But understand that it will cause massive unhappiness for the majority of cases where(for example) one's 75 year-old grandmother, who has forgotten her password and can't figure out how she phrased the answer to the security question, is about to permanently lose access to the last 5 years of her grand-children's emails.
The trouble is that the security appropriate for someone's professional e-mail accounts and security appropriate to the occasional elderly e-mail user are so far apart that having a single policy is guaranteed to serve one of the two market segments very badly.
Shh. Persuade advertisers of that and we lose Google, Facebook, all the news sites, and essentially every non-pay site on the web.
On the other hand, perhaps a $10/month subscription to Google along with another $5 for Slashdot, $5 for Ars Technical, $5 for the Atlantic, $3-4 for each of my web comics I read, and few bucks for each of the blogs I read etc. would be a reasonable substitution for not having to ignore ads.
But it would certainly suck for anyone who doesn't have an extra $100 or so a month to spend on their Internet content. (And cross-site links would be pretty dead.)
The old days are dead. With some very few (but noted) exceptions, if someone is paying more than a few bucks for the privilege of having me read their content, it's moderately likely their content isn't worth reading. Almost any site that's even half popular needs advertising to pay for the bandwidth, to say nothing of the cost of content creation and site upkeep.
I don't know about the actual amount of piracy on the Android, but I was amused to hear a salesman point out to a potential customer that one of the advantages of the Android is that you don't have to pay for your apps unlike the iPhone...
The article generalizes horribly. But, as far as horrible generalizations go, it's reasonably accurate as whole. Just don't apply to any *specific* case.
Of course, the idea that men taking on responsibilities and relationships makes them more productive members of society is only about as old as society itself. And yes, of course many young people can be moved into productive occupations because there's some generalized social payback there as well. But realistically speaking, a lot fewer men are going to be swayed by the subtleties of a sense of accomplishment at being socially useful than will be swayed by being directly useful to someone they value highly (spouse and/or children).
And, since there's no prescriptive solution to the problem of idle young men, the article is reasonably accurate, and totally useless.
Considering the fairly clear historical linkage between an overpopulation of young men and war, there are many who believe that China and India may well suffer violent social upheaval and a much higher chance of war. Here's hoping it doesn't involve nuclear weapons.
(The irony of producing too many males really starts when one considers that (generalizing terribly) women are probably better adapted for living in the modern world.)
Okay, two things - the view as a stock holder (in which case you are quite correct), and the view of what makes a healthy long-term company. The two are only somewhat connected. As a stock, MS sucks. It's an ideal income trust vehicle (lower expenses and all income goes out as dividends) as really, it's a utility. However, management wants to believe it can find *huge* success somewhere new and throws a lot of money down the drain to do it.
The truth is most companies only get one big winning idea. Microsoft got two (Windows + Office). Expecting a third, when MS's chances of success on each gamble aren't much better than J Random company (and possibly lower), is a pipe-dream. Better to invest in 10,000 companies who spend a million dollars, than in 100 MS schemes each costing a billion.
(At least a company that invests a million can claim victory if it makes 10 million. Companies like Apple can have fantastic successes that make 25 million and it will be ho-hum and shut it down.)
And yes, Apple is the darling because it's had 5 big ideas come up success: Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. But pretending any company can do that (or that Apple is guaranteed another big idea) is, as always, just a gamble. Why not gamble with a company that has a lot less to lose?
No one wants to say, even Bill Gates, that PCs are a boring commodity, with Microsoft having a virtual monopoly on it. Who the heck wants an interview where the future isn't shiny?
PCs may undergo a gradual decline to maybe 80% of their corporate sales and 60% of their home sales, but that's still a huge profitable market that MS can keep while spending next to nothing on R+D. Microsoft's downfall is not destruction. Perhaps a nice income trust.
And given the competition, PC prices can nudge upward once enough competitors leave the market. It's not like a consumer market= where people will go without rather than pay a little extra. If PCs go back up to being $1K/piece, that's still a minute fraction of worker's salaries.
