Linux has set the price for a functioning operating system as essentially $0; Microsoft has to milk as much out of the market as it can before the price of the OS hits $0. Apple has set the stage to usurp Microsoft; you can buy a Mac and optionally run Windows, if you need it, but it is now entirely optional. They need to continue to grow the OS so that Windows is never entirely optional. Finally Microsoft faces competition from itself; if it can't make Vista compelling enough, fewer people will "upgrade" from XP. There are still companies and people running Windows 2000!
Apple releases patches on a monthly basis, as does Microsoft. Apple releases updates on a quarterly basis; Microsoft seems to do it on a yearly basis. Apple releases upgrades on a yearly basis; Microsoft seems to take 5 years to do it.
Some further explanation: A patch is a small change to fix bug. An update is a collection of patches tested together, as well as small updates in functionality. An upgrade is brand new functionality that was not available before.
Agreed, there may be 5% to 15% of the market that will appreciate 4GB of ram (Photoshop, definitely), but I suspect those markets are also being heavily courted by Apple, with their existing 64 bit CPUs, OS, and applications... but Photoshop isn't ready, OS X 10.5 isn't ready, and the market just isn't ready.
So by the time Vista will "come into it's own", so too will the rest of the industry... including Apple.
If you earn $20 an hour, 5 hours of work nets you $100 in profit.
If it took you 6 hours standing in line to get a PS3, you actually lost money because you spent more time to earn the same amount of money.
What is worse is if you spent 16 hours in line, put it online, and waited 3 days to make $100. You just, essentially, earned yourself $1 an hour.
You can make more money buy taking the $900 you spent on the console, buying say TM stock or AAPL stock or some other "guaranteed" win in the next year and just letting the money grow. Apple, for example, if bought earlier this year at $60, now worth $85, would have given you $25 per share growth or $225 profit at no effort.
What problem does 64 bit solve in the desktop or business area?
Perhaps in render farms where... oh wait, Windows isn't used in HPC environments.
I think the difference is 3D acceleration, but we won't be actually seeing the benefits until SP1, and until August when back to school sales picks up, and then December when Christmas sales occur.
1) Apple DRM has nothing to do with moving music off an iPod. The music is stored in a hidden folder and can be copied off trivially. 2) Apple DRMed songs can trivially (in iTunes) be burned to a CD, opening up to a world of CD players and DVD players. If you choose to re-encode again you can transfer to additional devices other than iPods. 3) Apple has never acted like Microsoft. Microsoft has raised Windows license fees or withheld licenses from companies promoting or developing competing technologies (OS/2 and Netscape). The closest is when Apple withdrew licenses from clonemakers exactly because they did not want to only sell operating systems. Microsoft has also developed competitive technologies rather than endorsing existing solutions so they could extract more control (WMA instead of AAC, WMV instead of MPEG4, Direct3D instead of OpenGL, MTP instead of UMS, etc)
Maybe your point (Apple is a corporation, not an entity) would be better made as, "Don't trust Apple to be good by you unless it also helps them as well".
What if AoM pressed CDs instead and sold them at street corners? Would that be different?
Essentially, what is the difference between AoM and a counterfeit ring? The fact they can point at another organization, ROMS, and say, "They tell us it is okay?"
And as soon as ROMS is made illegitimate, then AoM is no different than a counterfeit ring.
Uh, in case you didn't know, the RIAA is also going after AllofMP3 and other "piracy" rings, alongside dead people, unconnected grandmothers, illiterate mothers, and little children.
Fewer jobs? You mean given a choice a person would rather be a factory worker sewing undergarments rather than a lawyer?
Or is the problem really the fact that many individuals do not make the choices that allow them to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, composers, and all manner of higher paying jobs?
Do YOU want to work in a factory? A call center? As a code monkey?
I work in software development. Software development is really just communication: Find out what the customer wants. Make it. Find out what the customer wants changed. Change it. You can't outsource communication skills because you are just redefining the customer.
Is the the consumer the customer? Is the QA department the customer? Is the build engineer the customer? Is the integration engineer the customer? Is the manager the customer? Is the developer the customer? Is the architect the customer? Is the team lead the customer?
Maybe you think of IT differently than I do. IT is no different than process engineering, except you use a computer to create the tools involved.
