It is pretty obvious as to why they want to do this. With the internet, prices become more transparent and competitors with more efficient manufacturing processes can undercut wholesale prices. The only differentiating factor is service which is human intensive and anathema for a company stuck in the industrial manufacturing mindset. In order to avoid being out of the loop, they need to dominate both ends of the value chain much like IBM with their components and their global services. By controlling the customer market information, they can then bully errr... incentivate:-) their "independent" sales dealer network (cough). Unfortunately the golden rule applies, he who has the gold makes the rules. If you look at certain car manufacturing, they've basically marginalised independent mechanics by offering warentees valid only if the customer returns to the company's (centralised) body shop for periodic checkups and have another go at gorging your pocket with custom-designed and oh-so-breakable expensive fenders. Guess how the independent mechanics feel about this one? Expect computer manufacturers to start thinking along the same line because as soon as they convince the customer to return for a yearly upgrade as part of their laptop service warentee, they can preload yet more bloatware to demonstrate the "obvious" need to upgrade to a faster machine.
It seems a pity that the low heat dissipation MIPS chips are going to disappear unless Sun really want to support a competiting processor to their embedded Sparcs. There has been reports of various firms developing low-cost, low heat chips (<1W better than Transmeta!) and it seems a waste for this low-cost niche to disappear. Too bad SGI can't get their A into G, port Linux across and do a reverse-Starfire purchase (Sun acquired the E10K shared bus tech originally from Cray when it merged with SGI) to shore up their low-end server racks. At the very least, it will encourage people to develop more MIPS binaries.
Oh well, nobody said computer vendors had to be smart.
China is big, both geographically and population-wise. If the general assumption that the benefits of technology accrue most rapidly after 50% penetration, then it will be quite a while yet before significant investment in IT infrastructure will pay off. Also you have to keep in mind that once you travel inland away from the prosperous coastal regions, you'd realise that the interior is still an agrilcultural based economy (donkeys, adobe houses, etc). Now IT may improve logistics and supply chains but first you need a decent transport network and information to calculate prices/cost (ie free market). Personally I would expect advanced countries like Japan to gain the most as IT will improve their not-so-hot service economy whereas the developing countries still need basic investments first in literacy, health and social institutions (rule of law rather than gun/nepotism). It may make it easier to absorb new tech but I'd like to point out that if you don't have the education system to create sysadmins to fix things when (not if) computers break down then you'd basically pissing money away. There's also some rather interesting research from places like "Centre for Appropriate Technology" which studies the role of tech outside big cities. For example, what is the point of a ceramic toilet (as compared with outdoor dunny) in outback Australia when you don't have the supermarkets to supply toilet paper? Rather than encourage a cargo cult mentality, perhaps it's best to let each country have access to the source and adapt it to their cultural and industrial needs as necessary.
Ahhhh.... the wonders of technology inflation... it might not appear on the economic metrics but effectively with Moore's Law, you are obsoleting your existing IT infrastructure which forces you into endless cycles of upgrades.
Unfortunately manufacturers don't like the alternative... allowing you to sell their "contract" on the open market as you avoid being a captive audience (thus losing those lovely gatekeeper fees for directing you to their dotcon partners). Think about cars, how you could lease the latest and greatest, then trade in for the next model after a year and they flog it to the guy willing to accept a lower price. Unfortunately, they would get very pissed off if someone created a secondhand market for phone contracts (ie agree to take over repayment schedule) as then they can't sell you the next gee-whiz with additional bells and whistles (with price-tag to match).
The alternative is the pay-as-you-go stored-value card which allows you the freedom to swap carriers if you dislike their level of service (which they of course discourage through additional connection fees). The problem is that someone has to pay for all that wireless infrastructure and that someone is the consumer (certainly the shareholder is not going to take the lumps if it can be avoided).
First of all, let's agree on some terminology. I would define a model as a "conceptual representation of reality". This usually consists of a combination of data (commonly accepted coordinate system) and computation (transformation from one dataspace to another). Thus two lawyers or two economists can communicate because they have the same language (information basis) to discuss complex concepts within a systematic framework. Even our very economic foundations are based on a simple accounting equation (Assets = Liability + Equity).
However, there may be many different "models" depending on your worldview. Consider something as simple as a brick. A geologist would say its a silicate/fused clay in rectilinear form, an egineering would say it has structural/compression/torsion strength of xyz, a builder will say its costs k available in quantities of l deliverable in m days, and I say great, but how do you build a wall? I suppose from a more philosophical world we can talk about perceptions of reality and common reference frames but then that's a more AI type problem.
The problem comes down to resolving conflicts among different world perceptions... in the extreme this can lead to holy crusades. Even a brick can be viewed as anything from a unit of building art to a handy weapon for Seattle protesters. Metaphors are merely one tool in the repeitoire of techniques of people attempting to "persuade" us that their viewpoint is "superior". That is why democracies tend to be slightly less self-destructive than other forms of society in that there is enough rotation of thoughts in the power structures (no old geriatics sticking to out-moded social theories). For those trained in critical thinking/analysis, they have the rare skill of being able to perceive reality and act accordingly (probably one reason why engineers dislike marketeers but I digress).
So, to survive, you need to build up a really good/accurate mental model of how the world works, whether a bushman in desert survival or a cynical politician scrounging for votes, and thus how you can interact within this perceived structure without wasting too much energy. And if you're really really good (philosopher, social entrepreneur or genius inventor), you get to form completely new models.
The whole fundamental basis of the current capital framework is the concept of depreciation of durable goods. You purchase an item, then you write off its cost over n years. Now if you are a manufacturing entity, you'd like to shift the equation towards more frequent purchases of lower-cost goods (amortise R&D base across wider spectrum) leading towards a consumer/throw-away mentality.
Now apply the same thinking to software, if your profit margin is in the first sale, then any activity which results in suppression of repeat sales of the next upgrade is to be severely discouraged. Entities like Microsoft have tacitly acknowledged this by noting that their biggest competitor is actually their old products.
Thus if your business model relies on forcing customers to go through an endless upgrade cycle (cough*Wintel*cough) the Internet is a threat because so long as there is one person with the passion and resources to keep a copy, others will be able to find it and offer some exchange/trade/resale. Think of web-rings, freshmeat and mirrors, all which collectively serve to persist information and minimise bit rot. This may not suit companies accustomised to high information decay rates as it forces them into a service model which is human intensive and because they've bid up the price of programming labor to insane levels in hiring software engineers to churn out the next killer-app, can't compete as service model requires a somewhat different skillset (more diagnostic and less development). Lower margins = less profits = collapsing share prices = pissed off investors.
As AbiWord CEO points out, "Users are tired of the crazy upgrade cycle which has become the norm for so many desktop applications", primarily because it puts the real cost of software in wasted time learning applications which may be deprecated in the next release cycle. From the software developers and distributors point of view, old software is also a disincentive for upgrading and thus their desire to shorten the half life of information or put time-limited licensing terms into their EULA.
OpenSource sorta gets around the problem as their real business is stability and interoperability, despite all too frequent plaintive cries that Unix is not "innovative" or "bleeding-edge". Until the marketing/advocacy people realise this and emphasise low "cost of repair/replacement", they will be perceived as at a disadvantage to "mainstream" software. However, despite similar functionality, it is a distinct business from licensing IP blocks (drag,drop,script) where all the value is retained by the manufacturer. Just like abandonware is not really a software distribution, it is in the nostalgia business. As such, it can probably carve out a small niche for its proponent provided he's smart to avoid copyright lawsuits, given that the majority of software purchasers have short-term memory (when did you ever come across a piece of non-gaming software that you really *enjoyed* using?).
LL
Cool != useful. I would be more interested in what problem domains they wou;d have superior characteristics than deterministic silicon stuff. I believe the original claims of it being used to solve combinatorical problems (e.g. travelling salesman) were retracted when they calculated the volume of DNA required to encode all the possibilities. If smaller but slower than RAM, then they might have a role as massive solid state memory devices. If they can duplicate the incredible self-repair mechanisms of cells, then they might be useful in hostile environments.
