Killfiles weren't used that much since X says stuff to Y who responds to Z. Z has to have access to X. There was less flaming. There was way more zealotry since you were dealing with lots of academics and grad students who are more passionate.
Talk about going full circle. Back in the days of usenet your identity for comments was tied to your real name and your professional email. Then we had the anonymous internet with little in the way of ties that came when the AOL crowd got internet. I've often wondered what the internet of today would be like with the policies of then.
The big difference was that most people worked for academia which is a very open environment where people don't get disciplined for opinions.
I doubt it. I'm surprised the new macmini isn't out yet. But that's going to play the role of the downmarket version of the pro. The tower I suspect is over.
Could you give some examples. Certainly you need Unix experience to admin Macs, but I generally see that as an advantage. Darwin is a fairly standard BSD and so it is easy to hook into the OS at a low level when needed. I don't see how one does anything similar on a Windows machine at all.
As far as roadmaps, agree 100%. Apple's culture of secrecy and rapid change are a terrible fit for enterprise IT. I'm shocked that IT is buying into iPhones as casually as they are.... wow are they in for a rough ride over the next decades supporting custom code in that environment.
no ethernet without dongle is a joke in a pro level product.
I've had my for over a year. You rarely use it and in places you need to plug in you just attach the dongle and leave it for weeks.
Finally not that many people need more power than the iMac either. More over it isn't a joke to jump up to the Pro because the price spread isn't that large.
The electronic copies are easy to make into physical media. The Hackintosh just isn't very stable because everyone is assuming a limited range of hardware. OSX people like Apple and the way Apple does business.
In all seriousness though, why is Windows forcing the windows to be a set size and calling this a feature?
They aren't completely. They are temporarily. The API has various sizes and they make use of them for applications. See for example the new Bing apps. Metro applications can make use of them and do. Right now they don't want end users to make use of them because they want to simplify the transition. But in theory if you had source code for your applications and some sort of do it yourself gui modifier this wouldn't be the case.
Remember the applications are going to be OSX applications. So by late 2014 or so the applications will be targeted for your particular hardware configuration and tested against it.
As far as the more general issue, Apple machines tend to be balanced for general use cases in a way that PCs aren't. The result is you often get features you wouldn't have paid for but really love. For example I bought the rMBP for the SSD and the quadcore. The retina screen, which on a PC I wouldn't have gotten however has been by far my favorite feature.
Their service was rather comparatively excellent before the Apple stores existed too. With phone support if you knew what you were doing you just got stuff. For example I had a problem with a keyboard and they sent me a new one. They didn't bother asking for the old back and playing games over a $50 part. Their phone service is way better than it is from most vendors, the stores just create a whole other layer on top of that.
Minimum turnaround time for applecare is something like two weeks.
Not true. Minimum turnaround time for applecare is a few hours on hardware. Throw in directly overnight and you are probably talking well over 85%. A few days and I'd be you are around 99+%. A few weeks and they would just give you a new machine and refurb yours.
any particular program I have uses as an application written for Windows XP generally looks/behaves the same as one written for Win7.
I agree. That's part of the negative culture that Microsoft has cultivated. That's not true for example of OSX applications. I'm can see Apple releasing a new API feature and it showing in my say 20% of my applications within 3 years. For example.NET 4.5 has much better IPv6 handling. Can I safely use it? Or if I have to do asynchronous communications can I use the cool new subsystems or should I am for backwards compatibility. I do a lot of work with CRM, can I assume Dynamics 2013 and assume a good quality cross browser system or do I need to use 3rd party? In the Windows of the early 1990s and before and OSX today the answer was use the new stuff. In the Windows or 2013 the answer is use the old stuff. And that's why you don't care about Microsoft's new APIs.
Lots of people say this, but the day that MS breaks companies of this habit is the day MS breaks companies out of being dependent on MS. If a company needs to completely retool its application landscape every 3-4 years in order to stick with Windows, then they really don't need to do all that much more to ditch Windows.
