I don't think that's really an accurate analogy. Bill Gates was a business guy. Microsoft's business model has been to identify and destroy any and all threats to Windows. It still is. The problem for them is that you can't win in the long-term when you're constantly playing defense like that. Eventually you get a competitor that you just can't kill before they become a significant player, and it all goes downhill from there.
Apple is a different story. It's kind of hard to predict where they'll go from here, because their business model as a high-volume premium brand requires them to be continuously entering new markets. Because the old markets become commodity markets as competitors improve their products, which requires Apple to either lower their prices or lose market share. And they generally don't lower their prices, so you can see that e.g. Android has taken the pole position in the smart phone market, and is likely to take a large chunk of the tablet market within a year or two. When that happens, to stay on top, Apple has to enter a new market: Mac -> iPod -> iPhone -> iPad -> ? So what's next? And what's next after that?
They may or may not be able to pull a couple more transitions like that off without Jobs, but it seems unlikely to continue indefinitely. In fact, what I would expect to get them sooner than their inability to make good on a product launch is that anyone of their size quickly starts accumulating powerful adversaries, telecommunications carriers, movie studios, Microsoft, etc., who notice Apple taking a huge chunk of their prospective margins and each make efforts to claw them back. I suspect Apple would have a serious problem price-wise if AT&T and Verizon both decided they were done subsidizing iOS devices, for example. And we all know what Microsoft is capable of when you threaten Windows dominance, etc.
More than 80 percent of Microsoft revenues are from corporations or parts of corporations or bonds of corporations they own.
I somehow doubt it works as you're supposing. If those corporations are just different pieces of Microsoft (e.g. Microsoft UK), they're still tied to revenues from Microsoft products that are fading in relevance.
If they're not then you're just talking about the interest they're collecting on their cash reserve, which has almost nothing to do with their actual operations: If Windows begins a decline that would require an entirely not cost effective investment to recover from, Microsoft may do well to just exist the software business and keep issuing that 80% of revenues as a dividend indefinitely instead of burning their capital trying to preserve market share in a market that may quickly be evolving into a low-margin commodity market.
Yeah, but man, a it's a completely solid state heat pump that dumps waste heat as usable light - now that's something. Just imagine: every server, instead of needing cooling, can have this stuck to the heatsink and mounted on a tall pole. No more datacenter, we'll have datapoles, and our streets will be full of them:)
You're not thinking like an evil genius. You've got a 10MW data center. You have a way to convert the heat load into light. And now you want to distribute it all over and make street lights out of it?
These cases help to make Joe Sixpack/Kegpack afraid of downloading. And that does impact file sharing.
Not by any evidence it doesn't. The amount of file sharing going on more than doubled in the first three years after they started suing people.
Although I suppose by "impact" you could mean "publicize the existence of file sharing and make people hate the record labels enough to use it instead of paying."
No one has been sued for *downloading* music. You get sued for uploading/distributing/making available.
I kind of wonder if there is any actual legal reason for that, or if it's just that the only way to catch a downloader is to be the uploader and the RIAA wouldn't be caught dead uploading "pirated" music.
The users of Google's products do not physically pay money to Google, advertisers do. Advertisers physically pay money to Google's advertising business unit.
The users of the construction company's products do not physically pay money to the construction company, bankers do. Bankers physically pay money to the construction company's mortgage loan business unit.
Disprove this fact. Not by straw man comparisons to hypothetical unrelated businesses or analogies, but by disproving that Google makes money from ads.
I am not contending that they make zero dollars from advertising. They make the same commission on advertising by having an internal ad network as they would have to pay a third party ad network if they didn't. And it turns out that that commission is 49% for custom search and 32% for everything else (and the 49% is obviously only that high because they're in part charging for their search service rather than just the ad network). The remaining value, a majority of the total in either event, comes from the value of the services themselves, their main business comprising some two thirds of the total revenue.
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
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Not sure why people think this is a big issue. Battery replacements for laptops can already be like $150 sometimes. Adding 20 minutes of moderately-skilled labor to that equation doesn't change much.
So you figure it's $200 after labor and markup and they can fix their iPad version N - 1. Or they can spend the same $200 on a brand new Kindle Fire version N + 1, which has whatever level of 'better' they manage to put in it given three or four years of technological progress.
You can kind of see how there might be a lot of converts.
