You mean, using dirty tricks to corner the market? Using despicable buyout tactics to remove competitors? Strong arming retail and other vendors into not carrying their products in the market place?
(Slick marketing and having a cool, usable product isn't a dirty trick. Unless you consider competent marketing and hardware/software design to be a dirty trick. Which case I'd think you were working for Palm or the WinMo group at MS.)
Given that Marvel went into bankruptcy ever should be enough evidence that the product just isn't that strong and the fact it was teetering on that edge again earlier this decade proves that the market just isn't that great. Their history is constantly peppered with, "and then they hit a sales slump." Gee, I wonder why? Maybe not everyone wants to look at comics full of sexually obtuse men, beating each other up in skin tight latex?
Professor X is lucky he hasn't been foreclosed on.
Shueisha, a major manga publisher, has never gone into bankruptcy. Neither has Kodansha. Marvel has. Twice. Once after the first XMen movie came out and damn near when the first Spiderman movie came out. DC may have never gone into bankruptcy, but they were in similar binds. Look at the history of either label. The entire history is full of periods of declining sales and
Granted, Shueisha and Kodansha are both major publishers in their own right, but let's face it, it's not until Manga hit it big in the US that a major publishing house like Random House through it's Del Rey imprint that major publishers even took the medium seriously.
Marvel and DC played to their fanboy base and went through a history of shitty sales, declining readership, poor writing and art quality, and at the same time, Japanese publishers have been making huge in roads into foreign markets. Korea has been having smaller scale success as well. It has everything to do with the fact that in foreign countries, comics are targeted at wider audiences than in America, and given the success of these comics in America, it's clear there is a market for comics targeted at wider audiences. The two major American comic imprints are worried about pissing off fanboys and writing to that super niche market and not worried about writing for everyone.
Yes, I am a weeaboo otaku. But the story doesn't end there. When I read books like Transmetropolitan, or V, I just know that western publishers *can* do better. They just somehow refuse to.
Your point being what, exactly? Newer isn't necessarily better. The TI89 is exactly powerful enough for what it needs to do.
It was, powerful enough. It's now not that great anymore. The only upside to the TI89 is the CAS. 3D rendering is also a joke. It's a simple plane! My PSP's GPU can render this in *real freaking time*. The TI89 has the CPU from the Genesis. TI has a lot of balls charging what it does for the 89.
A TI-89 runs on a 68k processor running at 12mHz and it' sbeen around since the early nineties has a better display and number crunching capabilities of a device built in the last two years with a 400mHz ARM processor and a PowerVR 3D chip.
I'd worry about floating point precision but... IT'S A FREAKING 68K. I know the nSpire is almost out but still...
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby didn't come out of the gate in the gate writing Spider-man and X-men. They spent quite a bit of time in the 40's diversified.
Vertigo's figured it out. End comics. let the owner control the property. Watchmen, Transmet, etc. Manga too. Kenshin comes to mind quickly with a 5 year run.
I really hope this forces Marvel to rethink their strategy. I love comics. I don't like super hero books. Super hero books that run for hundreds of issues with no coherent message or vision suck. I don't care if the current run is good, or if it used to be good years or even a few issues ago. Marvel needs to get back to it's roots selling comics that everyone wants to read, not just 30 something fanboys who obsess over whether or not Kevin Smith did justice to the Green Arrow.
The problem with cursive print is that it's an artifact from a by-gone era. Modern pens and pencils don't smudge and ink doesn't spill out of ink bottles anymore.
There's a purported speed gain from cursive, but that fails compared to the readability of block print letters compared to cursive.
(this is also being said of a person who worked at a survey research group that scanned survey data from forms filled in by pen. OCR works so much easier when letters are a more uniform size and shape.)
this is going to end well. I really hope that the crazy right wing are too tied up with healthcare reform to figure out that another one of their favorite intrusions into civil liberties is about to be abolished.
Sometimes it's cheaper to just pay off the plaintiff than to litigate. Blizzard has deeeeeeeeeeep pockets and has a reason to fight this. Let's see where this goes.
Ya know I keep hearing this "vendor lock in" thing mentioned. I don't think it means what they think it means.
I said, "Maybe i should buy a netbook and throw linux on it" to a Mac fanboy friend of mine.
I got hit with what I assume is either a sock full of quarters or a blackjack and woke up handcuffed to the iPhone display at the apple store just after closing. The next day, I bought 3 macbook pros.
