They're charging based on value to the customer, not based on cost. The faster mainframe (whatever) offers more to the customer, therefore it costs the customer more. The fact that it costs the same to make is incidental.
This was in the body of the story, but maybe it's more appropriate elsewhere. One of the more interesting links in the blog posts about this source code release was a transcript of a speech by RMS on how the Lisp Machine influenced his decision to start the free software movement. Interesting reading.
"I have noticed this. They especially do not want to pay intelligent honest people!... They will "outsource"
The difference between employees at outsourcing organizations and offshore development houses is not related to honesty and intelligence. It's simply that they'll do the work for less money.
"Yeah, and what makes that even more ridiculous is that when a doctor (for example) screws up, only one person dies. When an engineer screws up, bunches of people die! "
That's not necessarily true. Doctors that study infectious diseases or are test and develops medicines/procedures can have impact on huge numbers of people themselves.
"visual studio runs fine on my t43p, with uxga (1600x1200) resolution. widescreen serves no purpose other then "looking cool". "
Having run it both on 4:3 (at various resolutions up to 1600x1200) and now a 1900x1200 Widescreen Dell, I can safely say it runs better on Widescreen. This is particularly true of the debugger: widescreen makes it possible to have a stack trace/watch window on one side, the solution browser on the other, and a reasonable editor in the middle. 4:3 makes that a lot more cumbersome: I usually end up putting the stack trace, watch window, and solution browser all on the same side, which tends to be a little cramped. (Of course, lately I've spent a lot of time debugging an interpreter with very deep stack traces, so maybe I'm biased).
IMO, Titanium is only part of the story. The (IMO, much bigger deal) is the new Widescreen display (finally). The lack of a widescreen is a big part of the reason I did not buy a Thinkpad - Visual Studio runs better with the wider aspect ratio. I don't know if they offer resolutions past WXGA (1280x800), but we should all welcome IBM to at least 2002.
"If you really want to know if some ancient software prevetned another piece of software from working then disassemble it and get it over with. Looking at the code is the only way you can know for sure. "
You might be able to diagnose an error-causing fault, but it's often very hard to tell the intent of code without having the context. Hell, determining intent from source code can be hard enough.
(And yes, I know about the obvious exceptions like AARD.)
"China has a population roughly equal to four times that of the US."
Keeping this in mind, it's pretty naive to think that the U.S. will 'always' have a bigger economy than China. That would limit China to 1/4 the per capita wealth as the U.S., with all the commensurate limitations in health care, food, social services, etc. that implies. The U.S. (my country, BTW) will eventually have to get over itself and realize that it doesn't have to be either the biggest or most powerful nation. (After all, both are recent developments in and of themselves).
", the sheer population of Asian countries may allow them to train more scientists and engineers than the U.S. "
China already does produce more engineering graduates than the U.S., by a factor of ten. They also produce produce three times the number of college graduates. See the latest Fortune cover story for details.
Sadder still is that China is also graduating twice the number of engineeers per capita as the U.S. (India isn't far behind in either of these metrics). Before you blame this on offshoring, keep in mind that offshoring has only been a pressing issue for techies in the last four or five years, and economies are slow to change. This is a cultural thing too.
Windows 95 beta on a Pentium 100? Hm, the hottest PC anyone I knew had when Win95 appeared was a 486 DX-2 66 MHz...
Yeah, I also took part of the the money from that summer to buy a 32MB Micron P5-100 to replace my aging 8MB 486/33 (from High School). The test lab itself was a motley (by design) collection of hardware. The most notably unique things were all the PS/2's, but the Pentiums were generally Dells, etc.
My office PC (which I never used) was a 20MB PS/2 Model 80 running OS/2. It was a true museum piece, being IBM's first 386 machine (circa 1987-8 or so). The only thing that allowed it to run OS/2 was all the RAM (a large part of which was installed via Microchannel expansion boards, contrary to the modern practice of having it all on the motherboard.)
