I just remember from my professor who was a former CFO of 2 fortunate 500 companies and owns a corvette. In the exam he asked what the goal of a company is. If you answered to make money you were wrong. Seriously first day in class, he taught that it was to raise the share price and that it was our goal too as employees if we ever worked for a fortune 1,000 company.
In other courses we were taught good CEOs stay but Wall Street does not like them.
But this is what the new 20 something MBA students have learned, and are eager to get out and start slashing costs like IT and R&D. They learn it from that philosphy and yes it really is taught at universities.
To be honest a question on my exam for finance was "What is the goal of the company". If you answered to make money it was wrong. The whole course dealt with how to manipulate the stock price. That is the goal of business today and of course using debt to accomplish this.
I know this irritates you, but this is seriously taught in business school and these students will take these lessons to work. Oh, and small business yes it was about making money and we covered that for 2 weeks.
A CEO's job is to boost the stock price and he is an evil bastard if he focuses on the company. We even went over game theory which states that a managers job is not to be be fired, not serve the shareholders. Wall Street makes sure they have CEOs who focus on them and not the company nor their jobs. It is not like the bleeding vs the bones because in the Reagan years the courts ruled Wall Street owns the companies. So they rule.
I hate to say it but if you are public it is illegal to not think of htem first and immoral. THey are the true bosses and the CEO is paid to give them results to gamble on. If you think that is disgusting please stay private. I wish I was being a smartass or sarcastic but it is the sad truth and why R&D and IT are treated like crap. My former professor was a VP of finance for 2 fortune 500 companies and drives a corvette.
Not to mention the investors do not care if there is a recession and will always want their return. Since all the assets are gone there is nothing to generate money in the hard times and like my example above the CEO is in it for himself and the ones who made the bad decisions are gone in a carribean island somewhere or at the helm of another company.
I have an idea? You do not see the bond market acting this way. Perhaps if investors were forced to sell back their stocks are a time period for each share like bond expired. If they want to keep playing they could repurchase them. This will encourage them to be stable as the price then will be determined on worth when it matures.
I think that and banning pre and after market trading as well as flash trading would fix the situation. Glass-Seagull did wonders and it is a shame it is gone. It is a gambling hall game with micro second bets today. Please tell me how a company can gain its value or lose it in a micro second? It is gambling and this needs to end. I think we can do a lot but politically, it will all be impossible. Too many far right wing politicians funded by the banks will fillabuster even a debate on this topic and preserve the status quo.
In Business School they are taught intangible assets are just cause and effect relationships that can bring in more value indirectly. An accountant can only provide tangible assets in its books. Tangible means physical.
Now guess how Wall Street determines the value of a company? If you said its accounting books you got a winner. Wall Street classifies it as a loss as no assets can be balanced agaisnt the expense unfortuantely. It is agaisnt accounting principles to do so. Not even land value is in the books believe it or not.
So the CEO is under pressure to make its accounting books look good and all intangible assets or now liabilities to shun and to cut. This is how to raise your share price and by yourself a nice new comfy mansion if you are the CEO
How does refactoring bring shareholder value? How does it boast the company's stock price? How does it increase revenue?.../CEO/PHB voice
First off the CEO is there to make bonus money by screwing the company and leaving in 2-3 years before shit hits the fan. He doesn't care about you or technical debt.... infact he doesn't care about the company.
Its a viscous cycle, but if you want to do innovative and wonderful things do not become a public company. Wall Street only cares about its shareprice and cutting costs with tangable things that can be done on paper. Unfortunately if you lack the funds to do R&D going public is the best option and now you are in a catch 22. Since no benefit on paper can show an increase in assets by refactoring then it is a cost center and the accountants will fight you. Wall Street looks at metrics only on paper with tangable and not software/virtual assets. Sorry you arein this sitation and I would look for work elsewhere because in my experience management always wins and the head always falls from the bottom. Of course the manager will do whatever it takes to keep his job and that comes by blaming the guys with the least amount of power
CEO's are not in it to bring profits for a company. That is not their job. Their job is to boast the share price at all costs. Its taught in finance 101 in any college.