I agree with you. Companies that are aggressively and actively upgrading their application stack and monitoring it, are the same companies that could switch 80% of their users to a Linux in 3 years or less. I don't think Windows licenses are in the scheme of things very expensive but I agree that Microsoft in training their customers not to be lazy does fundamentally change the landscape as far as competition.
- I wouldn't be surprised if you could run calc.exe from Win3.1 on Windows 7.
Better than that in many ways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14 Microsoft used to care greatly about compatibility. DEC, SUN, IBM... cared more but for the desktop no one was close. Microsoft has cared less in the last decade but no question it was one of their primary advantages. But it wasn't something they cared about nearly as much in the 1980s during a period of rapid improvement. Right now I think the environment is more like the 1980s in home/small business because of mobile / touch technologies, big data analytics and social networking, cloud...
Mobile apps don't generally have dependencies other than the OS API, which makes them very easy to install/remove/etc.
Again very much like the 1980s. It wasn't uncommon for the 1980s apps to ship with their own printer drivers or video drivers for example. In the early 1990s I used Lotus' wonderful Office suite in part because of the terrific font subsystem it used in place of Windows'.
Oh, and whoever makes the device gets 1/3rd of the application revenue - not sure how well that will go over when a company wants to buy a $2M automation platform with 100 installs...
I'd say we know from Apple. If you run your enterprise server and buy those application directly from the ISV then Apple is fine getting 0. If you buy from Apple then they get their 30%. Also more companies are creating web services tied to mobile and apple isn't freaking out as much as they did.
Anyway you are raising a good counter argument. Let me just close with a video from almost 3 years ago showing where Microsoft sees themselves as heading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
That's X culture i.e. Unix culture more than it is X itself. If they were genuinely implementing using X you wouldn't be happy. What you are happy about is they care to make remote work well. I don't think that's going away. With a separation of protocols so that Unix developers have an explicit: local, LAN and WAN solution it will be much easier than having a LAN solution and then throwing a local solution on top and trying to get that to work and then some gimmicks to make WAN work....
. In a world where internet is finally everywhere, and X (if embraced) would allow to move a game from smartphone to TV when coming home. Or a text window from notebook to tablet for discussion around a table, or .
X doesn't allow that. X has frequent round trips. Which means over a WAN it is a very high latency protocol. The fixes for that have been to semi-shatter "network transparency". X can only work well on a mid latency setup, a LAN, the environment it evolved to handle. So no, X wouldn't allow you to do those things.
Worse it doesn't even allow you to do those things locally, Because one of the areas X also sucks at is complex graphics like TV and graphics and games. And that's because you can't share video buffers with applications buffers because it is client / server. So what that means is that locally you get many of the disadvantages of client / server or at the very least 1/2 graphical performance especially for games.
The reason people think X is obsolete is because the use case for which X is designed and optimized is rare in today's world.
Wow so you have a corporate image for the standard machine on a Macbook Pro. That's pretty funny. I'm sort of surprised you have Macs and have a lock-down managed system. Usually when the company goes BYOD / Mac the lockdown crowd is losing power inside of IT infrastructure.
You actually think that windows 8 is a functional fusion of tablet and desktop? Have you ever touched a PC running one? I'm yet to meet a single person who would make such a claim after actually using the OS.
Yes, I own a Surface Pro1 and it is my secondary laptop. I think it is really quite nice with lots of potential. I particularly like having the desktop mode running on an external monitor with the tablet monitor running the Metro interface. It is the first interface that makes sense for laptop + large monitor. ___
I get that. When they first came out I went with the 12" which was fantastic. I knew some people who liked the 17" but it died soon. 17" is hard to carry.
Put another way, if every company took Netflix approach that only the top 10% are worthy of a job, what do the other 90% do to eat?
