IBM pulled completely out of the consumer market. They were taking a huge loss-per-unit that totaled something like $1Billion.
In California, I never see consumer Dell machines sold. They do focus on SOHO sales over the phone/web though.
The only way that Compaq can be in the consumer market is to sell crapboxes that only serve to ruin their once excellent reputation among younger consumers.
Basically, because personal computers are all standard parts, it's a fucking race to the bottom. There's no money there (except for Intel/AMD and Microsoft) and home machines will get cheaper and cheaper until the only manufactures are no-name bozos and everything will be totally unreliable.
Then someone will look at what Apple is doing and team with Microsoft to make a proprietary "works better" version of the PC just to try to restore some sanity to the market.
Anyway enjoy the good times of cheap, good commodity hardware while they last -- it's basic economics that it can't go on forever.
Jeebuz -- I would consider that Buy.com example pretty much dumping. Why would Microsoft sell Word (alone) in some markets for $300-$350 and sell this bundle for $89? Something fishy, I'm sure.
As a side note, before MS Office got popular, both WordPerfect/DOS and Lotus 1-2-3/DOS cost around $600 retail each. Microsoft sold the Office For Windows bundle (with PowerPoint essentially for free) for $600 which is one of the biggest reason they took over that market segment. When WP and Lotus fought back, the price went to about $450, which is where it still is for the standard version.
My understanding is that the converters that are planned for existing "HDTV-Ready" sets are not planned to run at full HD resolution. Maybe 720p at the best, maybe worse.
But still, these converters might the the only chance for a consumer to get unencrpypted access to the HD picture. Best pick one up before they disappear from the market (which they will - there aren't that many HDTV-Ready sets in the US).
It's essentially a loss leader for the hardware. The previous version, OpenStep 4.2 plus developer tools, cost around $1500, for example. There's no way that Apple could sell a open hardware (PPC or x86) version at a price competitive with Microsoft.
Well, if they were so uneconomic, how did they manage to survive as long as they did?
(The answer is that they were priced at around $50 for a 'collectors' edition. But the standard packaging always had the same price as VHS. I'm sure they were profitable.)
I don't have real numbers of course, but I can bet that the loss-per-console on the NES and SNES (and N64) was far, far below the several hundred dollars that Microsoft is fronting each X-Box buyer.
Gaming consoles are a loss-leader market. Everybody takes a loss, not just the monopolist trying to drive the little guys away.
Not everyone -- Nintendo supposedly sells their consoles at near break-even or even makes a profit after a few years.
Playing the razor/blades game is a winner-take-all strategy. Meaning either Sony or Microsoft is going to lose their shirt, or they both will if there's no clear winner or consumers stay home.
Sega tried to play the same game, but was too poorly capitalized to do it. Nintendo might be an also-ran this time around, but it's a safe bet that they won't have bankrupted themselves and will be there for the next generation.
Windows XP Professional will retail for about the same price as Windows NT 3.1 Workstation, and XP Consumer (or "Home") will retail at the same price as Windows 95 through ME.
In real terms, Microsoft's prices have gone done over the years, not up. (But, Gates knew from the *very beginning* that growing the pie was more important than slicing it up.) Expect this to change over the next few years, but still...
And besides, outside of Open Source, there aren't any vendors cheaper than Microsoft. Check the historic retail prices of OS/2 and NetWare to be sure.
don't worry about lack of fair use for DVDs, you can always rely on VHS
Notice how the analog laserdisc (nearly the equal of DVD in image and sound quality, and no copy protection) was vaporized from the market when the first generation of DVD players shipped.
Personally I could give a shit if someone wants to make a set of single purpose devices to exchange encrypted content.
What's much more bothersome is the idea that key hardware and software components in a personal computer need to be blackboxed from the user. It goes against every fundemental idea of personal computing by removing the user's control over their own data.
Things like DeCSS and software DVD players were just the first stupid battle. Content protection mechnisms are already built into the Windows kernel. Every single I/O component is being readied for content protection. And, unlike most of you, I feel it's foolhardy to pretend that all of this will be cracked.
The long term trend is to turn your PC into a closed mediabox terminal, like so many failed 'settop' experiements back in the 1980s. Buyer beware, but there's not much you can do to stop it, except by not purchasing the product. And as DVD has shown, even the opposition is a wonderful customer.
