Depends on how its structured and where exactly you're at within the company.
The folks I work for has roughly 100,000+ employees, but as the sysadmin for one of the R&D labs, I'm given some very wide latitude. In exchange, I have to be a lot more flexible on lots of aspects than the guys who keep the production servers/network/etc going. IT's a trade-off, but one that I truly enjoy.
I can't hide behind policy to keep my schedule sane as a downside, in spite of working for a company whose production IT policies practically straddle the phrase "anal retentive". Then again, if I want to switch from one tech/protocol/etc to something else, as long as it doesn't disturb the developers and engineers, I'm free to do it (within reason, naturally - e.g. if it plugs into the corp network, it adheres to corp standards as seen from those interfaces, etc).
Even in the biggest, most soulless corporations, you can sometimes find yourself a place in it that not only lets you thrive, but a place where you are encouraged to.
Big company == shedloads of workstations with shedloads of not-too-intelligent computer users.
Aside from IT efforts to clean up (or at least keep their heads above water), the percentages would likely compare favorably with the home user population at large, methinks. Sometimes (like ferinstance the company I work for) can be outright anal about security (custom images, email that's filtered nine ways from Sunday, etc), and yet about once a month scans will pop up someone who has been bit with the latest variant of (insert malware here). To their credit, the guys here remove it often within minutes of detection- never seen one last more than a couple of hours. (not just saying that because I happen to be a sysadmin there, seriously... the user-end guys are anal about that sort of thing, and if they weren't the network guys would happily shut off the offending port @ the switch to get the user's attention).
I suspect that prices will begin to come down once two things happen:
1) iTMS gets some actual competition at the same ease-of-use level, yet maintain complete interoperability with it. It wouldn't take much technically to rig up a competing app that runs across platforms and make it sync tunes in and out of the iPod (gtkpod can almost do this now in Linux, I think?) - the interoperability part is the kicker, however... I don't see Apple making that easy by any stretch.
2) DRM finally dies in music firmware (or at least obviates it, depending on the implementation of #1 above), once and for all, allowing freely transferrable music... and on its way down, I believe that the last hangers-on to DRM (Hello, MSFT?) will forcibly drive down their prices (even at a loss) just to stay competitive. I could (almost... almost!) see MSFT making the Zune itself 100% DRM-free at some time just as a last gasp to keep it alive as well. Yes, I know about SanDisk and etc... but they haven't managed to make the same name and ubiquity for themselves, and don't have nearly the marketing budgets.
Sure - as soon as you want to let us know how much music Apple produces and sells...
(not trying to be smarmy or anything, but seriously - Jobs, Apple et al have been talking about making music DRM-free... hasn't said jack about software or hardware. I'll take any step in the right direction --no matter how small or niche-y it may be-- over none at all, y'know?)
I had personally, in 1999, had to go in and call Texas Instruments specifically to special-order a logic board for an ailing TI-931 terminal (early 80's model). I'm betting it's still there, right next to the old COMBAT 300-baud modem they used to call in their accounting sheets to Ford Motor Company every night.
(Then again, I was living in my hometown in Northwest Arkansas at the time, so draw your conclusions from that too...)
Personally, I don't see why MS would ever bother using a Linux kernel; it doesn't provide them much technical benefit.
Then again, the NT microkernel seems a bit overstressed for what it's being pushed to do in Vista, and it's starting to show... badly. Two versions from now, they're going to have to replace it with something... 'cause what they got now simply isn't going to cut the mustard (well, unless they up the minimum HW requirements to an 8-core box + 16GB of RAM + four SLI-chained vidcards...)
That said, I do agree that it prolly won't be Linux - MSFT will most likely snag the latest *BSD kernel (one that has no GPL encumbrance) and lock it down good and hard. Then they'll build the world's ugliest set of wrappers and APIs for it, then call the results "innovation".
I realize that it ain't exactly enterprise-grade server type stuff (no dual power supplies, dedicated SCSI/SAS hot-swap backplane, etc etc), but an 8-core Mac with lots o' RAM and a ton of HDD space RAIDed out a bit is likely to be way cheaper than what the likes of HP and Dell are gonna charge for this sucker once they spec a rackmount box to wrap around it (I wonder how this critter and the 8-core Mac stack up against each other, anyway?)
