Despite "shill" I'm going to try one more time to reason. Microsoft is the OS vendor that people choose for their systems. When the OS vendor upgrades that frequently means people have to upgrade their hardware. That's always been the case both with Microsoft and everyone else.
People aren't paying for Microsoft's mistakes, they are paying for the upgrade. If they want to be on a keyboard / mouse / no touchscreen system Microsoft sells one, Windows 7.
The market is growing very fast at that point. Tomi is claiming there was a loss of marketshare as a result of Elop not just a decline in sales. But that is not where marketshare starts to decline.
Now even if you mean sales you are cutting it to early. Feb 11, 2011 Elop's memo hits. By Feb 11, 2011 all 1Q2011 phones are ordered. Whatever effect that memo has it would have happened at the earliest in the 2Q2011 report. But more importantly you also see a similar drop in RIM and Motorola at the same time.
They don't. New OS means new new equipment has been standard for a very long time. Microsoft has downplayed this, particularly when they allowed Vista to ship with lower system requirements. And I think they should have made Window 8 touchscreen semi-mandatory. Pretending that Windows 8 works well on legacy hardware was bad.
That being said, the press on Windows 8 was pretty clear it was touch screen mandatory. You upgrade your OS upgrade your system to work with it. Microsoft doesn't owe you new hardware.
Just stop assuming Elop is lying, the board is full of fools and the other executives are to scared to say the truth. Just assume everyone is telling the true story.
The anti-Elop crowd are the people who have to postulate a weird conspiracy. My position is rather natural. Smart people handling a terrible hand, as best they knew how. Mistakes yes, but horrible stupidity and criminal conspiracies, no.
Assuming that article is true, it is a flat rate of $250m. And no they aren't close to paying back the funding from Microsoft. That went out the door in restructuring costs.
$1b+ in cash up front for the announcement. Additional marketing assistance. Colicensing deals for things like Nokia maps and Nokia music that were probably worth another $1b. More importantly the ability the ability to differentiate. Android was, and still is, dominated by asian manufacturers that Nokia wasn't cost competitive with.
Finally Nokia pays on paper $10 for WP8 licensing, that's lower than the patent costs they would be paying Microsoft for Android.
Yes really difficult. They can't sell enough N9 to pay for their fixed expenses they don't profit they bleed. They can't get the N9 in quantity. They don't have a follow up strategy. There are only 4 MeeGo phones through 2014 and they get buried under fixed costs.
Instead they commit to Microsoft get subsidies that cover the restructuring costs and they get another bite at the apple. The people who run Nokia are not stupid. If your analysis involves them being too stupid to do the obvious perhaps you need to read a bit more of what they are saying and less Tomi Ahonen.
I don't see any evidence that the Windows OS has been harmful to Lumia. Were that the case, that the OS were subtractive there would be a good aftermarket in loading Android on Lumia and reselling them, which doesn't exist.
. If they were ready to acknowledge that they couldn't go on with their own separate phone OS any more, they should have bitten the bullet, embraced Android, and done what Nokia do best - good hardware with good antennae.
Elop considered that and approached Google. Google was massive successful with Android, and didn't want a lead horse, like they eventually got with Samsung. They weren't offering Nokia anything outside the norm. Switching to Android would have meant directly competing with Asian manufactures on bundling parts and they never would have made acceptable margins.
Even now what particular advantage does Android offer over Windows phone? The better apps are being ported over and Windows phone is quickly going to get exclusive applications.
Sculley had convinced Apple that he would sell a computer like a bottle of soda.
No he didn't. Scully had convinced Apple that the right path was high margin gradual shrinkage to a niche product line. He was focused on the Newton and the PowerPC project as the direction forward.
Never mind that Nokia was on the verge of a great break through in their adoption of a Linux based OS with a world class framework, Qt, to back it
No they weren't. If they were they board wouldn't have changed horses that radically. What Nokia was on the verge of was a series of interlocking conflicting plans which were unachievable with no solid product pipeline to create the revenue to fix the mess. Why is it so hard to believe that the board was right given that every insider has defended Elop's assessment?