Using a Netbook means you are generally running software that usually was built targeting a much more powerful system - yes it runs, but not well.
Wait, what? Most of today's PC software was designed in the Pentium 4 era. Something like the AMD E-series makes the Pentium 4 look like a silly toy.
On top of that, a netbook processor is substantially faster than the processor in the iPad in absolute terms as well. If you're doing the same task on both, the netbook will be faster, period. The amount of inefficiency you see in 'designed for PC' software is never going to make up for the processor being like four times slower.
In other news, I bought one of the new AMD 6-core FX processors. Despite the miserable benchmarks, that thing feels faster than any other CPU I've had the privilege of using.
Yeah, AMD's marketing department is full of fail. They were telling everyone "50% faster than Sandy Bridge" and giving people high expectations, so after the benchmarks came out instead of people thinking "meh, it's OK" everybody was running around predicting the end of the world.
On top of that, they sent reviewers the FX-8150, the 8-thread version with the worst single thread performance per dollar because you're paying for eight threads whether you use them or not. So the reviewers compared it to the Intel chip that cost the same amount (i5-2500k) and it looks like crap on anything single-threaded. Meanwhile the FX-4170 has better single thread performance and is $100 cheaper.
No, that's the point! Google isn't in the loan business any more than the home builder is. Even if they facilitate loans (or ads), that isn't their business, it's just a means to the end of conducting the actual business.
That doesn't make any sense. The advertiser (say, Ford) pays an ad agency (say, Google) for ad space in the hope that it'll bring more consumers (you) that are buying its products. The consumer (you) pays the advertiser (Ford) back very monetarily, otherwise there'd be no point in it for the advertiser. The non-monetary exchange is between the ad space provider (also Google, and others) and the consumer (you).
I don't think so. You don't buy a car every time you see a Ford ad. Ford is not paying for you to buy a Ford, they're paying for you to consider buying a Ford (which is non-monetary). They make money through the magic of statistics, because some small fraction of they people they pay to consider buying a Ford will subsequently of their own volition actually decide to do so.
Moreover, not all advertisers are even interested in money. If you see an ad for Mitt Romney, he may be as happy to have your vote as your dollar. If you see an ad by the Red Cross, they may want you to donate blood as much as pay money, etc.
I am producing and selling websites for a living. The people that pay me for it are getting their money from selling their products. As a regular consumer I may be buying their products. So... am I paying for my own work? Yes! And No! If you follow the chain of money further than one immediate step then guess what, everybody is in everybody's business, because money goes round and round.
You're still confusing who pays the money with what work is being done. If you make a website, you are in the business of making websites, whether you get paid by cash money from the people you make the websites for, or some other method.
Let's try it one more time. Suppose you make websites for Ron Paul supporters. Ron Paul supporters don't believe in fiat money, so they all pay you in gold. You can't go to the grocery store and buy food with gold, so you just sell all the gold on eBay. Are you now in the gold business? All your money comes from selling gold, after all. You make zero "dollars" from making websites. Never mind that you spend 99% of your time making websites and 1% of your time putting an ounce of gold on eBay once a month, all of your money comes from gold, so your main business is as a gold merchant, right?
Nonsense. You make websites, you get compensated non-monetarily, and you sell the unwanted non-monetary compensation at auction for money. The final transaction doesn't change the line of business you're in, it just changes the form of compensation you accept.
No, because they don't make any money from the fact that the house is paid for by a mortgage. The construction company makes the same money whether they're paid in cash or through a mortgage.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. I mean for one thing it's wrong: They may get some commission from the bank for referring customers, and they certainly get a higher price on the price they can sell a house for by the fact that customers can pay more for a house than they have cash in the bank. But more importantly, how is that different from what Google is doing? The customer won't pay as much for the house if they have to pay cash instead of with a mortgage. The customer won't pay as much for web services if they have to pay cash instead of by viewing ads. The customer provides something to a third party (a mortgage on the house, an ad impression), which is worth money to the third party, and the third party gives that money to the home builder or to Google.
The bank makes money on the mortgage. So it's clearly the bank that's in the mortgage business, because they're
But that's hypothetical and doesn't change the fact that today all their money comes from their ad business.
