Even if eventually Google takes PayPal's place as the big, evil payment company? What the hell are you going to do to escape it when the company controlling the entire Internet is evil and now in charge of the payment system too?
How does that have anything to do with anything? They're going to do something extra evil with the payment system because they have a big search engine? Your question boils down to "what will you do when the payment processor is evil." Except that it already is. Paypal is more evil than Google could even pretend to be. I mean for fuck's sake, they're a payment processor that steals users' money at random. How much worse could it possibly get?
On top of that, the amount of public scrutiny Google is under is so far in excess of what Paypal is that they can't get away with doing anything evil. I mean look at the stuff they've been doing lately that isn't even remotely evil but everyone is dumping on them (mostly because of this and this).
And if you did, you'd be foolish, because the way to discover someone's intentions and motivations is not to ask them, but to observe what they actually do. Google is on an evil path.
Do you want to provide some actual examples? Like something more specific than "their marketing sucks" or "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal doesn't like their new privacy policy"?
No, you misread what he said. What he actually said was he wants to be able to transfer money from his bank to another bank directly, using a simple plastic card, rather than having to go through every Guido and Ese who wants his cut. In Europe bank to bank transfers are easy and common. In the U.S. it's expensive and a hassle.
That's correct, but the failure is not on the part of Google, it's on the part of U.S. banks.
I think also the thing to keep in mind is that all the major U.S. banks share ownership of Visa and MasterCard. They don't want to cut out the middle man; they are the middle man.
If they reduce their customers' and associates' choices and level of service for no other reason than to line their own pockets, with a larger percentage of profits taken from said associates in the bargain, then yes.
Except that there isn't "no other reason." There are a whole list of reasons: Paypal is continuously abusing their customers, their and their users and developers are not tied to the fortunes of a company that everyone from Apple to Visa is already trying to stomp into the ground, developing their own payment service allows them to make changes to the payment service itself when doing so is necessary to improve their products, etc.
You're assuming the opportunity is not already being taken. He doesn't have to discontinue iOS development to keep developing for Android. And it seems very, very unlikely that spending 20% more time on iOS is going to substantially increase sales there: Likely he already has most of the customers who want his game. The better approach is to figure out why you aren't getting the same level of penetration on Android and do something about it, because that's where the untapped market is.
If you drop support, but your app still remains on the app store, you continue making $2X until the already-supported hardware becomes obsolete. Discontinuing support means you raise profits from $X to $2X for some amount of time.
Which is, of course, not really dropping support. Because the next bug someone reports which you realize is significant and would make you an thousand extra sales on Android if you fixed, you decide to fix. And then that happens a few more times, meanwhile the installed base of Android increases by ten million devices and you end up getting more Android sales solely by virtue of that, which makes you decide it's cost effective to work on the Android version even more, etc.
On top of that, the company never said 80% of their time was spent on iOS bugs. In fact, they specifically stated how they desired to spend more time on content, so one could safely assume that at least some of that 80% is on content.
Which is irrelevant unless you actually know how much time they spent on iOS bugs. It could be 79% of the time or 1% of the time. Which is still irrelevant to the fact that you can't compare percentages of different values to determine which is bigger in absolute terms.
On top of *that*, 20% is still a greater share of time than the 5% share of revenue.
Which is exactly the thing I already explained is a totally inane thing to care about. You can't compare percentages of time to percentages of revenue because they're different amounts. 5% of the revenue could still be several times as much as 20% of the development budget.
Let me see if I can make you understand why it's stupid. Let's suppose that you divide the development budget into pieces and then assign portions of the revenue to each development cost. The average development cost will naturally equal its percent share of the revenues. Then some will provide better and worse than average bang for the buck. So let's say you now create a heuristic that says whatever has worse than the average bang for the buck, you cut. The problem is this: As soon as you cut whatever that is, you change the average. It used to be that half your development costs were above average and half were below, and now you've cut half of them out. Well, now there is a new average, and a quarter of the original development costs are now below the new average. Repeat this process a couple of times and you end up with a product that costs 0.1% as much to develop and brings in 2% as much revenue as it used to. Which is a great way to cut 99.9% of costs if you don't mind losing 98% of your revenue.
