You'd think if it was so easy to capture RFID, there'd be signs say "Be sure to protect your card" or something. There were plenty of signs everywhere warning you of various laws and dangers.
He ain't kidding, nor naïve either. I was in Malaysia a while back and I saw more than one ATM with a prominent sign posted next to it warning you to examine the machine carefully. Apparently crooks were fond of tacking fake card readers onto ATM machines. The banks knew there was a problem and they literally posted a sign.
Again, getting bought is the smart choice. Thinking you'll get rich by taking your start-up to an IPO is the bubble mentality.
Will spending all that money hurt eBay and Yahoo in the long run? Maybe, if they can't figure out a way to profit. But eBay and Yahoo are both well-established companies. If it's really a second dot-com bubble, do you really think eBay and Yahoo will be the first ones to go when it pops?
eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion. AOL bought Netscape for $4.2 billion and what happened there? AOL went out of business? Not yet, and if it does that wouldn't be why. The Netscape browser technology disappeared? Not yet, in fact last I heard everybody was jumping off IE to use Firefox.
Could eBay have built its own P2P VoIP and IM system for less than $2.6 billion? Maybe, but who's done it so far? Skype probably has 1.) patents eBay would need to license; 2.) talent the likes of which eBay would need to build its software; 3.) engineering already done, while eBay would need to spend money on that; 4.) brand presence, which eBay would need to fight for once its solution was finished, years from now; 5.) existing customers, which makes its solution worth using vs. an untried competing product from eBay; 6.) and so on, and so forth.
You say it was an inflated amount. But then, you haven't looked at the books of either company.
These graphs are totally meaningless. OK, so there were some people blogging about both Oracle and Siebel around August 1. How does this tell us anything about how "the buzz spreads" from an announcement made on September 12? The chart seems to end yesterday. You blog guys crack me up.
The market is actually contracting. Oracle buying up competitors means fewer vendors. How is that indicative of a bubble?
If there were three dozen new CRM start-ups appearing every few months -- backed by venture funding, going IPO, and then evaporating when everyone realized they didn't even have a product, let alone a chance of competing with the Oracles and SAPs of the world -- then that would be a bubble. This, on the other hand, is what we call consolidation. If anything, it's a sign that the enterprise applications companies are being realistic.
The standards may be fully-baked but it's still possible for different vendors to interpret the language of the standard differently. This happened with Wi-Fi and it may happen with WiMax. One proposed solution is to do a labeling program, like what happened with Wi-Fi. The WiMax Forum wants vendors to submit their products to it for interoperability testing. If they pass, they get to put the official WiMax Forum label on their product packaging. However, not one single product has completed this interoperability testing to date. You see products with a generic "WiMax" label on them, but they just slapped that on there themselves, without any kind of independent verification. There's no guarantee that one brand of hardware is going to work with another.
InfoWorld also got an early look at the X4100, though the review doesn't specify that model number because it hadn't even been announced yet. The price tag is ten times more than that of the X2100 the parent mentions, but as far as I understand it, the X2100 is pretty much an Asian white-box system. It's the X4100 and X4200 systems, a 1U and 2U respectively, that are Sun's new flagship custom designs. The big news is that InfoWorld's reviewers actually seem to have some fairly complementary things to say about them, which hasn't always been the case for Sun's AMD hardware in the past.
Of course the requirements are going to be bulky by mid 2005 standards. Vista is due in 2006/7 and will reflect the mid to high end computer design for late 2006.
I bought a modest, brand-name PC system this year for about $1,600 and it meets all the requirements mentioned.
Come on, ESR is pretty much off everyone's radar at the moment and has been for some time.
Sure. So, lest you think somebody just stumbled across a blog posting on Raymond's site and decided to submit it to Slashdot, let me verify that I actually received a press release alerting me to the e-mail from Microsoft and Eric's response. It was described as "your amusement item of the day"... but obviously my amusement wasn't the only purpose of the release. (Yes, I'm press.)
Miguel de Icaza has never failed to impress me with his charm, intelligence, and infectious enthusiasm. Nat Friedman, too, for that matter. Kudos to Novell for scooping them up.
...cuz you're making triple what I make and I live in San Francisco. A 30-year mortgage payment on a $600K house at 8% interest is what -- $4,200? Where's the other $137,000 a year going?
