Neither was Apple. In fact, Apple had no music-players in the market, whereas Creative and Diamond did. Creative and Diamond were the dominant players in the market when Apple entered it.
But Apple was a household name in computers that people could actually use. A few years before the iPod was released Apple had the hugely successful iMac campaign that everyone who had a TV knew about. That's what creates brand recognition and brand recognition sells. It doesn't matter that they weren't selling music players at the time because they when they did start selling them they had immediate recognition.
When did Diamond or Creative ever have a national advertising campaign?
If Diamond and Creative were such dominant players in the market, as you put it, then how did Apple succeed in beating both of them when at the time the iPod wasn't even as good as other players?
But back when iPod was released many people were still wondering when Apple is going to go out of business.
Again, if that were truly the case then why did consumers flock to the iPod by the 10's of millions. In fact, the release of the iMac about 3 years before the iPod had already saved the company. Apple was not in any financial trouble when they released the iPod.
The reality is that the *average* consumer doesn't read financial papers or follow industry trends. They are influenced by brand recognition and marketing. Apple has a brand that everyone has known and respected for over 20 years and no one can argue that they know how to market.
If you're so confident that iTMS tunes are not a lock-in then show me 5 people who did buy a non-iPod even though they had iTMS tunes. That should be easy too.
Bull. There was no reason that Diamond and Creative couldn't have competed perfectly well against the iPod. Both of them were large companies with long histories in the industry.
The industry you are referring to is the computer component industry. Although Diamond and Creative were well known to us geeks, at the time they were not a household name in the music player industry. Unlike the other two you mention Apple's brand is well known and respected to geeks and non-geeks alike. In the beginning of the explosion in the music player industry that Apple brand gave them a huge competitive advantage.
I assume they would go after the numerous subsidiaries that MS has all over the EU. And I'm guessing that MS might want to sell a copy or two of Vista some time in the future which is income that could be intercepted.
Long before the iTunes Store existed, the iPod was already the best selling music player. That's because it didn't suck, not because people were "locked in" to iTunes. In another way, you could argue that even before the store, you still got the most benefit from iPod by using it in conjunction with iTunes.
That's partly because when the iPod took off there weren't many competitors with Apple's stature. Not to say that the iPod isn't a good, well-marketed product but in today's market without the iTunes lock-in I don't think it would be long before you'd see a big drop in iPod/iTunes Store sales.
Considering the article states that the FCC defines anything over 200 Kbps as broadband I would say 512 Kbps is pretty good. No one said that it was a perfect solution or as good as wired but when you're servicing a sparsely populated area of a few million sq km there aren't a lot of cost effective options. And the last time I checked satellite access was still better that no access.
Population density does not determine broadband penetration. Population density distribution does. Look at this map and this table to see the distribution of Canada's population. Over 80% of Canada's population lives on maybe 10% of its land. That's a perfect storm for high broadband penetration with low overall population density.
Even putting 80% of Canada's population on 10% of the land puts the population density at 29 people/sq km which is still lower than the U.S. (even if slightly) but we still have 20% more people with broadband access.
Don't confuse population density with decentralization. More than 90% of Canada's population lives within 200km of the US, and 41% of actual Canadian soil contains less than.3% of the population.
That would mean that the other 59% of the land has the remaining 99.7% of the population giving a population density of 6.2 people/sq km which is still nowhere near the U.S. Even if we assumed everyone was living on 20% of the land we'd still have fewer people/sq km than the U.S.
In order to reach the U.S. density we'd have to move the entire country into Ontario. Even then we'd still have a greater percentage of people with broadband access which is the point of the discussion.
FYI, in the city of Iqaluit, Nunavut which is just shy of the Arctic circle and has a population of 5,236 you can get 2 Mbps broadband for about $60CDN. Elsewhere in this discussion someone mentioned that they lived is a large U.S. urban area and they could only get 768 Kbps for $65US.
I live in Toronto which is the largest city in Canada but is no where near as large as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago and I can get 5 Mbps for $30CDN (~$26US). Even cities as small a 100,000 people can get the same.