Stephen Elop needed his company to focus on the product line. He wasn't interested in selling a few million extra phones that would divert the transition. Once they decided MeeGo was a dead end, he had to face tremendous resistance from both employees and customers who didn't think it was a dead end. Look at the lead article.
I love the N9. N9 was really cool. MeeGo was cool. I wish Jolla nothing but the best with Sailfish. All that being said, Elop did the right thing for Nokia.
I tried them both. Touch cover was terrible, type cover was so/so for a laptop but nice for a tablet. I could imagine using type cover as a primary keyboard, I wouldn't like it but it is conceivable. Major step up.
It always pays to use relational over NoSQL when you can. But just like in data warehousing where it makes sense to denormalize for performance reasons it can make sense to organize the data around specific computations which damage the ability to use SQL.
You won't find any good reason with normal sized data sets and normal number of joins. Computations that require large tables that need to join multiple times in complex ways that can't be overcome with tricks like indexing.... then it can make sense to sacrifice the relational algebra.
I think you are mixing a lot of stuff together into one pile.
1) Cost of manufacturing. I highly doubt your custom built machine is remotely like the iMac in terms of manufacturing quality. Which is not to say the custom built machine doesn't have better parts, but the iMac line is built around high cost of manufacturing. Apple's CEO is a manufacturing logistics guy, part of their stock and trade has been ever increasing manufacturing process quality adjustments. You are taking a great deal of the cost of the iMac and treating it like it costs $0. I doubt your custom machine is 12.5 lbs or 6.8 inches in depth, those are both very expensive features. Every screw is better quality and then many of them glued down as well. Something like the Vizio-touch all-in-one is still worse manufacturing but at least in the same ballpark, I think generally goes with slightly better parts and is about the same cost.
2) Any OEM vendor charges you markup on parts. If you build your own you don't pay parts markup. That's starting to change as Apple is becoming their own parts vendor. But for now you have to compare marked up prices for parts to Apple.
I would exclude the personal build your own and compare Apple to a higher quality windows machine. Asus Zenbook vs. Retna. Vizio all-in-one vs. new iMac.... in terms of price comparison.
_____
Now in terms of what an iMac would have done for you, it would have let you run OSX. Unless you like OSX there isn't much reason to run Apple. If you are OK with Linux as a desktop OS then Apple only makes sense for laptops and only if manufacturing quality really matters to you (that's why Linus uses Apple laptops to run openSuse). I like Apple laptops for Linux distributions that are obscure mainly because they are well supported. Ubuntu is well supported on anything, so that's going to matter much if that's is the OS you want to run.
____
Finally my point on 10 years is simple. Apple does not allow you to comfortably use a system for 10 years. Your annual spend has to be higher to make Apple a good purchase.
I don't agree. Things like Hypervisor, a server class virtual OS platform on every desktop is a major step forward.
But getting to your main point I think Metro is a major step forward. Capacitive touchscreen is not old technology. Video embedded in icons is not old technology. All graphics being vector and not bitmap is not old technology. Automatic typography in realtime is old technology but totally new for Microsoft which has almost always been focused on simple not accurate implementations of WYSIWYG. A fully scriptable GUI layer is a huge step forward, it brings shell scripting to the modern shell. An interface which constantly readjusts to context is not old technology.
I don't think the interface is "dumbed down" so much as removing legacy cruft from Windows. Many of the aspects of our interfaces are historical legacy that make no sense. The old open / save / save-as / close / quit paradigm is based around dual floppy systems. It is stupid on modern hardware and it makes sense to get rid of it and move to something more like what you have on minis and mainframes.
So I don't agree this is just terrible or backwards or anything like that. I think they are putting together a really good attempt to step towards their vision. Let me link you to it.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
Understood. But Apple has a focus on the one and not the other.
The system I am replacing this spring I had custom built from good parts literally 10 years ago. It still works...
I built my own very good system back in 1990. I build servers all the time to capture value. Apple and the other OEMs do not offer the same ratios of value to cost.
If you are the kind of person who wants to use the same system for a decade you won't like Apple. I'm change my computer about every 3-4 years and I an't buying cheap Apple's all the time either. pple forces an OS upgrade and those OS upgrades often obsolete hardware. Most 2007 systems cannot run 10.7.3. Most software today requires 10.7.3. That is not atypical.