Porn as driver of technology
on
Pornified
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Back in 1991 or thereabouts, a friend of mine went to college at UCSC, where he was opened up to a whole world of new and amazing computing paraphernalia. We had previously both been computer geeks -- I on an Apple ][, he with a Kaypro, and both later on IBM PCs -- but this was the first time he had really been exposed to Unix, X terminals, big servers, fast Internet, and the like.
I remember talking on the phone with him one time in particular, when he told me about the NeXT box they had down there. Now, at the time, NeXT hardware was amazing. 'Nuff said. We all wanted to fool around with these things. I thought he was a lucky bastard to be at a university that actually had one.
"What are they using it for?" I asked him.
"Not much, really," he said. "The hard drive's pretty much just full of porn."
I mention this not just because it makes me chuckle, but because at the time it didn't surprise me at all. And it still doesn't. Throughout my experience with computers, and in particular the Internet, wherever you found a significant technological advance, somebody had found a way to use it for porn.
So, you ask "what technologies has Porno driven"? And I would say to you: The Internet. Computers.
Fancy browser programming, plug-ins, encryption, fat storage, streaming media, e-commerce... all of these things have been pushed forward by the public's seemingly insatiable demand for porn. I'm not saying porn caused these things to be invented, though I suppose that's possible in some cases. I'm saying that people who sell porn make money, and they spend that money on technology, and in so doing they advance the technology industry. And I believe they do it to more of a degree than you realize.
That's not how I remember it. Back then, the Apple ][ was a phenomenally successful computer and the trade magazines at the time really focused on the technical details of the machine. Softalk, for example, regularly ran huge code listings in addition to analysis and tutorial articles, showing you how to do everything from homegrown databases to Double-Hires graphics. I remember reading articles announcing the coming of the Apple/// and the general consensus was, "Um... what are we supposed to do with these?" Even the dedicated Apple/// column in Softalk had a listless air to it, as if the only thing the machine was good for was running VisiCalc and writing simple text-based apps in Basic.
Is it worth giving your blood to the company, working on a idea they themselves don't encourage you to do and are not paying you to do it? What are you going to get in the end, a big "thanks"?
...but the bottom line is that you did it anyway. And when you go shopping for a new job you tell your prospective employer all the interesting things you've been up to lately and that you'd like to do them for a company that appreciates them.
I learned a long time ago that company loyalty in America basically does not exist. Oh, I know there are plenty of people who are loyal to their companies. But that's not my point. I'm saying there's hardly a company in America that has so much a shred of loyalty to its employees. Hell, in the world of public corporations, it's practically illegal to value your employees above the almighty bottom line.
When a bunch of folks get laid off because of management's poor decisions, the usual story is: "It's a shame, I know. But that's business reality. Deal with it." People are treated like inanimate objects... it's even become trendy to call employees "human capital" these days. So when my company burns me out, doesn't appreciate me, takes my work and gives me nothing in return, and then I find a better job with somebody else with a nicer job description and more money, and my boss feels all disappointed and betrayed, I say -- "What did you expect? That's business reality. Deal with it."
Give your boss the opportunity to make you happy, but at the end of the day, if your present company can't do that, it's time to start looking around. Self-interest is not a sin, especially if you have a family to feed.
That's what Friendster used, the MySQL binaries you can download from the mysql.com site?
No, they did not. InfoWorld ran a case study recently on exactly what Friendster did with MySQL. They tweaked it in practically every conceivable way and customized it heavily (with a lot of support from MySQL AB). Friendster is pretty much the quintessential "bleeding-edge" MySQL shop.
...why increase the risk of your development process by switching back and forth? Oracle is available under a free development license. You don't need to buy additional licenses to develop applications on Oracle, only to deploy them. You can have a completely separate Oracle install as a test base and you won't have to worry about switching back and forth from PL/SQL (or "recompiling," though it seems foolish to hard-code your SQL queries in C).
There were clones of the Apple ][ for a while, but nobody really bought them except for ultra-hobbyists who wanted more for their $1,800. There were fully-licensed clones of the Macintosh for a while, but contrary to popular belief they weren't doing much to help Apple gain market share. The hardware was sub-par and the people who bought them were existing Mac users and they were only switching to clones because the clone manufacturers could get the latest PowerPC chips into their designs sooner than Apple could. Really all the clones did was eat into Apple's hardware sales.
