Re:"RE" far from the first
on
Resident Evil
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· Score: 1
this is the same director as the origin MK movie. He did a pretty decent job with that as well. It was just supposed be a big kung-fu special effects fest and it was.
It does what it should do
on
Resident Evil
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· Score: 1
#1) Ebert is an idiot.
#2) Anyone expecting much more out of this movie than what it delivers is expecting too much. It's delivers cheap scares, Milla in a dress and a gun, and the occasional nostalgia of actually playing the video games. If you want Oscar-level stuff go rent a Ron Howard film. If you want an entertaining movie that won't make you feel guilty you watched it, get this.
#3) It's at least worth a rental, but probably not the full ticket price...unless you are bored
#4) Ebert is an idiot. Is review is little more than a plot synopsis, and not even a very good one. I question whether he even watched the movie.
#5) If seeing Milla J. act like a badass and be half-naked from time to time isn't enough reason for the average male to see this film, then M. Rodrigrez's sultry tough girl act should wrap it up for you.
#6) Milla actually does a pretty good job despite a two dimensional character who mostly just acts surprised throughout the film. Despite rumors, she's a pretty darn good actress (watch The Messenger if you don't believe me)
Several years and a couple jobs ago I fought against our web dev teams moving to a completely IE-centric development for intranet/internet. It appeared we were moving from NS over to IE and everyone wanted to use every flash-bang thing MS was willing to throw at them. What I was trying to point out was that we had just made one browser change, and definately could again.
Since then, MS has made it's business "moves" into the browser market even stronger and won the AOL deal. I stopped browsing the HTML and DHTML newsgroups because I got tired of these newbie web monkeys who defended only writing for the latest version of IE because "it was the defacto standard".
One of the points I brought up was that AOL controls such a huge percentage of the web browsing demographic that if they ever changed their browser again, the "standard" would hardly a standard anymore.
When AOL and Netscape got joined at the hip, I figured people would listen. Nope.
Of course AOL will eventually move to Mozilla. They didn't buy the company just for a web portal. Case has never been particularly kind in his words to Microsoft (two companies that want to own everything, go figure they might not get along).
MS isn't doing itself any favors with it's ridiculous implementation of the HTTP standards.
Moz gets better with every build.
I'm not saying it will be tomorrow...heck it might not even be later this year.
But sometime, somewhere, some hackneyed developer is going to be rewriting his stupid IE-only javascript-enforced for submission because their AOL customers can't submit the form.
Remind me to just post a "told you so" on the old newsgroups.
how many legal region free DVD players are readily available? And most RF Players suck, from I've read of reviews, because they are frequently lower-end models. While I believe in voting by dollars... spending $300 on a second DVD player inferior to the one I've already got simply because the corporations decided to break up the markets through technology just doesnt seem sane.
Agreed. Let the big companies copy-protect Britney so much that nobody can copy her stuff...PLEASE. The best thing mp3 ever gave me was the ability find great small artists like Cat5, Boa, Airplane, etc...I 've bought like 10 CDs of people most nobody has ever heard of.
Re:Total misue of the word "Thief"
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
Yes, my misread. Apologies. But, I am curious. If you weren't going to call this kid a thief, what would it be?
Re:Total misue of the word "Thief"
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
Every day you are going to tell store managers to go fuck themselves? With those social skills, you'll go far.
There's differences between fraud and theft, but I'm willing to call both involved thieves.
But to be honest, I'm not sure which is more fascinating... that you just admitted to software piracy on an public web forum or that you think it's OK for employers not to pay their employees. You don't work for Enron do you?
Next time you are burning your CD of your fave programs, remember to email the authors and tell them. I'm sure,since there is nothing wrong with it at all, that they will welcome the greeting. Nobody is getting hurt right? They're only copies. They'd have nothing to get upset with.
I like my program fine, thanks.
Re:Total misue of the word "Thief"
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
The kid didn't take a picture, he took an exact duplicate.
But hey, if you are so sure it isn't a crime, go do what this kid did. Then go ask to see the store manager, and tell him to go fuck himself. We'll see how far you get there.
