for $25 I get legal versions of every single—ahem, questionably procured, shall we say— tracks in my gigantic iTunes library? Did the record companies read the fine print on this? I mean, as a voracious music consumer, I'm NOT complaining... we've all known for a long time that things were going to have to change in regard to digital media and copyright. And say what you will about them, I could see Apple being the company to make it happen. But really... how did they get away with this?
Consider how much money the record companies got for your--ahem--questionably procured tracks before this.
Compare that to some percentage of $25/year, possibly in perpetuity.
It's like a gambler with enough money to keep doubling down. You don't have to win right away, you just have to win somewhere along the line.
Of course, as anyone who's tries this tactic in real life will tell you, you'll always get to that point where you've had so many losses in a row that you don't have enough money to double down again. It's starting to look like Microsoft has hit that point.
(Metaphorically speaking, I mean. They've still got boatloads of non-metaphorical cash, as I recall)
My guess is that if the FCC declares that Skype has to be allowed to work over 3G too, AT&T will force Apple to drop it from the App Store so people won't be able to use Skype even on WiFi.
Be careful presenting that WSJ "article" as fact. It's an op-ed piece in their Opinion section, which means there's no implication of journalistic impartiality there.
There's just so much wrong with that response I don't hardly know where to begin...
1. Thumb drives are often not partitioned. There's no particularly good reason to do so. Just put a fat32 right on the bare drive and it works fine. Most people don't know what a partition is. In Windows, you only really need to deal with partitions when setting up a new hard drive, which most users never ever actually do because the drive comes pre-loaded from the store.
2. "Download this confusingly-named external piece of software" is not really a good counterargument to "Ubuntu has some spots that will still trip up a non-techie user".
(I know that G=Gnome (or Q=Qt), PART=Partition, ED=Editor makes perfect sense to us nerds, but it does not to normal people)
3. "Choose between either the Gnome one or the KDE one or some other partition manager" does not make the user happy. They just want to format a damn drive, they don't want to explore the ideological rift between KDE/Qt and Gnome/GTK. And to head off a potential response that they should use the one that corresponds to their desktop environment: They should not have to know what their desktop environment is.
4. Even disregarding all of that, this is just one thing. There are other little things like that. Even if each little problem has a solution, it's still a separate solution for every little problem that shouldn't bloody well be there in the first place. About 50% of the time, my laptop decides that networking is flat-out disabled when I bring it out of sleep. About 25% of the time, gnome-power-manager dies and it won't go to sleep when I hit the power button. Every once in a while pulseaudio dies and nothing will play sounds. Changing my Windows Networking workgroup requires a trip to the config file in a text editor. There's no obvious way to change the number of desktops without a trip into gconf-editor.
These are all just little things off the top of my head. There are probably more I've forgotten, and there are certainly more I haven't personally encountered but others have.
I dunno. Maybe you can. I'm too much of a pussy to try it.
And, well, the kernel they install has worked fine for me. That's the upside to it--I haven't *needed* to recompile my kernel. It's nice not to have to go through and decide each individual damn "Do you want to install driver for X?" question in make xconfig...
I look back at Slackware with a lot of fond memories, but managing even a medium sized installation of Slack machines was just too time consuming to continue.
s/a medium sized installation of Slack machines/a single Slack machine/g
That's why I switched over to Ubuntu. Firefox kept crashing and wouldn't run Flash Player 9, presumably because some library somewhere wasn't updated enough. Every time I wanted to upgrade something, I'd spend days in Dependency Hell trying to track down all of the other software that I needed to upgrade too to make it work.
Problem is that Slackware is so low-level that to do anything with it requires the knowledge and confidence to fiddle around with the system. With distros like Ubuntu, people who would think nothing of recompiling their kernel under Slack are uncomfortable doing something that might put the package management database into an inconsistent state.
This one just came up for me: Formatting a USB thumbdrive. Required dropping to a shell to run fdisk and mkfs.vfat.