When are you guys gonna learn? Cloning does not fit Apple's business model. Apple tried cloning, more than once, and it didn't do much to help them then, and it won't help them now. They're moving the Mac OS onto what ostensibly is off-the-shelf Intel hardware and they're still not going to allow cloning. Forget about it.
Why did they not simply pursue a GUI for the ][ series instead of branching off with a completely different product?
You make it sound like they quit making the Apple ][ series when they started working on the Apple///. Not so. The Apple/// was simply a new product line developed with business use in mind.
Also, you're talking Apples to oranges -- the Apple/// didn't have a GUI, so giving the Apple ][ a GUI wouldn't have helped it replace the Apple///. In fact, the reason the Apple/// failed is because most people felt the Apple ][ was a superior, more flexible computer, so they kept buying those.
Apple did eventually paste a GUI onto the Apple ][ series, as well -- have you forgotten the Apple//gs? The problem there was, not only was the IBM PC already going like gangbusters by the time it was released, not only was the//gs competing with both the Amiga and the Atari ST for the color games market, but Apple had already released its first Mac by the time the//gs came out. There was a well-documented battle going on between the Apple ][ camp and the Mac camp at Apple, and the Mac camp won. Nobody was going to promote the Apple//gs as Apple's gold-standard software development platform if it meant cannibalizing Mac sales.
The problem with today's captialism is the complacency of the consumer. Capitalism requires intelligent consumers to understand the pros and cons of every purchase.
No it doesn't. What kind of party-facts are those? You make it sound like you sit at home at your kitchen table, leafing through the literature on which kitchen spray cleanser to buy. You don't. How it really works is this: You flip on the TV and you see an ad for a kitchen cleanser. Later you spot that same cleanser in the aisle at Rite Aid, and it has a nice picture of a lemon on the bottle, so you buy it. You take it home and you enjoy the nice lemony smell. You enjoy it so much that you buy three bottles of it before you realize that it really doesn't do that good a job of cleaning your stovetop. Later, you go over to someone else's house, probably your mom's, and you see that she's using a different brand and it seems to work pretty well. So you buy that one next time.
Implicit in this little theater is one of the real requirements of functioning consumer markets, and that is alternatives. Consumers aren't being "complacent" if they don't have choices to begin with. That's why monopolies are bad.
You're also saying that a consumer who doesn't habitually choose local mom-n-pop stores over Wal-Mart is not "intelligent." That's a pretty pompous thing to say. There are all kinds of reasons for shopping at a big store rather than a little one. Not being able to find what you want at the small store is one. Lower prices is another. Might this mean that good jobs for caring employers are replaced with corporate wage-slave jobs? Yes. But this is not a sign of a broken market, nor is it stupidity on the part of consumers. Call it, instead, shortsightedness. But you'll need to come up with a different kind of solution to combat it, because unfortunately not every consumer feels compassionate enough about other people's cash-register jobs to pay more for the wrong product.
Well, Microsoft isn't the first to delay a major product release, even in the computer industry. Look at Apple and Copland, for example. And everyone here seems to love Apple. To be fair, though, pulling out some of the major APIs Microsoft has planned for Vista so that they're not tied to the OS release is probably a good idea, given how few customers are jumping to the next Windows version immediately upon release these days.
* Development of huge initiatives that business partners want and customers don't want like DRM and trusted computing
Are you serious? I'd say a great many very important customers want Microsoft to deliver DRM. Try the major record labels and movie studios, just for starters. You are confusing two key terms here. This is Microsoft. Microsoft sells retail products, but it is also a technology company. When you say customer, that's not the same thing as consumer.
* Not adapting to changing business models - open source for example.
Make no mistake, if Microsoft has an Achilles heel, this is it. Microsoft is very, very tied to the retail channel. It can no more pick up and adapt to the open source model than it can just decide to try out a subscription pricing model like Sun is trying now. Agile it is not; but then, it's still making money hand over fist, so maybe it doesn't have to be.
* Ability to market, but not deliver - like the MSN search that was going to be more accurate, etc...
Apple and Copland. IBM/Motorola and faster PowerPCs. PalmSource.