If it were the same 10% there would soon be a huge price discrepancy. What does it cost to hire one of the best 2000 football players in the United States (NFL material). What about the next 2000, the next 2000.... You can probably hire the 10,000th best football player for $25k a year while $2.5m a year wouldn't do it for #10. In theory we don't think the programming space is that narrow. So if the wage gap opened enough....
In a way, you're right. People who used it on "right hardware" probably do like it. Problem is, they like android and ios a whole lot more. And 8 is useless trash on desktop, where it's actually used.
I don't think that's true. In fact I know it isn't true. People who have the right hardware see iOS and Android as not remotely capable of fulfilling their needs. They aren't even options because the applications aren't close to good enough. Windows 8 is far better on good hardware than Windows 7 because it offers most of the advantages of Android or iOS while still offering the advantages of a desktop OS.
Tablet based PCs are growing 53.4% year over year in a market contracting by 11%. Customers are getting the message they have to buy this more expensive hardware.
A car analogy: 8 is a sedan being pushed into truck market, because microsoft is the only truck company worth a damn. It doesn't compete well against sedans when put against them, and it fails on principle when competing with previous iteration of the truck by the same company. However company makes it hard as hell to get older functional trucks, because it wants to get into sedan market and hopes that truck buyers will buy its sedans. Catastrophic collapse of sales ensues.
You can't have it both ways. You are arguing that the truck buyers are off buying sedans now. You are agreeing that these truck buyers are converting.
So let's try a different analogy. There used to only be trucks. Now sedans are invented and it turns out many people who own trucks might prefer a sedan. Some see an advantage in both and some only want a truck. So a truck company releases a sedan with a hitch and a back compartment allowing people to have the advantages of a sedan and the advantages of a truck. The truck people buy the sedan, don't buy the back compartment or the hitch and complain the sedan is a lousy truck.
Excel and Word when they first came out took years to thrive. SQL Server took years. Windows 8 we have no idea. Most people who try it on the right hardware like it.
As far as world wide, 3rd world Microsoft doesn't make much money. G20 is where they are focusing. Android has already won most of the planet, they can't compete. Microsoft doesn't have a viable $80 product, Google does.
OK now run those numbers. Talk about how it boosts margin and revises the platform. Stop thinking like a child and start thinking like you were running a platform.
I explained at great length why it doesn't matter if a small segment are alienated.
I doubt that the bulk of the complaining comes from companies the size of Raytheon and Boeing. The issue is likely more with medium-sized companies that don't have a huge IT function and volume licensing agreements. I work at a Fortune 500 company and we've probably had the option to upgrade from XP since Vista came out - the choice of when to do so was more about logistics and internal costs than licensing.
I agree. Though I have seen fortune 500 companies that are rather lazy about their multiyear plans. Raytheon and Boeing were GP's examples. I don't know enough about either to have an opinion.
A 3-4yr OS upgrade policy was not really feasible going back 10 years with the huge reliance on stuff like ActiveX and Win32 applications. Many of those applications have capital costs in the millions of dollars (when you look at the costs of licensing and customization), and you can't just amortize those costs over 4 years and have them make sense - not to mention the army of IT workers you'd need to mange the increase in project volume to oversee all those replacements.
You don't have to replace them just upgrade them. And we did this in the 1990s. Applications had associated with them a stable in house team that slowly improved them over time. Versions shifts were not a big deal because there was stable staffing. And yes that meant a lot more IT workers, but that wasn't a huge burden. It can be done and at reasonable cost.
However, there is no need for a 3-4yr policy - MS supports its OSes for 10 years
I agree there is no need for companies. That's a bad thing for the ecosystem. Let's use your numbers. Apple has their developers using new OS features almost the moment they ship an OS. So Apple ships a feature in year X, application that could benefit from that feature releases a version in year X+1 and company picks up that version in year X+2. If you have a 13 year cycle then it is more like. Microsoft releases a feature in year Y. Application that could benefit can't use it till year Y+12. Company doesn't pick up the new version till year Y+18. That's a 16 year technology spread. Even if the application is only getting 10-15% better that's a spread of 4.5-9.5x better applications for OSX than Windows given that long a frame. It is unlikely that Microsoft is ever going to drive their ecosystem down to weeks or months like Apple but on a 4 year cycle you would be looking at: Z, Z+2, Z+4. 4 years behind is tolerable 16 is not.
