you're all right, I've never heard of any of the solutions you've mentioned, nor have I ever seen, or heard of them being used, anywhere that I know of.
Well, maybe do a little research next time before making sweeping pronouncements, hmm? I can tell you that one company that my company works for uses Lotus Sametime. I can't disclose the name, but let's just say it's likely you've got a few cans of their main product in your kitchen.
A simple IM program isn't that hard to program, why do the corporate solutions cost so much?
Because however much they cost, it's still cheaper than the potential cost of corporate secrets being leaked via world-accessible IM; or criminal charges/liability lawsuits because, for example, an employee was using company equipment on company time to trade kiddie porn with one of his fellow pedophiles on a world-accessible IM system.
I think the biggest thing lacking with IM seems to be the lack of a corporate tool for IM.
What are you talking about? Microsoft offers a corporate IM server called Live Communications Server. IBM offers Lotus Sametime. Apple even has one built into OS X Server 10.4. There are also other companies that offer corporate/enterprise instant messaging solutions, so the server and clients are run in-house.
I picked up one of these in the beginning of the year, and put a 200GB drive in it. I keep all my installers, client drive images, and utilities on it, divided over six partitions. It has FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB2 connectors.
It replaced an identical enclosure that only offered FireWire 400 and USB2 that I bought a couple years ago, which had a 120GB drive in it.
Both enclosures are fanless, but I never had a problem with either drive due to heat. They don't run 24/7, but I've had them on for fairly long stretches. My only gripe with them is very minor: the blue activity LED is friggin' blinding-- I ended up taping a small square of copy paper over it to mute it a little bit.
Holy crap, are you misinformed. Read some books on the history of the personal computer industry in the late 70s and the 80s. Start with Cringely's "Accidental Empires."
Actually, the original PC BIOS wasn't so much reverse-engineered, as it was simply duplicated. IBM published the full annotated assembler listing in the original IBM PC technical manual.
Yes, that was done purposely in the hopes that its existence could be used to quickly shut down any cloners via copyright infringement lawsuit. The grandparent poster was right on about Phoenix. They actually took out a huge insurance policy from Lloyd's of London that would protect them if IBM sued them, so IBM couldn't just use a nebulous lawsuit to legal-fee them into submission (as Hughes and the RIAA like to do today).
IBM for its part didn't seem to care one way or the other.
The hell they didn't! Aside from addressing shortcomings in the ISA bus, one of the main reasons IBM developed the very proprietary Micro Channel Architecture was to try to cram the cloning genie back in the bottle. IBM told the cloners they'd be happy to license the MCA, but demanded extortionate fees to do so, and apparently also wanted to be paid for every prior IBM PC clone that had been produced-- an offer that IBM had to know would be completely unacceptable.
The cloners told IBM to pound sand, and went on building ISA-based IBM PC compatibles without paying IBM a dime, until PCI came on the scene. MCA went nowhere, and IBM's PC business continued its downward slide that started when Compaq was first to market with an 80386-based machine, and finished just last year when they sold the division to Lenovo.
I don't know if you've noticed, but OS X has the *built in* ability to print to a PDF. There is no need for Acrobat to duplicate that ability...
For me, no. For my clients, who do design work and need more robust PDF creation and editing capabilities, Acrobat is the only way to fly. But thanks for speaking to me as if I were a noob, I really appreciate it.
Anyway... the only real market I see for symantec for OSX users is system diagnostics and filesystem repair.
Too bad they gave up on that market by killing Norton Utilities for Mac a couple years ago. Of course, that product peaked at version 6 and started stinking up the place after that. IIRC, it was never updated for OS X, either-- the most they did with it was make it OS X aware, so it wouldn't screw something up while trying to "fix" something that OS X needed a certain way.
Pity, that. I used to swear by NUM back in the day. These days, I rely on Cocktail, DiskWarrior, and Data Rescue X. Not that I need them very often.
It actually is installed via a drag and drop into/Applications. On its initial launch, it asks for a password because it puts other stuff elsewhere in the system, the files necessary for the "Adobe PDF" printer to be created, for one.