The plus side of this is you get rapid development and deployment for the platform. The minus side of this is you need to keep up.
Like I said, I don't think you would be happy with Apple.
Sales of PCs have been down for 2 years before that. Yes they have a real problem. People in the consumer / small business spaceare having their needs met by Android and iOS. Which means less computers per person and longer upgrade cycles.
They need to shatter that by problem by meeting new needs.
You can't rely on consistency. Very quickly Microsoft is moving towards contextual interfaces which means the interface is going to constantly change based on what the context of execution is. Choose a different support strategy.
I am a disinterested consumer and I support it. I hate the stagnation of the last decade. I'm thrilled to see Microsoft acting as a leader for technology. I don't know whether Apple's ideas of interconnected devices or Microsoft's ideas of ubiquitous computing are the right strategy for the industry going forward. What I am positive though, is that Microsoft's customer base's position of spending as little as possible is incredibly destructive and anything to overturn that I'm in favor of.
I love progress, upheaval. I'm tired of the fatalistic can't do attitude of IT today. I want the 90's back where we put systems in place, then ripped them out and put something way better in place.
the worst possible UI design is to get rid of options and flexibility
Actually no. Design is all about removing options and flexibility. Design is about saying "no" to 1000 things and choosing very careful which ones to say yes to. The start menu itself was a "no" when it was created. It was created to abstract the filesystem and take the options and flexibility people had had with Windows 3.11 (and lower) to organize their applications files and folders how they wanted on the filesystem. Instead they got to organize icons but the programs themselves, particularly the libraries were going to be organized by the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite "shill" I'm going to try one more time to reason. Microsoft is the OS vendor that people choose for their systems. When the OS vendor upgrades that frequently means people have to upgrade their hardware. That's always been the case both with Microsoft and everyone else.
People aren't paying for Microsoft's mistakes, they are paying for the upgrade. If they want to be on a keyboard / mouse / no touchscreen system Microsoft sells one, Windows 7.
The market is growing very fast at that point. Tomi is claiming there was a loss of marketshare as a result of Elop not just a decline in sales. But that is not where marketshare starts to decline.
Q2 2010 | 39%
Q3 2010 | 33% | -6 | -15%
Q4 2010 | 28% | -5 | -15%
Q1 2011 | 24% | -4 | -16%
Q2 2011 | 16% | -8 | -33%
Q3 2011 | 14% | -2 | -13%
Q4 2011 | 13% | -1 | -7%
Q1 2012 | 8% | -5 | -38%
Now even if you mean sales you are cutting it to early. Feb 11, 2011 Elop's memo hits. By Feb 11, 2011 all 1Q2011 phones are ordered. Whatever effect that memo has it would have happened at the earliest in the 2Q2011 report. But more importantly you also see a similar drop in RIM and Motorola at the same time.
They don't. New OS means new new equipment has been standard for a very long time. Microsoft has downplayed this, particularly when they allowed Vista to ship with lower system requirements. And I think they should have made Window 8 touchscreen semi-mandatory. Pretending that Windows 8 works well on legacy hardware was bad.
That being said, the press on Windows 8 was pretty clear it was touch screen mandatory. You upgrade your OS upgrade your system to work with it. Microsoft doesn't owe you new hardware.
The graph isn't right. The sharp falloff in sales starts happening 2 quarters earlier before the burning platform menu.
Just stop assuming Elop is lying, the board is full of fools and the other executives are to scared to say the truth. Just assume everyone is telling the true story.
The anti-Elop crowd are the people who have to postulate a weird conspiracy. My position is rather natural. Smart people handling a terrible hand, as best they knew how. Mistakes yes, but horrible stupidity and criminal conspiracies, no.
Assuming that article is true, it is a flat rate of $250m. And no they aren't close to paying back the funding from Microsoft. That went out the door in restructuring costs.
$1b+ in cash up front for the announcement. Additional marketing assistance. Colicensing deals for things like Nokia maps and Nokia music that were probably worth another $1b. More importantly the ability the ability to differentiate. Android was, and still is, dominated by asian manufacturers that Nokia wasn't cost competitive with.
