and the rest of the non-tech business infrastructure is probably the bigger question.
In my experience, the business wing of most companies has little interest in testing. Works/doesn't work is far less important than building brand, driving sales, and so on. I haven't seen many cases in which a "show stopper" was really a show stopper that held up a launch or a release, or in which anything that was broken at launch or release was ever worked on again.
Before launch/release it's "we can't hold anything up, just release and we'll fix it later" and after launch/release it's "numbers were adequate even with that 'issue' in evidence, which means that it doesn't critically affect sales and we shouldn't spend anything to think about it; let's work on new features."
I bought a SquareTrade plan for about $20 for a $250 smartpen in 2009 on the reasoning that a pen is a fairly fragile device that goes through a lot of abuse.
About four months later, the pen's display broke. SquareTrade asked me to verify the serial number, then gave me $250 as a payout, no questions asked, which I used to buy the pen's replacement.
After that, I've covered my phones, since the coverage is relatively cheap in comparison to the cost of a retail smartphone, and a smartphone also goes through a lot of abuse. I wouldn't bother for a laptop or computer, or for something very inexpensive, but for a very expensive device that is not easily user-serviceable (I have had occasion to change the screen and battery on an iPhone for a friend, and I would not like to do it again), I'm happy to have the coverage given my good past experience and the fact that they offer coverage that covers even your own boneheaded moves (dropped in water, cracked when sat on, etc.)
Bonding is largely a matter of care. Evidence says that adopted infants and infant children of single dads do not suffer from the psychological disorders that commonly proceed from poor parental bonding.
Now the data do tell us that amongst the sample populations that we have, your data is accurate—the bond between mothers and children is, on average, stronger. But your reasoning about the cause is wrong.
It is precisely because there is a strong cultural bias offering (or requiring of) women far more caretaking that the numbers tell us that more bonding occurs. You're putting the cart before the horse—it's not that children bond with mom because she's a woman, it's that because she's a women, children have infinitely greater opportunity to bond with mom.
It's primarily a social outcome, not a biological one.
issues here. One is mathematical thinking—this is intuitive, and very difficult to teach; some people display aptitude for this (logical relationships, congruences, dependencies, correlations across qualitative cases, a "sense" for probability that is remarkably in tune with formal outcomes) and others struggle with it even if they become very proficient with Two, which is notation.
Too often, we conflate the former with the latter and call the whole package "math." But in fact, it is a deep, intuitive understanding of mathematical principles rather than incredible fluency with notation and notation manipulation which is needed for innovation in science and research. I know people that have one in spades (incredible "math sense" but poor formal notation skills or vice-versa).
It isn't necessary to have the formal notation skills to the nines to be a good scientist (a good co-author/co-PI can help to fill the gaps that you have), it is absolutely necessary to have habits and patterns of thought that are "mathematically" sensible, and the best scientists that I know are the ones that can look at a dataset and—after an "eyeball test"—have the strong sense that something important is in evidence in this series, or in this column, or in that set of experimental results, etc.—even if they struggle to prove it. Colleagues often come along and, if they are able to listen and grok, can come up with the formalities.
Ballmer continues to drive Microsoft into a ditch.
But you are absolutely correct; this is the fundamental issue. Microsoft doesn't understand the value proposition behind Windows products and hasn't done since BillG left; they're chasing value that they see at other companies, but starting from scratch, even as they throw away the tremendous and once industry-leading value that they'd already built.
It's idiocy, of a special sort that affects only the most badly run companies.
They wouldn't think of it as "cloud services," and they would think of their iPad as a "PC" but in fact that's exactly what's happening.
A more operational way to describe the change is away from "disk operating system centricity" and toward "SaaS and cloud centricity." It's a few years late, but the browser (network infrastructure and related UI of a device) has become the operating system.
User-facing mass-storage I/O (bulk storage, filesystems, locally stored and accessed software and files) is what is essentially dying. But the argument was essentially that people couldn't migrate from Windows because of the local, disk-based applications infrastructure. With that infrastructure becoming less relevant and net-centric SaaS that runs on any platform becoming the model of the future, there is no Windows vise-grip any longer.
to see people happily ogling photos that they (1) save low-res prints from Facebook, then (2) upload to Walgreens via the digital app, to (3) make fuzzy prints with. I used to try to explain that their full-size phone photos are already there, in a different app, and that if they would just use those instead, the prints would look sooooo much better.
Same thing with data processing—so much tap, tap, tap and iCloud when it's so much more convenient to have a couple files on a filesystem. Even things like multiple windows open at once to work on complex projects.
But young people right now that have come of age with the current technological complex seem utterly immune to these concerns. It's what they know, and so far as they're concerned, it's fine.