That's exactly the analogy. IBM *still* owns the mainframe. The only thing that killed IBM (although it changed business models to become very successful today) is that the market itself disappeared.
If you believe that the general purpose PC (I include Macs in this) is going to die, then MS is in trouble. But that's not happening. PC sales are stagnant, after all, it's already owns the world, but the PC in business (and a good number of homes) is pretty much like a utility like oil or electricity. It's not going away.
The phones and pads may supplement, but we're not seeing any substantial replacement.
The Price/Earnings ratio is irrelevant to whether a company is doomed. In terms of whether a company is viable, income and cash flow are what really matters. Having a low P/E just means that the gamblers on the stock market don't think they're going to be doubling their money on you. And they won't with MS.
The fact that MS is not a growth stock probably means it's a *safer* bet than the latest rocket up (and then often enough, down).
(Sorry, but I lived through the dot-com bust. The idea that the stock market is anything more than a guess about the double derivative of expectations about what some other sucker will pay down the line is long dead. If you're expecting the stock market to actually provide an in-depth valuation about what a tech company is really worth, you're in for some deep disappointment.)
Of course they use a lot of different technology. But pretty much every single employee get a PC with Windows and Office. Name any other company that's pretty much guaranteed to get paid for every corporate employee in North America. More to the point, almost all the high-end infrastructure has competitors. You can replace Oracle with DB2 or a dozen others. You can replace one flavor of Unix with another.
Nothing replaces Windows and Office. And unlike other infrastructure, you pay for it for every employee.
Well, given MS profit has been steadily rising, they aren't even hurting.
And even if MS never developed another thing, they'd still be making truckloads of money on Windows 7 and Office, and businesses basically have to upgrade when support runs out. Most companies with 10,000+ PCs are soon moving to 7, with another truckload of money for MS.
Basically, unless the PC dies, MS is in good shape financially. Technically, they've lost their mojo, but honestly, does it matter? You only have to be brilliant if you don't have every company shoveling money at you for every employee they hire (who needs a PC with Windows and Office).
Every dead company was eaten by a competitor, but honestly, can you imagine the PC dying in business?
I get it, but where's the analogy to the iPhone. It's not as if another mainstream OS and office package is eating Microsoft's lunch.
They'll own the PC until the end of time, and unless you are actually predicting the end of PC (which is going nowhere for most of the world and *especially* business), Microsoft is going to be around for a long, long time.
No, they haven't got any real winners in the pipeline, but then, owning the PC market, they scarcely need it to be a viable company. They just aren't the technical and stock market darlings of yore. But then, neither are most companies that produce a dependable, but not vastly growing stream of income.
If they do, corporate America is dead. MS is baked into its IT DNA. Competitors might score brand new technologies, but consumer tech is not going to replace the base IT infrastructure that supports 99.9% of all businesses. If MS mysteriously died, most IT divisions would collapse shortly thereafter.
Yeah, right on the edge of frigging bankruptcy. At this rate, within 5 years they'll be losing... well, almost losing... okay, making money, well, if you want to get technical, making oodles of money hand over fist (just not as much as Apple.)
The stock market doesn't like any stock that doesn't look like it will account for 3/4 of the world output in 5 years. It's like a casino - who wants to play a game where your payout is between 0.9 and 1.2 of what you put in?
Most companies would beg to have 1/100th of Microsoft's revenue stream, and that revenue stream isn't going anywhere fast. If MS fails absolutely everything, it will still be 20 years before it's actually losing money.
There is no other tech company even a quarter as secure as MS. Apple is exciting, but it's a consumer electronics company now, and their longevity is.... questionable. Apple's been able to throw many cards in the air and have them all turn into aces, and I am in awe of them, but a few big missteps and Apple's 1/10th its current size.
