Well if you're going to a disk free console then you have to store all your games on it. If you're going to sell 300 games and each one ends up with 2 GB of patches and DLC (DLC that you charge for I might note) and speedup installed data then 500 GB doesn't go very far.
Even 20 games, with 10GB of on HDD content each + 20GB still on disk + patches + download only games + the OS + the media library your console supports and 500GB can get eaten up fast.
As it is they sell consoles with 300 GB drives. I would expect a significant increase for the next gen so they can cram more stuff in. It doesn't take a lot of 30 GB game downloads over 5 years to eat up that much space.
Given that gamestop which is ~25% of the games market has, through used game sales created an adversarial relationship with all of the major game companies, and most of the smaller ones, I'm sure they'd be happy to see them die a rapid death. What's gamestop going to do, refuse to sell games if they can't be resold used? Good luck with that plan since Bestbuy, Amazon, and Wal Mart (walmart being another 25% of the market) will all sell without used resale.
With the PSN and XBL you do also have a captive market for advertising and sales. I'm not sure how that would work out, but foot traffic buys in stores aren't what they used to be, it could conceivably be viable to have an online only sales channel and make a lot more money. Remember, cut sales by 50% but do it all online and we still make about 2x as much money.
For better or worse the US by and large defines the world market on such things...
No, it doesn't. Lots of the world has widespread internet that is unsuitable for 20-50GB downloads on a regular basis. You can't base a console on only being useful in Japan, south Korea and a handful of major cities elsehwere.
The same way steam does it. The disk you bought, and the licence with it entitles your account to activate that key on your account. You can pass the disk around all you want, without a licence key the disk can copy the data files but has no other value since the game isn't active on any other account but yours. Theoretically you could build the system to allow any disk to be put a console, and without valid key it simply takes you to the PSN/XBL store where you can activate it for the appropriate fee.
Enough of the consoles have access to internet (about 75% ) that they will happily lop off the non net connected portion of the market and eliminate the used games business.
A good chunk of those non net connected consoles are probably just not in use over the sampling period, or are used as dedicated media players. The latter case is irrelevant since the PS4 and Xbox 3 are probably not releasing a new media format (like blu ray was), so they can't and won't compete with dedicated players.
So first off, about 70-75% of all consoles have always on internet. Secondly the primary market isn't kids, it's adults, the so called 18-36 although now it's more like 15-45 year olds, mostly men. Third, the download services (PSN, XBL and on PC Steam etc. ) have all been quite successful.
You're right, in that it's completely unreasonable to expect someone on a 1MB/s DSL to try and download a 20-50GB game, which is why you can't have download only consoles. But expect much deeper integration between what you get on disk and the online service it's connected to.
Realistically, by the time you can download games of that size you'll be able to just stream the content with dumb terminal anyway, and won't need any hardware in the console. Which is probably another generation or two away.
That was a big market for Blu ray adoption. That's a big deal for Sony, and a large part of how they 'won' that format war. But I doubt MS gives a shit either way. Selling a 500 or 600 dollar console (or more than that even) that doesn't offer any *new* optical player probably isn't a good plan. Not when you can get a blu ray player for under 100 bucks these days.
If they have some new optical medium to fight over then sure, but I would be surprised if anyone wants to bark up that tree again so soon, if ever.
Except that for the price sony paid to put a 20GB drive in the initial PS3's they could have put in a 500GB drive instead. That was the stupid choice they made sticking in a notebook drive, today they could easily do a 1TB drive or 1.5 TB for that price. They're probably looking at buying 10-20 million units (before they refresh and add a bigger drive) so they're probably looking at 30 bucks a drive or so.
I would expect next gen consoles to be looking at terabyte drives or more, as I said, since they cost basically nothing. With cloud storage for save games and small data, and the disks will serve as art distribution mechanisms.