The reason for that is because the heuristic is stupid. You don't compare one development cost to the other development costs, you compare it to the amount of revenue it produces, and if you come out ahead then you keep it.
You're obviously not very good at math. If you're spending $X on development but still making $2X in returns, you end up losing $X by discontinuing development. That doesn't change just because you spent $4X on development on another platform and then made $20X. Losing $X is losing $X.
On top of that, have you considered that spending 20% of the time on a platform that has 50% of the users may be a bad idea? How about spending equal time on it, so that your app doesn't suck on that platform and your sales don't keep dropping?
It doesn't search for synonyms of a single word if you put it in quotes. And as for autocorrect, most of the time it's right and when it isn't you just click the link that says "yes, I really meant the less common search term, it wasn't a typo."
Most of the time that's a useful feature. Yes, if I type 'quick' then pages that say 'fast' are also useful. And in the few cases they aren't, you can put the individual word in quotes to get the exact phrase.
They shop with whatever flexibility they have in their monthly expenses. "What?! You don't offer a phone with that? See ya!!"
The obvious way to solve this is by offering a payment plan for the phones. Then you can get whatever phone you want, no up front cost, based on how high a monthly fee you can afford.
But the subsidy goes away, because if you want to buy your phone outright, you get a much lower monthly bill. And if you want to buy a cheaper phone, you get a much lower phone payment.
There is a pretty obvious way for the phone companies to solve this. You offer a series of plans, some of which include no subsidy and are correspondingly much cheaper, others of which provide a fixed subsidy (e.g. $400) that you can apply toward any phone once every two years, and have correspondingly higher monthly fees. Those who get reimbursement can choose the latter plans (which will be much less distortionary because the subsidy is a fixed amount rather than varying based on device type), and everyone else can choose the cheaper plans and then choose a phone based on a combination of features and price.
I'm not even seeing any particular reason why a single phone company couldn't do this unilaterally -- the fixed-amount subsidy should still be competitive with other carriers' subsidized plans. You can even just come right out and say it: We have new unsubsidized plans, they're much cheaper because it's BYOD. It's not like the customer is going to be angry that you've giving them a chance to take a less expensive phone and get a discount for it.
I mean they've got marketing departments. If you actually want customers to realize that they're better off paying $55/month but paying $500 up front for a phone (or, once you have that choice, maybe $400 or $350) than they would be paying $80/month for two years to subsidize a $500 phone, you can make that clear to them.
What are you on about? He knows it's got a 7-inch display, he knows about how much it costs, he knows what software it runs. Does it really matter if the processor is 1.4GHz vs. 1GHz, or it has two cameras instead of one? You'll be able to use it to read books and watch videos either way.
And if he needs four of them, the difference between $800 vs. $2000 for 4 x iPad3 is $1200. That is no small amount of cash. You could use it as half the 20% down payment on a house for crying out loud. (Or you could get a little less than half a Mac Pro, whichever.)
You don't have to take it personally every time someone makes a decision that reduces the ever-shrinking likelihood that Apple will maintain its dominant position in the tablet market.
Win8 stands a good chance of being the next Vista, but by the time Win9 rolls around, I imagine that most of the important (ie: most-used) programs will have added Metro support
They have to be careful that doesn't lead down the road to perdition. The trouble with expecting good results from developers redesigning for Metro is that if you give developers the impression they're making an app that will be running on tablets, they're going to realize they ought to port it to iOS and Android since they're the #1 and #2 tablet platforms, at which point you've got "the most important (ie: most-used) programs" running on non-Windows operating systems. And then who cares about Win9 if I can run all my software on something not-Windows?
After Windows 7 came out they stopped selling XP for new OEM sales, and it's being discontinued in 2014. At that point the choice of Windows was between 7 or Vista. Of course people picked 7 -- and if they hadn't you would be here telling us how Slashdot panned Vista and half a billion people bought it, given that it was one or the other.
How does that tell anything about whether people will choose 7 over 8 like they chose XP over Vista, now that they're back to having the choice?
I don't need a giant list of all the programs on my computer lying around on my screen waiting for me to click them, especially if it takes away from my ability to do the above.
