They could access Google+ from the web browser.
And as a BlackBerry user, that's my only option... but I prefer apps to websites, because apps can take advantage of many of the social networking abilities of the BlackBerry... they can tie into the camera and video camera apps, they can provide push notifications for various events and expose those events separately to allow other applications to set custom alerts, etc.
Not sure how much of that applies to iOS... as it seems several places where Twitter is integrated in iOS5 are things that other mobile operating systems expose to a lot of various applications...
Well, I have a home studio, and a signal chain that can easily outpace the dynamic range of 16-bit audio, so yeah, I can theoretically hear the difference between 16-bit and higher - but realistically have very few audio sources outside of Blu-Ray discs that even approach trying to use that dynamic range. As for higher sample rates... over time, less and less can I hear the difference, but particularly for really simple recordings (a single acoustic guitar or a solo piano), I prefer something higher than 48KHz though probably less than 88.2KHz frankly if such a sample rate were anywhere near standard because they tend to better represent the relation between overtones better. Only because generally speaking, the random low pass filter at the top end of even 48KHz typically has effects at slightly lower than the maximum audio frequencies. With 88.2 - there's not even close to a problem. However, as soon as I turn a computer on in that room or something... well, not worth it anymore. Because you're right, ideal conditions are pretty damned necessary - and you'd even need a quiet environment if you were listening on high-end headphones, because they're pretty much all going to be open headphones, not closed - and thus you aren't going to be getting much in the way of any reduction of room noise when listening. And if I were mastering audio, though I prefer 88.2KHz because frankly it's just the lowest well better than necessary standard sample rate, 96KHz is usually better for distribution because so many DACs don't do 88.2KHz, which means you rely on generally pretty awful re-sampling at the consumer end. That's even a problem on one of my computers. But that motherboard got relegated to my storage server long ago for many reasons, so it doesn't really come up.
But circles are things you create, not that you join. They're one way - and it's the wrong way for events.
And public events, like concerts - are you seriously suggesting that the person organizing that should have to put everyone in a circle just to keep them updated? That'd be absolutely ridiculous. Or a hangout? For an event with like 1000 attendees? Really?
And on facebook, though there may be spammy businesses you can just not "like" them. And you have no reason to not block a fake account. Either way, that hasn't been my experience with most businesses on Facebook that are legitimate, and that exist in the real world.
I'm not talking about games. But there are other things that Google+ misses out on that Facebook has. I mean, events is a biggie, the number of concert events that correlate to concerts that I go to is increasing on facebook, and on most of those events, there has been discussion amongst attendees about public transit options, door opening times, etc. So this isn't just a "Integrate Google Calendar and Events is solved" thing, because you need to have the "forum" atmosphere attached, or it's not a substitute.
Another example: Google+ seems to lack the ability for companies to set up pages, with multiple users administering them, at least not unless you just give everyone access to the same account, and that seems a little ridiculous, and PROBABLY violates the TOS.
There are quite a few companies that are very active in terms of responding to users on Facebook, it's become an important channel in client interaction. For example, two of the transit agencies I use regularly are very very good at responding to customer inquiries, and even go so far as to adjust service based on Facebook response. These agencies don't have the money to set up their own forum infrastructures, and even if they did, the centralized nature of social networking ensures that they get used.
I know quite a few people that would be unable to set up an email newsletter, but who can easily set up a facebook group, for when they go on a trip and want to let specific people receive updates from what is a reasonably simple interface to do so.
Now, maybe it's true that the majority of people don't use Facebook for anything like that - but it seems to me most of my friends do. It could be a cultural thing - most of my friends are in their late-teens, early-twenties, they all live in Canada (which had pretty high Facebook adoption pretty early on so there IS a bit of a critical mass thing for Canadians I guess), probably a good half or so have blackberries, and many others are switching to blackberry or back to blackberry for their next phone - and Blackberry has good Facebook integration, which browsing a website just doesn't compare to... so in this early stage, that's going to make it hard for those friends to really care, or even make the switch... Pretty much every social event in my circle of friends is planned on Facebook (again, events are important for this) - even wedding information is distributed over Facebook. I have friends who write notes and start discussions on complex issues on Facebook. Basically, at least amongst my group of 500+ friends, Facebook isn't a game site. It isn't really even mostly about sharing pictures and status updates. It's not even particularly about networking. It's about facilitating and extended current real life social interaction in virtual space. And Google+ doesn't really do that.