But then, who knows? Maybe the SME market might put some pressure on Dell and HP, pointing at the Mac while doing it. (I know, I know... but seriously - rEFIt for booting, a solid Linux distro like CentOS, and a couple of PCI-X cards, and you've got a full on server for most small/medium biz needs. Chuck in AppleCare for (most) warranty stuff, and a small business can do the same computing horsepower for a whole hell of a lot less than they otherwise could afford, IIRC).
1) So, who does the development costs? The operators? With the iPhone, development is pretty much already supplied by third parties (a'la Blackberry again), as well as an existing developer mindshare that is large enough to not have the troubles and barrier-to-entry that a new mobile OS would have to face.
2) Network card and gear makers fell all over themselves to make their products "Novell Compatible" throughout the 1990's to support IPX/SPX - to the exclusion of NetBIOS/NetBEUI (MSFT's LanManager preference protocol) in most cases. In fact, Microsoft was forced to come up with the NDIS subsystem in Windows to compensate for that.
3) Perhaps not the MSNTV per se, but yeah... Microsoft has not been known for business acumen lately.
1) At the end of the day, operators can say whatever they want, but in reality they prolly couldn't care less so long as they can transfer all the heavy tech support to someone else (like, say, Apple) when/if things go wonky, and the level 1 tech script doesn't fix it (see also Blackberry. As example: When T-Mobile doesn't know what to do with it after asking if you've reset the critter and re-did the Enterprise Activation on it, they pass you straight on to RIM's tech support).
2) Vodafone can 'declare' whatever they want; there was once a time when Novell patently refused to include (or even accomodate) TCP/IP into Netware. Seen any massive IPX/SPX networks being built lately?;)
3) "And Microsoft wont make a "ZunePhone." " - Two years ago, you could've just as confidently said "Microsoft won't make an iPod-like device". Oh, and this may indeed say otherwise in either case: http://news.google.com/news?q=zune%20phone (link supplied by a fellow poster in this very thread;) ).
3a) Competitors using the same base product won't matter... Microsoft bought Peachtree in spite of the hordes of Windows-only Small/Medium Biz accounting software on the market; yet for some odd reason that hadn't driven the accountant masses to using non-Windows solutions, and Quicken hasn't exactly dried up and blown away, either. You also forget that Microsoft still sells MSNTV's, so in a way they do sell "PC" computers (albeit crippled and limited ones...)
OTOH, they do know that the more iPhones that get bought, the less they'll make in 'doze-based cell phone OS sales...and in the same market niches where Microsoft makes it's own money when it comes to the things.
Since (IIRC) no one outside of Apple has even come close to actually using an iPhone for anything at all, let alone for business purposes, it'd be impossible to tell if/what the things actually do business-wise, let alone if they do them well.
I can grok the bit about being a part of a global market, but why the quick assumption that 'no no noes, those nasty ol' Chineses are STEALING all their Vistas!'?
I mean, lookit from this angle: There are ~1000 apps that work as advertised in Vista, and that's from Microsoft's own mouth (mentioned earlier this week @/. ). Couple this with the fact that the Chinese language versions prolly have far, far, far less (almost certainly takes time to convert stuff over for language concerns). Now, top it off with the ungodly price of the thing at relative economy - it would be like you or me buying a decent used car (or you spending, say... $10k).
Conclusion? Now you have a perfectly credible reason for the mere speck of a market share for Vista at this time.
I mean, if they can make the Zune sales look like an iPod killer (e.g. "we're the #2 selling hard-drive based digital music player in the 30GB range! we pwnz0rs!!!!1!"), Microsoft is liable to be nearly orgasmic with delight in describing Vista's position as the "top selling multi-GB-sized DirectX10 inclusive DRM-based GUI-based OS" in China...
