1. A better player at a better price. Hard to do if you don't buy as much flash memory as Apple.
2. A better PC-based app than iTunes for sync and commerce. That'll cost a lot of money, and it will be very difficult to do better on the first try no matter how much you spend, so count on it taking three product lifecycles before you are even in the game. That is, count on spending 3X what Apple spends now on a rev of iTunes, before you even begin to take away market share.
3. Something unique... that Apple can't copy... that nobody has thought of yet.
Which are points to Microsoft. Now you would think Microsoft would be willing to throw the RIAA/MPAA under a bus and give the customer a big hug, but it isn't going that way. Anyone else think that is a mistake?
The real reason government entities don't want data collected is that it might be compared. Performance in answering emergency calls probably varies widely, and is probably poorly correlated to how much is spent. If cites were compared in their performance, people would demand better. Since it is difficult to falsify objective measures like location and response time, this data gets the "if everyone knew how long it takes to get an ambulance, the terrorists win" treatment.
What I'm looking for is actual data. You can suppose that the availability of 1000 horsepower engines will lead to "chaos" on the road, but there is no data to support that view - only theories and anecdotes.
The same pattern applies to other supposed ills due to extreme behavior: Will people turn in massive numbers to BASE jumping due to the availability of parachutes? No. Will model rocketry lead to homebrew terrorist missiles? No.
So, without actual statistically significant numbers that say "pirate FM causes actual harm," you are left with just theories and anecdotes to justify a status quo that has done well-documented harm in terms of creating an exception to the First Amendment, among other bad effects.
What you are claiming is contradicted by the falling viewer numbers for broadcast media. People want what they want, not what everyone wants. The "homogenizing" is the result of consolidation in a mature and shrinking broadcast business: financial engineering of conglomerates to compensate for the fact that each transmitter reaches fewer viewers/listeners.
At some point it will become obvious that The End is Near, and that spectrum should be turned over to UWB radios or some other means of sharing it without allocating it to a fixed purpose.
Is there any actual evidence that pirate FM broadcasters cause chaos?
Or are they more like squatters, living in the otherwise unoccupied parts of the spectrum? And if they are like squatters, how do you measure the harm they cause? Do they, in fact, cause any harm at all?
The "FCC as a bulwark against anarchy" argument is oversold, if only for the fact that spectrum allocation is a terribly inefficient way to share spectrum.
Then there is the fact that the FCC is an unelected bureaucratic exception to the First Amendment. Not only is the exception legally iffy, the FCC is insulated from answering to the public.
Then there is the way that spectrum has become an artificial kind of property, which leads to political favoritism in the way it is allocated, traded, paid for, and regulated.
There are a lot of reasons to think the FCC is in need of radical overhaul, and one should be very reluctant to dismiss people calling for reform without any evidence they are causing any harm.
You can find numerous examples of vertical applications keeping otherwise very obsolete and uneconomical hardware alive. But, on aggregate, vertical applications never saved a computer system from falling into obscurity.
The increasing use of Web front-ends to applications further reduces friction. As long as a compatible browser is available, the OS or processor doesn't matter.
The article leaves DRM, and the wider issue of "trusted" computing off the table.
"Trusted" computing turns your personal computer into something that you no longer fully own. That reduces the value of your PC. Currently, the only way to avoid having this happen is to use open source software.
While it may be true that FOSS cannot "win" the game, most games are lost, not won. This is especially true in business. The brilliant win is much rarer than the screwing up and losing.
By embracing the content publishers too closely and enthusiastically pursuing "trusted" computing, Microsoft may be choosing a losing path.
Multiman Publishing, a company Schilling apparently owns a large part of, publishes a lineup of strategy games. I think they acquired most of them from Avalon Hill. These are the kinds of games played with cardboard counters on hex-tiled maps.
You put your finger on it: Need to get around a big code base in a hurry? Suck it into Eclipse CDT and find things in a hurry. If you can build and debug it you can let breakpoint the main parts of the code and take a guided tour. Everyone can be productive once they are comfy in their own kustom krafted edit/build/debug environment. But if you don't need customization, you will get more contributors if you lower the barriers to entry.
