Its more than that. The two were totally different technologies. LG Prada was based on Adobe Flash, iPhone on Core Animation. So the touchscreen technology in the Prada was about scrolling and light data input. Not like the flocking and zooming experience on the iPhone. That is the Prada was far closer to the Palm than the iPhone.
There are lots of corporations that might be very happy with the massive infrastructure improvements needed to move to a more energy efficient economy. The coal industry is going to be against it, but even the oil industry getting excited about the potential of natural gas.
Gates, Koch, Getty and Bowes. That's a pretty diverse group. Either you don't trust anyone or that's about as close as you are going to get to a fair determination.
and surely a professional gambler will also be trying to reduce the risk (or rather, maximise the expected returns)?
A professional gambler not a gambler generally. He's a guy who arbitrages other's gambling.
Reducing risk is not the same as maximizing returns. Assuming a random walk (which isn't a good assumption) risk is standard deviation, while expectation is the mean. Generally (non gambling) the higher mean correlates with a higher SD. In fact if you are buying into the whole efficient market thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model
As an aside, the stock exchange or stock trading systems *are* zero sum situations
Of course they aren't. There is a real company producing earnings over time. And if you diversify a real economy producing net profits over time. The zero sum aspects as a distraction the dividends and dividend growth are the source of returns.
I bought an HP 7510 as my secondary printer they threw a mini touchpad in as the UI.:) Its fallen, though I do like it.
Wooing developers is going to very hard. Give them 100% cut of the app store and that won't matter. Heck make it 110% it still won't matter. If Microsoft moves tens or hundreds of millions the customer base will do the wooing, a tablet is all about software. If Microsoft moves a few million nothing will work
Lets assume I am an uniformed sales guy. And lets further assume you weren't approx a high school age kid in the around 94 who had an Amiga 2000 or 3000 and was unhappy when the system died... but that you were really around to talk about what was happening in '79 or 85. So we'll ignore the nonsense about what was happening in the 70s and 80s, and focus on the stuff you do remember.
The Amiga did cooperative not pre-emptive multitasking. The hardware didn't support the kinds of memory protection and process protection needed for the sort of multi-tasking that exists today. At the same time, Commodore couldn't throw all the monitoring hardware that had existed in late 60s mainframes in for cost reasons. The reason your Amiga crashed so much is because it was attempting to do in software something the hardware couldn't really support. It did it well and that made for showy demos but there is a difference between a stage magician and a genuine psychic. Having built an OS with this lack of hardware support was of course one of the main reasons the Amiga died. Amiga's OS needed to evolve in the same way Windows did with the migration to the NT kernel, because people now expected a multitasking environment that was much more stable. But to do that, without the emulation layers that Microsoft would spend a fortune on, would require developer support. And heavy rewrites at a time of falling sales were not in the cards. The Amiga OS couldn't stay where it was nor move forward. You see this today, in fact one of the reasons Aros doesn't support Amiga software, unlike the other emulator OSes is to get the clean break for hardware supported multi tasking.
This is why Xenix didn't support pre-emptive multitasking but SCO, BSDs and Linux did. This struggle of how to move from cooperative multi tasking to full pre-emption is what did MacOS in and almost killed Apple.
Of course it did. It wasn't the rather lame cooperative multitasking we saw on Mac OS7 or Windows 3, but genuine preemptive tasking where the CPU stopped the current process and moved on to the next process.
No, the program had to pass control back to the scheduler. That's why runaway programs could take the whole system down. It was close, and I understand why Amiga used this in their marketing; but there was a huge difference in what your Amiga 2000 was doing and what a mainframe was doing. Both used a similar system but on the mainframe the scheduler had its own memory and its own CPU so it could in a very electrical engineering sense of the word pre-empt.
You aren't 15 anymore its time to stop showing your friends what your cool Amiga can do, grow up and realize that in adult world there are real differences between the systems that were $50k in in 1990 like the RISC/6000, the ones that were $7k like the NeXT and the systems that were $2k like the Amiga 2000.
No. An investor should be avoiding 0 sum situations and trying to reduce risk. Gamblers love risk and accept additional risk as "excitement". They generally go for 0 sum or negative expectation plays.