Microsoft Office does it that way, too, drag and drop install followed by supplemental stuff (fonts, etc) installing itself on initial launch.
Sliders was a fantastic show, until Tracy Torme, the show's creator, left. Then they ran out of good 'alternate earth' ideas that wouldn't be over the head of Joe Sixpack, and started ripping off sci-fi movie plots (and doing a piss-poor job of it).
To reuse MSOffice look and feel under OSX. Look at the potential savings: 1. Full-time MacOS geeks on payroll eventually reduced by 90%. 2. No more OSX-specific marketing or tech support materials required -- all W32 Office materials will be perfectly suited to the Apple community (Just add "OSX" to the list of system req's, et voila). 3. Will greatly simplify porting of other strategic apps to the Mac (and eventually linux) platform. In order to properly compete with Firefox, IE must go cross-platform, period.
Microsoft has apparently learned nothing from the last time they tried to foist the Windows look and feel upon Mac users, Word 6. It was a piece of shit that barely resembled a Mac application, and it was bloated and slow too, due to Microsoft being cheap and lazy and reusing too much code from the Windows version. It was a half-assed port, and it showed. It was overwhelmingly rejected by Macintosh users, to the point that Microsoft opted to resume selling the previous Mac version, Word 5.1, right alongside it. I worked at a university bookstore's computer department at the time, and I can attest to the fact that once the news got out about how bad Word 6 really was, it gathered dust on the shelves while we could barely keep 5.1 in stock.
It was this debacle that led directly to the creation of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit, which beginning with Office 98 started producing Mac software that Mac users deemed worthy of the Mac. They've pulled a boner or two here or there, IMHO their worst gaffe being the terrible Exchange server support in Entourage 2004 (support MAPI, dammit!), but by and large they do their job well-- there are plenty of Mac Office reviews that declare it to be superior to its Windows counterpart.
IMHO it would be a terrible mistake on Microsoft's part to try this miserable cross-platform look and feel experiment again. Especially now that there are viable alternatives to Mac Office, which there weren't the last time.
...on stupid parents who ignore ratings and buy unsuitable games for their young kids? Like maybe, hold said stupid parents liable when their kids shoot people and say "the violent games made me do it!" as an excuse?
Because IMHO that's what we really need: parents being held responsible for their piss-poor parenting.
I've found that printers typically only last a year, at most.
/me looks over at his Apple LaserWriter Select 360, purchased in January of 1994 and still going strong. I plan to keep it until it totally dies.
IIRC, the innards of the LaserWriter Selects were made by Xerox-- dunno if Xerox lasers made today are as good, but back in the day they certainly were.
Apple still has a college student promotion going on, where you get a free iPod mini with purchase of selected Macs. It's supposed to run until September 24. Presumably they'll blow out their remaining mini stock on that promo . If they run out of minis, they'll either start substituting nanos or just end the promo early.
Yeah, it took quite a beating. In fact, CNN just announced (in the second paragraph as I write this) that it is more damaged that previously thought, and will probably have to be demolished.
I didn't know how badly it was damaged last week, but at the time I certainly wondered if it would have to come down simply for psychological reasons. The New Orleans residents who suffered so much inside it while their city died would probably never again be able to set foot inside or even look at it from the outside without getting upset at the memory. Frankly, just seeing the video clip from inside as the roof material was being torn off made me shudder-- I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in there at the time, wondering if the place was going to collapse.
It's a racetrack, for Christ's sake-- you're telling me they didn't have turnstiles with counters on them at the entrances there, like every other friggin' stadium and other large public venue in the country does?
What a total fiasco. I can't wait until the first civil suit gets filed by one of the people who got injured. You know it's coming, and a nice settlement will result.
Even if they wouldn't put the things on eBay like anyone with a shred of sense would have, there were still a million better ways to do this than a friggin' battle royale-- for example, why didn't they give out numbered tickets to everyone who showed up before a certain time, and then draw "winners" at random from that group?
If there will be more of these iBook fire sales, I hope they put some more thought into the execution than they did for this one.
...because it's not the standard bundled mouse with their desktop systems. I just checked, and it's not even a BTO option to replace the one-button mouse.
