Find the presentation (video, website, powerpoint, pdf, anything) and post a link. Anybody can make garbage claims. Back it up so that it's believable.
Sorry, I'm not going to waste my time trying to find evidence that you won't believe. I've told you the events I witnessed believe it or not, I don't really care. That part is merely exposition on where I got my information from, with some commentary on what they were showing and how they were able to do things that the Xbox was clearly not capable of.
Yes, how dare any company (much less Microsoft) try to protect their business, or branch out into a new area with the intent of making money? The audacity!
You seem to projecting your own anger at my revealing bad behavior on Microsoft part onto me. I'm not angry that Microsoft was trying grow their business, I'm merely telling you why they were getting into the console business. The business reasons made a lot of sense at the time and were obvious to anyone who had half a brain.
The Wii stole what thunder?
Obviously, the Xbox 360, it was supposed to be the dominant console world wide, but as soon as the Wii came out all anyone could talk about was the Wii. That was a significant blow to Microsoft's plans for the Xbox 360.
The iPhone and iPad did a number on everyone -- not just Microsoft
Obviously.
And neither the iPhone nor the iPad are in the least bit connected with the Xbox.
You don't seem to be able to follow a line of thought very well. The iPhone and the iPad have been the dominant tech story for the last couple of years, which has made it much more difficult for Microsoft to push the Xbox 360 as part of a home media system. Microsoft needs a functioning and slick tablet computer that is at least nearly equal to the iPad before they can go down the digital home road again or they'll just be laughed at by anyone with a clue. Tablets may end up being the future of home computing as opposed to say a box cabled to your TV.
[T]he Xbox 360 + Xbox live was one of the best products / ecosystems to come out of Microsoft ever, and that's saying something.
Irrelevant. I'm not talking about whether the Xbox 360 is good or not, just what Microsoft was trying to achieve.
Last bit of advice -- you don't like the Xbox? Don't buy one. You don't like Windows? Don't buy it. Don't use it. You don't like Windows Phone? Don't use it. Nobody can force you. Nobody gives a damn anyway. Just don't get overly upset and start spreading FUD if poeple do like and use those products, okay?
As is often the case with these types of posts, I'm much less upset than you. I have impugned the reputation of a company that you worship and you feel the need to defend it arduously. I'm not spreading FUD, no part of my post should inspire fear, uncertainty or doubt. Most people won't even get their hackles up over the allegations of faked product demos, it's not exactly a new criticism of Microsoft. They are, after all, the masters of FUD and have repeatedly used fake presentations to cripple competitors.
The point of my post wasn't that "Micro$oft suxors" but that Microsoft had and probably still has, specific goals for the Xbox program. And it's two-fold protect the monopoly that makes most of the company's profits and trying to dominate a new potential market, both goals which are entirely rational for Microsoft to follow. It may not be in other people's best interest to allow them to achieve those goals but that is an entirely different post.
Actually, they most definitely filed this complaint, they even demanded the defendant destroy all of the devices in question before the trial began. However, apparently this was a criminal case that was brought against the defendant. So Apple didn't even have to pay for the lawyers because the Spanish government prosecuted the case.
Wait, so either you didn't even look at the articles, or you have failed entirely to understand what you read and you are complaining about other people being uninformed and biased?
No, not really. Bill Gates has been a bit of a douche bag going all the way back to when he was complaining about people copying his implementation of basic while he was still in college. Microsoft has always been a company aimed at market domination and rolling in the fat monopoly rents that domination would create. When they first started out they used to publicly say they wanted to the be the only company in the computer business, which if you think about it, is a completely obnoxious goal to have. Microsoft has always been fundamentally dedicated to being evil*.
* Though Microsoft and it's peons are rarely able to recognize the inherent evil in deliberately trying to limit other people's choices and take money that they don't truly deserve (by using monopoly power to increases prices above what a fair market would settle on).
I was thinking the same thing, and then I looked up the definition of evangelical:
of, relating to, or being in agreement with the Christian gospel especially as it is presented in the four Gospels
Given that definition, the idea of an "evangelical atheist" is somewhat amusing, although I recognize the final definition is divorced from it's theistic origin.
