When my $25 membership renewal comes up, I don't even think twice. It saves me WAY more than it costs me and way more than the free versions offered by other stores (simply because it is so straightforward. 10% off everything, right here, right now). it doesn't take a genious to figure out that if you spend more than $21 a month in Barnes and Noble, the $25 is a good deal.
You're already making a penny on every dollar sold. How can you hope to fix that impression? It's not like you can cut prices. You could cut costs by making stores less nice, but the simple fact of the matter is that most people who still go to bookstores (like me) go for the experience. I like that everything in Barnes and Noble looks nice. There's a reason I'll drive farther to go to B&N over Books-a-Million or Borders. So while they could cut cost by becoming "Wal-books", they'd probably lose as many customers as they gained, and they still couldn't hope to compete with Amazon head to head on prices. No matter how cheaply run the store, it'll still cost more to run than no store at all.
You can find those places in the States too, but the key word in your post is "London". Could you find a nice cross section of adorable little specialist book shops in (*picks random little British town*) Kirkby on Bain? Or even (*picks random decent sized British town*) Hull, or York? You probably could find a subset of such things in say (*picks random fairly large city*) Birmingham or Manchester, but I doubt it's as good as London. It's the same here. New York is simply full of nice specialist book shops. I'm sure Washington, Chicago, Boston, or LA have a nice compliment as well. The small city I live in (in Alabama) has a few, with Nashville an hour and a half or so away with more. The little towns an hour of so outside of here have nothing. Books in those places are bought at Walmart, Amazon, or not at all.
The problem here is also one of scale. Nearly anyone in England is a day trip away from a fairly large city, and no more than a weekend trip from London. The US is simply much more spread out.
They do that partially by being no frills in every way (I happen to like that B&N is a comfortable place to shop), and partially by offering mostly overstock. They'll get a few big titles in "currently", which they'll sell at cost or even for a loss, but the vast majority of their stock is either overstock or over publish title that they get cheap and then get good margins on when they sell cheap.
I don't think you appreciate the difference between Amazon's and Barnes and Noble's business models. Economy of scale is a part of it (Amazon buys more copies of book and thus pay less per book), but it's mostly in the way they work. Amazon has a few large warehouses, from which all the books they sell are shipped. Barnes and Noble has a few large warehouses from which all the books they sell are shipped. Beyond that Barnes and Noble has hundreds (thousands? A lot, anyway) of large retail locations that have to be staffed, climate controlled, powered, designed, built, etc, etc. Amazon has a website. Oh yeah, B&N has one of those too, so they're not even really saving money there. Basically, B&N has the same back end costs as Amazon, plus hugely expensive retail outlets.
Unfortunately cutting the retail outlets just makes them a second best online bookseller. Not to mention that the retail outlets are exactly why I go to B&N over Amazon. It's a catch22, the retail outlets are what makes them special, what gives them an advantage over Amazon, but they're also an albatross that forces them to charge more. Worse, they're like a free advertising for Amazon. I know lots of people who do exactly what you did. Go into the brick and mortar store to browse (which is much more convenient after all), then get the books they've decided on cheaper from Amazon. Thanks to smart phones you can bloody sit in the Barnes and Noble checking relative prices and ordering from someone else.
The irony here is that B&N is falling prey to the most recent version of the same trends that they used to kill a lot of independent booksellers 10 or 20 years ago. Despite that, now that there are so few small booksellers, I will be sad to lose B&N as one of the few places you can still go to wander around and find a book.
By "little guy" I think he was referring to the small mom and pop bookstore where you used to be able to go and talk to an intelligent person who'd read a measurable percentage of the books on the shelf. Not that I've not encountered intelligent people in B&N (though I don't think anyone could read a measurable percentage of the books in there in any single lifetime); but I do sort of miss talking to booksellers who could talk about why they personally chose to carry author X after reading one of their books on a streetcar and getting so absorbed that they missed three stops and opened 15 minutes late that day (granted that bookshop was killed by Katrina, not B&N, but the point stands).
Sadly, it appears GP didn't read the FA, which suggested that the same pressures driving B&N out are making things even tougher than ever for small bookstores. I personally try to go to bookstores rather than using Amazon (partly out of a desire to help the local economy, partly because I hate waiting for a book to ship), but I know plenty of people that haven't been in a brick and mortar bookshop in years.