I'd bet, however, that once this has been around for a little while, they'll get manufacturing costs down and it will become the standard bundled mouse.
And when they do that, the smart move IMHO would be for new systems to be configured out of the box to still see the mouse as one-button (for the n00bs), and let those who want more functionality enable the features themselves. Or maybe have the Setup Assistant ask you your preference.
Yeah, but back then the patent examiners actually did their jobs, they didn't just approve everything with little regard for prior art, excessive breadth, or blinding obviousness.
You can spin things any way you like, but the fact of the matter is Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.
That's true, but no reasonable person would be surprised that the Apple people would be influenced by the stuff they saw at PARC. My theory is that (at the time) the Xerox suits saw no value in what was being developed, and thus saw no harm in letting Apple see it. If they thought it was valuable, they would never have let the Apple contingent in the building. Instead, they probably thought they were screwing Apple by getting virtually free money out of their investment, in exchange for letting Apple see worthless, unmarketable crap.
Eventually Xerox sued Apple
Well, sure, after realizing in horror that they gave away the keys to the kingdom. No matter how much money they made on their investment in Apple, it would have been dwarfed by what they could have made if they had fully exploited the GUI themselves.
Apple never tried to argue in that case that their tour of Xerox entitled them to any rights, by the way.
Well, that goes back to my first point. Nobody could reasonably expect the Apple people to not be influenced by what they saw. Short of erasing their memories after the tour a la "Men in Black," if you want to ensure they won't be influenced by the stuff, you don't let them see it.
And though Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple, I can only assume there were no NDAs covering the visits, either-- those would have been a potent weapon in the lawsuit, had they existed.
So you're asserting Apple stole Xerox's stuff, when right there in the text you quoted it says otherwise. Did you even read it? Allow me to repeat. Read just the bold parts:
Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology.
That looks like a pretty clear quid pro quo to me. Do you think the Xerox people who made this deal were idiots? Do you think they didn't know the probability the Apple people would take and build upon the things they saw at PARC-- things the Xerox suits had no plans to put into products of their own?
I suggest you watch Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds"-- one of the people interviewed is Adele Goldberg, a former PARC staffer. In her interview, she explained that she made it clear to the Xerox suits what was likely to happen if the Apple people got their tour, and refused to give any demos to them unless they Xerox suits directly ordered her to do so. Which they did. The rest is history.
No, Microsoft currently doesn't have anything to compete against the iPod.
Microsoft is not concerned about the physical player per se, but every iPod that's sold means there's one more person who won't be buying music from an online store that uses Windows Media format. So Microsoft does have something to lose.
Just the fact that Apple and MS are market rivals doesn't mean that MS would try to threaten a company like HP from promoting Apple products.
What are you talking about? They've already done that! Years ago, when PC makers started trying to bundle Netscape Navigator, Microsoft pressured them to stop with threats like increasing the price they paid for Windows, or revoking their Windows distribution license entirely.
It's not really likely that MS threatened HP in this case, but MS is certainly no stranger to such behavior (Read from paragraph 230 in the above link).
Sure Apple will lose sales of they're hardware at first but it will slowly pick up again and be stronger then ever
Were you not around in the mid-to-late 90's when Apple's cloning experiment cost them enough sales to put the company into a death spiral? The only thing that saved them was Jobs returning and doing some fancy footwork to terminate the cloners' licenses so people would have to buy computers from Apple again.
Apple sells systems. The hardware and software are complementary. They have a limited pool of hardware, they know its exact capabilities, and they take full advantage of them with software. That's synergy-- the whole being greater than just the sum of the parts.
That's why the iPod is so popular. You plug it in, and iTunes kicks off the sync process. Hardware and software working together as a complete system. No configuration wizard playing 20 Questions with you, or looking for drivers, or even telling you that it's found the drivers and is installing them. Plug it in, it works, you're done.