Wages are tied to economic growth. If we make decisions that slow down our growth we also slow down wage growth. In other words if we are less wealthy, we pay less.
Why does protectionism slow down economic growth? Because of the economic theory of "Comparative Advantage", which states that everyone wins if each country specializes.
If country A can make 10 oranges or 3 oranges and 3 apples and country B can make 10 apples or 3 oranges and 3 apples, it is most advantageous if both countries specialize, respectively, making oranges and apples, respectively. This holds true even in the case where one country has an advantage, such as: Country A, 10 oranges vs 5 oranges and 5 apples Country B, 8 apples vs 3 oranges and 3 apples
Specialization: A makes 10 oranges and trades 5 for apples, resulting in 5 oranges and 5 apples Country B makes 8 apples and trades 5 apples for 5 oranges, resulting in 5 oranges and 3 apples
So by forcing companies to keep production here we pay more to produce less, resulting in overall less growth. This in turn translates to lower wages, less jobs, etc. You make it sound obvious why keeping jobs here is good. I'm advocating for specialization. Move the low paying jobs out, the jobs we don't want (migrant Mexican labor is proof that agriculture is a field desperately looking to be outsourced), while specializing in higher paying, higher quality jobs.
Of course this isn't easy; sound economic and fiscal policy doesn't easily translate into sound personal choices. People want things to be easy.
Then tell me, why do corporations push protectionism in the form of complex intellectual, patent, and copyright protections if protectionism only provides disadvantages?
To prevent competition. So you tell me, why is it good for corporations to have essentially unlimited copyright power and excessive patent rights? I think it's better to have less; my belief is congruent, less protectionism, less copyright protections, and less patent laws.
Negative sum games mean both sides lose. I don't think that is what you meant.
Zero sum game means one side wins at the other's expense.
Reality is that there is no zero sum game. Both sides see benefits or neither side plays.
IT is glue; if it was booming, it was because more companies were adopting computers to their business model. As that levels off, so too will IT.
There will still be growth; the average bakery doesn't use computer models to predict seasonal demand or order supplies in a JIT manner. Most homes don't use computers to model and predict consumption habits, or to make consumption more efficient. There is still growth potential everywhere.
Your "gloom" scenario has nothing to do with outsourcing or globalism and everything to do with speculation, overconsumption, and risky financial behavior.
That is my point: Protectionist policies don't make sense.
If Japan dumps product here, they lose money. If Japan builds better products that we buy... we win because we get better product.
The issue in the 90s, of price dumping on minivans, seems spurious. Let the people decide! Isn't that the point of a government "for the people"?
If keeping jobs in America means: 1) Lower wages, higher prices 2) Technical disadvantage
What is the advantage of keeping jobs here? Again... let the people decide. We have colleges, we have investment money, we have jobs. Are we resurrecting a long dead issue? We already "import" illegals to do low wage work instead of hiring seasonal teenagers. We already manufacture CPUs, RAM, computers, cars, clothes, etc in other countries (to be sold in Walmart, among other places). What does protectionism give us, except disadvantages?
They don't stay because of protectionist policies; a factory in Japan will cost about the same as a factory here, with the difference that there are no shipping costs for raw materials they can acquire here in the US.
And you don't think protectionist policies are bad? The government is essentially telling the consumer they are wrong! It's like the government implementing protectionist policies to raise the price of iPods so people buy Zunes instead.
Apple can't sell you something it does not have the rights to sell. That is like blaming a BMW dealership for not selling you Mercedes (though of course arrangements can/do happen).
I think it's important to note the distinction; he said MP3 jukebox and you said music player.
A Discman is a music player; pop in a CD and hit play. A 300 disc CD changer is a jukebox; pop in 300 CDs and navigate the albums, the genres, the playlists, the artists, etc, and then you hit play.
Are you saying Foobar or Winamp has better organizational, search, playlist, and access features than iTunes? Of course I stopped using Winamp a 2.95, so it may have picked up additional jukebox features, but at the time Winamp required I navigate my file system and drag and drop files to make a playlist.
iTunes, in comparison, allows me to make a list of rules: Songs I've never played Genre not country Genre not children Artist is not Celine Less than 10 hours
And voila, I have a 10 hour long playlist of songs I've never played, that isn't country, not children's music, and not by artists with the name Celine.