Now imagine you are the CEO. You can invest in R&D and have your shareprice get cut down by almost half in this recession and risk your job for not using the money to hire more marketing and sales people, but if you stay on for 5+ years you will make tons of money and create long term value. Or you eliminate R&D and your company will die within 5 - 7 years right? As CEO you get a 20 million bonus for selling your prized assets that make you money for short term gain and your stock price goes up a good 35%. You do not think such CEOs who do this stay right? They jump ship within 2-3 years with a golden parachute. Even better with that track record you go on raiding the next company for even more money and become a guru and genius to stroke your ego. 90% of CEO's would pick this and let the next CEO take the fall when they go out of business or fade to the competion. Meantime you buy a yatch and retire or buy a bigger one as you ruin the next company, etc.
This is how the real world works.
If this needs to change we have to stop having Wall Street reward short term behavior and start punishing companies like HP who do retarded things for long term shareholder wealth. I do not know how and do not think it is our job to do this. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple initially because of R&D and a lack of results. Wall Street hated him for his long term ideas and R&D. They wanted the mac done cheap like a generic PC. HE came back and risked everything for the IPOD as most CEOs refused to work for Apple thinking they were dead.
But the costs are measured monetarly unfortunately. What is on paper determines its shareholder valuation too so guess where I.T. priority is?
It is frustrating, but good CEO's do things like look at opportunity cost and appreciation which accountants simply do not do. There very nature is to be precise and organized rather than think.
Wow, overpay then sell it 1 month after a product launch at a firesale price. Great geniuses at HP. I think they need a multi million dollar bonus for being so smart. I know neither of us could manage HP's assets so well that he deserves that price.
Corporations prefer Excel than C++ and view I.T. as a terrible waste than does not produce value thanks to the cost center attitude of upper management who are fiancial analysis and accountants rather than former engineers of yesterday.
So more will switch to clouds and salesforce.com and outsource I.T. so they can focus on what they make. Software will grow in intranet and.com portals and clouds. I feel the age of software can acomplish more productivity is over. Witness the folks still on 10 year old Windows XP? It is not the same as the 1990s when I.T. managers made 120,000 a year and companies upgraded every 3 years to the latest MS OS. Today, it is how much will it cost rather than what will it do for me.
Until this changes and Wall Street stops drooling for such people as CEO's I do not see a change. This is hte new norm
Management hates I.T. because their bosses are accountants who view it as a cost center rather than an asset. The problem is the bean counters are all upper management in most fortune 1,000 companies today and frankly do not care about productivity as programmers waste money anyway.
Many are switching to clouds and switching from C#/C++ to Excel. If Excel was fine for these bean counters then it is fine for real programming too. Then they do not have to waste it on I.T. and these silly contracptions called databases.
The accountants are the ones moving to upper management and are saying No to IT. 2 decades ago engineers became CEOs and upper management. All they know is cost and yes a company's job is to make money not blow it on I.T. so bean counters who are accountants get bonuses for cutting it. They are the ones who moved I.T. from investments to cost centers.
Also many accountants feel programming can be done in Excel since they use it all the time. If it can't be done in Excel then it is a waste of money. So Excel and accountants are the reason I.T. is dying and being replaced by clouds.
I normally have respect for haiyfeet as his comments contribute a lot and he knows what he is talking about.
In terms of DRM... IN actually, I find a lot more pirated versions of Windows XP than Windows 7 on a popular torrent site. The windows 7 ones were hackjobs taht required a special bootloader from some guy (seperate download) and with the hacks you get a Windows 7 OS but you can't use Windows update for patch 2334. Some give error messages a lot and so on.
Maybe there is a perfect pirated Windows 7 professional edition out there, but after reading this I decided to stick with Windows 7 home premium with these hassles. Windows XP has been hacked awhile back.
I have not seen a hacked version of Office 2010 either that worked for more than a week or two. Microsoft has got it down well with its DRM. I hate the DRM and I think Microsoft are idiots in their pricing scheme to the Asian world but it is their choice to be stupid. You need to pay if you use their products. Thank god for GoogleDocs and LibreOffice.
Balmer shows he is out to lunch and out of touch with the 99% of everyone else in this world. He has been stating on record "If you can afford a PC than you can afford $600 for a licensing" in the asian market. Hello, these people buy their computers used for crying out loud. $600 for Windows/Office is equilivent of $5,000 for you and I for these folks. Would you pay that?