In that sense consoles will start to look more and more like regular computers, again. They have to. Stick a 1TB drive in a box with a cpu, a half decent GPU, a web browser and a way to manage a few hundred installed programs and what do you have but a simplified version of Windows/Linux/OSX or cell phones. They're just terminals attached to the big servers at XBL and PSN who will control the licences for the games you have access to, and like steam games that come on disk, you're merely using that to save downloading and activating with them.
With enough disk space you don't really need a flash drive. Printing a CD or a DVD or a blu ray costs 20-50-80 cents, if that much anymore. A flash drive with 50-100GB capacity would be uh... expensive, and then you get into reliability etc. DVD's and Blu rays are surprisingly durable considering they cost next to nothing, whereas supporting fast flash storage would be troublesome, and artificially limits you in patch sizes for any sort of sensible price point.
The problem with politics and science is that one is supposed to cope with reality, the other is supposed to describe reality as it exists now.
The prediction of 1m rise is not going to happen. It isn't. Either politicians are going to look at that number and do something about it, and keep it from getting that bad. Or they're going to ignore it, and 1m is going to a significant under prediction. And that's far bigger than any state government.
Politicians have to guess what *is* going to happen, that's a guess, not a scientific prediction. Because who knows what the world economy is going to do, and what policies are going to be adopted about, or inspite of global warming, especially over the next 88 years.
Scientists can, and do make predictions, which are based on a series of assumptions about what people will or won't do. But the point of making the predictions is to change what people will, or won't do, which makes the assumptions wrong and requires new predictions. That's perfectly reasonable, but where you choose to pull the guess of what will actually happen as opposed to what will happen if people do nothing is basically arbitrary.
If this was a well thought out discussion from the german state of hannover saying that they believe governments will take action to prevent sea level rise beyond 50cm, and that forms the basis of their projections that would be about as good a guess as 15.6 inches (40cm) as north carolina comes up with. Guessing 100 years in the future is hard. Moreso when you don't want to believe in the present reality sure, but we have to be realistic in recognizing that those scientific predictions are for much different levels of government than a single US state.
Unless of course the actual owners of the source code is a private company who sell the same software to multiple governments or countries (state governments or other countries) at which point open sourcing it just fucked them out of a huge chunk of their revenue.
Worse still is that the same basic accounting software may be used by corporations as well. There's lots of problems when writing software for money that aren't unique to the US, any decimalized system that uses numbers in the approximate ranges that dollars are used in, so there's a whole backend of making sure you are correctly representing numbers and dealing with them properly that could be used for any accounting software, even if part of it is US government specific.
a search for the program in the article points to http://www.fms.treas.gov/cars/index.html
which specifically includes reporting to a US government programme, so a corporation might need very similar if not the same software to plug into the treasury and bill them for example.
Back in 1991 knowing anything about computers was a much harder to find skill than today though. We churn out a few hundred graduates a year who can do basic unix stuff from the local college.
You're asking for two separate skill sets, with two separate sets of training. There are handful of programmes that mix and mingle community college and university level work but you don't want those graduates doing software development.
If you want someone with a network operations background and network security you're looking for a CCNA community college 12 month course guy. If you want someone who does minor software development you're looking for a programmer (different 12 month CC course) or a Computer scientist/software engineer.
You *might* be able to find an CS person who had a career as a CCNA type before and wants away from that, but you're mixing two different jobs in one. Now where I am we have a couple of people like that, who had several years experience working as computer techs and then went back to school to be scientists, but you're looking at 80-90k for that.
You can't ask for a security expert who knows what tools to use that also does just a little programming on the side. Those are self contradictory. You're either a secure systems programmer (and you can guess that that comes with a price premium, my 80-90k a year guys) who are willing to come down to doing techie work level on the side, or you're asking for someone who should know better than to try and program, because they know they can't do it properly (in this case, securely).