I suspect the incentive to move manufacturing overseas drops quite a bit if consumption doesn't drive it.
In other words if we don't have a national policy of "Buy as much as you can for as little as you can" then moving a factory to China makes no sense. Why would we spend any money building a factory in China when you already have on in Indiana that works perfectly fine?
The answer is, "To increase profits by reducing costs" of course. But again if that isn't a priority, then what is the benefit? To undercut a competitor? It wouldn't reduce all outsourcing of course, and I don't want it to, but the pressure to reduce costs drives a lot of silly actions.
I got my iPod in 2001. Yes, it was really superior to everything out there at the time. It held more than a 128mb Rio flash player and was tiny in comparison to the Nomad Jukebox. It was more expensive and didn't have as much storage, but on the other hand file transfer was 10x faster, UI navigation was faster, and battery life was better.
It's not my fault that Creative couldn't come out with a competitor (The Zen) until 2004, three years later.
The hype and the cool and the hip came years later. Without a core of simplicity and functionality the iPod hype would have fizzled away... much like the PSP will soon too:)
We handed our manufacturing to China years ago. Japan has only recently started building factories in the US because it makes no sense to ship steel and cars back and forth across the ocean.
China hasn't started building our cars yet, but where do you think the next batch of $10k cars will come from?
Not to disagree with your point, we need to maintain alertness and vigilance, but dissing on outsourcing is distracting and hides the real problem: You can't sustain growth by only cutting costs. That is like encouraging a plant to grow by watering down the fertilizer. Growth requires capital.
I don't think there is any central organization that can control/limit/stabilize this kind of effect. It is all decentralized, insofar as companies experiment with outsourcing, find it works, or find that it doesn't, and grows or shrinks depending on market forces.
In that respect the best you can expect to do is live life carefully in your own sphere: Don't buy cheap/disposable when you can buy quality/durability, don't overconsume because it requires too many trade offs in price/quality, and live like it matters.
If you don't shop at Walmart, you aren't giving Walmart the clout to force suppliers to cut costs ruthlessly. If you don't prize cost over all else, you demonstrate that there are other more important values such as customer service, quality, durability, reliability, and design. If you consume moderately then you can afford to behave more richly, buying less frequently but more meaningfully than if price were the only deciding factor.
More people don't seem to agree with this, and this is reflected in our disposable, consumer, outsourcing society.
If I pay my son to mow the lawn but he hires his friend, at half price, to do it for him, who is building physical stamina? Who is learning how to cut grass? Who is learning how to use a lawn mower? How to maintain and fix it?
So my son is now harming his own family and helping his friend's because he is paying them to learn and money is leaving your household and will not be available again until it is used to buy something, as well as decreasing the likelihood that the money will ever return back to my household.
Does that sound absurd, or not? Because that is your argument, and to me it sounds absurd to think of it as bad.
If India can profitably be used as an outsource target then we gain more than we lose, otherwise there is no point. Profit, and money, is really a shorthand and symbol for value. If the transaction were not valuable to us (ie, unprofitable) then it would not work. Of course the reality is that in many cases it isn't profitable, but that isn't because outsourcing is bad but because the terms and conditions of the contract were bad. In other words a bad deal was made.
Do you not think of humans as, I don't know, fellows? Is it a zero sum game for you?
If India invents a solar powered house, do you not gain when said house is sold here? If China invents a quantum calculator, do you not gain when said calculator is sold here?
Economics and business is not zero sum; there is an exchange. In this case we exchange money for labor... no more or less than Tom Sawyer did when he was paid to whitewash his aunt's fence.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft faces competition from three quarters:
Linux has set the price for a functioning operating system as essentially $0; Microsoft has to milk as much out of the market as it can before the price of the OS hits $0.
Apple has set the stage to usurp Microsoft; you can buy a Mac and optionally run Windows, if you need it, but it is now entirely optional. They need to continue to grow the OS so that Windows is never entirely optional.
Finally Microsoft faces competition from itself; if it can't make Vista compelling enough, fewer people will "upgrade" from XP. There are still companies and people running Windows 2000!
You are confusing updates with upgrades.
