I'm not sure whether that fits Moore's MO--would rolling over in the grave be something he could borrow from the Charlton Comics, but then get indignant about when other people used it?
The drop in stock price is one of "the reasons highlighted" for why the company is likely to go out of business. Those words weren't used as an explanation for why the stores are doing poorly.
The two are not necessarily disconnected though. One of the last alteratives to Best Buy in this area was a chain named Tweeter. The event that caused them to accelerate toward fully out of business was not being able to finance purchasing inventory for their usual holiday season sale. The original reason for why companies sold stock (back before it was primarily around allowing early investors to cash out) was to raise capital for expansion. Depression of the stock price can itself be a cause for a company to do badly, since it reflects on things like the company's credit worthiness. This is not an insignificant thing for a retail store with a lot of cash tied up in its inventory.
Best Buy has over 1000 stores. Microcenter has, as you state, 23. That they don't really count here is a statistical observation; the odds that someone in the US lives near a Microcenter is pretty small. Microcenter's main competitive advantage, as I see it, in their staying small is that they've only entered profitable markets. For example, here in Baltimore, the closest Microcenter is over an hour drive away. That's because they haven't even considered this city a big enough market. Instead they only have stores in the denser areas near Washington DC and northern Virigina, where there are more tech buyers per square mile nearby than here.
It's generally believed that all of Apple's stores are doing well. They have a higher margin business and waste a lot less money in inventory, rent, and stock logistics than Best Buy. At last count there were 361 of them in the world. It's possible to build a successful retail store selling tech items in some places, but I doubt there are over a 1000 places that will work at. Best Buy has bet there are, and has been losing that bet for years now.
TVs are one of the worst things you can purchase based on how it looks in the store. Display models are intentionally miscalibrated to be distorted in a way that's eye catching. Standard procedure if you want a TV that looks like the media it plays intended is adjust them to fix the worst problems. High brightness sells, but it makes everything look bright--even things that are supposed to be black.
If you have some number of computers or help other people with theirs, the main things worth keeping some stock on are cables (USB and network) and a power supply. Recently I've added HDMI cables to that list too. They're all relatively inexpensive, have high markup when you do buy them retail, and are likely things to need. When I use up my last spare network cable or lose a power supply and install the spare, I order a replacement unit/batch the next time it's convienent. The way people use these items as examples to justify why retail should exist boggles my mind a bit. Keeping a small stock of items that are cheap online, expensive at retail, and commonly used is easy to justify as a sensible investment.
TFA talks about loss of control over margins at Best Buy. Apple Stores are known to have some of the highest margins in retail. Their success demonstrate that people are willing to pay high margins for products if they feel they're getting good service for it--which is certainly not the Best Buy experience.
Also, it's rarely the case that there is a large advantage to purchasing an Apple product outside of their stores, due to their extensive price controls at all retailers. As you can also see from that chart, Apple makes an ever higher margin for the products they sell online. They could adjust their price to match the lower overhead and sell them cheaper direct. The fact that they don't is an interesting component to their overall strategy.
The interviewer didn't even get the band's name right--it's not "Alan Parson’s Project". It is a magazine aimed at electronics installers, not music fans.
His work with Pink Floyd did produce the second biggest selling album ever though. The Alan Parsons Project isn't too well known outside of people who remember pop radio circa 1982. Whereas you can still find DSOTM prism t-shirts at major retailers, just saw one last year in a Target store.
And like McIntosh Laboratory, Cisco's iPhone, and the way the Mighty Mouse turned into the Magic Mouse. It's hard to feel sorry for Apple when they keep making the same class of mistake.
The difference between Facebook and all of its fallen ex-competitors is the applications system. That puts a giant stack of external developers working on improving their platform. There are plenty of less technical people who aren't even aware of the line where Facebook proper ends and their favored Zynga games begin. At this point, people who want to offer something different in the social networking space aren't as motivated to build a competitor to Facebook, because in so many cases it's possible to just build an application instead, putting the new ideas in there. Social networks take a while to support themselves; creating an app instead means you have no serious infrastructure to run, and FB does the billing etc. for you. You just have to figure out how to sell something usefully.
Combine that with the fact that any competitor is facing a profitable organization with piles of cash, and it will be quite hard to displace Facebook now. Google had a shot at it with Plus, which was launched during a period when Facebook frustration was leading many people to search for alternatives. But Google has blown it with controvery around their "real name" and privacy policies, which seems to make them no better than Facebook now, in the areas Facebook was the easiest to improve on. And Plus is certainly a regression in feature set if you consider all of the applications available for both platforms.