Windows and Office, on the other hand, are a license to print a steady stream of money. Not stock-market exciting because revenues aren't doubling every year, but rock steady.
I'd buy MS an income trust, no problem. It just needs to realize it's Exxon, not Apple.
I understand the need to weave a narrative where the winners all deserved their success and the losers all deserved their failures, but reality is rather more nuanced. (The need for winners to be good guys and losers to be lazy seems a strongly American phenomenon.)
(1) Almost all major tech companies *do* try lots of different products outside of their core competencies. Almost all fail. As long as you don't notice Microsoft's hundreds of failed innovative product attempts, it's easy to claim their sitting on their backside. Also remember that outside of one's area of specialization, the odds of success are pretty much the same as anyone's: 1 in 1,000. (2) RIM was busy serving their customers, and more to the point, probably serve their customers better than any competitor. They're having their lunch eaten because their market is ceasing to exist, being replaced by inferior (for their market's very particular uses) technology. Being able to play Angry Birds is NOT an improvement to businesses or governments productivity. Unfortunately for RIM, it turns out company productivity is not the final metric for phone selection...
The point is that while the tech winners inevitably are very hard working, most of the losers are as well, but failed to have the butterfly on the other side of the globe flap their wings the right way. It's amazing how these narratives are always clear only with hindsight.
Company A wasted their money and reputation n projects outside their core competencies and deserved to fail! Company A failed to anticipate the changing markets and deserved to fail!
Very, very few companies ever get more than one big success, and that's one more success than you or I have ever had. No need to disrespect them because they failed to get a second. (Or in MS's case, a fourth (DOS, Windows, Office)).
Um, the choice isn't theirs (the engineers) - it's the company's.
Moreover, just about everything you've posted there are reasons to NOT give out the source code!
(I apologize if this is meant to be humorous - if so, I'm missing it.)
when I see a concept in action in actual hardware..I could figure anything out.
Allowing you to produce better products that will help make the original company's products less attractive.
These people, having gained lots of knowledge and insight from their experimentation and other related studies, would be much better positioned and more confident about going into the business of creating their own state-of-the-art video cards.
Come on, this has to be humor. You're saying companies should release the source code to help others start new businesses that will destroy them?
I think the video card market could really use some more competitors at this juncture.
Thus with more competition profit margins decline even further, helping enrage the stock owners. Are you sure you're promoting open-source?
If NVidia and ATI/AMD truly are confident in having the best engineers, processes, etc, they will surely continue to dominate this market
Companies *aren't* certain they'll continue to dominate (at least the ones that last - there's nothing as doomed as a company that is certain they'll retain their leadership status). You're basically saying idiots will release source code.
the customers would get better and cheaper accelerators in the bargain.
Um, that's likely *bad* for the companies trying to make money selling video cards...
There needs to be new competitors entering the market, and there certainly will be sooner or later.
and again...
ATI/Nvidia may have the upper hand at this present moment, but other technological advances, computing in general, simulation and manufacturing capabilities, etc, have caused us to reach a point where much lower end players can now enter the graphics accelerator market and compete successfully.
So the big two should help to speed in their own destruction?
Which of you wants to be the inspiration to future graphics engineers, who will be influenced by your designs and your way of doing things
You don't want to influence you competitors to be more like you, you want to be unique so that customers flock to you alone!
Again, my apologies if this was meant to be humorous.
Nvidia's distinguishing technology and products are not its driver software
What? There's at least as much useful (and reproducible) technology in the drivers as in the hardware. I can pretty much guarantee any open-source drivers would be gone though with a fine-tooth comb for useful information in exactly the fashion that companies purchase and disassemble their competitors products for manufacturing information.
In any half-way competitive industry, if you're competition *isn't* using your open source efforts to improve their own products, they're probably already out of business for a whole host of other blatant stupidities.
