Sorry, but the business of Yahoo does not revolve around search as much as you think. Their numbers have been solid...actually incredible over the last year. They are also projecting 40% growth for the next couple of years. They are part-owner of the biggest web site in Asia - Yahoo Japan. They are also part owner of Google. Yes that is what I said. They have 2% stake. So they want a good IPO too. They will sell and it will show as gravy in the next quarter.
Yahoo was an early investor in Google. They own 2% of the company. They will be selling those shares at absurd prices to idiots on IPO day and taking a huge profit to the next quarter as a result.
Look, you have to realize someone has to pay the bills (and profits) for these services. You are not going to get unbiased, non-commercial results for free. Forget it. Fortunately most sites clearly tell you what results are paid.
Search engines are not a public service. They have to satisfy users and advertisers. Thats the balance. You could try to start a subscription-based totally-commercial-free alternative, but I suspect there is little interest in the larger internet audience.
I have yet to see a visualization tool that was truly useful. Do people really want to see their results laid out using Cartesian coordinates as result metadata? I don't think so. Its cute but the reality is that people will prefer a list, and more specifically, look at the first five entries. Getting the right links into that top five is all that matters.
Scale matters
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Lonely Planets
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Scale is extremely important in the physical universe.
If we were the size of ants our mouths would not be able to break the surface tension of water, and we would die. Hence many insects have sharp pointed mouths/beaks. If we were as big as a whale, the rate of increase in the mass of muscle vs bone would crush us. Hence whales live in the ocean where the water can support their weight.
Re:Take care of your own planet!
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Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
I may be thinking 1904, but you are thinking back even further. You presume any scientific or exploratory task must be directed by, and benefit, humanity. My presumption is more far-reaching - artificial intelligence will be vastly superior to human intelligence within two centuries, and if we intend to see the starts, we will not do so as we currently exist. We will either have to be happy sending artificial life forms to be our emissaries, or merge with them somehow. Humans as we are currenly evolved will not be leaving the Earth.
Take care of your own planet!
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Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
You are exactly correct in citing the vast distances to anywhere interesting out in space. You can presume that humans will never see these sights first hand - we will need to create artificial life forms that can exist and prosper in space over very very long periods of time (i.e. not die from radiation or muscle deterioration) far beyond any believable extension of the human lifespan (even if we could keep from going totally insane being in space that long).
This is why we need to take better care of our own planet - its probably where we as a species are going to stay...unless you think living on Mars is somehow preferrable to living on Earth.
If you don't have it, you are hosed, but you cannot count on it to differentiate you decisively from a competitor.
You are using the same Oracle or MySQL you competitor is.
You are using the same gcc as your competitor.
You are using the same OS as your competitor.
You are using the same hardware as your competitor.
With very few exceptions, there are extremely insiginificant differences in how major corporations make long-term IT decisions and investments. Maybe in 1984 someone could say "we automate that!!" for an advantage, but those days are gone.
Very few companies are differentiating themselves purely on the basis of IT these days. Strategy, marketing, product development and innovation are the key and they need not solely originate from code, but often lead where the code will go.
Saying IT is strategic is like saying electricity is strategic - well of course, if you don't have it you are hosed, but it rarely provides the impetus to squash competitors on its own anymore.
Listen to industry, not academia. If you think all of the savings are just accounting magic, then you and your profs can't do the arithmetic between $80k and $10k, which really doesn't surprise me.
The point here is that people still think IT is a strategic asset when in fact many (including Harvard biz school faculty) have begun to discount this notion entirely.
This is an ongoing fallacy of the outsourcing argument - higher wages mean higher performance. As you have pointed out, higher wages often simply indicate higher costs, not higher output.
Once again the innovation whipping-horse is trotted out so we can convince ourselves that Asians are nothing more than low-wage automatons.
The Europeans used to think Americans were all dirty farmers. This myopic thinking was as harmful to them as this thinking is to us. If there is a motivation to innovate, Indians and Chinese will step up to the plate just as North Americans would. You are not special.
What is the market for the Lindows/Xandors distros? I mean, I know what they describe as their audience, but I don't see much market presence. People who tend to not want to worry about the details of their software ("it just works") seem to be using the Windows that came preinstalled on their systems. The techie crowd seems to have zero interest in these types of distros also. I would be surprised if Lindows and Xandros are still around in two years. It seems the Sun/Novell (Suse) approach of focusing on business desktops has more momentum.
Claim: Apart from Konqueror and KDevelop, KDE has no viable packages. Nothing to compete with GIMP, nothing to compete with AbiWord, nothing to compete with Gaim.
KDE has a better file manager?!?! Great, maybe one day if I see the need for one it will matter.
Why are people pouring more money into massive terrestrial telescopes when orbital hubble-like telescopes seem to be inherently superior? (or are they?)
This is why Amazon cannot win long term doing drop-shipping against Walmart. And it isn't all just operations - Walmart uses its size to get better prices from suppliers...prices suppliers balk at offering to any other retailer.
yes, if you want to issue mountains of corporate debt to finance a plan to try to out-distribute and out-warehouse Walmart, be my guest.
Amazon by the way is trying to shed its "mortar" rapidly as it realizes it cannot hope to compete against huge retailers like Walmart or bottom-feeders like Overstock in the long term. They are trying to go the route of search (A9, a Froogle competitor) and store hosting (to compete with Ebay and Yahoo Store). We'll see if it works.
Evolution's next major upgrade will be very polished and featureful. I doubt any interest in Chandler (which appears to be perenially DOA anyway) will be left once we see the next Evolution release.
