The infrastructure and automation is key, if you've got 2-3 computer images, and 3-4 hardware models for 4,000 computers/users, then a half dozen support personnel is probably fine, especially if your software management is centralized (as it should be in this case). Not counting any odd server setups you may have, I could see an IT department getting away with 10 or fewer support personnel total, particularly if you've set yourself up to handle all but most severe problems remotely.
Now, if every user gets to pick what brand and model of computer he or she wants, and every setup is custom, then yeah you're looking at much much higher ratios. Most large companies have figured this out though, and don't allow that sort of thing. A standardized model will fit 99% of the time, and it dramatically reduces support and life-cycle costs.
Hey you know, if you really want them to change their ways, and make a few bucks in the process, you could report them to the BSA and get upwards of $1 million for your trouble.
Though, really, you'd only want to do this if you were leaving the company, as it likely wouldn't be a fun place to work for you afterwards. Still, they'd certainly change their ways!
We use Citrix as a barrier between sensitive networks. We have a corporate network, a buffer network, and a sensitive network. Citrix servers sit in the buffer network allowing users on the corporate network to access the sensitive network without having any direct link between the two. It works pretty well, since we can lock down the buffer network to only allow the citrix connections and a few outside connections for things like AV and MS updates.
As far as using Citrix to do real work on a day to day basis without such high security requirments, I've always thought it was a terrible idea. My company wants to do more of it though, and I can't understand why. A new laptop is about $600 and should last 2-3 years. Support per laptop is probably another $100 a year, for grand total of $900. I can't see the extra bandwidth and citrix licensing used up by a user working off of a citrix connection costing less than that over three years. Plus the fact that the user still needs a laptop, and if you make him buy it himself he's just going to charge you more for his services. So the only potential savings really is in software licensing, but if the users are working day in and day out on the same apps, always using up a citrix connection, then you aren't really saving anything as you still need that many licenses. It makes no sense to me, and you've drasticly increased your server side support needs.
CAL's aren't that bad, generally you just need to pick the structure that will cost you the least amount of money - i.e. for a lot of users and not a lot of machines, you want per-machine licenses. If it's the other way around you want per-user licenses. Some stuff like Exchange gets a bit more complicated, but overall it isn't that bad. It does get expensive, though Exchange is usually worth it.
1 tech to 100 users seems extraordinarily high, I've never worked in an environment with that many support techs. I've worked in a locked-down environment with about 3,000 users and 5 help desk personel as the sole non-server support, and I've worked in an environment with 5 desktop techs for about 4,000 users (not very restricted) with a remote help desk for trivial matters (anything that takes less than 5 minutes to fix, basically). I currently work on a separated network for the second company, I'm the remote support for about 500 users and I make sure the engineers don't break the 10-15 servers under my control. There are a couple union guys that handle any physical work, but it is definitely not the major portion of their work, and there is no other support outside of the union guys and me.
Your environment has to be a complete mess if you need 1 desktop tech per 100 windows machines. I could see it for a Linux setup if it's your first go of it, I imagine your IT department would need a few years to streamline things to get that number down, but really, windows is easy. If you need that many you're probably doing it wrong.
Sounds about on par with my group. If you have the right infrastructure, like a centralized software location for installs, you can quite easilly manage hundreds of applications without requiring aditional overhead. Generally when a windows app breaks you can fix it with a re-install, and if that takes 30 seconds then it's no big deal.
We have an outside help desk that only seems to be able to handle the most trival of problems, for everything halfway serious we do it. We have several hundred applications to deal with, and until recently it was no big deal at all (corporate overlords decided to manage all software installs globaly, so now it takes 20 minutes to install a piece of software, dumbasses). Anyway, we have about 5 guys supporting 4-5,000 users across three locations. I figure you could add another 2-3 guys worth of support and take away the nearly useless helpdesk, putting us right in line with the GP.
And that's with our hands tied behind our back a bit with a crappy ticketing system and users with semi-free reign of their machines.
That's only desktop support though, for server support we have a lot of servers (it has to be close to 100) and another half dozen to a dozen server admins, as well as a local carrier handling our phone support.
