gave up, Google would have a monopoly for access to users, but Bing has a fairly large (and largely unearned - based on monopoly tying that should've been more effectively dealt with) market share. Do we ignore that or not, just because advertisers aren't willing to pay for it (yet).
Except that nobody's forcing anybody to use Google. In fact, the real monopolist still forces every computer you buy to come with Windows and default you to Bing for searching. And they make it pretty tricky to change. I know, I know. When it works, it's pretty easy to change, but I've never actually seen anybody change the default search engine - even those that still use Google by typing www.google.com into the location bar. And I've seen cases where the search engine choice website hasn't worked at all.
Competition in Republican-speak means a race to the bottom between states to see who can provide the least coverage. It might help your employer find a cheaper policy, but it's not gonna save you a penny. Those cheap plans don't cover as much, so the rest comes from you.
So, either the 'UEFI must not be disablable' requirement no longer applies just to ARM-based systems, or this is an end run around the intel exception so that even if the bootloader is unlockable, there's no other system you can load on the thing anyway, rendering the 'unlockable on intel' argument meaningless. It's just the kind of crap Microsoft loves to pull. Sounds just like their support for ODF in Office. It 'works', but it doesn't work, based on a loophole Microsoft found in the spec that allowed them to build 'ODF support' that doesn't support anybody else's ODF docs properly.
That may be true - you can't count on the cheapo hardware vendors to fix the problem. But Google has to know this, and if they want devs to target the latest API's, they need to build them in a way that can be implemented on existing hardware (whether they work the same there or not). It's not a problem that my Nexus One can't be upgraded beyond gingerbread, but it's a problem for devs that it can't run apps that use the latest API's. Android needs to present a single platform for devs. And that means they need to put out a gingerbread-compatible 2.4 release that is binary compatible with most (if not all) 4.0 API's. Otherwise, Android is gingerbread for most things. Maybe that's not all that important for whole classes of apps that can work reasonably well everywhere targeting gingerbread - but how's a dev even supposed to know that? Does Google at least put out a 'do I need to target ICS?' document to help out?
Of course, if they make Jelly Bean multi-user, I'll forgive them and just go out and get a Nexus 7 ;-). Maybe the ICS features are only important for tablet-targeted apps.
Anybody out there know enough to comment on that?
Sounds like they actually invented something...
Depending on what you 'need' a stripped down Windows for, WINE might serve you pretty well. Sure it's not perfect, but it does a lot.
My company has a Windows app that occasional Mac users wanted to use. The standard answer was 'install Parallels', but I know it worked fine under WINE for Linux. It also worked fine under Crossover Mac. But I recently found the 'wineskins' project that lets you bundle your app with a full WINE setup (customized however your app needs it). Yeah, it's a big first-time install (~30MB zipped, ~140MB installed), but app upgrades can be simply dropped into the 'virtual C drive'. And end users love it. It launches instantly (as opposed to Parallels, where you have to actually boot Windows), and it integrates nicely with the Mac desktop (I have it set up to launch native Mac stuff for all external apps it wants to integrate with). Oh, and it's also free.
What's 'killing' Microsoft (and Microsoft is far from dying) is that Wall Street long ago cooked into the MS stock price the assumption that Windows would eventually displace all other operating systems. As recently as 2001, the brilliant morons responsible for selling the AIX server-based product I work on told me 'we can't sell it - it's not NT-based'. Didn't happen, and the MS stock price has been drifting back down to earth ever since.
Largely, the reason for this is Linux, which achieved huge success in the server space and re-legitimized Unix as a server OS. In fact, Apple's success is also largely tied to the success of Linux (and OSS in general). Had the server gone all Microsoft and had KHTML not come along for Apple to turn into Webkit, the iPhone may never have been viable. Even though apps rule today, a smartphone without a viable web browser might never have taken off (though I guess the original iPod might still have sold).
More recently, Linux and Android have shown the value of open source. There'd likely have been no Kindle without Linux (hell, there might not have been an Amazon for that matter). Smartphone form factors would've been limited to Apple's vision (assuming they survived to build the iPhone), or Blackberry's. And there'd have been no Winphone7 (or 8) had Microsoft not lost so badly in that arena. All due to that 'failed' OS, Linux.
Let 'em trade as fast as they can, but add a small transaction fee per share to weed out the traders that are gambling on the second-to-second fluctuations. Problem solved.
It's bad enough that poorly considered opinions posted to the internet live forever. Hideous that they show up whenever someone googles your name.
It's one thing to post a blog article anonymously - there should be no need for that. But another for a site that encourages feedback to enshrine off the cuff comments in perpetuity.
The 'Reardon Metal' case illustrates pretty well the difference between physical and software inventions. The IP to the metal apply only to the metal. There's no patent on 'building train tracks out of Reardon metal'. Just on producing the raw material. Presumably, Reardon would sell his metal to anyone at the same price; otherwise, that would be problematic.
Now take 'swipe to unlock'. First of all, 'invention'? If ever there were a patent on a pure idea, this is it. On a touchscreen device, you need to have a purposeful gesture to say 'I want the device to unlock - this is not just a case of the device bumping around in my pocket'. A left-to-right swipe on an icon is the simplest most obvious gesture to accomplish that. Anyone would have thought of it. But beside that, there's no way to place a reasonable price on rights to use it. It costs exactly 0 to produce a 'swipe to unlock' thingy. You can't just say, okay Apple produces 'swipe to unlocks' and everybody has to buy them from Apple. Microsoft has actually attempted to set a price on their patents, and the pricing is ridiculous. They charge about 30% of the cost of WP7 for the right to have a progress bar on the web brower, and to support SD cards, which use FAT32 filesystems in order to be compatible with desktop computers.
In the smartphone market, apparently, once one of the big guys (Microsoft and Apple, who already have a MAD patent sharing pact) gets a 'do this, but do it on a smartphone' idea, they can hold the whole industry hostage. Maybe John Galt would've been okay with that, but I doubt it. In the fantasy world of 'Atlas Shrugged', monopolization of industries wasn't the objective of its heroes. It was more of 'let the best inventor win' - not let nobody else compete.
Under the only definition relevant to this article: you'd have to be crazy to buy a lumia today - it's already obsolete.