Rory Sutherland discusses the need for every company to have a staff member with the power to do big things but no budget to spend
This sounds like the job from Hell. What qualified person would take it? It screams "cheap" – a company that thinks like this probably won't be too generous with raises and benefits either.
(Lots of IT staff, myself included, don't directly control any spending authority. But that's different than having "no budget to spend." What matters is that we get new equipment and/or software when the situation requires it.)
MAD only works when all parties involved are relatively sane, and when there is proper security to keep the goodies out of the hands of folks who aren't sane...
It worked against Stalin and Mao. I think it's a fairly high burden of proof to claim that a national leader is crazier and/or more evil than those two.
What are you talking about? Windows Phones are business phones.
Microsoft might like to think so, but in the real world, almost all businesses use Blackberries or iPhones.
Windows 8 will be used by 95% of all businesses, just like Windows 7/XP, etc.
But 95% of all businesses didn't use Windows Vista. And Windows 8 is shaping up to be another Vista-class stinker. Since Win7 is supported until 2020, why would cost-conscious businesses update to a product that all their IT people know sucks?
This is because RIM is 'corporate' orientated, so its a natural for Microsoft. Nokia, is consumer oriented ( Apple's territory )
That would make sense, if Microsoft was still thinking logically. But they're not. Steve Ballmer is obsessed with beating Apple, and is completely ignoring his core demographic (business users) to try to take Apple's market share in the consumer-oriented tablet and smartphone business. Nothing else can explain the epic fail that is Windows 8 Metro.
It seems to me that there would be a good business opportunity for a company to make their own VB6 compiler and provide long-term support even after Microsoft drops it. Clearly the market doesn't want VB6 to go away, but one of the drawbacks of closed source is that one company can jerk people around like this.
This is emblematic of what's wrong with the set-top box market. Except for the handful of CableCard third-party devices (e.g. Tivo), most set-top boxes are sold not to end users, but to cable companies. That means average quality is low, and the only "features" they care about are the ones that pad the cable company's profits. Cable boxes guzzle power like crazy (even when turned "off") and offer a poorer UI than almost any other modern electronic device, and now they're planning to invade your privacy as well!
Bad news: There will never be a 4K television standard
Sure there will. Having sold us the same films first in DVD and then in HD Blu-Ray, the only remaining step for the studios (aside from crappy 3D conversions that few are buying) is to sell them again in 4K. There are currently talks between Sony and other studios and manufacturers to come up with a 4K Blu-Ray specification.
But if you are willing to go up to a larger screen, 27" or above then you can get a size of 2560x1440. But you have to pay for it.
Not as much as you might think, if you don't care about name brands. Search for "Yamakasi Catleap" on eBay. These are South Korean-made 27" monitors with 2560x1440 resolution. They cost $300-$320 including shipping. I don't own one myself, but they seem to be fairly well regarded by those who do. The panels are probably made by the same companies as the name brand monitors anyway, since there aren't that many panel vendors out there.
What we really need to do is to blame the HDTV format which forces us to get those letterbox size screens.
The designers of ATSC chose a 16:9 aspect ratio because it matches many theatrical films and offers a better viewing experience than 4:3 on movies and TV shows. It wasn't their intent to create a de facto standard for computer monitors; that is due to cost-cutting on the part of the consumer electronics industry.
Yes. I use it all the time. Firefox gets launched from the Quick Launch bar, and for the other most commonly used programs, they're pinned to the Start Menu. The Windows 7 Start Menu is much more useful if you turn off "Store and display recently opened programs" from the properties sheet – that way you get what YOU want pinned to the menu and easily accessible, not what Microsoft thinks you might want.
I know Microsoft's data shows they don't, and people largely launch apps from the super bar.
Microsoft's metrics are largely taken from inexperienced home users. There is no good reason to think they're a representative sample. And even if power users are only 10% of the market, they're an important 10% – badmouthing from the tech community ensured that Vista was pretty much DOA, and the same may very well be true of Windows 8.
As I've suggested before, the existence of ill-behaved applications is one major reason why we don't have high-DPI monitors. (And as others have pointed out, the low cost of 1080p TV panels is another.) Windows 7 scales DPI pretty well, but some applications go out of their way to break it.