The situation in the US is that HDTV/DTV/Widescreen analog TV have all basically been scotched until the encryption details were worked out. The gist of the news story is that that has happened.
But, yes, DTV to analog converters are expected to be a popular item.
As a sidenote, IBM had about 0 interest in marketing OS/2 as a server operating system, which is one reason that Windows NT steamrolled it in that space.
This strategic error gave Microsoft a huge chunk of the low-end server space, which they are using as a base to launch attacks on the huge margin midrange systems from the classic Unix vendors such as SGI and IBM. Linux provides a cheap and easy solution to roadblock MS's growth in this market. If Microsoft's salesmen are out FUDing Linux on x86, that means they *aren't* focusing on RS/6000s accounts etc. Which keeps IBM's (etc) margins high, and the business happy.
Except that it wasn't intended that Clipper's backdoors would be widely known.
The thought was that a semi-smart criminal would go down to the store and pick up an "AT+T Secure Phone" and use it to conduct his dirty deeds without knowing that the government could be tapping it.
Note, how even though AT+T had this tech ready in 1992 (backdoored or no), "Secure Phones" are still not a consumer item...
Another problem was that AOL's newsreader had some stupid maximum like 32K per message. If people didn't split their encoded binaries into these ridiculously small parts, much AOL flamage would ensue.
But, be honest. The only reason the Usenet problem "went away" was that nobody tells newbies about Usenet anymore. Which means that most AOL users don't even know it exists, so the rest of the world doesn't see them.
I was on AOL briefly in *1991*, and most of the users were complete morons then, depsite the fact the online world was considerably more obscure. I have no doubt that the AOL message boards are currently just as full of inarticulate posts as Usenet was during the endless september.
I've seen cases where barely capable users that don't even know what the right mouse button is for have had file sharing on and enabled without a password. There's no way that the user turned this on. so my only theory is that some OEMs must ship Windows in this configuration. (Last time I installed Win98 retail some years ago, File Sharing was not enabled by default.)
Well, one very plausble theory is that Microsoft bought Softway to effectively bury the product, to be rolled out only in controlled migration situations (such as Hotmail, where it's used in production).
They wouldn't want developers using it to build cross-platform apps, or Unix server software, would they? Goes against their entire plan of building server marketshare on top of their client monopoly.
I've looked at it, and it's still very much in the style of the old strategy of "Windows DNA", which is no suprise because it was in feature freeze for about 2 years before it shipped. Remember that there's a difference between web services and web integration (for which Ex2000 has some nice features).
"Think Different" is a direct copyright infringement. However, that's exactly the kind of term that a marketing person would use.
Of course, Apple came up with "Think Different" because they were trying to sell an incompatible product to the subset of the market that might like that. AOL can't afford to do that.
I kinda like the idea that "assimilation" to describe Microsoft tactics has worked its way out of the Usenet/Slashdot advocacy lingo and into marketdroid speak. Probably too good to be true.
Very good explaination from a programmer's view (or the point of view of Microsoft Developer Marketing).
Note however that Microsoft is majorly confusing the marketing message. For example, while the developer's.NET hasn't shipped yet, MS is telling the systems people that they can deploy the ".NET Server Family" today. This includes products which have absolutely nothing to do with "Web Services" and the like such as Exchange 2000 (which was originally planned to be Exchange 98) and the new version of Proxy Server.
On another front, Microsoft has started to call their MSN/Internet initiatves ".NET" too. Hotmail became a.NET product while it was still running BSD. This is where the hailstorm/passport strategy comes in, and what AOL obviously dislikes. Some of this might fall back on "web services", but lots of it is the same old MSN portal integration strategy.
The term has also been applied to their software rental model.
So, you can understand the confusion of the average slashdot reader. The term ".NET" is turning into a generic brandname for "Made By Microsoft". I'm trying to do myself a favor by calling the CLR "the CLR", and calling Web Services "SOAP components", and avoid the marketing morass as best as I can.
The XP screenshots I've seen all have little links such as "Buy Music" embedded directly into the Explorer.
Ignore the confusing marketing message of NET/Hailstorm/Passport. Recall back to Windows 95 -- where Microsoft built the MSN interface directly into the OS GUI. From here, it looks like XP is just another attempt at doing that, just updated for the times.
Microsoft can't grow with its current Windows/Office monopolies. That meanst they've been trying to do two things for some years now:
1) Crack the server market
2) Establish themselves as the consumer services (e-commerce) channel.