And I have to say that I also ended up doing serious work on an iPad. When it came time to write my dissertation, somehow it ended up getting drafted on the iPad with a bluetooth keyboard. Something about the instant-on and the incredible mobility and battery life that let me move myself around from coffee shop to library to park, etc. helped everything flow better than sitting at a desk with my PC.
So there may be more here than meets the eye in terms of HCI/UX on iOS and mobile devices and their relationships to cognitive psychology and sociology, e.g. the way we think and the way we connect with things outside ourselves, without even realizing what the stakes/needs are.
use a laptop for papers, etc. But the share of students that tell me that they only have an iPad with them at school has been growing rapidly for the last couple of years. At the end of 2010, I saw virtually none of them in class. By this semester, just about every student in my classroom is turning up with an iPad decked out in a colorful case.
Some are using the bluetooth keyboard cases (Zagg, etc.) to make it a "laptop lite" but many take notes touch-typing right on the screen, at decent speed.
I'm being encouraged by the department and by half the class at the beginning of every semester to use an ebook-available textbook instead of the series I've been using for years, and I get a decent number of complaints (30-40 percent of class this semester) if/when I refer students to online material that's Flash-based and tell them that if they can't see it on their iPad, they'll have to go to a computer lab on their own time and engage with it there.
The change is happening. I don't have any guess as to what the peak of the trend might be (i.e. what percentage of students using only an iPad will mark the top of the trend) but right now it's still expanding, semester-over-semester.
Of course, this is anecdotal—one campus, one discipline, one professor. But considering the rather radical break that it represents from traditional methods of information processing and computing work, it's a startling anecdotal experience, and as someone that cut my teeth on computing with Sun workstations and UNIX before moving into the world of PC unices for the better part of two decades, it's very alien to me.
There will always be some hardcore gamers. But the enthusiasts with the 1,000 watt+ power supplies and SLI GPUs are not the "vast majority of lightweights" about which we're talking. Angry Birds has 1.7 billion downloads. Show me a PC game that does that volume.
is now the vast majority of non-business computing users.
They want:
(1) Web (95% of needs) (2) Office (5% of needs, and even then, only at a very rudimentary level)
Didn't you notice when all of the big-box stores shut down and the software aisles at the Wal-Marts and Costcos got emptied out? Yes, there was a time when people had a shelf full of CDs and DVDs that they wanted to install on their "next computer."
Those days are long gone.
The baby boomers in my extended family are happy to be free of the complexity. They tell "remember when" stories about how hard computing used to be, and how confusing computers were before you could just do everything that you needed to do online, in Firefox (most of them switched to Firefox during its heyday and are now solidly married to it, even if other options have become competitive). Most of the things that used to be standalone applications they now do online:
- Email (Google replaces Outlook) - To-do (Todoist, Toodledo, etc. replace Outlook) - Calendaring (Google replaces Outlook) - Contacts management (Google replaces Outlook) - Personal data management (Evernote replaces the file system) - Reference (Wikipedia replaces endless varieties of CD-ROM encyclopedias) - Entertainment (Social Gaming and YouTube replace CD-ROM gaming and multimedia) - Document editing (Google replaces Office) - Digital photos (Flickr/Facebook+Smartphone replace assorted "old" consumer digital photo apps+USB digital camera) - Music (Pandora replaces MP3 collections on hard drives)
I teach a bunch of college kids at local U, and have done now in two states over the better part of a decade. In 2006, kids showed up with Thinkpads. Now they show up with iPads.
In 2006, departmental policies often still required hardcopies of submitted work and installs of university-site-licensed educational software. These days, assignments are required to be submitted through online portals (Blackboard, Canvas, etc.) in digital form and devices like iPads are the *suggested* college study equipment. The Real Serious students get a bluetooth keyboard and the Pages app, but most of them type onscreen into Google Drive to do their work.
Seriously, the applications argument is dead—just like the PC. Specialized fields and roles will still require it, but I suspect that over time even those will go the way of the dodo as mobile devices get more and more processing power and more and more users move to them—which will tend to produce as web apps or mobile apps those things that used to be PC apps.
than many at the corporations with whom I work imagine to be fair.
I lose the stability and benefits that come with employment—but I gain productivity, the satisfaction of a job well done, and control over my own work life.
Call it whatever you want. But two of my current relationships have asked to put me on the books, with a raise, benefits, a great title, and a nice office. I've told them no in both cases—much to the surprise of one CEO. Instead, I continue to teach at the local university and offer my services on a contract, remote-work, you-pay-me-and-stay-out-of-my-way basis.
Again, call it what you want. Works for me, and for my clients—despite their desire to bring me in-house.
I've written multiple books, done award-winning work, and have sterling recommendations/references from people that can say all kinds of fabulous stuff about me. But all of my best work in life has been done in the contracting/consulting space, where I was basically a lone wolf.