There have been strong rumors for a while that Apple is preparing a Retina Display for the new MacBook Pro. If they keep the price point to $999 (and they did a good job of maintaining existing price points on the new iPad), it might be a good deal even for those of us who don't care for OSX – just blow off the default image and install Windows 7. The ultrabook market, like the tablet market, is one area where Apple is actually competitive in price.
Also, at the most recent consumer electronics shows, many TV manufacturers have demonstrated quad-HD (3840x2160) sets. While these will be very expensive at first, they will be heavily pushed as the next big thing, and prices will go down to reasonable levels eventually. I currently use a 32" 1080p TV as my monitor; it works great, but you can see a tiny bit of pixelation if you lean in close. A Quad HD 32" TV would be a retina display in all but name.
"the business desktop and the power user desktop isn't going away." They are if companies cannot make a profit building them.
There are profits to be made. Just not the Apple-esque profit levels the CEOs think they deserve.
The cheap crap desktops sold at Best Buy may go away in favor of tablets, but workstations are built to higher standards and command more money (plus service contracts). And for power users, I don't see Asus, MSI, etc. going out of business any time soon. And even if they did, Intel would make the motherboards itself if necessary (or, more accurately, continue outsourcing motherboard manufacturing to Foxconn) to preserve its high-margin CPU sales.
Belive it or not, that combo is still better than an equivalent laptop. It is certainly lighter than any laptop with the same screen size, the battery lasts longer and the keyboard may quite well be more confortable.
First of all, iPad keyboards suck. Secondly, if you're setting up with a keyboard and mouse, you don't care about battery life because you almost certainly have access to an AC outlet. Third, most people aren't going to want to squint at a 10" screen when they are at normal sitting distance (as opposed to holding a tablet 6 inches from your face).
DPI is one area where the current iPad excels. I currently use a 32" 1080p TV as my monitor at home, and it works great, but I'm still looking forward to the advent of affordable 4k monitors - at that point you're pretty much getting a "retina display" on the desktop.
But in reality the shift has already happened. The PC industry is headed for destruction, Dell and HP are spiraling into oblivion, the entire retail channel (Best Buy et al) is dead. Margins are already below zero for some categories (ultrabooks). And the totally misconceived shitshow that is Windows 8 will just drive a stake through what little is left of the PC consumer market. Soon, PCs will be hanging onto 3rd world markets & embedded devices and will be dead for all practical purposes.
Tablets and smartphones are still no damn good for doing actual work. They're great content consumption devices, but if you're actually producing stuff, you need a real PC. (If you like modern 3D games, a tablet won't help you much there either.)
Profit margins are irrelevant; why should I, as a consumer, care whether Dell makes money or not? PCs have already largely become a commodity, but the business desktop and the power user desktop isn't going away. Not now, not any time in the forseeable future.
Hell no. GIMP is one application, so it should have one taskbar entry per instance - not three or four. A web browser is also one application, so it too should have one taskbar entry per instance - not one entry for 30+ separate instances. My position on this is consistent.
I don't use browser tabs at all. Never have, never will. The OS already has a perfectly fine task-switching mechanism. I don't care what they do with tabs as long as my existing style keeps working and I can continue using the FF3/IE6 look and feel with classic full-size buttons and menus. And a real home page, none of this "new tab" garbage.
Why do people continue to support AMD? All I can figure is that it has to do with an irrational hatred of Intel. Intel is monopolistic. Intel is anti-competitive. Intel is expensive. So, rather than supporting Intel and getting the best products on the market, people go with AMD and suffer in smug self-righteousness for doing the "right thing" and not supporting the companies that are dominating the field.
This article is about graphics drivers, not CPUs. Intel doesn't make any discrete graphics cards. And their integrated video, while it's been getting better with every iteration, still has serious shortcomings and isn't suitable for anything but the most casual low-resolution gaming. It is fine for people who don't foresee ever playing anything more intense than WoW, or who don't care about 3D at all. (Fortunately for Intel, that's a majority of the market.) It would be great for HTPC if they'd ever fix that damn 23.976 FPS bug. But if you want to play any 3D games, you need AMD or nVidia. I'll be ready to switch to integrated graphics when they can play DQ8 on PCSX2 and Wind Waker on Dolphin at 1080p with no frame drops.