What you're not understanding is that that isn't where the money "comes from" by any sensible reasoning, unless you want to argue that the money the home construction company makes "comes from" the bank and not the home buyer because the home buyer never touches the loan money, the bank just gives it directly to the construction company. The money "comes from" the thing that actually creates value, which is the services, not the ads.
Let me make it even more clear: Suppose that you're a highly skilled designer of medical devices and as part of your compensation, your new employer agrees to pay up to $500,000 toward the purchase of a home. You find yourself a nice new $500,000 home and your employer pays the money directly to the home builder. You never see a dime of the money or pay a dime for the house, you just get the house and the home builder gets the money. Moreover, your employer is very large and is in the habit of structuring employment contracts that way and it turns out that that is the way the local home building company makes most of their revenues. And because they want to build more houses, they hire a couple of head hunters to find medical device talent and try to get them jobs at the local medical device company to increase local demand for housing, because it gets them more business. Is that home builder now in the medical device industry? Do most of their revenues "come from" headhunting for medical device talent? Of course not. They make homes, not medical devices -- they just get paid by makers of medical devices. This should be obvious because they're making $500,000/head and nobody would ever pay that much to a headhunter -- the value doesn't come from head hunting, it comes from building homes.
I have never said or even implied anything like this.
Going out of your way to point out that they're an advertising company strongly implies that there is a reason why that matters, which causes the reader to try to evaluate what that reason could be and brings to the mind of most readers the common public perception of advertisers as shysters and con men.
You're confusing what I'm actually saying and what you think I'm saying.
What I'm doing is attributing to what you said the thing that most readers will take away from it. I understand that it isn't what you meant, but that doesn't change how it comes across.
In the long ago past, wasn't GMAC GM's most profitable division?
It may be wise keep in mind that in many cases that such things are often just accounting anomalies: Dealers know they can 'lower' the price on the car because they can make it back by whacking you with a higher interest rate or other fees on the loan, which makes the books read like GMAC is the source of that extra money even though it isn't really. Likewise, GMAC would have advantages that other banks making car loans wouldn't, e.g. a dealer network that can move repossessions as used cars at dealership prices instead of fire sale auctions, because they're a car company, not a bank.
The problem is convincing geeks to all give money to the same organization, on a consistent basis, even after said groups issues a press release they don't like.
Speaking of which, you all may be interested in this link and specifically the box that says "I want to donate this amount monthly."
Innovation requires more effort than genius. There are few "Ah-ha!" developments that come to people in the middle of the night in a dream. Patents are intended to create a profit incentive for people to put in the requisite effort, thereby encouraging innovation for the public good.
This is the key argument for why software patents need to be destroyed but other patents can sometimes be useful. Because with software, 2/3rds of the expense is testing the code and removing the bugs. Which means that if you aren't engaged in copyright infringement, all that testing has to be duplicated. On top of the cost of actually reimplementing whatever allegedly patentable ideas were put forth, which is larger in software than in other industries because reverse engineering is plodding work -- in many cases it's more expensive to copy than to do a novel implementation (e.g. samba needing to reverse engineer crappy SMB instead of just starting over with something cleaner).
The US government could theoretically alter lookups of any specific DNS entry it wished to blacklist via its control of the world DNS root zones, and Verisign (yeah, them again) as the controlling contracted agent holding the root zones would probably act on such an order.
I'm not a DNS expert so do correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that it doesn't work that way. If your domain is thepiratebay.se, a DNS resolver first goes to the root servers and says 'where do I find.se'? Then it goes to the DNS server for.se and asks it where to find thepiratebay.se, and so on for subdomains. I think to redirect thepiratebay.se, they would first have to redirect all of.se, and I can see how there could be serious objections to that.
Of course, when that happens, the rest of the world will form one or more alternate root zones and the US will have to live within its Great Firewall. Sad, but since the DNS system is driven by consensus, breaking consensus breaks DNS.
Yeah, you kind of get the impression that they have no idea about the forces they're dealing with. The internet only exists as a world-wide unit because it operates on consensus. There is no King of the Internet who sets the rules, or who you can lean on or negotiate with to get what you want. The only way to do anything is to convince everybody that matters that what you want to do is the right thing to do.
All these jackasses who are used to just buying a couple of congress critters and then imposing their will on everybody else are in for a surprise if they keep this up. You can't use legislation to control something that operates world-wide through consensus. You can break it, but you can't control it -- because it just splinters into a hundred pieces if you push too hard on any part of it.