I've always wanted to know what it would be like to actually play Marble Madness with an iPhone. Even Jailbroken, there's no decent MAME port for the iPhone.
hi, this is your local isp calling. me and my friends battery life, mobile infrastructure, and fidelity want to have a chat why streaming from your phone is a horrible idea.
47 percent was pulled from the world smartphone market share list.
Presumably 100% of Symbian users wanted their phone when they bought it (well, discounting some unwanted gifts I suppose). If you're going to make claims about product satisfaction after that, you'll need to bring some hard evidence.
How many Symbian users *know* what the hell Symbian is? If you follow the thread you'll see that the point is pretty well made, Symbian smart phones make up a good majority of the sales, but what about app sales? Web presence? Who's using these phones as more than just phones that have keyboards for ease of texting? You'll be surprised what features people will pay for with out thinking about the underlying OS or overall platform.
I just drop photos into iPhoto if I want wall papers, and i drop audio into garage band for editing then export as ringtone.
What's so bad? Finding apps via google *sucks*. As an ex-WinMo user, finding apps is a PITA. App Store is a huge improvement. And I don't get raped in the ass by my telco for an app store.
You realize that Nokia is just as bad as apple with vendor lock in? If you're looking for a phone vendor that's willing to bend over backwards for it's telco overlords, Nokia is it.
Yes, you have user installable apps, but that's only if you're willing to hunt all over for apps or if your network provides it through their price jacked store.
I don't know of any US carrier that has "free" Symbian phones; the phones you're thinking of are Nokia's low-end dumb phones.
Right and wrong.
Replace AT&T, Verizon, et al. with NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, etc in other countries. In America, replace "free" with "cheapish." I'm still willing to wager that the large majority of Symbian users don't even know what Symbian is, or think it's some kind of extreme sex toy.
Also, great cameras? I would compare a 5mp phone cam to a 5mp point and shoot any day and the PnS would win hands down.
I'd hate to break it to you, but not everyone's interested in endlessly tweaking their phone until they get it to the point where they think it "works." That segment of the market is incredibly tiny. You may argue that the number of jailbroken iPhones is pretty big, but, why are they jailbreaking iphones instead of picking up WinMo, Android or WebOS(well, Pre) based phones? If you're savvy enough to jailbreak an iPhone i'm pretty sure getting around on Engadget or Gizmodo to shop around for a decent smart phone isn't going to be much of a challenge.
Sometimes getting pretty close out of the box is good enough.
The secret to successful vendor lock-in is making being locked-in to a platform more attractive than locked out.
Quite honestly, Apple's made me pretty happy. I don't want MMS, I don't want 5 different media players, I didn't want Copy/paste.
I want tethering but at this point, it's AT&T holding me back, not Apple.
Out of the box, the iPhone is a pretty good mobile web browser, a decent mail client, a decent MP3 player, and it's also a phone.
Restricting it to ONLY a single source is the EXTREMITY of centralization.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, with electronics, freedom is irrelevant. Give me a device that WORKS first, then worry about freedom. Unfortunately, WebOS, Android, Symbian and WinMo suck enough that iPhone OS looks good.
I don't see anything that Apple brings to the table. Apple's iPhone already costs more than twice than what those other phones cost, it's less capable, has worse battery life, can only be programmed in Apple-approved languages, and has severe restrictions on the kind of software you can write for it. And Apple's overall market share is small compared to Symbian.
The real question about the market share of Symbian is, how many Symbian users *want* to be Symbian users? Out of the ~%47 or so, how many of them actually break into their phone's full features beyond camera, music and phone? Given the rates of users who are regular bluetooth users versus users who aren't, I'd be surprised if even 10% of Symbian users are of the variety, "Oh this thing? It's the crappy phone Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/Tmobile gave me for free."
An unlocked iPhone 3GS without a two year contract already costs around $1400, about three times the price of an entry-level DSLR (if you buy it with a contract, you pay the same, it's just hidden in your monthly fees).
I sure hope you're not citing a number that's not USD. In USD, the cost for an unlocked iPhone is $599.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is the Microsoft of MP3 players.
You mean, using dirty tricks to corner the market? Using despicable buyout tactics to remove competitors? Strong arming retail and other vendors into not carrying their products in the market place?
(Slick marketing and having a cool, usable product isn't a dirty trick. Unless you consider competent marketing and hardware/software design to be a dirty trick. Which case I'd think you were working for Palm or the WinMo group at MS.)