However, it would still be useful if someone could point out papers describing their theoretical computing properties. All of classical computing (ie Turing) can be derived from binary logic and NAND gates, and a similar theoretical basis exists for quatum computing (but they're having problems with the engineering aspects). Has anyone developed the equivalent for biocomputing? I know a lot of work has gone into string, tree and sequence algorithms (a la computational molecular biology) but can they be adapted for other uses?
In some ways the fun part is the reverse-engineering of the genome. Imagine that you're given the compressed core dump of a Linux kernel, and are asked to recreate the instruction set, systems architecture and application source code from first principles. If those gene jocks ever succeed, maybe we'll be hacking/designing complete biostructures in a few decades.
... the cost is in the sunk infrastructure but the value is in the services.
With software, especially middleware all you are doing is spreading the access ponits to a wider set of end-devices. With minaturisation, you can clump larger functionality into the same space for less cost. That means that theoretically if you have an IP connection and appropriate software+interface, any device can emulate the functionality of any other (though doing weather simulations on a Palm might not be time-efficient).
Personally I think the fallacy is thinking there is convergence. The illusion is that all these improvements are arriving together and softare allows easy function shifting and it looks like everything is converging onto a mobile phone/PDA/camera. However, if you look at the social use, you'd find quite distinct patterns. PDAs are the equivalent of filofaxes, phones are human connectors, gameboyw are for time-wasting, etc. Sure you can put tetris on a phone but then you are mixing communications with entertainment modes which bosses tend to frown upon. (of course with/. you've got the excuse of.... uuummm... market research... yeah:-)).
Basically why do we use computers? Communications, education/training, entertainment, productivity. In essence a mental amplifier much the same way a lever is a physical amplifier. However, just like we've got distinct tools, we have distinct languages to address specific problem domains (SQL, lisp, etc) and convergence on a few physical form factors (size of hands+pockets+belts+purses+mail boxes) won't change that.
DrWiggy wrote
Can anybody tell me what the real commercial incentive is to run Linux on bigger systems? I'm just curious that's all. Perhaps I'm missing something here (almost certainly I'm sure).:-)
What are the inherent limitations of the information infrastructure? Certainly not hardware (vendors are keen to flog as many boxes as possible) or software (internet distribution costs are pretty much zero). The inherent bottlenecks are development time and trained staff. Linux attracts a pool of talent or at least the opportunity to learn the guts of a system without paying a hideous cost in acquiring system tools and development environments (cough*Microsoft*cough). Distribution boils down to boring physical aspects, you don't put datacentres and six-9 reliable systems in unstable locations (e.g. earhquake zones) or where there is a limit in the technology level. Given inherent limits in manpower you will see a move towards consolidation once the complexity passes a critical point as the cost of training exceeds the value for a small site. Currently web sites are still pretty primitive but once the next generation of tools are refined (e.g. Zope, ACS, etc) expect to see more critical mass building up. It's not so much the CPU but the storage as a couple of petabytes tends to be rather difficult to shift:-).
Given that latency is a big problem and getting bigger with faster CPU clock speed (e.g. 1 disk read = x megainstructions), it then makes sense for CPUs to be sited really really close and from a management/administration viewpont, a clump of systems is easier to manage than a zillion boxes (again issues to do with backups and system security). Why do we have petrol stations and gas farms (at ports/airports/etc)? Because you put the resources near where they will be used. Again, if you use the motoring analogy, Cisco builds the highways, SGI builds the gas farms, Microsoft builds the tollroads, etc... The skills required to create highly scalable *systems* is scarce which is why even PCs have yet to go beyond dual processors, and outside niches you might as well forget about parallel software that can use the horsepower.
So SGI is taking a strategic look at their markets and IMHO rebranding themselves as the BMW of the internet world focusing on industrial-strength trucks. The trends they wish to ride on are commodity OS (large pool of development to overcome constraints of talent) plus increasing outsourcing of specialist internet services (consolidated servers to achieve economy of scale - see their O3000 brick concept to understand their direction). In order to play you have to pay (in terms of a learning curve).
From a legal standpoint, renting is a contractual relationship where the "ownership" is retained by the lessor but "access" (in a modified form) is provided to the lessee. Distribution as normally interpreted is more a third party shifting the good in question through space (or time). Now the question people are asking is to what extent a GPL license affects bundled hardware or services. IANAL but reading the GPL, I would speculate that it only refers to peer software. This can be observed with the fact that the code of gcc is not GPL, and business models such as on-line GIMP studio processing does not GPL the pictures. IMHO, the nearest analogy of renting is that of accessing a gcc compiler through a web interface. You are "renting" CPU-disk time as a service, not "distributng" gcc per se. As part of the terms of service, you could say that breaking the seal abrogates your obligation of support as it is then not the service you were contracted to supply, a la if you vandalise a flat, the landlord can request an eviction notice.
As GPL becomes more prevalent, a lot of business practices (and legal precendences) have to be reexamined. GNU provides software according to its perception of the world, simplistic and dogmatic as it may appear to suits. OSS, BSD, MPL etc provide variations to account for a different view of reality. You can pick and choose as to what your beliefs are. Areas of potential conflict are
- what is "internal" to a company (when you have joint ventures, strategic relationships, etc)
- what does "distribution" and "linking" precisely mean
- amount of bundling allowed with hardware/services
These issues will obviously be debated until a common set of practices evolve. I am reminded of an old analogy...
Philosophy - why do we fsck?
Science - what is fsck?
Engineering - how to fsck better?
Economics - when can we fsck?
Marketing - who can fsck?
Law - who can't fsck?
Laws are pain in the neck, especially when they are set in stone to bias the playing field in favor of incumbent interests.
All industrial strength servers will migrate towards 19" racks or cubes (e.g SGI Origin 3000).
All consumer electronics will tend towards book-sized consoles (e.g Sony, Bose speakers)
Business machines will remain boring and beige:-).
why? you 'canna break the laws of physics and economics. What are the physical limitations of chips? Heat dissipation which means for a given level of technology (process shrink) they generate a certain thermal volume (aside it's rather interesting that the C-bricks modules SGI designed for their O3000 are deliberately oversized to handling the heat given off by the coming IA-64 processors.. rather interesting engineering commentary on the efficiency of the instruction set/design... you might save on the chip but negative externalities are realised elsewhere). Given high-end machines tend to occupy datacentres where costs are measured in $$/square metre (or 19"Us), high-end vendors aim to cram things into basic 19" units for easy comparison plus add optional fancy skins for the branding exercise de jure.
Deskside cubes are usually aimed to a) fit under a desk or b) migrate to a within an internal rack space so the physical dimensions are constrained, especially when you consider physical access to cables and the reset button.
Laws of economics dictate that for low-priced consumer items a larger fraction of cost is contained in the distribution system (think return/repair/replacement/etc). Hence a tendency is to reduce to form-factors which existing packaging/mailing tends to fit (e.g A3 sized padded envelops). Hence convenience is key so form factors will tend to standardise around a few common shapes (e.g. CD-case size).
One can point out to parallels with the rail industry where tracks were designed to handle carriages adapted from trolleys which had axis build from cart hoists/rigs which had width dependent on navigating the ruts on the original British roads. Hence width of modern railway tracks have their ancestry derived from Roman times! In a similar regard, you will see many shapes constrained by 19" rack form factor and CD-cases. The supporting infrastructure is so prevalent that it will have to be a really radical advance to justify a physical change.
Oh, as for boring and beige do you expect that an average penny-pinching company wants to waste money on something like aesthetics that's going to be obsolete in 2-3 years time? Of course Mac fans like to "think different":-).
... the basic gaming business model? As ESR noted, the gaming industry is basically a variant of the manufacturing model where for $s you get y hours worth of pleasure. As such it needs repeat buys or serial purchases (return of x, revenge of x, x revisited, etc) or multiple scenarios (Ultimas, Doom packs). If you have completely non-deterministic action and infinite puzzle solutions, are you basically cutting off your future revenue stream as people won't upgrade until they've "finished"? In which case you might as well have a subscription model (a la cable, pay per month) or crossword book model (pay per set of puzzles). Given the quite high establishment costs and market risks, who is willing to experiment?