And then all the people who actually know what they're doing have to get together and unfuck whatever damage is done and you'll end up with a new DNS that looks to the existing DNS like Freenet looks to FTP, just to keep all the imbeciles from being able to mess with it any further.
You're making the assumption that the people handling this are responsible and well-informed.
They're not.
They took down the dynamic DNS domain mooo.com and replaced all 84,000 of its subdomains with a message insinuating that they had each been used for child pornography. They seized a totally innocent music blog called dajaz1.com for more than a year while filing sealed continuances in court and refusing to provide any information to the owners before giving it back without so much as an apology. They seized the domain for jotform.com, a site for making web forms, for no apparent reason with no notice.
They're unaccountable bureaucrats playing games with nuclear weapons.
If I understand the summary correctly, it allows apps designed for X to use your phone as the display.
Which is actually a lot better, if you think about it. It lets you have an app 'running' on your Android device anywhere, but with the performance of your 8-core 4GHz x86 PC at home.
The latter get their money from advertising. Yes, they have to put on adequately good TV shows so that enough people watch. Their business is making adequately good TV shows, but their income comes from advertising. Same with most newspapers. Same with Google.
You're still not making the right distinction. The distinction you're making is between the quality of products made by for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.
I'll give you an example: NPR is not-for-profit, but they've gone to an ad-based funding model during the recession because the availability of public and private funding has fallen significantly. Their coverage is still far superior to anything produced by News Corp. or Viacom, notwithstanding that they make their money from ads, because they're concerned about making the best product rather than maximizing return on capital.
Now, you can argue that Google would somehow have better products if they were a non-profit that didn't have to care about shareholders, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they use advertising, subscriptions, donations or whatever else as revenues.
I'm not disagreeing with you exactly, but it is certainly the case that a lot of tabloid type newspapers were certainly created in order to make money first and foremost.
OK, sure. But what does it have to do with the funding method? You're just making the point that some people will consume a terrible product and supply follows demand. The crap they print in the tabloids isn't there because the advertisers want it, it's there because the readers want it.
The question "is this business purely about the advertisers or purely about the tourist readers" is meaningless. You need both for the business to work.
I'm not sure I buy it. The charity is just as dependent on the donors as the guidebook publisher is on the advertisers.
And the "needed for the business to work" criteria just doesn't make any sense. A home construction company isn't going to get any real business if nobody can get a home loan, but that doesn't mean their main business is home mortgages, or that their customers are the banks. That's just how people pay them for their actual business.
Preferable to you and me, obviously. Ask the shareholders though.
I'm sure the shareholders are happy to keep both the web services and the ads -- it seems to be working out pretty well for them. But the fact remains that they would be a highly profitable company with services but not ads, whereas they would be nobody with ads but no services.
I also think it's worth pointing out why I'm bothering to argue with you. I don't work for Google. I don't own any stock. Nobody is paying me to do this. But I find this to be a profoundly dishonorable, despicable way for Microsoft to do business. So I'm going to do everything I damn well can to make sure it isn't an effective way to do business. This is not something we should allow Microsoft to get away with.
How can you possibly argue that they're not in the advertising business? Their main business is advertising. It's a fact. And that's all I said. They get (virtually) no revenue from anything else they're doing. That doesn't mean they're not doing anything else, just that their main business is in advertising.
You're still conflating the business with the party who happened to be the last one to touch the money. The main business of a home construction company is not home mortgages. The fact that the bank is the one who physically supplies the money for the house does not make the bank the customer.
The money does not come from ads, it comes through ads. Advertising is like a loan. The advertiser pays for the product the user is buying, then the user pays the advertiser back (non-monetarily). But the ads are not the business, and the value doesn't come from the ads, they're just a Pareto efficient transaction medium -- the value comes from the services. The primary way they increase revenues is not by getting more advertisers, it's by getting more users.
The reason people make a big deal about it is that it's a propaganda point: If they're an advertising company then they must be disreputable shysters like Donald Draper out to mislead you with into buying shit you don't need with money you don't have. But they're not ad men; they don't make ads. They make web services.
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I don't think that's really an accurate analogy. Bill Gates was a business guy. Microsoft's business model has been to identify and destroy any and all threats to Windows. It still is. The problem for them is that you can't win in the long-term when you're constantly playing defense like that. Eventually you get a competitor that you just can't kill before they become a significant player, and it all goes downhill from there.