I do the non-physical work on about 500 users and computers, and 15 or so servers not quite by myself (a couple union guys do any physical work). I spend most of my day browsing slashdot with little to do, other than maintaining those servers, or when something goes seriously wrong on a machine. That's because the vast majority of the user's machines are locked down pretty hard (many don't even get icons on their desktop), and they only run a couple programs, which means there is almost nothing for them to screw up. The engineers tend to get themselves into more trouble, since their machines aren't locked down, but there are only a handful of them so it's no big deal (and they are smart, so they often fix their own problems).
It pretty much all depends on your environment. I could envision a case where 200 users, 50 computers, and 2-3 servers per head is ideal, but in most well-run environments that would be extreme over-kill. Bump it up to about 500 computers and 10-20 servers per head and I think you're in the average ballpark for a decent IT group, and you could raise that a bit more if everyone is in the same building. These days it's rare to have more than one user per computer.
On the other hand, if that's the level of service the business is willing to pay for, that's what they should get. IT doesn't run the world, they make it easier for others to run the world. If management wants an efficient IT department (and they probably should) then they will do what you suggest. If they want tech guys at their beck and call to just fix things whenever they screw up, or get them whatever newfangled toy they might like, then they won't. Smart management will want an IT that gives them the most productivity at the least price, and that doesn't always mean IT gets to be the gatekeeper.
Indeed, but don't forget the geographic structure of your organization and contractual limitations placed on IT either. For example, an organization housed in a single building, and an IT group that has little useless oversight (things like complicated ticketing systems, quotas, etc), one support tech could easily care for upwards of 2-3,000 customers, depending on the scenarios described above.
On the other hand, if your organization is spread across 20 small locations many miles apart and are forced to use a crappy ticketing system, you will probably need a support tech for every few hundred people, just because of the time needed to answer a single service call.
Add to that the fact that the way we react to hijackers is completely different now. Before it was "Do what the hijacker says, wait it out, it will just take you a while longer to get home." Now, it is "Take that bastard down before he hurts us or anybody else!" With the new attitude, it is virtually impossible for 9/11 to happen again. It would take someone extremely clever to come up with a scenario that would keep everyone in their seats, because it is no longer just about the hijacker.
If the passengers are going to die anyway, and if in dying they can prevent others from being hurt, that natural mysterious altruism in human nature kicks in and the hijackers don't stand a chance. The most likely result of a hijacking these days is a few passengers get hurt and the hijackers are completely nullified.
And that has nothing at all to do with the security theater on the ground, which in reality does jack-all.
For a playful little thought excersize, imagine TSA only screened for guns, bombs, and suspicious looking individuals, that they had an almost perfect success rate, and that they then handed a knife to every single passenger as they boarded the airplane. How far do you think a hijacker would get? I'd wager about 15 steps in 20 seconds or less, myself. Now that introduces a whole host of new problems (crazy angry drunks with knives are not cool), but it really screws things up for the relevance of the TSA in keeping us safe from terrorists.
The success of a hijacking very much depends on the weapon used. If a hijacker or hijackers have guns on board, well then I think people would remain in their seats. It's very difficult to storm an enemy armed with a gun.
Actually knives beat guns inside of 20 feet or so, and for a crowded airplane I'd imagine things go up in the kife's favor significantly. A bullet hole in the cabin will do nothing more than make it uncomfortable, it isn't going to prevent it from flying. Add to that the fact that the hijacker probably had to sneak on a very small gun, with low caliber and low capacity, and I doubt you'd end up with more than four or five people being hurt by a gunman, at the most, whereas a knife wielder can do much more damage over and over again.
The point is moot though, because if the passengers recognize that the hijacker intends to kill them all anyway then the passengers are far more likely to act. In the end, a couple people get hurt and the crisis is averted. Whether or not TSA exists has absolutely nothing to do with it.
The real TSA screeners are not the highschoold dropout instructing you to remove your shoes.
In most airports, there is nobody filling that role except the highschool dropout telling you to remove your shoes. If you think there is some hidden screener out there who is REALLY keeping you safe, you are sadly mistaken. There might be a very small number of airports that do this, but even so most people would be able to slip by anyway. Act bored and you win. They won't spot a thing.