"It was originally a colaboration between MS and IBM. So chances are MS owns some of the code. "
In the summer of 1995 [1], I worked at IBM in Austin for the OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise [2]group. OS/2 LAN Server was a direct descendent of the LAN Manager product that shipped with the original joint IBM/MS versions of OS/2 [3]. As a result of its origins, OS/2 LAN Server had huge amounts of Microsoft code baked in.
In an effort to eliminate the Microsoft code, IBM had divided the development team into two groups: "Clean" and "Dirty". "Dirty" staff being staff that had seen Microsoft code and was not eligible to help in the rewrite. I don't know how far the effort went.
1] I saw a beta of Windows 95 for the first time running on a Pentium 100 in an IBM FV Test lab.
2] LS Enterprise entailed the conversion of LS Advanced to use DCE services for authentication, etc.
3] LAN manager was originally part of OS/2 "Extended Edition".
Maybe I should start an IT consulting company. I'll call it the "Smart-Ass Group"!
There's already one close: Smart Associates... which reminds me of this law firm. (Check the URL.:-)
"I've read through the "Universal Binary" document Apple provided to help developers migrate to x86. It seems like every chapter is written to explain that the x86 architecure contains pitfall after pitfall that will make an app crash where I wouldn't on a PPC box."
Isn't that the purpose of the document: to warn develoeprs about things they have to change to migrate. If it's well written (and having skimmed it, it appears like it it), it should focus on the 'pitfalls' of x86.
IBM has the same problems Motorola/FreeScale did a few years ago: the desktop CPU business is very expensive and very risky. From their point of view, they're sinking huge amounts of money in R&D and fabs just to source a microprocessor to one main client. For an increasingly services oriented company, it's hard to imagine a worse business to be in.
That's why Apple is switching to Intel: IBM isn't willing to take the risks involved in keeping up with Intel and AMD. I can't blame them. My hunch is that after IBM failed to deliver the 3GHz G5, Apple and IBM had a 'come to jesus' meeting in which they both basically walked away from the partnership, allowing time for Apple to transition away with its backup plan. (If there's not a good transiton, Apple will be dragged into the abyss along with IBM's desktop chip business).
The next question is how long it'll take IBM to divest itself of the rest of the POWER CPU line.
"Maybe a dual-processor system: one PowerPC and one Intel? Not likely, I grant you. "
It's happened before. 10 years ago, Apple made a version of the Quadra 610 (codename Houdini) that had an 80486 on a plug in card. http://lowendmac.com/quadra/q610dos.shtml Sun did similar things, in addition to a 386 based workstation, they also made add in boards that let Sun workstations run DOS software.
The problem with this approach is that it's a hedge. x86 add in boards (or second CPU's) aren't really a good way to run x86 applications, and eveb if they were, x86 applications aren't the reason to buy non-x86 hardware. Persumably, folks that buy Macs want to run Macintosh software more than they want to run x86 software, therefore Apple would be hard pressed to justify much of a premium for hardware that runs x86 software better.
Another old school example of this is the Commodore 128. It had both a 8502 for 'native' applications and a Z80 for CP/M applications. I doubt those Z80's got used at all, except in the boot process (it got control before the 8502).
This may be gross overkill, but there's specialized hardware specifically designed for sustained high-throughput disk storage. A company called Conduant makes specialized disk controllers that use on board microcontrollers to drive arrays of disks. When I last saw them demoed, they could sustain writes of 100MB/sec using direct card to card transfers across the PCI bus. They can configure a data acquisition card to directly store information into a shared buffer on the disk controller across the PCI bus. The disk controller then picks the data up and drives it across ten IDE channels. That was a few years ago, these days it looks like they can sustain 200MB/sec with a controller, and up to 600MB/sec and 6TB of capacity with custom box mounted in a rack.
I'm not so sure what their story is regarding reading or querying. My guess is you lose a lot of bandwidth, but not all. Anyway, it might be worth checking out.
Another thing is that modern computers cam have lots innate capacity themselves. My hunch is that you could do a lot with a couple modern disks on seperate SATA channels and several GB of RAM. Maybe this is only a software problem...