Those are all 3rd year computer science or lower problems (CSS, Javascript, database design). 38k isn't a bad entry point for that, since you're not even talking full degree to be entry level. But for a web developer like that I'd be expecting up around 70k with a year of experience and a full CS degree. 150k would be a lot, depending on where you are, but not an unreasonable point to expect to get to career wise. For something like a senior web developer 90-100k would be the usual top end, unless you happen to be somewhere where there is extensive competition.
Being an IT guy though is tradeschool/community college type stuff. For that 38k really is reasonable. asking an engineer to do that job is, as you say, a 100k a year person you're asking to work at half rates. That's not doing anyone any favours since they'll try and leave asap.
Unlikely. Someone from mexico might work for 35k a year, but not someone from india. They can make PPP equivalent to that back home and not have to move half way around the world. For 35k a year it's not worth moving to the US. Unless you're in mexico. At least if you qualify for an H1B which requires a bachelors in a technical field. General immigration sure.
Where H1B visas hurt is things like sophisticated technical jobs. Rather than getting 90k a year they drag the price down to 60 or 70. If you have a degree in computer science and are only making 35k it's your own damn fault, either your degree is effectively fraudulent and the only one not aware of this is you, or you have chosen to make a living in a tradeschool job not a degree job. If you have 5 years experience and can't break through 70 that's probably because H1B's are keeping prices down.
Once you get get up into the 100k a year range though H1B's don't hurt that much either, because in that price bracket you're trying to maximize brain potential, price is secondary.
I've found that the ability to talk to non-technical people is more important to most hiring managers simply because it's a lot easier to train someone to be technical than it is to train them to work with people.
That is definitely not true.
If you don't have problem solving skills by the time you're a teenager you never will. I know a lot of late 20 something early 30 somethings who are getting PhD's in technical fields who couldn't diagnose a 'CPU fan not starting' problem to save their lives. In fact I just had to diagnose that for 4 of them. They had the case open and everything.
Some people are utterly beyond learning interpersonal skills, that's true. Typically it's a form of learning disability where they don't, and won't ever pick up social cues. You can try and help but they have to have a personality that's willing to accept that help. Most people who are socially inept though are simply immature and will learn to grow out of it, or they are narrowly inept (like in interviews), but are fine once they are comfortable with people. But teaching problem solving, especially with software and hardware is not something you do in school. In school we teach you what tools and knowledge is available as resources, and some of the procedures people have developed to streamline problem solving. But ultimately you have to have the right aptitude for problem solving on your own.
Coming out of school it's especially tricky to come off like you have interpersonal skills because you just spent 1-2-4-6-10 years surrounded by people who know the difference between a CPU and a the case your computer comes in, and you tend to need a few hard knocks to the head to learn to speak to people in language they can understand.
I suppose it's true that from the perspective of an MBA you can teach anyone technical skills. But they won't actually understand that information or meaningfully how to use it. They would be learning behaviours not understanding, and that leads to a whole slew of problems down the road when you realize they clicked a bunch of boxes because the guide said click a bunch of boxes without ever understanding what those boxes did.
Sure, but that's also a relatively small portion of the total market. If microsoft loses mindshare in the consumer space, or google steps up its google docs game there is theoretically a problem there. But MS isn't just sitting around doing nothing.
Why? The Xbox 2 will be dead within 3 months of the Xbox 3 launching.
Even if that wasn't coming relatively soon on the scale of software lifecycles, the Xbox is big enough they can have their own dedicated framework and tools. If those tools are basically silverlight, well, so what?
*some* desktop applications are going cloud ish, especially things that can be done on the web, and new technologies (that are mostly built from the ground up to be web products) are OS independent.
And sure, for those solutions windows is no better and no worse than its competitors. Even if that becomes 99% of computer use time. It's still the rest of the time that is the differentiating factor that Windows competes in. To give an extreme contrived example: imagine 99% of my computer use can be done in a webbrowser, in the cloud. the other 1% is diablo 3. Now, I can run diablo 3 on mac or windows and linux. If I just spent 600 or 700 dollars in computing hardware 'extra' to play diablo 3 am I going to now avoid spending another 100 or so on an operating system if that makes it perform better? That's where windows has to compete. They have to do all of the stuff you can't do in the cloud better than everyone else. Better can mean a lot of different things to different people of course.
