"This may be true for some people, and it sounds like a good theory, but in several weeks of use, I never quite swam, and mostly sank. Whenever I'd hit a wrong key (which was often), I found myself either hunting-and-pecking or craning my neck to peek at a conventional keyboard a few feet away for guidance."
Sweet Jesus.
The whole point of this product is that the absense of letters on the keys prevent the user from peaking while learning to touch-type, forcing him to rely upon muscle memory. This idiotic reviewer spends several weeks completely defeating the purpose of it by sneaking peaks at a nearby keyboard and then he is disappointed that his typing has not improved!
By reading reviews we hope to benefit from the reviewers erudite assessment of the item in question - it helps if the reviewer is not retarded.
Surely/. could exercise a little quality control before wasting the time of tens of thousands of readers with a worthless review.
"You are off by a factor of 10. If there are 1M customers, each is worth $1000 - about 20 times that of a cell phone customer."
Yes, forgive me, it's late and I'm tired:)
I got confused because I knew that there was a difference between the US and UK definition of a billion and, for some reason, I had it in my mind as I wrote that a US billion was 100,000,000.
Clearly, though, a valuation of $1000 per active, paying Skype user is even more ridiculous and only servers to underline that the journalists and commentators are off by even more than I was.
Okay, despite my inner-skeptic's enjoyment of recent Skype rumors, I have to admit that his one is not as ridiculous as it first appears.
I am posting fairly late in this discussion but, as no-one else has made the following connection, I will put it forward.
The key here is not Ebay but PayPal and their recent repositioning.
Before I go any further, I should mention that I don't believe anyone is going to be paying 10 figures for Skype, that's just ridiculous. From what I've heard, their P2P network is completely unsustainable, with far too few supernodes. If anyone does buy Skype, they will probably do so for the brand and customer base but replace the existing network with a more centralised one.
Skype's brand isn't really such a great catch - it would be quickly superseded if someone offered even a marginally better service - all ownership of the Skype brand would provide is a small head start. Is that worth billions? I don't know but I suspect not.
As for Skype's existing customer base, they say they have 52 million users, which really means 52 million downloads. Of those, only 2 million have ever actually parted with cash to use the Skype-Out feature that allows you to make calls to regular phones.
Now, bear in mind that I am one of those two million - I forget what I paid, probably a $5 minimum charge, just to play with the service for a while, probably used up a dollar or so calling embassies in China for a laugh. In the space of one week I downloaded Skype twice, installing it on 2 different machines to see if I could call myself. I made a grand total of ONE free call to another Skype user, a guy in Canada who posted on the Skype forum, asking for someone to call him so that he could see if Skype worked. I then annoyed a lot of people in China and, having had my fun, abandoned whatever money I had left in my account and uninstalled Skype from both machines.
If I am at all typical of first wave adopters, their active userbase is far, far smaller but they won't publicly release that figure. Ebay, however, will be well aware of it and will negotiate accordingly.
As for paying customers, well, I'm not the only person who's willing to blow a few dollars to play with a shiny new toy but quickly bored by it. How many recurring customers do they have? And how much do you think they spend on average? And how big is Skype's margin on that?
Let's say they have 1 million active paying customers (nonsense, but what the Hell), each of those would have to be valued $100 to make Skype worth a billion. That is about twice the going value of a mobile phone customer. Ridiculous.
So, having established that Skype is worth far less than over-excited journalists would have us believe, let's presume that Skype is actually willing to sell for far, far less. Who, then, would be interested in buying?
Any of the big names could probably harness the initial hype of the sale to their benefit. Yahoo could certainly use the edge against Google and they've swallowed some pretty interesting companies lately in their quest to reinvent themselves. Google knows that and would probably like to take Skype out of Yahoo's reach, but, generally, they prefer to develop their own tech in-house.
Vodaphone could do something really smart with Skype, link their networks in a way that would really blow the other mobile providers out of the water but, from what I know of corporate decision-making, that might be a little too out-of-the-box for a non-Internet company.
Which brings us back to PayPal. Last week, they announced something fairly momentous that was missed by pretty much everyone. After years of holding back the whole idea of micro-payments, they finally decided to granularize their fee scale to make smaller transactions viable. Before, you had to pay 30c + 3% of every transaction, leaving you with 67c from a dollar sale. Now, they are willing to take 5c + 5% instead, leaving you with 90c. This is huge news because it makes viable
This is a new low in corporate rimming of dictatorships, as morally reprehensible as IBM providing the Nazis with punch card computers to help make the holocaust more efficient.
Yahoo must be insane to have allowed this to happen, especially when their main competitor has a published philosophy including the statement: "You can make money without doing evil".