"The problem is that we're arguing with people who think a $900 Dell box with Best Buy-grade IDE disks is 'enterprise' and that Linux is as good as Solaris because with kernel patches, recompiles, and non-standard configurations it is possible to emulate Solaris 10's feature list."
The computer industry is one long flight to cheaper and faster (and then make it work well). There aren't historically many companies that have been able to stake out a high ground and hold on to it as a market niche for any long length of time. IBM, Sun, and Apple are currently the biggest exceptions.
The problem is Linux has a long way to go to get better: and it will. How will Solaris be able to continue to differentiate itself as Linux gets better?
"Sun's AMD based systems basically cost the same as Dells Intel based ones do at high quantities."
How many people buy at high quantities?
"Then I can leverage this value because I can run the same OS (Solaris 10) on both my enterprise systems and web farms, etc. I can even "port" my custom apps easily between them (spelled re-compile) due to the source compatibility. "
Even if portability is that easy, it still means re-compile, re-test, possibly re-certify. It means debugging on two different platforms that, while they should be compatible in theory, do have differences.
"So in essence, I can run any of my apps on systems from 256 CPU Fujitsu built systems clear down to 1U AMD based systems, all at 64 bits. And when the OS changes I KNOW my apps will still run.
Voila! Horizontal and Vertical scaling with 100% upward compatibility. Not bad...Who else offers this?"
Who cares?
Horizontal scaling: it doesn't matter what chip (or OS) I'm running on as long as the work gets done.
Vertical scaling: Even if I can get "x256" (for the sake of argument) scaling, how many organizations can't estimate their near-term requirements within a factor of 200? Worse still, getting software systems to scale up to large multi-CPU systems requires lots of work in and of itself: more along the lines of architectural redesign than recompiling. In that case, it's not going to do me that much good to have developers developing on small Sun boxes. It'd make more sense to either buy a second big machine and have folks network into it (you need a test environment for your apps anyway, in production environments).
"Couple that with the fact that SPARC is an open architecture and technically anyone can build SPARC systems (Like Fujitsu does)."
Who cares? The CPU business is risky, increasingly low margin, and amazingly capital intensive. Open standards or not, there's a reason that companies have been fleeing the business model over the last 15 years.
"While I would agree that Java development is sapping resources from Sun"
Very true.
"I don't think you could make a case for saying that Java is undermining Sun's hardware business unless you really don't understand what Java is.
Even Apple is smart enough to realize it's stupid to make it easy to port software away from their hardware (bread and butter).
This would not change much about the company's situation. Sun's biggest weakness is that they're selling custom, 'high-end' hardware into a commodity market, all the while undermining that business with cross-platform Java. The ownership of the company won't change any of this. Thus, SUNW is a bad investement, even for Sun itself.
Oh... and this time, this is a troll (if anybody sees it).
I would love nothing more to see a set of sound set of arguments explaining why Apple will have more success with FairPlay/iPod and increase their marketshare of MasOS
If being in a difficult position means; having $5B cash on hand,
$5B cash on hand means a lot less than it seems when your biggest competition doesn't have a hardware business, has $70B cash on hand, and 20 times the market share.
record stock prices,
Which are not an indicator of long term success.
record sales,
Of what? The iPod is hardly a platform on which to build a technology company. Scratch that, it's hardly a platform, given that nobody else can make compatible devices or sell compatible songs
a growing market share
Really? That explains why Apple's growth in the computer segment isn't even keeping up with industry-wide growth.
, a corner on the online music business,
They had a corner on the GUI computer market 15 years ago, tried to hold onto it a little too hard and now have a corner of the GUI computer market. They're doing the same thing with their FairPlay licensing system. Since Apple depends on hardware margins, they can't see them eroded by competition in that market. Thus, they're closing off the platform and suffocating it, compared to more open competition. This is exactly what happend in 1985-1995 with MacOS.
a corner of the MP3 player market,
How long will that last as the competiton gets better and people realize that their music can be used on more than one brand of player?
an increasing presence in the enterprise space,
Slooowly increasing, and only in an absolute sense, not a relative sense.
a stable, secure OS,
Linux is stable and secure. It has been for years. Where has it gotten in the desktop space, while Windows was continually growing market share?