That said, in many industries, there isn't a lot of useful information for competitors in the software. Fearing to open-source most general purpose computing is usually pretty foolish. However, high-end video cards is definitely not one of those industries. A lot of money is spent on software R&D innovations and experience to invent or improve algorithms which will happily be taken by the competition to improve their own product.
That's nice for you. Unfortunately most artists actually have a family and have to earn a living. If they want to pursue their art seriously, it has to pay enough to live off of. Hobbyist artists are fine, as are, for example, hobbyist programmers. But having any field confined to only hobbyists will strip away most of its talent.
My (unconfirmed) sources indicate that Hasbro was seriously considering forcing WOTC to kill D&D because 3.5 sales (by then mostly supplements) were making it a niche market that Hasbro has no interest in.
The much maligned Fourth edition may have saved D&D for a few years.
For many larger companies, if it's not selling a kajillion units a year, then close it down and start developing something else that does. Simply making a small but decent profit is not sufficient to keep a product alive.
Let me get this straight: money spent on a 3-sided die is a hilarious "waste", but one hundred times that money spent on fantasy role playing instruction books is not?
Are you sure you ever played D&D?
I don't think I ever met a RP gamer in high school who didn't lavish a few bucks (and often more) on dice and/or a dice bag. Special dice were often a point of pride, even if they were irrelevant. I was constantly trying (and failing) to find uses for my d30.
Is to allow users the flexibility to maximize their productivity in ways that they understand...
and to get fired for negligence when those users, who could not be expected to understand the ramifications of all their actions, cause major damage to the corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
But understand that it will cause massive unhappiness for the majority of cases where(for example) one's 75 year-old grandmother, who has forgotten her password and can't figure out how she phrased the answer to the security question, is about to permanently lose access to the last 5 years of her grand-children's emails.
The trouble is that the security appropriate for someone's professional e-mail accounts and security appropriate to the occasional elderly e-mail user are so far apart that having a single policy is guaranteed to serve one of the two market segments very badly.
Advertising does not work.
Shh. Persuade advertisers of that and we lose Google, Facebook, all the news sites, and essentially every non-pay site on the web.
On the other hand, perhaps a $10/month subscription to Google along with another $5 for Slashdot, $5 for Ars Technical, $5 for the Atlantic, $3-4 for each of my web comics I read, and few bucks for each of the blogs I read etc. would be a reasonable substitution for not having to ignore ads.
But it would certainly suck for anyone who doesn't have an extra $100 or so a month to spend on their Internet content. (And cross-site links would be pretty dead.)
The old days are dead. With some very few (but noted) exceptions, if someone is paying more than a few bucks for the privilege of having me read their content, it's moderately likely their content isn't worth reading. Almost any site that's even half popular needs advertising to pay for the bandwidth, to say nothing of the cost of content creation and site upkeep.
I don't know about the actual amount of piracy on the Android, but I was amused to hear a salesman point out to a potential customer that one of the advantages of the Android is that you don't have to pay for your apps unlike the iPhone...
The article generalizes horribly. But, as far as horrible generalizations go, it's reasonably accurate as whole. Just don't apply to any *specific* case.
Of course, the idea that men taking on responsibilities and relationships makes them more productive members of society is only about as old as society itself. And yes, of course many young people can be moved into productive occupations because there's some generalized social payback there as well. But realistically speaking, a lot fewer men are going to be swayed by the subtleties of a sense of accomplishment at being socially useful than will be swayed by being directly useful to someone they value highly (spouse and/or children).
And, since there's no prescriptive solution to the problem of idle young men, the article is reasonably accurate, and totally useless.
Considering the fairly clear historical linkage between an overpopulation of young men and war, there are many who believe that China and India may well suffer violent social upheaval and a much higher chance of war. Here's hoping it doesn't involve nuclear weapons.
(The irony of producing too many males really starts when one considers that (generalizing terribly) women are probably better adapted for living in the modern world.)