(Which I could do, since I was a Slackware user from about '96 until this year, but I was expecting the procedure would be along the lines of 'Right click, select "Format"', not "Determine the device name, fdisk it, and run mkfs" like on Slackware)
You do realize you could have just installed gparted and formatted it with that?
And you do realize that you just responded to my complaint about Linux not being user friendly by telling me to download some *extra software* that has a name which--while it makes perfect sense to us geeks (G for Gnome, Part for Partition, Ed for Editor)--would confuse the hell out of a normal person, to do something that's a fairly basic part of using a computer?
That does not help your argument.
I did find gparted as a solution when searching, but for me, doing it from the CLI was easier. So I did. I'm talking about the people for whom CLIs are scary. Something like gparted is gonna be just as scary.
Aunt Tilly (if there was an option for nautilus to format) could have clicked on the wrong drive and reformatted her hard drive
So have it only work on unmounted volumes, or have it only work on removable media. There's a much bigger chance of fuckup when you have to figure out it's/dev/sdi from the dmesg or df output and then type that in than when you're pointing right at the little icon that looks like a removable USB stick.
Also, instead of bitching about it, maybe you could email the developers for missing features like this, thats how open source improves.
Hell, I'm a professional programmer, so presumably I could do it myself.
Go ahead and do a google search for "format usb ubuntu". You'll find some pages returned that are people posting in the appropriate forum that this would be a good feature to have. From February. I.e., it's been suggested to the developers, and apparently, like me, nobody else is motivated enough to fix it.
And really, this is the crux of my argument. Yeah, making it so anyone can fix something is, in theory, how open source improves. But in practice, most people don't care enough to work on the little things that are the key differentiator between mediocre-to-bad user experience and great user experience.
So Ubuntu is Linux for the easily confused and befuddled geek? But isn't that Apple's demographic?
More like Linux for the geek who'd rather spend time USING his computer than fiddling around with it. Of course, saying this, I've just spent about four solid days fiddling with my Ubuntu system so things like control-U work properly like I was used to with Slackware (it means delete-line, dammit, not underline).
Linux is actually pretty easy, its just that people are so used to windows so people expect windows-lie behaviour and it doesn't work like windows so therefore they think its hard
No it's not. A lot of it is getting there, but there are still to this day things where Linux just falls down on usability. And I say this as someone who's been using Linux (and, until this year, *Slackware* Linux) as his primary OS since the mid-90s, so it's not just that I'm dumb and can't figure things out.
Quick example: The other day, I needed do format a USB drive because there was something messed up with its filesystem and it thought it has less memory than it actually does. I'm running Ubuntu now, so I assumed that there was a nice easy Gnome way to do it.
Yeah, there's not.
I right clicked on the drive, and I thoroughly searched the Nautilus menus and there wasn't a "Format" option. Eventually I gave up and googled it...and learned that the only way to do it is apparently to drop to a shell and run fdisk and mkfs.vfat by hand.
Even if you dispute my central premise that Aunt Tilly can't handle shell commands, you've got to at least grant me that forcing Aunt Tilly to handle shell commands where a one-character typo (e.g.,/dev/sda instead of/dev/sdi) could completely wipe out her hard drive is not particularly user friendly.
It's a little thing, but Linux is riddled with these little examples where the user is tooling along happily with Gnome wrapping them in a nice warm blanket of user friendliness and then they suddenly get kicked in the balls by the underlying Linux way of doing things when they have to set up slightly weird hardware or configure a program that doesn't have a nice graphical editor for its config file.
It's small stuff, yeah, but good user interface design is all about sweating the small stuff. Apple gets that. Microsoft doesn't, really, but they're close enough for most people. The open source community, for the most part, doesn't. Certainly some do, but for every coder out there who does there are ten going "So? What's so hard about fdisk and mkfs? People should learn to use the shell anyway, it's way more powerful." And they're the more prolific coders.