Oh, sure I was making broad generalizations. Plenty of Americans are terrible drivers; and I'm sure you wouldn't have to look long to find an individual Japanese or German driver that ought to be banned from the road (probably because of some habit they picked up in Italy:-)). Hell, look long enough and you may even find an Iraqi driver who doesn't turn every trip into the latest episode of his (or her) own personal production of Death Race. In general though, you can pick up a pretty good idea of driving habits in a given area fairly quickly. If you felt in immanent danger of death more times than you've driven miles, you're in one of *those* countries:-)
Of course American driving habit vary pretty strongly by region too; the band is narrower, and tends toward the "good" side, but New Yorkers do not drive like people from Montana.
but to get attention only or primarily because of one's looks is to very unwelcoming. It serves to alienate people, to denigrate them-- it's why we have terms like "sexual objectification" in our language
-You
Read an article from http://badphysics.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com], spend a few futile minutes googling for more pictures and trying to internally reconcile her ravishing looks with such effortless eloquence and boundless intelligence
-OP
Seems to me he's more impressed with her wit, intelligence, and writing ability, but also quite pleased by her beauty. I think you may be reading more into this than is there. A certain level of objectification is unavoidable when you don't know someone other than to see a picture and read their work, but in this case I don't think the OP has gone over the top.
It is, that's the point. The device is able to tell, based on the resistance in the line, what type of dumb charger is plugged in. The resistors are basically a little code that the device can read to tell how much power to draw. This is important, because a car or house charger can allow the device to charge itself much more quickly than, say, an external battery charger.
Dude, has it occurred to you that given she has a science blog with a very nice picture of herself setup obviously next to it kinda saying "Look at me, I'm a pretty little geek girl", she probably likes the attention? I'm not trying to knock her or anything, it's a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to like attention. I also greatly doubt that she wants to have wild monkey-sex with any great percentage of her readers, I'm not saying that either. She clearly likes to be paid attention to: both for her obvious intelligence and for her equally obvious good looks. Her website gives her to opportunity for both in a very safe and impersonal way, good on her. Don't expect people to ignore that she's pretty though.
Personally I kinda liked Ada better. I'm more of a technologist than a scientist, and I like the alt-girl look. To each their own though.
But you yourself admit to being unable or unwilling to repair your stuff, you just have access to cheap labor to do it for you. I mean sure, the American shop could work for $3-10... They wouldn't be able to pay for electricity to tell if the repairs were successful or not and they'd have to work out of a tent, but they could. The simple fact of the matter is that between the extremely small cost of electronics, and the generally quite reasonable desires of electronics repair people to be able to eat and pay their rent it's simply impractical to perform repairs on most consumer grade electronics.
The expense involved in acquiring a decent electronics repair bench, plus the limit knowledge of electricity most people have makes self repair a sort of unavailable option.
Americans are good drivers compared with a lot of the world. Not the best certainly (Germans are indeed far better), but good. Much more of the world is like Italy than Germany, or at least the bits I've seen or heard of. I've personally observed a fair chunk of Europe and the Middle East; and while northern Europeans are generally as good or better drivers than Americans, most of southern Europe is kind a scary. The Middle East is freaking frightening, and I say that as someone who did most of his driving there in an armored vehicle. Asia in general doesn't look any better in the footage I've seen, though there are definite exceptions (Japan comes to mind immediately). From first hand accounts of friends, Africa is one giant game of bumper cars in most countries.
If you listed every country on Earth in order of driving safety, I'd be willing to bet the US would be in the top 15 or 20 percent. And yes, that does scare the Hell out of me now that I think of it.
New Orleans has them run on the median ("Neutral Ground" in the local parlance), but is fairly unique among large metro areas in the US for having so much median space throughout the city. I know that in San Fransisco they run on the roads. New York has mostly subways and elevated trains, and I believe the same is mostly true for the other large East Coast cities, but I have only small experience of most of them. St. Louis run on either reclaimed rail track or specially built rail track that parallels the roads. Those are the only large US cities I have direct familiarity with, but as you can see it varies pretty extensively.