That's also why the Mac OS has the reputation it does. The limited pool of hardware on which it runs means it can do wicked cool stuff. Because there's so much different hardware of differing capability and quality, Windows must be coded to work with the lowest common denominator. That's why you will never (read: NEVER) be able to throw Mac OS X on some homebuilt PC and have it function as well as it does when it runs on a genuine Mac.* Even if you could, do you think Mac OS X for Generic x86 Computers would only be $129? Guess again. They'd have to make up for the pain of a lost hardware sale, so you'd probably be looking at double that at the least. If the software was that expensive, they'd have to do some serious anti-piracy activation type stuff to try to keep all you 'I want everything for next-to-nothing' types honest. But we all know it's only a matter of time before that would be cracked, and then it's a BitTorrent free-for-all. And Apple slowly bleeds to death because hardly anybody's buying their hardware (except for iPods) and nearly everybody's stealing their software.
---------- * There are only two possible exceptions to this which might happen one day in the distant future:
1. Apple licenses OS X and has a couple PC makers build systems from specific components, and adjusts OS X to support those components and only those components (in addition to what is available in Apple-branded Macs, of course).
2. Apple supports a small subset of the available commodity hardware-- like NeXT did when it ran on x86-- so you can build your own Mac OS X-compatible system by choosing parts from their list.
Don't expect either to happen anytime soon, if ever-- Apple's got enough on their plate right now with the upcoming Intel transition.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but didn't you imply earlier that you don't need another Mac for troubleshooting?
I don't-- When I'm on the job, I carry a large FireWire drive with a bootable utility partition, and I always have my iBook with me. I could just boot the ailing machine with the OS on the FireWire drive, but I prefer to use the iBook because I don't have to plug it into AC power. Either way, when booted from another volume the ailing drive shows up as a normal mounted volume (unless it's *really* hosed or dead) and I can go to work on it.
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On the other hand, never having to hear "yo, where you at?" ever again sounds like a great thing.
Yes, but without those, there's no longer a need for T-Mobile's hilarious "Poser Mobile" ads. And the loss of those will sting a little.
~Philly
you're all right, I've never heard of any of the solutions you've mentioned, nor have I ever seen, or heard of them being used, anywhere that I know of.
Well, maybe do a little research next time before making sweeping pronouncements, hmm? I can tell you that one company that my company works for uses Lotus Sametime. I can't disclose the name, but let's just say it's likely you've got a few cans of their main product in your kitchen.
A simple IM program isn't that hard to program, why do the corporate solutions cost so much?
Because however much they cost, it's still cheaper than the potential cost of corporate secrets being leaked via world-accessible IM; or criminal charges/liability lawsuits because, for example, an employee was using company equipment on company time to trade kiddie porn with one of his fellow pedophiles on a world-accessible IM system.
I think the biggest thing lacking with IM seems to be the lack of a corporate tool for IM.
What are you talking about? Microsoft offers a corporate IM server called Live Communications Server. IBM offers Lotus Sametime. Apple even has one built into OS X Server 10.4. There are also other companies that offer corporate/enterprise instant messaging solutions, so the server and clients are run in-house.
~Philly
I picked up one of these in the beginning of the year, and put a 200GB drive in it. I keep all my installers, client drive images, and utilities on it, divided over six partitions. It has FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB2 connectors.
It replaced an identical enclosure that only offered FireWire 400 and USB2 that I bought a couple years ago, which had a 120GB drive in it.
Both enclosures are fanless, but I never had a problem with either drive due to heat. They don't run 24/7, but I've had them on for fairly long stretches. My only gripe with them is very minor: the blue activity LED is friggin' blinding-- I ended up taping a small square of copy paper over it to mute it a little bit.
~Philly
Holy crap, are you misinformed. Read some books on the history of the personal computer industry in the late 70s and the 80s. Start with Cringely's "Accidental Empires."
Actually, the original PC BIOS wasn't so much reverse-engineered, as it was simply duplicated. IBM published the full annotated assembler listing in the original IBM PC technical manual.
Yes, that was done purposely in the hopes that its existence could be used to quickly shut down any cloners via copyright infringement lawsuit. The grandparent poster was right on about Phoenix. They actually took out a huge insurance policy from Lloyd's of London that would protect them if IBM sued them, so IBM couldn't just use a nebulous lawsuit to legal-fee them into submission (as Hughes and the RIAA like to do today).