* Competing against yourself - AXAPTA, NAVISION, GreatPlains... how many competing and overlapping ERP/CRM packages do you need?
You're giving one example and maybe there are more, I don't know. But Microsoft clearly doesn't really know what it's doing in the business applications market, but it doesn't want to be pushed out of that market until it figures out what it's doing. Does Oracle really need Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards?
* When was the last time there was a major real change in office, anyway?
You're just regurgitating rhetoric now. I'd say there have been a lot of them. OneNote, Sharepoint Services, and XML file formats are three that come to mind. Outlook has been steadily improved to the point that it's a pretty usable application now. I even appreciate the little UI improvements, like the balloon view for document annotations that got introduced in Office XP.
* Oh, and ceeding the entire low end of the computer industry to Linspire and linux (when was the last time you saw a new windowsXP computer for $250)?
You really think the kind of person who only has $250 to spend on a computer is going to learn Linux? Not to start a flamewar or anything, but that kind of customer wants to play games, not participate in the wonderful world of software freedom. Microsoft's position is that the fate of these machines is to have their hard drives wiped and replaced with pirated copies of Windows, and though I love it that you can buy systems with Linux pre-installed, I think they're right on this one. Also, is it wrong to cede a market that there's no money in? Are any Microsoft shareholders going to revolt because Microsoft doesn't want to compete for tissue-thin margins on the low end?
Sure, you can go out and buy a CD today, but what about in 10 years? 5? CDs will eventually be replaced by SACD or DVD-A, both of which have DRM schemes.
But surely they don't have mandatory DRM schemes? The DVD video format specifies both an encryption and a region-coding scheme. You don't have to use either. Unless they're going to enforce some kind of mandatory restrictions on future formats (which seems kind of silly) then the same bands who choose to deliver DRM-free MP3s now will be able to sell you DRM-free SACDs in the future.
It sounds like what you're really saying is, "if we don't stop G-UnitShadyAftermathInterscope records from putting DRM on those Lloyd Banks MP3s now, the world is doomed!" But in fact there's another solution: Don't listen to G-Unit, and don't shop major labels. You'll probably be smarter for it anyway.
They are apparently untroubled by a world where cultivating the past requires the permission of the past. They can't imagine that freedom could produce anything worthwhile at all.
Holy over-the-top rhetoric, Trademarked Character! People are opposed to the "remix culture" are against freedom now? I know, for an encore let's blame the French!
Seriously, most of the worthwhile things in the world have been the result of "freedom." If you read a great work of literature, it's because someone had the freedom to sit down and write it. The freedom Lessig seems to be talking about, on the other hand, is the freedom to pick up that novel, copy huge passages of it into your own work, and call yourself an artist. If that's not a "culture of greed," the what is?
I agree with a lot of what Lessig has to say, but when he starts equating a creator's right to control the fruit of his own labor with some kind of anti-freedom movement, I call foul. It makes me wonder what Lessig's agenda really is, in ten words or less.
Intel says: "If you buy AMD chips for your notebooks you'll just get a chip. You'll still have to go and part out motherboards, wireless chips, video cards, everything. On the other hand, you go with Intel, we'll give you an integrated motherboard with everything. You get the whole ball of wax from us, cheap! And if you want, you can pay us for a license to the Centrino brand name, too."
That's an incentive to buy Intel. It's also a disincentive against buying AMD. It also sounds like good business sense to me, not any kind of crime.
If Intel says, "If you do business with AMD then we'll charge you more for the Intel chips you're already buying," then that sounds sketchy. I don't know if they've ever actually done that. On the other hand, Intel is definitely saying, "If you use AMD chips you won't get to use the Centrino brand name and all your competitors have it, so you'll be cutting yourself out of the market." It still harms AMD, but that's just business.
I doubt this case is going to be anywhere near as cut and dried as some people seem to think.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, getting bought is the smart choice. Thinking you'll get rich by taking your start-up to an IPO is the bubble mentality.
Will spending all that money hurt eBay and Yahoo in the long run? Maybe, if they can't figure out a way to profit. But eBay and Yahoo are both well-established companies. If it's really a second dot-com bubble, do you really think eBay and Yahoo will be the first ones to go when it pops?
eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion. AOL bought Netscape for $4.2 billion and what happened there? AOL went out of business? Not yet, and if it does that wouldn't be why. The Netscape browser technology disappeared? Not yet, in fact last I heard everybody was jumping off IE to use Firefox.