So Microsoft needs to break companies of that habit.
Longer-term companies should try to move as much as they can to pure web-based or at least thin-client software. To the degree that this can be done you greatly reduce the complexity of upgrading client OS or the need for standardization. If you really could get all the software to run in a browser you could even just roll out something like ChromeOS, or give every employee a choice of what they want and have a support policy of reimage first, ask questions later.
That was Sun's position. I think they were right. The problem was always that some percentage of applications were thick client. Usually rolling into enterprise from the home/small business space or needed performance. So in practice it was too hard to do, since thin client needs to be true for 100%.
With the rise of mobile applications the home/small business space is moving back towards a rich client experience. With the rise of touch interfaces performance matters tremendously humans are disturbed by latencies above 1ms with touch / visual (no system is that responsive yet). So I don't think this is going to happen. I suspect IT budgets are just going to go up as the point of least resistance. And that's a very good thing.
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Killfiles weren't used that much since X says stuff to Y who responds to Z. Z has to have access to X. There was less flaming. There was way more zealotry since you were dealing with lots of academics and grad students who are more passionate.
I think that's still true today.
Talk about going full circle. Back in the days of usenet your identity for comments was tied to your real name and your professional email. Then we had the anonymous internet with little in the way of ties that came when the AOL crowd got internet. I've often wondered what the internet of today would be like with the policies of then.
The big difference was that most people worked for academia which is a very open environment where people don't get disciplined for opinions.
I doubt it. I'm surprised the new macmini isn't out yet. But that's going to play the role of the downmarket version of the pro. The tower I suspect is over.
Could you give some examples. Certainly you need Unix experience to admin Macs, but I generally see that as an advantage. Darwin is a fairly standard BSD and so it is easy to hook into the OS at a low level when needed. I don't see how one does anything similar on a Windows machine at all.
As far as roadmaps, agree 100%. Apple's culture of secrecy and rapid change are a terrible fit for enterprise IT. I'm shocked that IT is buying into iPhones as casually as they are .... wow are they in for a rough ride over the next decades supporting custom code in that environment.
I've had my for over a year. You rarely use it and in places you need to plug in you just attach the dongle and leave it for weeks.
Finally not that many people need more power than the iMac either. More over it isn't a joke to jump up to the Pro because the price spread isn't that large.
The electronic copies are easy to make into physical media. The Hackintosh just isn't very stable because everyone is assuming a limited range of hardware. OSX people like Apple and the way Apple does business.
OSX applications are going to be shifting workload to GPU. Remember this is designed for the OSX ecosystem.
They aren't completely. They are temporarily. The API has various sizes and they make use of them for applications. See for example the new Bing apps. Metro applications can make use of them and do. Right now they don't want end users to make use of them because they want to simplify the transition. But in theory if you had source code for your applications and some sort of do it yourself gui modifier this wouldn't be the case.
Remember the applications are going to be OSX applications. So by late 2014 or so the applications will be targeted for your particular hardware configuration and tested against it.
As far as the more general issue, Apple machines tend to be balanced for general use cases in a way that PCs aren't. The result is you often get features you wouldn't have paid for but really love. For example I bought the rMBP for the SSD and the quadcore. The retina screen, which on a PC I wouldn't have gotten however has been by far my favorite feature.
Their service was rather comparatively excellent before the Apple stores existed too. With phone support if you knew what you were doing you just got stuff. For example I had a problem with a keyboard and they sent me a new one. They didn't bother asking for the old back and playing games over a $50 part. Their phone service is way better than it is from most vendors, the stores just create a whole other layer on top of that.