Virtually every time a company has hired me, they have immediately put me in a box.
Step 1: Refuse to allow him to use his own tech tools/toolchains crafted over years and with which he is fabulous and familiar.
Step 2: Make sure that there's no allowance for him to do intense/creative work on his own daytime schedule; meetings are mandatory and if that means that the only time left for actual work is during hours when his brain isn't at its best, oh well.
Step 3: Lock him into a narrow chain of hierarchy/command so that he can't ever talk directly to the role players that he needs in order to directly get things done; instead, ensure that he's always stuck playing telephone through many organizational layers and that his immediate contact has an MBA and doesn't ever understand what he's saying.
Step 4: Evaluate him immediately (always too early) and on a linear progress model with synthetic "benchmarks," whether or not any of this matches the natural trajectory of the task at hand or not, so that instead of doing great things in the best way, he's working to "hit benchmarks" in ways that often interfere with the actual work, either slowing it tremendously or significantly reducing the potential of the final outcome.
Step 5: Take away any physical and psychological comfort and idiosyncrasy that enables him to act naturally and think clearly; dictate dress, office layout and organization, hours, speech and communications channels, venues, and characteristics, so that he's not even himself most of the time when he's working for you (you know, the self that did the great work that you want to have).
Step 6: Toss assorted new tasks and underlings into his lap that have no relationship to what he was actually hired to do and/or his actual area of expertise, ensuring that he'll spend more and more time doing stuff for which he is not the optimal laborer, again taking away from the work that you actually hired him to do.
Step 7: Undervalue or refuse to value at all any research work, preliminary design/development work, or anything that isn't clearly "making product" and "hitting benchmarks" and be sure to stop by the desk every ten minutes and remind him that he wasn't hired "to do that" but instead to "produce."
Under conditions of "employment" this has happened to me so many times that I hesitate to accept "employment" now and prefer to consult instead. I'm tired of seeing excitement turn into bewilderment of the "He came so highly recommended!" sort after just about every last thing that makes the best work that I've done possible (the work that they wanted to see done again, on their time) was methodically written out of my work life.
Too many MBAs and HR drones out there in the corporate world that are really only comfortable seeing other MBAs and HR drones buzzing about the office, wondering why nobody outside of management and HR seems to be "getting anything done."
the price range being talked about here is hardly a major expense. It's the price of a burger.
I buy apps routinely in this price range, sight unseen, based on the customer reviews in the app store.
Anyone that can't get people to shell out $10 for a product based on its description is not making a product that sounds very useful to the intended audience.
At $10, I can't see how it would be worth a software pirate's time to track down and/or crack a piece of software, apart from people that are in it just to be able to say they did it—and no anti-piracy measure will stop anyone like that; quite the contrary, it will simply encourage them.
pirate the app. I wouldn't. I simply wouldn't buy it or use it if I didn't think the price was fair.
But the evidence I've seen says that piracy is basically people that wouldn't pay for software anyway—given an enforced choice between nothing and paying the asked price, they'd choose nothing.
So you have two choices:
1) Reduce the price more to turn some pirates into paying customers. 2) Leave the price as-is and either fight piracy (and possibly lose paying customers due to annoyance) or don't (and end up with some people that wouldn't have paid your asking price using it).
Either way, you're not likely to increase sales significantly with anti-piracy measures. And more and more tech and software and the 'net in general are goodwill markets in which people want to want to pay. It's part of the value of a product/service, and when it's lacking, you're missing the best of your marketing potential.
Seriously, people will buy in if you make them love you and your product. Anyone that has any chance of ever paying for something will reward stuff they love. But you have to make them love it.
On the other hand, as a business, that should be your goal anyway. Anything less isn't good business.
in a transaction that they don't believe to be fair?
That's a losing proposition for any business. Like it or not, DRM or no, a business is ultimately at the mercy of its customers and what they believe to be fair—right or wrong, however that is measured.
Unless there's a plan to wrestle a monopoly on an absolutely necessary-for-life good out of a $5-10 app...
I switched phones from iOS to Android about a month and a half ago, because I wanted a phablet, widgets, and expandable memory and an escape from the jailbreak vs. upgrade-to-lates decisions and waits.
But I'll be damned if Android doesn't piss me off often. Most frustrating thing: inconsistent UI. What does the back button do in this app? And what does the onscreen "back function" near the top do do? Is it even there? That's one example, but the general theme is that Android apps are far less consistent than iOS apps, many requiring that you learn their own peculiarities.
Just as frustrating are the instability—so many apps crash regularly—and the UI speed and smoothness, which even with the jelly bean update really doesn't compare to iOS.
I wish one of these two systems would get it right.