It is pretty trivial to get knives past TSA, unless you are being honest about it. A friend of mine accidentally brought a boxcutter (the kind that can extend out to a 4-5" blade) through at least six TSA screenings, and he had simply put it in a pocket and forgotten about it. How's that for security?
You can get explosive rope these days, if you're clever you could probably sneak a half pound of the rope and another four or five pounds of standard plastics on board in a suitcase and nobody would be the wiser. You could do some major damage with that combo. The guy who got caught recently was just dumb as shit, and didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he STILL got explosives past security. They make you stay seated for the last hour and a half of an international flight now, but so what? The guy lit the bomb off in his chair anyway, what's the "remain seated" bullshit supposed to stop?
If you look at what happened on 9/11, the main problem was our attitude about hijackings at the time. Hijackings were supposed to be about ransoming for cash, not blowing up a target, so the standard procedure was do whatever the hijackers say and wait till it is over. Now, standard procedure is subdue the hijacker as soon as possible. Had that been done on 9/11 the news would have been about how 19 hijackers were thwarted in an attempt to hijack four airplanes, and a few passengers were injured in the process. That new policy is what protects us in the sky now, not any of the bullshit security theater which is absolutely worthless at catching all but the most basic and obvious weapons. People see someone with a weapon now, they won't hesitate any more - that guy is going down in a hurry. 9/11 would not happen again today and the TSA has nothing to with that at all.
It's all designed to make us feel safer, since the folks in the know realize they can't actually make us any safer. What we were doing before is as good as what we are doing now as far as airport screenings, the only real changes that can be made are in the background, with inteligence agencings tracking suspected terrorists and such. TSA is just the government saying "Look! aren't you glad we're making you so safe?"
Indeed, but since it's a cell phone patent battle, and nokia is far more likely to have patents that Apple infringes upon than vice versa, I say Nokia is the big dog in this case.
Apple is not a GSM Association member. They had nothing to do with developing GSM, and so don't have claim to the favorable RAND terms available to GSM Association members.
If Nokia wanted more in exchange for the use of their patents than other GSM patent holders do, then that is their right. If Apple doesn't want to pay Nokia's terms, they need to find a way around the patents. If that's what they did, then Apple will win. If they didn't, well, you don't get to just say "Your patent isn't important" and ignore it.
Claiming that other Apple products violate their patents is just more posturing to try and force a settlement on terms that are very unfavorable to Apple.
That's assuming Apple products don't violate Nokia patents. If they do violate the patents, then Nokia's position is completely legitimate, and Apple refused to license Nokia's patents and went ahead and infringed them.
The iPod line is one of the most expensive music players on the market, have you actually looked? Its big selling points are the easy interface and iTunes, definitely not price. Go to walmart and have a looksee for yourself. You'll find a half dozen players for much cheaper than the equivalent iPod.
I never said they were, and that point is pretty much irrelevant to the patent war going on between the two.
However, since you brought it up, Nokia has a little over 40% of the worldwide smartphone market, RIM has not quite 20%, and Apple has a little over 10% of the market. Nokia has been losing ground in smartphones, but they are still the behemoth, and Apple in particular hasn't been hurting them nearly as bad as RIM has (19.5% up from 10.9% last year).
The smartphone accounts for about 12% (and slowly rising) of the overall cell phone market, of which Nokia has been and continues to dominate.
My point was that Nokia is the big boy in this fight, not Apple, and it's true no matter what statistics you may wish to cherry-pick.
I'd be very surprised if Apple were the big dog in this fight, given that Nokia has been designing and manufacturing cell phones for decades (verses just a couple years for Apple), has a very large patent portfolio in the cell phone realm on such trivial technologies as GSM and the like, and has almost 500 times the cell phone market share that Apple has.
Seriously, Nokia is not just a behemoth in the cell phone realm, it is THE behemoth. Sony-Ericsson, the next largest cell phone manufacturer, has less than 1/3 Nokia's market share.
Also, patent trolling is buying up patents and springing lawsuits on companies when one of them gains sufficient momentum. That is not what Nokia did. Nokia does original research and developement in cell phone technology, it's why they are the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. Nokia offered licensing terms and Apple didn't like them. Just because Apple doesn't like the terms does not mean they get to ignore the patents. Apples only legal options were to accept the terms or not use the infringing technology, they did neither and now they have been sued.