Really? Because almost everyone I know on both Google+ and Facebook has pretty much already stopped using Google+ and gone back to using Facebook exclusively. It's not that Google+ isn't pretty. It's not even a critical mass thing. it's that it just does a hell of a lot less than Facebook. Sure it may be more private by default but in exchange for everything Facebook offers, given that one can also do a hell of a lot to make a Facebook profile private... (more in some ways than with a Google+ account)... it's just not worth the trade off for most people.
Damn straight, and wireless should be turned into a national, public asset too. Crown-corp for the towers, cell phones get to access the full range of frequencies from the towers to achieve the best connection/speed, and companies like Rogers and Bell or whatever can throw a box connecting to the tower to provide me access to their voicemail network, etc.
The best part would be that the for-profit companies would only be able to really gouge idiots, while the non-profit (merely sustainable + some for expansion) crown corp could provide bandwidth at approximately the same cost as you pay to transfer data between two machines you own. IE - next to nothing once the infrastructure is in place.
And most of all, it should be rolled out with IPv6 across the board.
Really, cos when I asked a question about it on the forums, it was deleted. And at that point, it was fairly early on in the problem so I was actually rather polite about it too.
Try looking at some of the stuff done by some of the more intense plugins from Waves. There's a lot of complicated stuff that goes on in plugins these days, because the point (from an engineer/producer's point of view) is not simply to change the sound, but to achieve a specific sound they hear in their head and realize that in actuality. Thus many effects are very dynamic, and more and more offer the ability to model prohibitively expensive real world equipment in software. Not an easy thing to do! When you start having to care about all of the specific analog tenancies of particular vacuum tubes, across wide varieties of input volume and frequency...
For instance, one new plugin that Waves has developed is MPX. Essentially it's an analog tape simulator. Do you think the math to simulate all of the effects of analog tape is simple? Guitar rig simulators can be very similar. You have to model each real-world component you're providing to the end user, and allow them to tie them together in relatively arbitrary fashion. A guitar signal chain through a computer might have the computer modeling a tube compressor, an analog distortion pedal, an analog stereo tape delay, two amps, two cabs, 4 mics (two per cab) with specific frequency and positioning characteristics, not only including modeling the orientation, but also where they would be placed on a real speaker..., and allow you to modify any of those settings on the fly - and you don't think that takes some serious CPU power? And that's a relatively simple signal chain - for only one input!
Isn't the question though more one of "does the algorithm actually make sense on GPU hardware"? Because the few people in the audio field that seem to be doing CUDA VST plugins say that many of the more complex algorithms actually involve very small, very serial operations. Though audio benefits from having multiple cores, because any given track of audio is going to be processed in parallel from another given track, it's not like they're processed at all similarly... I honestly don't know much about how a GPU works, but are they particularly good at doing lots of completely different parallel tasks that are generally fairly serial in and of themselves in nature?
Not when you're applying effects to the audio. At that point, you need CPU power. Fast CPU power too for each core if you are going to try to keep your latency down - the faster you can do your calculations, the less latency you're adding to the audio path.
Barely any church I've ever been to has an internet connection for the computer that's connected to their computer. Many of these churches use macs. Many summer camps that I've been to do not have internet connections for the computers connected to their projectors, some have no internet connections at all on the property. This is 2011, and when you're connecting a computer to a projector, being able to set the desktop background color to black is pretty damn useful, as it's not considered professional to see pictures of your family or whatever when you close PowerPoint or something. And as black isn't one of the predetermined colors given to you by Apple... it's not an arbitrary roadblock, it's a roadblock I've actually had to deal with many many times. So many times that I generally have a 32x32 black png file on my memory stick just in case a mac user needs a black background.
Or maybe they're steeped with having faced real world problems with no expedient solutions. It is very difficult to set a custom specific solid desktop color in OSX when there is no internet connection, and no paint-like program on the machine. If you know how it would be possible, please let me know, because it's come up rather frequently in the circles I'm in, and I can offer no help. I admit that with the internet, or a paint-type program, it's not a huge problem. It's not as convenient as just letting the user use a damn color picker in the desktop customization control panel, but it's pretty doable.