IBM for its part didn't seem to care one way or the other.
The hell they didn't! Aside from addressing shortcomings in the ISA bus, one of the main reasons IBM developed the very proprietary Micro Channel Architecture was to try to cram the cloning genie back in the bottle. IBM told the cloners they'd be happy to license the MCA, but demanded extortionate fees to do so, and apparently also wanted to be paid for every prior IBM PC clone that had been produced-- an offer that IBM had to know would be completely unacceptable.
The cloners told IBM to pound sand, and went on building ISA-based IBM PC compatibles without paying IBM a dime, until PCI came on the scene. MCA went nowhere, and IBM's PC business continued its downward slide that started when Compaq was first to market with an 80386-based machine, and finished just last year when they sold the division to Lenovo.
~Philly
I don't know if you've noticed, but OS X has the *built in* ability to print to a PDF. There is no need for Acrobat to duplicate that ability...
For me, no. For my clients, who do design work and need more robust PDF creation and editing capabilities, Acrobat is the only way to fly. But thanks for speaking to me as if I were a noob, I really appreciate it.
~Philly
Anyway... the only real market I see for symantec for OSX users is system diagnostics and filesystem repair.
Too bad they gave up on that market by killing Norton Utilities for Mac a couple years ago. Of course, that product peaked at version 6 and started stinking up the place after that. IIRC, it was never updated for OS X, either-- the most they did with it was make it OS X aware, so it wouldn't screw something up while trying to "fix" something that OS X needed a certain way.
Pity, that. I used to swear by NUM back in the day. These days, I rely on Cocktail, DiskWarrior, and Data Rescue X. Not that I need them very often.
~Philly
Acrobat.
/Applications. On its initial launch, it asks for a password because it puts other stuff elsewhere in the system, the files necessary for the "Adobe PDF" printer to be created, for one.
It actually is installed via a drag and drop into
Microsoft Office does it that way, too, drag and drop install followed by supplemental stuff (fonts, etc) installing itself on initial launch.
~Philly
Sliders was a fantastic show, until Tracy Torme, the show's creator, left. Then they ran out of good 'alternate earth' ideas that wouldn't be over the head of Joe Sixpack, and started ripping off sci-fi movie plots (and doing a piss-poor job of it).
~Philly
To reuse MSOffice look and feel under OSX. Look at the potential savings:
1. Full-time MacOS geeks on payroll eventually reduced by 90%.
2. No more OSX-specific marketing or tech support materials required -- all W32 Office materials will be perfectly suited to the Apple community (Just add "OSX" to the list of system req's, et voila).
3. Will greatly simplify porting of other strategic apps to the Mac (and eventually linux) platform. In order to properly compete with Firefox, IE must go cross-platform, period.
Microsoft has apparently learned nothing from the last time they tried to foist the Windows look and feel upon Mac users, Word 6.
It was a piece of shit that barely resembled a Mac application, and it was bloated and slow too, due to Microsoft being cheap and lazy and reusing too much code from the Windows version. It was a half-assed port, and it showed. It was overwhelmingly rejected by Macintosh users, to the point that Microsoft opted to resume selling the previous Mac version, Word 5.1, right alongside it. I worked at a university bookstore's computer department at the time, and I can attest to the fact that once the news got out about how bad Word 6 really was, it gathered dust on the shelves while we could barely keep 5.1 in stock.
It was this debacle that led directly to the creation of the Microsoft Mac Business Unit, which beginning with Office 98 started producing Mac software that Mac users deemed worthy of the Mac. They've pulled a boner or two here or there, IMHO their worst gaffe being the terrible Exchange server support in Entourage 2004 (support MAPI, dammit!), but by and large they do their job well-- there are plenty of Mac Office reviews that declare it to be superior to its Windows counterpart.
IMHO it would be a terrible mistake on Microsoft's part to try this miserable cross-platform look and feel experiment again. Especially now that there are viable alternatives to Mac Office, which there weren't the last time.
~Philly
...this site will have to do.
~Philly
Sheesh! Flip a coin, or do rock-scissors-paper or something. Winner's name goes before the hyphen, loser's name goes after it. Problem solved.