...real cool trick there, slick: Then I'd get a barrage of yellow banners claiming I need a plugin (could be a new JRE version, could be this MS thingy, could be...?) At least as it stands now, flash can installed, used when needed (on certain sites, but not on others), thus filtered at whim, yet I still get notification of relevant plugins, etc etc.
So, you were saying something about "knowledgable"... ?;)
Great... just great. Now there's TWO variants of flashing crap that I have to filter out of my browser.
On the plus side, if the MSFT version is Windows-only, I suspect we'll all have a brand new reason to persuade folks to abandon the OS for Linux/OSX/(and yes)*BSD after this little battle gets done...
There are many 3D/CG apps out there which come in one version alone; one does not simply shift a workflow overnight. I keep an old Win2k instance (under Virtual PC) around on my PowerMac in case I come across an old file I want to bring into a current project (it's easier to open VPC, fire up Rhinoceros, load the old.3dm file, then export it to.obj - than it would be to completely rebuild a an old proprietary-formatted NURBS-based high polycount-equivalent mesh from scratch). I realize you newbie types aren't familiar with such things, but trust me - it happens.
Finally? If someone coughs up the cash to buy a Mac, then fuck you - he or she is a Mac User, and I for one am more than happy to help any of 'em transit to using OSX primarily when/if they're ready. Same with Linux; if they took the time to install it and learn to do things on it, I don't give a flying shit if they have Crossover, Win4Lin, Xen, Cedega, or old-school WINE running some (or even most) of the apps they still want and/or need... at least they're willing to make the effort, which is a damned sight better than the majority out there.
In short - your bullshit elitist attitude is not welcome. You should've posted AC.
If an ISP starts doing any company (or cartel's) bidding, they no longer can claim to be neutral for content. This means that if so much as one child porn images streaks across an ISP's wires or servers, they can be credibly liable. After all, they actively prohibit copyright infringement, so why can't they stop or prevent the commission of a real criminal (or even tortious) act? While I doubt that criminal prosecutors would take that to heart, I do know that it would very likely leave a participating ISP quite defenseless to any civil suit that comes along naming them as a defendant...
* A lot of us don't trust Microsoft to wipe their noses correctly, let alone store our data (Linux, OSX, etc...) To be fair, you did qualify the statement I'm addressing that to, but in all honesty, the basis of trust differs for the app.
Ferinstance, I trust my credit union's webapps because 1) I already trust the company with my money, and 2) if they hose it up, they are legally bound to recompense me for any losses incurred and proven to be their fault (and if they don't or can't due to bankruptcy or such, the FDIC/NCUA/etc will to an extent).
OTOH, if I ran a business, I damned sure wouldn't trust anyone who is not me w/ proprietary information. In such cases, a strict control (even in-house) of such data is paramount. Also, at least if it's local, there's no one else to blame but me & my employees if there's loss (and not an accounting error in Accounts Payable that caused a check to be late causing cutoff, or the webapp company taking a nosedive, or etc). Also, who do I go after if I discover proprietary info that I had on a webapp server had been leaked to a competitor? Now there's one more avenue I'd have to check and prove/disprove. It'd be PITA enough with checking/enforcing against the avenues that are present locally.
Finally, the webapp company is just as prone to getting compromised as my own computers, and possibly even moreso considering the economies of scale, aggregation, and bandwidth.
That said, I think there are niches and circumstances in which webapps would easily supplant local apps: You could use them as 'escrow' apps (e.g. you and someone else go into partnership, and you keep your common data on a common 3rd-party's server). You could also use it to keep lightly-secured data common to all travelling salescritters (contact info, pooled lead lists, certain other types of CRM/ERP data, etc).
In short, I'd never be fool enough to chuck everything into the 'webapp' basket. I'd also not want to ignore the potential benefits that come with using webapps, either.
Yeah, and I'll admit this is a big reason why I voted Republican in 2000: I saw the writing on the wall with the way the Democrats were cozying up to the RIAA.
I can't say that the results are quite what I hoped.
If you didn't know *for a fact* in 2000 that a vote for Bush was a vote for misusing an attack on the US as an excuse to invade Iraq then you have no fucking business voting. It's a responsibility you ignorant moron, not just something to do.