I can tell you what Microsoft was telling business about the Xbox when they were rolling it out. I was at one of their "digital home" shows for businesses, where they were trying to convince the attendees that everyone would soon have 3 or 4 Xboxes in their houses which they could use a networked PVR/gaming systems.
The presentation was pathetic with obvious Microsoft employee "shills" in the audience who lobbed softball questions to the presenters. Even worse the "networked" PVR demo was faked, they hid an extra computer to feed video to their "remote" TV in the "bedroom". It was, overall, a pretty disgusting bit of charlatanism.
The point, of course, is that it was pretty obvious to anyone who cared to know exactly why Microsoft got into the Xbox business, they were hoping to shore up the Windows monopoly by producing a gaming console that they could eventually parlay into a monopoly on digital homes. They needed to do this to prevent anyone else from establishing domination in this arena, imagine if Linux became the standard for consumer appliances, it could potentially erode the Windows desktop monopoly.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, all the digital home stuff was way too early, they didn't actually have viable products to back it up at the time, and Nintendo and then Apple stole their thunder with the Wii, and iPhone and the iPad respectively. They've been trying for a very long time to figure out how to use the Xbox 360 to expand the reach of their monopolies without tipping their hand to the regulators. Now that the regulatory period is over, they no longer have to worry about making blatantly anticompetitive moves.
No, in fact it was not. You flew off the handle over a minor dig. The point made was that there wasn't much that is useful that can be done with a smart phone while driving. You have shown one example of something that might work and might be useful, that doesn't prove the point that Siri is the killer application that Apple executives are making it out to be.
Not really, all I'm saying, is it is illogical for an atheist to be like that. Atheism is a point of view that prizes logic above all else, thus it is disappointing (though not unsurprising) when they fail... For the most part, I have found them reasonable, intelligent people, and I would say the "fundamentalist" groups are the minority. But that is of course anecdotal....
That's not actually true, Atheism is a point of view that God doesn't exist. Many atheists arrive at this conclusion through the application of logic and reason, and indeed many atheists do prize logic above all else, but it is not intrinsic to atheism in general. Some people become atheists through personal tragedy, some arrive at it through religious cynicism, some people are atheists because they've never really considered anything else. It's a mixed group unified only by their lack of belief in deities. You can expect every atheist to be a paragon of logic and reason, but you will be disappointed because it's an unreasonably high standard and it is only sometimes applicable.
Even Jesus seems to be a composite of lots of earlier pagan traditions.
That should be expected. In the best case, the gospels were written almost a century after his death by people with no direct knowledge of the events. In the worst case there was no Jesus and the whole thing was based on the rumors, legends and myths. It could be as wrong as someone writing the Book of Norris 100 years from now and believing that he actually cured cancers based on the number of references to his ability to do so.
Exactly how can an atheist be fundamentalist? It seems like there's really only one fundamental tenet of atheism: there is no god. In that sense every atheist is a either a fundamentalist or agnostic.
Atheists have the opportunity not to sink to down to that level, and it is disappointing when they do. We expect it from the fundamentalist religious.
Lovely, a double-standard. You can expect some groups of people to be better than other groups of people, but most of the time you will be disappointed.
Just a clue-in here: Anthony Watts is famous (among some circles) for his denouncement of climate change and one of his big reasons for denouncing it is his claim that the scientists are all colluding to steal grant money from credulous governments. But you did a good job of explaining the point of the guy you responded to, and why it's really Anthony Watts who's the credulous schmuck.
Believe it or not, their members are usually on the side that's getting less. Income inequality is all about paying the employees less than they're actually worth and pocketing the difference. It's explicitly one of the fundamental reasons that unions exist.
You've forgotten about politics. Sometimes the obviously better method isn't the one that gets chosen because of other factors. Sometimes it's a simple as contractor expenses go into a different column than employee expenses, and there are incentives for keeping the employee expenses column total as low as possible and none for keeping the contractor expense column total low.