That would be the case if Apple were fitting off the shelf components into their devices. This is not the case. In the patent world, it is the design that infringes, it doesn't matter who actually assembles the product. It only matters who designed and commissioned the infringing product.
For example, if I have a thousand T-shirts made with another companies logo on them, I'm the one infringing the trademark, not the company that screen printed the shirts. It's the same thing here.
I forgot to mention, the top 16 most popular cell phones in the world are Nokias, with a combined 30% of the market. That's just until another manufacturer's device pops onto the list. Nokia has 25 of the top 29 most popular cell phone models in the world, and the iPhone is still a ways down on that list, right in there with the Sony-Ericsson G700, W380, and a half dozen Nokias.
I hate to break it to you, but Nokia's global market share is several times greater than that of their nearest competitor, it is up about 25% (39% share vs 52% this year) from last year, and it's about 477 times greater than Apple's share (0.11%) of the cell phone market.
Even RIM has about 25 times greater market share than Apple. Frankly, as popular as the iPhone is (4% of the smartphone market), it is peanuts when put in perspective.
Indeed, the only catagory Apple wins with in smart-phones is in the single-device category, and the blackberry 8300 series (5 devices that are essentially the same phone in different configurations) is just a hair behind the iPhone 3g. RIM has over 40% of the smartphone market, a number Apple can't touch.
Nokia does ok in the smartphone market, but their bread and butter is the general handset market, of which they control more than half of the entire market.
Apple is not the big guy in this battle, Nokia is. Apple has, what, four variations of the same phone? Nokia has thousands. They have been in the business long enough that they may well have a case against Apple computers as well, since a phone is really nothing more than a small computer anyway.
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The infrastructure and automation is key, if you've got 2-3 computer images, and 3-4 hardware models for 4,000 computers/users, then a half dozen support personnel is probably fine, especially if your software management is centralized (as it should be in this case). Not counting any odd server setups you may have, I could see an IT department getting away with 10 or fewer support personnel total, particularly if you've set yourself up to handle all but most severe problems remotely.
Now, if every user gets to pick what brand and model of computer he or she wants, and every setup is custom, then yeah you're looking at much much higher ratios. Most large companies have figured this out though, and don't allow that sort of thing. A standardized model will fit 99% of the time, and it dramatically reduces support and life-cycle costs.
Hey you know, if you really want them to change their ways, and make a few bucks in the process, you could report them to the BSA and get upwards of $1 million for your trouble.
Though, really, you'd only want to do this if you were leaving the company, as it likely wouldn't be a fun place to work for you afterwards. Still, they'd certainly change their ways!
Sounds like you're using wrong, then.
We use Citrix as a barrier between sensitive networks. We have a corporate network, a buffer network, and a sensitive network. Citrix servers sit in the buffer network allowing users on the corporate network to access the sensitive network without having any direct link between the two. It works pretty well, since we can lock down the buffer network to only allow the citrix connections and a few outside connections for things like AV and MS updates.
As far as using Citrix to do real work on a day to day basis without such high security requirments, I've always thought it was a terrible idea. My company wants to do more of it though, and I can't understand why. A new laptop is about $600 and should last 2-3 years. Support per laptop is probably another $100 a year, for grand total of $900. I can't see the extra bandwidth and citrix licensing used up by a user working off of a citrix connection costing less than that over three years. Plus the fact that the user still needs a laptop, and if you make him buy it himself he's just going to charge you more for his services. So the only potential savings really is in software licensing, but if the users are working day in and day out on the same apps, always using up a citrix connection, then you aren't really saving anything as you still need that many licenses. It makes no sense to me, and you've drasticly increased your server side support needs.
CAL's aren't that bad, generally you just need to pick the structure that will cost you the least amount of money - i.e. for a lot of users and not a lot of machines, you want per-machine licenses. If it's the other way around you want per-user licenses. Some stuff like Exchange gets a bit more complicated, but overall it isn't that bad. It does get expensive, though Exchange is usually worth it.