Ancient wisdom to the contrary, in the days of airplanes, buses, and trains the journey is not all it's cracked up to be... it's all about the destination. There's little enough to recommend a 5 or 6 hour airplane trip (between plane rides and layovers I'm looking at 5 hours from Huntsville to Boston next month, and that's a relatively short trip) that I'm not happy to have movies/books/music available on demand. Don't even get me started on cross country bus trips. Do you have any idea how much of the US looks like "grass, more grass, more more grass..."?
Not to mention that not every trip is for pleasure. Lemme tell ya, I got a lot of leveling done on my WoW characters the two weeks I spent in Chippewa Falls, WI in the middle of February. It was pretty much that or ice fishing, and I don't own any ice fishing gear. Had there been a class available in Hawaii, I'm sure I'd have spent more time on the beach and less in the hotel room, but as it was...
Hopefully both. With maybe a third party (who will probably not be MS, HP and WebOS maybe?). I'm all for competition in this space, I just don't think that Microsoft has the guns for it. They are too married to the Windows paradigm, and to unwilling to stick their neck out.
Obviously that would be a problem they'd have to solve wouldn't it? I can think of several ways. I don't have an iPad, but I do have Dropbox on my iPhone. You could integrate with programs like Dropbox and even provide your own cloud service to share off your documents. It's not like MS doesn't have their own cloud storage service is it? Hooks for your own cloud service and an API to let other vendor's cloud service work with your software. I'm fairly certain that if you told Dropbox or someone like them that there was now an API to tie into a full version of Office on the "iPlatforms", there would be a new client incorporating those APIs available in a matter of days. One solution.
You could build in support for browsing shared SMB file systems. Build it directly into the app. It would work with all your existing clients and servers (all of which have SMB file sharing built into their lowest level of DNA), and as a bonus (or not), Samba will allow people to use Unix or Mac clients to host the files. Since the iPad has built in VPN support, this will even work for execs on the go. That's another solution.
It also seems likely (though I'm not sure) that there's some kind of way to sync documents onto the device directly. I know it has a version of Apple's Officealike, plus some PDF readers and other things that likely need "outside" support. There's gotta be some way to sync documents directly. Considering that Apple is *extremely* keen on keeping its Outlook and Exchange integration working well, they'd probably even be willing to play nice with more, ahem, extensive access to the syncing APIs than they give to other software vendors.
Apple is quite well aware that MS rules the roost in the field of Office products (hence their great desire to be Exchange compatible), I think they'd be much more willing to play ball with MS over something like this than you believe. Being able to say "it works with Office" is a huge feather in the cap for corporate adoption, Apple will sell more devices (probably more phones and Touches too, may as well come up with a portable version while we're developing for iOS anyway). Apple's shown a willingness to play nice with a lot of other vendors (MS included) when the results are clearly "win-win".
Your biggest problem would probably be to convince people to spend a hundred dollars or more on an app, when they're used to spending $5-10 on the outside.
That's largely immaterial to the question "Could Microsoft buy Apple", or "How much are these companies worth". Your point is valid, but the worth of a company (the amount required to "buy it") is its market cap. To "own" either Microsoft or Apple, one must own half or more of the stock (crudely, the type of stock matters, and technically you really only need more than anyone else not half). The value of the outstanding stock is therefore highly relevant to the question "could Microsoft buy Apple" and the answer appears (at the moment) to be "no". At least not without destroying itself in the process.
Indeed, Office for the iPad would be approved in a heartbeat and sell like hotcakes, I think. The ability to view MS Office documents on a native system, and do modest editing in the same native environment (more than modest editing would be a tough sell on the format I think, but I could be wrong) would be really valuable to a fair number of people. Let's face it, Apple's tools are fairly good at reading/displaying/editing Office docs, but still not as good as Office, and Office remains the format of choice for most business people.
Building phones and building factories are not the same thing. Apple builds phones, HTC builds phones, Motorola builds phones... Oh, no, wait, some company in China with a really high suicide rate builds phones designed and marketed by Apple/HTC/Motorola. When you talk about a company making their "own" phone, you mean designed, marketed, and supported in house. It's still put together in a fab plant by a contractor. I could be wrong here of course, but I don't think any of the big players actually have their own factories, at the very least none of them build ALL their own stuff.