Perhaps the target audience is not the adolescent with excess hormones but perhaps the more mature audience. Think back to board games like Diplomacy or Machiavelli (sp?) where intrigue and mystery is an inherent part of the story and the randomness given by interaction with other humans. If so, you are in the mental challenge business which is strictly speaking not entertainment. People who want the mental equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest are not likely to be found at gaming conventions and you are competing against games like chess and bridge. As others have noted, the gameplay/plot is key in this situation and the graphics only a reinforcing visual prop.
I'm not fraging the idea, in fact puzzles are quite a good way of relaxing but perhaps the question should be framed as "what segment of the population enjoys puzzles and how they can best be approached using technology derived from current display engines?"
Given that technology is changing so quickly, it seems rather Chaute-like to try and impose constraints on the market. There is a role for the government, but in establishing standards for "Truth in Advertising" (keeping the corporates relatively honest), anti-competitive oversight (improper business tactics) and legal protection of property rights (e.g. can't sell spectrum and then impose forced sales or confiscatatory tactics). It is not the role of governments to try and pick winners. I can think of the example back in mid-90s when they triumpantly dolled out millions to establish multi-media centres just as the internet was taking off, starving many potential entrants in favor of the disc-in-a-sleeve distribution mechanism. If people are interested in laughing at their antics with 20/20 hindsight, they might wish to look at this, specially the thoughts on Broadband Networking. The only consolation is that other governments are probably not doing much better and at least the media is giving the incumbant telcos a roasting (telstra, commentary).
What people tend to forget is that one man's capital is another man's cost. If you overspend on rolling out a network, you have to pass the costs onto the next guy or consumer somehow or else your shareholders get rather upperty. All those megaprofit projections by the dotcons have to come out of someone's pocket.
One must keep in mind that one of the nice side-effects of a corporate republic (tongue-in-cheek), is the relatively low cost of capital. Given a liquid capital market which efficiently allocates credit expansions (courtesy of Greenspan's monetary inflation) to the corporate investment with the higest rates of returns, fund managers have confidence in throwing money into dotcons or other activities in the expectation they can pull their money out relatively painlessly (or so the behavioural economists would like you to believe). However in other countries where the cost of capital (ie borrowings to purchase ye ol' network infrastructure gear) is high, you have to innovate in other ways (e.g. hacking software in this case). For example, hersay is that places like China/Russia have come up with better algorithms purely because they dont' have the CPU grunt to waste cycles on. As Australia has one the lowest population densities in the world (with corresponding high network amortisation costs), it is a small miracle that they only 5 years behind in the countryside. <P> Let's not get too cocksure of ourselves... I would refer you to this <A HREF="http://www.smh.com.au/news/0007/20/world/wor ld4.html">article </A> where it stuck me that rather than give away high-tech goodies to encourage cargo-cult mentalities in developing countries (not to mention benefiting the media-financial complex), wouldn't it be better to teach those guys basic literacy & community health first? A fair chunk of the world still does not have access to running water, much less a telephone connection so the concept of free (speech) beer is too abstract and thus meaningless. Let's get the basics right and if the Australians can apply their skills to the less developed countries, perhaps places like Mexico or Africa can learn a few lessons and help themselves grow economically. <P> LL
And that is the reason why smart companies are fleeing to the perceived rewards of the dotcon sector. If you assume that people are smart and once burnt (or 2+ times depending on #PHBs), then they change their tactices. Bsaically with the dominance of a market gorilla with the declared intention of being #1 in every market niche with > 1 MegaUnit sales, the playing ground becomes a lottery. Technology comes in waves (mainly dependent on the capabilities to deploy and matching need) and if 5-6 startups storm a market, each expecting to get a fair slice but only one gets swallowed in a trade-sale, then disproportinate returns are due. It is a very very smart strategy, letting others take the risk of creating new markets, then overtaking them and cresting it at the inflection point (when R&D costs are paid off). Very profitable but it shifts the reward-risk ratio for the independents and ultimately, they drop out leading to an overall decline in innovation. The problem that escapes most people's notice is that MS is not a software firm, they are in the distribution and IP licensing business (think information bundle/unbundling). Now that the ASPs are charging into this business, MS is preparing to reengineer themselves via the.bet... sorry.net initiative. And with all gambling systems, you look for who's got the vig (always makes a profit regardless of success or failure). Linux will never beat it because its adherents are in the stability and interoperability business, not technology gambling. Hence, from a marketing POV, you'd want to emphasise industrial-strenght computing, used by professionals at home and not toys or froth eye-candy. Hence the fact that it is not-bleeding edge technology is a hidden strength (as OpenBSD shows), because it uses tried and well-tested techniques. A truck/bus has different operating constraints/reliability issues from bicycles and it is a serious mistake confusing the two just because they share the same road.
As for MS, they are very smart, buying up undervalued IP goods and repacking them for greater resale value. However, IMHO they are not intelligent because they are poisoning their own well in the process. Time will tell whether an alternative system will prove superior.
Pentium Moment (quote) "''It was our Pentium moment,'' comparing the eBay incident to the lesson Intel Corp. (INTC) learned in 1994 after the chip giant angered customers by initially trying to downplay a bug in its new Pentium chip."
BenchCrafting (mention? (do a string search!)) after that MindCraft Fiasco
FUD-EEE - The Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt tactic as part of a concerted Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy to disrupt competitors
Although we're still too close to the action, I'm sure other people can come up with memorial moments of the GNU Revolution given enough thinking perspective.
Ummmm.... Sony follows the give away the razor, sell the blades which I suspect Microsoft hopes to replicate. This requires:
a) a high margin on the blades which they achieve through developers licensing model at minimal risk (they get a slice no matter what games are produced)
b) blades wear out and thus require replacement. Now the trick with this is to periodically make the razor slightly incompatible enough that people are motivated to buy the new version. A more sophisticated form is make the product so compelling (a la Gilette) that the competition is basically sidelined by the hype
c) you retain control over the distribution/branding of the razor/blades. If people forgot, Sony has recently purchased a bank. Given their technical wizardry and ability to interface every consumer electronics gadget known to man-kind into their system (not to mention owning significant audio/video/digital content) then you can probably guess their strategy.
The problem with games is that the significant up-front costs of development is so high that you really want a block-buster (a la movie studios) to recoup additional money through merchandising (can we say Laura Croft?). Microsoft certainly has the cash-cow, but do they have the creative smarts to become a content powerhouse like Sony? While putting out emulators may be a short-term win, what they really want is control of your cable and entryway into your house (he who has the beachhead, controls the shores). Whichever group gets a 50% market share can then have more leeway in dictating access rights and conditions of entry (e.g. insistence of "inspection" of code against "viruses"). It doesn't have to be anal-retentive to be classified as anti-competitive (and risk bringing more anti-trust lawsuits), just onerous enough that they can delay and browbeat content producers into submission (think musicians but on larger scale). The problem is not so much *development*, but *distribution*. Control, control, control... of the key nexuses and technologies is enough.
However, the fatal assumption is that the blades (software) can wear out fast enough to gain significant revenue flow. Emulators have a purpose, they preserve the value of any large-scale software collection against hardware obsolescence (deliberate or otherwise). One can see the case in Inform, the Infocode compiler for interactive text adventures from Infocom which a certain group wishes to preserve for their own enjoyment. It was not intended for wholescale piracy of existing works but to maintain portability of the software across multiple platforms and across a longer time scale than the fortunes of any single company.
<rant mode=on>
***** PROSUMER PROTEST *****
I reject the presumption of media companies that digital media (especially games) are a disposable item. When I acquire an item to add to my not-inconsiderable collection, I expect the value (include resale) of that collection to be retained over time. While OSs are clearly a service industry (their job is to maintain system stability and interoperability), the computing games industry business is entertainment and I expect to recreate the pleasureable experience from fragging (in the nicest possible digital way) my younger brother for many years to come in the future.