Finally Nokia pays on paper $10 for WP8 licensing, that's lower than the patent costs they would be paying Microsoft for Android.
Yes really difficult. They can't sell enough N9 to pay for their fixed expenses they don't profit they bleed. They can't get the N9 in quantity. They don't have a follow up strategy. There are only 4 MeeGo phones through 2014 and they get buried under fixed costs.
Instead they commit to Microsoft get subsidies that cover the restructuring costs and they get another bite at the apple. The people who run Nokia are not stupid. If your analysis involves them being too stupid to do the obvious perhaps you need to read a bit more of what they are saying and less Tomi Ahonen.
I don't see any evidence that the Windows OS has been harmful to Lumia. Were that the case, that the OS were subtractive there would be a good aftermarket in loading Android on Lumia and reselling them, which doesn't exist.
. If they were ready to acknowledge that they couldn't go on with their own separate phone OS any more, they should have bitten the bullet, embraced Android, and done what Nokia do best - good hardware with good antennae.
Elop considered that and approached Google. Google was massive successful with Android, and didn't want a lead horse, like they eventually got with Samsung. They weren't offering Nokia anything outside the norm. Switching to Android would have meant directly competing with Asian manufactures on bundling parts and they never would have made acceptable margins.
Even now what particular advantage does Android offer over Windows phone? The better apps are being ported over and Windows phone is quickly going to get exclusive applications.
"They were Dead wrong" is begging the question.
i don't know what you mean by "missing". DEC was well aware PCs were eating their lunch. They had a PC division:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100
and later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStation
Sculley had convinced Apple that he would sell a computer like a bottle of soda.
No he didn't. Scully had convinced Apple that the right path was high margin gradual shrinkage to a niche product line. He was focused on the Newton and the PowerPC project as the direction forward.
Never mind that Nokia was on the verge of a great break through in their adoption of a Linux based OS with a world class framework, Qt, to back it
No they weren't. If they were they board wouldn't have changed horses that radically. What Nokia was on the verge of was a series of interlocking conflicting plans which were unachievable with no solid product pipeline to create the revenue to fix the mess. Why is it so hard to believe that the board was right given that every insider has defended Elop's assessment?
Stephen Elop needed his company to focus on the product line. He wasn't interested in selling a few million extra phones that would divert the transition. Once they decided MeeGo was a dead end, he had to face tremendous resistance from both employees and customers who didn't think it was a dead end. Look at the lead article.
I love the N9. N9 was really cool. MeeGo was cool. I wish Jolla nothing but the best with Sailfish. All that being said, Elop did the right thing for Nokia.
I haven't used the touch cover enough to touch type. I hated it. The type cover though I thought does the same thing and is good.
I tried them both. Touch cover was terrible, type cover was so/so for a laptop but nice for a tablet. I could imagine using type cover as a primary keyboard, I wouldn't like it but it is conceivable. Major step up.
It always pays to use relational over NoSQL when you can. But just like in data warehousing where it makes sense to denormalize for performance reasons it can make sense to organize the data around specific computations which damage the ability to use SQL.
You won't find any good reason with normal sized data sets and normal number of joins. Computations that require large tables that need to join multiple times in complex ways that can't be overcome with tricks like indexing.... then it can make sense to sacrifice the relational algebra.
I think you are mixing a lot of stuff together into one pile.
1) Cost of manufacturing. I highly doubt your custom built machine is remotely like the iMac in terms of manufacturing quality. Which is not to say the custom built machine doesn't have better parts, but the iMac line is built around high cost of manufacturing. Apple's CEO is a manufacturing logistics guy, part of their stock and trade has been ever increasing manufacturing process quality adjustments. You are taking a great deal of the cost of the iMac and treating it like it costs $0. I doubt your custom machine is 12.5 lbs or 6.8 inches in depth, those are both very expensive features. Every screw is better quality and then many of them glued down as well. Something like the Vizio-touch all-in-one is still worse manufacturing but at least in the same ballpark, I think generally goes with slightly better parts and is about the same cost.
2) Any OEM vendor charges you markup on parts. If you build your own you don't pay parts markup. That's starting to change as Apple is becoming their own parts vendor. But for now you have to compare marked up prices for parts to Apple.