Linux was always a system that required system-level tweaking in order to get and keep a system up and running. Defaults weren't particularly sensible for most use cases, drivers and components were unstable and needed to be replaced/reconfigured/updated/patched in order to achieve a stable, functioning work environment, and so on, and some things weren't "done yet"—drivers still under development years after hardware releases, and so on, with users waiting for them and needing to install/make use of them as soon as they were released.
That's just the nature of the beast when you're talking about a community-driven system with myriad code inputs that bases bunches of code on reverse-engineering.
But so long as Linux was reasonably transparent, anyone that valued free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech software could make the cost-benefit calculation that the amount of extra work and patience required to get and keep a system up and running was justified by the benefits involved.
Already by 2009, however, I felt as though the costs were growing while the benefits were the same as they had always been. An accelerating decrease in the transparency and modularity of desktop Linux distributions led the kinds of tweaking necessary to get and keep a linux system up and running to take longer and longer for me, and the continuous rush of new code and new subsystems that significantly different from the UNIX classics meant a corresponding increase in the need to continue to study and learn how these worked.
But my job wasn't and has never been Linux development, so this extra learning and work didn't contribute to my bottom line. It was just an increasing quantity of valuable time and energy being siphoned away from it, in fact.
There is still a market for a stable, easy-to-use, transparent Linux system with a smooth learning curve from easy-to-use/easy-to-learn through master-tasks/hard-to-learn, one that can open all of the documents, media, and network streams that mass market users need to be able to open and that is also free and open in all senses.
The problem isn't that Canonical is leading, it's the content of the leadership—both in terms of social/political issues, and in terms of the technical result, that aren't encouraging. Maybe one day someone will take up the mantle and finally deliver an easy-to-use, modular, transparent and powerful Linux system that's stable, has sensible defaults, and is both free and open. But to date nobody's come near the target, which is kind of a shame, because everyone's been able to see it for a decade, and it's often seemed as though "just a little bit of leadership" would get Linux there.
But I don't think Canonical is it; they're out to fulfill other goals/purposes, leaving that opportunity to continue to be open.
I transitioned away from SunOS and used Linux from 1993->2009. Big chunk of life.
In 2009, really out of curiosity, I installed a "Hackintosh" partition on my Thinkpad. Within four months I had a MacBook Pro and was using Mac OS.
The basic reality is that as a Linux user on some regular N percentage of days, I would sit down to do work and end up doing something else: fscking around with Linux. Download, tweak, read, peer at code, compile, plug, unplug, read some more, write some code, tweak again, blah, blah.
It was a regular occurrence. Every now and then I'd simply sit down to work on work and instead, hours later, would find myself having worked on Linux. I generally got the problem solved. Often it resulted from a "yum update" that did unexpected thing X to my userspace. Sometimes it didn't—it just emerged.
Some stuff had never worked well—sleeping, for example, or audio and streaming video—and I never spent much time on them in Linux. I didn't miss them until I'd had them working perfectly well on the Hackintosh partition—a system that was "hacked" together and that wasn't supposed to work well at all.
By the time I'd bought my Macbook Pro I'd already bought and installed Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, DevonThink, and a bunch of other software on the Mac partition, and had installed MacPorts and many GNU utilities, giving myself a command line that felt almost exactly like the Linux one. But fonts worked. Audio worked. Power management worked. Streaming video worked. Commercial applications worked. The apps all had a similar look, feel, and user interface behavior. The visual designs were cleaner and more professional, something I'd never given a second though to in Linux, but which I later realized had been distractions during visual scanning of screen space.
It was when I realized that all of my recent work was done on the Mac partition and I hadn't booted into Linux in a month and really didn't want to unless I had to that I decided to get the Macbook Pro. I thought I'd dual-boot Linux on it, but that soon went away. I still have a Parallels VM with Fedora on it here somewhere, but I don't think I've even run the initial yum updates on it after installing. It's just an unused VM, years later.
Linux had a lot of promise as a desktop OS once. But now, with the desktop on the wane for many common consumer uses and Mac OS and Windows trading blows as equals, I don't think Linux in its desktop form will ever be much more than it is right now. Android is another story—thought my experience with android has been less than perfect.
Too bad, in a way—when KDE 1.0 came out, it seemed to me that Linux was headed for global domination. I used it and loved it and was more productive that I could possibly have been with any of its contemporary Mac or Windows alternatives. But by the late '00s, the roles had reversed.
Slashdot Mirror
written on an iPad.
and the rest of the non-tech business infrastructure is probably the bigger question.
In my experience, the business wing of most companies has little interest in testing. Works/doesn't work is far less important than building brand, driving sales, and so on. I haven't seen many cases in which a "show stopper" was really a show stopper that held up a launch or a release, or in which anything that was broken at launch or release was ever worked on again.