Or hey I know, why don't you start burning CD's of all your favorite software and charge people for it? According to you, that wouldn't be theft either.
Or wait, I know - whenever you got a job, how about your employer just forgets to pay you. I mean, you aren't *out* anything. They didn't take anything from you. Can't be illegal, right?
Your rationale is so off I could do this all day. The kid entered a store and left with an expensive product he didn't pay for. Be it software, music, cars or posters - that's theft, and the kid was a thief.
But believe what you want. If you really act on what you believe (which I highly doubt you ever would have the courage to do and admit to it publicly), just do me a fave and post somewhere a pic of the look your lawyer gives you. I'm sure it will be priceless.
My favorite coverage of the Enron case so far was where they would show how much donation Enron gave to the very people now putting them in the hotseat.
The average was something like $100,000.
The government give the corporations welfare to keep them afloat and let the advertise to Mexico. The corporations give money to the government in order to keep their friends in power and happy.
Trickle-down economics is largely a falsehood, it merely propogates the same crappy economy we've had since Reagan (and yes, I'm including Clinton).
I'll agree, there isn't a conspiracy. A conspiracy would indicate a kind of plan, or strategy. This is a bunch of rich old men, some of them executives, some of them senators, who are in the business of staying rich.
Unfortunately, our legal system supports it. Money generally wins litigation, like it or not. Microsoft will come out of this fine not because they're right, but because they can bury the problem in dollars.
Now that is the funniest damn thing I've heard today.
Re:Total misue of the word "Thief"
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
Hands down, that's the dumbest thing I've heard today. Definition of steal is "to take the property of another wrongfully". He took software he didn't pay for. The fact that it was copy makes no difference.
Go into your favorite poster store. Ask them if you can borrow five of their posters so that you can scan them and print them out on a high quality printer because you really like how they look but you don't really feel like paying them for it.
The look they'll give is the look many people will be giving you for the rest of your life. Get used to it.
inkly
Re:It would never happen at Best Buy
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
maybe at your BB. At mine you can bring a suitcase full of toys if you desire.
or the fact that even broadband would be slow compared to the disk to disk transfer.
This story is utterly credible. The conversation I had with a Best Buy employee where he was trying to convince me that Windows ME and Windows 2K were the same thing is all too typical of your standard computer store employee. And it doesnt take a l33t hacker to figure out how to copy files.
Don't be so revisionist. In 1997, when the BeBox was produced, Linux was even less on people's radar than Be. It was ten times more of the "geek" OS than it is now and not even remarkably considered commercially. Red Hat was still a group of weirdos who wore, well, funny hats, at conventions.
Microsoft killed Be. They pressured OEMs not to offer the OS even the OEMs could do so at little/no cost if they decided. Microsoft used exclusionary deals to maintain their monopoly, which is illegal.
By 1998, lots of people had heard of Be. They were making lots of press.
These aren't conspiracy theories, they're fact. Believe it or not, big corporations actually do break the law in order to maintain their position. How much more down-to-earth reason do you need but greed and money?
How come even though there are some 80 different x86 compatible OS's, nobody is making one that dual boots commercially.
And here is one of the more interesting tidbits:
"Gassée says that Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, preinstallation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS preinstalled, but made changes to the bootloader -- rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer -- before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license.
Be was forced to post detailed instructions on their web site explaining to customers how to unhide their hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled. "
Someone please tell me how this is a "fair" and "competitive" marketplace.
There are also interesting comments on the DoJ in general...
A good argument, but I still see some open questions. First, I'm not sure you can compare IBM of 1980 to Microsoft of 1997. To geek out for a moment, it's a bit like Dr. Evil to Darth Vader. Sure, they're both kinda of evil - but one is less dangerous than seem and the other has the powers of the sith.
Be wasn't around in the early nineties - the BeBox was a garage machine running off the Hobbit chip. It wasn't publicly announced until '95. And offering compatibility has never solved a marketplace problem (see Amiga and Macintosh... although someone should tell Lindows this)
BeOS is unsuited for embedded devices, and wasn't even really suited for Internett Appliances, although those devices seemed to have failed of their own mettle.