That's true. This is Apple you go to store and they do an inspection more or less on demand.
Not true. Minimum turnaround time for applecare is a few hours on hardware. Throw in directly overnight and you are probably talking well over 85%. A few days and I'd be you are around 99+%. A few weeks and they would just give you a new machine and refurb yours.
I agree. That's part of the negative culture that Microsoft has cultivated. That's not true for example of OSX applications. I'm can see Apple releasing a new API feature and it showing in my say 20% of my applications within 3 years. For example .NET 4.5 has much better IPv6 handling. Can I safely use it? Or if I have to do asynchronous communications can I use the cool new subsystems or should I am for backwards compatibility. I do a lot of work with CRM, can I assume Dynamics 2013 and assume a good quality cross browser system or do I need to use 3rd party? In the Windows of the early 1990s and before and OSX today the answer was use the new stuff. In the Windows or 2013 the answer is use the old stuff. And that's why you don't care about Microsoft's new APIs.
I agree with you. Companies that are aggressively and actively upgrading their application stack and monitoring it, are the same companies that could switch 80% of their users to a Linux in 3 years or less. I don't think Windows licenses are in the scheme of things very expensive but I agree that Microsoft in training their customers not to be lazy does fundamentally change the landscape as far as competition.
Better than that in many ways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14
Microsoft used to care greatly about compatibility. DEC, SUN, IBM... cared more but for the desktop no one was close. Microsoft has cared less in the last decade but no question it was one of their primary advantages. But it wasn't something they cared about nearly as much in the 1980s during a period of rapid improvement. Right now I think the environment is more like the 1980s in home/small business because of mobile / touch technologies, big data analytics and social networking, cloud...
Again very much like the 1980s. It wasn't uncommon for the 1980s apps to ship with their own printer drivers or video drivers for example. In the early 1990s I used Lotus' wonderful Office suite in part because of the terrific font subsystem it used in place of Windows'.
I'd say we know from Apple. If you run your enterprise server and buy those application directly from the ISV then Apple is fine getting 0. If you buy from Apple then they get their 30%. Also more companies are creating web services tied to mobile and apple isn't freaking out as much as they did.
Anyway you are raising a good counter argument. Let me just close with a video from almost 3 years ago showing where Microsoft sees themselves as heading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
That's X culture i.e. Unix culture more than it is X itself. If they were genuinely implementing using X you wouldn't be happy. What you are happy about is they care to make remote work well. I don't think that's going away. With a separation of protocols so that Unix developers have an explicit: local, LAN and WAN solution it will be much easier than having a LAN solution and then throwing a local solution on top and trying to get that to work and then some gimmicks to make WAN work....
X doesn't allow that. X has frequent round trips. Which means over a WAN it is a very high latency protocol. The fixes for that have been to semi-shatter "network transparency". X can only work well on a mid latency setup, a LAN, the environment it evolved to handle. So no, X wouldn't allow you to do those things.
Worse it doesn't even allow you to do those things locally, Because one of the areas X also sucks at is complex graphics like TV and graphics and games. And that's because you can't share video buffers with applications buffers because it is client / server. So what that means is that locally you get many of the disadvantages of client / server or at the very least 1/2 graphical performance especially for games.
The reason people think X is obsolete is because the use case for which X is designed and optimized is rare in today's world.
Wow so you have a corporate image for the standard machine on a Macbook Pro. That's pretty funny. I'm sort of surprised you have Macs and have a lock-down managed system. Usually when the company goes BYOD / Mac the lockdown crowd is losing power inside of IT infrastructure.
No try again.
Metro on laptop screen
desktop on large screen
I think we should stop now. You are rude and silly.
Yes, I own a Surface Pro1 and it is my secondary laptop. I think it is really quite nice with lots of potential. I particularly like having the desktop mode running on an external monitor with the tablet monitor running the Metro interface. It is the first interface that makes sense for laptop + large monitor.