I...don't think that's mandatory. I'm pretty oblivious to all this unity nonsense since I generally stick to the LTS releases (we'll see whether I decide to switch to Mint after 12.04 is final), but assuming it works anything like the dock in OS X, you get the behavior you're asking for by just taking all the applications out of the dock. Then you open one and it shows up there, just like the task bar.
But the default behavior is useful because you can put the half dozen programs you keep running 99.9% of the time there, which makes it easier for you to open them if you ever reboot your computer (like if the power goes off).
That said, I get what you're saying. It seems to me that half of Linux users are software developers and Canonical has decided they want the other half. The way you design a UI for a programmer is totally different than how you design a UI for your standard issue Farmville customer. Which has actually been one of the problems with Linux previously: The UIs have all been designed to work well for software developers, not so much for others. So I can appreciate what Canonical is trying to do here: They're trying to make something that could convert less computer savvy users to Linux. But now there are a lot of people who don't understand that they aren't the target market anymore, who don't like the new UI because it wasn't designed for them.
Much of their target audience will not do that. It's the power users and geeks on here who make the most noise, but the platforms still sell millions when they're targeted towards average users.
Assuming the "Slashdot posters" who all of those "average users" go to for advice don't tell them to ask for Windows 7 instead of Windows 8 on their next PC, as happened with Vista.
Remember what Slashdot said about the iPod, iPhone, and iPad?
You may notice those products are each made by a different company than Windows 8 is. Query whether that may change the result.
Then don't use touch? Remove all the Metro apps from the Start screen and pin only your desktop apps and you'll end up with something like Windows 7 with a glorified start menu.
That's the problem though. Sure, you can reconfigure it to be like Windows 7...but WTF? If that's better then why are they wasting everybody's time developing something that serves only to make everybody turn it back off?
Which is the same problem with the dichotomy between tablets and desktops. There is a reason that iOS is not MacOS and Android is not Ubuntu or Mint or ChromeOS. What Microsoft is obviously trying to do is get everyone on the desktop used to their tablet UI so that they can sell tablets and have people be familiar with them. But that's total fail, because having a tablet UI on a desktop is crap. And if everybody changes it back right away then they both never become familiar with it and associate it with fail (on top of the fail of not running legacy apps on ARM) so that the tablets get associated with fail and nobody buys them. Or, as is far more likely, just nobody buys Windows 8 to begin with -- every business I'm aware of is planning to stick with Windows 7 indefinitely.
I'm happy to pay my bank to secure my money. That's their job, they offered to hold my money, I chose them to do it, and we've mutually agreed that they will do it for a cut of the interest made on storing my money for me.
Well then it sounds like your bank isn't holding up their end of the bargain, because they haven't provided a secure system to get money from your bank account into merchants in the same way that Visa and Google are, which is providing them with this opportunity for arbitrage. (Because if they had, you can pretty well bet the merchants would be using it, because they sure don't like paying those credit card processing fees.) So I'm not sure why you're blaming Google for the failure of the bank to provide the thing you think they ought to be providing.
They can sell that info to sleazy marketers who then go out and astroturf the reviews on epinions, bestbuy, amazon, wordpress, and newegg.
Except that their privacy policy doesn't, so far as I can tell, say anything about them using your information for that. And I would be amazed if there isn't a law against it for financial services, because otherwise Visa (and your bank that you like so much) would already be doing it.
What I'm saying is that Google is only doing (2) . They don't give a crap about (1). If you think it's about (1), they may be happy because you like them better, but it's not true and has nothing to do with (1). They don't care if they're refining kittens into sawdust paste, or saving cute baby chipmunks from a big scary leaf. They're only skimming vigorish off of transactions and sticking it in their banks, and nothing else.
So two points here. First, I don't care what they think, it matters what they do. Dislodging Paypal from its market dominance perch is a thing I would appreciate them for doing, regardless of their motives.
But second, how do you even know what their reasoning is? I kind of doubt you've gone and interviewed the individuals who made the decision. Which means that you're just applying the cynic's logic that because they're a corporation, they only care about dollars and never kittens. Doing that deprives corporations of any incentive to care about kittens, because you'll never give them the benefit of the doubt even when they do. And then they proceed to prove you right. I don't see that as a desirable outcome.