Apple releases patches on a monthly basis, as does Microsoft.
Apple releases updates on a quarterly basis; Microsoft seems to do it on a yearly basis.
Apple releases upgrades on a yearly basis; Microsoft seems to take 5 years to do it.
Some further explanation:
A patch is a small change to fix bug.
An update is a collection of patches tested together, as well as small updates in functionality.
An upgrade is brand new functionality that was not available before.
Agreed, there may be 5% to 15% of the market that will appreciate 4GB of ram (Photoshop, definitely), but I suspect those markets are also being heavily courted by Apple, with their existing 64 bit CPUs, OS, and applications... but Photoshop isn't ready, OS X 10.5 isn't ready, and the market just isn't ready.
:D
So by the time Vista will "come into it's own", so too will the rest of the industry... including Apple.
In other words, now is not the time for 64 bit
If you earn $20 an hour, 5 hours of work nets you $100 in profit.
If it took you 6 hours standing in line to get a PS3, you actually lost money because you spent more time to earn the same amount of money.
What is worse is if you spent 16 hours in line, put it online, and waited 3 days to make $100. You just, essentially, earned yourself $1 an hour.
You can make more money buy taking the $900 you spent on the console, buying say TM stock or AAPL stock or some other "guaranteed" win in the next year and just letting the money grow. Apple, for example, if bought earlier this year at $60, now worth $85, would have given you $25 per share growth or $225 profit at no effort.
What problem does 64 bit solve in the desktop or business area?
Perhaps in render farms where... oh wait, Windows isn't used in HPC environments.
I think the difference is 3D acceleration, but we won't be actually seeing the benefits until SP1, and until August when back to school sales picks up, and then December when Christmas sales occur.
Where did you get $2k when a MacBook costs $1.099?
1) Apple DRM has nothing to do with moving music off an iPod. The music is stored in a hidden folder and can be copied off trivially.
2) Apple DRMed songs can trivially (in iTunes) be burned to a CD, opening up to a world of CD players and DVD players. If you choose to re-encode again you can transfer to additional devices other than iPods.
3) Apple has never acted like Microsoft. Microsoft has raised Windows license fees or withheld licenses from companies promoting or developing competing technologies (OS/2 and Netscape). The closest is when Apple withdrew licenses from clonemakers exactly because they did not want to only sell operating systems. Microsoft has also developed competitive technologies rather than endorsing existing solutions so they could extract more control (WMA instead of AAC, WMV instead of MPEG4, Direct3D instead of OpenGL, MTP instead of UMS, etc)
Maybe your point (Apple is a corporation, not an entity) would be better made as, "Don't trust Apple to be good by you unless it also helps them as well".
Maybe because H.264 offers good compression and video quality while OGM is only a container format? What you are looking for, instead, is Theora.
As an aside, H.264 will play in Windows, Mac, iPods, PSPs, and quite a few cell phones.
What if AoM pressed CDs instead and sold them at street corners? Would that be different?
Essentially, what is the difference between AoM and a counterfeit ring? The fact they can point at another organization, ROMS, and say, "They tell us it is okay?"
And as soon as ROMS is made illegitimate, then AoM is no different than a counterfeit ring.
I dunno, it sounds like a duck, acts like a duck, so I think it's a piracy ring.
If the pressed counterfeit Office CDs are part of a piracy ring, why isn't the AoM downloads similarly part of a piracy ring?
Both present their article as legitimate yet do not license nor pay the original right holders.
Uh, in case you didn't know, the RIAA is also going after AllofMP3 and other "piracy" rings, alongside dead people, unconnected grandmothers, illiterate mothers, and little children.
So they happen to be equal opportunity litgants.
Fewer jobs? You mean given a choice a person would rather be a factory worker sewing undergarments rather than a lawyer?
Or is the problem really the fact that many individuals do not make the choices that allow them to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, composers, and all manner of higher paying jobs?
Do YOU want to work in a factory? A call center? As a code monkey?
I work in software development. Software development is really just communication: Find out what the customer wants. Make it. Find out what the customer wants changed. Change it. You can't outsource communication skills because you are just redefining the customer.
Is the the consumer the customer?
Is the QA department the customer?
Is the build engineer the customer?