Well as the article points out, it's already working for Google. Has been for a couple years now. Android is free (gratis) which I doubt the MS OS will be so that saves money to the OEM, It's customizable which the MS OS won't be, and it entrenched which the MS OS can't be. I think the author has a point here.
Right now the consumer smartphone market is essentially divided between Android and iPhone in the US (Note, the *consumer* and the *US* before you flame please). iPhone is the vertically integrated, what you see is what you get, we control the horizontal and the vertical, smartphone (Again, before the flames, I use a 3GS. I like it. Noting wrong with vertical integration as long as you know what you're getting). Android is the open, varied, commodity smartphone. It appears on handsets more advance than the best iPhone and on pieces of crap that can barely make phone calls. Microsoft appears to be trying to leverage an "in between" model that they hope will have all the advantages of both models.
The problem is that they're leaning towards Apple's model in every important way except how they plan to make money. Microsoft makes a ton of money off of Windows/Office because they sell millions and millions of copies. It seems unlikely (at this point) that they'll sell millions and million of phone licenses. It's a growth industry, sure. In twenty years smartphones might be like computers where nearly everyone has one and making 20 bucks a head on each sales is hugely profitable. Not now though, and Microsoft is no longer a lean little company that can afford to ride a 20 year wave waiting for the payoff.
I'll not disagree with you that there is likely very little advantage to large company or government organization going to something like Google. When an organization has reached a size sufficient that it can comfortably support (and has need for) a decent sized internal IT team, multiple data centers, and all the sundry things like data center wide redundant power and backup, it probably won't be saving money going to Google. You'll note that I never claimed otherwise.
Compared to most small and even many medium sized businesses, Google can save a lot on economies of scale, but after a certain point I think they lose some if not all of their advantage. Again, I point you at the two primary questions 1) will this save me money, and 2) will it provide the service I need. I don't personally know where the break even point is. It probably varies. A technology focused company, say an IT service provider, will probably have the house expertise to make the break even point a really small number. A chain of bakeries with a really distributed business model and not much in house IT knowledge might have a much higher break even point.
What's your suggestion then? Governments save money by using contractors. They can't hire experts in everything. So we can:
A) Spend more money and vastly increase government bureaucracy by hiring official "government" people to handle every little aspect of government work, or
B) Not give the government the basic information it needs in order to say, regulate traffic, collect trash, or enforce the laws.
You have a third option?
(Likely your option to for the government to stop collecting information at all, which I'm sure will be a great comfort when some kid puts his car through your living room window because "driver's licenses are oppression, man")
No Google is cheaper because it economizes such things. Think about it, Google is already running data centers with thousands of computers in them, it's cheap for them to add another rack or two for what you need. They've probably already got the backup capacity, the redundant data center. They've got hundreds of skilled technicians, programmers, and admins on staff already. They're specialists. All they know is data centers, and it works because they're selling you a data center (or at least a little piece of theirs). They don't have to document your setup, it's just like all the other setups and if the guy who runs yours picks up and leaves he can be replaced by the guy next to him.
The downside of this is that you get what Google gives you. It's not a perfect system. You can't call up IT and ask them to whip up a new CRM, or change out your mail server for something different. You have certain options, sure. Certain menus of choices, but not the near complete flexibility of in house IT. It seems to me that their are two main questions you want to ask when it comes to using a cloud provider for theses services:
1) Will it actually save you money? Don't discount this, it will save many organizations lots of money. Google does what they do well, and has definite economy of scale on its side. Do a fair comparison and see if it will save your company money.
2) Can you afford to lose the flexibility. Lots of companies can. You have to think about this one, do you really need this level of flexibility, or are you holding onto it because it seems "safe"?
There's lots of other things to consider of course. There's the level of trust that you, personally, have for the cloud provider. How much money you'll be saving vs. how much pain it's going to cost. But really it all pretty much boils down to: Will it save me money, and will it accomplish what I need. Assuming the answer to both questions is yes, it's probably something that should be looked into.