Maybe the Chinese will make their own nationalistic OS. I would like to say Linux based but Trinity and Gnome 3 make it unusable and inferior compared to Windows. If banks stop requiring IE 6 they could use a different OS.
Marketers keep forgetting that no matter how many times they try to sell us crap that if we can't afford it we wont get it. MS needs to wake up and slash prices heavily and make up by volume. Its better than nothing and I think the Chinese will switch to an Andriod tablet first before paying all the $$$ for a Windows 8 desktop.
Most gamers have left Windows XP a long time ago. What the statistics do not tell you is that most XP users are in China which has between 1/3 to 1/2 of all computers. In the US barely 1 out of 4 people still use Windows XP. It maybe number 2 but Vista and 7 combined almost equals 2/3s with the mac taking the rest.
I have noticed games like World of Warcraft seem slower with the directX 11 api than the Direct 9 which is odd and it shows my ati 5750 has some crappy drivers. Or Directx 9 is so good and less buggy that game makers target it. Directx 11 theoretically should be faster than DirectX 9.
With these gimicks the Chinese are going to keep WindowsXP for a long time and refuse to upgrade. Windows is very expensive to most of the world and seriously, adjusted for inflation would you pay $1500 for the priveledge of running Windows?
With Gnome 3 being useless there is simply no option for Linux
Right now the current climate is government BUD OUT! Government only destroys jobs while the private sector will always correct itself and jobs will magically appear by laying people off etc.
That is the conservative philosphy I am refering too. Austrain economics is laissez fair and anyone who says otherwise is a radical left wing anti American socialist.
That is who is running agaisn't Obama for the president as well as the clowns who fillabuster and say no to everything in Congress. I am not saying I agree in socialism and high taxation but rather greed and a powerful minority on a rigorous idealogy putting fear in candidates trying to make it pass the primaries.
Did you see what Apple did to Samsung in Europe? They can't even enter the market because it has rounded edges and is rectangular?? Whats next Ford claiming having 4 weels is a right only Ford can have? Or a steering wheel on the right.
Since video standards require rectangular screens you can not have a round screen. Amazon also owns 1 click. That is not fair since Windows/Mac standardized on one click so I have to pay a patent fee for someone elses OS that has nothing to do with Amazon.
This is getting insane! I would say it is time we protested and let our politicans know this has to change. Email EFF or IEEE. I am not sounding extreme if you have been reading slashdot these past 2 months. It is a hazard to do business in this toxic environment where even the fonts being rendered on your screen to read my posts are owned by someone else that can sue you.
If I were a phone maker I would be tempted to charge 5x as much as I would for the same phone in Asia where I do not have to worry about I.P. If Apple wants billions just to exist in the US. I would leave the US market as the fixed costs would not be worth it. I would then hire only Asians because of IP threats on operating on US soil.
It did not cost taht much 10 years ago and no they do not do 5x as much R&D. Celebrex is as powerful as an asprin yet costs $$$$. Yet people seeing these commercials on TV want it and you and I both pay for it by our premiums. Fuck them.
They are price gouging and using patents to abuse their power. Their margins are well in the thousands of percents.
How can we punish them with defection when we are stuck with contracts where they can punish us for such a move?
Every other country (ok most) outlaw abusive contracts. They are monopolists so you do not have a choice and they take advantage of it. We are 3rd world in terms of what we get for our prices. Even Africa has better bandwitdth and usage. We are a joke thanks to these clowns.
If a republican gets elected as a president next year I would say very likely, you can bet this will continue or get much worse over 4 years. I imagine in 10 years from now we will pay $500 for internet and phone and it will cost as much as a new car lease. This has got to stop somehow as with medical care it is unsustainable.
If far right wing and Austrain economics were not so prevaliant today, we would trust bust the drug companies, insurance companies, and telecoms to more affordable levels. However in this political climate and voters watching American Idol this is not going to happen anytime soon.
Yeah, but who would buy such HP servers and contracts when they can go all Dell and get everything from a unified vendor! I can get a Dell contract with services and a discount with Dell servers and desktops sold together.
IBM has accounting services, programing, CIO outsourcing, consultations, middleware products, etc. What does HP have? Some guy (probably a kid out of college) who can help integrate some server/client setup? Please. IBM had these things from the begining and has a huge platform. Worse HP looses money from each printer but makes it up in ink. Now how else can you get a great free printer with that HP purchase? Ooops...
