I've had the same experience. A huge number of employers websites take either plain text or.doc files, which of those two choices look better? The answers fairly obvious. Plus, most employers datamining would be coded for MS or raw text. It's getting better as more people are hacking in pdf format, but still an issue IMHO.
As well as was mentioned in the article, businesses and OEM's are the big customers of MS. If your business is standardized on MS, who's going to want to try to work out any incompatiblities between Linux and MS at home so they can answer an email or something? They drop the 50 cents on a couple blank disks, get their buddy to burn a copy of XP/Vista and office and away they go.
As a bit of an example that Windows is considered nearly free: At work our Win XP Pro licenses cost us $7, our MS Office 2003 Pro licenses $147 + about $60 for an exchange server client license. Its the office suite that MS is making their money from businesses.
P.S. I have a computer running only red hat linux, a clunker running Win 98, and a laptop dual booting XP and Kubuntu. I administrate 20 Solaris 8-10 workstations at work, among other things. Its not that I don't like UNIX and Linux, nor that I can't use them. In my case the bottom line is that the vast majority of the outside world assumes you have access to MS products, so I have to be 100% MS compatible for my outward facing activities. The only way I know to ensure this is to run 100% MS products on one of my computers.
Can't remember where I read it, but it struck a note with me. The GUI on Linux is pretty good, comparible to XP or Vista, the software is great to get for free. But do you want to risk that when you type your thesis, or resume and send it to someone that they can't open it? Is $200 worth a couple months without a job because it took that long for you to get a reply from the HR at a company you applied to saying they can't read your resume?
Last I checked Linux had about 4% market share, even so, what percentage of those would you say are single boot systems, owned by someone without a second computer running Windows? Like it or not MS Office is the defacto standard, unless your going to email your stuff as plan text you have to live with it.
That is the fundamental difference between FOSS and commerical software. A company wants the whole market to themself, as they are looking to pay their bills. FOSS says in effect, here is our program we really like it and hope you do too. But if not, use the code and modify it to do want you want. Open source isn't market greedy, everyone is making a bunch of little changes, and creating new 'products', that might suite some people better than the orginal branch of the code tree.
They don't say what the demographics they sampled were. How many 12 year olds who's daddy bought them a console are going to care about its movie features?
Also, unless you have a decent TV, who cares that it comes with a high fi format. It is almost like hunting for a Beta Max movie 5 years after VHS came out. Yeah, Blockbuster has 5 movies on a shelf somewhere, but you'd have to go dust them off to see which ones they are. IMHO, until the HD war is won, most people won't commit, and won't have a reason to care which format their console plays. It is almost like getting a free fist full of Riche Marks right after WWII started, great if they win, useless if they don't.
But I think that if the über-programmer really does exist, then eventually the free market will figure that out, and compensate him accordingly. There in lies the problem. It isn't a free economy. People with feelings make the pay scale in the company. Someone can have a lot of great references and such but you don't know he is a real winner until he's working on your projects and able to deliver. When the project manager gets asked for a raise, do you think he'll give him a large enough raise to make him make more than a project manager? No of course not, he is in the senior position. But say he realizes the guys worth and goes to HR with it, the HR guy isn't going to buck the system, his little book says an average developer in the area is making 60k, and there is no way in hell the guy will get bumped to 600k.
Now the company might promote him to a position that can get significantly more money, but then they might shoot the cash cow, because is this star going to be a great project lead as well? Can they risk the code throughput and quality, on a chance this guy can deliver in a higher position? Some will try him out, but others will never promote him, and end up forcing him out into a better paying job elsewhere.
P.S. There does seem to be some correlation between rarity of skills an salary. I'm right out of college with a physics degree. Working at a cancer center, which needed somebody that understanded radiation + computers (both sysadmin and development). Voila, I make 100k at my first job. Now there is no where to go within the center (except if I can convince someone to give me the CIO position in 10 years or so). Still a respectable salary. However, I had a hard time getting a development job elsewhere, so I guess the only guys willing to pay the premium are those needing the odd combination of skills (which makes sense economically, expected utility and all that jazz). Also, it is worth noting that my co-workers are all PhD's in medical physics making 90-150k a year, so I'm just making a normal starting salary, thus not the institutional issues I mention.
Yeah, price is a big issue. But I don't think the size of the car is as big an issue as you make it out to be, especially on the world market. I'd say about 80% of the time you just need to get 1 or 2 people somewhere with minimal baggage. So way drag around another ton or so of SUV, with horse power you don't need? I think once the price is around 120% of a gasoline car your going to see these sell like hotcakes, especially in asian and european markets. The US still has one of the lowest fuel costs in the world.
I think the leased battery is a bad idea. I see what their arguement is, you essentially have a warantee on the battery life, as if it doesn't work properly you lease a new one. This probably will help the resale value, as it will reduce the risk to the purchaser, you are guaranteed a working battery by the fact that you can lease a new one every so many years. The problem is the lease rate probably won't properly compensate people with good credit histories, and over compensate people that would be paying high interest rates if the battery was part of the purchase price. The problem is at the moment, their market is more of the former and less of the later as they are asking people to pay a premium for the car over a similar gas powered model. The typical high credit risk purchaser will be looking for the best deal they can, as that will be the only thing they can get financing for.