I can use any iPod on Windows with iTunes, and obviously macs for that matter.
Zune barely worked with XP much less Vista.
Given that Marvel went into bankruptcy ever should be enough evidence that the product just isn't that strong and the fact it was teetering on that edge again earlier this decade proves that the market just isn't that great. Their history is constantly peppered with, "and then they hit a sales slump." Gee, I wonder why? Maybe not everyone wants to look at comics full of sexually obtuse men, beating each other up in skin tight latex?
Let me put it this way.
Naruto never went bankrupt.
Professor X is lucky he hasn't been foreclosed on.
Shueisha, a major manga publisher, has never gone into bankruptcy. Neither has Kodansha. Marvel has. Twice. Once after the first XMen movie came out and damn near when the first Spiderman movie came out. DC may have never gone into bankruptcy, but they were in similar binds. Look at the history of either label. The entire history is full of periods of declining sales and
Granted, Shueisha and Kodansha are both major publishers in their own right, but let's face it, it's not until Manga hit it big in the US that a major publishing house like Random House through it's Del Rey imprint that major publishers even took the medium seriously.
Marvel and DC played to their fanboy base and went through a history of shitty sales, declining readership, poor writing and art quality, and at the same time, Japanese publishers have been making huge in roads into foreign markets. Korea has been having smaller scale success as well. It has everything to do with the fact that in foreign countries, comics are targeted at wider audiences than in America, and given the success of these comics in America, it's clear there is a market for comics targeted at wider audiences. The two major American comic imprints are worried about pissing off fanboys and writing to that super niche market and not worried about writing for everyone.
Yes, I am a weeaboo otaku. But the story doesn't end there. When I read books like Transmetropolitan, or V, I just know that western publishers *can* do better. They just somehow refuse to.
Your point being what, exactly? Newer isn't necessarily better. The TI89 is exactly powerful enough for what it needs to do.
It was, powerful enough. It's now not that great anymore. The only upside to the TI89 is the CAS. 3D rendering is also a joke. It's a simple plane! My PSP's GPU can render this in *real freaking time*. The TI89 has the CPU from the Genesis. TI has a lot of balls charging what it does for the 89.
A TI-89 runs on a 68k processor running at 12mHz and it' sbeen around since the early nineties has a better display and number crunching capabilities of a device built in the last two years with a 400mHz ARM processor and a PowerVR 3D chip.
I'd worry about floating point precision but... IT'S A FREAKING 68K. I know the nSpire is almost out but still...
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby didn't come out of the gate in the gate writing Spider-man and X-men. They spent quite a bit of time in the 40's diversified.
Vertigo's figured it out. End comics. let the owner control the property. Watchmen, Transmet, etc. Manga too. Kenshin comes to mind quickly with a 5 year run.
I really hope this forces Marvel to rethink their strategy. I love comics. I don't like super hero books. Super hero books that run for hundreds of issues with no coherent message or vision suck. I don't care if the current run is good, or if it used to be good years or even a few issues ago. Marvel needs to get back to it's roots selling comics that everyone wants to read, not just 30 something fanboys who obsess over whether or not Kevin Smith did justice to the Green Arrow.
The problem with cursive print is that it's an artifact from a by-gone era. Modern pens and pencils don't smudge and ink doesn't spill out of ink bottles anymore.
There's a purported speed gain from cursive, but that fails compared to the readability of block print letters compared to cursive.
(this is also being said of a person who worked at a survey research group that scanned survey data from forms filled in by pen. OCR works so much easier when letters are a more uniform size and shape.)
YOU were ironic.
The RNC was serious.
For some reason I read it in my head with the voice of Billy Mays.
"Billy Mays here for UBUNTU! ..."
this is going to end well. I really hope that the crazy right wing are too tied up with healthcare reform to figure out that another one of their favorite intrusions into civil liberties is about to be abolished.
I'd say that the ratio of pocket depth to relevance to core business is favoring blizzard to not settle and take up litigation.
Sometimes it's cheaper to just pay off the plaintiff than to litigate. Blizzard has deeeeeeeeeeep pockets and has a reason to fight this. Let's see where this goes.
Ya know I keep hearing this "vendor lock in" thing mentioned. I don't think it means what they think it means.
I said, "Maybe i should buy a netbook and throw linux on it" to a Mac fanboy friend of mine.