~Philly
...on stupid parents who ignore ratings and buy unsuitable games for their young kids? Like maybe, hold said stupid parents liable when their kids shoot people and say "the violent games made me do it!" as an excuse?
Because IMHO that's what we really need: parents being held responsible for their piss-poor parenting.
~Philly
I've found that printers typically only last a year, at most.
/me looks over at his Apple LaserWriter Select 360, purchased in January of 1994 and still going strong. I plan to keep it until it totally dies.
IIRC, the innards of the LaserWriter Selects were made by Xerox-- dunno if Xerox lasers made today are as good, but back in the day they certainly were.
~Philly
Apple still has a college student promotion going on, where you get a free iPod mini with purchase of selected Macs. It's supposed to run until September 24. Presumably they'll blow out their remaining mini stock on that promo . If they run out of minis, they'll either start substituting nanos or just end the promo early.
~Philly
Yeah, it took quite a beating. In fact, CNN just announced (in the second paragraph as I write this) that it is more damaged that previously thought, and will probably have to be demolished.
I didn't know how badly it was damaged last week, but at the time I certainly wondered if it would have to come down simply for psychological reasons. The New Orleans residents who suffered so much inside it while their city died would probably never again be able to set foot inside or even look at it from the outside without getting upset at the memory. Frankly, just seeing the video clip from inside as the roof material was being torn off made me shudder-- I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in there at the time, wondering if the place was going to collapse.
~Philly
...on the "Fry Hard 2" episode of Good Eats.
He used one of these, minus skull, tail and the bottom half of the legs, to demonstrate the proper way to dismantle a whole chicken for frying.
~Philly
It's a racetrack, for Christ's sake-- you're telling me they didn't have turnstiles with counters on them at the entrances there, like every other friggin' stadium and other large public venue in the country does?
What a total fiasco. I can't wait until the first civil suit gets filed by one of the people who got injured. You know it's coming, and a nice settlement will result.
Even if they wouldn't put the things on eBay like anyone with a shred of sense would have, there were still a million better ways to do this than a friggin' battle royale-- for example, why didn't they give out numbered tickets to everyone who showed up before a certain time, and then draw "winners" at random from that group?
If there will be more of these iBook fire sales, I hope they put some more thought into the execution than they did for this one.
~Philly
...because it's not the standard bundled mouse with their desktop systems. I just checked, and it's not even a BTO option to replace the one-button mouse.
I'd bet, however, that once this has been around for a little while, they'll get manufacturing costs down and it will become the standard bundled mouse.
And when they do that, the smart move IMHO would be for new systems to be configured out of the box to still see the mouse as one-button (for the n00bs), and let those who want more functionality enable the features themselves. Or maybe have the Setup Assistant ask you your preference.
~Philly
Yeah, but back then the patent examiners actually did their jobs, they didn't just approve everything with little regard for prior art, excessive breadth, or blinding obviousness.
~Philly
You can spin things any way you like, but the fact of the matter is Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.
That's true, but no reasonable person would be surprised that the Apple people would be influenced by the stuff they saw at PARC. My theory is that (at the time) the Xerox suits saw no value in what was being developed, and thus saw no harm in letting Apple see it. If they thought it was valuable, they would never have let the Apple contingent in the building. Instead, they probably thought they were screwing Apple by getting virtually free money out of their investment, in exchange for letting Apple see worthless, unmarketable crap.
Eventually Xerox sued Apple
Well, sure, after realizing in horror that they gave away the keys to the kingdom. No matter how much money they made on their investment in Apple, it would have been dwarfed by what they could have made if they had fully exploited the GUI themselves.
Apple never tried to argue in that case that their tour of Xerox entitled them to any rights, by the way.
Well, that goes back to my first point. Nobody could reasonably expect the Apple people to not be influenced by what they saw. Short of erasing their memories after the tour a la "Men in Black," if you want to ensure they won't be influenced by the stuff, you don't let them see it.
And though Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple, I can only assume there were no NDAs covering the visits, either-- those would have been a potent weapon in the lawsuit, had they existed.