1 tech to 100 users seems extraordinarily high, I've never worked in an environment with that many support techs. I've worked in a locked-down environment with about 3,000 users and 5 help desk personel as the sole non-server support, and I've worked in an environment with 5 desktop techs for about 4,000 users (not very restricted) with a remote help desk for trivial matters (anything that takes less than 5 minutes to fix, basically). I currently work on a separated network for the second company, I'm the remote support for about 500 users and I make sure the engineers don't break the 10-15 servers under my control. There are a couple union guys that handle any physical work, but it is definitely not the major portion of their work, and there is no other support outside of the union guys and me.
Your environment has to be a complete mess if you need 1 desktop tech per 100 windows machines. I could see it for a Linux setup if it's your first go of it, I imagine your IT department would need a few years to streamline things to get that number down, but really, windows is easy. If you need that many you're probably doing it wrong.
That's why you've set up a WSUS implimentation instead of just using MS though, so you can test the updates before you release them.
Sounds about on par with my group. If you have the right infrastructure, like a centralized software location for installs, you can quite easilly manage hundreds of applications without requiring aditional overhead. Generally when a windows app breaks you can fix it with a re-install, and if that takes 30 seconds then it's no big deal.
We have an outside help desk that only seems to be able to handle the most trival of problems, for everything halfway serious we do it. We have several hundred applications to deal with, and until recently it was no big deal at all (corporate overlords decided to manage all software installs globaly, so now it takes 20 minutes to install a piece of software, dumbasses). Anyway, we have about 5 guys supporting 4-5,000 users across three locations. I figure you could add another 2-3 guys worth of support and take away the nearly useless helpdesk, putting us right in line with the GP.
And that's with our hands tied behind our back a bit with a crappy ticketing system and users with semi-free reign of their machines.
That's only desktop support though, for server support we have a lot of servers (it has to be close to 100) and another half dozen to a dozen server admins, as well as a local carrier handling our phone support.
I do the non-physical work on about 500 users and computers, and 15 or so servers not quite by myself (a couple union guys do any physical work). I spend most of my day browsing slashdot with little to do, other than maintaining those servers, or when something goes seriously wrong on a machine. That's because the vast majority of the user's machines are locked down pretty hard (many don't even get icons on their desktop), and they only run a couple programs, which means there is almost nothing for them to screw up. The engineers tend to get themselves into more trouble, since their machines aren't locked down, but there are only a handful of them so it's no big deal (and they are smart, so they often fix their own problems).
It pretty much all depends on your environment. I could envision a case where 200 users, 50 computers, and 2-3 servers per head is ideal, but in most well-run environments that would be extreme over-kill. Bump it up to about 500 computers and 10-20 servers per head and I think you're in the average ballpark for a decent IT group, and you could raise that a bit more if everyone is in the same building. These days it's rare to have more than one user per computer.
On the other hand, if that's the level of service the business is willing to pay for, that's what they should get. IT doesn't run the world, they make it easier for others to run the world. If management wants an efficient IT department (and they probably should) then they will do what you suggest. If they want tech guys at their beck and call to just fix things whenever they screw up, or get them whatever newfangled toy they might like, then they won't. Smart management will want an IT that gives them the most productivity at the least price, and that doesn't always mean IT gets to be the gatekeeper.
Indeed, but don't forget the geographic structure of your organization and contractual limitations placed on IT either. For example, an organization housed in a single building, and an IT group that has little useless oversight (things like complicated ticketing systems, quotas, etc), one support tech could easily care for upwards of 2-3,000 customers, depending on the scenarios described above.
On the other hand, if your organization is spread across 20 small locations many miles apart and are forced to use a crappy ticketing system, you will probably need a support tech for every few hundred people, just because of the time needed to answer a single service call.
Add to that the fact that the way we react to hijackers is completely different now. Before it was "Do what the hijacker says, wait it out, it will just take you a while longer to get home." Now, it is "Take that bastard down before he hurts us or anybody else!" With the new attitude, it is virtually impossible for 9/11 to happen again. It would take someone extremely clever to come up with a scenario that would keep everyone in their seats, because it is no longer just about the hijacker.
If the passengers are going to die anyway, and if in dying they can prevent others from being hurt, that natural mysterious altruism in human nature kicks in and the hijackers don't stand a chance. The most likely result of a hijacking these days is a few passengers get hurt and the hijackers are completely nullified.