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When my $25 membership renewal comes up, I don't even think twice. It saves me WAY more than it costs me and way more than the free versions offered by other stores (simply because it is so straightforward. 10% off everything, right here, right now). it doesn't take a genious to figure out that if you spend more than $21 a month in Barnes and Noble, the $25 is a good deal.
You're already making a penny on every dollar sold. How can you hope to fix that impression? It's not like you can cut prices. You could cut costs by making stores less nice, but the simple fact of the matter is that most people who still go to bookstores (like me) go for the experience. I like that everything in Barnes and Noble looks nice. There's a reason I'll drive farther to go to B&N over Books-a-Million or Borders. So while they could cut cost by becoming "Wal-books", they'd probably lose as many customers as they gained, and they still couldn't hope to compete with Amazon head to head on prices. No matter how cheaply run the store, it'll still cost more to run than no store at all.
You can find those places in the States too, but the key word in your post is "London". Could you find a nice cross section of adorable little specialist book shops in (*picks random little British town*) Kirkby on Bain? Or even (*picks random decent sized British town*) Hull, or York? You probably could find a subset of such things in say (*picks random fairly large city*) Birmingham or Manchester, but I doubt it's as good as London. It's the same here. New York is simply full of nice specialist book shops. I'm sure Washington, Chicago, Boston, or LA have a nice compliment as well. The small city I live in (in Alabama) has a few, with Nashville an hour and a half or so away with more. The little towns an hour of so outside of here have nothing. Books in those places are bought at Walmart, Amazon, or not at all.
The problem here is also one of scale. Nearly anyone in England is a day trip away from a fairly large city, and no more than a weekend trip from London. The US is simply much more spread out.
They do that partially by being no frills in every way (I happen to like that B&N is a comfortable place to shop), and partially by offering mostly overstock. They'll get a few big titles in "currently", which they'll sell at cost or even for a loss, but the vast majority of their stock is either overstock or over publish title that they get cheap and then get good margins on when they sell cheap.
I don't think you appreciate the difference between Amazon's and Barnes and Noble's business models. Economy of scale is a part of it (Amazon buys more copies of book and thus pay less per book), but it's mostly in the way they work. Amazon has a few large warehouses, from which all the books they sell are shipped. Barnes and Noble has a few large warehouses from which all the books they sell are shipped. Beyond that Barnes and Noble has hundreds (thousands? A lot, anyway) of large retail locations that have to be staffed, climate controlled, powered, designed, built, etc, etc. Amazon has a website. Oh yeah, B&N has one of those too, so they're not even really saving money there. Basically, B&N has the same back end costs as Amazon, plus hugely expensive retail outlets.
Unfortunately cutting the retail outlets just makes them a second best online bookseller. Not to mention that the retail outlets are exactly why I go to B&N over Amazon. It's a catch22, the retail outlets are what makes them special, what gives them an advantage over Amazon, but they're also an albatross that forces them to charge more. Worse, they're like a free advertising for Amazon. I know lots of people who do exactly what you did. Go into the brick and mortar store to browse (which is much more convenient after all), then get the books they've decided on cheaper from Amazon. Thanks to smart phones you can bloody sit in the Barnes and Noble checking relative prices and ordering from someone else.
The irony here is that B&N is falling prey to the most recent version of the same trends that they used to kill a lot of independent booksellers 10 or 20 years ago. Despite that, now that there are so few small booksellers, I will be sad to lose B&N as one of the few places you can still go to wander around and find a book.
By "little guy" I think he was referring to the small mom and pop bookstore where you used to be able to go and talk to an intelligent person who'd read a measurable percentage of the books on the shelf. Not that I've not encountered intelligent people in B&N (though I don't think anyone could read a measurable percentage of the books in there in any single lifetime); but I do sort of miss talking to booksellers who could talk about why they personally chose to carry author X after reading one of their books on a streetcar and getting so absorbed that they missed three stops and opened 15 minutes late that day (granted that bookshop was killed by Katrina, not B&N, but the point stands).
Sadly, it appears GP didn't read the FA, which suggested that the same pressures driving B&N out are making things even tougher than ever for small bookstores. I personally try to go to bookstores rather than using Amazon (partly out of a desire to help the local economy, partly because I hate waiting for a book to ship), but I know plenty of people that haven't been in a brick and mortar bookshop in years.