Xouvert will likely not be the X project to take off over time - I suspect freedesktop.org will become the de facto kingmaker and they seem to be going with XServe,
Also you are not mentioning Cairo at all, and I believe this will be a huge X enhancement in 2004/5 whenever it comes along.
As for apps, I continue to advocate Gnumeric and AbiWord, which I believe are superior to their less-polished looking OpenOffice equivalents.
I am not saying the rise of linux is without substance. What I am saying is that in 2003 linux was vetted by simply being linux. There was a great deal of hype, but this was to be expected in the early stages of corporate adoption.
I stand by my statement - in 2004 people who are making investments in linux will get over simply adopting what is in the limelight and start judging linux as an IT investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but the business of Yahoo does not revolve around search as much as you think. Their numbers have been solid...actually incredible over the last year. They are also projecting 40% growth for the next couple of years. They are part-owner of the biggest web site in Asia - Yahoo Japan. They are also part owner of Google. Yes that is what I said. They have 2% stake. So they want a good IPO too. They will sell and it will show as gravy in the next quarter.
In the short term Yahoo wins no matter what.
So they are hoping for a good Google IPO too.
To quote my own post to which you replied:"Fortunately most sites clearly tell you what results are paid."
RTFP
Search engines are not a public service. They have to satisfy users and advertisers. Thats the balance. You could try to start a subscription-based totally-commercial-free alternative, but I suspect there is little interest in the larger internet audience.
I have yet to see a visualization tool that was truly useful. Do people really want to see their results laid out using Cartesian coordinates as result metadata? I don't think so. Its cute but the reality is that people will prefer a list, and more specifically, look at the first five entries. Getting the right links into that top five is all that matters.
If we were the size of ants our mouths would not be able to break the surface tension of water, and we would die. Hence many insects have sharp pointed mouths/beaks. If we were as big as a whale, the rate of increase in the mass of muscle vs bone would crush us. Hence whales live in the ocean where the water can support their weight.
I may be thinking 1904, but you are thinking back even further. You presume any scientific or exploratory task must be directed by, and benefit, humanity. My presumption is more far-reaching - artificial intelligence will be vastly superior to human intelligence within two centuries, and if we intend to see the starts, we will not do so as we currently exist. We will either have to be happy sending artificial life forms to be our emissaries, or merge with them somehow. Humans as we are currenly evolved will not be leaving the Earth.
This is why we need to take better care of our own planet - its probably where we as a species are going to stay...unless you think living on Mars is somehow preferrable to living on Earth.
If you are doing this, chances are they are too. Once again, asset becomes commodity because everyone is doing it.
You are using the same Oracle or MySQL you competitor is.
You are using the same gcc as your competitor.
You are using the same OS as your competitor.
You are using the same hardware as your competitor.
With very few exceptions, there are extremely insiginificant differences in how major corporations make long-term IT decisions and investments. Maybe in 1984 someone could say "we automate that!!" for an advantage, but those days are gone.
Saying IT is strategic is like saying electricity is strategic - well of course, if you don't have it you are hosed, but it rarely provides the impetus to squash competitors on its own anymore.
The point here is that people still think IT is a strategic asset when in fact many (including Harvard biz school faculty) have begun to discount this notion entirely.
This is an ongoing fallacy of the outsourcing argument - higher wages mean higher performance. As you have pointed out, higher wages often simply indicate higher costs, not higher output.
The Europeans used to think Americans were all dirty farmers. This myopic thinking was as harmful to them as this thinking is to us. If there is a motivation to innovate, Indians and Chinese will step up to the plate just as North Americans would. You are not special.
What is the market for the Lindows/Xandors distros? I mean, I know what they describe as their audience, but I don't see much market presence. People who tend to not want to worry about the details of their software ("it just works") seem to be using the Windows that came preinstalled on their systems. The techie crowd seems to have zero interest in these types of distros also. I would be surprised if Lindows and Xandros are still around in two years. It seems the Sun/Novell (Suse) approach of focusing on business desktops has more momentum.
KDE has a better file manager?!?! Great, maybe one day if I see the need for one it will matter.
3G also suffers from the "not IP" dilemma, but also ecause it is not clear excatly what 3G is in a fragmented cell network.
Why are people pouring more money into massive terrestrial telescopes when orbital hubble-like telescopes seem to be inherently superior? (or are they?)
This is why Amazon cannot win long term doing drop-shipping against Walmart. And it isn't all just operations - Walmart uses its size to get better prices from suppliers...prices suppliers balk at offering to any other retailer.
Amazon by the way is trying to shed its "mortar" rapidly as it realizes it cannot hope to compete against huge retailers like Walmart or bottom-feeders like Overstock in the long term. They are trying to go the route of search (A9, a Froogle competitor) and store hosting (to compete with Ebay and Yahoo Store). We'll see if it works.
EBay, Google and Yahoo are more obviously and sustainably profitable.
Evolution's next major upgrade will be very polished and featureful. I doubt any interest in Chandler (which appears to be perenially DOA anyway) will be left once we see the next Evolution release.
Also you are not mentioning Cairo at all, and I believe this will be a huge X enhancement in 2004/5 whenever it comes along.
As for apps, I continue to advocate Gnumeric and AbiWord, which I believe are superior to their less-polished looking OpenOffice equivalents.
I stand by my statement - in 2004 people who are making investments in linux will get over simply adopting what is in the limelight and start judging linux as an IT investment.