Hmm. I think shall have to impovisate Bitword, the new Libertarianistic alternativialistic language. But we'll have to freedomate the creation of words to make sure that it doesn't get devalumated by word inflation.
It was about the non-chalent contempt that they showed their customers by wording their email "don't you dare complain, the increase is less then the cost of that fancy coffee you're sucking on".
Of course that didn't happen. What the CEO did was reply to a reporter's question about the price increase by saying it was less than a cup of coffee a month, and thus he didn't think it would have a large impact on the number subscribers they have. Make of that what you will, but you'd look more reasonable if you didn't lie about what actually happened.
Not really. They actually said if you didn't use both services you could end up paying less, which is true. They tried to spin it as "what we need to do to continue offering high quality service to renters and streamers". However, it appears some people are more interested in being upset...
You're joking, right? Name one streaming competitor that has a catalog as large as Netflix's? Seriously, as bad as Netflix's catalog is, it does dwarf pretty much everybody elses catalog combined if you eliminate duplicates.
Being the best isn't an indication of having achieved domination (at least in the legal sense), the rule of thumb measure is if they can increase prices without loosing customers to competitors.
The Dreamworks deal wasn't a terribly bright idea if it cost them that much money.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I can't say I know either way. I would assume however, that Netflix was looking very carefully at how many people were watching Megamind. The $12 million a year is a small amount spread across 25 million subscribers. I presume that they think the content will increase retention and/or acquisition sufficiently to justify the cost. Don't forget that we're talking about family movies as well, which means they have a significant amount of repeat value for families with children.
Also, the reason they increased the price had nothing to do with licensing fees, they said so themselves, I'm not sure where people got the idea that licensing fees were related.
The licensing fees are an obvious scapegoat, and I don't think Netflix would tell us if they were the cause, it would make the company look weak and might hinder future negotiations. However, I think the reason they gave is fairly reasonable, they needed to isolate the revenue streams so they could appropriately fund both sides of their business.
Right, that was supposed to be GE not GM, and they said we have 46 years of oil left at current consumption rates (38 years at an average usage growth of 1%).
Basically if that's the case, then they were dumping and ought to be sued for the related antitrust violations.
It's only an antitrust violation if they have market domination and are dumping to undermine competitors. I doubt that anyone could convincingly show that the online streaming market is no longer competitive.
That's all well and good, but it's really hard for me to believe that it's really costing them that much more to stream movies than it is to send DVDs in the mail. Licensing fees or not.
Take for example the Dreamworks deal, that's about $12 million per movie per year. I'm pretty sure that's in addition to whatever they pay for the rights for DVD rentals. That's a premium they're paying to have newer content, but they still need licenses for every show in their library. That in addition to storage, servers and bandwidth. I'm pretty sure it costs more than $2 a month to provide service to either the average streaming customer or the average DVD customer.
Except they haven't messed up all that much, there are certainly indications that the trouble has been overstated (of course, future missteps can change that). They have lost less than 3% of their last maximum user numbers. They have more users now than they did last year and they have higher revenues, there is no evidence (yet) that they have unsustainable pricing in the U.S.
I wouldn't rate it a "buy" or a "sell" right now, I'd probably say it's a "hold". If they prove popular in Europe they could achieve dominance in that market and see significant profit growth.
The reward for a successful European roll out is market dominance in two of the primary streaming markets (I'm not sure whether the Asian market would be significant due to piracy and language issues). It's worth far more than the relatively minor market share loss ( 4%) in the U.S. If the European roll out works well, they will have the majority of the English language streaming market wrapped up, leaving only Australia.
Maybe it's because they like to think in box office terms? They may think their movies are obviously worth $10 per person watching. So they're probably not happy with "giving away" their content at less than $0.50 per potential viewer.
Slashdot Mirror
Find the presentation (video, website, powerpoint, pdf, anything) and post a link. Anybody can make garbage claims. Back it up so that it's believable.
Sorry, I'm not going to waste my time trying to find evidence that you won't believe. I've told you the events I witnessed believe it or not, I don't really care. That part is merely exposition on where I got my information from, with some commentary on what they were showing and how they were able to do things that the Xbox was clearly not capable of.