Oh, sure I was making broad generalizations. Plenty of Americans are terrible drivers; and I'm sure you wouldn't have to look long to find an individual Japanese or German driver that ought to be banned from the road (probably because of some habit they picked up in Italy:-)). Hell, look long enough and you may even find an Iraqi driver who doesn't turn every trip into the latest episode of his (or her) own personal production of Death Race. In general though, you can pick up a pretty good idea of driving habits in a given area fairly quickly. If you felt in immanent danger of death more times than you've driven miles, you're in one of *those* countries :-)
Of course American driving habit vary pretty strongly by region too; the band is narrower, and tends toward the "good" side, but New Yorkers do not drive like people from Montana.
but to get attention only or primarily because of one's looks is to very unwelcoming. It serves to alienate people, to denigrate them-- it's why we have terms like "sexual objectification" in our language
-You
Read an article from http://badphysics.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com], spend a few futile minutes googling for more pictures and trying to internally reconcile her ravishing looks with such effortless eloquence and boundless intelligence
-OP
Seems to me he's more impressed with her wit, intelligence, and writing ability, but also quite pleased by her beauty. I think you may be reading more into this than is there. A certain level of objectification is unavoidable when you don't know someone other than to see a picture and read their work, but in this case I don't think the OP has gone over the top.
It is, that's the point. The device is able to tell, based on the resistance in the line, what type of dumb charger is plugged in. The resistors are basically a little code that the device can read to tell how much power to draw. This is important, because a car or house charger can allow the device to charge itself much more quickly than, say, an external battery charger.
Dude, has it occurred to you that given she has a science blog with a very nice picture of herself setup obviously next to it kinda saying "Look at me, I'm a pretty little geek girl", she probably likes the attention? I'm not trying to knock her or anything, it's a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to like attention. I also greatly doubt that she wants to have wild monkey-sex with any great percentage of her readers, I'm not saying that either. She clearly likes to be paid attention to: both for her obvious intelligence and for her equally obvious good looks. Her website gives her to opportunity for both in a very safe and impersonal way, good on her. Don't expect people to ignore that she's pretty though.
Personally I kinda liked Ada better. I'm more of a technologist than a scientist, and I like the alt-girl look. To each their own though.
But you yourself admit to being unable or unwilling to repair your stuff, you just have access to cheap labor to do it for you. I mean sure, the American shop could work for $3-10... They wouldn't be able to pay for electricity to tell if the repairs were successful or not and they'd have to work out of a tent, but they could. The simple fact of the matter is that between the extremely small cost of electronics, and the generally quite reasonable desires of electronics repair people to be able to eat and pay their rent it's simply impractical to perform repairs on most consumer grade electronics.
The expense involved in acquiring a decent electronics repair bench, plus the limit knowledge of electricity most people have makes self repair a sort of unavailable option.
Americans are good drivers compared with a lot of the world. Not the best certainly (Germans are indeed far better), but good. Much more of the world is like Italy than Germany, or at least the bits I've seen or heard of. I've personally observed a fair chunk of Europe and the Middle East; and while northern Europeans are generally as good or better drivers than Americans, most of southern Europe is kind a scary. The Middle East is freaking frightening, and I say that as someone who did most of his driving there in an armored vehicle. Asia in general doesn't look any better in the footage I've seen, though there are definite exceptions (Japan comes to mind immediately). From first hand accounts of friends, Africa is one giant game of bumper cars in most countries.
If you listed every country on Earth in order of driving safety, I'd be willing to bet the US would be in the top 15 or 20 percent. And yes, that does scare the Hell out of me now that I think of it.
New Orleans has them run on the median ("Neutral Ground" in the local parlance), but is fairly unique among large metro areas in the US for having so much median space throughout the city. I know that in San Fransisco they run on the roads. New York has mostly subways and elevated trains, and I believe the same is mostly true for the other large East Coast cities, but I have only small experience of most of them. St. Louis run on either reclaimed rail track or specially built rail track that parallels the roads. Those are the only large US cities I have direct familiarity with, but as you can see it varies pretty extensively.