And Be didn't initially target PowerPC's, they intially targeted their own hardware. And then they targetted pretty much all hardware. Apple's pulling out the Clones had little impact on their marketshare. In fact, it could have helped by creating a glut of cheap dual-PPC machines to the market.
But finally, I think you are overestimating Apple's "excellently executed strategy". How much "gained marketshare" has Apple received as of late? And monopoly? I don't think see, Apple doesn't have that kind of clout. A strong hold onto certain markets, sure, but they're quite a few inches away from being any kind of monopoly in any market.
The real problem is that the decision and spending power isn't at the customers. Even with Apple's great strategy (and I'm not saying they aren't doing a great job), they're a fraction of the market and most consumers never get the chance to put Macintoshes on their shopping list.
Be's strategy wasn't to "take on the mature mass market". Read their old press releases and such, their goal was to coincide. They were planning on getting in through the back door. They weren't going after Microsoft or Apple, they were trying to make it easy for people to get their OS on their machines without disturbing the status quo. In some ways, it was brilliant. They wanted to offer people the chance to examine two OS's side by side without messing up their computers or having to know what a Boot Manager was to do it.
They even released the entire OS on CD so that you could run it without actually installing it.
What they really wanted, though, was for OEMs to provide this in the market. Now here's where MS comes in. You can't do that on a Windows box. It's not allowed. It's exclusionary. They got a single OEM to do it on a single line, and Microsoft went lawyer nuts over it.
It's the thing that Microsoft fears. If someone actually had the opportunity to use another OS out of the box, right next to Windows, maybe the consumers would see that a more stable OS can provide email, web-browsing and word processing (the three most common home functions - aside from gaming).
Save money and wait? No business can save money if they haven't already garned a market share.
MY problem with BeOS is simple. It wasn't so technically superior, and I can't believe that nobody is bringing this up. We can talk about market share all we want, but Microsoft's the monoply here and they'll have to answer in court as what they did or didn't do wrong.
BeOS may have had a great UI, and database managed filesystem, and super safe threading, etc. etc.
I wouldn't know.
I never got it running on any of my boxes. The demo CD would never install correctly with my vid card. And I knew a lot of people who also had incompatible hardware, so they couldn't see it.
Be had a great strategy, but it was flawed. They couldn't get to the one market they did have access to - geeks who are willing to dual boot, because they never got the Intel platform down correctly.
imho, THAT was Be's real mistake. But it wouldn't have mattered. Even if they had succeeded there, it would have been only has a another Linux, and probably couldn't have gotten the market to support a new company.
So basically, thanks largely to MS, we have a landscape where there is no point in trying to develop a next-generation OS.
it's an interesting theory, but I do humbly disagree. Nothing you said is invalid, but all in all the PalmOS devices are simply better sellers. What nobody at MS seems to understand is that very few people want a "mini-computer" as their PDA. It was part of the flaw with the newton (imho). The Palm is a simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, stable device. PocketPC's, by and large, aren't.
Now, in time, what you've outline might come to pass. MS has no problem waiting, and if they see someone as enough of a threat (which Palm certainly is), they'll try and end around them.
Add this to your scenario for real fear: Microsoft gets into the hardware game (a la XBox). They release a PDA at loss (a la XBox), drowning the market in fancy devices for cheap. Palm loses marketshare, MS drops the line and let's their vendors go to town.
A little fringe, I know, but something akin to it is plausible. It's essentially the IE strategy done with hardware...
said Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler. "The industry is at its best when it's developing new products and focusing on innovation."
Notice how MSSpeak uses "innovation" whenever they're challenged? How does this lawsuit challenge their right to "innovate"? What, the lawyers are too busy with the courts to go code Microsoft Word?
No offense, but comparing Be to SGI is pretty silly. SGI has been an established player for sometime with a strong niche market in the high-end graphics/animation field. Be was an up and coming OS trying a niche for hobbyists, much - as you said, like SGI.