Give me an example of an IBM home PC that could play music-quality sound in 1979 (like Atari) or 1982 (Commodore)
The IBM PC wasn't released until 1981, so no they didn't have a good model to compete in '79. And with this any many other things I suspect you are reading spec sheets. In '79 if you wanted to use a computer for music you used analog computers not digital. Digital computers, except for extremely expensive ones, were worse than basic music equipment. Midi wasn't even untl about '85. Around '94 is when digital music on cheap hardware became a reality, not '79.
Or an example that could show full-screen in 1985 (both Atari & Commodore) or 1988 (Apple Mac).
I don't know what you mean by "full screen".
Or an example of an IBM home PC that could do preemptive tasking in 1985 (Commodore).
Commodore did not do preemptive multitasking in 1985. The 68000 didn't really support it, you had to wait until the 68030 for it to really work. You are reading too much Amiga propaganda. By 1985 people were happy that single tasking was working reliably. If you wanted to do task switching you were on a workstation in '85. You could multi task like that on a Mini or Mainframe. 1988 OS/2 Lan Manager was probably the first genuinely multi tasking application that ran on PC class machines and that was still expensive servers not cheap Commodores. Cooperative multi tasking / task switching existed for years because in real life these things were hard to do on the crappy hardware of the day. If Commodore had actually been capable of what you think they were
In 1993 I used to sell the Amiga 500 as a toy for kids. Which was essentially a slight upgrade from the 1000, the model you are making these claims for. No the 500 could not do these things. The Amiga 2000, 3000 were starting to be capable of what you are claiming for the 1000 but even then... this is a serious stretch.
But at least Microsoft has shown that it can design good hardware. Their mice and keyboards are terrific so maybe the Slate has a chance. Time will tell.
I think with the Slate it is going to come down to pricing. How aggressively do they want to price these devices? If they lose $50 each and move 100m units then they start to change the culture and but they are only out $5b. If they only sell a few million they may not have any impact. On the ARM side, the use of the term "Windows RT" which is going to be very confusing for consumers. I remember the (very good) Windows CE keyboard tablets that existed in the 90's and ran about $1200 in place of laptops causing massive confusion. We'll have to see how they handle this.
But it is good to see Microsoft showing some leadership again.
Microsoft's server revenue was $4.5b last quarter growing at 14% year over year. Yes sharepoint, SQL Server, Dynamics... are something to write home about.
The public has much more control over government than it does over business. And while there is some over regulation right now, I'd say you are screaming fire during a flood.
If you mean the iPhone app store, Apple doesn't want serious apps. They want the iOS devices to be secondary devices. And as secondary devices there are tons of applications that allow for viewing, editing and replying to data. QlikView (an end user business intelligence layer) iPhone client for example.
If you mean for OSX. there's little advantage to expensive apps through the app store, except for anti-piracy. And that might be enough.
Nonsense. Compaq was a huge innovator, they brought down the size and weight of portables and arguably invented the laptop. Zeos was an innovator in micro electronics and pen based computing a decade before the OS had any support for it. Micron was a huge innovator in memory technology. Dell was an innovator in the manufacturing process and brought a degree of customization never seen before to electronics at good prices. Packard Bell developed all sorts of ease of use features like: color coded cabling systems so that naive users could assemble a computer, their own DOS shell....
Most of those companies didn't survive. There has been a race to the bottom for the since 2000. But there certainly was a point where PC companies were innovators. Atari and Commodore were vastly vastly inferior to the PCs of the early 1980s. They were quite often 10% of the price so no one expected them to compete. I suspect you hearing a version of history that's a bit biased.
Not really. I've seen awesome tablets from Fuji and Lenevo for the last decade and Microsoft One Note. What I haven't seen was a commitment on the OEM's part to driving down the cost of crucial components like the hinge.
But those types of tablets and the iOS / Android tablets which are touched based are fundamentally different in intent.
The Lauren ad was quite successful. Microsoft has tremendous brand awareness. The problem is people used lockdown or poorly maintained windows machines at work and associated their work machine with what Windows is capable of. To get out of that they would need to do something that would alienate corporate customers, like the Dude you're getting a Dell.
Windows Phone is good,
The Windows Phone is good, what it is not is compelling. To get someone to switch you don't need to be good, you need to be, in at least some ways far better. IN 2008 the people who had iPhones could tell me what was better about them than my Blackberry. And even before that the ads were pretty clear about what was better pre release iPhone ads.
XBox is good
And XBox sells well.