Is the integration engineer the customer?
Is the manager the customer?
Is the developer the customer?
Is the architect the customer?
Is the team lead the customer?
Maybe you think of IT differently than I do. IT is no different than process engineering, except you use a computer to create the tools involved.
Wages are tied to economic growth. If we make decisions that slow down our growth we also slow down wage growth. In other words if we are less wealthy, we pay less.
Why does protectionism slow down economic growth? Because of the economic theory of "Comparative Advantage", which states that everyone wins if each country specializes.
If country A can make 10 oranges or 3 oranges and 3 apples and country B can make 10 apples or 3 oranges and 3 apples, it is most advantageous if both countries specialize, respectively, making oranges and apples, respectively. This holds true even in the case where one country has an advantage, such as:
Country A, 10 oranges vs 5 oranges and 5 apples
Country B, 8 apples vs 3 oranges and 3 apples
Specialization: A makes 10 oranges and trades 5 for apples, resulting in 5 oranges and 5 apples
Country B makes 8 apples and trades 5 apples for 5 oranges, resulting in 5 oranges and 3 apples
So by forcing companies to keep production here we pay more to produce less, resulting in overall less growth. This in turn translates to lower wages, less jobs, etc. You make it sound obvious why keeping jobs here is good. I'm advocating for specialization. Move the low paying jobs out, the jobs we don't want (migrant Mexican labor is proof that agriculture is a field desperately looking to be outsourced), while specializing in higher paying, higher quality jobs.
Of course this isn't easy; sound economic and fiscal policy doesn't easily translate into sound personal choices. People want things to be easy.
Then tell me, why do corporations push protectionism in the form of complex intellectual, patent, and copyright protections if protectionism only provides disadvantages?
To prevent competition. So you tell me, why is it good for corporations to have essentially unlimited copyright power and excessive patent rights? I think it's better to have less; my belief is congruent, less protectionism, less copyright protections, and less patent laws.
Negative sum games mean both sides lose. I don't think that is what you meant.
Zero sum game means one side wins at the other's expense.
Reality is that there is no zero sum game. Both sides see benefits or neither side plays.
IT is glue; if it was booming, it was because more companies were adopting computers to their business model. As that levels off, so too will IT.
There will still be growth; the average bakery doesn't use computer models to predict seasonal demand or order supplies in a JIT manner. Most homes don't use computers to model and predict consumption habits, or to make consumption more efficient. There is still growth potential everywhere.
Your "gloom" scenario has nothing to do with outsourcing or globalism and everything to do with speculation, overconsumption, and risky financial behavior.
That is my point: Protectionist policies don't make sense.
If Japan dumps product here, they lose money.
If Japan builds better products that we buy... we win because we get better product.
The issue in the 90s, of price dumping on minivans, seems spurious. Let the people decide! Isn't that the point of a government "for the people"?
If keeping jobs in America means:
1) Lower wages, higher prices
2) Technical disadvantage
What is the advantage of keeping jobs here? Again... let the people decide. We have colleges, we have investment money, we have jobs. Are we resurrecting a long dead issue? We already "import" illegals to do low wage work instead of hiring seasonal teenagers. We already manufacture CPUs, RAM, computers, cars, clothes, etc in other countries (to be sold in Walmart, among other places). What does protectionism give us, except disadvantages?
They don't stay because of protectionist policies; a factory in Japan will cost about the same as a factory here, with the difference that there are no shipping costs for raw materials they can acquire here in the US.
And you don't think protectionist policies are bad? The government is essentially telling the consumer they are wrong! It's like the government implementing protectionist policies to raise the price of iPods so people buy Zunes instead.
iTunes is still easier because I can set the playtime as a rule.
Apple can't sell you something it does not have the rights to sell. That is like blaming a BMW dealership for not selling you Mercedes (though of course arrangements can/do happen).
What it means is that these marketing companies are trying to emulate real customer enthusiasm... to generate "word of mouth" interest.
Unfortunately it won't work if the device in question isn't sturdy enough to carry that burden.
I think it's important to note the distinction; he said MP3 jukebox and you said music player.
A Discman is a music player; pop in a CD and hit play.
A 300 disc CD changer is a jukebox; pop in 300 CDs and navigate the albums, the genres, the playlists, the artists, etc, and then you hit play.
