Obstacles for this service killing off the bricks and mortar rental shops:
Closed captioning.
Big ass TVs that aren't connected to the 'net.
Being able to take it to a friend's house.
The sweet spot for me for a service such as this will be when Apple releases a Mac mini with an HDTV tuner for convenient way to get a movie from my PC to my television where I can watch movies from the comfort of my couch with my decent stereo cranked up enough to make the bass notes of the soundtrack rumble through the floor. Not to mention, it makes it hard to rent a flick to take on the road to a friend's house or for the kid's watch on a long trip in the car. Consequently, I think the bricks and mortar rental places have plenty of time to keep making a substantial profit.
Inspecting a pair jeans to ensure that it meets fit for use standards means a visual inspection on an assembly line. A single worker can inspect a few pairs of jeans per minute. And if a unit passes inspection without being fit for use, the manufacturer, at most, has to refund the wholesale cost of a single pair of jeans/if/ the consumer complains about it.
Inspecting body armor to ensure that it meets fit for use standards means a pain-staking, time-consuming inspection which includes hitting it with several types of ordinance and exposing it to all sorts of chemicals. Further, statistical analysis must be done so to ensure that the the sample size takes the percentage of units that will be suitable for use in the field to at least three (if not four or five) nines. If a unit passes inspection without being fit for use, someone may die or be critically wounded and the manufacturer may be subject to recalling entire lots of thousands of units if not subjected to a huge product liability law suit.
Don't confuse fitness for use with the armor fitting a soldier. The two have very little to do with each other.
If he already knows the/how/ of putting it together and has a defined bill of materials, then there is no reason to believe that his estimate of 2k per unit in mass quantities is inaccurate. But what I bet isn't considered in the cost is the price of testing and quality control. This isn't a simple widget where a mere visual inspection suffices for weeding out bad units. A large enough percentage of the production output will need to be taken to the lab and destroyed to ensure uniform output and fitness for use.
Unless I read the article wrong, the suit costs Troy about 2k to make. Mass production for the military would require several steps not counted such as sampling and testing to assure fitness for use. Some of this would be offset by efficiencies of scale but I suspect that the additional costs will be larger than any of the savings attained by moving to mass production.
Sony and Nintendo are both trouncing Microsoft. Sales of the XBOX 360 a year after launch are lower than sales of both the PS/2 and the Nintendo DS for December. If marketshare is your metric, Microsoft is in a distant third place in the video game market.
Aside from which, it isn't really honest to compare sales of a console one year into it's lifespan to to sales of consoles out for less than three months. Contrary to your assessment, not being able to keep up with demand in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It/can/ be bad if consumers are so frustrated that they/exclusively/ turn to substitutes. But so long as the consumers are not frustrated to the point where they never buy the console, that demand is not presently being met is neither here nor there. At most, from a free market perspective, it tells you that Sony and Nintendo aren't pricing the console high enough. Nintendo could have doubled or trebled their profit if they took this into account and announced that it will ship originally for 600, go down to 400 in january and go down to 250 in february where it will remain.
Also, momentum is less than it's cracked up to be. The Sega Dreamcase sold 300k units on pre-order and an additional 500k within the first two weeks of launch. It continued to build up momentum even after the release of the PS/2 and Gamecube, only starting to drop off once Sony and Nintendo ironed out production issues and could meet demand.
Once late spring and early summer roll around then we'll start to get far enough into the life cycles of the next generation consoles to start making useful comparissons. Once January 2008 rolls around and we can compare Christmas season numbers, then we'll have an even better picture.
With regards to ethics, so long as both parties to the lawsuit are aware of what capacity she represented the defendent in the past, I don't even see a conflict of interest unless she was privy to some sort of information that Apple has a right to withold from Cisco should this go to trial. If all she knows about Apple's insides is stuff that Cisco will eventually find out regardless of who their counsel is, then it's hard to argue that it's unfair for her to represent Cisco.
Of course, just the legalities of the situation may very well differ from the ethics of the situation. But even there, I don't think it entirely uncommon for a lawyer to have at one point represented both sides of a dispute. It would be a clear conflict of interest if she were presently representing both sides.
But I'm hesitant to think it means anything that scads of recruiters are all jockying to send my resume to fill the same set of requirements.
Things may be getting better, but they are still no where close to what things were like during the dot com bubble when the really good people were getting lured away from their employers by insanely lucrative salaries and the firms they were hired away from faced a genuine shortage of skilled workers and started hiring just about anybody that knew anything about computers to fill vacancies.