The answer to your questions is that if MS is successful, both server products and Hailstorm will be very profitable. They are both equally important to MS's long term future. They don't have a much of a connection, though, except for the magical marketing term of ".NET".
Now, try to follow along: If the only way to acquire a copy of the source code is via the terms of the GPL, and the GPL is ruled null and void in a court of law... Your license to have a copy of that software is no longer valid.
Even following your argument, it's unlikely that a court would invalidate the entire GPL. Specifically, the "you have a right to use this software" is so unambigious that I can't imagine how it would be struck down.
Anyway - Section 106 of the copyright law gives the owner exclusive rights "to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership"
Section 117 says "it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an
essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner"
Thus, it appears to me that absent any EULAs, if Microsoft or Richard Stallman or Joe Freeware legally transfers a copy of the software to me, I have the fair use to "utilize" (run) it. And tons of commercial software has been distributed purely under copyright law, with no special licences. IANAL, but if you can find law that reads differently, I'd like to see it.
From "Windows NT Server (4.0) Networking Guide" (aka the Resource Kit):
Remote Procedure Call
Much of the original work on Remote Procedure Call (RPC) was initiated at Sun Microsystems. This work ahs been carried forward by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) as part of their Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). The Microsoft RPC implementation is compatible with the OSF/DCE standard RPC.
It is important to note that it is _compatible_ but not _compliant_. In this situation, compliance implies that you started with the OSF source code and worked forward. For a number of reasons, Microsoft developed RPC from the ground up.
There's your credit. Do you believe the statements made to be untrue? (I personally have no idea if they used OSF source or not...)
You know one big reason there's an "Coward" option on Slashdot is so that people can break confidentiality and employment agreements and post their real world experiences.
His post looks credible, so take it for what it's worth and don't rap his knuckles over posting AC.
It's a somewhat important point that SQL was originally designed for ad hoc reporting tasks by semi-technical users. It's got a low bar of entry by design.
In particular the "Woz Machine" Floppy Controller (US Patent 4,210,959) was one of Apple's key technical advantages over everyone else in the early years of the personal computer industry.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM pulled completely out of the consumer market. They were taking a huge loss-per-unit that totaled something like $1Billion.
In California, I never see consumer Dell machines sold. They do focus on SOHO sales over the phone/web though.
The only way that Compaq can be in the consumer market is to sell crapboxes that only serve to ruin their once excellent reputation among younger consumers.
Basically, because personal computers are all standard parts, it's a fucking race to the bottom. There's no money there (except for Intel/AMD and Microsoft) and home machines will get cheaper and cheaper until the only manufactures are no-name bozos and everything will be totally unreliable.
Then someone will look at what Apple is doing and team with Microsoft to make a proprietary "works better" version of the PC just to try to restore some sanity to the market.
Anyway enjoy the good times of cheap, good commodity hardware while they last -- it's basic economics that it can't go on forever.
Jeebuz -- I would consider that Buy.com example pretty much dumping. Why would Microsoft sell Word (alone) in some markets for $300-$350 and sell this bundle for $89? Something fishy, I'm sure.
As a side note, before MS Office got popular, both WordPerfect/DOS and Lotus 1-2-3/DOS cost around $600 retail each. Microsoft sold the Office For Windows bundle (with PowerPoint essentially for free) for $600 which is one of the biggest reason they took over that market segment. When WP and Lotus fought back, the price went to about $450, which is where it still is for the standard version.
My understanding is that the converters that are planned for existing "HDTV-Ready" sets are not planned to run at full HD resolution. Maybe 720p at the best, maybe worse.
But still, these converters might the the only chance for a consumer to get unencrpypted access to the HD picture. Best pick one up before they disappear from the market (which they will - there aren't that many HDTV-Ready sets in the US).
Erm, I was going to mention MacOS, but forgot.
It's essentially a loss leader for the hardware. The previous version, OpenStep 4.2 plus developer tools, cost around $1500, for example. There's no way that Apple could sell a open hardware (PPC or x86) version at a price competitive with Microsoft.
Well, if they were so uneconomic, how did they manage to survive as long as they did?
(The answer is that they were priced at around $50 for a 'collectors' edition. But the standard packaging always had the same price as VHS. I'm sure they were profitable.)