Before launch/release it's "we can't hold anything up, just release and we'll fix it later" and after launch/release it's "numbers were adequate even with that 'issue' in evidence, which means that it doesn't critically affect sales and we shouldn't spend anything to think about it; let's work on new features."
I bought a SquareTrade plan for about $20 for a $250 smartpen in 2009 on the reasoning that a pen is a fairly fragile device that goes through a lot of abuse.
About four months later, the pen's display broke. SquareTrade asked me to verify the serial number, then gave me $250 as a payout, no questions asked, which I used to buy the pen's replacement.
After that, I've covered my phones, since the coverage is relatively cheap in comparison to the cost of a retail smartphone, and a smartphone also goes through a lot of abuse. I wouldn't bother for a laptop or computer, or for something very inexpensive, but for a very expensive device that is not easily user-serviceable (I have had occasion to change the screen and battery on an iPhone for a friend, and I would not like to do it again), I'm happy to have the coverage given my good past experience and the fact that they offer coverage that covers even your own boneheaded moves (dropped in water, cracked when sat on, etc.)
Bonding is largely a matter of care. Evidence says that adopted infants and infant children of single dads do not suffer from the psychological disorders that commonly proceed from poor parental bonding.
Now the data do tell us that amongst the sample populations that we have, your data is accurate—the bond between mothers and children is, on average, stronger. But your reasoning about the cause is wrong.
It is precisely because there is a strong cultural bias offering (or requiring of) women far more caretaking that the numbers tell us that more bonding occurs. You're putting the cart before the horse—it's not that children bond with mom because she's a woman, it's that because she's a women, children have infinitely greater opportunity to bond with mom.
It's primarily a social outcome, not a biological one.
compared to climate change effects.
issue. So long, Amazon.
issues here. One is mathematical thinking—this is intuitive, and very difficult to teach; some people display aptitude for this (logical relationships, congruences, dependencies, correlations across qualitative cases, a "sense" for probability that is remarkably in tune with formal outcomes) and others struggle with it even if they become very proficient with Two, which is notation.
Too often, we conflate the former with the latter and call the whole package "math." But in fact, it is a deep, intuitive understanding of mathematical principles rather than incredible fluency with notation and notation manipulation which is needed for innovation in science and research. I know people that have one in spades (incredible "math sense" but poor formal notation skills or vice-versa).
It isn't necessary to have the formal notation skills to the nines to be a good scientist (a good co-author/co-PI can help to fill the gaps that you have), it is absolutely necessary to have habits and patterns of thought that are "mathematically" sensible, and the best scientists that I know are the ones that can look at a dataset and—after an "eyeball test"—have the strong sense that something important is in evidence in this series, or in this column, or in that set of experimental results, etc.—even if they struggle to prove it. Colleagues often come along and, if they are able to listen and grok, can come up with the formalities.
Ballmer continues to drive Microsoft into a ditch.
But you are absolutely correct; this is the fundamental issue. Microsoft doesn't understand the value proposition behind Windows products and hasn't done since BillG left; they're chasing value that they see at other companies, but starting from scratch, even as they throw away the tremendous and once industry-leading value that they'd already built.
It's idiocy, of a special sort that affects only the most badly run companies.
They wouldn't think of it as "cloud services," and they would think of their iPad as a "PC" but in fact that's exactly what's happening.
A more operational way to describe the change is away from "disk operating system centricity" and toward "SaaS and cloud centricity." It's a few years late, but the browser (network infrastructure and related UI of a device) has become the operating system.
User-facing mass-storage I/O (bulk storage, filesystems, locally stored and accessed software and files) is what is essentially dying. But the argument was essentially that people couldn't migrate from Windows because of the local, disk-based applications infrastructure. With that infrastructure becoming less relevant and net-centric SaaS that runs on any platform becoming the model of the future, there is no Windows vise-grip any longer.
to see people happily ogling photos that they (1) save low-res prints from Facebook, then (2) upload to Walgreens via the digital app, to (3) make fuzzy prints with. I used to try to explain that their full-size phone photos are already there, in a different app, and that if they would just use those instead, the prints would look sooooo much better.
Same thing with data processing—so much tap, tap, tap and iCloud when it's so much more convenient to have a couple files on a filesystem. Even things like multiple windows open at once to work on complex projects.
But young people right now that have come of age with the current technological complex seem utterly immune to these concerns. It's what they know, and so far as they're concerned, it's fine.
And I have to say that I also ended up doing serious work on an iPad. When it came time to write my dissertation, somehow it ended up getting drafted on the iPad with a bluetooth keyboard. Something about the instant-on and the incredible mobility and battery life that let me move myself around from coffee shop to library to park, etc. helped everything flow better than sitting at a desk with my PC.