No, but I'd like you to list the steps required to set your background to an arbitrary color, say... RGB=(76, 43, 25)
In Windows, it'd be: 1) Right click on desktop 2) Click personalize 3) Click "Desktop Background" 4) In "Picture location:" chose "Solid Colors" 5) Click "More..." 6) Type in the RGB values into the color picker 7) Press OK --- at this point the desktop color will have changed, the full desktop will be this one specific color. --- 8) Press "save changes" to actually commit the changes.
8 steps, a fairly logical and intuitive procedure, narrowing down from the desire to personalize the look, to selecting the specific solid color. No outside applications, no transparent images, and that procedure will work on a fresh install, with no network connectivity.
Is requiring that you create a transparent.png file, or your own set of color swatches, really that easy though? Compared to how easy that task is in even earlier versions of MacOS, and certainly in Windows and any Linux window manager I've ever used, it seems asinine to ask the most basic of users to create custom images - even once - in order to make desktop background a color specifically of their choosing. Not impossible like some other tasks are, sure, but it's not a one step process like it should be, and requires that you have the software on your computer to create the necessary image. Which can actually make the task pretty damn impossible in some situations. I had a projector connected eMac running 10.4 back when 10.4 was the latest version of OSX, and I wanted to set the desktop color to black so that if I was switching between a powerpoint presentation and a DVD for instance, the projector would only show black. That machine had no image editing software installed, and was not network connected in any shape or form. Therefore I had to use another machine in order to create a black PNG file to use as my background color, because black wasn't among the palette of choices Apple offered out of the box. (Transparent would have worked to enable any color, but I only needed black in that specific case). So, given only that computer, with what came on it, I could never have changed my background to black.
And frankly, if it's easier than that to do I'd actually really like to know how, because it was one hell of a pain in the ass, and if there are other options, then either they're newer than 10.4, or so undocumented I haven't heard about them in copious Google searches since.
http://www.macworld.com/article/133297/2008/05/solidcolors.html
Last time I used OSX, it wasn't like you could pick an arbitrary background color. You had to do what the article describes.
Now, if that's changed, then I am misinformed. But it's not like it was "Click here to chose an arbitrary color" easy on my Mac. Rather, you were presented with Apple's pre-defined selection of solid colors.
If you agree that there should be some market benefit to the person who comes up with this, then the problem with current patents is that the time for which they guarantee exclusivity/right to license is too long when compared to the pace of modern technology. Patents are granting protection to single companies well beyond the lifespan of the associated products, stiffing competition.
It may not be the feature that takes over the market and makes it the one true phone, but it gives it a strong niche. Some people really like smartphones with good keyboards, and Blackberry is the phone you get if that's what you want.
After all, isn't that the point of a competitive market? I mean, if everyone just released exactly the same thing, what would be the point? I can chose a Blackberry because of all the smart phones, it has specific details that suit my needs more than others. A friend can choose an iPhone because that has details that meets his or her needs...
The danger for RIM, if they were to do what so many people want them to, which seems to me to be "build an iPhone copy or build an Android phone" is twofold.
1) They've almost completed their transition to QNX. Abandoning that path now would mean adding a senseless delay between now and the "Next Gen of Blackberry" which would probably kill RIM.
2) If they started releasing products like everyone else on the market, why on earth would you buy a RIM phone? As a Canadian business, they'd never be able to compete in price for Android phones because their initial engineering costs would likely be high, and they'd have to recoop the R&D costs they've spent and are currently spending on their current path. So that's pretty much a path to destruction.
So what does that leave for RIM?
Currently there is a segment of the market that actually buys Blackberry because what RIM offers today, is what those people want. I'm one of those people. I have friends who are those people. I have iPhone owning friends who are probably going to switch to Blackberry OS7 devices this fall because they also are those people. The reason that market exists is that Blackberry IS different from other phones. Blackberries HAVE good keyboards. They HAVE good battery life. And the platform thus-far demonstrates that RIM has pretty much put communication first, and other tasks second... and for some people that's what they want out of a phone. So RIM will continue to be able to sell what they make to people who want what they make - which is a segment that still exists. They still have BES which is, well, again it's different to other enterprise solutions, and if RIM listens to enterprises, and improves BES slowly to continue to meet their needs as best they can, then they'll be able to continue to sell Blackberry to some enterprise level organizations. Not all, but some - and frankly probably still a lot.