Altering the system from a durable item (console + disk + game) to a mere temporary license to use for a limited period due to the "oh, so sorry, parts for your failed console are unavailable" is a subtle form of *BAIT and SWITCH* IMHO. Hardware is failable, but software can always be recreated/emulated. Why won't companies like MS or Sony play fair? Think about it. If there was a *CREDIBLE* (ie FUD-proof) software competitor to their hardware, guess how they would retain long-term control over developers who can bypass them and go straight to the software emulator? From the point of view of a prosumer (ie take the con- out of consumer), I would prefer a long-term competitive landscape so that prices reflect reality and also give incentives for the smaller niche players (e.g. MUD) to develop really innovative games (plus as a matter of principle, I like supporting the underdogs).
If people are serious about preserving the long-term value of any games they may buy, I would strongly urge you to support the WulfStation project on SourceForge. It is in *your* long-term interests to keep any PSX2 games you buy when they roll around with the PSX3 in 5-6 years time. The X-Box may or may not be worthwhile emulation platform but that's irrelevant if the goal is to preserve your priviledges as a collector. Ditto for any X-box/Dreamcast/Amiga/Sega games in that any good ones should be preserved for prosperity if possible.
Regardless of whether the software is open-source or not, someone has to physically spend time to install, customise, tune and upgrade it otherwise the software suffers from bit rot. It then comes down to do you hire that person directly or outsource it? Either way you have to spend the money (not to mention usual overheads). Now if the profit margins for consultancy (*cough* Oracle *cough*) are high, then it makes sense to acquire such expertise in-house. However, if it is *NOT* a core competency, *AND* the risk/cost is lowered by hiring specialists (the whole point of a free market in services IMHO) then it makes sense to pay for the external support. It's the same reasoning that we don't all become in-house corporate doctors, the time it takes to learn the stuff and the frequency we use it doesn't make it worthwhile. Instead we pay for health insurance and scream for emergency help when disaster strikes. Even if you can view the base software as "free" (once development costs are written off), support costs is really a form of insurance that you will have some competent help (*cough* MSCE *cough*) around *WHEN* things go wrong (and I guarentee that error-free software has not been invented yet apart from 1-line hello worlds).
So, how much are you willing to pay for peace of mind?
... I believe is actually due to the mountains containing the smog in a sort of air basin. Thus you don't get any flushing effects and the haze persists for many many days until a serious storm comes along. Some nice pictures and a brief explanation give the somewhat reassuring claim that LA will meet federal standards by 2010. For those doubtful of the effectiveness of federal institutions and national standards testing, this is probably enough incentive to start emmigration procedures:-).
Actually, it is a rather interesting scientific question as to how far you have to alter the landscape before local micro-climate effects become significant and broadly measureable. Claims that cutting down rainforests affecting the tight ground-moisture cycle (e.g. leaves breaking up the water to reduce flash run-offs + erosion) tend to be rather hot points of discussion but certainly humans can alter ground effects such as vegetation, heat distributions, evaporation rates, etc which can lead to a discernable regional effect on the local weather patterns. However, exactly how much impact we have on the wider global cycles taking into account natural decadal variability is still a major topic of research
... between your client hiring in-house dev team (ie just buying you out) and outsourcing to you? This is IMHO the real deciding factor in calculating the value proposition. Answers that I can think of: - you can amortise the development costs across many companies (ie fairly large client base) - the software is NOT their core business - you offer a faster growth/development/debugging rate than they can do in=house - the collective feedback and user support base cuts down on internal costs - the software creates productivity but requires serious training (e.g. certain financial trading packages) in which case you put on courses and charge real-line (same time/place) help (ie charge out rate)
If it is a once-off, work many times without fault then perhaps you may wish to offer it as an embedded device. Ie get a small linux kernel, compact in your software, database logs, management tools, etc and sell it as an item with remote monitoring on a long-term on-going basis. If people can recognise the service of 24 hour monitoring, then they should be able to cost it.
If it is a specialised area, requiring specific domain knowledge, then offer it as a leader to your professional services (a la lawyers doing pro bonum work).
If it is something so trivial that anyone can recreate it then why are you trying to charge above market rates? Ie buy vs build argument. People forget that the main function of a market driven firm is price discovery, finding an appropriate market value for their goods/services. If you think you are worth $100K+/person, but the market doesn't share your sentiment, then we've got a serious reality discontinuity here. This leads to a rather interesting angle on venture capitalists as what are they really investing into? A collection of intangible goods which may have fluctuating value depending on what other people don't know?
The open/close source is just a distribution mechanism. You still have to think about what business you are in, who are your clients, and how you can align your specialised resources with their objectives.
There are a couple of points - sunk costs are that, effectively lost though humans have sentimental attachment to familiar objects
- when the marginal value of anything (including software) goes to zero or even negative, then the smart thing to do is liquidate it (or equivalent software of GPL) so that hopefully value can be retained by someone else
- Personally I think the point of software is to create user base with a compound average growth rate high enough to keep the idea going and growing. A static entity helps nobody.
- academic computing is different from most in that the return is often far in the future. How can you value the worth of helping someone get out of a poverty trap by equiping them with the skills to enter a higher level profession. It is very difficult to capture this and charging people up-front tends to discourage them into cheaper vocational work rather than higher value learning.
I congratulate you on your willingness to take a risk on GPL. I sincerely hope that you can gather a group of hackers with the same passion for helping others to evolve your system and perhaps, it may one day help find and recognise the next Enstein, da Vinci or Gandhi.
If there is a qualified accountant out there, perhaps they can inform us of how "goodwill" is treated during a company liquidation? My reading of the situation is that goodwill is trust and customer satisfaction that has accumulated over time (remember these.con companies have only existed for a few years) and can be priced into the "intangible" value of a company. Thus when a company gets taken over (ie new owner - moral stance open to question), it is written off over a period of time due to fact that they have to reestablish their credibility. Now if a company goes kaput, does this goodwill dissipate immediately and only the hard assets (like name/customer databases) exist? Or can you count on further transactions as in the Amiga fan base with its Lazarus effect? If you discount goodwill by only valuing immediate short-term gains (Flogging off the users for spam listing) then are you in fact destroying whatever residual long-term value there is?
I would really like to know how the bean-counters value "software" or even "internet" plays as it seems a nebulous concept at times.
Ummmm.... Sony follows the give away the razor, sell the blades. This requires:
a) a high margin on the blades which they achieve through developers licensing model at minimal risk (they get a slice no matter what games are produced)
b) blades wear out and thus require replacement. Now the trick with this is to periodically make the razor slightly incompatible enough that people are motivated to buy the new version. A more sophisticated form is make the product so compelling (a la Gilette) that the competition is basically sidelined by the hype
c) you retain control over the distribution/branding of the razor/blades. If people forgot, Sony has recently purchased a bank. Given their technical wizardry and ability to interface every consumer electronics gadget known to man-kind into their system (not to mention owning significant audio/video/digital content) then you can probably guess their strategy.
***** PROSUMER PROTEST *****
I reject the presumption of media companies that digital media (including games) are a disposable item. When I acquire an item to add to my not-inconsiderable collection, I expect the value (include resale) of that collection to be retained over time. While OSs are clearly a service industry (their job is to maintain system stability and interoperability), the computing games industry business is entertainment and I expect to recreate the pleasureable experience from fragging (in the nicest possible digital way) my younger brother for many years to come in the future. Altering the system from a durable item (console + disk + game) to a mere temporary license to use for a limited period due to the "oh, so sorry, parts for your failed console are unavailable" is a subtle form of *BAIT and SWITCH*. Hardware is failable, but software can always be recreated/emulated. Now if there was a *CREDIBLE* (ie FUD-proof) software competitor to their hardware, guess how they would retain long-term control over developers who can bypass them and go straight to the software emulator? Sony might not be the Evil Empire (TM) currently attached to a not-so-loved company but from the point of view of a prosumer (ie take the con- out of consumer), I would prefer a long-term competitive landscape so that prices reflect reality and also give incentives for the smaller niche players (e.g. MUD) to develop really innovative games (plus as a matter of principle, I like supporting the underdogs).
If people are serious about preserving the long-term value of any games they may buy, I would strongly urge you to support the WulfStation project on SourceForge. It is in *your* long-term interests to keep any PSX2 games you buy when they roll around with the PSX3 in 5-6 years time.