Admittedly, the question sort of implies a connection with Office and Windows, which is fair enough, if not all that clear in the summary. How office will survive, when there are cloud document systems that are much more reliable than traditional office on a desktop ever can be might be fair question, but that's why windows 8 is integrating skydrive and all that stuff, and office is as well.
Again though, that's a 'single icon on my existing phone' sort of problem. It doesn't get them a whole lot in the way of a full featured phone. It gets them one feature they would be better to put on other peoples phones.
I wasn't seriously suggesting a developer phone product as something they should do. I'm just trying to figure out what they *are* doing. That was the first idea that came into my head as something that could exist in support of, or in conjunction with some other software service that fits their existing skills base.
Facebook has a giant pile of money, for all it matters they could buy a phone company or build their own. I'm just not seeing how hiring a bunch of engineers translates into facebooks usual business model.
Yahoo has a much more diverse array of services though. Facebook basically has a platform API for making stuff that works on facebook. Yahoo has tie ins to e-mail (real e-mail), finances, travel shopping, internet search, maps, music players, TV translations, jobs personals etc. They do (and did) a hell of a lot more than facebook.
I'm not really sure what facebook could do with a phone. They're a software on top of something company, google had to buy an operating system company to make android. I can't really see Facebook having a whole lot of traction making its own operating system to compete with Apple and Google. A Facebook branded phone sure, but who cares? You could put a facebook logo on a pair of speakers because they aren't in the 'music' business, I'm not sure that means much. They could make just an Android phone, again, why?
I could see them wanting a developer phone, or developer tools, say a phone that can boot multiple versions of android (and Windows Phone 7/8), can emulate screen sizes etc. That could be a very interesting (and very lucrative) project, especially if you tie it to mobile services hosting (think amazon cloud), that works efficiently anywhere in the world. It's a decidedly developer product, but could generate revenue per app/user anywhere, and then the facebook 'app' is really just a demo. But trying to enter the consumer phone space because they have one icon of the 200 or so on my phone doesn't really seem like a great plan, and I can't seriously imagine anyone there thinking it's a great plan.
I heard a rumour that they might look to buy out opera. It's probably a rumour, but opera is big in the mobile space. I guess that would give them a mobile browser... but why? I can see ways that facebook could use it's cash pile to make money on mobile, certainly buying opera could do that, but I'm not seeing a lot of ways facebook could make the facebook social network and privacy invasion service make money on mobile without ads. Which doesn't require apple engineers or a joint project with HTC.
If anything this is more the fault of the government for making the change without enough time for software makers to fix it, or at least not deciding to make the change well enough in advance so they don't have to change it at all.
Though I can't find anything that lists when exactly this change was made.
Littered throughout the comments are other tech having the same problem.
Imagine you patented something that you charge one dollar per copy of.
And them microsoft infringed on your patent and sold a couple of billion copies of windows before you realized the situation.
Now you're asking someone, even someone big to front a fantastically large amount of money to contest their case.
While not quite the case I was thinking of: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20070308-75/supreme-court-rules-against-microsoft-in-i4i-patent-case/ is a relatively recent example.
In short, you're spot on, that would be insane, even the existing rules make it very difficult to enforce a legitimate patent if it's being widely infringed, especially by big players.
considering they have 70 or so million people, which is about on par with France or the UK (actually slightly larger) you would expect them to be able to quite a diverse range of equipment.
Given sanctions and their GDP you expect it to not necessarily be as good as comparable western productions, but it can still be in quantity and respectable quality.
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Well if you're going to a disk free console then you have to store all your games on it. If you're going to sell 300 games and each one ends up with 2 GB of patches and DLC (DLC that you charge for I might note) and speedup installed data then 500 GB doesn't go very far.