I suppose then we should make only one type of car per manufacturer so the consumer doesn't get confused, or one computer per manufacturer
For years, GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been making multiple lines with basically the same car in them. E.g., the old GMC Safari van was the exact same vehicle as the Chevrolet Astro, just with different chrome slapped on the front. If you've been listening to the news lately, you may have heard that one of the plans the Big Three have to rescue themselves is to knock that shit off and simplify their car lines.
An example from my own personal experience: I was looking to replace my car and decided I wanted a hybrid. I went down to the Honda dealership to test drive the civic hybrid and the dealer started trying to sell me the non-hybrid civic since it was cheaper and he thought I'd be more likely to buy that day for a lower price. But if you took away my base "I want a hybrid", then my choice went from 'Civic vs Prius' to 'All of the small four-door cars currently on the market'.
Long story short, I bought a Prius.
Also, for a while, Apple had the Macintosh Performa, the Macintosh Centris, the Macintosh Quadra, the Macintosh Powerbook, the Macintosh LC, the Apple Workgroup Servers, the Color Classic, and probably a few others I'm forgetting, all being sold at the same time, all with a variety of different model numbers and configurations, some of which were the same machine internally but with different nameplates on the front for different markets. One of the big changes Steve Jobs made when he came back was to simplify that down to: iMac/Powermac, iBook/Powerbook (and then later iMac/Mac Pro, MacBook/MacBook Pro). Simplifying the line increased the overall Mac s
Since then: nothing out of Apple, despite mounting pressure from projects like Android that are vying for Apple's throne.
First off, I want to point something out: "Apple's throne" was achieved in less than two years, starting basically from zero, when competing against companies that have been in the cell phone market since the 80s. Keep that in mind when criticizing Apple's business strategies.
Open source is becoming the default way to develop software in many industries.
One SIGNIFICANT subset of the industry where open source is not the default way to develop software: Industries where the user interface matters. Think about how many times you've heard the phrase "As easy to use as Linux".
Open sourcing the iPhone gives customers a much broader selection of applications. Customers faced with a plethora of attractive applications when they visit the app store will spend money.
There is a lot of empirical evidence to refute this. Customers DO NOT want choice. One of the big complaints about Linux is that people have to choose between Ubuntu, Redhat, Slackware, Debian, Kubuntu, Fedora, LFS, Gentoo, etc. Or maybe FreeBSD or NetBSD. And on top of that, Gnome or KDE or something else. When faced with too many choices, the reaction amongst most humans is give up. One of the reasons Ubuntu has been so successful is that (unlike, say, Slackware) you don't have to go through and choose which programs and window manager/desktop system you want.
One of the biggest wins by far of the App Store is that there is a certain minimum quality level needed to be in it. If they opened that up, it would turn into something like SourceForge and it would be impossible to find the good stuff amongst the chaff.
It Will Solidify Apple's Dominance. Apple's got a rare opportunity to solidify dominance in a market by killing the competition in the cradle.
But I thought you said choice was good?;)
Honestly, I prefer Apple to have competition. Keeps 'em honest.
If They Don't, Someone Else Will
All of the other smartphones are already a lot more open than the iPhone, and (with the exception of Android) they've been around a lot longer. Apple's still whuppin' their asses.
That's right, Linux on the iPhone. Earth to Apple: if the iPhone had been open sourced, this probably wouldn't have happened.
Wow, you don't understand Linux people at all, do you? There is a certain sort of person who will try to install Linux on anything that stands still in front of them for too long. The only computing hardware that people won't try getting to run Linux is computing hardware that's already running Linux. And even then, they'll try to swap in a *custom* version of Linux. It's what they do. Making the iPhone more open would just have made that happen more quickly.
Nokia sell in a quarter what Apple sell in a year.
There's another way to look at that.
Nokia: A huge lineup of phones for sale, for any carrier, with a history of mobile phone sales going back to the 80s. They have phones targeted at every price point, every demographic, every market.
Apple: Has one cell phone model (available in two configurations), which it has been selling for a year and a half. In most countries, it's only available with one provider, and it hasn't even been *available* (legally, anyway) in most countries until the middle of this year.