I don't have real numbers of course, but I can bet that the loss-per-console on the NES and SNES (and N64) was far, far below the several hundred dollars that Microsoft is fronting each X-Box buyer.
Gaming consoles are a loss-leader market. Everybody takes a loss, not just the monopolist trying to drive the little guys away.
Not everyone -- Nintendo supposedly sells their consoles at near break-even or even makes a profit after a few years.
Playing the razor/blades game is a winner-take-all strategy. Meaning either Sony or Microsoft is going to lose their shirt, or they both will if there's no clear winner or consumers stay home.
Sega tried to play the same game, but was too poorly capitalized to do it. Nintendo might be an also-ran this time around, but it's a safe bet that they won't have bankrupted themselves and will be there for the next generation.
Windows XP Professional will retail for about the same price as Windows NT 3.1 Workstation, and XP Consumer (or "Home") will retail at the same price as Windows 95 through ME.
In real terms, Microsoft's prices have gone done over the years, not up. (But, Gates knew from the *very beginning* that growing the pie was more important than slicing it up.) Expect this to change over the next few years, but still...
And besides, outside of Open Source, there aren't any vendors cheaper than Microsoft. Check the historic retail prices of OS/2 and NetWare to be sure.
don't worry about lack of fair use for DVDs, you can always rely on VHS
Notice how the analog laserdisc (nearly the equal of DVD in image and sound quality, and no copy protection) was vaporized from the market when the first generation of DVD players shipped.
Personally I could give a shit if someone wants to make a set of single purpose devices to exchange encrypted content.
What's much more bothersome is the idea that key hardware and software components in a personal computer need to be blackboxed from the user. It goes against every fundemental idea of personal computing by removing the user's control over their own data.
Things like DeCSS and software DVD players were just the first stupid battle. Content protection mechnisms are already built into the Windows kernel. Every single I/O component is being readied for content protection. And, unlike most of you, I feel it's foolhardy to pretend that all of this will be cracked.
The long term trend is to turn your PC into a closed mediabox terminal, like so many failed 'settop' experiements back in the 1980s. Buyer beware, but there's not much you can do to stop it, except by not purchasing the product. And as DVD has shown, even the opposition is a wonderful customer.
The situation in the US is that HDTV/DTV/Widescreen analog TV have all basically been scotched until the encryption details were worked out. The gist of the news story is that that has happened.
But, yes, DTV to analog converters are expected to be a popular item.
As a sidenote, IBM had about 0 interest in marketing OS/2 as a server operating system, which is one reason that Windows NT steamrolled it in that space.
This strategic error gave Microsoft a huge chunk of the low-end server space, which they are using as a base to launch attacks on the huge margin midrange systems from the classic Unix vendors such as SGI and IBM. Linux provides a cheap and easy solution to roadblock MS's growth in this market. If Microsoft's salesmen are out FUDing Linux on x86, that means they *aren't* focusing on RS/6000s accounts etc. Which keeps IBM's (etc) margins high, and the business happy.
Except that it wasn't intended that Clipper's backdoors would be widely known.
The thought was that a semi-smart criminal would go down to the store and pick up an "AT+T Secure Phone" and use it to conduct his dirty deeds without knowing that the government could be tapping it.
Note, how even though AT+T had this tech ready in 1992 (backdoored or no), "Secure Phones" are still not a consumer item...
Another problem was that AOL's newsreader had some stupid maximum like 32K per message. If people didn't split their encoded binaries into these ridiculously small parts, much AOL flamage would ensue.
But, be honest. The only reason the Usenet problem "went away" was that nobody tells newbies about Usenet anymore. Which means that most AOL users don't even know it exists, so the rest of the world doesn't see them.
I was on AOL briefly in *1991*, and most of the users were complete morons then, depsite the fact the online world was considerably more obscure. I have no doubt that the AOL message boards are currently just as full of inarticulate posts as Usenet was during the endless september.
I've seen cases where barely capable users that don't even know what the right mouse button is for have had file sharing on and enabled without a password. There's no way that the user turned this on. so my only theory is that some OEMs must ship Windows in this configuration. (Last time I installed Win98 retail some years ago, File Sharing was not enabled by default.)
Well, one very plausble theory is that Microsoft bought Softway to effectively bury the product, to be rolled out only in controlled migration situations (such as Hotmail, where it's used in production).
They wouldn't want developers using it to build cross-platform apps, or Unix server software, would they? Goes against their entire plan of building server marketshare on top of their client monopoly.