Okay, two things - the view as a stock holder (in which case you are quite correct), and the view of what makes a healthy long-term company. The two are only somewhat connected. As a stock, MS sucks. It's an ideal income trust vehicle (lower expenses and all income goes out as dividends) as really, it's a utility. However, management wants to believe it can find *huge* success somewhere new and throws a lot of money down the drain to do it.
The truth is most companies only get one big winning idea. Microsoft got two (Windows + Office). Expecting a third, when MS's chances of success on each gamble aren't much better than J Random company (and possibly lower), is a pipe-dream. Better to invest in 10,000 companies who spend a million dollars, than in 100 MS schemes each costing a billion.
(At least a company that invests a million can claim victory if it makes 10 million. Companies like Apple can have fantastic successes that make 25 million and it will be ho-hum and shut it down.)
And yes, Apple is the darling because it's had 5 big ideas come up success: Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. But pretending any company can do that (or that Apple is guaranteed another big idea) is, as always, just a gamble. Why not gamble with a company that has a lot less to lose?
No one wants to say, even Bill Gates, that PCs are a boring commodity, with Microsoft having a virtual monopoly on it. Who the heck wants an interview where the future isn't shiny?
PCs may undergo a gradual decline to maybe 80% of their corporate sales and 60% of their home sales, but that's still a huge profitable market that MS can keep while spending next to nothing on R+D. Microsoft's downfall is not destruction. Perhaps a nice income trust.
And given the competition, PC prices can nudge upward once enough competitors leave the market. It's not like a consumer market= where people will go without rather than pay a little extra. If PCs go back up to being $1K/piece, that's still a minute fraction of worker's salaries.
That's exactly the analogy. IBM *still* owns the mainframe. The only thing that killed IBM (although it changed business models to become very successful today) is that the market itself disappeared.
If you believe that the general purpose PC (I include Macs in this) is going to die, then MS is in trouble. But that's not happening. PC sales are stagnant, after all, it's already owns the world, but the PC in business (and a good number of homes) is pretty much like a utility like oil or electricity. It's not going away.
The phones and pads may supplement, but we're not seeing any substantial replacement.
The Price/Earnings ratio is irrelevant to whether a company is doomed. In terms of whether a company is viable, income and cash flow are what really matters. Having a low P/E just means that the gamblers on the stock market don't think they're going to be doubling their money on you. And they won't with MS.
The fact that MS is not a growth stock probably means it's a *safer* bet than the latest rocket up (and then often enough, down).
(Sorry, but I lived through the dot-com bust. The idea that the stock market is anything more than a guess about the double derivative of expectations about what some other sucker will pay down the line is long dead. If you're expecting the stock market to actually provide an in-depth valuation about what a tech company is really worth, you're in for some deep disappointment.)
Of course they use a lot of different technology. But pretty much every single employee get a PC with Windows and Office. Name any other company that's pretty much guaranteed to get paid for every corporate employee in North America. More to the point, almost all the high-end infrastructure has competitors. You can replace Oracle with DB2 or a dozen others. You can replace one flavor of Unix with another.
Nothing replaces Windows and Office. And unlike other infrastructure, you pay for it for every employee.
Well, given MS profit has been steadily rising, they aren't even hurting.
And even if MS never developed another thing, they'd still be making truckloads of money on Windows 7 and Office, and businesses basically have to upgrade when support runs out. Most companies with 10,000+ PCs are soon moving to 7, with another truckload of money for MS.
Basically, unless the PC dies, MS is in good shape financially. Technically, they've lost their mojo, but honestly, does it matter? You only have to be brilliant if you don't have every company shoveling money at you for every employee they hire (who needs a PC with Windows and Office).
Every dead company was eaten by a competitor, but honestly, can you imagine the PC dying in business?
I get it, but where's the analogy to the iPhone. It's not as if another mainstream OS and office package is eating Microsoft's lunch.
They'll own the PC until the end of time, and unless you are actually predicting the end of PC (which is going nowhere for most of the world and *especially* business), Microsoft is going to be around for a long, long time.