Ancient wisdom to the contrary, in the days of airplanes, buses, and trains the journey is not all it's cracked up to be... it's all about the destination. There's little enough to recommend a 5 or 6 hour airplane trip (between plane rides and layovers I'm looking at 5 hours from Huntsville to Boston next month, and that's a relatively short trip) that I'm not happy to have movies/books/music available on demand. Don't even get me started on cross country bus trips. Do you have any idea how much of the US looks like "grass, more grass, more more grass..."?
Not to mention that not every trip is for pleasure. Lemme tell ya, I got a lot of leveling done on my WoW characters the two weeks I spent in Chippewa Falls, WI in the middle of February. It was pretty much that or ice fishing, and I don't own any ice fishing gear. Had there been a class available in Hawaii, I'm sure I'd have spent more time on the beach and less in the hotel room, but as it was...
Hopefully both. With maybe a third party (who will probably not be MS, HP and WebOS maybe?). I'm all for competition in this space, I just don't think that Microsoft has the guns for it. They are too married to the Windows paradigm, and to unwilling to stick their neck out.
Obviously that would be a problem they'd have to solve wouldn't it? I can think of several ways. I don't have an iPad, but I do have Dropbox on my iPhone. You could integrate with programs like Dropbox and even provide your own cloud service to share off your documents. It's not like MS doesn't have their own cloud storage service is it? Hooks for your own cloud service and an API to let other vendor's cloud service work with your software. I'm fairly certain that if you told Dropbox or someone like them that there was now an API to tie into a full version of Office on the "iPlatforms", there would be a new client incorporating those APIs available in a matter of days. One solution.
You could build in support for browsing shared SMB file systems. Build it directly into the app. It would work with all your existing clients and servers (all of which have SMB file sharing built into their lowest level of DNA), and as a bonus (or not), Samba will allow people to use Unix or Mac clients to host the files. Since the iPad has built in VPN support, this will even work for execs on the go. That's another solution.
It also seems likely (though I'm not sure) that there's some kind of way to sync documents onto the device directly. I know it has a version of Apple's Officealike, plus some PDF readers and other things that likely need "outside" support. There's gotta be some way to sync documents directly. Considering that Apple is *extremely* keen on keeping its Outlook and Exchange integration working well, they'd probably even be willing to play nice with more, ahem, extensive access to the syncing APIs than they give to other software vendors.
Apple is quite well aware that MS rules the roost in the field of Office products (hence their great desire to be Exchange compatible), I think they'd be much more willing to play ball with MS over something like this than you believe. Being able to say "it works with Office" is a huge feather in the cap for corporate adoption, Apple will sell more devices (probably more phones and Touches too, may as well come up with a portable version while we're developing for iOS anyway). Apple's shown a willingness to play nice with a lot of other vendors (MS included) when the results are clearly "win-win".
Your biggest problem would probably be to convince people to spend a hundred dollars or more on an app, when they're used to spending $5-10 on the outside.
That's largely immaterial to the question "Could Microsoft buy Apple", or "How much are these companies worth". Your point is valid, but the worth of a company (the amount required to "buy it") is its market cap. To "own" either Microsoft or Apple, one must own half or more of the stock (crudely, the type of stock matters, and technically you really only need more than anyone else not half). The value of the outstanding stock is therefore highly relevant to the question "could Microsoft buy Apple" and the answer appears (at the moment) to be "no". At least not without destroying itself in the process.
You know, if you're going to be a Grammar Nazi you might try thoroughly proofreading your *subject*. :-P
Indeed, Office for the iPad would be approved in a heartbeat and sell like hotcakes, I think. The ability to view MS Office documents on a native system, and do modest editing in the same native environment (more than modest editing would be a tough sell on the format I think, but I could be wrong) would be really valuable to a fair number of people. Let's face it, Apple's tools are fairly good at reading/displaying/editing Office docs, but still not as good as Office, and Office remains the format of choice for most business people.
Did you read the article? No, of course you didn't. That's what they're doing.
Building phones and building factories are not the same thing. Apple builds phones, HTC builds phones, Motorola builds phones... Oh, no, wait, some company in China with a really high suicide rate builds phones designed and marketed by Apple/HTC/Motorola. When you talk about a company making their "own" phone, you mean designed, marketed, and supported in house. It's still put together in a fab plant by a contractor. I could be wrong here of course, but I don't think any of the big players actually have their own factories, at the very least none of them build ALL their own stuff.