And that has nothing at all to do with the security theater on the ground, which in reality does jack-all.
For a playful little thought excersize, imagine TSA only screened for guns, bombs, and suspicious looking individuals, that they had an almost perfect success rate, and that they then handed a knife to every single passenger as they boarded the airplane. How far do you think a hijacker would get? I'd wager about 15 steps in 20 seconds or less, myself. Now that introduces a whole host of new problems (crazy angry drunks with knives are not cool), but it really screws things up for the relevance of the TSA in keeping us safe from terrorists.
The success of a hijacking very much depends on the weapon used. If a hijacker or hijackers have guns on board, well then I think people would remain in their seats. It's very difficult to storm an enemy armed with a gun.
Actually knives beat guns inside of 20 feet or so, and for a crowded airplane I'd imagine things go up in the kife's favor significantly. A bullet hole in the cabin will do nothing more than make it uncomfortable, it isn't going to prevent it from flying. Add to that the fact that the hijacker probably had to sneak on a very small gun, with low caliber and low capacity, and I doubt you'd end up with more than four or five people being hurt by a gunman, at the most, whereas a knife wielder can do much more damage over and over again.
The point is moot though, because if the passengers recognize that the hijacker intends to kill them all anyway then the passengers are far more likely to act. In the end, a couple people get hurt and the crisis is averted. Whether or not TSA exists has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Except for the fact that the US was behind the Taliban's installment in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's in Iraq, you're absolutely correct...
Oops.
The truth is they hate everybody, the US is just the biggest target, and not a difficult one either because of all our freedoms.
The real TSA screeners are not the highschoold dropout instructing you to remove your shoes.
In most airports, there is nobody filling that role except the highschool dropout telling you to remove your shoes. If you think there is some hidden screener out there who is REALLY keeping you safe, you are sadly mistaken. There might be a very small number of airports that do this, but even so most people would be able to slip by anyway. Act bored and you win. They won't spot a thing.
It is pretty trivial to get knives past TSA, unless you are being honest about it. A friend of mine accidentally brought a boxcutter (the kind that can extend out to a 4-5" blade) through at least six TSA screenings, and he had simply put it in a pocket and forgotten about it. How's that for security?
You can get explosive rope these days, if you're clever you could probably sneak a half pound of the rope and another four or five pounds of standard plastics on board in a suitcase and nobody would be the wiser. You could do some major damage with that combo. The guy who got caught recently was just dumb as shit, and didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he STILL got explosives past security. They make you stay seated for the last hour and a half of an international flight now, but so what? The guy lit the bomb off in his chair anyway, what's the "remain seated" bullshit supposed to stop?
If you look at what happened on 9/11, the main problem was our attitude about hijackings at the time. Hijackings were supposed to be about ransoming for cash, not blowing up a target, so the standard procedure was do whatever the hijackers say and wait till it is over. Now, standard procedure is subdue the hijacker as soon as possible. Had that been done on 9/11 the news would have been about how 19 hijackers were thwarted in an attempt to hijack four airplanes, and a few passengers were injured in the process. That new policy is what protects us in the sky now, not any of the bullshit security theater which is absolutely worthless at catching all but the most basic and obvious weapons. People see someone with a weapon now, they won't hesitate any more - that guy is going down in a hurry. 9/11 would not happen again today and the TSA has nothing to with that at all.
It's all designed to make us feel safer, since the folks in the know realize they can't actually make us any safer. What we were doing before is as good as what we are doing now as far as airport screenings, the only real changes that can be made are in the background, with inteligence agencings tracking suspected terrorists and such. TSA is just the government saying "Look! aren't you glad we're making you so safe?"
Indeed, but since it's a cell phone patent battle, and nokia is far more likely to have patents that Apple infringes upon than vice versa, I say Nokia is the big dog in this case.
Apple is not a GSM Association member. They had nothing to do with developing GSM, and so don't have claim to the favorable RAND terms available to GSM Association members.
If Nokia wanted more in exchange for the use of their patents than other GSM patent holders do, then that is their right. If Apple doesn't want to pay Nokia's terms, they need to find a way around the patents. If that's what they did, then Apple will win. If they didn't, well, you don't get to just say "Your patent isn't important" and ignore it.