And then beyond all that, in the current reality of patents, RIM is about to become the owner of some of the LTE patents. As such, they're going to be in a position where for some range of LTE devices that they don't even make, they're going to make money.
RIM therefore is in a position where it may not actually grow much more than it has, and short term, there's been a lot of damage by tech journalists which will lead probably to a bit of a collapse in their market, but they're still a profitable company that is perhaps entering a period of stability, rather than a period of growth. That's not terrible. It's actually fine to be in that position. It may even be profitable for them to lose market-share, because the market still might grow, just not RIMs segment of the market. That's also still fine.
However, a company that is stable, instead of a company that is growing, is going to need different investors. Right now, it seems there are many investors who are looking to profit from the stock price of RIM growing by virtue of the company growing. Whereas if RIM isn't going to grow much, but isn't failing to profit, then instead of being a medium risk/medium profit stock, they're going to be a stock where the investor profits from eventual dividend payments, a share of the stable ongoing profits RIM is to date still able to make.
Now I have no idea how to smoothly indicate to the market that it is more appropriate for one kind of investor to invest in a company as compared to another - I'm not sure RIM does either, and t
They are about to start playing with the new rules. By bringing QNX to phones. Moving to 'Droid WOULD be "getting out of the game". Instead, they're moving to a new platform, and releasing it on phones when it's ready.
And they still have a competitive advantage. It's called a kick-ass keyboard.
Whereas with Windows XP you get none of those things.
And frankly, Pulseaudio tries to be Windows 7/Vista audio. Pulseaudio came out in what, 2008/2009? Whereas Vista was available in 2006, and betas were available before then...
Slashdot Mirror
They could access Google+ from the web browser. And as a BlackBerry user, that's my only option... but I prefer apps to websites, because apps can take advantage of many of the social networking abilities of the BlackBerry... they can tie into the camera and video camera apps, they can provide push notifications for various events and expose those events separately to allow other applications to set custom alerts, etc. Not sure how much of that applies to iOS... as it seems several places where Twitter is integrated in iOS5 are things that other mobile operating systems expose to a lot of various applications...
Well, I have a home studio, and a signal chain that can easily outpace the dynamic range of 16-bit audio, so yeah, I can theoretically hear the difference between 16-bit and higher - but realistically have very few audio sources outside of Blu-Ray discs that even approach trying to use that dynamic range. As for higher sample rates... over time, less and less can I hear the difference, but particularly for really simple recordings (a single acoustic guitar or a solo piano), I prefer something higher than 48KHz though probably less than 88.2KHz frankly if such a sample rate were anywhere near standard because they tend to better represent the relation between overtones better. Only because generally speaking, the random low pass filter at the top end of even 48KHz typically has effects at slightly lower than the maximum audio frequencies. With 88.2 - there's not even close to a problem. However, as soon as I turn a computer on in that room or something... well, not worth it anymore. Because you're right, ideal conditions are pretty damned necessary - and you'd even need a quiet environment if you were listening on high-end headphones, because they're pretty much all going to be open headphones, not closed - and thus you aren't going to be getting much in the way of any reduction of room noise when listening. And if I were mastering audio, though I prefer 88.2KHz because frankly it's just the lowest well better than necessary standard sample rate, 96KHz is usually better for distribution because so many DACs don't do 88.2KHz, which means you rely on generally pretty awful re-sampling at the consumer end. That's even a problem on one of my computers. But that motherboard got relegated to my storage server long ago for many reasons, so it doesn't really come up.
And you aren't locked down in terms of apps on the Blackberry anyway. Worst case scenario is you sideload them just fine from your PC.
But circles are things you create, not that you join. They're one way - and it's the wrong way for events. And public events, like concerts - are you seriously suggesting that the person organizing that should have to put everyone in a circle just to keep them updated? That'd be absolutely ridiculous. Or a hangout? For an event with like 1000 attendees? Really? And on facebook, though there may be spammy businesses you can just not "like" them. And you have no reason to not block a fake account. Either way, that hasn't been my experience with most businesses on Facebook that are legitimate, and that exist in the real world.