Yes, how dare any company (much less Microsoft) try to protect their business, or branch out into a new area with the intent of making money? The audacity!
You seem to projecting your own anger at my revealing bad behavior on Microsoft part onto me. I'm not angry that Microsoft was trying grow their business, I'm merely telling you why they were getting into the console business. The business reasons made a lot of sense at the time and were obvious to anyone who had half a brain.
The Wii stole what thunder?
Obviously, the Xbox 360, it was supposed to be the dominant console world wide, but as soon as the Wii came out all anyone could talk about was the Wii. That was a significant blow to Microsoft's plans for the Xbox 360.
The iPhone and iPad did a number on everyone -- not just Microsoft
Obviously.
And neither the iPhone nor the iPad are in the least bit connected with the Xbox.
You don't seem to be able to follow a line of thought very well. The iPhone and the iPad have been the dominant tech story for the last couple of years, which has made it much more difficult for Microsoft to push the Xbox 360 as part of a home media system. Microsoft needs a functioning and slick tablet computer that is at least nearly equal to the iPad before they can go down the digital home road again or they'll just be laughed at by anyone with a clue. Tablets may end up being the future of home computing as opposed to say a box cabled to your TV.
[T]he Xbox 360 + Xbox live was one of the best products / ecosystems to come out of Microsoft ever, and that's saying something.
Irrelevant. I'm not talking about whether the Xbox 360 is good or not, just what Microsoft was trying to achieve.
Last bit of advice -- you don't like the Xbox? Don't buy one. You don't like Windows? Don't buy it. Don't use it. You don't like Windows Phone? Don't use it. Nobody can force you. Nobody gives a damn anyway. Just don't get overly upset and start spreading FUD if poeple do like and use those products, okay?
As is often the case with these types of posts, I'm much less upset than you. I have impugned the reputation of a company that you worship and you feel the need to defend it arduously. I'm not spreading FUD, no part of my post should inspire fear, uncertainty or doubt. Most people won't even get their hackles up over the allegations of faked product demos, it's not exactly a new criticism of Microsoft. They are, after all, the masters of FUD and have repeatedly used fake presentations to cripple competitors.
The point of my post wasn't that "Micro$oft suxors" but that Microsoft had and probably still has, specific goals for the Xbox program. And it's two-fold protect the monopoly that makes most of the company's profits and trying to dominate a new potential market, both goals which are entirely rational for Microsoft to follow. It may not be in other people's best interest to allow them to achieve those goals but that is an entirely different post.
Wait so is Steve Sauron now? I thought he was playing Saruman to Bill's Sauron!
Why doesn't anyone tell me about these casting changes?
Actually, they most definitely filed this complaint, they even demanded the defendant destroy all of the devices in question before the trial began. However, apparently this was a criminal case that was brought against the defendant. So Apple didn't even have to pay for the lawyers because the Spanish government prosecuted the case.
Wait, so either you didn't even look at the articles, or you have failed entirely to understand what you read and you are complaining about other people being uninformed and biased?
No, not really. Bill Gates has been a bit of a douche bag going all the way back to when he was complaining about people copying his implementation of basic while he was still in college. Microsoft has always been a company aimed at market domination and rolling in the fat monopoly rents that domination would create. When they first started out they used to publicly say they wanted to the be the only company in the computer business, which if you think about it, is a completely obnoxious goal to have. Microsoft has always been fundamentally dedicated to being evil*.
* Though Microsoft and it's peons are rarely able to recognize the inherent evil in deliberately trying to limit other people's choices and take money that they don't truly deserve (by using monopoly power to increases prices above what a fair market would settle on).
I was thinking the same thing, and then I looked up the definition of evangelical:
of, relating to, or being in agreement with the Christian gospel especially as it is presented in the four Gospels
Given that definition, the idea of an "evangelical atheist" is somewhat amusing, although I recognize the final definition is divorced from it's theistic origin.