The simple answer is that this scenario won't happen. It is ridiculous.
So what does getting this into a Business Week article accomplish (apart from selling copies of BW, which always gets a boost from companies like Microsoft on the cover)?
It's called "positioning:"
It suggests management could turn a few financial knobs and create a ton of shareholder value.
It creates an artificial boogie man in the form of extreme changes that will never happen, so when the financial knobs get adjusted it is seen as very conservative.
It paints Microsoft as a kind of "sleeping giant."
The real question for Microsoft is "Why did you stop using the 'creative destruction' model of delivering customer value?" Microsoft used be the terror of the technology business by putting workstation, minicomputer, and mainframe capabilities into PCs. Now they cosy up to Hollywood instead of being disruptive, and they wonder why the old magic no longer works.
Microsoft is dong some things right, but these follow the established model: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server will replace PBXs. Big old expensive machines out, Windows servers in. If Microsoft was that disruptive to the media businesses, then they would have their groove back.
To paint Richard Stallman as a radical is simply incorrect. He is not trying to change reality, he sees it as it is: Compiling a higher level language to machine code or intermediate language was never designed to be a good way of protecting intellectual property, and, not surprisingly, it isn't.
Stallman sees the consequence: attempting to obscure what your computer is doing is futile and/or harmful. Everything else follows from that. You need different licenses, different business models, etc.
I have also never known Richard Stallman to be against making a buck.
It's going to take time in geological scale for any lead to get out of the glass it is part of. Considering vitrification is a way of getting radwaste out of the environment for an immensely long time, why are we worrying about leaded glass? The only worry is to keep it OUT of the recycling stream so you don't get it in glass intended for food, and, even then it is unlikely to go anywhere.
In some places it is still very common to park strollers outside a cafe or shop. No, these places (e.g. Italy, where purse-snatching is a sport) are not crime-free paradises. It's just that people are more rational: A baby just isn't likely to be stolen, and people have the restraint to mind their own business.
Which makes all the "it's for emergency use" stuff seem silly. It's just a phone! A cheap prepaid phone with some minutes costs $100. If you spent $100 on a nice tennis racquet for an 8 year old, you would not restrict its use. It's a phone, call someone, if you feel like it.
"You have no privacy, get over it." - Scott McNealy
Although McNealy spent a lot of time and ink explaining his point of view, and claiming he was taken out of context, he never backed off that statement. In fact, he clarifies this way "If there were no audit trails and no fingerprints, there would be a lot more crime in this world. Audit trails deter lots of criminal activity. So all I'm suggesting, given that we all have ID cards anyhow, is to use the biometric and other forms of authentication that are way more powerful and way more accurate than the garbage we use today."
The part that is wrong about this is that audit trails are for government and corporate operations, to make sure they are honest and within the law, and within the bounds of their investors' and constituents contracts. Applying the same controls to individuals is oppressive, and McNealy should not have been surprised to find out many people objected to his view.
The Electoral College has a function: It is a firewall between states that may have corrupt or defective elections. If you think voting machines can be hacked, or that illegal voting happens in larger numbers than generally reported, you should be against subverting or eliminating the Electoral College.
Right, there's no interest at all in avoiding another Taliban-like haven for government-sponsored terrorism, as is found in Iran.
So now, instead of a Baathist dictatorship, we have Iran's secret services running the Shia side of a civil war in Iraq, and a society that appears to be more Islamist than before. How's that workin' out for us?
As bad as Iraq used to be, it is possible that it is worse now, and will get worse still. One very possible outcome is that part of a divided Iraq becomes a client-state of Iran, no matter what we do, or how much we continue to spend doing it.
Looking back from today, Windows 95 looks like a hack, and not in a good way.
But it was a tremendous accomplishment. At the time, Apple was adrift and Windows 3.1 sucked and was looking very old. In that environment, Windows 95 provided a pretty good alternative to Apple: A usable desktop, A 32 bit API, a decent class library, good developer tools, darn good hardware detection, even for the many devices for which it had to be ad hoc.