Could eBay have built its own P2P VoIP and IM system for less than $2.6 billion? Maybe, but who's done it so far? Skype probably has 1.) patents eBay would need to license; 2.) talent the likes of which eBay would need to build its software; 3.) engineering already done, while eBay would need to spend money on that; 4.) brand presence, which eBay would need to fight for once its solution was finished, years from now; 5.) existing customers, which makes its solution worth using vs. an untried competing product from eBay; 6.) and so on, and so forth.
You say it was an inflated amount. But then, you haven't looked at the books of either company.
These graphs are totally meaningless. OK, so there were some people blogging about both Oracle and Siebel around August 1. How does this tell us anything about how "the buzz spreads" from an announcement made on September 12? The chart seems to end yesterday. You blog guys crack me up.
The market is actually contracting. Oracle buying up competitors means fewer vendors. How is that indicative of a bubble?
If there were three dozen new CRM start-ups appearing every few months -- backed by venture funding, going IPO, and then evaporating when everyone realized they didn't even have a product, let alone a chance of competing with the Oracles and SAPs of the world -- then that would be a bubble. This, on the other hand, is what we call consolidation. If anything, it's a sign that the enterprise applications companies are being realistic.
The standards may be fully-baked but it's still possible for different vendors to interpret the language of the standard differently. This happened with Wi-Fi and it may happen with WiMax. One proposed solution is to do a labeling program, like what happened with Wi-Fi. The WiMax Forum wants vendors to submit their products to it for interoperability testing. If they pass, they get to put the official WiMax Forum label on their product packaging. However, not one single product has completed this interoperability testing to date. You see products with a generic "WiMax" label on them, but they just slapped that on there themselves, without any kind of independent verification. There's no guarantee that one brand of hardware is going to work with another.
InfoWorld also got an early look at the X4100, though the review doesn't specify that model number because it hadn't even been announced yet. The price tag is ten times more than that of the X2100 the parent mentions, but as far as I understand it, the X2100 is pretty much an Asian white-box system. It's the X4100 and X4200 systems, a 1U and 2U respectively, that are Sun's new flagship custom designs. The big news is that InfoWorld's reviewers actually seem to have some fairly complementary things to say about them, which hasn't always been the case for Sun's AMD hardware in the past.
It's the truth. If you buy a PC today it will in all likelihood run Vista just fine.
Miguel de Icaza has never failed to impress me with his charm, intelligence, and infectious enthusiasm. Nat Friedman, too, for that matter. Kudos to Novell for scooping them up.
Both have already been optioned by other studios.
...cuz you're making triple what I make and I live in San Francisco. A 30-year mortgage payment on a $600K house at 8% interest is what -- $4,200? Where's the other $137,000 a year going?
Back in 1991 or thereabouts, a friend of mine went to college at UCSC, where he was opened up to a whole world of new and amazing computing paraphernalia. We had previously both been computer geeks -- I on an Apple ][, he with a Kaypro, and both later on IBM PCs -- but this was the first time he had really been exposed to Unix, X terminals, big servers, fast Internet, and the like.
... all of these things have been pushed forward by the public's seemingly insatiable demand for porn. I'm not saying porn caused these things to be invented, though I suppose that's possible in some cases. I'm saying that people who sell porn make money, and they spend that money on technology, and in so doing they advance the technology industry. And I believe they do it to more of a degree than you realize.
I remember talking on the phone with him one time in particular, when he told me about the NeXT box they had down there. Now, at the time, NeXT hardware was amazing. 'Nuff said. We all wanted to fool around with these things. I thought he was a lucky bastard to be at a university that actually had one.
"What are they using it for?" I asked him.
"Not much, really," he said. "The hard drive's pretty much just full of porn."
I mention this not just because it makes me chuckle, but because at the time it didn't surprise me at all. And it still doesn't. Throughout my experience with computers, and in particular the Internet, wherever you found a significant technological advance, somebody had found a way to use it for porn.
So, you ask "what technologies has Porno driven"? And I would say to you: The Internet. Computers.