While stable and secure is a really good thing to have (particularly these days), it's not necessarily an indicator of success. Also, Windows is narrowing the gap fast enough that if and when (very unlikely) it actually becomes the key component of OS buying choices, Apple's lead won't matter.
tons of good press,
Which is worthless, compared to market share, cash flow, margins, and a defensible business. Apple may have market share in the MP3 arena, but they also have everybody else in the industry trying to erode it. A more open strategy would level the playing field a little, dont'cha think?
and the ability to produce functional and beautiful hardware,
Ferrari has that too. The only reason they make it work is that they don't have to worry about compatibility.
In the computer space, there have been tons of wonderful systems (both software and hardware) that have fallen, thanks to the fact that design and technical excellense are neither necessary nor sufficient for market success. The market doesan't collectively value design enough and consumers don't understand technical excellence enough.
then don't feel to sorry for them, I think they can manage just fine without your pity.
It's not so much pity for them as pity for the whole industry. We'd all be better off if Microsoft had more competition in the desktop and commodify server spaces.
I'm not going to predict Apple's doom, but I will predict a hugely diminished marketshare in the music player arena and more of the same borderline irrelevant marketshare in the computer arena, over the next 5-10 years.
This is so damn frustrating since they're making the same mistake again. I just want to know why they think it'll be different this time. (Surely they aren't happy with 2%)
I'm modded a troll for posting facts, and the guy who said "...Microsoft's stuff is so crappy that they have to throw it all out every few years and start over?" gets modded +5, Insightful? Sheesh, Sorry to disagree with your bias.
Slashdot Mirror
They're charging based on value to the customer, not based on cost. The faster mainframe (whatever) offers more to the customer, therefore it costs the customer more. The fact that it costs the same to make is incidental.
This was in the body of the story, but maybe it's more appropriate elsewhere. One of the more interesting links in the blog posts about this source code release was a transcript of a speech by RMS on how the Lisp Machine influenced his decision to start the free software movement. Interesting reading.
"I have noticed this. They especially do not want to pay intelligent honest people! ... They will "outsource"
The difference between employees at outsourcing organizations and offshore development houses is not related to honesty and intelligence. It's simply that they'll do the work for less money.
"Yeah, and what makes that even more ridiculous is that when a doctor (for example) screws up, only one person dies. When an engineer screws up, bunches of people die! " That's not necessarily true. Doctors that study infectious diseases or are test and develops medicines/procedures can have impact on huge numbers of people themselves.
"dell, introduce a 17" laptop with 1920x1200 resolution."
Dell offers 1920x1600 in 15.4" on the I6000 and D810. Nice high DPI goodness + a wider screen.
"'the advantage of widescreen laptops' exists solely in everyone's head."
I find it to be a real advantage. I don't have quantitative proof, but I suspect that you don't either.
"visual studio runs fine on my t43p, with uxga (1600x1200) resolution. widescreen serves no purpose other then "looking cool". "
Having run it both on 4:3 (at various resolutions up to 1600x1200) and now a 1900x1200 Widescreen Dell, I can safely say it runs better on Widescreen. This is particularly true of the debugger: widescreen makes it possible to have a stack trace/watch window on one side, the solution browser on the other, and a reasonable editor in the middle. 4:3 makes that a lot more cumbersome: I usually end up putting the stack trace, watch window, and solution browser all on the same side, which tends to be a little cramped. (Of course, lately I've spent a lot of time debugging an interpreter with very deep stack traces, so maybe I'm biased).
Dual Screens is nicer still, but less portable.
IMO, Titanium is only part of the story. The (IMO, much bigger deal) is the new Widescreen display (finally). The lack of a widescreen is a big part of the reason I did not buy a Thinkpad - Visual Studio runs better with the wider aspect ratio. I don't know if they offer resolutions past WXGA (1280x800), but we should all welcome IBM to at least 2002.