So there may be more here than meets the eye in terms of HCI/UX on iOS and mobile devices and their relationships to cognitive psychology and sociology, e.g. the way we think and the way we connect with things outside ourselves, without even realizing what the stakes/needs are.
use a laptop for papers, etc. But the share of students that tell me that they only have an iPad with them at school has been growing rapidly for the last couple of years. At the end of 2010, I saw virtually none of them in class. By this semester, just about every student in my classroom is turning up with an iPad decked out in a colorful case.
Some are using the bluetooth keyboard cases (Zagg, etc.) to make it a "laptop lite" but many take notes touch-typing right on the screen, at decent speed.
I'm being encouraged by the department and by half the class at the beginning of every semester to use an ebook-available textbook instead of the series I've been using for years, and I get a decent number of complaints (30-40 percent of class this semester) if/when I refer students to online material that's Flash-based and tell them that if they can't see it on their iPad, they'll have to go to a computer lab on their own time and engage with it there.
The change is happening. I don't have any guess as to what the peak of the trend might be (i.e. what percentage of students using only an iPad will mark the top of the trend) but right now it's still expanding, semester-over-semester.
Of course, this is anecdotal—one campus, one discipline, one professor. But considering the rather radical break that it represents from traditional methods of information processing and computing work, it's a startling anecdotal experience, and as someone that cut my teeth on computing with Sun workstations and UNIX before moving into the world of PC unices for the better part of two decades, it's very alien to me.
is not the "vast majority" of computer users. The PC gamer segment is estimated at 100-300 million individuals worldwide. Sure, that's not nothing. But in comparison to estimates for total worldwide PC use (workstations, desktops, tablets) approaching 2 billion, it's not a big percentage.
There will always be some hardcore gamers. But the enthusiasts with the 1,000 watt+ power supplies and SLI GPUs are not the "vast majority of lightweights" about which we're talking. Angry Birds has 1.7 billion downloads. Show me a PC game that does that volume.
is now the vast majority of non-business computing users.
They want:
(1) Web (95% of needs)
(2) Office (5% of needs, and even then, only at a very rudimentary level)
Didn't you notice when all of the big-box stores shut down and the software aisles at the Wal-Marts and Costcos got emptied out? Yes, there was a time when people had a shelf full of CDs and DVDs that they wanted to install on their "next computer."
Those days are long gone.
The baby boomers in my extended family are happy to be free of the complexity. They tell "remember when" stories about how hard computing used to be, and how confusing computers were before you could just do everything that you needed to do online, in Firefox (most of them switched to Firefox during its heyday and are now solidly married to it, even if other options have become competitive). Most of the things that used to be standalone applications they now do online:
- Email (Google replaces Outlook)
- To-do (Todoist, Toodledo, etc. replace Outlook)
- Calendaring (Google replaces Outlook)
- Contacts management (Google replaces Outlook)
- Personal data management (Evernote replaces the file system)
- Reference (Wikipedia replaces endless varieties of CD-ROM encyclopedias)
- Entertainment (Social Gaming and YouTube replace CD-ROM gaming and multimedia)
- Document editing (Google replaces Office)
- Digital photos (Flickr/Facebook+Smartphone replace assorted "old" consumer digital photo apps+USB digital camera)
- Music (Pandora replaces MP3 collections on hard drives)
I teach a bunch of college kids at local U, and have done now in two states over the better part of a decade. In 2006, kids showed up with Thinkpads. Now they show up with iPads.
In 2006, departmental policies often still required hardcopies of submitted work and installs of university-site-licensed educational software. These days, assignments are required to be submitted through online portals (Blackboard, Canvas, etc.) in digital form and devices like iPads are the *suggested* college study equipment. The Real Serious students get a bluetooth keyboard and the Pages app, but most of them type onscreen into Google Drive to do their work.
Seriously, the applications argument is dead—just like the PC. Specialized fields and roles will still require it, but I suspect that over time even those will go the way of the dodo as mobile devices get more and more processing power and more and more users move to them—which will tend to produce as web apps or mobile apps those things that used to be PC apps.
"Bikini Google is Forking WebKit" and had to do a double-take?
than many at the corporations with whom I work imagine to be fair.
I lose the stability and benefits that come with employment—but I gain productivity, the satisfaction of a job well done, and control over my own work life.
Call it whatever you want. But two of my current relationships have asked to put me on the books, with a raise, benefits, a great title, and a nice office. I've told them no in both cases—much to the surprise of one CEO. Instead, I continue to teach at the local university and offer my services on a contract, remote-work, you-pay-me-and-stay-out-of-my-way basis.
Again, call it what you want. Works for me, and for my clients—despite their desire to bring me in-house.
I've written multiple books, done award-winning work, and have sterling recommendations/references from people that can say all kinds of fabulous stuff about me. But all of my best work in life has been done in the contracting/consulting space, where I was basically a lone wolf.