No, they haven't got any real winners in the pipeline, but then, owning the PC market, they scarcely need it to be a viable company. They just aren't the technical and stock market darlings of yore. But then, neither are most companies that produce a dependable, but not vastly growing stream of income.
Microsoft Income:
2011 $23.15B
2010 $18.76B
2009 $14.57B
2008 $17.68B
2007 $14.07B
2006 $12.60B
2005 $12.25B
2004 $8.17B
2003 $7.53B
2002 $5.35B
Yeah, no growth. Do even 1% of companies have a 10 year income growth record like that?
If they do, corporate America is dead. MS is baked into its IT DNA. Competitors might score brand new technologies, but consumer tech is not going to replace the base IT infrastructure that supports 99.9% of all businesses. If MS mysteriously died, most IT divisions would collapse shortly thereafter.
And as for MS's profitability:
2011 $23.15B
2010 $18.76B
2009 $14.57B
2008 $17.68B
2007 $14.07B
2006 $12.60B
2005 $12.25B
2004 $8.17B
2003 $7.53B
2002 $5.35B
Yeah, right on the edge of frigging bankruptcy. At this rate, within 5 years they'll be losing... well, almost losing... okay, making money, well, if you want to get technical, making oodles of money hand over fist (just not as much as Apple.)
The stock market doesn't like any stock that doesn't look like it will account for 3/4 of the world output in 5 years. It's like a casino - who wants to play a game where your payout is between 0.9 and 1.2 of what you put in?
I think a better analogy is Exxon. It's sits right in the middle, collecting money.
And yes, any day, all those green technologies are going to bankrupt Exxon :-).
Most companies would beg to have 1/100th of Microsoft's revenue stream, and that revenue stream isn't going anywhere fast. If MS fails absolutely everything, it will still be 20 years before it's actually losing money.
There is no other tech company even a quarter as secure as MS. Apple is exciting, but it's a consumer electronics company now, and their longevity is.... questionable. Apple's been able to throw many cards in the air and have them all turn into aces, and I am in awe of them, but a few big missteps and Apple's 1/10th its current size.
Windows and Office, on the other hand, are a license to print a steady stream of money. Not stock-market exciting because revenues aren't doubling every year, but rock steady.
I'd buy MS an income trust, no problem. It just needs to realize it's Exxon, not Apple.
I understand the need to weave a narrative where the winners all deserved their success and the losers all deserved their failures, but reality is rather more nuanced. (The need for winners to be good guys and losers to be lazy seems a strongly American phenomenon.)
(1) Almost all major tech companies *do* try lots of different products outside of their core competencies. Almost all fail. As long as you don't notice Microsoft's hundreds of failed innovative product attempts, it's easy to claim their sitting on their backside. Also remember that outside of one's area of specialization, the odds of success are pretty much the same as anyone's: 1 in 1,000.
(2) RIM was busy serving their customers, and more to the point, probably serve their customers better than any competitor. They're having their lunch eaten because their market is ceasing to exist, being replaced by inferior (for their market's very particular uses) technology. Being able to play Angry Birds is NOT an improvement to businesses or governments productivity. Unfortunately for RIM, it turns out company productivity is not the final metric for phone selection...
The point is that while the tech winners inevitably are very hard working, most of the losers are as well, but failed to have the butterfly on the other side of the globe flap their wings the right way. It's amazing how these narratives are always clear only with hindsight.
Company A wasted their money and reputation n projects outside their core competencies and deserved to fail! Company A failed to anticipate the changing markets and deserved to fail!
Very, very few companies ever get more than one big success, and that's one more success than you or I have ever had. No need to disrespect them because they failed to get a second. (Or in MS's case, a fourth (DOS, Windows, Office)).
The choice is yours!
Um, the choice isn't theirs (the engineers) - it's the company's.
Moreover, just about everything you've posted there are reasons to NOT give out the source code!