I want my bank to give me a smart card, and to use that smart card to securely transfer payments to vendors without paying any other intermediaries whatsoever.
So you want them to design a secure payment system, and issue you a high tech piece of plastic, and keep it secure against attacks, and operate servers to process payments until the end of time... for zero dollars, ever. I mean sure, that would be nice, but unless you want to build it yourself, how do you ever expect that to happen? Why would any company build something like that with no prospect of getting paid, according to your own logic that corporations never do anything except to get money?
I'm sure Google likes it when people rationalize their behavior into somehow "not doing evil," because that makes them seem like they have the high ground, but this is a completely amoral decision. It's driven by profit, profit, and more profit.
Because profit is bad, am I right? Anyone who manages to do something beneficial to humanity, like unseating the abusive and widely-loathed Paypal, must automatically be an evildoer as soon as they find a way to turn a profit doing it?
You understand that what you're engaging in is the corollary to corporate CEOs refusing to consider any course of action unless it converts the greatest volume of live baby kittens into refined, processed baby kitten apparel. By ascribing ulterior motives to any course of action that benefits humanity while turning a profit, you encourage executives to ignore any such positive externalities (because you refuse them any credit for it) and instead have them concentrate solely on eeking that last penny of profit out of anything regardless that they could make 80% as much money while killing 1% as many baby kittens. Moreover, you make unprofitability a prerequisite to any effort that allows anyone to get credit for doing something that benefits the general public, thereby encouraging such efforts to be underfunded and unsustainable.
I have explained why they have to refuse to accept Paypal in order to crack Paypal's dominant market position. The consequences of doing so are 1) that Paypal use goes down, reducing their capacity to abuse users and 2) that Google makes a pile of money. I could give a crap about (2). But (1) is something that somebody needs to do, somehow, the sooner the better. If Google can accomplish that, I say we support that effort -- because it benefits us regardless of whether it also benefits them.
There is a vast difference between thinking about "Don't do drugs" and "live a healthy life"
Of course there is: It's not claiming the middle. You can refrain from doing drugs without actually living a healthy life.
The problem is that with concepts as vague as good and evil, you can't claim the middle. The claim-the-middle version of "don't be evil" is "always be perfect." Which is, of course, impossible, and therefore useless. At best you can rephrase "don't be evil" as "be good or satisfactory," but doesn't that sound kind of silly? It makes it sound like satisfactory is on the same level of desirability as good. "Don't be evil" instead implies that avoiding evil is the goal, and that it should be avoided as much as possible notwithstanding that perfection is unattainable.
Market demand is supposed to drive industry. What people actually want, rather than what's been vacuumed out of their back pockets by their government, and what their government then decides it feels inclined to declassify.
That's a little bit out of context, don't you think? They didn't develop Keyhole as some kind of subsidy for industry. They did it so they could take pictures of Russian nuclear facilities from space etc. It turns out that it, like the internet and GPS, have civilian uses as well. Would you rather that they spent your money and then just kept all that stuff still classified?
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. The only thing that springs to mind is that they didn't immediately release the source for Ice Cream Sandwich, and then everybody was harping about how Android was going to be closed from now on... even though Google said they would release it when it was finished... and then they did release it, and most of those people shut up because they were wrong.
Paypal is paypal. We know what they are and what drives their motives.
Yeah, um... misanthropy?
It's pretty obvious why Google is doing this. Payment services have strong network effects. If all the users have Paypal accounts, all the sellers will accept Paypal. If the sellers only accept Paypal, new users will only sign up for Paypal accounts. Which allows Paypal to steal your money and kill your dog while making you thank them for it.
The only way to unseat them is for a big player (like Google) to say enough is enough and discontinue doing business with a company with such abusive practices. And of course, then they need an alternative to replace it with, so they created one.
I mean what's the worst that could happen, Google Wallet starts behaving like Paypal? Seems unlikely. And even then, how is that any worse than the status quo?
This is a description of Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation. Many have observed that it applies to (among other things) client-server computing as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if eventually Google takes PayPal's place as the big, evil payment company? What the hell are you going to do to escape it when the company controlling the entire Internet is evil and now in charge of the payment system too?