Zune was really good
It was. It had some nice features. But iTunes and the integration is what it didn't have.
There are 2 layers here. The first layer is inclusion of signing authorities. There are not going to be many of those in hardware: Microsoft , probably a few Asian ones, someone like Verisign and that's it. And those will be the only people the hardware will accept as authorities by default. The end user will be able to add their own keys to the BIOS but that needs to be hard enough that people who don't understand that this is like giving up the root password don't do it casually.
The way most Linuxes will get on is not by becoming a signing authority, for which the standards are very very high, but asking a well respected signing authority to sign their kernel. Microsoft, as a signing authority has already agreed to help here. So what will happen is RedHat will submit the kernel to Microsoft and Microsoft will sign the RedHat kernel. When the hardware tries to load it will identify itself as signed by Microsoft, provide a number (encrypted checksum) which proves that this exact binary was provided to Microsoft and signed. The hardware doesn't know who RedHat is, all it knows is that Microsoft confirmed that this kernel is legit. Microsoft isn't confirming that the kernel "works" but they are confirming this exact binary did come from RedHat and not some 3rd party. The purpose of this signing system is not to stop RedHats, or Ubuntu or anything like this but rather rootkits and possibly piracy. Microsoft has been clear they are not interested in creating complications for Linux, you want a kernel with special permission, pay $80 and Microsoft will sign it.
Now what Canonical is doing is trying to avoid even that, creating a shim system for Linux users so that the boot-loaders get authenticated not kernels. That way Linux users run only with protected boot-loaders but unprotected kernels while Windows users have the extra layer of security which Linux people don't want. And Microsoft is fine with that strategy. So assuming Canonical is successful they are going to sign each boot-loader and you will need to pay once per boot-loader not even once per kernel.
Both Gnome and KDE do provide services to programs. In fact the whole move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 was driven by needing to provide services to programs that Gnome 2 was architected to support. Window managers are replaceable under Gnome and KDE.
Your rant seems to be free floating misinformation.
My guess is that you are long time Gnome 2 user. In which case you are already invested. If Mate fails then you go through the transition away from Gnome 2 later. That's all.
Here is my opinion on the matter. That this is a specific group:
Ubuntu brought in a huge group of people who learned Linux from Ubuntu. Their only real experience was Gnome 2. Ubuntu goes after the netbook and then tablet market.
At this point they would be ready to switch to another distribution but Gnome 3 is a major change.
So for the first time they are becoming Linux users, with no desktop or distribution home. In then end some will go KDE, some Gnome 3, some LXDE or XFCE, who know some might decide they like a BSD or even AIX better. But the Gnome switch and the Unity switch is what is forcing the whole deal and they are none too happy.
AC interesting article, though you are reading that backwards. T Rowe evidentially had a stake in the shares prior to the IPO. They bought a state before public trading for their investment vehicles.
What I've seen is that many apps are starting to have 2 versions:
a) The internet version -- designed the way the developer wants -- paid upgrades -- weak or weaker tie to iOS version
b) The app store version -- designed the way Apple wants -- free upgrades (or rarely 100% rebuy upgrades) -- strong tie to the iOS version via. iCloud
That's a really interesting choice. So far I've always gone for the internet version because the app store worries me. I like the idea of iCloud integration, but most of what I want I could get though dropbox and sym/hard links. I could get the update management the more traditions way (http://www.macupdate.com/desktop/) but frankly all the apps check by themselves at this point mostly.
But I don't know the App store is "in trouble". I think there is likely to be a fork in what you get where. The App store might have lots of inexpensive simple applications, free demos, desktop support for phone apps and other apps that are single purpose while the retail side focus on the $20 on up apps which are more versatile. I don't think it is good that the market is forking creating two software ecosystems with different tastes.
I understand and I agree. The ability to be a commanding presence is worth real money, Exxon would have to pay cash to get that same kind of buzz, that Microsoft gets by virtue of who they are. And as you mention that marketing money is just like a cash subsidy. My point 10 up is that that legal. What Exxon can do, Microsoft can do. Its only the things Exxon could not do, that Microsoft is forbidden from doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Its more than that. The two were totally different technologies. LG Prada was based on Adobe Flash, iPhone on Core Animation. So the touchscreen technology in the Prada was about scrolling and light data input. Not like the flocking and zooming experience on the iPhone. That is the Prada was far closer to the Palm than the iPhone.