Virtually every time a company has hired me, they have immediately put me in a box.
Step 1: Refuse to allow him to use his own tech tools/toolchains crafted over years and with which he is fabulous and familiar.
Step 2: Make sure that there's no allowance for him to do intense/creative work on his own daytime schedule; meetings are mandatory and if that means that the only time left for actual work is during hours when his brain isn't at its best, oh well.
Step 3: Lock him into a narrow chain of hierarchy/command so that he can't ever talk directly to the role players that he needs in order to directly get things done; instead, ensure that he's always stuck playing telephone through many organizational layers and that his immediate contact has an MBA and doesn't ever understand what he's saying.
Step 4: Evaluate him immediately (always too early) and on a linear progress model with synthetic "benchmarks," whether or not any of this matches the natural trajectory of the task at hand or not, so that instead of doing great things in the best way, he's working to "hit benchmarks" in ways that often interfere with the actual work, either slowing it tremendously or significantly reducing the potential of the final outcome.
Step 5: Take away any physical and psychological comfort and idiosyncrasy that enables him to act naturally and think clearly; dictate dress, office layout and organization, hours, speech and communications channels, venues, and characteristics, so that he's not even himself most of the time when he's working for you (you know, the self that did the great work that you want to have).
Step 6: Toss assorted new tasks and underlings into his lap that have no relationship to what he was actually hired to do and/or his actual area of expertise, ensuring that he'll spend more and more time doing stuff for which he is not the optimal laborer, again taking away from the work that you actually hired him to do.
Step 7: Undervalue or refuse to value at all any research work, preliminary design/development work, or anything that isn't clearly "making product" and "hitting benchmarks" and be sure to stop by the desk every ten minutes and remind him that he wasn't hired "to do that" but instead to "produce."
Under conditions of "employment" this has happened to me so many times that I hesitate to accept "employment" now and prefer to consult instead. I'm tired of seeing excitement turn into bewilderment of the "He came so highly recommended!" sort after just about every last thing that makes the best work that I've done possible (the work that they wanted to see done again, on their time) was methodically written out of my work life.
Too many MBAs and HR drones out there in the corporate world that are really only comfortable seeing other MBAs and HR drones buzzing about the office, wondering why nobody outside of management and HR seems to be "getting anything done."
the price range being talked about here is hardly a major expense. It's the price of a burger.
I buy apps routinely in this price range, sight unseen, based on the customer reviews in the app store.
Anyone that can't get people to shell out $10 for a product based on its description is not making a product that sounds very useful to the intended audience.
At $10, I can't see how it would be worth a software pirate's time to track down and/or crack a piece of software, apart from people that are in it just to be able to say they did it—and no anti-piracy measure will stop anyone like that; quite the contrary, it will simply encourage them.
pirate the app. I wouldn't. I simply wouldn't buy it or use it if I didn't think the price was fair.
But the evidence I've seen says that piracy is basically people that wouldn't pay for software anyway—given an enforced choice between nothing and paying the asked price, they'd choose nothing.
So you have two choices:
1) Reduce the price more to turn some pirates into paying customers.
2) Leave the price as-is and either fight piracy (and possibly lose paying customers due to annoyance) or don't (and end up with some people that wouldn't have paid your asking price using it).
Either way, you're not likely to increase sales significantly with anti-piracy measures. And more and more tech and software and the 'net in general are goodwill markets in which people want to want to pay. It's part of the value of a product/service, and when it's lacking, you're missing the best of your marketing potential.
Seriously, people will buy in if you make them love you and your product. Anyone that has any chance of ever paying for something will reward stuff they love. But you have to make them love it.
On the other hand, as a business, that should be your goal anyway. Anything less isn't good business.
in a transaction that they don't believe to be fair?
That's a losing proposition for any business. Like it or not, DRM or no, a business is ultimately at the mercy of its customers and what they believe to be fair—right or wrong, however that is measured.
Unless there's a plan to wrestle a monopoly on an absolutely necessary-for-life good out of a $5-10 app...
then ask them to do it.
Many will, if it's valuable to them. Those that won't likely wouldn't have done so anyway.
There was a recent TED talk, "The Art of Asking," that made an argument along similar lines, though it was more concerned with digital music.
I pay for stuff I like if I feel that the price is fair. Most others are the same way.
I switched phones from iOS to Android about a month and a half ago, because I wanted a phablet, widgets, and expandable memory and an escape from the jailbreak vs. upgrade-to-lates decisions and waits.
But I'll be damned if Android doesn't piss me off often. Most frustrating thing: inconsistent UI. What does the back button do in this app? And what does the onscreen "back function" near the top do do? Is it even there? That's one example, but the general theme is that Android apps are far less consistent than iOS apps, many requiring that you learn their own peculiarities.