Traditionally about a quarter of the workforce was busy looking for a new job. So the competition for any job was 25% of the workforce + the unemployment rate. In the fast few years with chronic underemployment and a decline in real wages closer to three quarters of the workforce is busy looking for a new job at any given time.
In 1997-1998 you could land a decent tech job just by knowing how to edit a file with vi. The job market pendulum has swung back to the side favoring employers since 2001 or so with hundreds of applications being thown at every single position.
The Christian Science Monitor has an excellent article on energy conservation in the home: Surprise: Not-so-glamorous conservation works best. The two biggest issues to tackle are lighting and heating. Consider this:
although residences consume only about two-fifths of this as electricity, because electrical generation is inherently inefficient, it accounts for 71 percent of household emissions. A home's electrical use may be responsible for more CO2 emissions than the two cars in the driveway.
Sure, Pogue argued that Microsoft ripped off a few features from Apple. But then he went on to say:
Apple also rips off features from other software vendors, including Microsoft, and
the features Microsoft ripped off of Apple are done very well and
Other features such as grouping, stacking and filtering in an explorer window; using USB flash drivers for system memory; and Presentation Mode are Microsoft innovations and
Microsoft added significant design changes to improve security
And then read some of his conclusions:
Windows Vista is not, as the Web's chorus of caustic critics claim, little more than a warmed-over Windows XP. Its more intelligent navigation and more powerful file-manipulation tools provide you with greater efficiency from Day 1....
Vista is better looking, better designed and better insulated against the annoyances of the Internet
Granted, he does offer criticism along with the praise and does have some barbs. But over all, it was a fairly well balanced review.
If the review seems superficial, it's because of Pogue's target audience being average end users. I thought the actual review was quite balanced (features x,y,z seem to be taken straight from OS X but Apple also also rips off other dev shops and they aren't the only new features, for example q) and contained appropriate content for the target market. Most users don't really care about the guts of the system. They care mostly about the eye candy, whether it will work with their existing programs and peripherals, and how fast or slow things are going to run.
Imagine a user who just bought an x86 Macintosh running OS X 10.4. Apple would like to sell that user a desktop upgrade when 10.5 comes out. Microsoft would like to sell that user a desktop version of Windows. That makes Apple and Microsoft direct competitors on the Intel desktop PC market.
The original software developers don't have any marginal Q&A costs for the new licenses, but usually Q&A and other relatively fixed costs are spread out over the entire life cycle of the product. The higher the total revenue, the greater the ROI.
But that is another point to consider, the marginal profits vs the marginal costs for the original developers. Selling redistribution rights to a distributor had very little marginal cost but a very significant marginal profit. It was as close to free money as you can get at the margins. Given that every who purchased the bundle is now a customer and far more likely to buy the next version, you could even look at this as the distributor paying the developer for the privilege of marketing the product.
In the original anti-trust suit against Microsoft in which they were found to have monopoly status, the industry over which they were found to have a monopoly was explicitly defined by the court as Intel based PCs. Now that Apple has made the transition to Intel, supports loading Windows onto their hardware via bootcamp and makes an Intel x86 compatible operating system, they are a competitor of Microsoft according to the court's definition.
Some might argue that since Apple doesn't support OS X on non-Apple kit and, therefore, doesn't compete with Microsoft. But (a) OS X can be installed and run quite nicely on non-Apple kit and (b) users of newer Apple hardware have a clear choice to continue the OS X upgrade path or the Windows upgrade path (or both).
Not to mention that many new Apple products compete head to head with Microsoft products. iTunes vs. Media Player, iPod vs Zune, Keynote vs Powerpoint, Pages vs Word, OS X Server vs Windows Server, Apple Developer Tools vs Visual Studio...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that this situation is about a group of developers that sold resale rights for a fixed sum and then some had seller's remorse after they saw how much product the reseller moved. No piracy there. That isn't much different than a former employer of mine selling their vertical application I helped develop for tens of millions of dollars per license and while paying us grunts in the trenches tens of thousands.
While I've never worked on a retail shrink-wrap piece of software, I've yet to work on any piece of commercial software in a corporate setting where the developers get anywhere near a quarter of the revenue generated from the sale of that software.
You can disagree all want, but read the full quote
on
2007 Java Predictions
·
· Score: 1
``Apple will continue to trounce everyone else for the preferred geek platform. The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.''