And despite that, according to you, Apple's already matched 1/4th of Nokia's sales?
They're already up to ~13% and growing faster than any other company. You say they're too targeted at one market, but the market they're targeting isn't "Executives who need to have access to their email at all times" like RIM and Microsoft have targeted with their respective smartphone OSes--it's "People who want a good cell phone." That's a pretty big market.
Also, what do you mean "like all Apple products"? The iPod still has north of 70% market share.
Your argument is a red herring. Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit.
Why not? If a company spends $50,000 developing a program (A reasonable price for 1 cheap developer employed for 1 year) and then distributes it digitally, you're saying they should only sell it for like $.05/copy? They would have to sell a million copies just to break even.
Not to mention that when a program is shipped, ongoing costs don't just stop dead. There's maintenance, support, sales, advertising, and other such ongoing costs you have to deal with.
And incidentally, unless your app is featured in one of Apple's commercials, the average sales of software in the App store is about 16/day. Assume you price it at the App Store minimum of $0.99 (the only lower price point being 'Free'), which you apparently still think is an enormous markup since you're only taking into account reproduction costs. Apple takes its 30% cut, leaving you with about 70 cents. Times 16 is $11/day. Times 365 is about $4000/year. So to make up that $50,000 worth of development cost would take about 12 years, and God help you if you need to fix a bug, because you can't afford to keep your developer employed during that period or it adds another 12 years. Oh, and this assumes that people keep downloading an app at that rate when you can't afford to debug it or market it in any way.
Software prices aren't based on "artificial scarcity". They're based on scarcity of Programmers, and decent programmers are a very scarce commodity indeed.
The Employee Free Choice Act doesn't do away with secret ballots. Secret ballots are still an option. Secret ballots are, in fact, required if more than 30% but less than the majority of employees publicly support the union, and secret ballots are still used to de-unionize. The reason for this is that employers have a long time between the union declaring its intention to be a union and the time when the official vote happens for the Employer to do things like holding mandatory "If You Join A Union, The Company Will Fold And Your Children Will Die Penniless And Hungry In The Street Like Dogs" meetings. Under the EFCA, if a majority of the employees get together and say "We want to form a union", then it works. If a majority of the employees get together and say "We want to have a secret ballot to determine whether or not to form a union", that works too. Under the current rules, that first one doesn't work unless the employer authorizes it.
harassment by unions is not the problem. In a study of a more than 60-year period, the Human Resources Policy Association listed 113 NLRB cases which they claimed involved union deception and/or coercion in obtaining authorization card signatures. Careful examination of those cases, however, reveals that union misconduct was found in only 42 of those 113 claimed cases. By contrast, in 2005 alone, over 30,000 workers received back pay from employers that illegally fired or otherwise discriminated against them for their union activities.
If it were something like "There are twice as many instances of Management coercion than Union coercion", I could see that you'd have a position to say "Well, those numbers are probably massaged a bit". But this is thirty-thousand in one year vs 42 cases over the course of six decades. An average of a whopping 7/10ths of a case per year, compared to tens of thousands.
So in conclusion: The fears of rampant, coercing union bosses are mostly mythical. The fears of management illegally preventing unions that a majority of employees really want are very much grounded in reality.
I actually started doing this fairly recently in my Prius. One chunk of my commute upped its speed limit from 55mph to 65mph last winter and I noticed a drop in my gas mileage. A few months back, I decided to just move my ass over to the slow lane and set the cruise control for 55mph the whole way.
Result? I'm back to getting 51 miles per gallon in my Prius. When I was driving 65mph in the 65mph zone, I was getting around 46 miles per gallon.
(Also: the difference in commute time was less than three minutes total.)
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for $25 I get legal versions of every single—ahem, questionably procured, shall we say— tracks in my gigantic iTunes library? Did the record companies read the fine print on this? I mean, as a voracious music consumer, I'm NOT complaining... we've all known for a long time that things were going to have to change in regard to digital media and copyright. And say what you will about them, I could see Apple being the company to make it happen. But really... how did they get away with this?