It's all too easy for any group (especially if highly focused) to vote for free beer and circuses (rule by mob or popular acclaim). I would at the very least like to see some structure where the people read/understand the issues and the ramifications/impacts before any voting. Sorta add in a datamodel which checks when back-ground web pages (provided by a spectrum of experts) have been read and at least some evidence of semi-intelligent discussion before presenting any voting page. No reflections on all those decent consumers keeping the rest of the world afloat but I shudder to think what people with short attention spans conditioned by marketeers for one-click shopping would do to a petition name drive. There are reasons why countries with transparent policy development processes succeed (in the long-term) better than those with autocratic rule. Part of the trick is to build up community consensus and that process can't be hurried if you want to consider all the interests out there. The tech is here but the social rules of conduct haven't evolved as yet.
Slashdot Mirror
It is pretty obvious as to why they want to do this. With the internet, prices become more transparent and competitors with more efficient manufacturing processes can undercut wholesale prices. The only differentiating factor is service which is human intensive and anathema for a company stuck in the industrial manufacturing mindset. In order to avoid being out of the loop, they need to dominate both ends of the value chain much like IBM with their components and their global services. By controlling the customer market information, they can then bully errr ... incentivate :-) their "independent" sales dealer network (cough). Unfortunately the golden rule applies, he who has the gold makes the rules. If you look at certain car manufacturing, they've basically marginalised independent mechanics by offering warentees valid only if the customer returns to the company's (centralised) body shop for periodic checkups and have another go at gorging your pocket with custom-designed and oh-so-breakable expensive fenders. Guess how the independent mechanics feel about this one? Expect computer manufacturers to start thinking along the same line because as soon as they convince the customer to return for a yearly upgrade as part of their laptop service warentee, they can preload yet more bloatware to demonstrate the "obvious" need to upgrade to a faster machine.
LL
One of the fundamental flaws of a patent system designed for the industrial age is that it assumes the payback time is relatively long and conmeasurate with the development time. Thus if you spend 10 years working on finding a new chemical treatment, then you would expect to gain the benefits for at least that amount of time. However, if you let any half-baked idea through that takes 5 minutes to implement (cough*one-click*cough) and claim exclusivity with the intention of hindering your competitors, this is effectively a form of
If these guys were really innovative, they would create a completely new industry sector like Adobe desktop publishing or SGI's 3D graphics instead of filing lawsuits and generally clogging up the system.
LL
It seems a pity that the low heat dissipation MIPS chips are going to disappear unless Sun really want to support a competiting processor to their embedded Sparcs. There has been reports of various firms developing low-cost, low heat chips (<1W better than Transmeta!) and it seems a waste for this low-cost niche to disappear. Too bad SGI can't get their A into G, port Linux across and do a reverse-Starfire purchase (Sun acquired the E10K shared bus tech originally from Cray when it merged with SGI) to shore up their low-end server racks. At the very least, it will encourage people to develop more MIPS binaries.
Oh well, nobody said computer vendors had to be smart.
LL
China is big, both geographically and population-wise. If the general assumption that the benefits of technology accrue most rapidly after 50% penetration, then it will be quite a while yet before significant investment in IT infrastructure will pay off. Also you have to keep in mind that once you travel inland away from the prosperous coastal regions, you'd realise that the interior is still an agrilcultural based economy (donkeys, adobe houses, etc). Now IT may improve logistics and supply chains but first you need a decent transport network and information to calculate prices/cost (ie free market). Personally I would expect advanced countries like Japan to gain the most as IT will improve their not-so-hot service economy whereas the developing countries still need basic investments first in literacy, health and social institutions (rule of law rather than gun/nepotism). It may make it easier to absorb new tech but I'd like to point out that if you don't have the education system to create sysadmins to fix things when (not if) computers break down then you'd basically pissing money away. There's also some rather interesting research from places like "Centre for Appropriate Technology" which studies the role of tech outside big cities. For example, what is the point of a ceramic toilet (as compared with outdoor dunny) in outback Australia when you don't have the supermarkets to supply toilet paper? Rather than encourage a cargo cult mentality, perhaps it's best to let each country have access to the source and adapt it to their cultural and industrial needs as necessary.
LL
Ahhhh .... the wonders of technology inflation ... it might not appear on the economic metrics but effectively with Moore's Law, you are obsoleting your existing IT infrastructure which forces you into endless cycles of upgrades.
... allowing you to sell their "contract" on the open market as you avoid being a captive audience (thus losing those lovely gatekeeper fees for directing you to their dotcon partners). Think about cars, how you could lease the latest and greatest, then trade in for the next model after a year and they flog it to the guy willing to accept a lower price. Unfortunately, they would get very pissed off if someone created a secondhand market for phone contracts (ie agree to take over repayment schedule) as then they can't sell you the next gee-whiz with additional bells and whistles (with price-tag to match).
Unfortunately manufacturers don't like the alternative
The alternative is the pay-as-you-go stored-value card which allows you the freedom to swap carriers if you dislike their level of service (which they of course discourage through additional connection fees). The problem is that someone has to pay for all that wireless infrastructure and that someone is the consumer (certainly the shareholder is not going to take the lumps if it can be avoided).
LL
However, there may be many different "models" depending on your worldview. Consider something as simple as a brick. A geologist would say its a silicate/fused clay in rectilinear form, an egineering would say it has structural/compression/torsion strength of xyz, a builder will say its costs k available in quantities of l deliverable in m days, and I say great, but how do you build a wall? I suppose from a more philosophical world we can talk about perceptions of reality and common reference frames but then that's a more AI type problem.
The problem comes down to resolving conflicts among different world perceptions ... in the extreme this can lead to holy crusades. Even a brick can be viewed as anything from a unit of building art to a handy weapon for Seattle protesters. Metaphors are merely one tool in the repeitoire of techniques of people attempting to "persuade" us that their viewpoint is "superior". That is why democracies tend to be slightly less self-destructive than other forms of society in that there is enough rotation of thoughts in the power structures (no old geriatics sticking to out-moded social theories). For those trained in critical thinking/analysis, they have the rare skill of being able to perceive reality and act accordingly (probably one reason why engineers dislike marketeers but I digress).
So, to survive, you need to build up a really good/accurate mental model of how the world works, whether a bushman in desert survival or a cynical politician scrounging for votes, and thus how you can interact within this perceived structure without wasting too much energy. And if you're really really good (philosopher, social entrepreneur or genius inventor), you get to form completely new models.
ObJoke and commentary on human nature
LL
Now apply the same thinking to software, if your profit margin is in the first sale, then any activity which results in suppression of repeat sales of the next upgrade is to be severely discouraged. Entities like Microsoft have tacitly acknowledged this by noting that their biggest competitor is actually their old products.
Thus if your business model relies on forcing customers to go through an endless upgrade cycle (cough*Wintel*cough) the Internet is a threat because so long as there is one person with the passion and resources to keep a copy, others will be able to find it and offer some exchange/trade/resale. Think of web-rings, freshmeat and mirrors, all which collectively serve to persist information and minimise bit rot. This may not suit companies accustomised to high information decay rates as it forces them into a service model which is human intensive and because they've bid up the price of programming labor to insane levels in hiring software engineers to churn out the next killer-app, can't compete as service model requires a somewhat different skillset (more diagnostic and less development). Lower margins = less profits = collapsing share prices = pissed off investors.
As AbiWord CEO points out, "Users are tired of the crazy upgrade cycle which has become the norm for so many desktop applications", primarily because it puts the real cost of software in wasted time learning applications which may be deprecated in the next release cycle. From the software developers and distributors point of view, old software is also a disincentive for upgrading and thus their desire to shorten the half life of information or put time-limited licensing terms into their EULA.