Apple is a different story. It's kind of hard to predict where they'll go from here, because their business model as a high-volume premium brand requires them to be continuously entering new markets. Because the old markets become commodity markets as competitors improve their products, which requires Apple to either lower their prices or lose market share. And they generally don't lower their prices, so you can see that e.g. Android has taken the pole position in the smart phone market, and is likely to take a large chunk of the tablet market within a year or two. When that happens, to stay on top, Apple has to enter a new market: Mac -> iPod -> iPhone -> iPad -> ? So what's next? And what's next after that?
They may or may not be able to pull a couple more transitions like that off without Jobs, but it seems unlikely to continue indefinitely. In fact, what I would expect to get them sooner than their inability to make good on a product launch is that anyone of their size quickly starts accumulating powerful adversaries, telecommunications carriers, movie studios, Microsoft, etc., who notice Apple taking a huge chunk of their prospective margins and each make efforts to claw them back. I suspect Apple would have a serious problem price-wise if AT&T and Verizon both decided they were done subsidizing iOS devices, for example. And we all know what Microsoft is capable of when you threaten Windows dominance, etc.
More than 80 percent of Microsoft revenues are from corporations or parts of corporations or bonds of corporations they own.
I somehow doubt it works as you're supposing. If those corporations are just different pieces of Microsoft (e.g. Microsoft UK), they're still tied to revenues from Microsoft products that are fading in relevance.
If they're not then you're just talking about the interest they're collecting on their cash reserve, which has almost nothing to do with their actual operations: If Windows begins a decline that would require an entirely not cost effective investment to recover from, Microsoft may do well to just exist the software business and keep issuing that 80% of revenues as a dividend indefinitely instead of burning their capital trying to preserve market share in a market that may quickly be evolving into a low-margin commodity market.
Yeah, but man, a it's a completely solid state heat pump that dumps waste heat as usable light - now that's something. Just imagine: every server, instead of needing cooling, can have this stuck to the heatsink and mounted on a tall pole. No more datacenter, we'll have datapoles, and our streets will be full of them :)
You're not thinking like an evil genius. You've got a 10MW data center. You have a way to convert the heat load into light. And now you want to distribute it all over and make street lights out of it?
Whatever. I want my huge frackin' laser.
These cases help to make Joe Sixpack/Kegpack afraid of downloading. And that does impact file sharing.
Not by any evidence it doesn't. The amount of file sharing going on more than doubled in the first three years after they started suing people.
Although I suppose by "impact" you could mean "publicize the existence of file sharing and make people hate the record labels enough to use it instead of paying."
No one has been sued for *downloading* music. You get sued for uploading/distributing/making available.
I kind of wonder if there is any actual legal reason for that, or if it's just that the only way to catch a downloader is to be the uploader and the RIAA wouldn't be caught dead uploading "pirated" music.
The users of Google's products do not physically pay money to Google, advertisers do. Advertisers physically pay money to Google's advertising business unit.
The users of the construction company's products do not physically pay money to the construction company, bankers do. Bankers physically pay money to the construction company's mortgage loan business unit.
Disprove this fact. Not by straw man comparisons to hypothetical unrelated businesses or analogies, but by disproving that Google makes money from ads.
I am not contending that they make zero dollars from advertising. They make the same commission on advertising by having an internal ad network as they would have to pay a third party ad network if they didn't. And it turns out that that commission is 49% for custom search and 32% for everything else (and the 49% is obviously only that high because they're in part charging for their search service rather than just the ad network). The remaining value, a majority of the total in either event, comes from the value of the services themselves, their main business comprising some two thirds of the total revenue.
Not sure why people think this is a big issue. Battery replacements for laptops can already be like $150 sometimes. Adding 20 minutes of moderately-skilled labor to that equation doesn't change much.
So you figure it's $200 after labor and markup and they can fix their iPad version N - 1. Or they can spend the same $200 on a brand new Kindle Fire version N + 1, which has whatever level of 'better' they manage to put in it given three or four years of technological progress.
You can kind of see how there might be a lot of converts.
Using a Netbook means you are generally running software that usually was built targeting a much more powerful system - yes it runs, but not well.