BTW, just to highlight the difference between this and the usual/. chatter, a brave journalist is going to spend 10 years in brutal, frightening conditions, at the mercy of a system that would prefer him to be dead. He would not be in Jail if Yahoo had not crossed the line and given the authorities access to his email account.
Sure, Yahoo has to protect it's $1bn investment in
Chinese Ecommerce firm Alibaba.com but other companies manage to keep the Chinese authorities happy by censoring bloggers etc (Yahoo already has a strong record of collaborating in censorship) but, so far, other companies have drawn the line at becoming police informants.
And, yes, I understand that companies must obey the laws of the countries they operate in but, you know what, sometimes you have to recognize the difference between pragmatism and evil.
If Apple was willing to distribute an old version of OS X free on iPods, they could just as easily put free CDs on the counters in computer stores. The biggest difference would be that they would not be making money from an iPod sale, but how many people would buy an iPod just to get a free copy of OS X?
Distributing OS X on an iPod would catch potential users at their most susceptible, when they're still bathed in technolust, still reveling in the pink mist of their shiny new purchase. Everyone knows that, in those first few days when you're still delighted with a new gadget, you are far more likely to buy periherals and accessories. If someone is ever going to take the time to give OS X a trial run on their PC, it would be then. That would also be the point at which they would be most likely to subscribe to whole Apple way of life.
Distributing free CDs would completely miss the point, it would be just as boring as AOL.
Having said all that, none of this will ever happen, it's too complex a proposition to bundle with a product that thrives on it's reputation for simplicity.
Keep an eye on the Firefox Extensions page for my imminent release, The Firefox Anti-Corporate Extension, which will remove the word "Corporation" from the the About pop-up.
Thank God for the awesome power and flexibility of extensions.
Wasn't there another guy who used to do something like this? Called it something like SkillsMarket?
He used to link to it in his/. sig but then, about half a year ago, he announced that he wanted to "move on with his life" and would sell his code, site and related goodwill.
I think part of the deal was that he was going to open the source but I never heard any more about it. Anyone know if that happened? Or of any FOSS projects working on graphing employment data?
I for one, am happy to pay for my TV license in order to avoid advertising on BBC channels and the BBC news website. It is amazing to see the so called 'half hour' simpsons finish in about 20 mins when there are no ads.
Yeah, best 35p a day you'll ever spend, especially as they occasionally hold the government to task on all their spin. Okay, they're pretty timid but nowhere near as unquestioning as the US media.
Whenever I stay in America I'm shocked by how intrusive the advertising is but Americans seem to have become numb to it. I gather, though, that it's only really the poorest Americans who are subjected to the full onslaught, more affluent Americans subscribe to cable which has less ads and educated Amercians tend to simply watch a great deal less.
This just helps cement my positive opinions of the BBC...I'm not usually very patriotic, but the BBC makes me want to start running around singing Rule Britannia at the top of my voice and hitting Welshmen with Union Jacks.
Um... it's probably worth pointing out that Wales is actually in the Union.
Also, just for the sake of clarity, BBC Wales has been responsible for many important elements of the BBC's success including the one that's probably most familiar to slashdotters: the recent Doctor Who series.
I'm not dissing socialism or the BBC. I find it ironic that America is falling behind them
Fair enough, I just get a little touchy because the BBC has had a lot of flak recently because it failed to entirely roll over for the government on Iraq and, as revenge, open season has been declared on what is probably the best funding model for quality content and objective reporting ever seen.
It's ironic that a socialist funded network can innovate faster than our great and mighty capitalist free market media can.
Jesus, that's the stupidest thing I've heard all day; if you want to critize Socialism, it helps to know what Socialism actually is. The BBC is no more socialist than Time Magazine.
Great list, however, i'd have to say the genius series "The Office" deserves more than an "etc" mention...
Actually, yeah, The Office should be in there and probably a couple more I can't think of. I suspect that The Office was temporarily erazed from my memory because I recently downloaded a couple of episodes of the rather unfortunate American version.
The first season was really innovative and genuinely funny, a good example (along with Brass Eye, Spaced, Peep Show, Nathan Barley etc) of the best wave of British comedy since the Monty Python/Fawlty Towers era.
I don't think piracy had much of an influence at that point.
I can categorically assure you that, since their inception, there have always been more PCs running unauthorized copies of MS software than PCs entirely running authorized MS software.
More importantly, the widespread uptake driven by piracy is what got their software to "that Point".
"Conspiracy theorists unite: an Apple marketing scheme?"
Accidental or not, you can bet that this development has MS in a cold sweat. Seriously, if it wasn't for piracy, MS would never have gained their stranglehold. Now, the sudden possibility of OSX spreading frictionlessly into Windows' marketshare signals a major change in the commercial landscape.