~Philly
So you're asserting Apple stole Xerox's stuff, when right there in the text you quoted it says otherwise. Did you even read it? Allow me to repeat. Read just the bold parts:
Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology.
That looks like a pretty clear quid pro quo to me. Do you think the Xerox people who made this deal were idiots? Do you think they didn't know the probability the Apple people would take and build upon the things they saw at PARC-- things the Xerox suits had no plans to put into products of their own?
I suggest you watch Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds"-- one of the people interviewed is Adele Goldberg, a former PARC staffer. In her interview, she explained that she made it clear to the Xerox suits what was likely to happen if the Apple people got their tour, and refused to give any demos to them unless they Xerox suits directly ordered her to do so. Which they did. The rest is history.
~Philly
No, Microsoft currently doesn't have anything to compete against the iPod.
Microsoft is not concerned about the physical player per se, but every iPod that's sold means there's one more person who won't be buying music from an online store that uses Windows Media format. So Microsoft does have something to lose.
Just the fact that Apple and MS are market rivals doesn't mean that MS would try to threaten a company like HP from promoting Apple products.
What are you talking about? They've already done that! Years ago, when PC makers started trying to bundle Netscape Navigator, Microsoft pressured them to stop with threats like increasing the price they paid for Windows, or revoking their Windows distribution license entirely.
It's not really likely that MS threatened HP in this case, but MS is certainly no stranger to such behavior (Read from paragraph 230 in the above link).
~Philly
Sure Apple will lose sales of they're hardware at first but it will slowly pick up again and be stronger then ever
Were you not around in the mid-to-late 90's when Apple's cloning experiment cost them enough sales to put the company into a death spiral? The only thing that saved them was Jobs returning and doing some fancy footwork to terminate the cloners' licenses so people would have to buy computers from Apple again.
Apple sells systems. The hardware and software are complementary. They have a limited pool of hardware, they know its exact capabilities, and they take full advantage of them with software. That's synergy-- the whole being greater than just the sum of the parts.
That's why the iPod is so popular. You plug it in, and iTunes kicks off the sync process. Hardware and software working together as a complete system. No configuration wizard playing 20 Questions with you, or looking for drivers, or even telling you that it's found the drivers and is installing them. Plug it in, it works, you're done.
That's also why the Mac OS has the reputation it does. The limited pool of hardware on which it runs means it can do wicked cool stuff. Because there's so much different hardware of differing capability and quality, Windows must be coded to work with the lowest common denominator. That's why you will never (read: NEVER) be able to throw Mac OS X on some homebuilt PC and have it function as well as it does when it runs on a genuine Mac.* Even if you could, do you think Mac OS X for Generic x86 Computers would only be $129? Guess again. They'd have to make up for the pain of a lost hardware sale, so you'd probably be looking at double that at the least. If the software was that expensive, they'd have to do some serious anti-piracy activation type stuff to try to keep all you 'I want everything for next-to-nothing' types honest. But we all know it's only a matter of time before that would be cracked, and then it's a BitTorrent free-for-all. And Apple slowly bleeds to death because hardly anybody's buying their hardware (except for iPods) and nearly everybody's stealing their software.
----------
* There are only two possible exceptions to this which might happen one day in the distant future:
1. Apple licenses OS X and has a couple PC makers build systems from specific components, and adjusts OS X to support those components and only those components (in addition to what is available in Apple-branded Macs, of course).
2. Apple supports a small subset of the available commodity hardware-- like NeXT did when it ran on x86-- so you can build your own Mac OS X-compatible system by choosing parts from their list.
Don't expect either to happen anytime soon, if ever-- Apple's got enough on their plate right now with the upcoming Intel transition.
~Philly
Maybe I'm mistaken, but didn't you imply earlier that you don't need another Mac for troubleshooting?
I don't-- When I'm on the job, I carry a large FireWire drive with a bootable utility partition, and I always have my iBook with me. I could just boot the ailing machine with the OS on the FireWire drive, but I prefer to use the iBook because I don't have to plug it into AC power. Either way, when booted from another volume the ailing drive shows up as a normal mounted volume (unless it's *really* hosed or dead) and I can go to work on it.
~Philly