OpenSource sorta gets around the problem as their real business is stability and interoperability, despite all too frequent plaintive cries that Unix is not "innovative" or "bleeding-edge". Until the marketing/advocacy people realise this and emphasise low "cost of repair/replacement", they will be perceived as at a disadvantage to "mainstream" software. However, despite similar functionality, it is a distinct business from licensing IP blocks (drag,drop,script) where all the value is retained by the manufacturer. Just like abandonware is not really a software distribution, it is in the nostalgia business. As such, it can probably carve out a small niche for its proponent provided he's smart to avoid copyright lawsuits, given that the majority of software purchasers have short-term memory (when did you ever come across a piece of non-gaming software that you really *enjoyed* using?). LL
Cool != useful. I would be more interested in what problem domains they wou;d have superior characteristics than deterministic silicon stuff. I believe the original claims of it being used to solve combinatorical problems (e.g. travelling salesman) were retracted when they calculated the volume of DNA required to encode all the possibilities. If smaller but slower than RAM, then they might have a role as massive solid state memory devices. If they can duplicate the incredible self-repair mechanisms of cells, then they might be useful in hostile environments.
However, it would still be useful if someone could point out papers describing their theoretical computing properties. All of classical computing (ie Turing) can be derived from binary logic and NAND gates, and a similar theoretical basis exists for quatum computing (but they're having problems with the engineering aspects). Has anyone developed the equivalent for biocomputing? I know a lot of work has gone into string, tree and sequence algorithms (a la computational molecular biology) but can they be adapted for other uses?
In some ways the fun part is the reverse-engineering of the genome. Imagine that you're given the compressed core dump of a Linux kernel, and are asked to recreate the instruction set, systems architecture and application source code from first principles. If those gene jocks ever succeed, maybe we'll be hacking/designing complete biostructures in a few decades.
LL
... the cost is in the sunk infrastructure but the value is in the services.
/. you've got the excuse of .... uuummm ... market research ... yeah :-)).
With software, especially middleware all you are doing is spreading the access ponits to a wider set of end-devices. With minaturisation, you can clump larger functionality into the same space for less cost. That means that theoretically if you have an IP connection and appropriate software+interface, any device can emulate the functionality of any other (though doing weather simulations on a Palm might not be time-efficient).
Personally I think the fallacy is thinking there is convergence. The illusion is that all these improvements are arriving together and softare allows easy function shifting and it looks like everything is converging onto a mobile phone/PDA/camera. However, if you look at the social use, you'd find quite distinct patterns. PDAs are the equivalent of filofaxes, phones are human connectors, gameboyw are for time-wasting, etc. Sure you can put tetris on a phone but then you are mixing communications with entertainment modes which bosses tend to frown upon. (of course with
Basically why do we use computers? Communications, education/training, entertainment, productivity. In essence a mental amplifier much the same way a lever is a physical amplifier. However, just like we've got distinct tools, we have distinct languages to address specific problem domains (SQL, lisp, etc) and convergence on a few physical form factors (size of hands+pockets+belts+purses+mail boxes) won't change that.
LL
What are the inherent limitations of the information infrastructure? Certainly not hardware (vendors are keen to flog as many boxes as possible) or software (internet distribution costs are pretty much zero). The inherent bottlenecks are development time and trained staff. Linux attracts a pool of talent or at least the opportunity to learn the guts of a system without paying a hideous cost in acquiring system tools and development environments (cough*Microsoft*cough). Distribution boils down to boring physical aspects, you don't put datacentres and six-9 reliable systems in unstable locations (e.g. earhquake zones) or where there is a limit in the technology level. Given inherent limits in manpower you will see a move towards consolidation once the complexity passes a critical point as the cost of training exceeds the value for a small site. Currently web sites are still pretty primitive but once the next generation of tools are refined (e.g. Zope, ACS, etc) expect to see more critical mass building up. It's not so much the CPU but the storage as a couple of petabytes tends to be rather difficult to shift :-).
Given that latency is a big problem and getting bigger with faster CPU clock speed (e.g. 1 disk read = x megainstructions), it then makes sense for CPUs to be sited really really close and from a management/administration viewpont, a clump of systems is easier to manage than a zillion boxes (again issues to do with backups and system security). Why do we have petrol stations and gas farms (at ports/airports/etc)? Because you put the resources near where they will be used. Again, if you use the motoring analogy, Cisco builds the highways, SGI builds the gas farms, Microsoft builds the tollroads, etc ... The skills required to create highly scalable *systems* is scarce which is why even PCs have yet to go beyond dual processors, and outside niches you might as well forget about parallel software that can use the horsepower.
So SGI is taking a strategic look at their markets and IMHO rebranding themselves as the BMW of the internet world focusing on industrial-strength trucks. The trends they wish to ride on are commodity OS (large pool of development to overcome constraints of talent) plus increasing outsourcing of specialist internet services (consolidated servers to achieve economy of scale - see their O3000 brick concept to understand their direction). In order to play you have to pay (in terms of a learning curve).
LL
From a legal standpoint, renting is a contractual relationship where the "ownership" is retained by the lessor but "access" (in a modified form) is provided to the lessee. Distribution as normally interpreted is more a third party shifting the good in question through space (or time). Now the question people are asking is to what extent a GPL license affects bundled hardware or services. IANAL but reading the GPL, I would speculate that it only refers to peer software. This can be observed with the fact that the code of gcc is not GPL, and business models such as on-line GIMP studio processing does not GPL the pictures. IMHO, the nearest analogy of renting is that of accessing a gcc compiler through a web interface. You are "renting" CPU-disk time as a service, not "distributng" gcc per se. As part of the terms of service, you could say that breaking the seal abrogates your obligation of support as it is then not the service you were contracted to supply, a la if you vandalise a flat, the landlord can request an eviction notice.
...
As GPL becomes more prevalent, a lot of business practices (and legal precendences) have to be reexamined. GNU provides software according to its perception of the world, simplistic and dogmatic as it may appear to suits. OSS, BSD, MPL etc provide variations to account for a different view of reality. You can pick and choose as to what your beliefs are. Areas of potential conflict are
- what is "internal" to a company (when you have joint ventures, strategic relationships, etc)
- what does "distribution" and "linking" precisely mean
- amount of bundling allowed with hardware/services
These issues will obviously be debated until a common set of practices evolve. I am reminded of an old analogy
Philosophy - why do we fsck?
Science - what is fsck?
Engineering - how to fsck better?
Economics - when can we fsck?
Marketing - who can fsck?
Law - who can't fsck?
Laws are pain in the neck, especially when they are set in stone to bias the playing field in favor of incumbent interests.
LL
All consumer electronics will tend towards book-sized consoles (e.g Sony, Bose speakers)
Business machines will remain boring and beige :-).
why? you 'canna break the laws of physics and economics. What are the physical limitations of chips? Heat dissipation which means for a given level of technology (process shrink) they generate a certain thermal volume (aside it's rather interesting that the C-bricks modules SGI designed for their O3000 are deliberately oversized to handling the heat given off by the coming IA-64 processors .. rather interesting engineering commentary on the efficiency of the instruction set/design ... you might save on the chip but negative externalities are realised elsewhere). Given high-end machines tend to occupy datacentres where costs are measured in $$/square metre (or 19"Us), high-end vendors aim to cram things into basic 19" units for easy comparison plus add optional fancy skins for the branding exercise de jure.
Deskside cubes are usually aimed to a) fit under a desk or b) migrate to a within an internal rack space so the physical dimensions are constrained, especially when you consider physical access to cables and the reset button.
Laws of economics dictate that for low-priced consumer items a larger fraction of cost is contained in the distribution system (think return/repair/replacement/etc). Hence a tendency is to reduce to form-factors which existing packaging/mailing tends to fit (e.g A3 sized padded envelops). Hence convenience is key so form factors will tend to standardise around a few common shapes (e.g. CD-case size).
One can point out to parallels with the rail industry where tracks were designed to handle carriages adapted from trolleys which had axis build from cart hoists/rigs which had width dependent on navigating the ruts on the original British roads. Hence width of modern railway tracks have their ancestry derived from Roman times! In a similar regard, you will see many shapes constrained by 19" rack form factor and CD-cases. The supporting infrastructure is so prevalent that it will have to be a really radical advance to justify a physical change.
Oh, as for boring and beige do you expect that an average penny-pinching company wants to waste money on something like aesthetics that's going to be obsolete in 2-3 years time? Of course Mac fans like to "think different" :-).
