RIP = converting the high level print language to a low level print language. For example PDF to Xerox Metacode or PCL Engine = take low level print language and put dots on a piece of paper.
Servers - nah - except for those buried in MS only software
Their server sales are expanding and "MS only software" is a rather large percentage of the server market. There is Windows / Linux are the two major players and the statistics are rather mixed between them as to who is bigger.
They grew their business on products that they were the sole supplier, and they dictated their prices - hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for a copy of software that is sold in millions.
They grew their business on being a languages company and while they were the first entrant in the PC space they quickly had competition. From there the OS contract was competitive. They were the sole supplier to the IBM offering but IBM was not alone: Atari, Apple, DEC.... all had offerings.
Even this decade their growth has been in the CRM/ERP, Unified Communications and Database market all of which they faced substantial competition.
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As far as the profit margins you are exactly right. Even selling 100% of say 1b devices a year with a $10 OS licensing fee, replacing most of the PC space would be a financial disaster. That's why they are pushing ubiquitous computing. Give away the tablet (software) make money on the desktop and even more money on the server.
I thought that too until we bought one. What it (10" iPad) ended up being used for was a living room computer. It was good for things like watching movies on Amazon Prime while sitting on a couch. It was good for playing poker while watching the news. It was good for looking stuff up fast. The long battery life and instant on turned out to open up options I'd never considered.
Since then we picked up a 7" tablet for travel and presentations. Guidebooks, maps, etc.. don't work well on a 4" screen. Also as a presenter a touchscreen makes a huge difference, it allows for intuitive quick to use tools.
They charge money for licenses, manage relicensing, and handle accessories sales. They are so far over the line in being a distributor it isn't remotely questionable.
So we agree. As an aside, I don't think inconsistent RIP times mean as much for print as they did. You'd be hard pressed to find an engine 2.5x faster than the one you would get in a good quality commercial printer of the same form factor in the mid 1990s. At the same time you would be hard pressed to find a RIP that wasn't at least 25x as fast as one from the mid 1990s. RIPing is so fast relative to other parts of the engine that there aren't dedicated hardware RIPs at all, it is just a process you throw in some where else.
In terms of security, PostScript was insecure but at least it was designed to be easily sandboxed. Alternately you could wrap PostScript in such a way that the few dangerous commands would fail. PDF was designed to be secure via. limiting its capacity, adding a Turing complete language to those environments seems much more dangerous. Better to know you are in a shark tank and at least have the right gear.
Not really. That survey is an outlier. Most show Apple with the highest customer satisfaction. On Device's panel approach doesn't appear to statistically align with most other survey techniques.
Agreed. And not only that, RAID had a similar impact of allowing inexpensive x86 servers to compete with systems with much more expensive hard drives a similar disruption for servers.
Well the idea of PDF was to avoid indefinite resolution, inconsistent RIP times.... I think it makes more sense to keep it out but I'd say really the question is, "why not bring back Postscript for more complex documents"?
I think you are thinking PostScript. PDF requires that all computations resolve to a well defined value based on information contained within the document (i.e. not turning complete). So then of course Adobe had to add a turing complete language back in.
They don't want to support that. Some gamers want to be able to do some of those things. like print. Everyone doesn't need 95% of what Windows does, they just differ on the 5% they want. As far as less process running, that's what service manager is for.
It wasn't about 6 figures when Linux started, it was about 4 figures. When Linux first came as a workstation OS. It allowed you on a $2k PC to do 80% of what you could do on a $7k Solaris workstation. Then there was the push to many of the bulk Unix servers like FTP servers and so on. Those were never 6 figure machines they were cheap but x86 and Linux made them much cheaper. LAMP created a market for inexpensive web-servers and lots of them.
Commercial Unixes exploded in popularity during those years of Linux development. Linux slowly cannibalism as it moved up market, classic disruptive technology style. As far as the cost of the OS, the OS cost was often built into the hardware costs. There were years when Solaris was extra, there were years when Solaris was free but the price was always: Sun Hardware + Solaris license.
Yes but postponing the inevitable can be quite profitable.
Let's say a company has a $1b a year in profits from market X. If they get disrupted there will $100m in profits available from X2. Getting 2 more years out of X is probably worth more than getting 100% of X2. It is better postpone then to win by being early.
Well it was 2012 and this idiot spend $2500 on a retina macbook. I got a machine which would lose in some categories and win in other with Alphas minis I used to work on that served 3000 end users. Everything is about 5x faster then my old machine.
but if linux wasn't licensed under the GPL and was sold at a similar price as windows, would it have any hope at all?
Its hard to imagine what that would even mean. The open source ecosystem is what makes Linux, Linux. Its like asking if lions didn't eat meat would they be as feared? If they don't eat meat they just aren't lions anymore.
The Unix server market was rather big. While Linux being free helped Linux displace Sun, SGI, Digital Unix, HPUX, IBM I don't think free had much to do with it beating Windows. On the other hand without Linux, LAMP never happens and thus Windows probably wins the server world and we don't have an open web. From there history is just too different.
Agreed. And Microsoft agrees with you too. It is a race to see if Android can cover more and more use cases fast enough to replace Windows or Windows can modernize fast enough to eliminate the need.
I wouldn't minimize those differences in software though. Those vertical applications cost many billions.
Slashdot Mirror
Prime doesn't stream to Tivo for free shows.
How are end users going to be able to successfully confirm the security hole.
No.
RIP = converting the high level print language to a low level print language. For example PDF to Xerox Metacode or PCL
Engine = take low level print language and put dots on a piece of paper.