The main difference between their strategy is *when*. When SGI did it, MS didn't have the strangehold they did when Be did.
Everyone keeps saying "It's Be's fault - they screwed up."
But this sounds like the guys who try and complain that an NFL coach made a bad call, but they don't know what a good call would have been.
What was Be's mistake? Where did they go wrong? What should they have done better?
Be tried *everything*. I think they tried every possibly marketing strategy out there for modern OS's - custom hardware, cross-platform, giving it away FREE.
What is it exactly they should have done better? What would you have done?
Be's problem is that there wasn't a market for them to enter. The cause, according to this lawsuit, is Microsoft. Considering the court findings, I'd say they have a case.
You more than anyone, since you followed the trial for two years, should realize that simply abusing it's monopoly, Microsoft has done enough damage to this industry to make how it got to be the "industry leader" moot. It's position now is based on those practices.
Two years is an eternity in the computing industry. Two years ago, there was no Win 2000, no XP,.Net was called something like COM++, etc. etc.
And two years ago, Be might have had a chance.
But perhaps "earned" is the wrong word. Would maintain make you happier? Does it matter? Microsoft is where it is today by breaking the law. If they had played by the rules, the industry would be a different place.
A valid and distinct point, but there is some evidence that MS's road to being a monopoly wasn't exactly a clean, legal trip either - but it's paved in small lawsuits that generally got taken out of the public eye because they were settled.
But that road is also surrounded by the mistakes of others - Commodore's poor business strategy, Apple mistakenly allowing them to steal technology, etc.
But how long have they maintained their control through these practices?
End result in either way: MS is where they are because they broke the law.
I wish I could agree with you - mostly because I came *this* close to buying one before they disappeared. But they dropped out of the hardware market because it was killing them. See Sega for an analogy... brilliant hardware, no profit = no hardware.
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this is the same director as the origin MK movie. He did a pretty decent job with that as well. It was just supposed be a big kung-fu special effects fest and it was.
#1) Ebert is an idiot.
#2) Anyone expecting much more out of this movie than what it delivers is expecting too much. It's delivers cheap scares, Milla in a dress and a gun, and the occasional nostalgia of actually playing the video games. If you want Oscar-level stuff go rent a Ron Howard film. If you want an entertaining movie that won't make you feel guilty you watched it, get this.
#3) It's at least worth a rental, but probably not the full ticket price...unless you are bored
#4) Ebert is an idiot. Is review is little more than a plot synopsis, and not even a very good one. I question whether he even watched the movie.
#5) If seeing Milla J. act like a badass and be half-naked from time to time isn't enough reason for the average male to see this film, then M. Rodrigrez's sultry tough girl act should wrap it up for you.
#6) Milla actually does a pretty good job despite a two dimensional character who mostly just acts surprised throughout the film. Despite rumors, she's a pretty darn good actress (watch The Messenger if you don't believe me)
#7) Ebert is an idiot.
#8) Ebert is an idiot.
inkly
Several years and a couple jobs ago I fought against our web dev teams moving to a completely IE-centric development for intranet/internet. It appeared we were moving from NS over to IE and everyone wanted to use every flash-bang thing MS was willing to throw at them. What I was trying to point out was that we had just made one browser change, and definately could again.
Since then, MS has made it's business "moves" into the browser market even stronger and won the AOL deal. I stopped browsing the HTML and DHTML newsgroups because I got tired of these newbie web monkeys who defended only writing for the latest version of IE because "it was the defacto standard".
One of the points I brought up was that AOL controls such a huge percentage of the web browsing demographic that if they ever changed their browser again, the "standard" would hardly a standard anymore.
When AOL and Netscape got joined at the hip, I figured people would listen. Nope.
Of course AOL will eventually move to Mozilla. They didn't buy the company just for a web portal. Case has never been particularly kind in his words to Microsoft (two companies that want to own everything, go figure they might not get along).
MS isn't doing itself any favors with it's ridiculous implementation of the HTTP standards.
Moz gets better with every build.
I'm not saying it will be tomorrow...heck it might not even be later this year.