I'm not talking about games. But there are other things that Google+ misses out on that Facebook has. I mean, events is a biggie, the number of concert events that correlate to concerts that I go to is increasing on facebook, and on most of those events, there has been discussion amongst attendees about public transit options, door opening times, etc. So this isn't just a "Integrate Google Calendar and Events is solved" thing, because you need to have the "forum" atmosphere attached, or it's not a substitute.
Another example: Google+ seems to lack the ability for companies to set up pages, with multiple users administering them, at least not unless you just give everyone access to the same account, and that seems a little ridiculous, and PROBABLY violates the TOS.
There are quite a few companies that are very active in terms of responding to users on Facebook, it's become an important channel in client interaction. For example, two of the transit agencies I use regularly are very very good at responding to customer inquiries, and even go so far as to adjust service based on Facebook response. These agencies don't have the money to set up their own forum infrastructures, and even if they did, the centralized nature of social networking ensures that they get used.
I know quite a few people that would be unable to set up an email newsletter, but who can easily set up a facebook group, for when they go on a trip and want to let specific people receive updates from what is a reasonably simple interface to do so.
Now, maybe it's true that the majority of people don't use Facebook for anything like that - but it seems to me most of my friends do. It could be a cultural thing - most of my friends are in their late-teens, early-twenties, they all live in Canada (which had pretty high Facebook adoption pretty early on so there IS a bit of a critical mass thing for Canadians I guess), probably a good half or so have blackberries, and many others are switching to blackberry or back to blackberry for their next phone - and Blackberry has good Facebook integration, which browsing a website just doesn't compare to... so in this early stage, that's going to make it hard for those friends to really care, or even make the switch... Pretty much every social event in my circle of friends is planned on Facebook (again, events are important for this) - even wedding information is distributed over Facebook. I have friends who write notes and start discussions on complex issues on Facebook. Basically, at least amongst my group of 500+ friends, Facebook isn't a game site. It isn't really even mostly about sharing pictures and status updates. It's not even particularly about networking. It's about facilitating and extended current real life social interaction in virtual space. And Google+ doesn't really do that.
Really? Because almost everyone I know on both Google+ and Facebook has pretty much already stopped using Google+ and gone back to using Facebook exclusively. It's not that Google+ isn't pretty. It's not even a critical mass thing. it's that it just does a hell of a lot less than Facebook. Sure it may be more private by default but in exchange for everything Facebook offers, given that one can also do a hell of a lot to make a Facebook profile private... (more in some ways than with a Google+ account)... it's just not worth the trade off for most people.
Damn straight, and wireless should be turned into a national, public asset too. Crown-corp for the towers, cell phones get to access the full range of frequencies from the towers to achieve the best connection/speed, and companies like Rogers and Bell or whatever can throw a box connecting to the tower to provide me access to their voicemail network, etc.
The best part would be that the for-profit companies would only be able to really gouge idiots, while the non-profit (merely sustainable + some for expansion) crown corp could provide bandwidth at approximately the same cost as you pay to transfer data between two machines you own. IE - next to nothing once the infrastructure is in place.
And most of all, it should be rolled out with IPv6 across the board.
Yeah, because that's exactly how social health care works in the rest of the world.
Really, cos when I asked a question about it on the forums, it was deleted. And at that point, it was fairly early on in the problem so I was actually rather polite about it too.
Try looking at some of the stuff done by some of the more intense plugins from Waves. There's a lot of complicated stuff that goes on in plugins these days, because the point (from an engineer/producer's point of view) is not simply to change the sound, but to achieve a specific sound they hear in their head and realize that in actuality. Thus many effects are very dynamic, and more and more offer the ability to model prohibitively expensive real world equipment in software. Not an easy thing to do! When you start having to care about all of the specific analog tenancies of particular vacuum tubes, across wide varieties of input volume and frequency... For instance, one new plugin that Waves has developed is MPX. Essentially it's an analog tape simulator. Do you think the math to simulate all of the effects of analog tape is simple? Guitar rig simulators can be very similar. You have to model each real-world component you're providing to the end user, and allow them to tie them together in relatively arbitrary fashion. A guitar signal chain through a computer might have the computer modeling a tube compressor, an analog distortion pedal, an analog stereo tape delay, two amps, two cabs, 4 mics (two per cab) with specific frequency and positioning characteristics, not only including modeling the orientation, but also where they would be placed on a real speaker..., and allow you to modify any of those settings on the fly - and you don't think that takes some serious CPU power? And that's a relatively simple signal chain - for only one input!