Consider how much money the record companies got for your--ahem--questionably procured tracks before this.
Compare that to some percentage of $25/year, possibly in perpetuity.
I would debate that. Of the basic functions of my iPhone, making phone calls is the one I use by far the least.
It's like a gambler with enough money to keep doubling down. You don't have to win right away, you just have to win somewhere along the line.
Of course, as anyone who's tries this tactic in real life will tell you, you'll always get to that point where you've had so many losses in a row that you don't have enough money to double down again. It's starting to look like Microsoft has hit that point.
(Metaphorically speaking, I mean. They've still got boatloads of non-metaphorical cash, as I recall)
My guess is that if the FCC declares that Skype has to be allowed to work over 3G too, AT&T will force Apple to drop it from the App Store so people won't be able to use Skype even on WiFi.
So...not really a win.
Get all of the "X Digit UID club" achievements on my primary account!
Wait, what?
Be careful presenting that WSJ "article" as fact. It's an op-ed piece in their Opinion section, which means there's no implication of journalistic impartiality there.
There's just so much wrong with that response I don't hardly know where to begin...
1. Thumb drives are often not partitioned. There's no particularly good reason to do so. Just put a fat32 right on the bare drive and it works fine. Most people don't know what a partition is. In Windows, you only really need to deal with partitions when setting up a new hard drive, which most users never ever actually do because the drive comes pre-loaded from the store.
2. "Download this confusingly-named external piece of software" is not really a good counterargument to "Ubuntu has some spots that will still trip up a non-techie user".
(I know that G=Gnome (or Q=Qt), PART=Partition, ED=Editor makes perfect sense to us nerds, but it does not to normal people)
3. "Choose between either the Gnome one or the KDE one or some other partition manager" does not make the user happy. They just want to format a damn drive, they don't want to explore the ideological rift between KDE/Qt and Gnome/GTK. And to head off a potential response that they should use the one that corresponds to their desktop environment: They should not have to know what their desktop environment is.
4. Even disregarding all of that, this is just one thing. There are other little things like that. Even if each little problem has a solution, it's still a separate solution for every little problem that shouldn't bloody well be there in the first place. About 50% of the time, my laptop decides that networking is flat-out disabled when I bring it out of sleep. About 25% of the time, gnome-power-manager dies and it won't go to sleep when I hit the power button. Every once in a while pulseaudio dies and nothing will play sounds. Changing my Windows Networking workgroup requires a trip to the config file in a text editor. There's no obvious way to change the number of desktops without a trip into gconf-editor.
These are all just little things off the top of my head. There are probably more I've forgotten, and there are certainly more I haven't personally encountered but others have.
I dunno. Maybe you can. I'm too much of a pussy to try it.
And, well, the kernel they install has worked fine for me. That's the upside to it--I haven't *needed* to recompile my kernel. It's nice not to have to go through and decide each individual damn "Do you want to install driver for X?" question in make xconfig...
I look back at Slackware with a lot of fond memories, but managing even a medium sized installation of Slack machines was just too time consuming to continue.
s/a medium sized installation of Slack machines/a single Slack machine/g
That's why I switched over to Ubuntu. Firefox kept crashing and wouldn't run Flash Player 9, presumably because some library somewhere wasn't updated enough. Every time I wanted to upgrade something, I'd spend days in Dependency Hell trying to track down all of the other software that I needed to upgrade too to make it work.
Eventually I just said fuck it.
Problem is that Slackware is so low-level that to do anything with it requires the knowledge and confidence to fiddle around with the system. With distros like Ubuntu, people who would think nothing of recompiling their kernel under Slack are uncomfortable doing something that might put the package management database into an inconsistent state.
This one just came up for me: Formatting a USB thumbdrive. Required dropping to a shell to run fdisk and mkfs.vfat.