But sometime, somewhere, some hackneyed developer is going to be rewriting his stupid IE-only javascript-enforced for submission because their AOL customers can't submit the form.
Remind me to just post a "told you so" on the old newsgroups.
inkly
Chances are there is a guy above you that is working half as hard, with the half the talent and making three times more than you.
There are exceptions, but they are getting rarer and rarer...
how many legal region free DVD players are readily available? And most RF Players suck, from I've read of reviews, because they are frequently lower-end models. While I believe in voting by dollars ... spending $300 on a second DVD player inferior to the one I've already got simply because the corporations decided to break up the markets through technology just doesnt seem sane.
inkly
Agreed. Let the big companies copy-protect Britney so much that nobody can copy her stuff...PLEASE. The best thing mp3 ever gave me was the ability find great small artists like Cat5, Boa, Airplane, etc...I 've bought like 10 CDs of people most nobody has ever heard of.
Yes, my misread. Apologies. But, I am curious. If you weren't going to call this kid a thief, what would it be?
Every day you are going to tell store managers to go fuck themselves? With those social skills, you'll go far.
... that you just admitted to software piracy on an public web forum or that you think it's OK for employers not to pay their employees. You don't work for Enron do you?
There's differences between fraud and theft, but I'm willing to call both involved thieves.
But to be honest, I'm not sure which is more fascinating
Next time you are burning your CD of your fave programs, remember to email the authors and tell them. I'm sure,since there is nothing wrong with it at all, that they will welcome the greeting. Nobody is getting hurt right? They're only copies. They'd have nothing to get upset with.
I like my program fine, thanks.
The kid didn't take a picture, he took an exact duplicate.
But hey, if you are so sure it isn't a crime, go do what this kid did. Then go ask to see the store manager, and tell him to go fuck himself. We'll see how far you get there.
Or hey I know, why don't you start burning CD's of all your favorite software and charge people for it? According to you, that wouldn't be theft either.
Or wait, I know - whenever you got a job, how about your employer just forgets to pay you. I mean, you aren't *out* anything. They didn't take anything from you. Can't be illegal, right?
Your rationale is so off I could do this all day. The kid entered a store and left with an expensive product he didn't pay for. Be it software, music, cars or posters - that's theft, and the kid was a thief.
But believe what you want. If you really act on what you believe (which I highly doubt you ever would have the courage to do and admit to it publicly), just do me a fave and post somewhere a pic of the look your lawyer gives you. I'm sure it will be priceless.
My favorite coverage of the Enron case so far was where they would show how much donation Enron gave to the very people now putting them in the hotseat.
The average was something like $100,000.
The government give the corporations welfare to keep them afloat and let the advertise to Mexico. The corporations give money to the government in order to keep their friends in power and happy.
Trickle-down economics is largely a falsehood, it merely propogates the same crappy economy we've had since Reagan (and yes, I'm including Clinton).
I'll agree, there isn't a conspiracy. A conspiracy would indicate a kind of plan, or strategy. This is a bunch of rich old men, some of them executives, some of them senators, who are in the business of staying rich.
Unfortunately, our legal system supports it. Money generally wins litigation, like it or not. Microsoft will come out of this fine not because they're right, but because they can bury the problem in dollars.
inkly
inkly
Now that is the funniest damn thing I've heard today.
Hands down, that's the dumbest thing I've heard today. Definition of steal is "to take the property of another wrongfully". He took software he didn't pay for. The fact that it was copy makes no difference.
Go into your favorite poster store. Ask them if you can borrow five of their posters so that you can scan them and print them out on a high quality printer because you really like how they look but you don't really feel like paying them for it.
The look they'll give is the look many people will be giving you for the rest of your life. Get used to it.
inkly
maybe at your BB. At mine you can bring a suitcase full of toys if you desire.
or the fact that even broadband would be slow compared to the disk to disk transfer.
This story is utterly credible. The conversation I had with a Best Buy employee where he was trying to convince me that Windows ME and Windows 2K were the same thing is all too typical of your standard computer store employee. And it doesnt take a l33t hacker to figure out how to copy files.
inkly
Because I didn't think it was very constitutional when Microsoft robbed an industry of billions of dollars.