I can tell you what Microsoft was telling business about the Xbox when they were rolling it out. I was at one of their "digital home" shows for businesses, where they were trying to convince the attendees that everyone would soon have 3 or 4 Xboxes in their houses which they could use a networked PVR/gaming systems.
The presentation was pathetic with obvious Microsoft employee "shills" in the audience who lobbed softball questions to the presenters. Even worse the "networked" PVR demo was faked, they hid an extra computer to feed video to their "remote" TV in the "bedroom". It was, overall, a pretty disgusting bit of charlatanism.
The point, of course, is that it was pretty obvious to anyone who cared to know exactly why Microsoft got into the Xbox business, they were hoping to shore up the Windows monopoly by producing a gaming console that they could eventually parlay into a monopoly on digital homes. They needed to do this to prevent anyone else from establishing domination in this arena, imagine if Linux became the standard for consumer appliances, it could potentially erode the Windows desktop monopoly.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, all the digital home stuff was way too early, they didn't actually have viable products to back it up at the time, and Nintendo and then Apple stole their thunder with the Wii, and iPhone and the iPad respectively. They've been trying for a very long time to figure out how to use the Xbox 360 to expand the reach of their monopolies without tipping their hand to the regulators. Now that the regulatory period is over, they no longer have to worry about making blatantly anticompetitive moves.
You seem to have anger issues, why don't you try not being an asshole?
My reply was perfectly reasonable; yours was not.
No, in fact it was not. You flew off the handle over a minor dig. The point made was that there wasn't much that is useful that can be done with a smart phone while driving. You have shown one example of something that might work and might be useful, that doesn't prove the point that Siri is the killer application that Apple executives are making it out to be.
Not really, all I'm saying, is it is illogical for an atheist to be like that. Atheism is a point of view that prizes logic above all else, thus it is disappointing (though not unsurprising) when they fail... For the most part, I have found them reasonable, intelligent people, and I would say the "fundamentalist" groups are the minority. But that is of course anecdotal....
That's not actually true, Atheism is a point of view that God doesn't exist. Many atheists arrive at this conclusion through the application of logic and reason, and indeed many atheists do prize logic above all else, but it is not intrinsic to atheism in general. Some people become atheists through personal tragedy, some arrive at it through religious cynicism, some people are atheists because they've never really considered anything else. It's a mixed group unified only by their lack of belief in deities. You can expect every atheist to be a paragon of logic and reason, but you will be disappointed because it's an unreasonably high standard and it is only sometimes applicable.
Even Jesus seems to be a composite of lots of earlier pagan traditions.
That should be expected. In the best case, the gospels were written almost a century after his death by people with no direct knowledge of the events. In the worst case there was no Jesus and the whole thing was based on the rumors, legends and myths. It could be as wrong as someone writing the Book of Norris 100 years from now and believing that he actually cured cancers based on the number of references to his ability to do so.
Exactly how can an atheist be fundamentalist? It seems like there's really only one fundamental tenet of atheism: there is no god. In that sense every atheist is a either a fundamentalist or agnostic.
Atheists have the opportunity not to sink to down to that level, and it is disappointing when they do. We expect it from the fundamentalist religious.
Lovely, a double-standard. You can expect some groups of people to be better than other groups of people, but most of the time you will be disappointed.
...
Just a clue-in here: Anthony Watts is famous (among some circles) for his denouncement of climate change and one of his big reasons for denouncing it is his claim that the scientists are all colluding to steal grant money from credulous governments. But you did a good job of explaining the point of the guy you responded to, and why it's really Anthony Watts who's the credulous schmuck.
Believe it or not, their members are usually on the side that's getting less. Income inequality is all about paying the employees less than they're actually worth and pocketing the difference. It's explicitly one of the fundamental reasons that unions exist.
You've forgotten about politics. Sometimes the obviously better method isn't the one that gets chosen because of other factors. Sometimes it's a simple as contractor expenses go into a different column than employee expenses, and there are incentives for keeping the employee expenses column total as low as possible and none for keeping the contractor expense column total low.
Don't pretend your hyperbole is a quotation, it just makes you look like an ass.