Even 20 games, with 10GB of on HDD content each + 20GB still on disk + patches + download only games + the OS + the media library your console supports and 500GB can get eaten up fast.
As it is they sell consoles with 300 GB drives. I would expect a significant increase for the next gen so they can cram more stuff in. It doesn't take a lot of 30 GB game downloads over 5 years to eat up that much space.
The licence key that comes on a piece of paper will prove ownership, the disc is merely an art distribution method.
Given that gamestop which is ~25% of the games market has, through used game sales created an adversarial relationship with all of the major game companies, and most of the smaller ones, I'm sure they'd be happy to see them die a rapid death. What's gamestop going to do, refuse to sell games if they can't be resold used? Good luck with that plan since Bestbuy, Amazon, and Wal Mart (walmart being another 25% of the market) will all sell without used resale.
With the PSN and XBL you do also have a captive market for advertising and sales. I'm not sure how that would work out, but foot traffic buys in stores aren't what they used to be, it could conceivably be viable to have an online only sales channel and make a lot more money. Remember, cut sales by 50% but do it all online and we still make about 2x as much money.
For better or worse the US by and large defines the world market on such things...
No, it doesn't. Lots of the world has widespread internet that is unsuitable for 20-50GB downloads on a regular basis. You can't base a console on only being useful in Japan, south Korea and a handful of major cities elsehwere.
Bethesda softworks (owned by Zenimax) don't have their own cloud, they use steamworks. As does the total war series.
The PSN and XBL will almost certainly be a cloud service like steam, where any game released on those consoles are activated on those clouds.
The same way steam does it. The disk you bought, and the licence with it entitles your account to activate that key on your account. You can pass the disk around all you want, without a licence key the disk can copy the data files but has no other value since the game isn't active on any other account but yours. Theoretically you could build the system to allow any disk to be put a console, and without valid key it simply takes you to the PSN/XBL store where you can activate it for the appropriate fee.
Enough of the consoles have access to internet (about 75% ) that they will happily lop off the non net connected portion of the market and eliminate the used games business.
A good chunk of those non net connected consoles are probably just not in use over the sampling period, or are used as dedicated media players. The latter case is irrelevant since the PS4 and Xbox 3 are probably not releasing a new media format (like blu ray was), so they can't and won't compete with dedicated players.
So first off, about 70-75% of all consoles have always on internet. Secondly the primary market isn't kids, it's adults, the so called 18-36 although now it's more like 15-45 year olds, mostly men. Third, the download services (PSN, XBL and on PC Steam etc. ) have all been quite successful.
You're right, in that it's completely unreasonable to expect someone on a 1MB/s DSL to try and download a 20-50GB game, which is why you can't have download only consoles. But expect much deeper integration between what you get on disk and the online service it's connected to.
Realistically, by the time you can download games of that size you'll be able to just stream the content with dumb terminal anyway, and won't need any hardware in the console. Which is probably another generation or two away.
That was a big market for Blu ray adoption. That's a big deal for Sony, and a large part of how they 'won' that format war. But I doubt MS gives a shit either way. Selling a 500 or 600 dollar console (or more than that even) that doesn't offer any *new* optical player probably isn't a good plan. Not when you can get a blu ray player for under 100 bucks these days.
If they have some new optical medium to fight over then sure, but I would be surprised if anyone wants to bark up that tree again so soon, if ever.
Except that for the price sony paid to put a 20GB drive in the initial PS3's they could have put in a 500GB drive instead. That was the stupid choice they made sticking in a notebook drive, today they could easily do a 1TB drive or 1.5 TB for that price. They're probably looking at buying 10-20 million units (before they refresh and add a bigger drive) so they're probably looking at 30 bucks a drive or so.
I would expect next gen consoles to be looking at terabyte drives or more, as I said, since they cost basically nothing. With cloud storage for save games and small data, and the disks will serve as art distribution mechanisms.
