Barring comparability and performance regressions, at $20 why not upgrade?
One reason - printer drivers - yes the old canard still has a bite - my Canon multifunction doesn't have 10.8 drivers yet - and may never get them - it took Canon several months to make their drivers Lion compatible last year, and I expect the same if not longer for this release.
I don't use SSL-VPN anymore, but that's another case where unless you're lucky, if you have older kit, you will experience lack of driver availability - took 8 months for my SSL VPN provider to support Snow Leopard.
"Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever."
or?
We were all very eager for a path forward that offered fixes and completion for Lion's half-realized and sometimes infuriating design / implementation choices.:-)
I'll take that over Microsoft's Vista, which took 5 years to arrive after XP landed. Even at its longest, Apple has never left their users without an OS update for more than 2.5 years (Tiger - during which they added support for Intel processors).
How can you possibly say it was priced too high? If all of the shares Facebook was selling were bought by someone at $38, then that was the correct price.
You realize that initial covering of this price was required by their underwriter, Morgan Stanley [1]. They were basically sustaining the price at $38 all of opening day.
The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?
I pose a question in response to your question: What about the business in Somalia that never got off the ground because there were no clean roads, no mail service, and the bribes to keep the warlords from stealing all of your good and killing your workers is too high.
The fact is, without the fundamentals, establishing a successful venture is astronomically more difficult - how many successful large-scale businesses existed in the middle ages (which is pretty much what Somalia looks like today, but with modern weaponry)?
Yes, the successful business owner deserves credit - just nowhere near as much as Wall St. (and their lackeys in office) think they do. Take that same business, move them to Somalia (hell, even some run down parts of major metropolitan areas), and give them a week or two before the venture completely implodes.
If it's not obvious, I do think that Microsoft has gone batshit crazy and suicidal in its old age. If you look at just about every business and strategic decision they've made since ~2008, they've dropped the ball and bent over backwards to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every possible opportunity
As much as I dislike Microsoft, you're being a bit unfair - they are competing with companies like Google and Apple - who execute *very* well. If your competitors are bringing their A game and you've been bringing your B game for the past decade but were the only game in town back then, of course you will look bad.
Keep in mind that,while bringing their B game, MSFT has been making money hand over fist for that past decade and their top-line is amazing. It's just, they are no longer the biggest/brightest/boldest company around.
But it's dead as a source of important news. It's an aggregator along with the rest - nothing special about it. Furthermore, as a forum it is basically as useful as HuffPo except without the scoops.
Meanwhile, people still link to slashdot, and the comments here are still +1 Informative that I don't see elsewhere. If you want digg, you might as well go reddit and get the AMA and other features that make that site digg but better.
I don't think Microsoft could ever pull an Apple or Google and "leave money on the table". Your entire (brilliant) strategy goes against profit maximization - by adding to the brand value.
The problem with the bean counter worldview of "leaving money on the table" is to forget there are other tables - and your ability to access those tables are exactly by not extracting whatever you can from (ie, screwing over) your current customers.
Remember, Microsoft sells very little percentage of their product to end customers - they sell to a captive audience - their distributors and PC manufacturers, and for server market, major corporations who can't quit the Microsoft habit.
Ballmer in a month: "They fled. The Apple louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of Microsoft yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the Apple employees. We had not anticipated this... Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Redmond. Be assured, Redmond is safe, protected."
In France, where almost all domestic broadband is "triple play" (phone, TV and Internet), at least two of the major ISPs offers gaming as part of the functionality of their latest glorified router package. You can't get much easier to install than "It's already there", and the ISPs already have a distribution model that they use to sell view-on-demand video.
What kind of content do they offer? Bejeweled? Card games? What's the controller like?
At the end of the day, "just showing up", though important, doesn't help when the content or usability are weak. That's like the VOD I have for Dish Network - completely uninterested, even if it was free - there's better stuff on Netflix or Amazon Video and it's easier to access those with a Roku.
People/apps just haven't caught up yet - the vast majority of end users who want a cheap laptop would actually be better served by a locked-down (as in, secure) tablet, they just don't know it yet.
Right now Siri is beta (and IMHO not quite baked), but in two years, it will be a decent input method that doesn't suck. Do away with the need for the keyboard and tablets will reign supreme, with the iPad squatting on the sweet spot of the price-profit curve.
Problem is, tools can be commoditized and often veer towards standards (see HTML) which command lower margins while "solutions" and "experiences" can leverage huge margins.