This guy is a raider and I give it maybe 5 years max before it goes out of business. I would like to say 2 years more likely. The only salvage I can think of is they become a small company specialising in ink with maybe 500 employees. By the patents and copyrights on their ink refill chips will expire and then what? GONE
Many HP shops would be horrified if Oracle blackmailed them and insisted on millions of dollars if they want their 1,000 HP desktops supported, by a contract. Then the contract would force them to use Oracle Database for more money and would be stuck with Java and so on...
Oracle has been known to use tactics like this to create lockin
Corporations and small businesses like to only buy from one vendor. This is why people buy Dell Poweredge servers even though I think they are garbage. So unless you have expensive specialized servers like Oracle and IBM, HP will lose marketshare in the server room too. They killed off OpenVMS and their Unix and seem more interested in plastic servers than the big iron systems.
This is great news for Dell and Lenovo. If I were starting a business tomorrow and needing PCs I would get some Dells or Lenovos and I can tell you the servers to serve them would also be from the same vendor. I could get discounts and get a unified support contract for them all.
HP is totally stupid. Or maybe the CEO is smart and plans to raid the company and more retarded stock brokers will boast the value of his shares and he will jump ship. What a shame. If you had a time machine and told me back in 1997 that HP would be in trouble selling off its desktop divisions to compete with Apple I would be on the floor laughing. There is no logical reason why HP ended this way other than stupid Fiona and pure greed. My guess is the good management fled the company during the last decade.
I can tell you from experience Toshiba's which are listed as the top SUCK. They are always in a shop I used to work at as they have problems. My exwife and my own had issues. I have an Asus desktop currently and its ok. I only had it for a year, but my exgf bought an Asus laptop and the cheap plastic is coming off it... it was tied with Toshiba for number 1.
Apple I assumed was much more reliable? Acer I can see as well as crap. I see them BSOD in the store all the time hehe
Slashdot Mirror
I just remember from my professor who was a former CFO of 2 fortunate 500 companies and owns a corvette. In the exam he asked what the goal of a company is. If you answered to make money you were wrong. Seriously first day in class, he taught that it was to raise the share price and that it was our goal too as employees if we ever worked for a fortune 1,000 company.
In other courses we were taught good CEOs stay but Wall Street does not like them.
But this is what the new 20 something MBA students have learned, and are eager to get out and start slashing costs like IT and R&D. They learn it from that philosphy and yes it really is taught at universities.
To be honest a question on my exam for finance was "What is the goal of the company". If you answered to make money it was wrong. The whole course dealt with how to manipulate the stock price. That is the goal of business today and of course using debt to accomplish this.
I know this irritates you, but this is seriously taught in business school and these students will take these lessons to work. Oh, and small business yes it was about making money and we covered that for 2 weeks.
A CEO's job is to boost the stock price and he is an evil bastard if he focuses on the company. We even went over game theory which states that a managers job is not to be be fired, not serve the shareholders. Wall Street makes sure they have CEOs who focus on them and not the company nor their jobs. It is not like the bleeding vs the bones because in the Reagan years the courts ruled Wall Street owns the companies. So they rule.
I hate to say it but if you are public it is illegal to not think of htem first and immoral. THey are the true bosses and the CEO is paid to give them results to gamble on. If you think that is disgusting please stay private. I wish I was being a smartass or sarcastic but it is the sad truth and why R&D and IT are treated like crap. My former professor was a VP of finance for 2 fortune 500 companies and drives a corvette.
Not to mention the investors do not care if there is a recession and will always want their return. Since all the assets are gone there is nothing to generate money in the hard times and like my example above the CEO is in it for himself and the ones who made the bad decisions are gone in a carribean island somewhere or at the helm of another company.
I have an idea? You do not see the bond market acting this way. Perhaps if investors were forced to sell back their stocks are a time period for each share like bond expired. If they want to keep playing they could repurchase them. This will encourage them to be stable as the price then will be determined on worth when it matures.
I think that and banning pre and after market trading as well as flash trading would fix the situation. Glass-Seagull did wonders and it is a shame it is gone. It is a gambling hall game with micro second bets today. Please tell me how a company can gain its value or lose it in a micro second? It is gambling and this needs to end. I think we can do a lot but politically, it will all be impossible. Too many far right wing politicians funded by the banks will fillabuster even a debate on this topic and preserve the status quo.