"If you really want to know if some ancient software prevetned another piece of software from working then disassemble it and get it over with. Looking at the code is the only way you can know for sure. "
You might be able to diagnose an error-causing fault, but it's often very hard to tell the intent of code without having the context. Hell, determining intent from source code can be hard enough.
(And yes, I know about the obvious exceptions like AARD.)
"China has a population roughly equal to four times that of the US."
Keeping this in mind, it's pretty naive to think that the U.S. will 'always' have a bigger economy than China. That would limit China to 1/4 the per capita wealth as the U.S., with all the commensurate limitations in health care, food, social services, etc. that implies. The U.S. (my country, BTW) will eventually have to get over itself and realize that it doesn't have to be either the biggest or most powerful nation. (After all, both are recent developments in and of themselves).
", the sheer population of Asian countries may allow them to train more scientists and engineers than the U.S. "
China already does produce more engineering graduates than the U.S., by a factor of ten. They also produce produce three times the number of college graduates. See the latest Fortune cover story for details.
Sadder still is that China is also graduating twice the number of engineeers per capita as the U.S. (India isn't far behind in either of these metrics). Before you blame this on offshoring, keep in mind that offshoring has only been a pressing issue for techies in the last four or five years, and economies are slow to change. This is a cultural thing too.
Windows 95 beta on a Pentium 100?
Hm, the hottest PC anyone I knew had when Win95 appeared was a 486 DX-2 66 MHz...
Yeah, I also took part of the the money from that summer to buy a 32MB Micron P5-100 to replace my aging 8MB 486/33 (from High School). The test lab itself was a motley (by design) collection of hardware. The most notably unique things were all the PS/2's, but the Pentiums were generally Dells, etc.
My office PC (which I never used) was a 20MB PS/2 Model 80 running OS/2. It was a true museum piece, being IBM's first 386 machine (circa 1987-8 or so). The only thing that allowed it to run OS/2 was all the RAM (a large part of which was installed via Microchannel expansion boards, contrary to the modern practice of having it all on the motherboard.)
"It was originally a colaboration between MS and IBM. So chances are MS owns some of the code. "
In the summer of 1995 [1], I worked at IBM in Austin for the OS/2 Lan Server Enterprise [2]group. OS/2 LAN Server was a direct descendent of the LAN Manager product that shipped with the original joint IBM/MS versions of OS/2 [3]. As a result of its origins, OS/2 LAN Server had huge amounts of Microsoft code baked in.
In an effort to eliminate the Microsoft code, IBM had divided the development team into two groups: "Clean" and "Dirty". "Dirty" staff being staff that had seen Microsoft code and was not eligible to help in the rewrite. I don't know how far the effort went.
1] I saw a beta of Windows 95 for the first time running on a Pentium 100 in an IBM FV Test lab.
2] LS Enterprise entailed the conversion of LS Advanced to use DCE services for authentication, etc.
3] LAN manager was originally part of OS/2 "Extended Edition".
Maybe I should start an IT consulting company. I'll call it the "Smart-Ass Group"! There's already one close: Smart Associates... which reminds me of this law firm. (Check the URL. :-)
"I've read through the "Universal Binary" document Apple provided to help developers migrate to x86. It seems like every chapter is written to explain that the x86 architecure contains pitfall after pitfall that will make an app crash where I wouldn't on a PPC box." Isn't that the purpose of the document: to warn develoeprs about things they have to change to migrate. If it's well written (and having skimmed it, it appears like it it), it should focus on the 'pitfalls' of x86.
IBM has the same problems Motorola/FreeScale did a few years ago: the desktop CPU business is very expensive and very risky. From their point of view, they're sinking huge amounts of money in R&D and fabs just to source a microprocessor to one main client. For an increasingly services oriented company, it's hard to imagine a worse business to be in.
That's why Apple is switching to Intel: IBM isn't willing to take the risks involved in keeping up with Intel and AMD. I can't blame them. My hunch is that after IBM failed to deliver the 3GHz G5, Apple and IBM had a 'come to jesus' meeting in which they both basically walked away from the partnership, allowing time for Apple to transition away with its backup plan. (If there's not a good transiton, Apple will be dragged into the abyss along with IBM's desktop chip business).