The key question here is what did Hansson mean by preferred geek platform? It seems pretty clear that he's not speaking of Apple's web platform, Web Objects, but of Apple hardware. And if he wasn't speaking directly to Web Objects, the only other standard web dev software Apple puts out is Apache and the other OSS that comes bundled with OS X. It doesn't make any sense to single Apple out for that when the same can run on Windows and comes with just about every flavor of Linux.
No, Hansson must have been referring to the fact that techies with Apple kit, regardless of what OS they're running on them, are the cool kids in town.
Hansson's prediction was that Apple will become the development platform of choice for techies and, consequently, other developers will laugh at any web devs saddled with using a Windows based laptop.
The reasearch firm runs an opt-in consumer panel. The members have to ask to join. The members were approach one day and asked if all of their credit card transaction could be monitored for a set period of time. The ones that agreed were the sample for this study. So the basis of the original research comes from the small fraction of a self-selected group willing to hand over their financial history.
Slashdot Mirror
- Closed captioning.
- Big ass TVs that aren't connected to the 'net.
- Being able to take it to a friend's house.
The sweet spot for me for a service such as this will be when Apple releases a Mac mini with an HDTV tuner for convenient way to get a movie from my PC to my television where I can watch movies from the comfort of my couch with my decent stereo cranked up enough to make the bass notes of the soundtrack rumble through the floor. Not to mention, it makes it hard to rent a flick to take on the road to a friend's house or for the kid's watch on a long trip in the car. Consequently, I think the bricks and mortar rental places have plenty of time to keep making a substantial profit.It's a Red Herring unless you think you can quantify the value of human life. I don't.
Inspecting a pair jeans to ensure that it meets fit for use standards means a visual inspection on an assembly line. A single worker can inspect a few pairs of jeans per minute. And if a unit passes inspection without being fit for use, the manufacturer, at most, has to refund the wholesale cost of a single pair of jeans /if/ the consumer complains about it.
Inspecting body armor to ensure that it meets fit for use standards means a pain-staking, time-consuming inspection which includes hitting it with several types of ordinance and exposing it to all sorts of chemicals. Further, statistical analysis must be done so to ensure that the the sample size takes the percentage of units that will be suitable for use in the field to at least three (if not four or five) nines. If a unit passes inspection without being fit for use, someone may die or be critically wounded and the manufacturer may be subject to recalling entire lots of thousands of units if not subjected to a huge product liability law suit.
Don't confuse fitness for use with the armor fitting a soldier. The two have very little to do with each other.
If he already knows the /how/ of putting it together and has a defined bill of materials, then there is no reason to believe that his estimate of 2k per unit in mass quantities is inaccurate. But what I bet isn't considered in the cost is the price of testing and quality control. This isn't a simple widget where a mere visual inspection suffices for weeding out bad units. A large enough percentage of the production output will need to be taken to the lab and destroyed to ensure uniform output and fitness for use.
Unless I read the article wrong, the suit costs Troy about 2k to make. Mass production for the military would require several steps not counted such as sampling and testing to assure fitness for use. Some of this would be offset by efficiencies of scale but I suspect that the additional costs will be larger than any of the savings attained by moving to mass production.
Aside from which, it isn't really honest to compare sales of a console one year into it's lifespan to to sales of consoles out for less than three months. Contrary to your assessment, not being able to keep up with demand in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It /can/ be bad if consumers are so frustrated that they /exclusively/ turn to substitutes. But so long as the consumers are not frustrated to the point where they never buy the console, that demand is not presently being met is neither here nor there. At most, from a free market perspective, it tells you that Sony and Nintendo aren't pricing the console high enough. Nintendo could have doubled or trebled their profit if they took this into account and announced that it will ship originally for 600, go down to 400 in january and go down to 250 in february where it will remain.
Also, momentum is less than it's cracked up to be. The Sega Dreamcase sold 300k units on pre-order and an additional 500k within the first two weeks of launch. It continued to build up momentum even after the release of the PS/2 and Gamecube, only starting to drop off once Sony and Nintendo ironed out production issues and could meet demand.
Once late spring and early summer roll around then we'll start to get far enough into the life cycles of the next generation consoles to start making useful comparissons. Once January 2008 rolls around and we can compare Christmas season numbers, then we'll have an even better picture.
Or alternatively, the iPod Sosumi edition.