That is the accountants view.
In Business School they are taught intangible assets are just cause and effect relationships that can bring in more value indirectly. An accountant can only provide tangible assets in its books. Tangible means physical.
Now guess how Wall Street determines the value of a company? If you said its accounting books you got a winner. Wall Street classifies it as a loss as no assets can be balanced agaisnt the expense unfortuantely. It is agaisnt accounting principles to do so. Not even land value is in the books believe it or not.
So the CEO is under pressure to make its accounting books look good and all intangible assets or now liabilities to shun and to cut. This is how to raise your share price and by yourself a nice new comfy mansion if you are the CEO
CEO/PHB voice here
How does refactoring bring shareholder value? How does it boast the company's stock price? How does it increase revenue? .../CEO/PHB voice
First off the CEO is there to make bonus money by screwing the company and leaving in 2-3 years before shit hits the fan. He doesn't care about you or technical debt .... infact he doesn't care about the company.
Its a viscous cycle, but if you want to do innovative and wonderful things do not become a public company. Wall Street only cares about its shareprice and cutting costs with tangable things that can be done on paper. Unfortunately if you lack the funds to do R&D going public is the best option and now you are in a catch 22. Since no benefit on paper can show an increase in assets by refactoring then it is a cost center and the accountants will fight you. Wall Street looks at metrics only on paper with tangable and not software/virtual assets. Sorry you arein this sitation and I would look for work elsewhere because in my experience management always wins and the head always falls from the bottom. Of course the manager will do whatever it takes to keep his job and that comes by blaming the guys with the least amount of power
Here is a little secret.
CEO's are not in it to bring profits for a company. That is not their job. Their job is to boast the share price at all costs. Its taught in finance 101 in any college.
Now imagine you are the CEO. You can invest in R&D and have your shareprice get cut down by almost half in this recession and risk your job for not using the money to hire more marketing and sales people, but if you stay on for 5+ years you will make tons of money and create long term value. Or you eliminate R&D and your company will die within 5 - 7 years right? As CEO you get a 20 million bonus for selling your prized assets that make you money for short term gain and your stock price goes up a good 35%. You do not think such CEOs who do this stay right? They jump ship within 2-3 years with a golden parachute. Even better with that track record you go on raiding the next company for even more money and become a guru and genius to stroke your ego. 90% of CEO's would pick this and let the next CEO take the fall when they go out of business or fade to the competion. Meantime you buy a yatch and retire or buy a bigger one as you ruin the next company, etc.
This is how the real world works.
If this needs to change we have to stop having Wall Street reward short term behavior and start punishing companies like HP who do retarded things for long term shareholder wealth. I do not know how and do not think it is our job to do this. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple initially because of R&D and a lack of results. Wall Street hated him for his long term ideas and R&D. They wanted the mac done cheap like a generic PC. HE came back and risked everything for the IPOD as most CEOs refused to work for Apple thinking they were dead.
But the costs are measured monetarly unfortunately. What is on paper determines its shareholder valuation too so guess where I.T. priority is?
It is frustrating, but good CEO's do things like look at opportunity cost and appreciation which accountants simply do not do. There very nature is to be precise and organized rather than think.
Wow, overpay then sell it 1 month after a product launch at a firesale price. Great geniuses at HP. I think they need a multi million dollar bonus for being so smart. I know neither of us could manage HP's assets so well that he deserves that price.
Corporations prefer Excel than C++ and view I.T. as a terrible waste than does not produce value thanks to the cost center attitude of upper management who are fiancial analysis and accountants rather than former engineers of yesterday.
So more will switch to clouds and salesforce.com and outsource I.T. so they can focus on what they make. Software will grow in intranet and .com portals and clouds. I feel the age of software can acomplish more productivity is over. Witness the folks still on 10 year old Windows XP? It is not the same as the 1990s when I.T. managers made 120,000 a year and companies upgraded every 3 years to the latest MS OS. Today, it is how much will it cost rather than what will it do for me.