Well as the article points out, it's already working for Google. Has been for a couple years now. Android is free (gratis) which I doubt the MS OS will be so that saves money to the OEM, It's customizable which the MS OS won't be, and it entrenched which the MS OS can't be. I think the author has a point here.
Right now the consumer smartphone market is essentially divided between Android and iPhone in the US (Note, the *consumer* and the *US* before you flame please). iPhone is the vertically integrated, what you see is what you get, we control the horizontal and the vertical, smartphone (Again, before the flames, I use a 3GS. I like it. Noting wrong with vertical integration as long as you know what you're getting). Android is the open, varied, commodity smartphone. It appears on handsets more advance than the best iPhone and on pieces of crap that can barely make phone calls. Microsoft appears to be trying to leverage an "in between" model that they hope will have all the advantages of both models.
The problem is that they're leaning towards Apple's model in every important way except how they plan to make money. Microsoft makes a ton of money off of Windows/Office because they sell millions and millions of copies. It seems unlikely (at this point) that they'll sell millions and million of phone licenses. It's a growth industry, sure. In twenty years smartphones might be like computers where nearly everyone has one and making 20 bucks a head on each sales is hugely profitable. Not now though, and Microsoft is no longer a lean little company that can afford to ride a 20 year wave waiting for the payoff.
I'll not disagree with you that there is likely very little advantage to large company or government organization going to something like Google. When an organization has reached a size sufficient that it can comfortably support (and has need for) a decent sized internal IT team, multiple data centers, and all the sundry things like data center wide redundant power and backup, it probably won't be saving money going to Google. You'll note that I never claimed otherwise.
Compared to most small and even many medium sized businesses, Google can save a lot on economies of scale, but after a certain point I think they lose some if not all of their advantage. Again, I point you at the two primary questions 1) will this save me money, and 2) will it provide the service I need. I don't personally know where the break even point is. It probably varies. A technology focused company, say an IT service provider, will probably have the house expertise to make the break even point a really small number. A chain of bakeries with a really distributed business model and not much in house IT knowledge might have a much higher break even point.
What's your suggestion then? Governments save money by using contractors. They can't hire experts in everything. So we can:
A) Spend more money and vastly increase government bureaucracy by hiring official "government" people to handle every little aspect of government work, or
B) Not give the government the basic information it needs in order to say, regulate traffic, collect trash, or enforce the laws.
You have a third option?
(Likely your option to for the government to stop collecting information at all, which I'm sure will be a great comfort when some kid puts his car through your living room window because "driver's licenses are oppression, man")
No Google is cheaper because it economizes such things. Think about it, Google is already running data centers with thousands of computers in them, it's cheap for them to add another rack or two for what you need. They've probably already got the backup capacity, the redundant data center. They've got hundreds of skilled technicians, programmers, and admins on staff already. They're specialists. All they know is data centers, and it works because they're selling you a data center (or at least a little piece of theirs). They don't have to document your setup, it's just like all the other setups and if the guy who runs yours picks up and leaves he can be replaced by the guy next to him.
The downside of this is that you get what Google gives you. It's not a perfect system. You can't call up IT and ask them to whip up a new CRM, or change out your mail server for something different. You have certain options, sure. Certain menus of choices, but not the near complete flexibility of in house IT. It seems to me that their are two main questions you want to ask when it comes to using a cloud provider for theses services:
1) Will it actually save you money? Don't discount this, it will save many organizations lots of money. Google does what they do well, and has definite economy of scale on its side. Do a fair comparison and see if it will save your company money.
2) Can you afford to lose the flexibility. Lots of companies can. You have to think about this one, do you really need this level of flexibility, or are you holding onto it because it seems "safe"?
There's lots of other things to consider of course. There's the level of trust that you, personally, have for the cloud provider. How much money you'll be saving vs. how much pain it's going to cost. But really it all pretty much boils down to: Will it save me money, and will it accomplish what I need. Assuming the answer to both questions is yes, it's probably something that should be looked into.