LL
... the basic gaming business model? As ESR noted, the gaming industry is basically a variant of the manufacturing model where for $s you get y hours worth of pleasure. As such it needs repeat buys or serial purchases (return of x, revenge of x, x revisited, etc) or multiple scenarios (Ultimas, Doom packs). If you have completely non-deterministic action and infinite puzzle solutions, are you basically cutting off your future revenue stream as people won't upgrade until they've "finished"? In which case you might as well have a subscription model (a la cable, pay per month) or crossword book model (pay per set of puzzles). Given the quite high establishment costs and market risks, who is willing to experiment?
Perhaps the target audience is not the adolescent with excess hormones but perhaps the more mature audience. Think back to board games like Diplomacy or Machiavelli (sp?) where intrigue and mystery is an inherent part of the story and the randomness given by interaction with other humans. If so, you are in the mental challenge business which is strictly speaking not entertainment. People who want the mental equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest are not likely to be found at gaming conventions and you are competing against games like chess and bridge. As others have noted, the gameplay/plot is key in this situation and the graphics only a reinforcing visual prop.
I'm not fraging the idea, in fact puzzles are quite a good way of relaxing but perhaps the question should be framed as "what segment of the population enjoys puzzles and how they can best be approached using technology derived from current display engines?"
LL
What people tend to forget is that one man's capital is another man's cost. If you overspend on rolling out a network, you have to pass the costs onto the next guy or consumer somehow or else your shareholders get rather upperty. All those megaprofit projections by the dotcons have to come out of someone's pocket.
LL
One must keep in mind that one of the nice side-effects of a corporate republic (tongue-in-cheek), is the relatively low cost of capital. Given a liquid capital market which efficiently allocates credit expansions (courtesy of Greenspan's monetary inflation) to the corporate investment with the higest rates of returns, fund managers have confidence in throwing money into dotcons or other activities in the expectation they can pull their money out relatively painlessly (or so the behavioural economists would like you to believe). However in other countries where the cost of capital (ie borrowings to purchase ye ol' network infrastructure gear) is high, you have to innovate in other ways (e.g. hacking software in this case). For example, hersay is that places like China/Russia have come up with better algorithms purely because they dont' have the CPU grunt to waste cycles on. As Australia has one the lowest population densities in the world (with corresponding high network amortisation costs), it is a small miracle that they only 5 years behind in the countryside. ... I would refer you to this <A HREF="http://www.smh.com.au/news/0007/20/world/wor ld4.html">article </A> where it stuck me that rather than give away high-tech goodies to encourage cargo-cult mentalities in developing countries (not to mention benefiting the media-financial complex), wouldn't it be better to teach those guys basic literacy & community health first? A fair chunk of the world still does not have access to running water, much less a telephone connection so the concept of free (speech) beer is too abstract and thus meaningless. Let's get the basics right and if the Australians can apply their skills to the less developed countries, perhaps places like Mexico or Africa can learn a few lessons and help themselves grow economically.
<P>
Let's not get too cocksure of ourselves
<P>
LL
And that is the reason why smart companies are fleeing to the perceived rewards of the dotcon sector. If you assume that people are smart and once burnt (or 2+ times depending on #PHBs), then they change their tactices. Bsaically with the dominance of a market gorilla with the declared intention of being #1 in every market niche with > 1 MegaUnit sales, the playing ground becomes a lottery. Technology comes in waves (mainly dependent on the capabilities to deploy and matching need) and if 5-6 startups storm a market, each expecting to get a fair slice but only one gets swallowed in a trade-sale, then disproportinate returns are due. It is a very very smart strategy, letting others take the risk of creating new markets, then overtaking them and cresting it at the inflection point (when R&D costs are paid off). Very profitable but it shifts the reward-risk ratio for the independents and ultimately, they drop out leading to an overall decline in innovation. The problem that escapes most people's notice is that MS is not a software firm, they are in the distribution and IP licensing business (think information bundle/unbundling). Now that the ASPs are charging into this business, MS is preparing to reengineer themselves via the .bet ... sorry .net initiative. And with all gambling systems, you look for who's got the vig (always makes a profit regardless of success or failure). Linux will never beat it because its adherents are in the stability and interoperability business, not technology gambling. Hence, from a marketing POV, you'd want to emphasise industrial-strenght computing, used by professionals at home and not toys or froth eye-candy. Hence the fact that it is not-bleeding edge technology is a hidden strength (as OpenBSD shows), because it uses tried and well-tested techniques. A truck/bus has different operating constraints/reliability issues from bicycles and it is a serious mistake confusing the two just because they share the same road.
As for MS, they are very smart, buying up undervalued IP goods and repacking them for greater resale value. However, IMHO they are not intelligent because they are poisoning their own well in the process. Time will tell whether an alternative system will prove superior.
LL
Pentium Moment (quote) "''It was our Pentium moment,'' comparing the eBay incident to the lesson Intel Corp. (INTC) learned in 1994 after the chip giant angered customers by initially trying to downplay a bug in its new Pentium chip."
BenchCrafting (mention? (do a string search!)) after that MindCraft Fiasco
FUD-EEE - The Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt tactic as part of a concerted Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy to disrupt competitors
Although we're still too close to the action, I'm sure other people can come up with memorial moments of the GNU Revolution given enough thinking perspective.
LL
a) a high margin on the blades which they achieve through developers licensing model at minimal risk (they get a slice no matter what games are produced)
b) blades wear out and thus require replacement. Now the trick with this is to periodically make the razor slightly incompatible enough that people are motivated to buy the new version. A more sophisticated form is make the product so compelling (a la Gilette) that the competition is basically sidelined by the hype
c) you retain control over the distribution/branding of the razor/blades. If people forgot, Sony has recently purchased a bank. Given their technical wizardry and ability to interface every consumer electronics gadget known to man-kind into their system (not to mention owning significant audio/video/digital content) then you can probably guess their strategy.
The problem with games is that the significant up-front costs of development is so high that you really want a block-buster (a la movie studios) to recoup additional money through merchandising (can we say Laura Croft?). Microsoft certainly has the cash-cow, but do they have the creative smarts to become a content powerhouse like Sony? While putting out emulators may be a short-term win, what they really want is control of your cable and entryway into your house (he who has the beachhead, controls the shores). Whichever group gets a 50% market share can then have more leeway in dictating access rights and conditions of entry (e.g. insistence of "inspection" of code against "viruses"). It doesn't have to be anal-retentive to be classified as anti-competitive (and risk bringing more anti-trust lawsuits), just onerous enough that they can delay and browbeat content producers into submission (think musicians but on larger scale). The problem is not so much *development*, but *distribution*. Control, control, control ... of the key nexuses and technologies is enough.
However, the fatal assumption is that the blades (software) can wear out fast enough to gain significant revenue flow. Emulators have a purpose, they preserve the value of any large-scale software collection against hardware obsolescence (deliberate or otherwise). One can see the case in Inform, the Infocode compiler for interactive text adventures from Infocom which a certain group wishes to preserve for their own enjoyment. It was not intended for wholescale piracy of existing works but to maintain portability of the software across multiple platforms and across a longer time scale than the fortunes of any single company.
<rant mode=on>
***** PROSUMER PROTEST *****
I reject the presumption of media companies that digital media (especially games) are a disposable item. When I acquire an item to add to my not-inconsiderable collection, I expect the value (include resale) of that collection to be retained over time. While OSs are clearly a service industry (their job is to maintain system stability and interoperability), the computing games industry business is entertainment and I expect to recreate the pleasureable experience from fragging (in the nicest possible digital way) my younger brother for many years to come in the future.
Altering the system from a durable item (console + disk + game) to a mere temporary license to use for a limited period due to the "oh, so sorry, parts for your failed console are unavailable" is a subtle form of *BAIT and SWITCH* IMHO. Hardware is failable, but software can always be recreated/emulated. Why won't companies like MS or Sony play fair? Think about it. If there was a *CREDIBLE* (ie FUD-proof) software competitor to their hardware, guess how they would retain long-term control over developers who can bypass them and go straight to the software emulator? From the point of view of a prosumer (ie take the con- out of consumer), I would prefer a long-term competitive landscape so that prices reflect reality and also give incentives for the smaller niche players (e.g. MUD) to develop really innovative games (plus as a matter of principle, I like supporting the underdogs).