I would exclude the personal build your own and compare Apple to a higher quality windows machine. Asus Zenbook vs. Retna. Vizio all-in-one vs. new iMac.... in terms of price comparison.
_____
Now in terms of what an iMac would have done for you, it would have let you run OSX. Unless you like OSX there isn't much reason to run Apple. If you are OK with Linux as a desktop OS then Apple only makes sense for laptops and only if manufacturing quality really matters to you (that's why Linus uses Apple laptops to run openSuse). I like Apple laptops for Linux distributions that are obscure mainly because they are well supported. Ubuntu is well supported on anything, so that's going to matter much if that's is the OS you want to run.
____
Finally my point on 10 years is simple. Apple does not allow you to comfortably use a system for 10 years. Your annual spend has to be higher to make Apple a good purchase.
I don't agree. Things like Hypervisor, a server class virtual OS platform on every desktop is a major step forward.
But getting to your main point I think Metro is a major step forward.
Capacitive touchscreen is not old technology.
Video embedded in icons is not old technology.
All graphics being vector and not bitmap is not old technology.
Automatic typography in realtime is old technology but totally new for Microsoft which has almost always been focused on simple not accurate implementations of WYSIWYG.
A fully scriptable GUI layer is a huge step forward, it brings shell scripting to the modern shell.
An interface which constantly readjusts to context is not old technology.
I don't think the interface is "dumbed down" so much as removing legacy cruft from Windows. Many of the aspects of our interfaces are historical legacy that make no sense. The old open / save / save-as / close / quit paradigm is based around dual floppy systems. It is stupid on modern hardware and it makes sense to get rid of it and move to something more like what you have on minis and mainframes.
So I don't agree this is just terrible or backwards or anything like that. I think they are putting together a really good attempt to step towards their vision. Let me link you to it.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
Understood. But Apple has a focus on the one and not the other.
I built my own very good system back in 1990. I build servers all the time to capture value. Apple and the other OEMs do not offer the same ratios of value to cost.
If you are the kind of person who wants to use the same system for a decade you won't like Apple. I'm change my computer about every 3-4 years and I an't buying cheap Apple's all the time either. pple forces an OS upgrade and those OS upgrades often obsolete hardware. Most 2007 systems cannot run 10.7.3. Most software today requires 10.7.3. That is not atypical.
The plus side of this is you get rapid development and deployment for the platform. The minus side of this is you need to keep up.
Like I said, I don't think you would be happy with Apple.
Well the desktop thing will be fixed as more apps go Metro. What's kicking them into desktop mode?
What's going to help is them getting a touchscreen so those controls feel intuitive.
Sales of PCs have been down for 2 years before that. Yes they have a real problem. People in the consumer / small business spaceare having their needs met by Android and iOS. Which means less computers per person and longer upgrade cycles.
They need to shatter that by problem by meeting new needs.
You can't rely on consistency. Very quickly Microsoft is moving towards contextual interfaces which means the interface is going to constantly change based on what the context of execution is. Choose a different support strategy.
For yourself, poweruser than Windows-Q navigation. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/hyperyash/archive/2012/08/28/windows-8-shortcuts.aspx
I am a disinterested consumer and I support it. I hate the stagnation of the last decade. I'm thrilled to see Microsoft acting as a leader for technology. I don't know whether Apple's ideas of interconnected devices or Microsoft's ideas of ubiquitous computing are the right strategy for the industry going forward. What I am positive though, is that Microsoft's customer base's position of spending as little as possible is incredibly destructive and anything to overturn that I'm in favor of.
I love progress, upheaval. I'm tired of the fatalistic can't do attitude of IT today. I want the 90's back where we put systems in place, then ripped them out and put something way better in place.
the worst possible UI design is to get rid of options and flexibility
Actually no. Design is all about removing options and flexibility. Design is about saying "no" to 1000 things and choosing very careful which ones to say yes to. The start menu itself was a "no" when it was created. It was created to abstract the filesystem and take the options and flexibility people had had with Windows 3.11 (and lower) to organize their applications files and folders how they wanted on the filesystem. Instead they got to organize icons but the programs themselves, particularly the libraries were going to be organized by the system.
You may not actually not like design.