With regards to ethics, so long as both parties to the lawsuit are aware of what capacity she represented the defendent in the past, I don't even see a conflict of interest unless she was privy to some sort of information that Apple has a right to withold from Cisco should this go to trial. If all she knows about Apple's insides is stuff that Cisco will eventually find out regardless of who their counsel is, then it's hard to argue that it's unfair for her to represent Cisco. Of course, just the legalities of the situation may very well differ from the ethics of the situation. But even there, I don't think it entirely uncommon for a lawyer to have at one point represented both sides of a dispute. It would be a clear conflict of interest if she were presently representing both sides.
Perhaps you fail to understand what underemployment and a decline in real wages actually mean.
Things may be getting better, but they are still no where close to what things were like during the dot com bubble when the really good people were getting lured away from their employers by insanely lucrative salaries and the firms they were hired away from faced a genuine shortage of skilled workers and started hiring just about anybody that knew anything about computers to fill vacancies.
Traditionally about a quarter of the workforce was busy looking for a new job. So the competition for any job was 25% of the workforce + the unemployment rate. In the fast few years with chronic underemployment and a decline in real wages closer to three quarters of the workforce is busy looking for a new job at any given time.
In 1997-1998 you could land a decent tech job just by knowing how to edit a file with vi. The job market pendulum has swung back to the side favoring employers since 2001 or so with hundreds of applications being thown at every single position.
I'll bet you $100 that a car at idle while sitting in the driver produces CO2.
And then read some of his conclusions:
Granted, he does offer criticism along with the praise and does have some barbs. But over all, it was a fairly well balanced review.
If the review seems superficial, it's because of Pogue's target audience being average end users. I thought the actual review was quite balanced (features x,y,z seem to be taken straight from OS X but Apple also also rips off other dev shops and they aren't the only new features, for example q) and contained appropriate content for the target market. Most users don't really care about the guts of the system. They care mostly about the eye candy, whether it will work with their existing programs and peripherals, and how fast or slow things are going to run.
Imagine a user who just bought an x86 Macintosh running OS X 10.4. Apple would like to sell that user a desktop upgrade when 10.5 comes out. Microsoft would like to sell that user a desktop version of Windows. That makes Apple and Microsoft direct competitors on the Intel desktop PC market.
But that is another point to consider, the marginal profits vs the marginal costs for the original developers. Selling redistribution rights to a distributor had very little marginal cost but a very significant marginal profit. It was as close to free money as you can get at the margins. Given that every who purchased the bundle is now a customer and far more likely to buy the next version, you could even look at this as the distributor paying the developer for the privilege of marketing the product.
Some might argue that since Apple doesn't support OS X on non-Apple kit and, therefore, doesn't compete with Microsoft. But (a) OS X can be installed and run quite nicely on non-Apple kit and (b) users of newer Apple hardware have a clear choice to continue the OS X upgrade path or the Windows upgrade path (or both).
Not to mention that many new Apple products compete head to head with Microsoft products. iTunes vs. Media Player, iPod vs Zune, Keynote vs Powerpoint, Pages vs Word, OS X Server vs Windows Server, Apple Developer Tools vs Visual Studio ...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that this situation is about a group of developers that sold resale rights for a fixed sum and then some had seller's remorse after they saw how much product the reseller moved. No piracy there. That isn't much different than a former employer of mine selling their vertical application I helped develop for tens of millions of dollars per license and while paying us grunts in the trenches tens of thousands.
The large software vendors have something like a 60% ROI meaning that /all/ costs add up to less than 40% of the capital invested.
While I've never worked on a retail shrink-wrap piece of software, I've yet to work on any piece of commercial software in a corporate setting where the developers get anywhere near a quarter of the revenue generated from the sale of that software.
The key question here is what did Hansson mean by preferred geek platform? It seems pretty clear that he's not speaking of Apple's web platform, Web Objects, but of Apple hardware. And if he wasn't speaking directly to Web Objects, the only other standard web dev software Apple puts out is Apache and the other OSS that comes bundled with OS X. It doesn't make any sense to single Apple out for that when the same can run on Windows and comes with just about every flavor of Linux.
No, Hansson must have been referring to the fact that techies with Apple kit, regardless of what OS they're running on them, are the cool kids in town.
Hansson's prediction was that Apple will become the development platform of choice for techies and, consequently, other developers will laugh at any web devs saddled with using a Windows based laptop.
The reasearch firm runs an opt-in consumer panel. The members have to ask to join. The members were approach one day and asked if all of their credit card transaction could be monitored for a set period of time. The ones that agreed were the sample for this study. So the basis of the original research comes from the small fraction of a self-selected group willing to hand over their financial history.