Once again, Cringely successly applies his National Enquirer sensibility to Nerd-World and concocts yet another bizarre headline guaranteed to funnel slashdotters to his site.
It's a damn shame that the recent fore-grounding of tech in our culture has attracted so few real journalists or credible commentators rather than hucksters like Cringely. If you want a rough idea of just how little this guy knows or understands, check out the lousy forums he ran for years, little more than a spam-harvester's playground and now, thankfully, defunct and archived. If this guy doesn't even know how to install a forum to properly capitalize on the hype he generates, Hell, his opinion isn't worth much.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweet Jesus.
The whole point of this product is that the absense of letters on the keys prevent the user from peaking while learning to touch-type, forcing him to rely upon muscle memory. This idiotic reviewer spends several weeks completely defeating the purpose of it by sneaking peaks at a nearby keyboard and then he is disappointed that his typing has not improved!
By reading reviews we hope to benefit from the reviewers erudite assessment of the item in question - it helps if the reviewer is not retarded.
Surely /. could exercise a little quality control before wasting the time of tens of thousands of readers with a worthless review.
I got confused because I knew that there was a difference between the US and UK definition of a billion and, for some reason, I had it in my mind as I wrote that a US billion was 100,000,000.
Clearly, though, a valuation of $1000 per active, paying Skype user is even more ridiculous and only servers to underline that the journalists and commentators are off by even more than I was.
I am posting fairly late in this discussion but, as no-one else has made the following connection, I will put it forward.
The key here is not Ebay but PayPal and their recent repositioning.
Before I go any further, I should mention that I don't believe anyone is going to be paying 10 figures for Skype, that's just ridiculous. From what I've heard, their P2P network is completely unsustainable, with far too few supernodes. If anyone does buy Skype, they will probably do so for the brand and customer base but replace the existing network with a more centralised one.
Skype's brand isn't really such a great catch - it would be quickly superseded if someone offered even a marginally better service - all ownership of the Skype brand would provide is a small head start. Is that worth billions? I don't know but I suspect not.
As for Skype's existing customer base, they say they have 52 million users, which really means 52 million downloads. Of those, only 2 million have ever actually parted with cash to use the Skype-Out feature that allows you to make calls to regular phones.
Now, bear in mind that I am one of those two million - I forget what I paid, probably a $5 minimum charge, just to play with the service for a while, probably used up a dollar or so calling embassies in China for a laugh. In the space of one week I downloaded Skype twice, installing it on 2 different machines to see if I could call myself. I made a grand total of ONE free call to another Skype user, a guy in Canada who posted on the Skype forum, asking for someone to call him so that he could see if Skype worked. I then annoyed a lot of people in China and, having had my fun, abandoned whatever money I had left in my account and uninstalled Skype from both machines.
If I am at all typical of first wave adopters, their active userbase is far, far smaller but they won't publicly release that figure. Ebay, however, will be well aware of it and will negotiate accordingly.
As for paying customers, well, I'm not the only person who's willing to blow a few dollars to play with a shiny new toy but quickly bored by it. How many recurring customers do they have? And how much do you think they spend on average? And how big is Skype's margin on that?
Let's say they have 1 million active paying customers (nonsense, but what the Hell), each of those would have to be valued $100 to make Skype worth a billion. That is about twice the going value of a mobile phone customer. Ridiculous.
So, having established that Skype is worth far less than over-excited journalists would have us believe, let's presume that Skype is actually willing to sell for far, far less. Who, then, would be interested in buying?
Any of the big names could probably harness the initial hype of the sale to their benefit. Yahoo could certainly use the edge against Google and they've swallowed some pretty interesting companies lately in their quest to reinvent themselves. Google knows that and would probably like to take Skype out of Yahoo's reach, but, generally, they prefer to develop their own tech in-house.
Vodaphone could do something really smart with Skype, link their networks in a way that would really blow the other mobile providers out of the water but, from what I know of corporate decision-making, that might be a little too out-of-the-box for a non-Internet company.
Which brings us back to PayPal. Last week, they announced something fairly momentous that was missed by pretty much everyone. After years of holding back the whole idea of micro-payments, they finally decided to granularize their fee scale to make smaller transactions viable. Before, you had to pay 30c + 3% of every transaction, leaving you with 67c from a dollar sale. Now, they are willing to take 5c + 5% instead, leaving you with 90c. This is huge news because it makes viable
You should try it sometime.
Yahoo must be insane to have allowed this to happen, especially when their main competitor has a published philosophy including the statement: "You can make money without doing evil".