Or look at it this way: Windows 2000 was a "better" OS, but normal end-users could not install it and run it. Without Windows 95, Microsoft would have left the field open for Apple or some other alternative.
Toyota makes hundreds of thousands to millions of every product. So the process for making a Corolla can be lavishly studied and planned, and painstakingly measured and refined. Microsoft doesn't have a problem in their factories. Google up "software factory"
Very few software processes are repeatable over even a dozen iterations, which isn't enough to refine that process. In a project with hundreds of non-repeatable development tasks, you end up banging many round pegs into process square holes.
Now, if the Debian project managers were told to write specs for all n-thousand of these modules, and then told "deliver these modules so we can have the next 'eager beaver' release," then you'd be looking at a concerted effort.
You have answered youself: TFA asks if a project the size of Windows in controllable. In an environment where the tone is set by Steve Ballmer the answer sure looks like "No." Maybe "Hell no."
TFA also states Windows has 50 layers and circular dependencies. Linux has complex version and interface dependencies, too. But, evidently, the Windows dependencies are hairy enough to flummox 2000 smart people working in "concert" while Linux gets by with only a handful or people working in the same place at the same time and a much simpler process.
That is, Linux has better modularity and less process.
That points to the depth of the problem at Microsoft: They will have to change almost everything about how Windows is made in order to get a different result:
They have to stop telling developers to "do or die." Has that ever happened in the entire course of Linux development? Probably not. It's something that software project management can do without.
They have to get strong product management that knows which features are actually important, so you don't get that "do or die" message being sent to teams that are making things that don't add that much value.
They have to decouple development more: Why on Earth do you need to have 2000 people working in concert on any software project? That's a bug, not a feature.
They have to un-layer their management structure. 11 layers? That's ridiculous for a software company.
There is no one prescription for success. Apple succeeds by having very strong product management, so they know which features are actually important to the end user. Linux succeeds by having no product management at all, and having to adapt process to the practical constraints of being FOSS. Microsoft is stuck in the middle: Not enough product management strength to know which parts really deserve a "do or die" effort, and so much process, interdependency, and management layers that any of the 500 product managers Microsoft already employs that are smart enough to make these decisions can't possibly put them into effect.
I can cite two examples of a "network effect," where FOSS has improved commercial products. One example involves Apple.
1. Embedded Linux has a huge growth rate in mobile handsets and other embedded applications, most of which are big commercial product development projects. These projects benefit from widely available experience with Linux kernel building. Anyone with a spare old PC and the time to read an O'Reilly book (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/belinuxsys/)can get into configuring and building embedded Linux kernels and persuse and modify source code as much as they like. Contrast this with what it would take for you to get into porting Symbian, or even VxWorks.
2. The Web browser in the Nokia E61 (and probably many upcoming Nokia handsets) is based on WebKit: http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/ This means Nokia customers will benefit from having the same HTML engine and Javascript engine as in Konquerer and Safari.
So Linux users may or may not "care" about FOSS, but the elements of the value chain bringing Linux-based and other products that include FOSS certainly do care, and so should Apple. In fact I think the customers will begin to care quite a bit.
If Apple doesn't do all they can to cultivate a FOSS community around MacOS, they are missing a trick. Even if they triple their market share based on iPod users switching, that's still an 8:1 ratio (or worse) of Windows to MacOS in market share. Apple can't afford to stumble the way Sun did in their relations to the FOSS community.
The real reason online games are growing is freedom: No restrictions based on the size of the company. No ESRB. No Wal-Mart decency standards. No industry self-censorship. No distributors and publishers colluding with the bluenoses. No laws banning violence or sexual content. And, if such laws were to appear, the games would move to jurisdictions where they could not be shut down.
Freedom of expression isn't just a nice ideological point, it's profitable.
As you conveniently point out, Iran could lob a missile into Europe. The vast majority of European countries only protect their head of state with an armored limosine and a few guards. In most countries, legislators, provincial governors, and bureaucrats commute to work like you and me. Will our bunkered bureaucrats save us from chaos that hangs over Europe, or do these European countries just have a better sense of proportion?