Are you saying Foobar or Winamp has better organizational, search, playlist, and access features than iTunes? Of course I stopped using Winamp a 2.95, so it may have picked up additional jukebox features, but at the time Winamp required I navigate my file system and drag and drop files to make a playlist.
iTunes, in comparison, allows me to make a list of rules:
Songs I've never played
Genre not country
Genre not children
Artist is not Celine
Less than 10 hours
And voila, I have a 10 hour long playlist of songs I've never played, that isn't country, not children's music, and not by artists with the name Celine.
I suspect the incentive to move manufacturing overseas drops quite a bit if consumption doesn't drive it.
In other words if we don't have a national policy of "Buy as much as you can for as little as you can" then moving a factory to China makes no sense. Why would we spend any money building a factory in China when you already have on in Indiana that works perfectly fine?
The answer is, "To increase profits by reducing costs" of course. But again if that isn't a priority, then what is the benefit? To undercut a competitor? It wouldn't reduce all outsourcing of course, and I don't want it to, but the pressure to reduce costs drives a lot of silly actions.
I got my iPod in 2001. Yes, it was really superior to everything out there at the time. It held more than a 128mb Rio flash player and was tiny in comparison to the Nomad Jukebox. It was more expensive and didn't have as much storage, but on the other hand file transfer was 10x faster, UI navigation was faster, and battery life was better.
:)
It's not my fault that Creative couldn't come out with a competitor (The Zen) until 2004, three years later.
The hype and the cool and the hip came years later. Without a core of simplicity and functionality the iPod hype would have fizzled away... much like the PSP will soon too
We handed our manufacturing to China years ago. Japan has only recently started building factories in the US because it makes no sense to ship steel and cars back and forth across the ocean.
China hasn't started building our cars yet, but where do you think the next batch of $10k cars will come from?
Not to disagree with your point, we need to maintain alertness and vigilance, but dissing on outsourcing is distracting and hides the real problem: You can't sustain growth by only cutting costs. That is like encouraging a plant to grow by watering down the fertilizer. Growth requires capital.
I don't think there is any central organization that can control/limit/stabilize this kind of effect. It is all decentralized, insofar as companies experiment with outsourcing, find it works, or find that it doesn't, and grows or shrinks depending on market forces.
In that respect the best you can expect to do is live life carefully in your own sphere: Don't buy cheap/disposable when you can buy quality/durability, don't overconsume because it requires too many trade offs in price/quality, and live like it matters.
If you don't shop at Walmart, you aren't giving Walmart the clout to force suppliers to cut costs ruthlessly.
If you don't prize cost over all else, you demonstrate that there are other more important values such as customer service, quality, durability, reliability, and design.
If you consume moderately then you can afford to behave more richly, buying less frequently but more meaningfully than if price were the only deciding factor.
More people don't seem to agree with this, and this is reflected in our disposable, consumer, outsourcing society.
Again I bring in the neighbor/Tom Sawyer analogy.
If I pay my son to mow the lawn but he hires his friend, at half price, to do it for him, who is building physical stamina? Who is learning how to cut grass? Who is learning how to use a lawn mower? How to maintain and fix it?
So my son is now harming his own family and helping his friend's because he is paying them to learn and money is leaving your household and will not be available again until it is used to buy something, as well as decreasing the likelihood that the money will ever return back to my household.
Does that sound absurd, or not? Because that is your argument, and to me it sounds absurd to think of it as bad.
If India can profitably be used as an outsource target then we gain more than we lose, otherwise there is no point. Profit, and money, is really a shorthand and symbol for value. If the transaction were not valuable to us (ie, unprofitable) then it would not work. Of course the reality is that in many cases it isn't profitable, but that isn't because outsourcing is bad but because the terms and conditions of the contract were bad. In other words a bad deal was made.
Do you not think of humans as, I don't know, fellows? Is it a zero sum game for you?
If India invents a solar powered house, do you not gain when said house is sold here?
If China invents a quantum calculator, do you not gain when said calculator is sold here?
Economics and business is not zero sum; there is an exchange. In this case we exchange money for labor... no more or less than Tom Sawyer did when he was paid to whitewash his aunt's fence.