Damn - did you sneak into your dad's Slashdot account or something? He's gonna be awfully pissed at you when he finds out...
Show of hands, folks - who else in here could've even hoped to have thought that the impending events of 9/11 or the war @ Iraq was known "for a fact" to the average US citizen in 2000? Anybody? Just the frothing partisan fellow I'm replying to, then?
Your ignorance makes you *directly* responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
By that goofball logic, I certainly hope you had never voted for Carter (East Timor, Iran), Clinton (Somalia, Bosnia, inaction towards Rwanda), Bush Sr. (Gulf War I), Reagan (Beirut, Nicaraugua, Grenada), Kennedy (Cuba, Vietnam), Johnson (Vietnam), Nixon (Ditto) or anyone in Congress during, oh, 1975-76 (again, Ditto, except this time refusing financial aid to S. Vietnam, causing their fall to the Vietcong, which in turn emboldened Pol Pot...).
Only a flaming asshat with an ideological axe to grind could possibly sit there and spew that much illogical bile... get a grip already.
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The folks I work for has roughly 100,000+ employees, but as the sysadmin for one of the R&D labs, I'm given some very wide latitude. In exchange, I have to be a lot more flexible on lots of aspects than the guys who keep the production servers/network/etc going. IT's a trade-off, but one that I truly enjoy.
I can't hide behind policy to keep my schedule sane as a downside, in spite of working for a company whose production IT policies practically straddle the phrase "anal retentive". Then again, if I want to switch from one tech/protocol/etc to something else, as long as it doesn't disturb the developers and engineers, I'm free to do it (within reason, naturally - e.g. if it plugs into the corp network, it adheres to corp standards as seen from those interfaces, etc).
Even in the biggest, most soulless corporations, you can sometimes find yourself a place in it that not only lets you thrive, but a place where you are encouraged to.
Aside from IT efforts to clean up (or at least keep their heads above water), the percentages would likely compare favorably with the home user population at large, methinks. Sometimes (like ferinstance the company I work for) can be outright anal about security (custom images, email that's filtered nine ways from Sunday, etc), and yet about once a month scans will pop up someone who has been bit with the latest variant of (insert malware here). To their credit, the guys here remove it often within minutes of detection- never seen one last more than a couple of hours. (not just saying that because I happen to be a sysadmin there, seriously... the user-end guys are anal about that sort of thing, and if they weren't the network guys would happily shut off the offending port @ the switch to get the user's attention).
That's easy... let the multipurpose device /dev/null manage it.
1) iTMS gets some actual competition at the same ease-of-use level, yet maintain complete interoperability with it. It wouldn't take much technically to rig up a competing app that runs across platforms and make it sync tunes in and out of the iPod (gtkpod can almost do this now in Linux, I think?) - the interoperability part is the kicker, however... I don't see Apple making that easy by any stretch.
2) DRM finally dies in music firmware (or at least obviates it, depending on the implementation of #1 above), once and for all, allowing freely transferrable music... and on its way down, I believe that the last hangers-on to DRM (Hello, MSFT?) will forcibly drive down their prices (even at a loss) just to stay competitive. I could (almost... almost!) see MSFT making the Zune itself 100% DRM-free at some time just as a last gasp to keep it alive as well. Yes, I know about SanDisk and etc... but they haven't managed to make the same name and ubiquity for themselves, and don't have nearly the marketing budgets.
(not trying to be smarmy or anything, but seriously - Jobs, Apple et al have been talking about making music DRM-free... hasn't said jack about software or hardware. I'll take any step in the right direction --no matter how small or niche-y it may be-- over none at all, y'know?)
I had personally, in 1999, had to go in and call Texas Instruments specifically to special-order a logic board for an ailing TI-931 terminal (early 80's model). I'm betting it's still there, right next to the old COMBAT 300-baud modem they used to call in their accounting sheets to Ford Motor Company every night.
(Then again, I was living in my hometown in Northwest Arkansas at the time, so draw your conclusions from that too...)