I forget - in America, money equals the law. Silly me. Carry on.
inkly
Don't be so revisionist. In 1997, when the BeBox was produced, Linux was even less on people's radar than Be. It was ten times more of the "geek" OS than it is now and not even remarkably considered commercially. Red Hat was still a group of weirdos who wore, well, funny hats, at conventions.
Microsoft killed Be. They pressured OEMs not to offer the OS even the OEMs could do so at little/no cost if they decided. Microsoft used exclusionary deals to maintain their monopoly, which is illegal.
By 1998, lots of people had heard of Be. They were making lots of press.
These aren't conspiracy theories, they're fact. Believe it or not, big corporations actually do break the law in order to maintain their position. How much more down-to-earth reason do you need but greed and money?
inkly
An online version of the "Bootloader" column appears in:
4 s0 001/0827_hacker.html
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1115/byt2001082
And indeed, it does raise one vital question:
How come even though there are some 80 different x86 compatible OS's, nobody is making one that dual boots commercially.
And here is one of the more interesting tidbits:
"Gassée says that Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, preinstallation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS preinstalled, but made changes to the bootloader -- rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer -- before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license.
Be was forced to post detailed instructions on their web site explaining to customers how to unhide their hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled. "
Someone please tell me how this is a "fair" and "competitive" marketplace.
There are also interesting comments on the DoJ in general...
good post,
inkly
A good argument, but I still see some open questions. First, I'm not sure you can compare IBM of 1980 to Microsoft of 1997. To geek out for a moment, it's a bit like Dr. Evil to Darth Vader. Sure, they're both kinda of evil - but one is less dangerous than seem and the other has the powers of the sith.
... although someone should tell Lindows this)
Be wasn't around in the early nineties - the BeBox was a garage machine running off the Hobbit chip. It wasn't publicly announced until '95. And offering compatibility has never solved a marketplace problem (see Amiga and Macintosh
BeOS is unsuited for embedded devices, and wasn't even really suited for Internett Appliances, although those devices seemed to have failed of their own mettle.
And Be didn't initially target PowerPC's, they intially targeted their own hardware. And then they targetted pretty much all hardware. Apple's pulling out the Clones had little impact on their marketshare. In fact, it could have helped by creating a glut of cheap dual-PPC machines to the market.
But finally, I think you are overestimating Apple's "excellently executed strategy". How much "gained marketshare" has Apple received as of late? And monopoly? I don't think see, Apple doesn't have that kind of clout. A strong hold onto certain markets, sure, but they're quite a few inches away from being any kind of monopoly in any market.
The real problem is that the decision and spending power isn't at the customers. Even with Apple's great strategy (and I'm not saying they aren't doing a great job), they're a fraction of the market and most consumers never get the chance to put Macintoshes on their shopping list.
Be's strategy wasn't to "take on the mature mass market". Read their old press releases and such, their goal was to coincide. They were planning on getting in through the back door. They weren't going after Microsoft or Apple, they were trying to make it easy for people to get their OS on their machines without disturbing the status quo. In some ways, it was brilliant. They wanted to offer people the chance to examine two OS's side by side without messing up their computers or having to know what a Boot Manager was to do it.
They even released the entire OS on CD so that you could run it without actually installing it.
What they really wanted, though, was for OEMs to provide this in the market. Now here's where MS comes in. You can't do that on a Windows box. It's not allowed. It's exclusionary. They got a single OEM to do it on a single line, and Microsoft went lawyer nuts over it.
It's the thing that Microsoft fears. If someone actually had the opportunity to use another OS out of the box, right next to Windows, maybe the consumers would see that a more stable OS can provide email, web-browsing and word processing (the three most common home functions - aside from gaming).
Save money and wait? No business can save money if they haven't already garned a market share.
MY problem with BeOS is simple. It wasn't so technically superior, and I can't believe that nobody is bringing this up. We can talk about market share all we want, but Microsoft's the monoply here and they'll have to answer in court as what they did or didn't do wrong.