Hmm. I think shall have to impovisate Bitword, the new Libertarianistic alternativialistic language. But we'll have to freedomate the creation of words to make sure that it doesn't get devalumated by word inflation.
It was about the non-chalent contempt that they showed their customers by wording their email "don't you dare complain, the increase is less then the cost of that fancy coffee you're sucking on".
Of course that didn't happen. What the CEO did was reply to a reporter's question about the price increase by saying it was less than a cup of coffee a month, and thus he didn't think it would have a large impact on the number subscribers they have. Make of that what you will, but you'd look more reasonable if you didn't lie about what actually happened.
Not really. They actually said if you didn't use both services you could end up paying less, which is true. They tried to spin it as "what we need to do to continue offering high quality service to renters and streamers". However, it appears some people are more interested in being upset...
You're joking, right? Name one streaming competitor that has a catalog as large as Netflix's? Seriously, as bad as Netflix's catalog is, it does dwarf pretty much everybody elses catalog combined if you eliminate duplicates.
Being the best isn't an indication of having achieved domination (at least in the legal sense), the rule of thumb measure is if they can increase prices without loosing customers to competitors.
The Dreamworks deal wasn't a terribly bright idea if it cost them that much money.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I can't say I know either way. I would assume however, that Netflix was looking very carefully at how many people were watching Megamind. The $12 million a year is a small amount spread across 25 million subscribers. I presume that they think the content will increase retention and/or acquisition sufficiently to justify the cost. Don't forget that we're talking about family movies as well, which means they have a significant amount of repeat value for families with children.
Also, the reason they increased the price had nothing to do with licensing fees, they said so themselves, I'm not sure where people got the idea that licensing fees were related.
The licensing fees are an obvious scapegoat, and I don't think Netflix would tell us if they were the cause, it would make the company look weak and might hinder future negotiations. However, I think the reason they gave is fairly reasonable, they needed to isolate the revenue streams so they could appropriately fund both sides of their business.
Right, that was supposed to be GE not GM, and they said we have 46 years of oil left at current consumption rates (38 years at an average usage growth of 1%).
I think you mean 100 years before oil is a luxury which can only be afford by billionaires?
GM, after all, predicted we have less than 100 years of oil left at todays usage rate, and since usage increases every year...
Basically if that's the case, then they were dumping and ought to be sued for the related antitrust violations.
It's only an antitrust violation if they have market domination and are dumping to undermine competitors. I doubt that anyone could convincingly show that the online streaming market is no longer competitive.
That's all well and good, but it's really hard for me to believe that it's really costing them that much more to stream movies than it is to send DVDs in the mail. Licensing fees or not.
Take for example the Dreamworks deal, that's about $12 million per movie per year. I'm pretty sure that's in addition to whatever they pay for the rights for DVD rentals. That's a premium they're paying to have newer content, but they still need licenses for every show in their library. That in addition to storage, servers and bandwidth. I'm pretty sure it costs more than $2 a month to provide service to either the average streaming customer or the average DVD customer.
Except they haven't messed up all that much, there are certainly indications that the trouble has been overstated (of course, future missteps can change that). They have lost less than 3% of their last maximum user numbers. They have more users now than they did last year and they have higher revenues, there is no evidence (yet) that they have unsustainable pricing in the U.S.
I wouldn't rate it a "buy" or a "sell" right now, I'd probably say it's a "hold". If they prove popular in Europe they could achieve dominance in that market and see significant profit growth.
The reward for a successful European roll out is market dominance in two of the primary streaming markets (I'm not sure whether the Asian market would be significant due to piracy and language issues). It's worth far more than the relatively minor market share loss ( 4%) in the U.S. If the European roll out works well, they will have the majority of the English language streaming market wrapped up, leaving only Australia.
Maybe it's because they like to think in box office terms? They may think their movies are obviously worth $10 per person watching. So they're probably not happy with "giving away" their content at less than $0.50 per potential viewer.
Due to European start up costs. As they say "You have to spend money to make money".
Of course, if the European launch fails it could, in theory, bankrupt the company.