Microsoft's main problem is they haven't had a successful original idea in the consumer market aside from Kinnect in over a decade (and even that was trying to out-Wii the Wii). Their main cash cows are at-risk of being seriously diluted (Windows Phone?, how original) while other companies are busy really innovating the next new thing (Google Maps, Amazon Prime, Apple iPhone) that brings home the consumers.
Metro looks like a great solution for an iPad competitor. Only a desperate company would try to graft it onto the desktop OS... even if it was dead-sexy and consistent, problems like gorilla arm and the lack of intuitive trackpad gesturing make it a bad fit.
When the amount and kind of service you need is such that it would cost more to employ people in house than to outsource it, you do. However when you get large, it is silly to outsource.
Many very large companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google included) outsource some of their IT work to increase flexibility. Implementing a new Oracle/SAP module? Hire proficient folks on-demand, and manage them with internal employees. Of course, doing this kind of work requires a lot of proficiency as you need to prevent contractor and subs from gaming the system, but with a large enough scale it can be economical and provide strategic agility.
That said, I'm glad GM is doing what is likely the right thing - contractors, if not managed properly will drain your budget while providing substandard output. With ever-improving skillsets here in the US (as opposed to 10 years ago, when competent IT was hard to find) and a focus on implementing the right solutions as opposed to whatever Microsoft/IBM/Oracle shove your way, will really help out the organization as a whole.
Any security-minded organization would indoctrinate their employees, and set policy (either via OS security and/or SOP) to use only secured USB keys, which are provided. This should be a no-brainer, and shouldn't cost a significant amount.
This kind of policy limit the scope of these kind of attacks, as well as helps to prevent inadvertent info-leaks like when workers lose their wallet/backpack. By preventing stupidity and bad luck you greatly improve the company security.
If you're not paranoid of the average person, you either live in a bubble or haven't been paying attention to the rest of the world.
The average person will gladly lie, cheat, and steal (or worse), and is only stopped by immediate negative consequences for those actions. The average person should not be trusted - they'd take everything you had if they reasonably believed they could get away with it forever.
This applies equally well to Law Enforcement Officers, the Aristocracy and Politicians. Combine with Acton's Law [1], and you get ripe conditions for mass abuse of power, and selling out the public as a whole.
LEO's need to be held to a higher standard. The problem is ultimately the issue of who funds them - the 1%, by cutting the funding of such organizations, hold them hostage to their whims. When was the last time you heard of a CEO getting a traffic ticket?
1. Ensure that registered voters have unrestricted access to their polling place.
You have already missed an important step - ensuring that nefarious groups aren't preventing eligible voters from being allowed to register [1], and that they aren't caged [2], or summarily invalidated from being registered [3] (the main problem with this is that people are prevented from getting IDs in the first place by virtue of being homeless, etc).
Let's not forget the time honored tradition of just jailing your political opponents or threatening their death if they stand for election is yet another way for the formalities of democracy to be observed while gaming the end-result. You can have completely "clean" elections but still have a thoroughly corrupt output.
...is smirking in schadenfreude at Ellison's loss.
SaaS is the new model, and it's immune to this approach - sure customers can resell their licenses, but what does that give you? Monthly per-user pricing keeps it real for the customer as well as the vendor.
This is one software's natural business models (other main model is tying to hardware a la Apple/IBM) - open source companies like Redhat sell support and maintenance contracts, as well as professional services, just like the proprietary companies, and all of this is preserved in the SaaS, cloud model.
I always felt Bill Gates' vision of software licensing that he laid out in the 70s is an increasingly outdated business model - yes very large enterprises will still buy on-premise software, but for most small companies and individuals, SaaS provides benefits that far outweigh the costs of installing/updating local software.
Without the public option, this bill is just a way to further cement and inflate the profits of health insurance companies -- which, last I checked, were the "bad guys" who refuse to cover the cost of necessary treatment.
As a fan of the public option (and hell, government-run healthcare as in the UK), I think the 80% MLR [1] is going to squeeze some efficiency into the insurers - and it may well kill the privatized insurance scam as it exists today.
There is still room for the public option. I'm an incrementalist - yes, the public option (aka medicare part E for everybody) should have been on the table and used as a bludgeon (or sacrificial lamb) to push through other parts of health care reform (some dropped provisions would have been far stronger). However, there will be an opportunity in the future to expand this either from the federal or state levels.