If people are serious about preserving the long-term value of any games they may buy, I would strongly urge you to support the WulfStation project on SourceForge. It is in *your* long-term interests to keep any PSX2 games you buy when they roll around with the PSX3 in 5-6 years time. The X-Box may or may not be worthwhile emulation platform but that's irrelevant if the goal is to preserve your priviledges as a collector. Ditto for any X-box/Dreamcast/Amiga/Sega games in that any good ones should be preserved for prosperity if possible.
</rant>
LL
Regardless of whether the software is open-source or not, someone has to physically spend time to install, customise, tune and upgrade it otherwise the software suffers from bit rot. It then comes down to do you hire that person directly or outsource it? Either way you have to spend the money (not to mention usual overheads). Now if the profit margins for consultancy (*cough* Oracle *cough*) are high, then it makes sense to acquire such expertise in-house. However, if it is *NOT* a core competency, *AND* the risk/cost is lowered by hiring specialists (the whole point of a free market in services IMHO) then it makes sense to pay for the external support. It's the same reasoning that we don't all become in-house corporate doctors, the time it takes to learn the stuff and the frequency we use it doesn't make it worthwhile. Instead we pay for health insurance and scream for emergency help when disaster strikes. Even if you can view the base software as "free" (once development costs are written off), support costs is really a form of insurance that you will have some competent help (*cough* MSCE *cough*) around *WHEN* things go wrong (and I guarentee that error-free software has not been invented yet apart from 1-line hello worlds).
So, how much are you willing to pay for peace of mind?
LL
Actually, it is a rather interesting scientific question as to how far you have to alter the landscape before local micro-climate effects become significant and broadly measureable. Claims that cutting down rainforests affecting the tight ground-moisture cycle (e.g. leaves breaking up the water to reduce flash run-offs + erosion) tend to be rather hot points of discussion but certainly humans can alter ground effects such as vegetation, heat distributions, evaporation rates, etc which can lead to a discernable regional effect on the local weather patterns. However, exactly how much impact we have on the wider global cycles taking into account natural decadal variability is still a major topic of research
LL
... between your client hiring in-house dev team (ie just buying you out) and outsourcing to you? This is IMHO the real deciding factor in calculating the value proposition. Answers that I can think of:
- you can amortise the development costs across many companies (ie fairly large client base)
- the software is NOT their core business
- you offer a faster growth/development/debugging rate than they can do in=house
- the collective feedback and user support base cuts down on internal costs
- the software creates productivity but requires serious training (e.g. certain financial trading packages) in which case you put on courses and charge real-line (same time/place) help (ie charge out rate)
If it is a once-off, work many times without fault then perhaps you may wish to offer it as an embedded device. Ie get a small linux kernel, compact in your software, database logs, management tools, etc and sell it as an item with remote monitoring on a long-term on-going basis. If people can recognise the service of 24 hour monitoring, then they should be able to cost it.
If it is a specialised area, requiring specific domain knowledge, then offer it as a leader to your professional services (a la lawyers doing pro bonum work).
If it is something so trivial that anyone can recreate it then why are you trying to charge above market rates? Ie buy vs build argument. People forget that the main function of a market driven firm is price discovery, finding an appropriate market value for their goods/services. If you think you are worth $100K+/person, but the market doesn't share your sentiment, then we've got a serious reality discontinuity here. This leads to a rather interesting angle on venture capitalists as what are they really investing into? A collection of intangible goods which may have fluctuating value depending on what other people don't know?
The open/close source is just a distribution mechanism. You still have to think about what business you are in, who are your clients, and how you can align your specialised resources with their objectives.
LL
There are a couple of points
- sunk costs are that, effectively lost though humans have sentimental attachment to familiar objects
- when the marginal value of anything (including software) goes to zero or even negative, then the smart thing to do is liquidate it (or equivalent software of GPL) so that hopefully value can be retained by someone else
- Personally I think the point of software is to create user base with a compound average growth rate high enough to keep the idea going and growing. A static entity helps nobody.
- academic computing is different from most in that the return is often far in the future. How can you value the worth of helping someone get out of a poverty trap by equiping them with the skills to enter a higher level profession. It is very difficult to capture this and charging people up-front tends to discourage them into cheaper vocational work rather than higher value learning.
I congratulate you on your willingness to take a risk on GPL. I sincerely hope that you can gather a group of hackers with the same passion for helping others to evolve your system and perhaps, it may one day help find and recognise the next Enstein, da Vinci or Gandhi.
Regards,
LL
If there is a qualified accountant out there, perhaps they can inform us of how "goodwill" is treated during a company liquidation? My reading of the situation is that goodwill is trust and customer satisfaction that has accumulated over time (remember these .con companies have only existed for a few years) and can be priced into the "intangible" value of a company. Thus when a company gets taken over (ie new owner - moral stance open to question), it is written off over a period of time due to fact that they have to reestablish their credibility. Now if a company goes kaput, does this goodwill dissipate immediately and only the hard assets (like name/customer databases) exist? Or can you count on further transactions as in the Amiga fan base with its Lazarus effect? If you discount goodwill by only valuing immediate short-term gains (Flogging off the users for spam listing) then are you in fact destroying whatever residual long-term value there is?
I would really like to know how the bean-counters value "software" or even "internet" plays as it seems a nebulous concept at times.
LL
a) a high margin on the blades which they achieve through developers licensing model at minimal risk (they get a slice no matter what games are produced)
b) blades wear out and thus require replacement. Now the trick with this is to periodically make the razor slightly incompatible enough that people are motivated to buy the new version. A more sophisticated form is make the product so compelling (a la Gilette) that the competition is basically sidelined by the hype
c) you retain control over the distribution/branding of the razor/blades. If people forgot, Sony has recently purchased a bank. Given their technical wizardry and ability to interface every consumer electronics gadget known to man-kind into their system (not to mention owning significant audio/video/digital content) then you can probably guess their strategy.
***** PROSUMER PROTEST *****
I reject the presumption of media companies that digital media (including games) are a disposable item. When I acquire an item to add to my not-inconsiderable collection, I expect the value (include resale) of that collection to be retained over time. While OSs are clearly a service industry (their job is to maintain system stability and interoperability), the computing games industry business is entertainment and I expect to recreate the pleasureable experience from fragging (in the nicest possible digital way) my younger brother for many years to come in the future. Altering the system from a durable item (console + disk + game) to a mere temporary license to use for a limited period due to the "oh, so sorry, parts for your failed console are unavailable" is a subtle form of *BAIT and SWITCH*. Hardware is failable, but software can always be recreated/emulated. Now if there was a *CREDIBLE* (ie FUD-proof) software competitor to their hardware, guess how they would retain long-term control over developers who can bypass them and go straight to the software emulator? Sony might not be the Evil Empire (TM) currently attached to a not-so-loved company but from the point of view of a prosumer (ie take the con- out of consumer), I would prefer a long-term competitive landscape so that prices reflect reality and also give incentives for the smaller niche players (e.g. MUD) to develop really innovative games (plus as a matter of principle, I like supporting the underdogs).
If people are serious about preserving the long-term value of any games they may buy, I would strongly urge you to support the WulfStation project on SourceForge. It is in *your* long-term interests to keep any PSX2 games you buy when they roll around with the PSX3 in 5-6 years time.
LL
It's all too easy for any group (especially if highly focused) to vote for free beer and circuses (rule by mob or popular acclaim). I would at the very least like to see some structure where the people read/understand the issues and the ramifications/impacts before any voting. Sorta add in a datamodel which checks when back-ground web pages (provided by a spectrum of experts) have been read and at least some evidence of semi-intelligent discussion before presenting any voting page. No reflections on all those decent consumers keeping the rest of the world afloat but I shudder to think what people with short attention spans conditioned by marketeers for one-click shopping would do to a petition name drive. There are reasons why countries with transparent policy development processes succeed (in the long-term) better than those with autocratic rule. Part of the trick is to build up community consensus and that process can't be hurried if you want to consider all the interests out there. The tech is here but the social rules of conduct haven't evolved as yet.
LL