___
Now have you ever run it with the right hardware?
I get that. When they first came out I went with the 12" which was fantastic. I knew some people who liked the 17" but it died soon. 17" is hard to carry.
If it were the same 10% there would soon be a huge price discrepancy. What does it cost to hire one of the best 2000 football players in the United States (NFL material). What about the next 2000, the next 2000.... You can probably hire the 10,000th best football player for $25k a year while $2.5m a year wouldn't do it for #10. In theory we don't think the programming space is that narrow. So if the wage gap opened enough ....
I don't think that's true. In fact I know it isn't true. People who have the right hardware see iOS and Android as not remotely capable of fulfilling their needs. They aren't even options because the applications aren't close to good enough. Windows 8 is far better on good hardware than Windows 7 because it offers most of the advantages of Android or iOS while still offering the advantages of a desktop OS.
Tablet based PCs are growing 53.4% year over year in a market contracting by 11%. Customers are getting the message they have to buy this more expensive hardware.
You can't have it both ways. You are arguing that the truck buyers are off buying sedans now. You are agreeing that these truck buyers are converting.
So let's try a different analogy. There used to only be trucks. Now sedans are invented and it turns out many people who own trucks might prefer a sedan. Some see an advantage in both and some only want a truck. So a truck company releases a sedan with a hitch and a back compartment allowing people to have the advantages of a sedan and the advantages of a truck. The truck people buy the sedan, don't buy the back compartment or the hitch and complain the sedan is a lousy truck.
Excel and Word when they first came out took years to thrive. SQL Server took years. Windows 8 we have no idea. Most people who try it on the right hardware like it.
As far as world wide, 3rd world Microsoft doesn't make much money. G20 is where they are focusing. Android has already won most of the planet, they can't compete. Microsoft doesn't have a viable $80 product, Google does.
OK now run those numbers. Talk about how it boosts margin and revises the platform. Stop thinking like a child and start thinking like you were running a platform.
I explained at great length why it doesn't matter if a small segment are alienated.
I agree. Though I have seen fortune 500 companies that are rather lazy about their multiyear plans. Raytheon and Boeing were GP's examples. I don't know enough about either to have an opinion.
You don't have to replace them just upgrade them. And we did this in the 1990s. Applications had associated with them a stable in house team that slowly improved them over time. Versions shifts were not a big deal because there was stable staffing. And yes that meant a lot more IT workers, but that wasn't a huge burden. It can be done and at reasonable cost.
I agree there is no need for companies. That's a bad thing for the ecosystem. Let's use your numbers. Apple has their developers using new OS features almost the moment they ship an OS. So Apple ships a feature in year X, application that could benefit from that feature releases a version in year X+1 and company picks up that version in year X+2. If you have a 13 year cycle then it is more like. Microsoft releases a feature in year Y. Application that could benefit can't use it till year Y+12. Company doesn't pick up the new version till year Y+18. That's a 16 year technology spread. Even if the application is only getting 10-15% better that's a spread of 4.5-9.5x better applications for OSX than Windows given that long a frame. It is unlikely that Microsoft is ever going to drive their ecosystem down to weeks or months like Apple but on a 4 year cycle you would be looking at: Z, Z+2, Z+4. 4 years behind is tolerable 16 is not.
So Microsoft needs to break companies of that habit.
That was Sun's position. I think they were right. The problem was always that some percentage of applications were thick client. Usually rolling into enterprise from the home/small business space or needed performance. So in practice it was too hard to do, since thin client needs to be true for 100%.
With the rise of mobile applications the home/small business space is moving back towards a rich client experience. With the rise of touch interfaces performance matters tremendously humans are disturbed by latencies above 1ms with touch / visual (no system is that responsive yet). So I don't think this is going to happen. I suspect IT budgets are just going to go up as the point of least resistance. And that's a very good thing.