BeOS may have had a great UI, and database managed filesystem, and super safe threading, etc. etc.
I wouldn't know.
I never got it running on any of my boxes. The demo CD would never install correctly with my vid card. And I knew a lot of people who also had incompatible hardware, so they couldn't see it.
Be had a great strategy, but it was flawed. They couldn't get to the one market they did have access to - geeks who are willing to dual boot, because they never got the Intel platform down correctly.
imho, THAT was Be's real mistake. But it wouldn't have mattered. Even if they had succeeded there, it would have been only has a another Linux, and probably couldn't have gotten the market to support a new company.
So basically, thanks largely to MS, we have a landscape where there is no point in trying to develop a next-generation OS.
Nobody will buy it.
inky
it's an interesting theory, but I do humbly disagree. Nothing you said is invalid, but all in all the PalmOS devices are simply better sellers. What nobody at MS seems to understand is that very few people want a "mini-computer" as their PDA. It was part of the flaw with the newton (imho). The Palm is a simple, easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, stable device. PocketPC's, by and large, aren't.
Now, in time, what you've outline might come to pass. MS has no problem waiting, and if they see someone as enough of a threat (which Palm certainly is), they'll try and end around them.
Add this to your scenario for real fear: Microsoft gets into the hardware game (a la XBox). They release a PDA at loss (a la XBox), drowning the market in fancy devices for cheap. Palm loses marketshare, MS drops the line and let's their vendors go to town.
A little fringe, I know, but something akin to it is plausible. It's essentially the IE strategy done with hardware...
inkly
said Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler. "The industry is at its best when it's developing new products and focusing on innovation."
Notice how MSSpeak uses "innovation" whenever they're challenged? How does this lawsuit challenge their right to "innovate"? What, the lawyers are too busy with the courts to go code Microsoft Word?
inky
My guess is both.
Why would they go for a no-monetary-gains trial? Money is what they'll use to prove damages. What exactly should Be be going for?
inkly
No offense, but comparing Be to SGI is pretty silly. SGI has been an established player for sometime with a strong niche market in the high-end graphics/animation field. Be was an up and coming OS trying a niche for hobbyists, much - as you said, like SGI.
The main difference between their strategy is *when*. When SGI did it, MS didn't have the strangehold they did when Be did.
Everyone keeps saying "It's Be's fault - they screwed up."
But this sounds like the guys who try and complain that an NFL coach made a bad call, but they don't know what a good call would have been.
What was Be's mistake? Where did they go wrong? What should they have done better?
Be tried *everything*. I think they tried every possibly marketing strategy out there for modern OS's - custom hardware, cross-platform, giving it away FREE.
What is it exactly they should have done better? What would you have done?
Be's problem is that there wasn't a market for them to enter. The cause, according to this lawsuit, is Microsoft. Considering the court findings, I'd say they have a case.
inky
You more than anyone, since you followed the trial for two years, should realize that simply abusing it's monopoly, Microsoft has done enough damage to this industry to make how it got to be the "industry leader" moot. It's position now is based on those practices.
.Net was called something like COM++, etc. etc.
Two years is an eternity in the computing industry. Two years ago, there was no Win 2000, no XP,
And two years ago, Be might have had a chance.
But perhaps "earned" is the wrong word. Would maintain make you happier? Does it matter? Microsoft is where it is today by breaking the law. If they had played by the rules, the industry would be a different place.
inkly
A valid and distinct point, but there is some evidence that MS's road to being a monopoly wasn't exactly a clean, legal trip either - but it's paved in small lawsuits that generally got taken out of the public eye because they were settled.
But that road is also surrounded by the mistakes of others - Commodore's poor business strategy, Apple mistakenly allowing them to steal technology, etc.
But how long have they maintained their control through these practices?
End result in either way: MS is where they are because they broke the law.
I wish I could agree with you - mostly because I came *this* close to buying one before they disappeared. But they dropped out of the hardware market because it was killing them. See Sega for an analogy ... brilliant hardware, no profit = no hardware.
inky