Until this changes and Wall Street stops drooling for such people as CEO's I do not see a change. This is hte new norm
Management hates I.T. because their bosses are accountants who view it as a cost center rather than an asset. The problem is the bean counters are all upper management in most fortune 1,000 companies today and frankly do not care about productivity as programmers waste money anyway.
Many are switching to clouds and switching from C#/C++ to Excel. If Excel was fine for these bean counters then it is fine for real programming too. Then they do not have to waste it on I.T. and these silly contracptions called databases.
I couldn't disagree more.
The accountants are the ones moving to upper management and are saying No to IT. 2 decades ago engineers became CEOs and upper management. All they know is cost and yes a company's job is to make money not blow it on I.T. so bean counters who are accountants get bonuses for cutting it. They are the ones who moved I.T. from investments to cost centers.
Also many accountants feel programming can be done in Excel since they use it all the time. If it can't be done in Excel then it is a waste of money. So Excel and accountants are the reason I.T. is dying and being replaced by clouds.
No he got the link wrong. The right link is here.
I normally have respect for haiyfeet as his comments contribute a lot and he knows what he is talking about.
In terms of DRM ...
IN actually, I find a lot more pirated versions of Windows XP than Windows 7 on a popular torrent site. The windows 7 ones were hackjobs taht required a special bootloader from some guy (seperate download) and with the hacks you get a Windows 7 OS but you can't use Windows update for patch 2334. Some give error messages a lot and so on.
Maybe there is a perfect pirated Windows 7 professional edition out there, but after reading this I decided to stick with Windows 7 home premium with these hassles. Windows XP has been hacked awhile back.
I have not seen a hacked version of Office 2010 either that worked for more than a week or two. Microsoft has got it down well with its DRM. I hate the DRM and I think Microsoft are idiots in their pricing scheme to the Asian world but it is their choice to be stupid. You need to pay if you use their products. Thank god for GoogleDocs and LibreOffice.
Balmer shows he is out to lunch and out of touch with the 99% of everyone else in this world. He has been stating on record "If you can afford a PC than you can afford $600 for a licensing" in the asian market. Hello, these people buy their computers used for crying out loud. $600 for Windows/Office is equilivent of $5,000 for you and I for these folks. Would you pay that?
Maybe the Chinese will make their own nationalistic OS. I would like to say Linux based but Trinity and Gnome 3 make it unusable and inferior compared to Windows. If banks stop requiring IE 6 they could use a different OS.
Marketers keep forgetting that no matter how many times they try to sell us crap that if we can't afford it we wont get it. MS needs to wake up and slash prices heavily and make up by volume. Its better than nothing and I think the Chinese will switch to an Andriod tablet first before paying all the $$$ for a Windows 8 desktop.
Most gamers have left Windows XP a long time ago. What the statistics do not tell you is that most XP users are in China which has between 1/3 to 1/2 of all computers. In the US barely 1 out of 4 people still use Windows XP. It maybe number 2 but Vista and 7 combined almost equals 2/3s with the mac taking the rest.
I have noticed games like World of Warcraft seem slower with the directX 11 api than the Direct 9 which is odd and it shows my ati 5750 has some crappy drivers. Or Directx 9 is so good and less buggy that game makers target it. Directx 11 theoretically should be faster than DirectX 9.
With these gimicks the Chinese are going to keep WindowsXP for a long time and refuse to upgrade. Windows is very expensive to most of the world and seriously, adjusted for inflation would you pay $1500 for the priveledge of running Windows?
With Gnome 3 being useless there is simply no option for Linux
Right now the current climate is government BUD OUT! Government only destroys jobs while the private sector will always correct itself and jobs will magically appear by laying people off etc.
That is the conservative philosphy I am refering too. Austrain economics is laissez fair and anyone who says otherwise is a radical left wing anti American socialist.
That is who is running agaisn't Obama for the president as well as the clowns who fillabuster and say no to everything in Congress. I am not saying I agree in socialism and high taxation but rather greed and a powerful minority on a rigorous idealogy putting fear in candidates trying to make it pass the primaries.
Overeacting?
Did you see what Apple did to Samsung in Europe? They can't even enter the market because it has rounded edges and is rectangular?? Whats next Ford claiming having 4 weels is a right only Ford can have? Or a steering wheel on the right.