Yup, that'd be the kind of person I am. I guess I should have been more specific.
Isn't the question though more one of "does the algorithm actually make sense on GPU hardware"? Because the few people in the audio field that seem to be doing CUDA VST plugins say that many of the more complex algorithms actually involve very small, very serial operations. Though audio benefits from having multiple cores, because any given track of audio is going to be processed in parallel from another given track, it's not like they're processed at all similarly... I honestly don't know much about how a GPU works, but are they particularly good at doing lots of completely different parallel tasks that are generally fairly serial in and of themselves in nature?
Not when you're applying effects to the audio. At that point, you need CPU power. Fast CPU power too for each core if you are going to try to keep your latency down - the faster you can do your calculations, the less latency you're adding to the audio path.
And in the case where raw CPU does matter? You know, like when you're mixing audio or something?
Barely any church I've ever been to has an internet connection for the computer that's connected to their computer. Many of these churches use macs. Many summer camps that I've been to do not have internet connections for the computers connected to their projectors, some have no internet connections at all on the property. This is 2011, and when you're connecting a computer to a projector, being able to set the desktop background color to black is pretty damn useful, as it's not considered professional to see pictures of your family or whatever when you close PowerPoint or something. And as black isn't one of the predetermined colors given to you by Apple... it's not an arbitrary roadblock, it's a roadblock I've actually had to deal with many many times. So many times that I generally have a 32x32 black png file on my memory stick just in case a mac user needs a black background.
Or maybe they're steeped with having faced real world problems with no expedient solutions. It is very difficult to set a custom specific solid desktop color in OSX when there is no internet connection, and no paint-like program on the machine. If you know how it would be possible, please let me know, because it's come up rather frequently in the circles I'm in, and I can offer no help. I admit that with the internet, or a paint-type program, it's not a huge problem. It's not as convenient as just letting the user use a damn color picker in the desktop customization control panel, but it's pretty doable.
Now, do that on a machine without an internet connection.
No, but I'd like you to list the steps required to set your background to an arbitrary color, say... RGB=(76, 43, 25)
In Windows, it'd be:
1) Right click on desktop
2) Click personalize
3) Click "Desktop Background"
4) In "Picture location:" chose "Solid Colors"
5) Click "More..."
6) Type in the RGB values into the color picker
7) Press OK
--- at this point the desktop color will have changed, the full desktop will be this one specific color. ---
8) Press "save changes" to actually commit the changes.
8 steps, a fairly logical and intuitive procedure, narrowing down from the desire to personalize the look, to selecting the specific solid color. No outside applications, no transparent images, and that procedure will work on a fresh install, with no network connectivity.
I'm pretty sure it's not that easy on OSX.
Is requiring that you create a transparent .png file, or your own set of color swatches, really that easy though? Compared to how easy that task is in even earlier versions of MacOS, and certainly in Windows and any Linux window manager I've ever used, it seems asinine to ask the most basic of users to create custom images - even once - in order to make desktop background a color specifically of their choosing. Not impossible like some other tasks are, sure, but it's not a one step process like it should be, and requires that you have the software on your computer to create the necessary image. Which can actually make the task pretty damn impossible in some situations. I had a projector connected eMac running 10.4 back when 10.4 was the latest version of OSX, and I wanted to set the desktop color to black so that if I was switching between a powerpoint presentation and a DVD for instance, the projector would only show black. That machine had no image editing software installed, and was not network connected in any shape or form. Therefore I had to use another machine in order to create a black PNG file to use as my background color, because black wasn't among the palette of choices Apple offered out of the box. (Transparent would have worked to enable any color, but I only needed black in that specific case). So, given only that computer, with what came on it, I could never have changed my background to black.