If the floor panels go down, then you have to step up a bit more to get to the next panel over. You are essentially forcing the customer to walk up a bunch of tiny steps. Not a big deal right? Until somebody says hey if we double the depression, we can pay for the electricity for our offices too. Eventually this has a noticable effect on the effort required to do your day to day activities.
As well, your energy has to come from somewhere. So you eat a little bit more, your food comes from farms, so more land needed to generate this food. We use way more energy than our bodies can produce in a day, and it isn't fair to make your customers pay your power bill, by exerting greater strain on their body. I'm not working for my retail purchase, that is why I'm giving them money.
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As well as was mentioned in the article, businesses and OEM's are the big customers of MS. If your business is standardized on MS, who's going to want to try to work out any incompatiblities between Linux and MS at home so they can answer an email or something? They drop the 50 cents on a couple blank disks, get their buddy to burn a copy of XP/Vista and office and away they go.
As a bit of an example that Windows is considered nearly free: At work our Win XP Pro licenses cost us $7, our MS Office 2003 Pro licenses $147 + about $60 for an exchange server client license. Its the office suite that MS is making their money from businesses.
P.S. I have a computer running only red hat linux, a clunker running Win 98, and a laptop dual booting XP and Kubuntu. I administrate 20 Solaris 8-10 workstations at work, among other things. Its not that I don't like UNIX and Linux, nor that I can't use them. In my case the bottom line is that the vast majority of the outside world assumes you have access to MS products, so I have to be 100% MS compatible for my outward facing activities. The only way I know to ensure this is to run 100% MS products on one of my computers.
Last I checked Linux had about 4% market share, even so, what percentage of those would you say are single boot systems, owned by someone without a second computer running Windows? Like it or not MS Office is the defacto standard, unless your going to email your stuff as plan text you have to live with it.
That is the fundamental difference between FOSS and commerical software. A company wants the whole market to themself, as they are looking to pay their bills. FOSS says in effect, here is our program we really like it and hope you do too. But if not, use the code and modify it to do want you want. Open source isn't market greedy, everyone is making a bunch of little changes, and creating new 'products', that might suite some people better than the orginal branch of the code tree.
Also, unless you have a decent TV, who cares that it comes with a high fi format. It is almost like hunting for a Beta Max movie 5 years after VHS came out. Yeah, Blockbuster has 5 movies on a shelf somewhere, but you'd have to go dust them off to see which ones they are. IMHO, until the HD war is won, most people won't commit, and won't have a reason to care which format their console plays. It is almost like getting a free fist full of Riche Marks right after WWII started, great if they win, useless if they don't.
Now the company might promote him to a position that can get significantly more money, but then they might shoot the cash cow, because is this star going to be a great project lead as well? Can they risk the code throughput and quality, on a chance this guy can deliver in a higher position? Some will try him out, but others will never promote him, and end up forcing him out into a better paying job elsewhere.
P.S. There does seem to be some correlation between rarity of skills an salary. I'm right out of college with a physics degree. Working at a cancer center, which needed somebody that understanded radiation + computers (both sysadmin and development). Voila, I make 100k at my first job. Now there is no where to go within the center (except if I can convince someone to give me the CIO position in 10 years or so). Still a respectable salary. However, I had a hard time getting a development job elsewhere, so I guess the only guys willing to pay the premium are those needing the odd combination of skills (which makes sense economically, expected utility and all that jazz). Also, it is worth noting that my co-workers are all PhD's in medical physics making 90-150k a year, so I'm just making a normal starting salary, thus not the institutional issues I mention.
I think the leased battery is a bad idea. I see what their arguement is, you essentially have a warantee on the battery life, as if it doesn't work properly you lease a new one. This probably will help the resale value, as it will reduce the risk to the purchaser, you are guaranteed a working battery by the fact that you can lease a new one every so many years. The problem is the lease rate probably won't properly compensate people with good credit histories, and over compensate people that would be paying high interest rates if the battery was part of the purchase price. The problem is at the moment, their market is more of the former and less of the later as they are asking people to pay a premium for the car over a similar gas powered model. The typical high credit risk purchaser will be looking for the best deal they can, as that will be the only thing they can get financing for.
If the floor panels go down, then you have to step up a bit more to get to the next panel over. You are essentially forcing the customer to walk up a bunch of tiny steps. Not a big deal right? Until somebody says hey if we double the depression, we can pay for the electricity for our offices too. Eventually this has a noticable effect on the effort required to do your day to day activities.
As well, your energy has to come from somewhere. So you eat a little bit more, your food comes from farms, so more land needed to generate this food. We use way more energy than our bodies can produce in a day, and it isn't fair to make your customers pay your power bill, by exerting greater strain on their body. I'm not working for my retail purchase, that is why I'm giving them money.