How does that have anything to do with anything? They're going to do something extra evil with the payment system because they have a big search engine? Your question boils down to "what will you do when the payment processor is evil." Except that it already is. Paypal is more evil than Google could even pretend to be. I mean for fuck's sake, they're a payment processor that steals users' money at random. How much worse could it possibly get?
On top of that, the amount of public scrutiny Google is under is so far in excess of what Paypal is that they can't get away with doing anything evil. I mean look at the stuff they've been doing lately that isn't even remotely evil but everyone is dumping on them (mostly because of this and this).
And if you did, you'd be foolish, because the way to discover someone's intentions and motivations is not to ask them, but to observe what they actually do. Google is on an evil path.
Do you want to provide some actual examples? Like something more specific than "their marketing sucks" or "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal doesn't like their new privacy policy"?
No, you misread what he said. What he actually said was he wants to be able to transfer money from his bank to another bank directly, using a simple plastic card, rather than having to go through every Guido and Ese who wants his cut. In Europe bank to bank transfers are easy and common. In the U.S. it's expensive and a hassle.
That's correct, but the failure is not on the part of Google, it's on the part of U.S. banks.
I think also the thing to keep in mind is that all the major U.S. banks share ownership of Visa and MasterCard. They don't want to cut out the middle man; they are the middle man.
If they reduce their customers' and associates' choices and level of service for no other reason than to line their own pockets, with a larger percentage of profits taken from said associates in the bargain, then yes.
Except that there isn't "no other reason." There are a whole list of reasons: Paypal is continuously abusing their customers, their and their users and developers are not tied to the fortunes of a company that everyone from Apple to Visa is already trying to stomp into the ground, developing their own payment service allows them to make changes to the payment service itself when doing so is necessary to improve their products, etc.
You're assuming the opportunity is not already being taken. He doesn't have to discontinue iOS development to keep developing for Android. And it seems very, very unlikely that spending 20% more time on iOS is going to substantially increase sales there: Likely he already has most of the customers who want his game. The better approach is to figure out why you aren't getting the same level of penetration on Android and do something about it, because that's where the untapped market is.
If you drop support, but your app still remains on the app store, you continue making $2X until the already-supported hardware becomes obsolete. Discontinuing support means you raise profits from $X to $2X for some amount of time.
Which is, of course, not really dropping support. Because the next bug someone reports which you realize is significant and would make you an thousand extra sales on Android if you fixed, you decide to fix. And then that happens a few more times, meanwhile the installed base of Android increases by ten million devices and you end up getting more Android sales solely by virtue of that, which makes you decide it's cost effective to work on the Android version even more, etc.
On top of that, the company never said 80% of their time was spent on iOS bugs. In fact, they specifically stated how they desired to spend more time on content, so one could safely assume that at least some of that 80% is on content.
Which is irrelevant unless you actually know how much time they spent on iOS bugs. It could be 79% of the time or 1% of the time. Which is still irrelevant to the fact that you can't compare percentages of different values to determine which is bigger in absolute terms.
On top of *that*, 20% is still a greater share of time than the 5% share of revenue.
Which is exactly the thing I already explained is a totally inane thing to care about. You can't compare percentages of time to percentages of revenue because they're different amounts. 5% of the revenue could still be several times as much as 20% of the development budget.
Let me see if I can make you understand why it's stupid. Let's suppose that you divide the development budget into pieces and then assign portions of the revenue to each development cost. The average development cost will naturally equal its percent share of the revenues. Then some will provide better and worse than average bang for the buck. So let's say you now create a heuristic that says whatever has worse than the average bang for the buck, you cut. The problem is this: As soon as you cut whatever that is, you change the average. It used to be that half your development costs were above average and half were below, and now you've cut half of them out. Well, now there is a new average, and a quarter of the original development costs are now below the new average. Repeat this process a couple of times and you end up with a product that costs 0.1% as much to develop and brings in 2% as much revenue as it used to. Which is a great way to cut 99.9% of costs if you don't mind losing 98% of your revenue.
The reason for that is because the heuristic is stupid. You don't compare one development cost to the other development costs, you compare it to the amount of revenue it produces, and if you come out ahead then you keep it.
You're obviously not very good at math. If you're spending $X on development but still making $2X in returns, you end up losing $X by discontinuing development. That doesn't change just because you spent $4X on development on another platform and then made $20X. Losing $X is losing $X.