Claiming that other Apple products violate their patents is just more posturing to try and force a settlement on terms that are very unfavorable to Apple.
That's assuming Apple products don't violate Nokia patents. If they do violate the patents, then Nokia's position is completely legitimate, and Apple refused to license Nokia's patents and went ahead and infringed them.
That is $100 if you commit to a 2 year agreement running close to $100 a month. It still retails at around $500.
The iPod line is one of the most expensive music players on the market, have you actually looked? Its big selling points are the easy interface and iTunes, definitely not price. Go to walmart and have a looksee for yourself. You'll find a half dozen players for much cheaper than the equivalent iPod.
I never said they were, and that point is pretty much irrelevant to the patent war going on between the two.
However, since you brought it up, Nokia has a little over 40% of the worldwide smartphone market, RIM has not quite 20%, and Apple has a little over 10% of the market. Nokia has been losing ground in smartphones, but they are still the behemoth, and Apple in particular hasn't been hurting them nearly as bad as RIM has (19.5% up from 10.9% last year).
The smartphone accounts for about 12% (and slowly rising) of the overall cell phone market, of which Nokia has been and continues to dominate.
My point was that Nokia is the big boy in this fight, not Apple, and it's true no matter what statistics you may wish to cherry-pick.
Did you actually check the site? Cause it's gone.
Besides, I'd assume Apple.edu is meant for educational (students & teachers) people only, which doesn't really count.
According to Apple the Macbook is $999, or $949 with the educational discount.
I'd be very surprised if Apple were the big dog in this fight, given that Nokia has been designing and manufacturing cell phones for decades (verses just a couple years for Apple), has a very large patent portfolio in the cell phone realm on such trivial technologies as GSM and the like, and has almost 500 times the cell phone market share that Apple has.
Seriously, Nokia is not just a behemoth in the cell phone realm, it is THE behemoth. Sony-Ericsson, the next largest cell phone manufacturer, has less than 1/3 Nokia's market share.
Also, patent trolling is buying up patents and springing lawsuits on companies when one of them gains sufficient momentum. That is not what Nokia did. Nokia does original research and developement in cell phone technology, it's why they are the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world. Nokia offered licensing terms and Apple didn't like them. Just because Apple doesn't like the terms does not mean they get to ignore the patents. Apples only legal options were to accept the terms or not use the infringing technology, they did neither and now they have been sued.
That would be the case if Apple were fitting off the shelf components into their devices. This is not the case. In the patent world, it is the design that infringes, it doesn't matter who actually assembles the product. It only matters who designed and commissioned the infringing product.
For example, if I have a thousand T-shirts made with another companies logo on them, I'm the one infringing the trademark, not the company that screen printed the shirts. It's the same thing here.
I forgot to mention, the top 16 most popular cell phones in the world are Nokias, with a combined 30% of the market. That's just until another manufacturer's device pops onto the list. Nokia has 25 of the top 29 most popular cell phone models in the world, and the iPhone is still a ways down on that list, right in there with the Sony-Ericsson G700, W380, and a half dozen Nokias.
I hate to break it to you, but Nokia's global market share is several times greater than that of their nearest competitor, it is up about 25% (39% share vs 52% this year) from last year, and it's about 477 times greater than Apple's share (0.11%) of the cell phone market.
Even RIM has about 25 times greater market share than Apple. Frankly, as popular as the iPhone is (4% of the smartphone market), it is peanuts when put in perspective.
http://stats.getjar.com/statistics/
Indeed, the only catagory Apple wins with in smart-phones is in the single-device category, and the blackberry 8300 series (5 devices that are essentially the same phone in different configurations) is just a hair behind the iPhone 3g. RIM has over 40% of the smartphone market, a number Apple can't touch.
Nokia does ok in the smartphone market, but their bread and butter is the general handset market, of which they control more than half of the entire market.
Apple is not the big guy in this battle, Nokia is. Apple has, what, four variations of the same phone? Nokia has thousands. They have been in the business long enough that they may well have a case against Apple computers as well, since a phone is really nothing more than a small computer anyway.