Really? I'm not in the 1% and I have no difficulty affording my health insurance. Exaggerate much?
Lemme guess - you don't a) have a "pre-existing condition" that insurance companies find unprofitable to deal with and b) you don't take expensive medications (which have risen in cost at a strong multiple of inflation for the past 10 years and will continue to rise in cost).
Thing is, both of these conditions can change - suddenly. When you can be revoked at any time, Insurance doesn't really give you much assurance.
Your current state (and even precautions you take) doesn't have a definitive outcome on whether you will or won't draw an unlucky card next year or decade.
Unlike some other former presidents who during from 1/01-01/09 spent a great deal of time relentlessly attacking the then President and attempting to undermine him... 43 seems to have opted to allow the current president to succeed or fail on his own.
No, he delegates the undermining to former VP (and part cyborg) Cheney.
I still have my laptop from 2006 and it still does everything my brand new one does, it even has higher res screen.
I'll echo what you said, I have both a 2006 Macbook and Mac Mini - they are both doing incredibly well - albeit with shiny new SSDs
In fact, I'd bet my 2006 devices are faster than many currently selling desktop/laptops that don't also have an SSD for mundane tasks like booting the OS, browsing and moving files around (yeah, their video cards don't quite support HD streams without stuttering but that's what tablets and roku/appetvs are for nowadays).
Slashdot Mirror
Barring comparability and performance regressions, at $20 why not upgrade?
One reason - printer drivers - yes the old canard still has a bite - my Canon multifunction doesn't have 10.8 drivers yet - and may never get them - it took Canon several months to make their drivers Lion compatible last year, and I expect the same if not longer for this release.
I don't use SSL-VPN anymore, but that's another case where unless you're lucky, if you have older kit, you will experience lack of driver availability - took 8 months for my SSL VPN provider to support Snow Leopard.
"Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever."
or?
We were all very eager for a path forward that offered fixes and completion for Lion's half-realized and sometimes infuriating design / implementation choices. :-)
I'll take that over Microsoft's Vista, which took 5 years to arrive after XP landed. Even at its longest, Apple has never left their users without an OS update for more than 2.5 years (Tiger - during which they added support for Intel processors).
How can you possibly say it was priced too high? If all of the shares Facebook was selling were bought by someone at $38, then that was the correct price.
You realize that initial covering of this price was required by their underwriter, Morgan Stanley [1]. They were basically sustaining the price at $38 all of opening day.
[1] http://business.time.com/2012/05/22/facebook-ipo-fallout-four-lessons-from-a-troubling-public-debut/
That's pretty damn cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DyqPzmox4U
Without businesses paying property taxes, sales taxes, business license fees, etc, the government would not have been able to build those streets.
Clearly, by your logic, the businesses which have evaded paying taxes [1] for the past several years should get no credit at all.
Fact: The majority of taxes is paid for not by corporations [2], but people. Go figure.
[1] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/04/09/460519/major-corporations-no-taxes-four-year/?mobile=nc
[2] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm/
So I have a question that maybe you can answer.
The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?
I pose a question in response to your question: What about the business in Somalia that never got off the ground because there were no clean roads, no mail service, and the bribes to keep the warlords from stealing all of your good and killing your workers is too high.
The fact is, without the fundamentals, establishing a successful venture is astronomically more difficult - how many successful large-scale businesses existed in the middle ages (which is pretty much what Somalia looks like today, but with modern weaponry)?
Yes, the successful business owner deserves credit - just nowhere near as much as Wall St. (and their lackeys in office) think they do. Take that same business, move them to Somalia (hell, even some run down parts of major metropolitan areas), and give them a week or two before the venture completely implodes.
They were (gasp) text ads - nothing lurid, no links to pictures of hot heavy action.
Perhaps they didn't live up to the moderators' standards of a nice good racy ad?
iPads come with a tablet? Wow. I guess I'll have to keep that stuff they fill the box with the next time I buy one.
These iPad boxes came with REAL tablets - like the millenia-old original issue types. Even Microsoft was late to that game.
If it's not obvious, I do think that Microsoft has gone batshit crazy and suicidal in its old age. If you look at just about every business and strategic decision they've made since ~2008, they've dropped the ball and bent over backwards to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every possible opportunity
As much as I dislike Microsoft, you're being a bit unfair - they are competing with companies like Google and Apple - who execute *very* well. If your competitors are bringing their A game and you've been bringing your B game for the past decade but were the only game in town back then, of course you will look bad.