On top of that, have you considered that spending 20% of the time on a platform that has 50% of the users may be a bad idea? How about spending equal time on it, so that your app doesn't suck on that platform and your sales don't keep dropping?
It doesn't search for synonyms of a single word if you put it in quotes. And as for autocorrect, most of the time it's right and when it isn't you just click the link that says "yes, I really meant the less common search term, it wasn't a typo."
it doesn't try to 'help' by replacing my acronyms
Most of the time that's a useful feature. Yes, if I type 'quick' then pages that say 'fast' are also useful. And in the few cases they aren't, you can put the individual word in quotes to get the exact phrase.
Obvious troll is obvious. You might want to look up the difference between "can't afford it" and "worse value for money."
They shop with whatever flexibility they have in their monthly expenses. "What?! You don't offer a phone with that? See ya!!"
The obvious way to solve this is by offering a payment plan for the phones. Then you can get whatever phone you want, no up front cost, based on how high a monthly fee you can afford.
But the subsidy goes away, because if you want to buy your phone outright, you get a much lower monthly bill. And if you want to buy a cheaper phone, you get a much lower phone payment.
There is a pretty obvious way for the phone companies to solve this. You offer a series of plans, some of which include no subsidy and are correspondingly much cheaper, others of which provide a fixed subsidy (e.g. $400) that you can apply toward any phone once every two years, and have correspondingly higher monthly fees. Those who get reimbursement can choose the latter plans (which will be much less distortionary because the subsidy is a fixed amount rather than varying based on device type), and everyone else can choose the cheaper plans and then choose a phone based on a combination of features and price.
I'm not even seeing any particular reason why a single phone company couldn't do this unilaterally -- the fixed-amount subsidy should still be competitive with other carriers' subsidized plans. You can even just come right out and say it: We have new unsubsidized plans, they're much cheaper because it's BYOD. It's not like the customer is going to be angry that you've giving them a chance to take a less expensive phone and get a discount for it.
I mean they've got marketing departments. If you actually want customers to realize that they're better off paying $55/month but paying $500 up front for a phone (or, once you have that choice, maybe $400 or $350) than they would be paying $80/month for two years to subsidize a $500 phone, you can make that clear to them.
What are you on about? He knows it's got a 7-inch display, he knows about how much it costs, he knows what software it runs. Does it really matter if the processor is 1.4GHz vs. 1GHz, or it has two cameras instead of one? You'll be able to use it to read books and watch videos either way.
And if he needs four of them, the difference between $800 vs. $2000 for 4 x iPad3 is $1200. That is no small amount of cash. You could use it as half the 20% down payment on a house for crying out loud. (Or you could get a little less than half a Mac Pro, whichever.)
You don't have to take it personally every time someone makes a decision that reduces the ever-shrinking likelihood that Apple will maintain its dominant position in the tablet market.
That's a valid complaint, but what makes you think it's something they're incapable of fixing in the near future?
Win8 stands a good chance of being the next Vista, but by the time Win9 rolls around, I imagine that most of the important (ie: most-used) programs will have added Metro support
They have to be careful that doesn't lead down the road to perdition. The trouble with expecting good results from developers redesigning for Metro is that if you give developers the impression they're making an app that will be running on tablets, they're going to realize they ought to port it to iOS and Android since they're the #1 and #2 tablet platforms, at which point you've got "the most important (ie: most-used) programs" running on non-Windows operating systems. And then who cares about Win9 if I can run all my software on something not-Windows?
After Windows 7 came out they stopped selling XP for new OEM sales, and it's being discontinued in 2014. At that point the choice of Windows was between 7 or Vista. Of course people picked 7 -- and if they hadn't you would be here telling us how Slashdot panned Vista and half a billion people bought it, given that it was one or the other.
How does that tell anything about whether people will choose 7 over 8 like they chose XP over Vista, now that they're back to having the choice?
I don't need a giant list of all the programs on my computer lying around on my screen waiting for me to click them, especially if it takes away from my ability to do the above.