(I apologize if this is meant to be humorous - if so, I'm missing it.)
when I see a concept in action in actual hardware ..I could figure anything out.
Allowing you to produce better products that will help make the original company's products less attractive.
These people, having gained lots of knowledge and insight from their experimentation and other related studies, would be much better positioned and more confident about going into the business of creating their own state-of-the-art video cards.
Come on, this has to be humor. You're saying companies should release the source code to help others start new businesses that will destroy them?
I think the video card market could really use some more competitors at this juncture.
Thus with more competition profit margins decline even further, helping enrage the stock owners. Are you sure you're promoting open-source?
If NVidia and ATI/AMD truly are confident in having the best engineers, processes, etc, they will surely continue to dominate this market
Companies *aren't* certain they'll continue to dominate (at least the ones that last - there's nothing as doomed as a company that is certain they'll retain their leadership status). You're basically saying idiots will release source code.
the customers would get better and cheaper accelerators in the bargain.
Um, that's likely *bad* for the companies trying to make money selling video cards...
There needs to be new competitors entering the market, and there certainly will be sooner or later.
and again...
ATI/Nvidia may have the upper hand at this present moment, but other technological advances, computing in general, simulation and manufacturing capabilities, etc, have caused us to reach a point where much lower end players can now enter the graphics accelerator market and compete successfully.
So the big two should help to speed in their own destruction?
Which of you wants to be the inspiration to future graphics engineers, who will be influenced by your designs and your way of doing things
You don't want to influence you competitors to be more like you, you want to be unique so that customers flock to you alone!
Again, my apologies if this was meant to be humorous.
Nvidia's distinguishing technology and products are not its driver software
What? There's at least as much useful (and reproducible) technology in the drivers as in the hardware. I can pretty much guarantee any open-source drivers would be gone though with a fine-tooth comb for useful information in exactly the fashion that companies purchase and disassemble their competitors products for manufacturing information.
In any half-way competitive industry, if you're competition *isn't* using your open source efforts to improve their own products, they're probably already out of business for a whole host of other blatant stupidities.
That said, in many industries, there isn't a lot of useful information for competitors in the software. Fearing to open-source most general purpose computing is usually pretty foolish. However, high-end video cards is definitely not one of those industries. A lot of money is spent on software R&D innovations and experience to invent or improve algorithms which will happily be taken by the competition to improve their own product.
That's nice for you. Unfortunately most artists actually have a family and have to earn a living. If they want to pursue their art seriously, it has to pay enough to live off of. Hobbyist artists are fine, as are, for example, hobbyist programmers. But having any field confined to only hobbyists will strip away most of its talent.
My (unconfirmed) sources indicate that Hasbro was seriously considering forcing WOTC to kill D&D because 3.5 sales (by then mostly supplements) were making it a niche market that Hasbro has no interest in.
The much maligned Fourth edition may have saved D&D for a few years.
For many larger companies, if it's not selling a kajillion units a year, then close it down and start developing something else that does. Simply making a small but decent profit is not sufficient to keep a product alive.
In fact, "Murphy's Rules" was a collection of comics devoted to the fun of literal interpretation of the rules. I still chuckle when I leaf through.
Let me get this straight: money spent on a 3-sided die is a hilarious "waste", but one hundred times that money spent on fantasy role playing instruction books is not?
Are you sure you ever played D&D?
I don't think I ever met a RP gamer in high school who didn't lavish a few bucks (and often more) on dice and/or a dice bag. Special dice were often a point of pride, even if they were irrelevant. I was constantly trying (and failing) to find uses for my d30.
Given the story about the inability for important cancer research results to be duplicated from a few days ago, those foreigners may just want to check all those research results they've been stealing...
Is to allow users the flexibility to maximize their productivity in ways that they understand...
and to get fired for negligence when those users, who could not be expected to understand the ramifications of all their actions, cause major damage to the corporation.