(Which I could do, since I was a Slackware user from about '96 until this year, but I was expecting the procedure would be along the lines of 'Right click, select "Format"', not "Determine the device name, fdisk it, and run mkfs" like on Slackware)
True enough. But Uncle Max might, because he thinks he's good with computers but actually isn't.
You do realize you could have just installed gparted and formatted it with that?
And you do realize that you just responded to my complaint about Linux not being user friendly by telling me to download some *extra software* that has a name which--while it makes perfect sense to us geeks (G for Gnome, Part for Partition, Ed for Editor)--would confuse the hell out of a normal person, to do something that's a fairly basic part of using a computer?
That does not help your argument.
I did find gparted as a solution when searching, but for me, doing it from the CLI was easier. So I did. I'm talking about the people for whom CLIs are scary. Something like gparted is gonna be just as scary.
Aunt Tilly (if there was an option for nautilus to format) could have clicked on the wrong drive and reformatted her hard drive
So have it only work on unmounted volumes, or have it only work on removable media. There's a much bigger chance of fuckup when you have to figure out it's /dev/sdi from the dmesg or df output and then type that in than when you're pointing right at the little icon that looks like a removable USB stick.
Also, instead of bitching about it, maybe you could email the developers for missing features like this, thats how open source improves.
Hell, I'm a professional programmer, so presumably I could do it myself.
Go ahead and do a google search for "format usb ubuntu". You'll find some pages returned that are people posting in the appropriate forum that this would be a good feature to have. From February. I.e., it's been suggested to the developers, and apparently, like me, nobody else is motivated enough to fix it.
And really, this is the crux of my argument. Yeah, making it so anyone can fix something is, in theory, how open source improves. But in practice, most people don't care enough to work on the little things that are the key differentiator between mediocre-to-bad user experience and great user experience.
So Ubuntu is Linux for the easily confused and befuddled geek? But isn't that Apple's demographic?
More like Linux for the geek who'd rather spend time USING his computer than fiddling around with it. Of course, saying this, I've just spent about four solid days fiddling with my Ubuntu system so things like control-U work properly like I was used to with Slackware (it means delete-line, dammit, not underline).
And yes, that's who Apple targets as well.
Linux is actually pretty easy, its just that people are so used to windows so people expect windows-lie behaviour and it doesn't work like windows so therefore they think its hard
No it's not. A lot of it is getting there, but there are still to this day things where Linux just falls down on usability. And I say this as someone who's been using Linux (and, until this year, *Slackware* Linux) as his primary OS since the mid-90s, so it's not just that I'm dumb and can't figure things out.
Quick example: The other day, I needed do format a USB drive because there was something messed up with its filesystem and it thought it has less memory than it actually does. I'm running Ubuntu now, so I assumed that there was a nice easy Gnome way to do it.
Yeah, there's not.
I right clicked on the drive, and I thoroughly searched the Nautilus menus and there wasn't a "Format" option. Eventually I gave up and googled it...and learned that the only way to do it is apparently to drop to a shell and run fdisk and mkfs.vfat by hand.
Even if you dispute my central premise that Aunt Tilly can't handle shell commands, you've got to at least grant me that forcing Aunt Tilly to handle shell commands where a one-character typo (e.g., /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdi) could completely wipe out her hard drive is not particularly user friendly.
It's a little thing, but Linux is riddled with these little examples where the user is tooling along happily with Gnome wrapping them in a nice warm blanket of user friendliness and then they suddenly get kicked in the balls by the underlying Linux way of doing things when they have to set up slightly weird hardware or configure a program that doesn't have a nice graphical editor for its config file.
It's small stuff, yeah, but good user interface design is all about sweating the small stuff. Apple gets that. Microsoft doesn't, really, but they're close enough for most people. The open source community, for the most part, doesn't. Certainly some do, but for every coder out there who does there are ten going "So? What's so hard about fdisk and mkfs? People should learn to use the shell anyway, it's way more powerful." And they're the more prolific coders.