Maybe that should be our immigration slogan, "Come to Canada. We've got cheap internet access."
Can you give an example of a more decentralized country that has better broadband access?
Canada has a population density of 3.6 people/sq km with a 77% broadband penetration while the U.S. has a density of 32.6 people/sq km (almost 10x denser) with only a 57% broadband penetration.
We've hidden a nuclear missile silo under very Tim Horton's built in the last 10 years. Get us angry and we'll bombard you with a billion radioactive Timbits.
I don't think Mexico's all that worried--for one thing, they've got that whole "buffer country" thing going that the Soviet Union used so successfully to keep western Europe from invading.
I should have said our neighbour immediately to the south. But don't think we won't be coming for them after we're done with the U.S.
Our country's full name is Canada not the Dominion of Canada. The British North America Act (1867) declares "the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly." (emphasis added)
In this context the word "dominion" means "nation".
The term "Dominion of Canada" was never officially recognized and has not been in regular use in government documents since the 50's or 60's so as not to intimidate our neighbour to the south.
Especially those doughnut eating sled dogs wearing toques. Of course you have to sacrifice some of the bandwidth for a 24 or 2.
NOTE: Non-Canadians who haven't seen Bob and Doug Mackenzie will not understand the above comment. Non-Canadians too young to remember Bob and Doug Mackenzie have no hope of understanding.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And yet it performs a useful function for the business... If you don't like it, you could always move to a different job or business.
Nice bit of flamebait. Moving right along...
Or.
Perhaps you might want to extend your remit to advocating the technologies you would choose, to the business management. Perhaps you might even want to create a development environment for personnel to produce adhoc applications in the technologies you prefer. Or shock, horror, you could even provide that service within the IT department and actively go looking for opportunities to improve productivity.
My company does all of that. We have a list of technologies that are approved, in containment and being retired. The department I work for is the likely place for these types of requests to be handled and we have a triage process that takes any request that comes in to well publicized email address and discusses it with the client to determine their needs and estimate the effort. If the client wants to go ahead it is prioritized and put in the schedule. Most times when they realize how much thought and effort it really takes to do it right they let us do it for them.
Even with all that there's always a guy (surprisingly never a woman) who read VB for dummies over the weekend and now thinks he knows as much as the entire IT department of a multi-billion dollar company. Unfortunately, what he doesn't realize is that writing a program is only a small piece of the problem. Once it's there you have to support and maintain it and that takes time. Then people begin asking for enhancements that he starts bolting on anywhere he can but it's getting harder and harder because he has no concept of design. Now his boss is telling him that he's spending too much time on it and it's not what he's getting paid for anyway. Then it gets dumped on IT and now we have to maintain it.
And anyone who says why don't you tell them that they'll have to keep maintaining it themselves or pay to have us migrate it to an approved technology has never worked in a large shop where politics often wins out over reality.
Besides, IT areas do a lot more than write programs. Coding is maybe 15-25% of the actual effort. There is analysis, design, integration (with other internal/external apps), regression testing and deployment to name a few. That's not to mention on-call support, enhancements and regulatory compliance not the least of which is SOX.
I don't have a problem with trained VB developers it's just that the simplicity of the tool and Microsoft's marketing give untrained people a false sense of ability.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
From a technical perspective it might suck but it works a lot of people (especially non-programmers) to get real work done.
And when that program gets too big for them to maintain (or they just don't feel like it anymore) they dump it on their IT area and we're stuck maintaining or converting an app in a technology we wouldn't have chosen that looks like it was designed by a pack of drunken monkeys.
Build a tool even an idiot can use and only an idiot will want to use it.
Another anonymous spelling Nazi heard from. At least have the marbles to post as yourself.
And if you're going to comment on someone else's English you may want to pay more attention to your own. Sentences and the word "English" are usually capitalized. The GP had one spelling mistake in an entire paragraph and you managed two mistakes in 6 words.