They aren't "handing on" in enterprise. They've expanded enterprise sales and profits tremendously. It is what they spent this decade doing.
And while Apple is an amazing success... Microsoft has $300b in market cap, $70b in sales and about $16b in profits for the last year.
Their server sales are expanding and "MS only software" is a rather large percentage of the server market. There is Windows / Linux are the two major players and the statistics are rather mixed between them as to who is bigger.
I own a Surface Pro. I don't know that you can cut it down much more and not make the experience rather miserable.
They grew their business on being a languages company and while they were the first entrant in the PC space they quickly had competition. From there the OS contract was competitive. They were the sole supplier to the IBM offering but IBM was not alone: Atari, Apple, DEC.... all had offerings.
Even this decade their growth has been in the CRM/ERP, Unified Communications and Database market all of which they faced substantial competition.
_____
As far as the profit margins you are exactly right. Even selling 100% of say 1b devices a year with a $10 OS licensing fee, replacing most of the PC space would be a financial disaster. That's why they are pushing ubiquitous computing. Give away the tablet (software) make money on the desktop and even more money on the server.
I thought that too until we bought one. What it (10" iPad) ended up being used for was a living room computer. It was good for things like watching movies on Amazon Prime while sitting on a couch. It was good for playing poker while watching the news. It was good for looking stuff up fast. The long battery life and instant on turned out to open up options I'd never considered.
Since then we picked up a 7" tablet for travel and presentations. Guidebooks, maps, etc.. don't work well on a 4" screen. Also as a presenter a touchscreen makes a huge difference, it allows for intuitive quick to use tools.
They charge money for licenses, manage relicensing, and handle accessories sales. They are so far over the line in being a distributor it isn't remotely questionable.
Apple is the distributor for the app store. Distributors have rather substantial obligations under the GPL.
One of the big wine devs is Codeweavers which makes CrossOver a commercial implementation of Wine for Mac.
So we agree. As an aside, I don't think inconsistent RIP times mean as much for print as they did. You'd be hard pressed to find an engine 2.5x faster than the one you would get in a good quality commercial printer of the same form factor in the mid 1990s. At the same time you would be hard pressed to find a RIP that wasn't at least 25x as fast as one from the mid 1990s. RIPing is so fast relative to other parts of the engine that there aren't dedicated hardware RIPs at all, it is just a process you throw in some where else.
In terms of security, PostScript was insecure but at least it was designed to be easily sandboxed. Alternately you could wrap PostScript in such a way that the few dangerous commands would fail. PDF was designed to be secure via. limiting its capacity, adding a Turing complete language to those environments seems much more dangerous. Better to know you are in a shark tank and at least have the right gear.
Not really. That survey is an outlier. Most show Apple with the highest customer satisfaction. On Device's panel approach doesn't appear to statistically align with most other survey techniques.
Agreed. And not only that, RAID had a similar impact of allowing inexpensive x86 servers to compete with systems with much more expensive hard drives a similar disruption for servers.
Wow! .pdfs become binaries. Talk about a glaring security hole.
Well the idea of PDF was to avoid indefinite resolution, inconsistent RIP times.... I think it makes more sense to keep it out but I'd say really the question is, "why not bring back Postscript for more complex documents"?
I think you are thinking PostScript. PDF requires that all computations resolve to a well defined value based on information contained within the document (i.e. not turning complete). So then of course Adobe had to add a turing complete language back in.
They don't want to support that. Some gamers want to be able to do some of those things. like print. Everyone doesn't need 95% of what Windows does, they just differ on the 5% they want. As far as less process running, that's what service manager is for.
It wasn't about 6 figures when Linux started, it was about 4 figures. When Linux first came as a workstation OS. It allowed you on a $2k PC to do 80% of what you could do on a $7k Solaris workstation. Then there was the push to many of the bulk Unix servers like FTP servers and so on. Those were never 6 figure machines they were cheap but x86 and Linux made them much cheaper. LAMP created a market for inexpensive web-servers and lots of them.
Commercial Unixes exploded in popularity during those years of Linux development. Linux slowly cannibalism as it moved up market, classic disruptive technology style. As far as the cost of the OS, the OS cost was often built into the hardware costs. There were years when Solaris was extra, there were years when Solaris was free but the price was always: Sun Hardware + Solaris license.
Yes but postponing the inevitable can be quite profitable.
Let's say a company has a $1b a year in profits from market X. If they get disrupted there will $100m in profits available from X2. Getting 2 more years out of X is probably worth more than getting 100% of X2. It is better postpone then to win by being early.
Very true and funny.
Well it was 2012 and this idiot spend $2500 on a retina macbook. I got a machine which would lose in some categories and win in other with Alphas minis I used to work on that served 3000 end users. Everything is about 5x faster then my old machine.
Its hard to imagine what that would even mean. The open source ecosystem is what makes Linux, Linux. Its like asking if lions didn't eat meat would they be as feared? If they don't eat meat they just aren't lions anymore.
The Unix server market was rather big. While Linux being free helped Linux displace Sun, SGI, Digital Unix, HPUX, IBM I don't think free had much to do with it beating Windows. On the other hand without Linux, LAMP never happens and thus Windows probably wins the server world and we don't have an open web. From there history is just too different.
Not Goldman and nowhere near enough but some little ray of sunshine: http://www.justice.gov/ag/Hayes-Tom-and-Darin-Roger-Complaint.pdf
Agreed. And Microsoft agrees with you too. It is a race to see if Android can cover more and more use cases fast enough to replace Windows or Windows can modernize fast enough to eliminate the need.
I wouldn't minimize those differences in software though. Those vertical applications cost many billions.