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You mean, like Visual J++?
1. A better player at a better price. Hard to do if you don't buy as much flash memory as Apple.
2. A better PC-based app than iTunes for sync and commerce. That'll cost a lot of money, and it will be very difficult to do better on the first try no matter how much you spend, so count on it taking three product lifecycles before you are even in the game. That is, count on spending 3X what Apple spends now on a rev of iTunes, before you even begin to take away market share.
3. Something unique... that Apple can't copy... that nobody has thought of yet.
Which are points to Microsoft. Now you would think Microsoft would be willing to throw the RIAA/MPAA under a bus and give the customer a big hug, but it isn't going that way. Anyone else think that is a mistake?
The real reason government entities don't want data collected is that it might be compared. Performance in answering emergency calls probably varies widely, and is probably poorly correlated to how much is spent. If cites were compared in their performance, people would demand better. Since it is difficult to falsify objective measures like location and response time, this data gets the "if everyone knew how long it takes to get an ambulance, the terrorists win" treatment.
What I'm looking for is actual data. You can suppose that the availability of 1000 horsepower engines will lead to "chaos" on the road, but there is no data to support that view - only theories and anecdotes.
The same pattern applies to other supposed ills due to extreme behavior: Will people turn in massive numbers to BASE jumping due to the availability of parachutes? No. Will model rocketry lead to homebrew terrorist missiles? No.
So, without actual statistically significant numbers that say "pirate FM causes actual harm," you are left with just theories and anecdotes to justify a status quo that has done well-documented harm in terms of creating an exception to the First Amendment, among other bad effects.
What you are claiming is contradicted by the falling viewer numbers for broadcast media. People want what they want, not what everyone wants. The "homogenizing" is the result of consolidation in a mature and shrinking broadcast business: financial engineering of conglomerates to compensate for the fact that each transmitter reaches fewer viewers/listeners.
At some point it will become obvious that The End is Near, and that spectrum should be turned over to UWB radios or some other means of sharing it without allocating it to a fixed purpose.
Is there any actual evidence that pirate FM broadcasters cause chaos?
Or are they more like squatters, living in the otherwise unoccupied parts of the spectrum? And if they are like squatters, how do you measure the harm they cause? Do they, in fact, cause any harm at all?
The "FCC as a bulwark against anarchy" argument is oversold, if only for the fact that spectrum allocation is a terribly inefficient way to share spectrum.
Then there is the fact that the FCC is an unelected bureaucratic exception to the First Amendment. Not only is the exception legally iffy, the FCC is insulated from answering to the public.
Then there is the way that spectrum has become an artificial kind of property, which leads to political favoritism in the way it is allocated, traded, paid for, and regulated.
There are a lot of reasons to think the FCC is in need of radical overhaul, and one should be very reluctant to dismiss people calling for reform without any evidence they are causing any harm.
You can find numerous examples of vertical applications keeping otherwise very obsolete and uneconomical hardware alive. But, on aggregate, vertical applications never saved a computer system from falling into obscurity.
The increasing use of Web front-ends to applications further reduces friction. As long as a compatible browser is available, the OS or processor doesn't matter.
The article leaves DRM, and the wider issue of "trusted" computing off the table.
"Trusted" computing turns your personal computer into something that you no longer fully own. That reduces the value of your PC. Currently, the only way to avoid having this happen is to use open source software.
While it may be true that FOSS cannot "win" the game, most games are lost, not won. This is especially true in business. The brilliant win is much rarer than the screwing up and losing.
By embracing the content publishers too closely and enthusiastically pursuing "trusted" computing, Microsoft may be choosing a losing path.
Multiman Publishing, a company Schilling apparently owns a large part of, publishes a lineup of strategy games. I think they acquired most of them from Avalon Hill. These are the kinds of games played with cardboard counters on hex-tiled maps.
Nah... "No food, no shelter, no monkey butlers. This island is a death hole."
You put your finger on it: Need to get around a big code base in a hurry? Suck it into Eclipse CDT and find things in a hurry. If you can build and debug it you can let breakpoint the main parts of the code and take a guided tour. Everyone can be productive once they are comfy in their own kustom krafted edit/build/debug environment. But if you don't need customization, you will get more contributors if you lower the barriers to entry.