I suppose then we should make only one type of car per manufacturer so the consumer doesn't get confused, or one computer per manufacturer
For years, GM, Ford, and Chrysler have been making multiple lines with basically the same car in them. E.g., the old GMC Safari van was the exact same vehicle as the Chevrolet Astro, just with different chrome slapped on the front. If you've been listening to the news lately, you may have heard that one of the plans the Big Three have to rescue themselves is to knock that shit off and simplify their car lines.
An example from my own personal experience: I was looking to replace my car and decided I wanted a hybrid. I went down to the Honda dealership to test drive the civic hybrid and the dealer started trying to sell me the non-hybrid civic since it was cheaper and he thought I'd be more likely to buy that day for a lower price. But if you took away my base "I want a hybrid", then my choice went from 'Civic vs Prius' to 'All of the small four-door cars currently on the market'.
Long story short, I bought a Prius.
Also, for a while, Apple had the Macintosh Performa, the Macintosh Centris, the Macintosh Quadra, the Macintosh Powerbook, the Macintosh LC, the Apple Workgroup Servers, the Color Classic, and probably a few others I'm forgetting, all being sold at the same time, all with a variety of different model numbers and configurations, some of which were the same machine internally but with different nameplates on the front for different markets. One of the big changes Steve Jobs made when he came back was to simplify that down to: iMac/Powermac, iBook/Powerbook (and then later iMac/Mac Pro, MacBook/MacBook Pro). Simplifying the line increased the overall Mac s
Since then: nothing out of Apple, despite mounting pressure from projects like Android that are vying for Apple's throne.
First off, I want to point something out: "Apple's throne" was achieved in less than two years, starting basically from zero, when competing against companies that have been in the cell phone market since the 80s. Keep that in mind when criticizing Apple's business strategies.
Open source is becoming the default way to develop software in many industries.
One SIGNIFICANT subset of the industry where open source is not the default way to develop software: Industries where the user interface matters. Think about how many times you've heard the phrase "As easy to use as Linux".
Open sourcing the iPhone gives customers a much broader selection of applications. Customers faced with a plethora of attractive applications when they visit the app store will spend money.
There is a lot of empirical evidence to refute this. Customers DO NOT want choice. One of the big complaints about Linux is that people have to choose between Ubuntu, Redhat, Slackware, Debian, Kubuntu, Fedora, LFS, Gentoo, etc. Or maybe FreeBSD or NetBSD. And on top of that, Gnome or KDE or something else. When faced with too many choices, the reaction amongst most humans is give up. One of the reasons Ubuntu has been so successful is that (unlike, say, Slackware) you don't have to go through and choose which programs and window manager/desktop system you want.
One of the biggest wins by far of the App Store is that there is a certain minimum quality level needed to be in it. If they opened that up, it would turn into something like SourceForge and it would be impossible to find the good stuff amongst the chaff.
It Will Solidify Apple's Dominance.
Apple's got a rare opportunity to solidify dominance in a market by killing the competition in the cradle.
But I thought you said choice was good? ;)
Honestly, I prefer Apple to have competition. Keeps 'em honest.
If They Don't, Someone Else Will
All of the other smartphones are already a lot more open than the iPhone, and (with the exception of Android) they've been around a lot longer. Apple's still whuppin' their asses.
That's right, Linux on the iPhone. Earth to Apple: if the iPhone had been open sourced, this probably wouldn't have happened.
Wow, you don't understand Linux people at all, do you? There is a certain sort of person who will try to install Linux on anything that stands still in front of them for too long. The only computing hardware that people won't try getting to run Linux is computing hardware that's already running Linux. And even then, they'll try to swap in a *custom* version of Linux. It's what they do. Making the iPhone more open would just have made that happen more quickly.
Nokia sell in a quarter what Apple sell in a year.
There's another way to look at that.
Nokia: A huge lineup of phones for sale, for any carrier, with a history of mobile phone sales going back to the 80s. They have phones targeted at every price point, every demographic, every market.
Apple: Has one cell phone model (available in two configurations), which it has been selling for a year and a half. In most countries, it's only available with one provider, and it hasn't even been *available* (legally, anyway) in most countries until the middle of this year.