I got hit with what I assume is either a sock full of quarters or a blackjack and woke up handcuffed to the iPhone display at the apple store just after closing. The next day, I bought 3 macbook pros.
Maybe that's what he means?
I've always wanted to know what it would be like to actually play Marble Madness with an iPhone. Even Jailbroken, there's no decent MAME port for the iPhone.
hi, this is your local isp calling. me and my friends battery life, mobile infrastructure, and fidelity want to have a chat why streaming from your phone is a horrible idea.
my last phone before I converted to the cult of iPhone let me upload jpgs, mp3s and other stuff through bluetooth
Too bad it was a RAZR.
47 percent was pulled from the world smartphone market share list.
Presumably 100% of Symbian users wanted their phone when they bought it (well, discounting some unwanted gifts I suppose). If you're going to make claims about product satisfaction after that, you'll need to bring some hard evidence.
How many Symbian users *know* what the hell Symbian is? If you follow the thread you'll see that the point is pretty well made, Symbian smart phones make up a good majority of the sales, but what about app sales? Web presence? Who's using these phones as more than just phones that have keyboards for ease of texting? You'll be surprised what features people will pay for with out thinking about the underlying OS or overall platform.
I just drop photos into iPhoto if I want wall papers, and i drop audio into garage band for editing then export as ringtone.
What's so bad? Finding apps via google *sucks*. As an ex-WinMo user, finding apps is a PITA. App Store is a huge improvement. And I don't get raped in the ass by my telco for an app store.
You realize that Nokia is just as bad as apple with vendor lock in? If you're looking for a phone vendor that's willing to bend over backwards for it's telco overlords, Nokia is it.
Yes, you have user installable apps, but that's only if you're willing to hunt all over for apps or if your network provides it through their price jacked store.
I don't know of any US carrier that has "free" Symbian phones; the phones you're thinking of are Nokia's low-end dumb phones.
Right and wrong.
Replace AT&T, Verizon, et al. with NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, etc in other countries. In America, replace "free" with "cheapish." I'm still willing to wager that the large majority of Symbian users don't even know what Symbian is, or think it's some kind of extreme sex toy.
Also, great cameras? I would compare a 5mp phone cam to a 5mp point and shoot any day and the PnS would win hands down.
I'd hate to break it to you, but not everyone's interested in endlessly tweaking their phone until they get it to the point where they think it "works." That segment of the market is incredibly tiny. You may argue that the number of jailbroken iPhones is pretty big, but, why are they jailbreaking iphones instead of picking up WinMo, Android or WebOS(well, Pre) based phones? If you're savvy enough to jailbreak an iPhone i'm pretty sure getting around on Engadget or Gizmodo to shop around for a decent smart phone isn't going to be much of a challenge.
Sometimes getting pretty close out of the box is good enough.
The secret to successful vendor lock-in is making being locked-in to a platform more attractive than locked out.
Quite honestly, Apple's made me pretty happy. I don't want MMS, I don't want 5 different media players, I didn't want Copy/paste.
I want tethering but at this point, it's AT&T holding me back, not Apple.
Out of the box, the iPhone is a pretty good mobile web browser, a decent mail client, a decent MP3 player, and it's also a phone.
Restricting it to ONLY a single source is the EXTREMITY of centralization.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, with electronics, freedom is irrelevant. Give me a device that WORKS first, then worry about freedom. Unfortunately, WebOS, Android, Symbian and WinMo suck enough that iPhone OS looks good.
I don't see anything that Apple brings to the table. Apple's iPhone already costs more than twice than what those other phones cost, it's less capable, has worse battery life, can only be programmed in Apple-approved languages, and has severe restrictions on the kind of software you can write for it. And Apple's overall market share is small compared to Symbian.
The real question about the market share of Symbian is, how many Symbian users *want* to be Symbian users? Out of the ~%47 or so, how many of them actually break into their phone's full features beyond camera, music and phone? Given the rates of users who are regular bluetooth users versus users who aren't, I'd be surprised if even 10% of Symbian users are of the variety, "Oh this thing? It's the crappy phone Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/Tmobile gave me for free."
An unlocked iPhone 3GS without a two year contract already costs around $1400, about three times the price of an entry-level DSLR (if you buy it with a contract, you pay the same, it's just hidden in your monthly fees).
I sure hope you're not citing a number that's not USD. In USD, the cost for an unlocked iPhone is $599.
At what point will libertarians contempt for humanity end?