Not everyone is a 3D gamer who wants to be on the absolute cutting edge of everything. Not everyone thinks trading off stability against a few extra FPS is a good deal.
Would it be too much to give us a stable driver, with maybe one update per year? By stable I mean no dodgy hacks, and no game-specific "optimizations". I mean a driver that won't crash, and that isn't afraid to be a little slower in order to do things right. Is there really no one else out there who cares about stability?
If we're down to the 'several thousand' of a particular injury per year then we're in the territory of injuries due to contact with spacecraft (ICD 10 code WX849OXA), initial turtle attacks (W5921XA) or repetitive turtle attacks (W5921XD) and other similarly major dangers to civilization.
Plastic clamshell packaging has always been a nightmare from an end-consumer's perspective, and yes, there's lip-service paid to changing things in the words of major retailers and consumer goods distributors, but it's not likely to change because of "wrap rage."
It will stop once retailers and manufacturers start getting sued for the injuries caused by opening the packages. A few multi-million-dollar punitive awards will concentrate the mind wonderfully. Since the CPSC, despite documenting thousands of injuries every year, hasn't seen fit to do anything about it, the courts may have to step in.
Clamshell packaging sucks from the consumer perspective because most of it isn't designed with consumers in mind. It's designed with retailers in mind. Retailers don't care if you cut yourself opening the package, but they are highly paranoid about the possibility of shoplifting (even though a majority of retail theft is internal).
What surprises me is that there haven't been any large-scale lawsuits over this junk. Fully-sealed clamshell packages deliberately put the end user at a greater risk of cuts (since you need a sharp instrument to open them) without providing any offsetting benefits to the end user. People have gotten themselves on the wrong end of multi-million dollar punitive judgments for much less. A good trial lawyer should have little trouble convincing a jury that a company which deliberately traded off product safety for less shoplifting should be responsible for the human costs of that decision. Especially when everyone on the jury remembers struggling with the damn things themselves.
Alternatively, the CPSC should mandate that clamshell packages must be able to be opened without the use of a sharp implement.
I think everyone hates those offal things; I know I do. But the worst design? Hardly. Clamshell packaging never killed anybody.
Probably not, but it's caused plenty of unnecessary cuts.
Worse, your ac/heat controls used to have knobs, too. You could change the temp without taking your eyes off the road. Now they have BUTTONS! God damn it, listen up, idiot designers, buttons don't belong on a car's dash!
Many cars today with automatic climate control use a rotary encoder for the temperature control (just as they do for the volume control on the stereo). This gives digital precision while still continuing to use a knob instead of buttons. Cheaper cars with manual A/C usually still have traditional speed controls for the fan and analog knobs (probably potentiometer driven) for the temp.
Which, of course, explains why the last chisel I bought was hermetically sealed in an indestructible plastic clamshell package.
A wood chisel is supposed to be razor sharp. If it got dulled by being thrown around in transit, it won't work properly and will be dangerous to the user.
But in total seriousness....why would I move from XP to 7 or 8?
Because XP will stop receiving security updates after mid-2014, while Windows 7 is covered through 2020. That's the biggest reason. Also, some newer software (i.e. anything that relies on DirectX 10+) won't run on XP at all. Most Web browsers have incomplete or no hardware acceleration in XP, but full acceleration on Windows 7.
Windows 7 is also more intuitive, less crash-prone, and (IMO) more aesthetically appealing. Aero isn't just eye-candy; hardware acceleration actually makes it faster than XP, despite what you might think. I don't like the combined "dock" thing that it defaults to, but it's not hard to get back the old Quick Launch bar and traditional-style taskbar.
Not even considering Windows 8 until we can get the Start button and the real Start menu back, and until Metro can be completely disabled for those of us who simply aren't interested.
Fortunately, Windows 7 has extended support through 2020, more than enough time for Ballmer to get the boot and Microsoft to come back to its senses.