Since video standards require rectangular screens you can not have a round screen. Amazon also owns 1 click. That is not fair since Windows/Mac standardized on one click so I have to pay a patent fee for someone elses OS that has nothing to do with Amazon.
This is getting insane! I would say it is time we protested and let our politicans know this has to change. Email EFF or IEEE. I am not sounding extreme if you have been reading slashdot these past 2 months. It is a hazard to do business in this toxic environment where even the fonts being rendered on your screen to read my posts are owned by someone else that can sue you.
Yeah great Chinese economy.
If I were a phone maker I would be tempted to charge 5x as much as I would for the same phone in Asia where I do not have to worry about I.P. If Apple wants billions just to exist in the US. I would leave the US market as the fixed costs would not be worth it. I would then hire only Asians because of IP threats on operating on US soil.
Something needs to be done
Thats BS
It did not cost taht much 10 years ago and no they do not do 5x as much R&D. Celebrex is as powerful as an asprin yet costs $$$$. Yet people seeing these commercials on TV want it and you and I both pay for it by our premiums. Fuck them.
They are price gouging and using patents to abuse their power. Their margins are well in the thousands of percents.
How can we punish them with defection when we are stuck with contracts where they can punish us for such a move?
Every other country (ok most) outlaw abusive contracts. They are monopolists so you do not have a choice and they take advantage of it. We are 3rd world in terms of what we get for our prices. Even Africa has better bandwitdth and usage. We are a joke thanks to these clowns.
If a republican gets elected as a president next year I would say very likely, you can bet this will continue or get much worse over 4 years. I imagine in 10 years from now we will pay $500 for internet and phone and it will cost as much as a new car lease. This has got to stop somehow as with medical care it is unsustainable.
If far right wing and Austrain economics were not so prevaliant today, we would trust bust the drug companies, insurance companies, and telecoms to more affordable levels. However in this political climate and voters watching American Idol this is not going to happen anytime soon.
Yeah, but who would buy such HP servers and contracts when they can go all Dell and get everything from a unified vendor! I can get a Dell contract with services and a discount with Dell servers and desktops sold together.
IBM has accounting services, programing, CIO outsourcing, consultations, middleware products, etc. What does HP have? Some guy (probably a kid out of college) who can help integrate some server/client setup? Please. IBM had these things from the begining and has a huge platform. Worse HP looses money from each printer but makes it up in ink. Now how else can you get a great free printer with that HP purchase? Ooops ...
This guy is a raider and I give it maybe 5 years max before it goes out of business. I would like to say 2 years more likely. The only salvage I can think of is they become a small company specialising in ink with maybe 500 employees. By the patents and copyrights on their ink refill chips will expire and then what? GONE
Dont give them any ideas!
Many HP shops would be horrified if Oracle blackmailed them and insisted on millions of dollars if they want their 1,000 HP desktops supported, by a contract. Then the contract would force them to use Oracle Database for more money and would be stuck with Java and so on ...
Oracle has been known to use tactics like this to create lockin
Corporations and small businesses like to only buy from one vendor. This is why people buy Dell Poweredge servers even though I think they are garbage. So unless you have expensive specialized servers like Oracle and IBM, HP will lose marketshare in the server room too. They killed off OpenVMS and their Unix and seem more interested in plastic servers than the big iron systems.
This is great news for Dell and Lenovo. If I were starting a business tomorrow and needing PCs I would get some Dells or Lenovos and I can tell you the servers to serve them would also be from the same vendor. I could get discounts and get a unified support contract for them all.
HP is totally stupid. Or maybe the CEO is smart and plans to raid the company and more retarded stock brokers will boast the value of his shares and he will jump ship. What a shame. If you had a time machine and told me back in 1997 that HP would be in trouble selling off its desktop divisions to compete with Apple I would be on the floor laughing. There is no logical reason why HP ended this way other than stupid Fiona and pure greed. My guess is the good management fled the company during the last decade.
I can tell you from experience Toshiba's which are listed as the top SUCK. They are always in a shop I used to work at as they have problems. My exwife and my own had issues. I have an Asus desktop currently and its ok. I only had it for a year, but my exgf bought an Asus laptop and the cheap plastic is coming off it ... it was tied with Toshiba for number 1.
Apple I assumed was much more reliable? Acer I can see as well as crap. I see them BSOD in the store all the time hehe