In that sense consoles will start to look more and more like regular computers, again. They have to. Stick a 1TB drive in a box with a cpu, a half decent GPU, a web browser and a way to manage a few hundred installed programs and what do you have but a simplified version of Windows/Linux/OSX or cell phones. They're just terminals attached to the big servers at XBL and PSN who will control the licences for the games you have access to, and like steam games that come on disk, you're merely using that to save downloading and activating with them.
With enough disk space you don't really need a flash drive. Printing a CD or a DVD or a blu ray costs 20-50-80 cents, if that much anymore. A flash drive with 50-100GB capacity would be uh... expensive, and then you get into reliability etc. DVD's and Blu rays are surprisingly durable considering they cost next to nothing, whereas supporting fast flash storage would be troublesome, and artificially limits you in patch sizes for any sort of sensible price point.
The problem with politics and science is that one is supposed to cope with reality, the other is supposed to describe reality as it exists now.
The prediction of 1m rise is not going to happen. It isn't. Either politicians are going to look at that number and do something about it, and keep it from getting that bad. Or they're going to ignore it, and 1m is going to a significant under prediction. And that's far bigger than any state government.
Politicians have to guess what *is* going to happen, that's a guess, not a scientific prediction. Because who knows what the world economy is going to do, and what policies are going to be adopted about, or inspite of global warming, especially over the next 88 years.
Scientists can, and do make predictions, which are based on a series of assumptions about what people will or won't do. But the point of making the predictions is to change what people will, or won't do, which makes the assumptions wrong and requires new predictions. That's perfectly reasonable, but where you choose to pull the guess of what will actually happen as opposed to what will happen if people do nothing is basically arbitrary.
If this was a well thought out discussion from the german state of hannover saying that they believe governments will take action to prevent sea level rise beyond 50cm, and that forms the basis of their projections that would be about as good a guess as 15.6 inches (40cm) as north carolina comes up with. Guessing 100 years in the future is hard. Moreso when you don't want to believe in the present reality sure, but we have to be realistic in recognizing that those scientific predictions are for much different levels of government than a single US state.
Unless of course the actual owners of the source code is a private company who sell the same software to multiple governments or countries (state governments or other countries) at which point open sourcing it just fucked them out of a huge chunk of their revenue.
Worse still is that the same basic accounting software may be used by corporations as well. There's lots of problems when writing software for money that aren't unique to the US, any decimalized system that uses numbers in the approximate ranges that dollars are used in, so there's a whole backend of making sure you are correctly representing numbers and dealing with them properly that could be used for any accounting software, even if part of it is US government specific.
a search for the program in the article points to http://www.fms.treas.gov/cars/index.html
which specifically includes reporting to a US government programme, so a corporation might need very similar if not the same software to plug into the treasury and bill them for example.
Back in 1991 knowing anything about computers was a much harder to find skill than today though. We churn out a few hundred graduates a year who can do basic unix stuff from the local college.
That drives the price down a lot.
You're asking for two separate skill sets, with two separate sets of training. There are handful of programmes that mix and mingle community college and university level work but you don't want those graduates doing software development.
If you want someone with a network operations background and network security you're looking for a CCNA community college 12 month course guy. If you want someone who does minor software development you're looking for a programmer (different 12 month CC course) or a Computer scientist/software engineer.
You *might* be able to find an CS person who had a career as a CCNA type before and wants away from that, but you're mixing two different jobs in one. Now where I am we have a couple of people like that, who had several years experience working as computer techs and then went back to school to be scientists, but you're looking at 80-90k for that.
You can't ask for a security expert who knows what tools to use that also does just a little programming on the side. Those are self contradictory. You're either a secure systems programmer (and you can guess that that comes with a price premium, my 80-90k a year guys) who are willing to come down to doing techie work level on the side, or you're asking for someone who should know better than to try and program, because they know they can't do it properly (in this case, securely).