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Rory Sutherland discusses the need for every company to have a staff member with the power to do big things but no budget to spend
This sounds like the job from Hell. What qualified person would take it? It screams "cheap" – a company that thinks like this probably won't be too generous with raises and benefits either.
(Lots of IT staff, myself included, don't directly control any spending authority. But that's different than having "no budget to spend." What matters is that we get new equipment and/or software when the situation requires it.)
MAD only works when all parties involved are relatively sane, and when there is proper security to keep the goodies out of the hands of folks who aren't sane...
It worked against Stalin and Mao. I think it's a fairly high burden of proof to claim that a national leader is crazier and/or more evil than those two.
What are you talking about? Windows Phones are business phones.
Microsoft might like to think so, but in the real world, almost all businesses use Blackberries or iPhones.
Windows 8 will be used by 95% of all businesses, just like Windows 7/XP, etc.
But 95% of all businesses didn't use Windows Vista. And Windows 8 is shaping up to be another Vista-class stinker. Since Win7 is supported until 2020, why would cost-conscious businesses update to a product that all their IT people know sucks?
This is because RIM is 'corporate' orientated, so its a natural for Microsoft. Nokia, is consumer oriented ( Apple's territory )
That would make sense, if Microsoft was still thinking logically. But they're not. Steve Ballmer is obsessed with beating Apple, and is completely ignoring his core demographic (business users) to try to take Apple's market share in the consumer-oriented tablet and smartphone business. Nothing else can explain the epic fail that is Windows 8 Metro.
It seems to me that there would be a good business opportunity for a company to make their own VB6 compiler and provide long-term support even after Microsoft drops it. Clearly the market doesn't want VB6 to go away, but one of the drawbacks of closed source is that one company can jerk people around like this.
This is emblematic of what's wrong with the set-top box market. Except for the handful of CableCard third-party devices (e.g. Tivo), most set-top boxes are sold not to end users, but to cable companies. That means average quality is low, and the only "features" they care about are the ones that pad the cable company's profits. Cable boxes guzzle power like crazy (even when turned "off") and offer a poorer UI than almost any other modern electronic device, and now they're planning to invade your privacy as well!
Bad news: There will never be a 4K television standard
Sure there will. Having sold us the same films first in DVD and then in HD Blu-Ray, the only remaining step for the studios (aside from crappy 3D conversions that few are buying) is to sell them again in 4K. There are currently talks between Sony and other studios and manufacturers to come up with a 4K Blu-Ray specification.
But if you are willing to go up to a larger screen, 27" or above then you can get a size of 2560x1440. But you have to pay for it.
Not as much as you might think, if you don't care about name brands. Search for "Yamakasi Catleap" on eBay. These are South Korean-made 27" monitors with 2560x1440 resolution. They cost $300-$320 including shipping. I don't own one myself, but they seem to be fairly well regarded by those who do. The panels are probably made by the same companies as the name brand monitors anyway, since there aren't that many panel vendors out there.
What we really need to do is to blame the HDTV format which forces us to get those letterbox size screens.
The designers of ATSC chose a 16:9 aspect ratio because it matches many theatrical films and offers a better viewing experience than 4:3 on movies and TV shows. It wasn't their intent to create a de facto standard for computer monitors; that is due to cost-cutting on the part of the consumer electronics industry.
Does anyone actually use the start menu anymore?
Yes. I use it all the time. Firefox gets launched from the Quick Launch bar, and for the other most commonly used programs, they're pinned to the Start Menu. The Windows 7 Start Menu is much more useful if you turn off "Store and display recently opened programs" from the properties sheet – that way you get what YOU want pinned to the menu and easily accessible, not what Microsoft thinks you might want.
I know Microsoft's data shows they don't, and people largely launch apps from the super bar.
Microsoft's metrics are largely taken from inexperienced home users. There is no good reason to think they're a representative sample. And even if power users are only 10% of the market, they're an important 10% – badmouthing from the tech community ensured that Vista was pretty much DOA, and the same may very well be true of Windows 8.
As I've suggested before, the existence of ill-behaved applications is one major reason why we don't have high-DPI monitors. (And as others have pointed out, the low cost of 1080p TV panels is another.) Windows 7 scales DPI pretty well, but some applications go out of their way to break it.