BTW, just to highlight the difference between this and the usual /. chatter, a brave journalist is going to spend 10 years in brutal, frightening conditions, at the mercy of a system that would prefer him to be dead. He would not be in Jail if Yahoo had not crossed the line and given the authorities access to his email account.
Sure, Yahoo has to protect it's $1bn investment in Chinese Ecommerce firm Alibaba.com but other companies manage to keep the Chinese authorities happy by censoring bloggers etc (Yahoo already has a strong record of collaborating in censorship) but, so far, other companies have drawn the line at becoming police informants.
And, yes, I understand that companies must obey the laws of the countries they operate in but, you know what, sometimes you have to recognize the difference between pragmatism and evil.
Distributing OS X on an iPod would catch potential users at their most susceptible, when they're still bathed in technolust, still reveling in the pink mist of their shiny new purchase. Everyone knows that, in those first few days when you're still delighted with a new gadget, you are far more likely to buy periherals and accessories. If someone is ever going to take the time to give OS X a trial run on their PC, it would be then. That would also be the point at which they would be most likely to subscribe to whole Apple way of life.
Distributing free CDs would completely miss the point, it would be just as boring as AOL.
Having said all that, none of this will ever happen, it's too complex a proposition to bundle with a product that thrives on it's reputation for simplicity.
Brilliant, someone mod parent up!!!
So, do you live in a poorly-scripted sitcom?
Keep an eye on the Firefox Extensions page for my imminent release, The Firefox Anti-Corporate Extension, which will remove the word "Corporation" from the the About pop-up.
Thank God for the awesome power and flexibility of extensions.
He used to link to it in his /. sig but then, about half a year ago, he announced that he wanted to "move on with his life" and would sell his code, site and related goodwill.
I think part of the deal was that he was going to open the source but I never heard any more about it. Anyone know if that happened? Or of any FOSS projects working on graphing employment data?
Yeah, best 35p a day you'll ever spend, especially as they occasionally hold the government to task on all their spin. Okay, they're pretty timid but nowhere near as unquestioning as the US media.
Whenever I stay in America I'm shocked by how intrusive the advertising is but Americans seem to have become numb to it. I gather, though, that it's only really the poorest Americans who are subjected to the full onslaught, more affluent Americans subscribe to cable which has less ads and educated Amercians tend to simply watch a great deal less.
Um... it's probably worth pointing out that Wales is actually in the Union.
Also, just for the sake of clarity, BBC Wales has been responsible for many important elements of the BBC's success including the one that's probably most familiar to slashdotters: the recent Doctor Who series.
Fair enough, I just get a little touchy because the BBC has had a lot of flak recently because it failed to entirely roll over for the government on Iraq and, as revenge, open season has been declared on what is probably the best funding model for quality content and objective reporting ever seen.
Jesus, that's the stupidest thing I've heard all day; if you want to critize Socialism, it helps to know what Socialism actually is. The BBC is no more socialist than Time Magazine.
Actually, yeah, The Office should be in there and probably a couple more I can't think of. I suspect that The Office was temporarily erazed from my memory because I recently downloaded a couple of episodes of the rather unfortunate American version.
The first season was really innovative and genuinely funny, a good example (along with Brass Eye, Spaced, Peep Show, Nathan Barley etc) of the best wave of British comedy since the Monty Python/Fawlty Towers era.
I'm just alarmed to hear that innocent Hollywood Execs have been hanging around with these Redmond types. Moral corruption is a terrible thing.
More importantly, the widespread uptake driven by piracy is what got their software to "that Point".
As for Apple becoming another Microsoft, I'm sure their shareholders would be delighted to see that happen.
Accidental or not, you can bet that this development has MS in a cold sweat. Seriously, if it wasn't for piracy, MS would never have gained their stranglehold. Now, the sudden possibility of OSX spreading frictionlessly into Windows' marketshare signals a major change in the commercial landscape.
Once again, Cringely successly applies his National Enquirer sensibility to Nerd-World and concocts yet another bizarre headline guaranteed to funnel slashdotters to his site.
It's a damn shame that the recent fore-grounding of tech in our culture has attracted so few real journalists or credible commentators rather than hucksters like Cringely. If you want a rough idea of just how little this guy knows or understands, check out the lousy forums he ran for years, little more than a spam-harvester's playground and now, thankfully, defunct and archived. If this guy doesn't even know how to install a forum to properly capitalize on the hype he generates, Hell, his opinion isn't worth much.
Damn, I had a great ratio at ET!!
If they bust Empornium next, they'll completely ruin my sex life.
How difficult would it be to host these trackers in China or any other country that the neo-cons in Washington don't have against the wall?
Latency shouldn't be such a problem, all the tracker has to do is hook the users up.