Wait, what? Most of today's PC software was designed in the Pentium 4 era. Something like the AMD E-series makes the Pentium 4 look like a silly toy.
On top of that, a netbook processor is substantially faster than the processor in the iPad in absolute terms as well. If you're doing the same task on both, the netbook will be faster, period. The amount of inefficiency you see in 'designed for PC' software is never going to make up for the processor being like four times slower.
In other news, I bought one of the new AMD 6-core FX processors. Despite the miserable benchmarks, that thing feels faster than any other CPU I've had the privilege of using.
Yeah, AMD's marketing department is full of fail. They were telling everyone "50% faster than Sandy Bridge" and giving people high expectations, so after the benchmarks came out instead of people thinking "meh, it's OK" everybody was running around predicting the end of the world.
On top of that, they sent reviewers the FX-8150, the 8-thread version with the worst single thread performance per dollar because you're paying for eight threads whether you use them or not. So the reviewers compared it to the Intel chip that cost the same amount (i5-2500k) and it looks like crap on anything single-threaded. Meanwhile the FX-4170 has better single thread performance and is $100 cheaper.
So is Google in the loan business, or what?
No, that's the point! Google isn't in the loan business any more than the home builder is. Even if they facilitate loans (or ads), that isn't their business, it's just a means to the end of conducting the actual business.
That doesn't make any sense. The advertiser (say, Ford) pays an ad agency (say, Google) for ad space in the hope that it'll bring more consumers (you) that are buying its products. The consumer (you) pays the advertiser (Ford) back very monetarily, otherwise there'd be no point in it for the advertiser. The non-monetary exchange is between the ad space provider (also Google, and others) and the consumer (you).
I don't think so. You don't buy a car every time you see a Ford ad. Ford is not paying for you to buy a Ford, they're paying for you to consider buying a Ford (which is non-monetary). They make money through the magic of statistics, because some small fraction of they people they pay to consider buying a Ford will subsequently of their own volition actually decide to do so.
Moreover, not all advertisers are even interested in money. If you see an ad for Mitt Romney, he may be as happy to have your vote as your dollar. If you see an ad by the Red Cross, they may want you to donate blood as much as pay money, etc.
I am producing and selling websites for a living. The people that pay me for it are getting their money from selling their products. As a regular consumer I may be buying their products. So... am I paying for my own work? Yes! And No! If you follow the chain of money further than one immediate step then guess what, everybody is in everybody's business, because money goes round and round.
You're still confusing who pays the money with what work is being done. If you make a website, you are in the business of making websites, whether you get paid by cash money from the people you make the websites for, or some other method.
Let's try it one more time. Suppose you make websites for Ron Paul supporters. Ron Paul supporters don't believe in fiat money, so they all pay you in gold. You can't go to the grocery store and buy food with gold, so you just sell all the gold on eBay. Are you now in the gold business? All your money comes from selling gold, after all. You make zero "dollars" from making websites. Never mind that you spend 99% of your time making websites and 1% of your time putting an ounce of gold on eBay once a month, all of your money comes from gold, so your main business is as a gold merchant, right?
Nonsense. You make websites, you get compensated non-monetarily, and you sell the unwanted non-monetary compensation at auction for money. The final transaction doesn't change the line of business you're in, it just changes the form of compensation you accept.
No, because they don't make any money from the fact that the house is paid for by a mortgage. The construction company makes the same money whether they're paid in cash or through a mortgage.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. I mean for one thing it's wrong: They may get some commission from the bank for referring customers, and they certainly get a higher price on the price they can sell a house for by the fact that customers can pay more for a house than they have cash in the bank. But more importantly, how is that different from what Google is doing? The customer won't pay as much for the house if they have to pay cash instead of with a mortgage. The customer won't pay as much for web services if they have to pay cash instead of by viewing ads. The customer provides something to a third party (a mortgage on the house, an ad impression), which is worth money to the third party, and the third party gives that money to the home builder or to Google.
The bank makes money on the mortgage. So it's clearly the bank that's in the mortgage business, because they're
But that's hypothetical and doesn't change the fact that today all their money comes from their ad business.
What you're not understanding is that that isn't where the money "comes from" by any sensible reasoning, unless you want to argue that the money the home construction company makes "comes from" the bank and not the home buyer because the home buyer never touches the loan money, the bank just gives it directly to the construction company. The money "comes from" the thing that actually creates value, which is the services, not the ads.