I...don't think that's mandatory. I'm pretty oblivious to all this unity nonsense since I generally stick to the LTS releases (we'll see whether I decide to switch to Mint after 12.04 is final), but assuming it works anything like the dock in OS X, you get the behavior you're asking for by just taking all the applications out of the dock. Then you open one and it shows up there, just like the task bar.
But the default behavior is useful because you can put the half dozen programs you keep running 99.9% of the time there, which makes it easier for you to open them if you ever reboot your computer (like if the power goes off).
That said, I get what you're saying. It seems to me that half of Linux users are software developers and Canonical has decided they want the other half. The way you design a UI for a programmer is totally different than how you design a UI for your standard issue Farmville customer. Which has actually been one of the problems with Linux previously: The UIs have all been designed to work well for software developers, not so much for others. So I can appreciate what Canonical is trying to do here: They're trying to make something that could convert less computer savvy users to Linux. But now there are a lot of people who don't understand that they aren't the target market anymore, who don't like the new UI because it wasn't designed for them.
Much of their target audience will not do that. It's the power users and geeks on here who make the most noise, but the platforms still sell millions when they're targeted towards average users.
Assuming the "Slashdot posters" who all of those "average users" go to for advice don't tell them to ask for Windows 7 instead of Windows 8 on their next PC, as happened with Vista.
Remember what Slashdot said about the iPod, iPhone, and iPad?
You may notice those products are each made by a different company than Windows 8 is. Query whether that may change the result.
Then don't use touch? Remove all the Metro apps from the Start screen and pin only your desktop apps and you'll end up with something like Windows 7 with a glorified start menu.
That's the problem though. Sure, you can reconfigure it to be like Windows 7...but WTF? If that's better then why are they wasting everybody's time developing something that serves only to make everybody turn it back off?
Which is the same problem with the dichotomy between tablets and desktops. There is a reason that iOS is not MacOS and Android is not Ubuntu or Mint or ChromeOS. What Microsoft is obviously trying to do is get everyone on the desktop used to their tablet UI so that they can sell tablets and have people be familiar with them. But that's total fail, because having a tablet UI on a desktop is crap. And if everybody changes it back right away then they both never become familiar with it and associate it with fail (on top of the fail of not running legacy apps on ARM) so that the tablets get associated with fail and nobody buys them. Or, as is far more likely, just nobody buys Windows 8 to begin with -- every business I'm aware of is planning to stick with Windows 7 indefinitely.
I'm happy to pay my bank to secure my money. That's their job, they offered to hold my money, I chose them to do it, and we've mutually agreed that they will do it for a cut of the interest made on storing my money for me.
Well then it sounds like your bank isn't holding up their end of the bargain, because they haven't provided a secure system to get money from your bank account into merchants in the same way that Visa and Google are, which is providing them with this opportunity for arbitrage. (Because if they had, you can pretty well bet the merchants would be using it, because they sure don't like paying those credit card processing fees.) So I'm not sure why you're blaming Google for the failure of the bank to provide the thing you think they ought to be providing.
They can sell that info to sleazy marketers who then go out and astroturf the reviews on epinions, bestbuy, amazon, wordpress, and newegg.
Except that their privacy policy doesn't, so far as I can tell, say anything about them using your information for that. And I would be amazed if there isn't a law against it for financial services, because otherwise Visa (and your bank that you like so much) would already be doing it.
What I'm saying is that Google is only doing (2) . They don't give a crap about (1). If you think it's about (1), they may be happy because you like them better, but it's not true and has nothing to do with (1). They don't care if they're refining kittens into sawdust paste, or saving cute baby chipmunks from a big scary leaf. They're only skimming vigorish off of transactions and sticking it in their banks, and nothing else.
So two points here. First, I don't care what they think, it matters what they do. Dislodging Paypal from its market dominance perch is a thing I would appreciate them for doing, regardless of their motives.
But second, how do you even know what their reasoning is? I kind of doubt you've gone and interviewed the individuals who made the decision. Which means that you're just applying the cynic's logic that because they're a corporation, they only care about dollars and never kittens. Doing that deprives corporations of any incentive to care about kittens, because you'll never give them the benefit of the doubt even when they do. And then they proceed to prove you right. I don't see that as a desirable outcome.
I want my bank to give me a smart card, and to use that smart card to securely transfer payments to vendors without paying any other intermediaries whatsoever.