And despite that, according to you, Apple's already matched 1/4th of Nokia's sales?
Pretty damned impressive, that.
That 1.5M number is way higher than the actual sales.
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/10/dont_buy_the_g1.html
(Note that URL truncates the full title, which is "Don't buy the G1 Sales Figures". It's not just an article telling you not to buy the G1)
I would not bet against Apple were I you.
http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/gartner_apple_overtakes_microsoft_as_worlds_3_smartphone_os_vendor/
They're already up to ~13% and growing faster than any other company. You say they're too targeted at one market, but the market they're targeting isn't "Executives who need to have access to their email at all times" like RIM and Microsoft have targeted with their respective smartphone OSes--it's "People who want a good cell phone." That's a pretty big market.
Also, what do you mean "like all Apple products"? The iPod still has north of 70% market share.
Your argument is a red herring. Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit.
Why not? If a company spends $50,000 developing a program (A reasonable price for 1 cheap developer employed for 1 year) and then distributes it digitally, you're saying they should only sell it for like $.05/copy? They would have to sell a million copies just to break even.
Not to mention that when a program is shipped, ongoing costs don't just stop dead. There's maintenance, support, sales, advertising, and other such ongoing costs you have to deal with.
And incidentally, unless your app is featured in one of Apple's commercials, the average sales of software in the App store is about 16/day. Assume you price it at the App Store minimum of $0.99 (the only lower price point being 'Free'), which you apparently still think is an enormous markup since you're only taking into account reproduction costs. Apple takes its 30% cut, leaving you with about 70 cents. Times 16 is $11/day. Times 365 is about $4000/year. So to make up that $50,000 worth of development cost would take about 12 years, and God help you if you need to fix a bug, because you can't afford to keep your developer employed during that period or it adds another 12 years. Oh, and this assumes that people keep downloading an app at that rate when you can't afford to debug it or market it in any way.
Software prices aren't based on "artificial scarcity". They're based on scarcity of Programmers, and decent programmers are a very scarce commodity indeed.
Beyond the resolution of 35mm lenses, maybe. I believe the particular RED back with the 261MP sensor was designed to mount large-format glass.
The 50D doesn't have video either. Just the 5DII (and the D90 on the Nikon side)
The Employee Free Choice Act doesn't do away with secret ballots. Secret ballots are still an option. Secret ballots are, in fact, required if more than 30% but less than the majority of employees publicly support the union, and secret ballots are still used to de-unionize. The reason for this is that employers have a long time between the union declaring its intention to be a union and the time when the official vote happens for the Employer to do things like holding mandatory "If You Join A Union, The Company Will Fold And Your Children Will Die Penniless And Hungry In The Street Like Dogs" meetings. Under the EFCA, if a majority of the employees get together and say "We want to form a union", then it works. If a majority of the employees get together and say "We want to have a secret ballot to determine whether or not to form a union", that works too. Under the current rules, that first one doesn't work unless the employer authorizes it.
From The Committee on Education and Labor:
If it were something like "There are twice as many instances of Management coercion than Union coercion", I could see that you'd have a position to say "Well, those numbers are probably massaged a bit". But this is thirty-thousand in one year vs 42 cases over the course of six decades. An average of a whopping 7/10ths of a case per year, compared to tens of thousands.
So in conclusion: The fears of rampant, coercing union bosses are mostly mythical. The fears of management illegally preventing unions that a majority of employees really want are very much grounded in reality.
I actually started doing this fairly recently in my Prius. One chunk of my commute upped its speed limit from 55mph to 65mph last winter and I noticed a drop in my gas mileage. A few months back, I decided to just move my ass over to the slow lane and set the cruise control for 55mph the whole way.
Result? I'm back to getting 51 miles per gallon in my Prius. When I was driving 65mph in the 65mph zone, I was getting around 46 miles per gallon.
(Also: the difference in commute time was less than three minutes total.)
Participation in the United States political process.
We're gonna need it.