The simple answer is that this scenario won't happen. It is ridiculous.
So what does getting this into a Business Week article accomplish (apart from selling copies of BW, which always gets a boost from companies like Microsoft on the cover)?
It's called "positioning:"
It suggests management could turn a few financial knobs and create a ton of shareholder value.
It creates an artificial boogie man in the form of extreme changes that will never happen, so when the financial knobs get adjusted it is seen as very conservative.
It paints Microsoft as a kind of "sleeping giant."
The real question for Microsoft is "Why did you stop using the 'creative destruction' model of delivering customer value?" Microsoft used be the terror of the technology business by putting workstation, minicomputer, and mainframe capabilities into PCs. Now they cosy up to Hollywood instead of being disruptive, and they wonder why the old magic no longer works.
Microsoft is dong some things right, but these follow the established model: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server will replace PBXs. Big old expensive machines out, Windows servers in. If Microsoft was that disruptive to the media businesses, then they would have their groove back.
To paint Richard Stallman as a radical is simply incorrect. He is not trying to change reality, he sees it as it is: Compiling a higher level language to machine code or intermediate language was never designed to be a good way of protecting intellectual property, and, not surprisingly, it isn't.
Stallman sees the consequence: attempting to obscure what your computer is doing is futile and/or harmful. Everything else follows from that. You need different licenses, different business models, etc.
I have also never known Richard Stallman to be against making a buck.
It's going to take time in geological scale for any lead to get out of the glass it is part of. Considering vitrification is a way of getting radwaste out of the environment for an immensely long time, why are we worrying about leaded glass? The only worry is to keep it OUT of the recycling stream so you don't get it in glass intended for food, and, even then it is unlikely to go anywhere.
In some places it is still very common to park strollers outside a cafe or shop. No, these places (e.g. Italy, where purse-snatching is a sport) are not crime-free paradises. It's just that people are more rational: A baby just isn't likely to be stolen, and people have the restraint to mind their own business.
Which makes all the "it's for emergency use" stuff seem silly. It's just a phone! A cheap prepaid phone with some minutes costs $100. If you spent $100 on a nice tennis racquet for an 8 year old, you would not restrict its use. It's a phone, call someone, if you feel like it.
"You have no privacy, get over it." - Scott McNealy
Although McNealy spent a lot of time and ink explaining his point of view, and claiming he was taken out of context, he never backed off that statement. In fact, he clarifies this way "If there were no audit trails and no fingerprints, there would be a lot more crime in this world. Audit trails deter lots of criminal activity. So all I'm suggesting, given that we all have ID cards anyhow, is to use the biometric and other forms of authentication that are way more powerful and way more accurate than the garbage we use today."
The part that is wrong about this is that audit trails are for government and corporate operations, to make sure they are honest and within the law, and within the bounds of their investors' and constituents contracts. Applying the same controls to individuals is oppressive, and McNealy should not have been surprised to find out many people objected to his view.
The Electoral College has a function: It is a firewall between states that may have corrupt or defective elections. If you think voting machines can be hacked, or that illegal voting happens in larger numbers than generally reported, you should be against subverting or eliminating the Electoral College.
So now, instead of a Baathist dictatorship, we have Iran's secret services running the Shia side of a civil war in Iraq, and a society that appears to be more Islamist than before. How's that workin' out for us?
As bad as Iraq used to be, it is possible that it is worse now, and will get worse still. One very possible outcome is that part of a divided Iraq becomes a client-state of Iran, no matter what we do, or how much we continue to spend doing it.
Looking back from today, Windows 95 looks like a hack, and not in a good way.
But it was a tremendous accomplishment. At the time, Apple was adrift and Windows 3.1 sucked and was looking very old. In that environment, Windows 95 provided a pretty good alternative to Apple: A usable desktop, A 32 bit API, a decent class library, good developer tools, darn good hardware detection, even for the many devices for which it had to be ad hoc.