Keep in mind that,while bringing their B game, MSFT has been making money hand over fist for that past decade and their top-line is amazing. It's just, they are no longer the biggest/brightest/boldest company around.
of course, that does not work when the battery is out.
Of course, neither does the phone. Which invalidates half it's usefulness - to get calls.
digg is still bigger than slashdot.. about 5x bigger
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digg.com
But it's dead as a source of important news. It's an aggregator along with the rest - nothing special about it. Furthermore, as a forum it is basically as useful as HuffPo except without the scoops.
Meanwhile, people still link to slashdot, and the comments here are still +1 Informative that I don't see elsewhere. If you want digg, you might as well go reddit and get the AMA and other features that make that site digg but better.
I don't think Microsoft could ever pull an Apple or Google and "leave money on the table". Your entire (brilliant) strategy goes against profit maximization - by adding to the brand value.
The problem with the bean counter worldview of "leaving money on the table" is to forget there are other tables - and your ability to access those tables are exactly by not extracting whatever you can from (ie, screwing over) your current customers.
Remember, Microsoft sells very little percentage of their product to end customers - they sell to a captive audience - their distributors and PC manufacturers, and for server market, major corporations who can't quit the Microsoft habit.
Ballmer in a month: "They fled. The Apple louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of Microsoft yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the Apple employees. We had not anticipated this... Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Redmond. Be assured, Redmond is safe, protected."
Microsoft's new product "Microsoft Baghdad Bob"
In France, where almost all domestic broadband is "triple play" (phone, TV and Internet), at least two of the major ISPs offers gaming as part of the functionality of their latest glorified router package. You can't get much easier to install than "It's already there", and the ISPs already have a distribution model that they use to sell view-on-demand video.
What kind of content do they offer? Bejeweled? Card games? What's the controller like?
At the end of the day, "just showing up", though important, doesn't help when the content or usability are weak. That's like the VOD I have for Dish Network - completely uninterested, even if it was free - there's better stuff on Netflix or Amazon Video and it's easier to access those with a Roku.
People/apps just haven't caught up yet - the vast majority of end users who want a cheap laptop would actually be better served by a locked-down (as in, secure) tablet, they just don't know it yet.
Right now Siri is beta (and IMHO not quite baked), but in two years, it will be a decent input method that doesn't suck. Do away with the need for the keyboard and tablets will reign supreme, with the iPad squatting on the sweet spot of the price-profit curve.
As TOOLS become REFINED they change less.
Problem is, tools can be commoditized and often veer towards standards (see HTML) which command lower margins while "solutions" and "experiences" can leverage huge margins.
Microsoft's main problem is they haven't had a successful original idea in the consumer market aside from Kinnect in over a decade (and even that was trying to out-Wii the Wii). Their main cash cows are at-risk of being seriously diluted (Windows Phone?, how original) while other companies are busy really innovating the next new thing (Google Maps, Amazon Prime, Apple iPhone) that brings home the consumers.
Metro looks like a great solution for an iPad competitor. Only a desperate company would try to graft it onto the desktop OS... even if it was dead-sexy and consistent, problems like gorilla arm and the lack of intuitive trackpad gesturing make it a bad fit.
When the amount and kind of service you need is such that it would cost more to employ people in house than to outsource it, you do. However when you get large, it is silly to outsource.
Many very large companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google included) outsource some of their IT work to increase flexibility. Implementing a new Oracle/SAP module? Hire proficient folks on-demand, and manage them with internal employees. Of course, doing this kind of work requires a lot of proficiency as you need to prevent contractor and subs from gaming the system, but with a large enough scale it can be economical and provide strategic agility.
That said, I'm glad GM is doing what is likely the right thing - contractors, if not managed properly will drain your budget while providing substandard output. With ever-improving skillsets here in the US (as opposed to 10 years ago, when competent IT was hard to find) and a focus on implementing the right solutions as opposed to whatever Microsoft/IBM/Oracle shove your way, will really help out the organization as a whole.
Any security-minded organization would indoctrinate their employees, and set policy (either via OS security and/or SOP) to use only secured USB keys, which are provided. This should be a no-brainer, and shouldn't cost a significant amount.
This kind of policy limit the scope of these kind of attacks, as well as helps to prevent inadvertent info-leaks like when workers lose their wallet/backpack. By preventing stupidity and bad luck you greatly improve the company security.
If you're not paranoid of the average person, you either live in a bubble or haven't been paying attention to the rest of the world.