Let me make it even more clear: Suppose that you're a highly skilled designer of medical devices and as part of your compensation, your new employer agrees to pay up to $500,000 toward the purchase of a home. You find yourself a nice new $500,000 home and your employer pays the money directly to the home builder. You never see a dime of the money or pay a dime for the house, you just get the house and the home builder gets the money. Moreover, your employer is very large and is in the habit of structuring employment contracts that way and it turns out that that is the way the local home building company makes most of their revenues. And because they want to build more houses, they hire a couple of head hunters to find medical device talent and try to get them jobs at the local medical device company to increase local demand for housing, because it gets them more business. Is that home builder now in the medical device industry? Do most of their revenues "come from" headhunting for medical device talent? Of course not. They make homes, not medical devices -- they just get paid by makers of medical devices. This should be obvious because they're making $500,000/head and nobody would ever pay that much to a headhunter -- the value doesn't come from head hunting, it comes from building homes.
I have never said or even implied anything like this.
Going out of your way to point out that they're an advertising company strongly implies that there is a reason why that matters, which causes the reader to try to evaluate what that reason could be and brings to the mind of most readers the common public perception of advertisers as shysters and con men.
You're confusing what I'm actually saying and what you think I'm saying.
What I'm doing is attributing to what you said the thing that most readers will take away from it. I understand that it isn't what you meant, but that doesn't change how it comes across.
In the long ago past, wasn't GMAC GM's most profitable division?
It may be wise keep in mind that in many cases that such things are often just accounting anomalies: Dealers know they can 'lower' the price on the car because they can make it back by whacking you with a higher interest rate or other fees on the loan, which makes the books read like GMAC is the source of that extra money even though it isn't really. Likewise, GMAC would have advantages that other banks making car loans wouldn't, e.g. a dealer network that can move repossessions as used cars at dealership prices instead of fire sale auctions, because they're a car company, not a bank.
The problem is convincing geeks to all give money to the same organization, on a consistent basis, even after said groups issues a press release they don't like.
Speaking of which, you all may be interested in this link and specifically the box that says "I want to donate this amount monthly."
It's because they're the media. "Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel."
Which is also why they're starting to lose. Ask yourself, do you get most of your news today from cable TV or from the internet?
Innovation requires more effort than genius. There are few "Ah-ha!" developments that come to people in the middle of the night in a dream. Patents are intended to create a profit incentive for people to put in the requisite effort, thereby encouraging innovation for the public good.
This is the key argument for why software patents need to be destroyed but other patents can sometimes be useful. Because with software, 2/3rds of the expense is testing the code and removing the bugs. Which means that if you aren't engaged in copyright infringement, all that testing has to be duplicated. On top of the cost of actually reimplementing whatever allegedly patentable ideas were put forth, which is larger in software than in other industries because reverse engineering is plodding work -- in many cases it's more expensive to copy than to do a novel implementation (e.g. samba needing to reverse engineer crappy SMB instead of just starting over with something cleaner).
The US government could theoretically alter lookups of any specific DNS entry it wished to blacklist via its control of the world DNS root zones, and Verisign (yeah, them again) as the controlling contracted agent holding the root zones would probably act on such an order.
I'm not a DNS expert so do correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that it doesn't work that way. If your domain is thepiratebay.se, a DNS resolver first goes to the root servers and says 'where do I find .se'? Then it goes to the DNS server for .se and asks it where to find thepiratebay.se, and so on for subdomains. I think to redirect thepiratebay.se, they would first have to redirect all of .se, and I can see how there could be serious objections to that.
Of course, when that happens, the rest of the world will form one or more alternate root zones and the US will have to live within its Great Firewall. Sad, but since the DNS system is driven by consensus, breaking consensus breaks DNS.
Yeah, you kind of get the impression that they have no idea about the forces they're dealing with. The internet only exists as a world-wide unit because it operates on consensus. There is no King of the Internet who sets the rules, or who you can lean on or negotiate with to get what you want. The only way to do anything is to convince everybody that matters that what you want to do is the right thing to do.
All these jackasses who are used to just buying a couple of congress critters and then imposing their will on everybody else are in for a surprise if they keep this up. You can't use legislation to control something that operates world-wide through consensus. You can break it, but you can't control it -- because it just splinters into a hundred pieces if you push too hard on any part of it.