And frankly, if it's easier than that to do I'd actually really like to know how, because it was one hell of a pain in the ass, and if there are other options, then either they're newer than 10.4, or so undocumented I haven't heard about them in copious Google searches since.
http://www.macworld.com/article/133297/2008/05/solidcolors.html Last time I used OSX, it wasn't like you could pick an arbitrary background color. You had to do what the article describes. Now, if that's changed, then I am misinformed. But it's not like it was "Click here to chose an arbitrary color" easy on my Mac. Rather, you were presented with Apple's pre-defined selection of solid colors.
If you agree that there should be some market benefit to the person who comes up with this, then the problem with current patents is that the time for which they guarantee exclusivity/right to license is too long when compared to the pace of modern technology. Patents are granting protection to single companies well beyond the lifespan of the associated products, stiffing competition.
They may not, but try setting a custom desktop background color on OSX.
It may not be the feature that takes over the market and makes it the one true phone, but it gives it a strong niche. Some people really like smartphones with good keyboards, and Blackberry is the phone you get if that's what you want.
After all, isn't that the point of a competitive market? I mean, if everyone just released exactly the same thing, what would be the point? I can chose a Blackberry because of all the smart phones, it has specific details that suit my needs more than others. A friend can choose an iPhone because that has details that meets his or her needs...
The danger for RIM, if they were to do what so many people want them to, which seems to me to be "build an iPhone copy or build an Android phone" is twofold.
1) They've almost completed their transition to QNX. Abandoning that path now would mean adding a senseless delay between now and the "Next Gen of Blackberry" which would probably kill RIM.
2) If they started releasing products like everyone else on the market, why on earth would you buy a RIM phone? As a Canadian business, they'd never be able to compete in price for Android phones because their initial engineering costs would likely be high, and they'd have to recoop the R&D costs they've spent and are currently spending on their current path. So that's pretty much a path to destruction.
So what does that leave for RIM?
Currently there is a segment of the market that actually buys Blackberry because what RIM offers today, is what those people want. I'm one of those people. I have friends who are those people. I have iPhone owning friends who are probably going to switch to Blackberry OS7 devices this fall because they also are those people. The reason that market exists is that Blackberry IS different from other phones. Blackberries HAVE good keyboards. They HAVE good battery life. And the platform thus-far demonstrates that RIM has pretty much put communication first, and other tasks second... and for some people that's what they want out of a phone. So RIM will continue to be able to sell what they make to people who want what they make - which is a segment that still exists. They still have BES which is, well, again it's different to other enterprise solutions, and if RIM listens to enterprises, and improves BES slowly to continue to meet their needs as best they can, then they'll be able to continue to sell Blackberry to some enterprise level organizations. Not all, but some - and frankly probably still a lot.
And then beyond all that, in the current reality of patents, RIM is about to become the owner of some of the LTE patents. As such, they're going to be in a position where for some range of LTE devices that they don't even make, they're going to make money.
RIM therefore is in a position where it may not actually grow much more than it has, and short term, there's been a lot of damage by tech journalists which will lead probably to a bit of a collapse in their market, but they're still a profitable company that is perhaps entering a period of stability, rather than a period of growth. That's not terrible. It's actually fine to be in that position. It may even be profitable for them to lose market-share, because the market still might grow, just not RIMs segment of the market. That's also still fine.
However, a company that is stable, instead of a company that is growing, is going to need different investors. Right now, it seems there are many investors who are looking to profit from the stock price of RIM growing by virtue of the company growing. Whereas if RIM isn't going to grow much, but isn't failing to profit, then instead of being a medium risk/medium profit stock, they're going to be a stock where the investor profits from eventual dividend payments, a share of the stable ongoing profits RIM is to date still able to make.
Now I have no idea how to smoothly indicate to the market that it is more appropriate for one kind of investor to invest in a company as compared to another - I'm not sure RIM does either, and t
They are about to start playing with the new rules. By bringing QNX to phones. Moving to 'Droid WOULD be "getting out of the game". Instead, they're moving to a new platform, and releasing it on phones when it's ready.
And they still have a competitive advantage. It's called a kick-ass keyboard.
Whereas with Windows XP you get none of those things. And frankly, Pulseaudio tries to be Windows 7/Vista audio. Pulseaudio came out in what, 2008/2009? Whereas Vista was available in 2006, and betas were available before then...