Or look at it this way: Windows 2000 was a "better" OS, but normal end-users could not install it and run it. Without Windows 95, Microsoft would have left the field open for Apple or some other alternative.
Toyota makes hundreds of thousands to millions of every product. So the process for making a Corolla can be lavishly studied and planned, and painstakingly measured and refined. Microsoft doesn't have a problem in their factories. Google up "software factory"
Very few software processes are repeatable over even a dozen iterations, which isn't enough to refine that process. In a project with hundreds of non-repeatable development tasks, you end up banging many round pegs into process square holes.
Now, if the Debian project managers were told to write specs for all n-thousand of these modules, and then told "deliver these modules so we can have the next 'eager beaver' release," then you'd be looking at a concerted effort.
You have answered youself: TFA asks if a project the size of Windows in controllable. In an environment where the tone is set by Steve Ballmer the answer sure looks like "No." Maybe "Hell no."
TFA also states Windows has 50 layers and circular dependencies. Linux has complex version and interface dependencies, too. But, evidently, the Windows dependencies are hairy enough to flummox 2000 smart people working in "concert" while Linux gets by with only a handful or people working in the same place at the same time and a much simpler process.
That is, Linux has better modularity and less process.
That points to the depth of the problem at Microsoft: They will have to change almost everything about how Windows is made in order to get a different result:
They have to stop telling developers to "do or die." Has that ever happened in the entire course of Linux development? Probably not. It's something that software project management can do without.
They have to get strong product management that knows which features are actually important, so you don't get that "do or die" message being sent to teams that are making things that don't add that much value.
They have to decouple development more: Why on Earth do you need to have 2000 people working in concert on any software project? That's a bug, not a feature.
They have to un-layer their management structure. 11 layers? That's ridiculous for a software company.
There is no one prescription for success. Apple succeeds by having very strong product management, so they know which features are actually important to the end user. Linux succeeds by having no product management at all, and having to adapt process to the practical constraints of being FOSS. Microsoft is stuck in the middle: Not enough product management strength to know which parts really deserve a "do or die" effort, and so much process, interdependency, and management layers that any of the 500 product managers Microsoft already employs that are smart enough to make these decisions can't possibly put them into effect.
I can cite two examples of a "network effect," where FOSS has improved commercial products. One example involves Apple.
1. Embedded Linux has a huge growth rate in mobile handsets and other embedded applications, most of which are big commercial product development projects. These projects benefit from widely available experience with Linux kernel building. Anyone with a spare old PC and the time to read an O'Reilly book (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/belinuxsys/)can get into configuring and building embedded Linux kernels and persuse and modify source code as much as they like. Contrast this with what it would take for you to get into porting Symbian, or even VxWorks.
2. The Web browser in the Nokia E61 (and probably many upcoming Nokia handsets) is based on WebKit: http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/ This means Nokia customers will benefit from having the same HTML engine and Javascript engine as in Konquerer and Safari.
So Linux users may or may not "care" about FOSS, but the elements of the value chain bringing Linux-based and other products that include FOSS certainly do care, and so should Apple. In fact I think the customers will begin to care quite a bit.
If Apple doesn't do all they can to cultivate a FOSS community around MacOS, they are missing a trick. Even if they triple their market share based on iPod users switching, that's still an 8:1 ratio (or worse) of Windows to MacOS in market share. Apple can't afford to stumble the way Sun did in their relations to the FOSS community.
The real reason online games are growing is freedom: No restrictions based on the size of the company. No ESRB. No Wal-Mart decency standards. No industry self-censorship. No distributors and publishers colluding with the bluenoses. No laws banning violence or sexual content. And, if such laws were to appear, the games would move to jurisdictions where they could not be shut down.
Freedom of expression isn't just a nice ideological point, it's profitable.
As you conveniently point out, Iran could lob a missile into Europe. The vast majority of European countries only protect their head of state with an armored limosine and a few guards. In most countries, legislators, provincial governors, and bureaucrats commute to work like you and me. Will our bunkered bureaucrats save us from chaos that hangs over Europe, or do these European countries just have a better sense of proportion?