And then all the people who actually know what they're doing have to get together and unfuck whatever damage is done and you'll end up with a new DNS that looks to the existing DNS like Freenet looks to FTP, just to keep all the imbeciles from being able to mess with it any further.
Yeah, it totally costs $2000 to assemble a Mac Pro. That's clearly what it is.
This affects only some "gray businesses"
You're making the assumption that the people handling this are responsible and well-informed.
They're not.
They took down the dynamic DNS domain mooo.com and replaced all 84,000 of its subdomains with a message insinuating that they had each been used for child pornography. They seized a totally innocent music blog called dajaz1.com for more than a year while filing sealed continuances in court and refusing to provide any information to the owners before giving it back without so much as an apology. They seized the domain for jotform.com, a site for making web forms, for no apparent reason with no notice.
They're unaccountable bureaucrats playing games with nuclear weapons.
If I understand the summary correctly, it allows apps designed for X to use your phone as the display.
Which is actually a lot better, if you think about it. It lets you have an app 'running' on your Android device anywhere, but with the performance of your 8-core 4GHz x86 PC at home.
The latter get their money from advertising. Yes, they have to put on adequately good TV shows so that enough people watch. Their business is making adequately good TV shows, but their income comes from advertising. Same with most newspapers. Same with Google.
You're still not making the right distinction. The distinction you're making is between the quality of products made by for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.
I'll give you an example: NPR is not-for-profit, but they've gone to an ad-based funding model during the recession because the availability of public and private funding has fallen significantly. Their coverage is still far superior to anything produced by News Corp. or Viacom, notwithstanding that they make their money from ads, because they're concerned about making the best product rather than maximizing return on capital.
Now, you can argue that Google would somehow have better products if they were a non-profit that didn't have to care about shareholders, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they use advertising, subscriptions, donations or whatever else as revenues.
I'm not disagreeing with you exactly, but it is certainly the case that a lot of tabloid type newspapers were certainly created in order to make money first and foremost.
OK, sure. But what does it have to do with the funding method? You're just making the point that some people will consume a terrible product and supply follows demand. The crap they print in the tabloids isn't there because the advertisers want it, it's there because the readers want it.
The question "is this business purely about the advertisers or purely about the tourist readers" is meaningless. You need both for the business to work.
I'm not sure I buy it. The charity is just as dependent on the donors as the guidebook publisher is on the advertisers.
And the "needed for the business to work" criteria just doesn't make any sense. A home construction company isn't going to get any real business if nobody can get a home loan, but that doesn't mean their main business is home mortgages, or that their customers are the banks. That's just how people pay them for their actual business.
Preferable to you and me, obviously. Ask the shareholders though.
I'm sure the shareholders are happy to keep both the web services and the ads -- it seems to be working out pretty well for them. But the fact remains that they would be a highly profitable company with services but not ads, whereas they would be nobody with ads but no services.
I also think it's worth pointing out why I'm bothering to argue with you. I don't work for Google. I don't own any stock. Nobody is paying me to do this. But I find this to be a profoundly dishonorable, despicable way for Microsoft to do business. So I'm going to do everything I damn well can to make sure it isn't an effective way to do business. This is not something we should allow Microsoft to get away with.
Let me put this another way:
Ninety-nine percent of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs.
How can you possibly argue that they're not in the advertising business?
Their main business is advertising. It's a fact. And that's all I said. They get (virtually) no revenue from anything else they're doing. That doesn't mean they're not doing anything else, just that their main business is in advertising.
You're still conflating the business with the party who happened to be the last one to touch the money. The main business of a home construction company is not home mortgages. The fact that the bank is the one who physically supplies the money for the house does not make the bank the customer.
The money does not come from ads, it comes through ads. Advertising is like a loan. The advertiser pays for the product the user is buying, then the user pays the advertiser back (non-monetarily). But the ads are not the business, and the value doesn't come from the ads, they're just a Pareto efficient transaction medium -- the value comes from the services. The primary way they increase revenues is not by getting more advertisers, it's by getting more users.
The reason people make a big deal about it is that it's a propaganda point: If they're an advertising company then they must be disreputable shysters like Donald Draper out to mislead you with into buying shit you don't need with money you don't have. But they're not ad men; they don't make ads. They make web services.