There are lots of corporations that might be very happy with the massive infrastructure improvements needed to move to a more energy efficient economy. The coal industry is going to be against it, but even the oil industry getting excited about the potential of natural gas.
Gates, Koch, Getty and Bowes. That's a pretty diverse group. Either you don't trust anyone or that's about as close as you are going to get to a fair determination.
and surely a professional gambler will also be trying to reduce the risk (or rather, maximise the expected returns)?
A professional gambler not a gambler generally. He's a guy who arbitrages other's gambling.
Reducing risk is not the same as maximizing returns. Assuming a random walk (which isn't a good assumption) risk is standard deviation, while expectation is the mean. Generally (non gambling) the higher mean correlates with a higher SD. In fact if you are buying into the whole efficient market thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model
As an aside, the stock exchange or stock trading systems *are* zero sum situations
Of course they aren't. There is a real company producing earnings over time. And if you diversify a real economy producing net profits over time. The zero sum aspects as a distraction the dividends and dividend growth are the source of returns.
I bought an HP 7510 as my secondary printer they threw a mini touchpad in as the UI. :) Its fallen, though I do like it.
Wooing developers is going to very hard. Give them 100% cut of the app store and that won't matter. Heck make it 110% it still won't matter. If Microsoft moves tens or hundreds of millions the customer base will do the wooing, a tablet is all about software. If Microsoft moves a few million nothing will work
Lets assume I am an uniformed sales guy. And lets further assume you weren't approx a high school age kid in the around 94 who had an Amiga 2000 or 3000 and was unhappy when the system died... but that you were really around to talk about what was happening in '79 or 85. So we'll ignore the nonsense about what was happening in the 70s and 80s, and focus on the stuff you do remember.
The Amiga did cooperative not pre-emptive multitasking. The hardware didn't support the kinds of memory protection and process protection needed for the sort of multi-tasking that exists today. At the same time, Commodore couldn't throw all the monitoring hardware that had existed in late 60s mainframes in for cost reasons. The reason your Amiga crashed so much is because it was attempting to do in software something the hardware couldn't really support. It did it well and that made for showy demos but there is a difference between a stage magician and a genuine psychic. Having built an OS with this lack of hardware support was of course one of the main reasons the Amiga died. Amiga's OS needed to evolve in the same way Windows did with the migration to the NT kernel, because people now expected a multitasking environment that was much more stable. But to do that, without the emulation layers that Microsoft would spend a fortune on, would require developer support. And heavy rewrites at a time of falling sales were not in the cards. The Amiga OS couldn't stay where it was nor move forward. You see this today, in fact one of the reasons Aros doesn't support Amiga software, unlike the other emulator OSes is to get the clean break for hardware supported multi tasking.
This is why Xenix didn't support pre-emptive multitasking but SCO, BSDs and Linux did. This struggle of how to move from cooperative multi tasking to full pre-emption is what did MacOS in and almost killed Apple.
Of course it did. It wasn't the rather lame cooperative multitasking we saw on Mac OS7 or Windows 3, but genuine preemptive tasking where the CPU stopped the current process and moved on to the next process.
No, the program had to pass control back to the scheduler. That's why runaway programs could take the whole system down. It was close, and I understand why Amiga used this in their marketing; but there was a huge difference in what your Amiga 2000 was doing and what a mainframe was doing. Both used a similar system but on the mainframe the scheduler had its own memory and its own CPU so it could in a very electrical engineering sense of the word pre-empt.
You aren't 15 anymore its time to stop showing your friends what your cool Amiga can do, grow up and realize that in adult world there are real differences between the systems that were $50k in in 1990 like the RISC/6000, the ones that were $7k like the NeXT and the systems that were $2k like the Amiga 2000.
Voodpad by flyingmeat is a great example.
Omni's software particularly Omni Focus.
No. An investor should be avoiding 0 sum situations and trying to reduce risk. Gamblers love risk and accept additional risk as "excitement". They generally go for 0 sum or negative expectation plays.
Well for 2011 your 80% is right
Took in $70b
$15.5b expense labor (I'm assuming consulting, help desk, implementation....)