I've heard from a few people that 3web's support sucks. Myself, I've been considering a switch from Bell to TekSavvy.
Anyone in Canada looking to switch ISPs should check out http://www.canadianisp.com/. They have a list of ISPs in most major cities (82 for me in Toronto) complete with customer reviews.
Slashdot Mirror
But Apple was a household name in computers that people could actually use. A few years before the iPod was released Apple had the hugely successful iMac campaign that everyone who had a TV knew about. That's what creates brand recognition and brand recognition sells. It doesn't matter that they weren't selling music players at the time because they when they did start selling them they had immediate recognition.
When did Diamond or Creative ever have a national advertising campaign?
If Diamond and Creative were such dominant players in the market, as you put it, then how did Apple succeed in beating both of them when at the time the iPod wasn't even as good as other players?
Again, if that were truly the case then why did consumers flock to the iPod by the 10's of millions. In fact, the release of the iMac about 3 years before the iPod had already saved the company. Apple was not in any financial trouble when they released the iPod.
The reality is that the *average* consumer doesn't read financial papers or follow industry trends. They are influenced by brand recognition and marketing. Apple has a brand that everyone has known and respected for over 20 years and no one can argue that they know how to market.
If you're so confident that iTMS tunes are not a lock-in then show me 5 people who did buy a non-iPod even though they had iTMS tunes. That should be easy too.
The industry you are referring to is the computer component industry. Although Diamond and Creative were well known to us geeks, at the time they were not a household name in the music player industry. Unlike the other two you mention Apple's brand is well known and respected to geeks and non-geeks alike. In the beginning of the explosion in the music player industry that Apple brand gave them a huge competitive advantage.
I assume they would go after the numerous subsidiaries that MS has all over the EU. And I'm guessing that MS might want to sell a copy or two of Vista some time in the future which is income that could be intercepted.
That's partly because when the iPod took off there weren't many competitors with Apple's stature. Not to say that the iPod isn't a good, well-marketed product but in today's market without the iTunes lock-in I don't think it would be long before you'd see a big drop in iPod/iTunes Store sales.
Considering the article states that the FCC defines anything over 200 Kbps as broadband I would say 512 Kbps is pretty good. No one said that it was a perfect solution or as good as wired but when you're servicing a sparsely populated area of a few million sq km there aren't a lot of cost effective options. And the last time I checked satellite access was still better that no access.
Sorry about that. You're right. I get about 1 Mbps upstream.
Even putting 80% of Canada's population on 10% of the land puts the population density at 29 people/sq km which is still lower than the U.S. (even if slightly) but we still have 20% more people with broadband access.
Even the most remote areas of Canada have affordable broadband internet access. In fact more affordable than a lot of dense U.S. urban areas.
Iqaluit, Nunavut (pop. 5,236) - $60CDN for 2 Mbps
Whitehorse, Yukon (pop. 23,272) - $60CDN for 2 Mbps
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (pop. 16,541) - $100CDN for 6 Mbps
Pretty much everywhere in Nunavut, Northwest Territories - Satelite service, 512 Kbps for $60CDN or 1 Mbps for $100CDN
If that doesn't show Canada's commitment to affordable broadband access for remote areas I don't know what does.
That would mean that the other 59% of the land has the remaining 99.7% of the population giving a population density of 6.2 people/sq km which is still nowhere near the U.S. Even if we assumed everyone was living on 20% of the land we'd still have fewer people/sq km than the U.S.
In order to reach the U.S. density we'd have to move the entire country into Ontario. Even then we'd still have a greater percentage of people with broadband access which is the point of the discussion.
FYI, in the city of Iqaluit, Nunavut which is just shy of the Arctic circle and has a population of 5,236 you can get 2 Mbps broadband for about $60CDN. Elsewhere in this discussion someone mentioned that they lived is a large U.S. urban area and they could only get 768 Kbps for $65US.
I live in Toronto which is the largest city in Canada but is no where near as large as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago and I can get 5 Mbps for $30CDN (~$26US). Even cities as small a 100,000 people can get the same.