The average person will gladly lie, cheat, and steal (or worse), and is only stopped by immediate negative consequences for those actions. The average person should not be trusted - they'd take everything you had if they reasonably believed they could get away with it forever.
This applies equally well to Law Enforcement Officers, the Aristocracy and Politicians. Combine with Acton's Law [1], and you get ripe conditions for mass abuse of power, and selling out the public as a whole.
LEO's need to be held to a higher standard. The problem is ultimately the issue of who funds them - the 1%, by cutting the funding of such organizations, hold them hostage to their whims. When was the last time you heard of a CEO getting a traffic ticket?
[1] http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely.html
1. Ensure that registered voters have unrestricted access to their polling place.
You have already missed an important step - ensuring that nefarious groups aren't preventing eligible voters from being allowed to register [1], and that they aren't caged [2], or summarily invalidated from being registered [3] (the main problem with this is that people are prevented from getting IDs in the first place by virtue of being homeless, etc).
Let's not forget the time honored tradition of just jailing your political opponents or threatening their death if they stand for election is yet another way for the formalities of democracy to be observed while gaming the end-result. You can have completely "clean" elections but still have a thoroughly corrupt output.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/us/restrictions-on-voter-registration-in-florida-have-groups-opting-out.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caging_(voter_suppression)
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57467195-503544/stringent-voter-id-law-in-pa-could-prevent-750000-from-voting/
...is smirking in schadenfreude at Ellison's loss.
SaaS is the new model, and it's immune to this approach - sure customers can resell their licenses, but what does that give you? Monthly per-user pricing keeps it real for the customer as well as the vendor.
This is one software's natural business models (other main model is tying to hardware a la Apple/IBM) - open source companies like Redhat sell support and maintenance contracts, as well as professional services, just like the proprietary companies, and all of this is preserved in the SaaS, cloud model.
I always felt Bill Gates' vision of software licensing that he laid out in the 70s is an increasingly outdated business model - yes very large enterprises will still buy on-premise software, but for most small companies and individuals, SaaS provides benefits that far outweigh the costs of installing/updating local software.
Without the public option, this bill is just a way to further cement and inflate the profits of health insurance companies -- which, last I checked, were the "bad guys" who refuse to cover the cost of necessary treatment.
As a fan of the public option (and hell, government-run healthcare as in the UK), I think the 80% MLR [1] is going to squeeze some efficiency into the insurers - and it may well kill the privatized insurance scam as it exists today.
There is still room for the public option. I'm an incrementalist - yes, the public option (aka medicare part E for everybody) should have been on the table and used as a bludgeon (or sacrificial lamb) to push through other parts of health care reform (some dropped provisions would have been far stronger). However, there will be an opportunity in the future to expand this either from the federal or state levels.
[1] http://www.healthcare.gov/law/resources/reports/mlr-rebates06212012a.html
Really? I'm not in the 1% and I have no difficulty affording my health insurance. Exaggerate much?
Lemme guess - you don't a) have a "pre-existing condition" that insurance companies find unprofitable to deal with and b) you don't take expensive medications (which have risen in cost at a strong multiple of inflation for the past 10 years and will continue to rise in cost).
Thing is, both of these conditions can change - suddenly. When you can be revoked at any time, Insurance doesn't really give you much assurance.
Your current state (and even precautions you take) doesn't have a definitive outcome on whether you will or won't draw an unlucky card next year or decade.
Unlike some other former presidents who during from 1/01-01/09 spent a great deal of time relentlessly attacking the then President and attempting to undermine him... 43 seems to have opted to allow the current president to succeed or fail on his own.
No, he delegates the undermining to former VP (and part cyborg) Cheney.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/10/at-bush-administration-reunion-cheney-attacks-obama-again/
http://www.americablog.com/2011/01/cheney-attacks-obama-for-doing-what-he.html
http://www.alan.com/2012/04/15/cheney-attacks-obama-as-unmitigated-disaster/
I still have my laptop from 2006 and it still does everything my brand new one does, it even has higher res screen.
I'll echo what you said, I have both a 2006 Macbook and Mac Mini - they are both doing incredibly well - albeit with shiny new SSDs
In fact, I'd bet my 2006 devices are faster than many currently selling desktop/laptops that don't also have an SSD for mundane tasks like booting the OS, browsing and moving files around (yeah, their video cards don't quite support HD streams without stuttering but that's what tablets and roku/appetvs are for nowadays).