They spent additionally:
$9b R&D
$14b sales and marketing
$4.2b admin
$5b taxes
leaving $23b in profits
Give me an example of an IBM home PC that could play music-quality sound in 1979 (like Atari) or 1982 (Commodore)
The IBM PC wasn't released until 1981, so no they didn't have a good model to compete in '79. And with this any many other things I suspect you are reading spec sheets. In '79 if you wanted to use a computer for music you used analog computers not digital. Digital computers, except for extremely expensive ones, were worse than basic music equipment. Midi wasn't even untl about '85. Around '94 is when digital music on cheap hardware became a reality, not '79.
Or an example that could show full-screen in 1985 (both Atari & Commodore) or 1988 (Apple Mac).
I don't know what you mean by "full screen".
Or an example of an IBM home PC that could do preemptive tasking in 1985 (Commodore).
Commodore did not do preemptive multitasking in 1985. The 68000 didn't really support it, you had to wait until the 68030 for it to really work. You are reading too much Amiga propaganda. By 1985 people were happy that single tasking was working reliably. If you wanted to do task switching you were on a workstation in '85. You could multi task like that on a Mini or Mainframe. 1988 OS/2 Lan Manager was probably the first genuinely multi tasking application that ran on PC class machines and that was still expensive servers not cheap Commodores. Cooperative multi tasking / task switching existed for years because in real life these things were hard to do on the crappy hardware of the day. If Commodore had actually been capable of what you think they were
In 1993 I used to sell the Amiga 500 as a toy for kids. Which was essentially a slight upgrade from the 1000, the model you are making these claims for. No the 500 could not do these things. The Amiga 2000, 3000 were starting to be capable of what you are claiming for the 1000 but even then... this is a serious stretch.
Glad you agree.
But at least Microsoft has shown that it can design good hardware. Their mice and keyboards are terrific so maybe the Slate has a chance. Time will tell.
I think with the Slate it is going to come down to pricing. How aggressively do they want to price these devices? If they lose $50 each and move 100m units then they start to change the culture and but they are only out $5b. If they only sell a few million they may not have any impact. On the ARM side, the use of the term "Windows RT" which is going to be very confusing for consumers. I remember the (very good) Windows CE keyboard tablets that existed in the 90's and ran about $1200 in place of laptops causing massive confusion. We'll have to see how they handle this.
But it is good to see Microsoft showing some leadership again.
Microsoft's server revenue was $4.5b last quarter growing at 14% year over year. Yes sharepoint, SQL Server, Dynamics... are something to write home about.
The public has much more control over government than it does over business. And while there is some over regulation right now, I'd say you are screaming fire during a flood.
If you mean the iPhone app store, Apple doesn't want serious apps. They want the iOS devices to be secondary devices. And as secondary devices there are tons of applications that allow for viewing, editing and replying to data. QlikView (an end user business intelligence layer) iPhone client for example.
If you mean for OSX. there's little advantage to expensive apps through the app store, except for anti-piracy. And that might be enough.
Nonsense.
Compaq was a huge innovator, they brought down the size and weight of portables and arguably invented the laptop.
Zeos was an innovator in micro electronics and pen based computing a decade before the OS had any support for it.
Micron was a huge innovator in memory technology.
Dell was an innovator in the manufacturing process and brought a degree of customization never seen before to electronics at good prices.
Packard Bell developed all sorts of ease of use features like: color coded cabling systems so that naive users could assemble a computer, their own DOS shell....
Most of those companies didn't survive. There has been a race to the bottom for the since 2000. But there certainly was a point where PC companies were innovators. Atari and Commodore were vastly vastly inferior to the PCs of the early 1980s. They were quite often 10% of the price so no one expected them to compete. I suspect you hearing a version of history that's a bit biased.
Not really. I've seen awesome tablets from Fuji and Lenevo for the last decade and Microsoft One Note. What I haven't seen was a commitment on the OEM's part to driving down the cost of crucial components like the hinge.
But those types of tablets and the iOS / Android tablets which are touched based are fundamentally different in intent.
Compare that to the "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" ads.
The Lauren ad was quite successful. Microsoft has tremendous brand awareness. The problem is people used lockdown or poorly maintained windows machines at work and associated their work machine with what Windows is capable of. To get out of that they would need to do something that would alienate corporate customers, like the Dude you're getting a Dell.
Windows Phone is good,
The Windows Phone is good, what it is not is compelling. To get someone to switch you don't need to be good, you need to be, in at least some ways far better. IN 2008 the people who had iPhones could tell me what was better about them than my Blackberry. And even before that the ads were pretty clear about what was better pre release iPhone ads.