Fancy browser programming, plug-ins, encryption, fat storage, streaming media, e-commerce
That's not how I remember it. Back then, the Apple ][ was a phenomenally successful computer and the trade magazines at the time really focused on the technical details of the machine. Softalk, for example, regularly ran huge code listings in addition to analysis and tutorial articles, showing you how to do everything from homegrown databases to Double-Hires graphics. I remember reading articles announcing the coming of the Apple /// and the general consensus was, "Um... what are we supposed to do with these?" Even the dedicated Apple /// column in Softalk had a listless air to it, as if the only thing the machine was good for was running VisiCalc and writing simple text-based apps in Basic.
I learned a long time ago that company loyalty in America basically does not exist. Oh, I know there are plenty of people who are loyal to their companies. But that's not my point. I'm saying there's hardly a company in America that has so much a shred of loyalty to its employees. Hell, in the world of public corporations, it's practically illegal to value your employees above the almighty bottom line.
When a bunch of folks get laid off because of management's poor decisions, the usual story is: "It's a shame, I know. But that's business reality. Deal with it." People are treated like inanimate objects ... it's even become trendy to call employees "human capital" these days. So when my company burns me out, doesn't appreciate me, takes my work and gives me nothing in return, and then I find a better job with somebody else with a nicer job description and more money, and my boss feels all disappointed and betrayed, I say -- "What did you expect? That's business reality. Deal with it."
Give your boss the opportunity to make you happy, but at the end of the day, if your present company can't do that, it's time to start looking around. Self-interest is not a sin, especially if you have a family to feed.
...why increase the risk of your development process by switching back and forth? Oracle is available under a free development license. You don't need to buy additional licenses to develop applications on Oracle, only to deploy them. You can have a completely separate Oracle install as a test base and you won't have to worry about switching back and forth from PL/SQL (or "recompiling," though it seems foolish to hard-code your SQL queries in C).
There were clones of the Apple ][ for a while, but nobody really bought them except for ultra-hobbyists who wanted more for their $1,800. There were fully-licensed clones of the Macintosh for a while, but contrary to popular belief they weren't doing much to help Apple gain market share. The hardware was sub-par and the people who bought them were existing Mac users and they were only switching to clones because the clone manufacturers could get the latest PowerPC chips into their designs sooner than Apple could. Really all the clones did was eat into Apple's hardware sales.
When are you guys gonna learn? Cloning does not fit Apple's business model. Apple tried cloning, more than once, and it didn't do much to help them then, and it won't help them now. They're moving the Mac OS onto what ostensibly is off-the-shelf Intel hardware and they're still not going to allow cloning. Forget about it.
Also, you're talking Apples to oranges -- the Apple /// didn't have a GUI, so giving the Apple ][ a GUI wouldn't have helped it replace the Apple ///. In fact, the reason the Apple /// failed is because most people felt the Apple ][ was a superior, more flexible computer, so they kept buying those.
Apple did eventually paste a GUI onto the Apple ][ series, as well -- have you forgotten the Apple //gs? The problem there was, not only was the IBM PC already going like gangbusters by the time it was released, not only was the //gs competing with both the Amiga and the Atari ST for the color games market, but Apple had already released its first Mac by the time the //gs came out. There was a well-documented battle going on between the Apple ][ camp and the Mac camp at Apple, and the Mac camp won. Nobody was going to promote the Apple //gs as Apple's gold-standard software development platform if it meant cannibalizing Mac sales.
I think you better re-read my original post. Try the second paragraph.
Implicit in this little theater is one of the real requirements of functioning consumer markets, and that is alternatives. Consumers aren't being "complacent" if they don't have choices to begin with. That's why monopolies are bad.
You're also saying that a consumer who doesn't habitually choose local mom-n-pop stores over Wal-Mart is not "intelligent." That's a pretty pompous thing to say. There are all kinds of reasons for shopping at a big store rather than a little one. Not being able to find what you want at the small store is one. Lower prices is another. Might this mean that good jobs for caring employers are replaced with corporate wage-slave jobs? Yes. But this is not a sign of a broken market, nor is it stupidity on the part of consumers. Call it, instead, shortsightedness. But you'll need to come up with a different kind of solution to combat it, because unfortunately not every consumer feels compassionate enough about other people's cash-register jobs to pay more for the wrong product.
* Changes and delays with their OS product.