The next question is how long it'll take IBM to divest itself of the rest of the POWER CPU line.
"Maybe a dual-processor system: one PowerPC and one Intel? Not likely, I grant you. "
It's happened before. 10 years ago, Apple made a version of the Quadra 610 (codename Houdini) that had an 80486 on a plug in card. http://lowendmac.com/quadra/q610dos.shtml Sun did similar things, in addition to a 386 based workstation, they also made add in boards that let Sun workstations run DOS software.
The problem with this approach is that it's a hedge. x86 add in boards (or second CPU's) aren't really a good way to run x86 applications, and eveb if they were, x86 applications aren't the reason to buy non-x86 hardware. Persumably, folks that buy Macs want to run Macintosh software more than they want to run x86 software, therefore Apple would be hard pressed to justify much of a premium for hardware that runs x86 software better.
Another old school example of this is the Commodore 128. It had both a 8502 for 'native' applications and a Z80 for CP/M applications. I doubt those Z80's got used at all, except in the boot process (it got control before the 8502).
This may be gross overkill, but there's specialized hardware specifically designed for sustained high-throughput disk storage. A company called Conduant makes specialized disk controllers that use on board microcontrollers to drive arrays of disks. When I last saw them demoed, they could sustain writes of 100MB/sec using direct card to card transfers across the PCI bus. They can configure a data acquisition card to directly store information into a shared buffer on the disk controller across the PCI bus. The disk controller then picks the data up and drives it across ten IDE channels. That was a few years ago, these days it looks like they can sustain 200MB/sec with a controller, and up to 600MB/sec and 6TB of capacity with custom box mounted in a rack.
I'm not so sure what their story is regarding reading or querying. My guess is you lose a lot of bandwidth, but not all. Anyway, it might be worth checking out.
http://www.conduant.com/products/overview.html
Another thing is that modern computers cam have lots innate capacity themselves. My hunch is that you could do a lot with a couple modern disks on seperate SATA channels and several GB of RAM. Maybe this is only a software problem...
"The problem is that we're arguing with people who think a $900 Dell box with Best Buy-grade IDE disks is 'enterprise' and that Linux is as good as Solaris because with kernel patches, recompiles, and non-standard configurations it is possible to emulate Solaris 10's feature list."
The computer industry is one long flight to cheaper and faster (and then make it work well). There aren't historically many companies that have been able to stake out a high ground and hold on to it as a market niche for any long length of time. IBM, Sun, and Apple are currently the biggest exceptions.
The problem is Linux has a long way to go to get better: and it will. How will Solaris be able to continue to differentiate itself as Linux gets better?
"Sun's AMD based systems basically cost the same as Dells Intel based ones do at high quantities."
How many people buy at high quantities?
"Then I can leverage this value because I can run the same OS (Solaris 10) on both my enterprise systems and web farms, etc. I can even "port" my custom apps easily between them (spelled re-compile) due to the source compatibility. "
Even if portability is that easy, it still means re-compile, re-test, possibly re-certify. It means debugging on two different platforms that, while they should be compatible in theory, do have differences.
"So in essence, I can run any of my apps on systems from 256 CPU Fujitsu built systems clear down to 1U AMD based systems, all at 64 bits. And when the OS changes I KNOW my apps will still run.
Voila! Horizontal and Vertical scaling with 100% upward compatibility. Not bad...Who else offers this?"
Who cares?
Horizontal scaling: it doesn't matter what chip (or OS) I'm running on as long as the work gets done.
Vertical scaling: Even if I can get "x256" (for the sake of argument) scaling, how many organizations can't estimate their near-term requirements within a factor of 200? Worse still, getting software systems to scale up to large multi-CPU systems requires lots of work in and of itself: more along the lines of architectural redesign than recompiling. In that case, it's not going to do me that much good to have developers developing on small Sun boxes. It'd make more sense to either buy a second big machine and have folks network into it (you need a test environment for your apps anyway, in production environments).