Just as frustrating are the instability—so many apps crash regularly—and the UI speed and smoothness, which even with the jelly bean update really doesn't compare to iOS.
I wish one of these two systems would get it right.
on an iPad, using Sente and Daedalus. Works for me.
Linux was always a system that required system-level tweaking in order to get and keep a system up and running. Defaults weren't particularly sensible for most use cases, drivers and components were unstable and needed to be replaced/reconfigured/updated/patched in order to achieve a stable, functioning work environment, and so on, and some things weren't "done yet"—drivers still under development years after hardware releases, and so on, with users waiting for them and needing to install/make use of them as soon as they were released.
That's just the nature of the beast when you're talking about a community-driven system with myriad code inputs that bases bunches of code on reverse-engineering.
But so long as Linux was reasonably transparent, anyone that valued free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech software could make the cost-benefit calculation that the amount of extra work and patience required to get and keep a system up and running was justified by the benefits involved.
Already by 2009, however, I felt as though the costs were growing while the benefits were the same as they had always been. An accelerating decrease in the transparency and modularity of desktop Linux distributions led the kinds of tweaking necessary to get and keep a linux system up and running to take longer and longer for me, and the continuous rush of new code and new subsystems that significantly different from the UNIX classics meant a corresponding increase in the need to continue to study and learn how these worked.
But my job wasn't and has never been Linux development, so this extra learning and work didn't contribute to my bottom line. It was just an increasing quantity of valuable time and energy being siphoned away from it, in fact.
There is still a market for a stable, easy-to-use, transparent Linux system with a smooth learning curve from easy-to-use/easy-to-learn through master-tasks/hard-to-learn, one that can open all of the documents, media, and network streams that mass market users need to be able to open and that is also free and open in all senses.
The problem isn't that Canonical is leading, it's the content of the leadership—both in terms of social/political issues, and in terms of the technical result, that aren't encouraging. Maybe one day someone will take up the mantle and finally deliver an easy-to-use, modular, transparent and powerful Linux system that's stable, has sensible defaults, and is both free and open. But to date nobody's come near the target, which is kind of a shame, because everyone's been able to see it for a decade, and it's often seemed as though "just a little bit of leadership" would get Linux there.
But I don't think Canonical is it; they're out to fulfill other goals/purposes, leaving that opportunity to continue to be open.
I transitioned away from SunOS and used Linux from 1993->2009. Big chunk of life.
In 2009, really out of curiosity, I installed a "Hackintosh" partition on my Thinkpad. Within four months I had a MacBook Pro and was using Mac OS.
The basic reality is that as a Linux user on some regular N percentage of days, I would sit down to do work and end up doing something else: fscking around with Linux. Download, tweak, read, peer at code, compile, plug, unplug, read some more, write some code, tweak again, blah, blah.
It was a regular occurrence. Every now and then I'd simply sit down to work on work and instead, hours later, would find myself having worked on Linux. I generally got the problem solved. Often it resulted from a "yum update" that did unexpected thing X to my userspace. Sometimes it didn't—it just emerged.
Some stuff had never worked well—sleeping, for example, or audio and streaming video—and I never spent much time on them in Linux. I didn't miss them until I'd had them working perfectly well on the Hackintosh partition—a system that was "hacked" together and that wasn't supposed to work well at all.
By the time I'd bought my Macbook Pro I'd already bought and installed Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, DevonThink, and a bunch of other software on the Mac partition, and had installed MacPorts and many GNU utilities, giving myself a command line that felt almost exactly like the Linux one. But fonts worked. Audio worked. Power management worked. Streaming video worked. Commercial applications worked. The apps all had a similar look, feel, and user interface behavior. The visual designs were cleaner and more professional, something I'd never given a second though to in Linux, but which I later realized had been distractions during visual scanning of screen space.
It was when I realized that all of my recent work was done on the Mac partition and I hadn't booted into Linux in a month and really didn't want to unless I had to that I decided to get the Macbook Pro. I thought I'd dual-boot Linux on it, but that soon went away. I still have a Parallels VM with Fedora on it here somewhere, but I don't think I've even run the initial yum updates on it after installing. It's just an unused VM, years later.
Linux had a lot of promise as a desktop OS once. But now, with the desktop on the wane for many common consumer uses and Mac OS and Windows trading blows as equals, I don't think Linux in its desktop form will ever be much more than it is right now. Android is another story—thought my experience with android has been less than perfect.
Too bad, in a way—when KDE 1.0 came out, it seemed to me that Linux was headed for global domination. I used it and loved it and was more productive that I could possibly have been with any of its contemporary Mac or Windows alternatives. But by the late '00s, the roles had reversed.