Those are all 3rd year computer science or lower problems (CSS, Javascript, database design). 38k isn't a bad entry point for that, since you're not even talking full degree to be entry level. But for a web developer like that I'd be expecting up around 70k with a year of experience and a full CS degree. 150k would be a lot, depending on where you are, but not an unreasonable point to expect to get to career wise. For something like a senior web developer 90-100k would be the usual top end, unless you happen to be somewhere where there is extensive competition.
Being an IT guy though is tradeschool/community college type stuff. For that 38k really is reasonable. asking an engineer to do that job is, as you say, a 100k a year person you're asking to work at half rates. That's not doing anyone any favours since they'll try and leave asap.
Unlikely. Someone from mexico might work for 35k a year, but not someone from india. They can make PPP equivalent to that back home and not have to move half way around the world. For 35k a year it's not worth moving to the US. Unless you're in mexico. At least if you qualify for an H1B which requires a bachelors in a technical field. General immigration sure.
Where H1B visas hurt is things like sophisticated technical jobs. Rather than getting 90k a year they drag the price down to 60 or 70. If you have a degree in computer science and are only making 35k it's your own damn fault, either your degree is effectively fraudulent and the only one not aware of this is you, or you have chosen to make a living in a tradeschool job not a degree job. If you have 5 years experience and can't break through 70 that's probably because H1B's are keeping prices down.
Once you get get up into the 100k a year range though H1B's don't hurt that much either, because in that price bracket you're trying to maximize brain potential, price is secondary.
I've found that the ability to talk to non-technical people is more important to most hiring managers simply because it's a lot easier to train someone to be technical than it is to train them to work with people.
That is definitely not true.
If you don't have problem solving skills by the time you're a teenager you never will. I know a lot of late 20 something early 30 somethings who are getting PhD's in technical fields who couldn't diagnose a 'CPU fan not starting' problem to save their lives. In fact I just had to diagnose that for 4 of them. They had the case open and everything.
Some people are utterly beyond learning interpersonal skills, that's true. Typically it's a form of learning disability where they don't, and won't ever pick up social cues. You can try and help but they have to have a personality that's willing to accept that help. Most people who are socially inept though are simply immature and will learn to grow out of it, or they are narrowly inept (like in interviews), but are fine once they are comfortable with people. But teaching problem solving, especially with software and hardware is not something you do in school. In school we teach you what tools and knowledge is available as resources, and some of the procedures people have developed to streamline problem solving. But ultimately you have to have the right aptitude for problem solving on your own.
Coming out of school it's especially tricky to come off like you have interpersonal skills because you just spent 1-2-4-6-10 years surrounded by people who know the difference between a CPU and a the case your computer comes in, and you tend to need a few hard knocks to the head to learn to speak to people in language they can understand.
I suppose it's true that from the perspective of an MBA you can teach anyone technical skills. But they won't actually understand that information or meaningfully how to use it. They would be learning behaviours not understanding, and that leads to a whole slew of problems down the road when you realize they clicked a bunch of boxes because the guide said click a bunch of boxes without ever understanding what those boxes did.
Sure, but that's also a relatively small portion of the total market. If microsoft loses mindshare in the consumer space, or google steps up its google docs game there is theoretically a problem there. But MS isn't just sitting around doing nothing.
Why? The Xbox 2 will be dead within 3 months of the Xbox 3 launching.
Even if that wasn't coming relatively soon on the scale of software lifecycles, the Xbox is big enough they can have their own dedicated framework and tools. If those tools are basically silverlight, well, so what?
*some* desktop applications are going cloud ish, especially things that can be done on the web, and new technologies (that are mostly built from the ground up to be web products) are OS independent.