"Couple that with the fact that SPARC is an open architecture and technically anyone can build SPARC systems (Like Fujitsu does)."
Who cares? The CPU business is risky, increasingly low margin, and amazingly capital intensive. Open standards or not, there's a reason that companies have been fleeing the business model over the last 15 years.
"While I would agree that Java development is sapping resources from Sun"
Very true.
"I don't think you could make a case for saying that Java is undermining Sun's hardware business unless you really don't understand what Java is.
Even Apple is smart enough to realize it's stupid to make it easy to port software away from their hardware (bread and butter).
This would not change much about the company's situation. Sun's biggest weakness is that they're selling custom, 'high-end' hardware into a commodity market, all the while undermining that business with cross-platform Java. The ownership of the company won't change any of this. Thus, SUNW is a bad investement, even for Sun itself.
Oh... and this time, this is a troll (if anybody sees it).
I would love nothing more to see a set of sound set of arguments explaining why Apple will have more success with FairPlay/iPod and increase their marketshare of MasOS
If being in a difficult position means; having $5B cash on hand,
$5B cash on hand means a lot less than it seems when your biggest competition doesn't have a hardware business, has $70B cash on hand, and 20 times the market share.
record stock prices,
Which are not an indicator of long term success.
record sales,
Of what? The iPod is hardly a platform on which to build a technology company. Scratch that, it's hardly a platform, given that nobody else can make compatible devices or sell compatible songs
a growing market share
Really? That explains why Apple's growth in the computer segment isn't even keeping up with industry-wide growth.
, a corner on the online music business,
They had a corner on the GUI computer market 15 years ago, tried to hold onto it a little too hard and now have a corner of the GUI computer market. They're doing the same thing with their FairPlay licensing system. Since Apple depends on hardware margins, they can't see them eroded by competition in that market. Thus, they're closing off the platform and suffocating it, compared to more open competition. This is exactly what happend in 1985-1995 with MacOS.
a corner of the MP3 player market,
How long will that last as the competiton gets better and people realize that their music can be used on more than one brand of player?
an increasing presence in the enterprise space,
Slooowly increasing, and only in an absolute sense, not a relative sense.
a stable, secure OS,
Linux is stable and secure. It has been for years. Where has it gotten in the desktop space, while Windows was continually growing market share?
While stable and secure is a really good thing to have (particularly these days), it's not necessarily an indicator of success. Also, Windows is narrowing the gap fast enough that if and when (very unlikely) it actually becomes the key component of OS buying choices, Apple's lead won't matter.
tons of good press,
Which is worthless, compared to market share, cash flow, margins, and a defensible business. Apple may have market share in the MP3 arena, but they also have everybody else in the industry trying to erode it. A more open strategy would level the playing field a little, dont'cha think?
and the ability to produce functional and beautiful hardware,
Ferrari has that too. The only reason they make it work is that they don't have to worry about compatibility.
In the computer space, there have been tons of wonderful systems (both software and hardware) that have fallen, thanks to the fact that design and technical excellense are neither necessary nor sufficient for market success. The market doesan't collectively value design enough and consumers don't understand technical excellence enough.
then don't feel to sorry for them, I think they can manage just fine without your pity.
It's not so much pity for them as pity for the whole industry. We'd all be better off if Microsoft had more competition in the desktop and commodify server spaces.
I'm not going to predict Apple's doom, but I will predict a hugely diminished marketshare in the music player arena and more of the same borderline irrelevant marketshare in the computer arena, over the next 5-10 years.
This is so damn frustrating since they're making the same mistake again. I just want to know why they think it'll be different this time. (Surely they aren't happy with 2%)
Yes. This is an accurate statement of my intent.
I'm modded a troll for posting facts, and the guy who said "...Microsoft's stuff is so crappy that they have to throw it all out every few years and start over?" gets modded +5, Insightful? Sheesh, Sorry to disagree with your bias.
"I think I could make a strong argument that Apple is NOT the same company that had all of those issues."
I agree. It's just too bad they're in as difficult a position as they are.