Then again, the NT microkernel seems a bit overstressed for what it's being pushed to do in Vista, and it's starting to show... badly. Two versions from now, they're going to have to replace it with something... 'cause what they got now simply isn't going to cut the mustard (well, unless they up the minimum HW requirements to an 8-core box + 16GB of RAM + four SLI-chained vidcards...)
That said, I do agree that it prolly won't be Linux - MSFT will most likely snag the latest *BSD kernel (one that has no GPL encumbrance) and lock it down good and hard. Then they'll build the world's ugliest set of wrappers and APIs for it, then call the results "innovation".
But then, who knows? Maybe the SME market might put some pressure on Dell and HP, pointing at the Mac while doing it. (I know, I know... but seriously - rEFIt for booting, a solid Linux distro like CentOS, and a couple of PCI-X cards, and you've got a full on server for most small/medium biz needs. Chuck in AppleCare for (most) warranty stuff, and a small business can do the same computing horsepower for a whole hell of a lot less than they otherwise could afford, IIRC).
2) Network card and gear makers fell all over themselves to make their products "Novell Compatible" throughout the 1990's to support IPX/SPX - to the exclusion of NetBIOS/NetBEUI (MSFT's LanManager preference protocol) in most cases. In fact, Microsoft was forced to come up with the NDIS subsystem in Windows to compensate for that.
3) Perhaps not the MSNTV per se, but yeah... Microsoft has not been known for business acumen lately.
2) Vodafone can 'declare' whatever they want; there was once a time when Novell patently refused to include (or even accomodate) TCP/IP into Netware. Seen any massive IPX/SPX networks being built lately? ;)
3) "And Microsoft wont make a "ZunePhone." " - Two years ago, you could've just as confidently said "Microsoft won't make an iPod-like device". Oh, and this may indeed say otherwise in either case: http://news.google.com/news?q=zune%20phone (link supplied by a fellow poster in this very thread ;) ).
3a) Competitors using the same base product won't matter... Microsoft bought Peachtree in spite of the hordes of Windows-only Small/Medium Biz accounting software on the market; yet for some odd reason that hadn't driven the accountant masses to using non-Windows solutions, and Quicken hasn't exactly dried up and blown away, either. You also forget that Microsoft still sells MSNTV's, so in a way they do sell "PC" computers (albeit crippled and limited ones...)
OTOH, they do know that the more iPhones that get bought, the less they'll make in 'doze-based cell phone OS sales ...and in the same market niches where Microsoft makes it's own money when it comes to the things.
'course, a more likely explanation is that MSFT already has a cell phone OS biz they'd rather keep protected from such things as competition, no?
IOW: Nothing to see here, move along... :)
I can grok the bit about being a part of a global market, but why the quick assumption that 'no no noes, those nasty ol' Chineses are STEALING all their Vistas!'?
I mean, lookit from this angle: There are ~1000 apps that work as advertised in Vista, and that's from Microsoft's own mouth (mentioned earlier this week @ /. ). Couple this with the fact that the Chinese language versions prolly have far, far, far less (almost certainly takes time to convert stuff over for language concerns). Now, top it off with the ungodly price of the thing at relative economy - it would be like you or me buying a decent used car (or you spending, say... $10k).
Conclusion? Now you have a perfectly credible reason for the mere speck of a market share for Vista at this time.
stupid URL-parsing... here: http://adblock.mozdev.org/
So, you were saying something about "knowledgable"... ? ;)
On the plus side, if the MSFT version is Windows-only, I suspect we'll all have a brand new reason to persuade folks to abandon the OS for Linux/OSX/(and yes)*BSD after this little battle gets done...
*snicker*
There are many 3D/CG apps out there which come in one version alone; one does not simply shift a workflow overnight. I keep an old Win2k instance (under Virtual PC) around on my PowerMac in case I come across an old file I want to bring into a current project (it's easier to open VPC, fire up Rhinoceros, load the old .3dm file, then export it to .obj - than it would be to completely rebuild a an old proprietary-formatted NURBS-based high polycount-equivalent mesh from scratch). I realize you newbie types aren't familiar with such things, but trust me - it happens.