There have been strong rumors for a while that Apple is preparing a Retina Display for the new MacBook Pro. If they keep the price point to $999 (and they did a good job of maintaining existing price points on the new iPad), it might be a good deal even for those of us who don't care for OSX – just blow off the default image and install Windows 7. The ultrabook market, like the tablet market, is one area where Apple is actually competitive in price.
Also, at the most recent consumer electronics shows, many TV manufacturers have demonstrated quad-HD (3840x2160) sets. While these will be very expensive at first, they will be heavily pushed as the next big thing, and prices will go down to reasonable levels eventually. I currently use a 32" 1080p TV as my monitor; it works great, but you can see a tiny bit of pixelation if you lean in close. A Quad HD 32" TV would be a retina display in all but name.
"the business desktop and the power user desktop isn't going away." They are if companies cannot make a profit building them.
There are profits to be made. Just not the Apple-esque profit levels the CEOs think they deserve.
The cheap crap desktops sold at Best Buy may go away in favor of tablets, but workstations are built to higher standards and command more money (plus service contracts). And for power users, I don't see Asus, MSI, etc. going out of business any time soon. And even if they did, Intel would make the motherboards itself if necessary (or, more accurately, continue outsourcing motherboard manufacturing to Foxconn) to preserve its high-margin CPU sales.
Belive it or not, that combo is still better than an equivalent laptop. It is certainly lighter than any laptop with the same screen size, the battery lasts longer and the keyboard may quite well be more confortable.
First of all, iPad keyboards suck. Secondly, if you're setting up with a keyboard and mouse, you don't care about battery life because you almost certainly have access to an AC outlet. Third, most people aren't going to want to squint at a 10" screen when they are at normal sitting distance (as opposed to holding a tablet 6 inches from your face).
DPI is one area where the current iPad excels. I currently use a 32" 1080p TV as my monitor at home, and it works great, but I'm still looking forward to the advent of affordable 4k monitors - at that point you're pretty much getting a "retina display" on the desktop.
But in reality the shift has already happened. The PC industry is headed for destruction, Dell and HP are spiraling into oblivion, the entire retail channel (Best Buy et al) is dead. Margins are already below zero for some categories (ultrabooks). And the totally misconceived shitshow that is Windows 8 will just drive a stake through what little is left of the PC consumer market. Soon, PCs will be hanging onto 3rd world markets & embedded devices and will be dead for all practical purposes.
Tablets and smartphones are still no damn good for doing actual work. They're great content consumption devices, but if you're actually producing stuff, you need a real PC. (If you like modern 3D games, a tablet won't help you much there either.)
Profit margins are irrelevant; why should I, as a consumer, care whether Dell makes money or not? PCs have already largely become a commodity, but the business desktop and the power user desktop isn't going away. Not now, not any time in the forseeable future.
Good start.
Now, if only they'd relent on the Start button, Start menu, and letting users opt-out of Metro altogether...
Let me guess, a GIMP developer?
Hell no. GIMP is one application, so it should have one taskbar entry per instance - not three or four. A web browser is also one application, so it too should have one taskbar entry per instance - not one entry for 30+ separate instances. My position on this is consistent.
I don't use browser tabs at all. Never have, never will. The OS already has a perfectly fine task-switching mechanism. I don't care what they do with tabs as long as my existing style keeps working and I can continue using the FF3/IE6 look and feel with classic full-size buttons and menus. And a real home page, none of this "new tab" garbage.
Why do people continue to support AMD? All I can figure is that it has to do with an irrational hatred of Intel. Intel is monopolistic. Intel is anti-competitive. Intel is expensive. So, rather than supporting Intel and getting the best products on the market, people go with AMD and suffer in smug self-righteousness for doing the "right thing" and not supporting the companies that are dominating the field.
This article is about graphics drivers, not CPUs. Intel doesn't make any discrete graphics cards. And their integrated video, while it's been getting better with every iteration, still has serious shortcomings and isn't suitable for anything but the most casual low-resolution gaming. It is fine for people who don't foresee ever playing anything more intense than WoW, or who don't care about 3D at all. (Fortunately for Intel, that's a majority of the market.) It would be great for HTPC if they'd ever fix that damn 23.976 FPS bug. But if you want to play any 3D games, you need AMD or nVidia. I'll be ready to switch to integrated graphics when they can play DQ8 on PCSX2 and Wind Waker on Dolphin at 1080p with no frame drops.