And sure, for those solutions windows is no better and no worse than its competitors. Even if that becomes 99% of computer use time. It's still the rest of the time that is the differentiating factor that Windows competes in. To give an extreme contrived example: imagine 99% of my computer use can be done in a webbrowser, in the cloud. the other 1% is diablo 3. Now, I can run diablo 3 on mac or windows and linux. If I just spent 600 or 700 dollars in computing hardware 'extra' to play diablo 3 am I going to now avoid spending another 100 or so on an operating system if that makes it perform better? That's where windows has to compete. They have to do all of the stuff you can't do in the cloud better than everyone else. Better can mean a lot of different things to different people of course.
Admittedly, the question sort of implies a connection with Office and Windows, which is fair enough, if not all that clear in the summary. How office will survive, when there are cloud document systems that are much more reliable than traditional office on a desktop ever can be might be fair question, but that's why windows 8 is integrating skydrive and all that stuff, and office is as well.
Again though, that's a 'single icon on my existing phone' sort of problem. It doesn't get them a whole lot in the way of a full featured phone. It gets them one feature they would be better to put on other peoples phones.
It's also not a hardware problem.
I wasn't seriously suggesting a developer phone product as something they should do. I'm just trying to figure out what they *are* doing. That was the first idea that came into my head as something that could exist in support of, or in conjunction with some other software service that fits their existing skills base.
Facebook has a giant pile of money, for all it matters they could buy a phone company or build their own. I'm just not seeing how hiring a bunch of engineers translates into facebooks usual business model.
Yahoo has a much more diverse array of services though. Facebook basically has a platform API for making stuff that works on facebook. Yahoo has tie ins to e-mail (real e-mail), finances, travel shopping, internet search, maps, music players, TV translations, jobs personals etc. They do (and did) a hell of a lot more than facebook.
I'm not really sure what facebook could do with a phone. They're a software on top of something company, google had to buy an operating system company to make android. I can't really see Facebook having a whole lot of traction making its own operating system to compete with Apple and Google. A Facebook branded phone sure, but who cares? You could put a facebook logo on a pair of speakers because they aren't in the 'music' business, I'm not sure that means much. They could make just an Android phone, again, why?
I could see them wanting a developer phone, or developer tools, say a phone that can boot multiple versions of android (and Windows Phone 7/8), can emulate screen sizes etc. That could be a very interesting (and very lucrative) project, especially if you tie it to mobile services hosting (think amazon cloud), that works efficiently anywhere in the world. It's a decidedly developer product, but could generate revenue per app/user anywhere, and then the facebook 'app' is really just a demo. But trying to enter the consumer phone space because they have one icon of the 200 or so on my phone doesn't really seem like a great plan, and I can't seriously imagine anyone there thinking it's a great plan.
I heard a rumour that they might look to buy out opera. It's probably a rumour, but opera is big in the mobile space. I guess that would give them a mobile browser... but why? I can see ways that facebook could use it's cash pile to make money on mobile, certainly buying opera could do that, but I'm not seeing a lot of ways facebook could make the facebook social network and privacy invasion service make money on mobile without ads. Which doesn't require apple engineers or a joint project with HTC.
If anything this is more the fault of the government for making the change without enough time for software makers to fix it, or at least not deciding to make the change well enough in advance so they don't have to change it at all.
Though I can't find anything that lists when exactly this change was made.
Littered throughout the comments are other tech having the same problem.
Imagine you patented something that you charge one dollar per copy of.
And them microsoft infringed on your patent and sold a couple of billion copies of windows before you realized the situation.
Now you're asking someone, even someone big to front a fantastically large amount of money to contest their case.
While not quite the case I was thinking of: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20070308-75/supreme-court-rules-against-microsoft-in-i4i-patent-case/ is a relatively recent example.
In short, you're spot on, that would be insane, even the existing rules make it very difficult to enforce a legitimate patent if it's being widely infringed, especially by big players.
considering they have 70 or so million people, which is about on par with France or the UK (actually slightly larger) you would expect them to be able to quite a diverse range of equipment.
Given sanctions and their GDP you expect it to not necessarily be as good as comparable western productions, but it can still be in quantity and respectable quality.