Maybe that should be our immigration slogan, "Come to Canada. We've got cheap internet access."
Canada has a population density of 3.6 people/sq km with a 77% broadband penetration while the U.S. has a density of 32.6 people/sq km (almost 10x denser) with only a 57% broadband penetration.
Reference:
Canada
United States
Broadband stats
We've hidden a nuclear missile silo under very Tim Horton's built in the last 10 years. Get us angry and we'll bombard you with a billion radioactive Timbits.
I should have said our neighbour immediately to the south. But don't think we won't be coming for them after we're done with the U.S.
To bring it back into focus.
Our country's full name is Canada not the Dominion of Canada. The British North America Act (1867) declares "the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly." (emphasis added)
In this context the word "dominion" means "nation".
The term "Dominion of Canada" was never officially recognized and has not been in regular use in government documents since the 50's or 60's so as not to intimidate our neighbour to the south.
Especially those doughnut eating sled dogs wearing toques. Of course you have to sacrifice some of the bandwidth for a 24 or 2.
NOTE: Non-Canadians who haven't seen Bob and Doug Mackenzie will not understand the above comment. Non-Canadians too young to remember Bob and Doug Mackenzie have no hope of understanding.
What we need is pretzel flavoured ink.
Nice bit of flamebait. Moving right along...
My company does all of that. We have a list of technologies that are approved, in containment and being retired. The department I work for is the likely place for these types of requests to be handled and we have a triage process that takes any request that comes in to well publicized email address and discusses it with the client to determine their needs and estimate the effort. If the client wants to go ahead it is prioritized and put in the schedule. Most times when they realize how much thought and effort it really takes to do it right they let us do it for them.
Even with all that there's always a guy (surprisingly never a woman) who read VB for dummies over the weekend and now thinks he knows as much as the entire IT department of a multi-billion dollar company. Unfortunately, what he doesn't realize is that writing a program is only a small piece of the problem. Once it's there you have to support and maintain it and that takes time. Then people begin asking for enhancements that he starts bolting on anywhere he can but it's getting harder and harder because he has no concept of design. Now his boss is telling him that he's spending too much time on it and it's not what he's getting paid for anyway. Then it gets dumped on IT and now we have to maintain it.
And anyone who says why don't you tell them that they'll have to keep maintaining it themselves or pay to have us migrate it to an approved technology has never worked in a large shop where politics often wins out over reality.
Besides, IT areas do a lot more than write programs. Coding is maybe 15-25% of the actual effort. There is analysis, design, integration (with other internal/external apps), regression testing and deployment to name a few. That's not to mention on-call support, enhancements and regulatory compliance not the least of which is SOX.
I don't have a problem with trained VB developers it's just that the simplicity of the tool and Microsoft's marketing give untrained people a false sense of ability.
And when that program gets too big for them to maintain (or they just don't feel like it anymore) they dump it on their IT area and we're stuck maintaining or converting an app in a technology we wouldn't have chosen that looks like it was designed by a pack of drunken monkeys.
Build a tool even an idiot can use and only an idiot will want to use it.
It doesn't prove how big his dick is but how big a dick he is.
Another anonymous spelling Nazi heard from. At least have the marbles to post as yourself.
And if you're going to comment on someone else's English you may want to pay more attention to your own. Sentences and the word "English" are usually capitalized. The GP had one spelling mistake in an entire paragraph and you managed two mistakes in 6 words.
I've heard from a few people that 3web's support sucks. Myself, I've been considering a switch from Bell to TekSavvy.
Anyone in Canada looking to switch ISPs should check out http://www.canadianisp.com/. They have a list of ISPs in most major cities (82 for me in Toronto) complete with customer reviews.
Instead of "funny" I would have modded this as insightful.
Well said.
Only if the guys are Caucasian, otherwise it would be racist gay porn.
Where I work Windows XP is being rolled out just now. It'll be a long time before they even contemplate rolling out Vista.