So you want them to design a secure payment system, and issue you a high tech piece of plastic, and keep it secure against attacks, and operate servers to process payments until the end of time... for zero dollars, ever. I mean sure, that would be nice, but unless you want to build it yourself, how do you ever expect that to happen? Why would any company build something like that with no prospect of getting paid, according to your own logic that corporations never do anything except to get money?
I'm sure Google likes it when people rationalize their behavior into somehow "not doing evil," because that makes them seem like they have the high ground, but this is a completely amoral decision. It's driven by profit, profit, and more profit.
Because profit is bad, am I right? Anyone who manages to do something beneficial to humanity, like unseating the abusive and widely-loathed Paypal, must automatically be an evildoer as soon as they find a way to turn a profit doing it?
You understand that what you're engaging in is the corollary to corporate CEOs refusing to consider any course of action unless it converts the greatest volume of live baby kittens into refined, processed baby kitten apparel. By ascribing ulterior motives to any course of action that benefits humanity while turning a profit, you encourage executives to ignore any such positive externalities (because you refuse them any credit for it) and instead have them concentrate solely on eeking that last penny of profit out of anything regardless that they could make 80% as much money while killing 1% as many baby kittens. Moreover, you make unprofitability a prerequisite to any effort that allows anyone to get credit for doing something that benefits the general public, thereby encouraging such efforts to be underfunded and unsustainable.
I have explained why they have to refuse to accept Paypal in order to crack Paypal's dominant market position. The consequences of doing so are 1) that Paypal use goes down, reducing their capacity to abuse users and 2) that Google makes a pile of money. I could give a crap about (2). But (1) is something that somebody needs to do, somehow, the sooner the better. If Google can accomplish that, I say we support that effort -- because it benefits us regardless of whether it also benefits them.
So, by that analysis, OS X was "open" so long as Apple published the Source to Darwin.
Darwin was open "so long as Apple published the Source to Darwin." OS X wasn't open any more than the binary blog drivers were themselves open.
There is a vast difference between thinking about "Don't do drugs" and "live a healthy life"
Of course there is: It's not claiming the middle. You can refrain from doing drugs without actually living a healthy life.
The problem is that with concepts as vague as good and evil, you can't claim the middle. The claim-the-middle version of "don't be evil" is "always be perfect." Which is, of course, impossible, and therefore useless. At best you can rephrase "don't be evil" as "be good or satisfactory," but doesn't that sound kind of silly? It makes it sound like satisfactory is on the same level of desirability as good. "Don't be evil" instead implies that avoiding evil is the goal, and that it should be avoided as much as possible notwithstanding that perfection is unattainable.
Market demand is supposed to drive industry. What people actually want, rather than what's been vacuumed out of their back pockets by their government, and what their government then decides it feels inclined to declassify.
That's a little bit out of context, don't you think? They didn't develop Keyhole as some kind of subsidy for industry. They did it so they could take pictures of Russian nuclear facilities from space etc. It turns out that it, like the internet and GPS, have civilian uses as well. Would you rather that they spent your money and then just kept all that stuff still classified?
But increasingly, they are closing the openness.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. The only thing that springs to mind is that they didn't immediately release the source for Ice Cream Sandwich, and then everybody was harping about how Android was going to be closed from now on... even though Google said they would release it when it was finished... and then they did release it, and most of those people shut up because they were wrong.
Paypal is paypal. We know what they are and what drives their motives.
Yeah, um... misanthropy?
It's pretty obvious why Google is doing this. Payment services have strong network effects. If all the users have Paypal accounts, all the sellers will accept Paypal. If the sellers only accept Paypal, new users will only sign up for Paypal accounts. Which allows Paypal to steal your money and kill your dog while making you thank them for it.
The only way to unseat them is for a big player (like Google) to say enough is enough and discontinue doing business with a company with such abusive practices. And of course, then they need an alternative to replace it with, so they created one.
I mean what's the worst that could happen, Google Wallet starts behaving like Paypal? Seems unlikely. And even then, how is that any worse than the status quo?
This is a description of Sutherland's Wheel of Reincarnation. Many have observed that it applies to (among other things) client-server computing as well.