I've looked at it, and it's still very much in the style of the old strategy of "Windows DNA", which is no suprise because it was in feature freeze for about 2 years before it shipped. Remember that there's a difference between web services and web integration (for which Ex2000 has some nice features).
"Think Different" is a direct copyright infringement. However, that's exactly the kind of term that a marketing person would use.
Of course, Apple came up with "Think Different" because they were trying to sell an incompatible product to the subset of the market that might like that. AOL can't afford to do that.
I kinda like the idea that "assimilation" to describe Microsoft tactics has worked its way out of the Usenet/Slashdot advocacy lingo and into marketdroid speak. Probably too good to be true.
Very good explaination from a programmer's view (or the point of view of Microsoft Developer Marketing).
.NET hasn't shipped yet, MS is telling the systems people that they can deploy the ".NET Server Family" today. This includes products which have absolutely nothing to do with "Web Services" and the like such as Exchange 2000 (which was originally planned to be Exchange 98) and the new version of Proxy Server.
.NET product while it was still running BSD. This is where the hailstorm/passport strategy comes in, and what AOL obviously dislikes. Some of this might fall back on "web services", but lots of it is the same old MSN portal integration strategy.
Note however that Microsoft is majorly confusing the marketing message. For example, while the developer's
On another front, Microsoft has started to call their MSN/Internet initiatves ".NET" too. Hotmail became a
The term has also been applied to their software rental model.
So, you can understand the confusion of the average slashdot reader. The term ".NET" is turning into a generic brandname for "Made By Microsoft". I'm trying to do myself a favor by calling the CLR "the CLR", and calling Web Services "SOAP components", and avoid the marketing morass as best as I can.
The XP screenshots I've seen all have little links such as "Buy Music" embedded directly into the Explorer.
Ignore the confusing marketing message of NET/Hailstorm/Passport. Recall back to Windows 95 -- where Microsoft built the MSN interface directly into the OS GUI. From here, it looks like XP is just another attempt at doing that, just updated for the times.
Microsoft can't grow with its current Windows/Office monopolies. That meanst they've been trying to do two things for some years now:
1) Crack the server market
2) Establish themselves as the consumer services (e-commerce) channel.
The answer to your questions is that if MS is successful, both server products and Hailstorm will be very profitable. They are both equally important to MS's long term future. They don't have a much of a connection, though, except for the magical marketing term of ".NET".
Now, try to follow along: If the only way to acquire a copy of the source code is via the terms of the GPL, and the GPL is ruled null and void in a court of law... Your license to have a copy of that software is no longer valid.
)
Even following your argument, it's unlikely that a court would invalidate the entire GPL. Specifically, the "you have a right to use this software" is so unambigious that I can't imagine how it would be struck down.
Anyway - Section 106 of the copyright law gives the owner exclusive rights "to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership"
Section 117 says "it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an
essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner"
Thus, it appears to me that absent any EULAs, if Microsoft or Richard Stallman or Joe Freeware legally transfers a copy of the software to me, I have the fair use to "utilize" (run) it. And tons of commercial software has been distributed purely under copyright law, with no special licences. IANAL, but if you can find law that reads differently, I'd like to see it.
(http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/ch1.html
Here's an aside to your aside:
From "Windows NT Server (4.0) Networking Guide" (aka the Resource Kit):
Remote Procedure Call
Much of the original work on Remote Procedure Call (RPC) was initiated at Sun Microsystems. This work ahs been carried forward by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) as part of their Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). The Microsoft RPC implementation is compatible with the OSF/DCE standard RPC.
It is important to note that it is _compatible_ but not _compliant_. In this situation, compliance implies that you started with the OSF source code and worked forward. For a number of reasons, Microsoft developed RPC from the ground up.
There's your credit. Do you believe the statements made to be untrue? (I personally have no idea if they used OSF source or not...)
You know one big reason there's an "Coward" option on Slashdot is so that people can break confidentiality and employment agreements and post their real world experiences.
His post looks credible, so take it for what it's worth and don't rap his knuckles over posting AC.
It's a somewhat important point that SQL was originally designed for ad hoc reporting tasks by semi-technical users. It's got a low bar of entry by design.
In particular the "Woz Machine" Floppy Controller (US Patent 4,210,959) was one of Apple's key technical advantages over everyone else in the early years of the personal computer industry.