XBox is good
And XBox sells well.
Zune was really good
It was. It had some nice features. But iTunes and the integration is what it didn't have.
It is often more than the price of Windows. Both Sony and Dell have put it in the $50-75 range.
There are 2 layers here. The first layer is inclusion of signing authorities. There are not going to be many of those in hardware: Microsoft , probably a few Asian ones, someone like Verisign and that's it. And those will be the only people the hardware will accept as authorities by default. The end user will be able to add their own keys to the BIOS but that needs to be hard enough that people who don't understand that this is like giving up the root password don't do it casually.
The way most Linuxes will get on is not by becoming a signing authority, for which the standards are very very high, but asking a well respected signing authority to sign their kernel. Microsoft, as a signing authority has already agreed to help here. So what will happen is RedHat will submit the kernel to Microsoft and Microsoft will sign the RedHat kernel. When the hardware tries to load it will identify itself as signed by Microsoft, provide a number (encrypted checksum) which proves that this exact binary was provided to Microsoft and signed. The hardware doesn't know who RedHat is, all it knows is that Microsoft confirmed that this kernel is legit. Microsoft isn't confirming that the kernel "works" but they are confirming this exact binary did come from RedHat and not some 3rd party. The purpose of this signing system is not to stop RedHats, or Ubuntu or anything like this but rather rootkits and possibly piracy. Microsoft has been clear they are not interested in creating complications for Linux, you want a kernel with special permission, pay $80 and Microsoft will sign it.
Now what Canonical is doing is trying to avoid even that, creating a shim system for Linux users so that the boot-loaders get authenticated not kernels. That way Linux users run only with protected boot-loaders but unprotected kernels while Windows users have the extra layer of security which Linux people don't want. And Microsoft is fine with that strategy. So assuming Canonical is successful they are going to sign each boot-loader and you will need to pay once per boot-loader not even once per kernel.
Both Gnome and KDE do provide services to programs. In fact the whole move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 was driven by needing to provide services to programs that Gnome 2 was architected to support. Window managers are replaceable under Gnome and KDE.
Your rant seems to be free floating misinformation.
My guess is that you are long time Gnome 2 user. In which case you are already invested. If Mate fails then you go through the transition away from Gnome 2 later. That's all.
Here is my opinion on the matter. That this is a specific group:
Ubuntu brought in a huge group of people who learned Linux from Ubuntu. Their only real experience was Gnome 2.
Ubuntu goes after the netbook and then tablet market.
At this point they would be ready to switch to another distribution but Gnome 3 is a major change.
So for the first time they are becoming Linux users, with no desktop or distribution home. In then end some will go KDE, some Gnome 3, some LXDE or XFCE, who know some might decide they like a BSD or even AIX better. But the Gnome switch and the Unity switch is what is forcing the whole deal and they are none too happy.
AC interesting article, though you are reading that backwards. T Rowe evidentially had a stake in the shares prior to the IPO. They bought a state before public trading for their investment vehicles.
What I've seen is that many apps are starting to have 2 versions:
a) The internet version
-- designed the way the developer wants
-- paid upgrades
-- weak or weaker tie to iOS version
b) The app store version
-- designed the way Apple wants
-- free upgrades (or rarely 100% rebuy upgrades)
-- strong tie to the iOS version via. iCloud
That's a really interesting choice. So far I've always gone for the internet version because the app store worries me. I like the idea of iCloud integration, but most of what I want I could get though dropbox and sym/hard links. I could get the update management the more traditions way (http://www.macupdate.com/desktop/) but frankly all the apps check by themselves at this point mostly.
But I don't know the App store is "in trouble". I think there is likely to be a fork in what you get where. The App store might have lots of inexpensive simple applications, free demos, desktop support for phone apps and other apps that are single purpose while the retail side focus on the $20 on up apps which are more versatile. I don't think it is good that the market is forking creating two software ecosystems with different tastes.
I understand and I agree. The ability to be a commanding presence is worth real money, Exxon would have to pay cash to get that same kind of buzz, that Microsoft gets by virtue of who they are. And as you mention that marketing money is just like a cash subsidy. My point 10 up is that that legal. What Exxon can do, Microsoft can do. Its only the things Exxon could not do, that Microsoft is forbidden from doing.