Not everyone is a 3D gamer who wants to be on the absolute cutting edge of everything. Not everyone thinks trading off stability against a few extra FPS is a good deal.
Would it be too much to give us a stable driver, with maybe one update per year? By stable I mean no dodgy hacks, and no game-specific "optimizations". I mean a driver that won't crash, and that isn't afraid to be a little slower in order to do things right. Is there really no one else out there who cares about stability?
If we're down to the 'several thousand' of a particular injury per year then we're in the territory of injuries due to contact with spacecraft (ICD 10 code WX849OXA), initial turtle attacks (W5921XA) or repetitive turtle attacks (W5921XD) and other similarly major dangers to civilization.
It's turtles all the way down.
Plastic clamshell packaging has always been a nightmare from an end-consumer's perspective, and yes, there's lip-service paid to changing things in the words of major retailers and consumer goods distributors, but it's not likely to change because of "wrap rage."
It will stop once retailers and manufacturers start getting sued for the injuries caused by opening the packages. A few multi-million-dollar punitive awards will concentrate the mind wonderfully. Since the CPSC, despite documenting thousands of injuries every year, hasn't seen fit to do anything about it, the courts may have to step in.
Clamshell packaging sucks from the consumer perspective because most of it isn't designed with consumers in mind. It's designed with retailers in mind. Retailers don't care if you cut yourself opening the package, but they are highly paranoid about the possibility of shoplifting (even though a majority of retail theft is internal).
What surprises me is that there haven't been any large-scale lawsuits over this junk. Fully-sealed clamshell packages deliberately put the end user at a greater risk of cuts (since you need a sharp instrument to open them) without providing any offsetting benefits to the end user. People have gotten themselves on the wrong end of multi-million dollar punitive judgments for much less. A good trial lawyer should have little trouble convincing a jury that a company which deliberately traded off product safety for less shoplifting should be responsible for the human costs of that decision. Especially when everyone on the jury remembers struggling with the damn things themselves.
Alternatively, the CPSC should mandate that clamshell packages must be able to be opened without the use of a sharp implement.
I think everyone hates those offal things; I know I do. But the worst design? Hardly. Clamshell packaging never killed anybody.
Probably not, but it's caused plenty of unnecessary cuts.
Worse, your ac/heat controls used to have knobs, too. You could change the temp without taking your eyes off the road. Now they have BUTTONS! God damn it, listen up, idiot designers, buttons don't belong on a car's dash!
Many cars today with automatic climate control use a rotary encoder for the temperature control (just as they do for the volume control on the stereo). This gives digital precision while still continuing to use a knob instead of buttons. Cheaper cars with manual A/C usually still have traditional speed controls for the fan and analog knobs (probably potentiometer driven) for the temp.
Which, of course, explains why the last chisel I bought was hermetically sealed in an indestructible plastic clamshell package.
A wood chisel is supposed to be razor sharp. If it got dulled by being thrown around in transit, it won't work properly and will be dangerous to the user.
But in total seriousness....why would I move from XP to 7 or 8?
Because XP will stop receiving security updates after mid-2014, while Windows 7 is covered through 2020. That's the biggest reason. Also, some newer software (i.e. anything that relies on DirectX 10+) won't run on XP at all. Most Web browsers have incomplete or no hardware acceleration in XP, but full acceleration on Windows 7.
Windows 7 is also more intuitive, less crash-prone, and (IMO) more aesthetically appealing. Aero isn't just eye-candy; hardware acceleration actually makes it faster than XP, despite what you might think. I don't like the combined "dock" thing that it defaults to, but it's not hard to get back the old Quick Launch bar and traditional-style taskbar.
Not even considering Windows 8 until we can get the Start button and the real Start menu back, and until Metro can be completely disabled for those of us who simply aren't interested.
Fortunately, Windows 7 has extended support through 2020, more than enough time for Ballmer to get the boot and Microsoft to come back to its senses.