Well, Microsoft isn't the first to delay a major product release, even in the computer industry. Look at Apple and Copland, for example. And everyone here seems to love Apple. To be fair, though, pulling out some of the major APIs Microsoft has planned for Vista so that they're not tied to the OS release is probably a good idea, given how few customers are jumping to the next Windows version immediately upon release these days.
* Development of huge initiatives that business partners want and customers don't want like DRM and trusted computing
Are you serious? I'd say a great many very important customers want Microsoft to deliver DRM. Try the major record labels and movie studios, just for starters. You are confusing two key terms here. This is Microsoft. Microsoft sells retail products, but it is also a technology company. When you say customer, that's not the same thing as consumer.
* Not adapting to changing business models - open source for example.
Make no mistake, if Microsoft has an Achilles heel, this is it. Microsoft is very, very tied to the retail channel. It can no more pick up and adapt to the open source model than it can just decide to try out a subscription pricing model like Sun is trying now. Agile it is not; but then, it's still making money hand over fist, so maybe it doesn't have to be.
* Ability to market, but not deliver - like the MSN search that was going to be more accurate, etc...
Apple and Copland. IBM/Motorola and faster PowerPCs. PalmSource.
* Competing against yourself - AXAPTA, NAVISION, GreatPlains... how many competing and overlapping ERP/CRM packages do you need?
You're giving one example and maybe there are more, I don't know. But Microsoft clearly doesn't really know what it's doing in the business applications market, but it doesn't want to be pushed out of that market until it figures out what it's doing. Does Oracle really need Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards?
* When was the last time there was a major real change in office, anyway?
You're just regurgitating rhetoric now. I'd say there have been a lot of them. OneNote, Sharepoint Services, and XML file formats are three that come to mind. Outlook has been steadily improved to the point that it's a pretty usable application now. I even appreciate the little UI improvements, like the balloon view for document annotations that got introduced in Office XP.
* Oh, and ceeding the entire low end of the computer industry to Linspire and linux (when was the last time you saw a new windowsXP computer for $250)?
You really think the kind of person who only has $250 to spend on a computer is going to learn Linux? Not to start a flamewar or anything, but that kind of customer wants to play games, not participate in the wonderful world of software freedom. Microsoft's position is that the fate of these machines is to have their hard drives wiped and replaced with pirated copies of Windows, and though I love it that you can buy systems with Linux pre-installed, I think they're right on this one. Also, is it wrong to cede a market that there's no money in? Are any Microsoft shareholders going to revolt because Microsoft doesn't want to compete for tissue-thin margins on the low end?
It sounds like what you're really saying is, "if we don't stop G-UnitShadyAftermathInterscope records from putting DRM on those Lloyd Banks MP3s now, the world is doomed!" But in fact there's another solution: Don't listen to G-Unit, and don't shop major labels. You'll probably be smarter for it anyway.
Seriously, most of the worthwhile things in the world have been the result of "freedom." If you read a great work of literature, it's because someone had the freedom to sit down and write it. The freedom Lessig seems to be talking about, on the other hand, is the freedom to pick up that novel, copy huge passages of it into your own work, and call yourself an artist. If that's not a "culture of greed," the what is?
I agree with a lot of what Lessig has to say, but when he starts equating a creator's right to control the fruit of his own labor with some kind of anti-freedom movement, I call foul. It makes me wonder what Lessig's agenda really is, in ten words or less.
Intel says: "If you buy AMD chips for your notebooks you'll just get a chip. You'll still have to go and part out motherboards, wireless chips, video cards, everything. On the other hand, you go with Intel, we'll give you an integrated motherboard with everything. You get the whole ball of wax from us, cheap! And if you want, you can pay us for a license to the Centrino brand name, too."
That's an incentive to buy Intel. It's also a disincentive against buying AMD. It also sounds like good business sense to me, not any kind of crime.
If Intel says, "If you do business with AMD then we'll charge you more for the Intel chips you're already buying," then that sounds sketchy. I don't know if they've ever actually done that. On the other hand, Intel is definitely saying, "If you use AMD chips you won't get to use the Centrino brand name and all your competitors have it, so you'll be cutting yourself out of the market." It still harms AMD, but that's just business.
I doubt this case is going to be anywhere near as cut and dried as some people seem to think.