Finally? If someone coughs up the cash to buy a Mac, then fuck you - he or she is a Mac User, and I for one am more than happy to help any of 'em transit to using OSX primarily when/if they're ready. Same with Linux; if they took the time to install it and learn to do things on it, I don't give a flying shit if they have Crossover, Win4Lin, Xen, Cedega, or old-school WINE running some (or even most) of the apps they still want and/or need... at least they're willing to make the effort, which is a damned sight better than the majority out there.
In short - your bullshit elitist attitude is not welcome. You should've posted AC.
If an ISP starts doing any company (or cartel's) bidding, they no longer can claim to be neutral for content. This means that if so much as one child porn images streaks across an ISP's wires or servers, they can be credibly liable. After all, they actively prohibit copyright infringement, so why can't they stop or prevent the commission of a real criminal (or even tortious) act? While I doubt that criminal prosecutors would take that to heart, I do know that it would very likely leave a participating ISP quite defenseless to any civil suit that comes along naming them as a defendant...
* A lot of us don't trust Microsoft to wipe their noses correctly, let alone store our data (Linux, OSX, etc...) To be fair, you did qualify the statement I'm addressing that to, but in all honesty, the basis of trust differs for the app.
Ferinstance, I trust my credit union's webapps because 1) I already trust the company with my money, and 2) if they hose it up, they are legally bound to recompense me for any losses incurred and proven to be their fault (and if they don't or can't due to bankruptcy or such, the FDIC/NCUA/etc will to an extent).
OTOH, if I ran a business, I damned sure wouldn't trust anyone who is not me w/ proprietary information. In such cases, a strict control (even in-house) of such data is paramount. Also, at least if it's local, there's no one else to blame but me & my employees if there's loss (and not an accounting error in Accounts Payable that caused a check to be late causing cutoff, or the webapp company taking a nosedive, or etc). Also, who do I go after if I discover proprietary info that I had on a webapp server had been leaked to a competitor? Now there's one more avenue I'd have to check and prove/disprove. It'd be PITA enough with checking/enforcing against the avenues that are present locally.
Finally, the webapp company is just as prone to getting compromised as my own computers, and possibly even moreso considering the economies of scale, aggregation, and bandwidth.
That said, I think there are niches and circumstances in which webapps would easily supplant local apps: You could use them as 'escrow' apps (e.g. you and someone else go into partnership, and you keep your common data on a common 3rd-party's server). You could also use it to keep lightly-secured data common to all travelling salescritters (contact info, pooled lead lists, certain other types of CRM/ERP data, etc).
In short, I'd never be fool enough to chuck everything into the 'webapp' basket. I'd also not want to ignore the potential benefits that come with using webapps, either.
I can't say that the results are quite what I hoped.
If you didn't know *for a fact* in 2000 that a vote for Bush was a vote for misusing an attack on the US as an excuse to invade Iraq then you have no fucking business voting. It's a responsibility you ignorant moron, not just something to do.
Damn - did you sneak into your dad's Slashdot account or something? He's gonna be awfully pissed at you when he finds out...
Show of hands, folks - who else in here could've even hoped to have thought that the impending events of 9/11 or the war @ Iraq was known "for a fact" to the average US citizen in 2000? Anybody? Just the frothing partisan fellow I'm replying to, then?
Your ignorance makes you *directly* responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.By that goofball logic, I certainly hope you had never voted for Carter (East Timor, Iran), Clinton (Somalia, Bosnia, inaction towards Rwanda), Bush Sr. (Gulf War I), Reagan (Beirut, Nicaraugua, Grenada), Kennedy (Cuba, Vietnam), Johnson (Vietnam), Nixon (Ditto) or anyone in Congress during, oh, 1975-76 (again, Ditto, except this time refusing financial aid to S. Vietnam, causing their fall to the Vietcong, which in turn emboldened Pol Pot...).
Only a flaming asshat with an ideological axe to grind could possibly sit there and spew that much illogical bile... get a grip already.