Limiting the amount of time someone can cause you trouble is not the same thing as stopping them. And the last time I personally ran into this sort of problem, the person frustrated with IT who just hooked up their personal hardware was a C-level executive, which made handling the violation a tricky internal company politics issue. The threat of firing someone isn't always enough to keep them from doing something.
Saying that the kernel level or low-level library work was the "heavy lifting" is a kernel-centric point of view. Apple's PCs are vastly more popular than any pure BSD OS. There's an alternate view that's easy to argue for, that the real "heavy" part here is the UI level work. To many end-users, that's the only part that really matters. And if making things pretty for the masses were the easy part, that would be ubiquitous while kernels are rare. Instead, it's kernel and library level code that there are multiple viable alternatives for. The continued inability of the Linux desktop to hit critical mass also suggests the kernel/library level is not the most important or most difficult to build layer to a desktop computing stack.
I feel that all Pink/Taligent/Copland proved is that throwing too many engineers at OS design leads into something too complicated to ever ship. The public info on that whole mess suggests that massive second-system design creep had a significant role in its failure. The fact that Be produced a feasible alternative here, with a smaller team and relatively short development cycle, proves the problem was tractable. It just wasn't possible to solve within a dysfunctional Apple. The point at which IBM also got involved is one of the larger examples of "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" in software history.
To support the idea that BSD wasn't a critical component here, it's worth pointing out that Apple considered several alternatives to the BSD derived NeXT the birthed OS X from. BeOS, Solaris, and even Windows NT were all considered at some point. Had the owners of Be lowered their financial expectations, it easily could have been OS X derived from Be instead. The main benefit of basing things on NeXT instead was that it brought Jobs back into day to day operation again. He was the right guy to be heading the expansion into friendlier consumer electronics that revived Apple's financials, and that mattered quite a bit more than the origin of the kernel.
As far as I know the differences in directory layout you've mentioned flowed from RedHat's RPM packaging down to Mandrake. They did some useful innovation in addressing the desktop section of the market that RedHat abandoned; part of their problem is that they never offered a compelling server alternative to RedHat that was different enough to distinguish itself.
In the case of PostgreSQL, there definitely wasn't any conscious decision on the part of RedHat/Mandrake here. By default when compiled from source, PostgreSQL expects the database configuration file to be in the same directory as the database itself. RedHat and Mandrake don't change that; Debian goes to a lot of trouble to move those to/etc instead. And even that's not complete, one of the configuration files needed for replication setup (recovery.conf) still goes into the database directory, even on Debian.
The sort of problems companies are running into with the "IT can't support that" mindset are the myriad back-door ways to get devices running. IT won't let your iPhone on the network due to wireless security issues? Plug your own Wi-Fi router into the wired network port at your desk, have the phone connect to that network through that instead. It's not just that people are showing up at work with their iDevices. Home users are now exposed to enough networking trivia that they feel (rightly) that they can do some things that used to be IT department only territory. 10 years ago, the idea that the average home user would know something about Ethernet, routers, and NAT firewalls seemed impossible; we're there now though.
The obvious downside is that making your network secure is a dramatically harder problem than just making it work, and the gap there isn't obvious even to most sophisticated home users. And, as you point out, sometimes the overhead around the IT department compared with DIY is due to business regulatory issues, things that individual people don't worry about. People bypass that infrastructure at considerable peril to the business; that doesn't stop them though.
Apple's struggles in the mid 80's were on a couple of fronts. They didn't have a compelling set of business software, and botched the launch of the Macintosh Office with everything from slow availability to a terrible ad campaign. The Apple ][ and Mac divisions fought each other internally. And they built more expensive computers and demanded higher margins on them than their competitors, during a period where there was a massive price shake-out in the home computing market. The fundamental issue wasn't ignorance of what business users expected. It was failure to execute on delivering it, which went from product strategy mistakes to massive inventory mismanagement. John Sculley's "Odyssey" covers this period of Apple's history closely. The tried to win over the business market but just didn't do a very good job of it.
Nowadays, Apple is selling to consumers in droves and doesn't care at all about whatever traditional business IT departments want. They're not trying and failing this time; they're not even trying. The demand is coming up from individual people and pushing toward IT. In the 80's, there just wasn't enough demand to offset their production and R&D overhead.
The other major factor impacting both initial setup cost and operating overhead is the general cost of doing business in the US. From taxes to safety, an enormous amount of resources go into that here. Complying with OSHA rules makes for a more expensive factory because safer tools/processes costs more; but it's also the case that the paperwork around complying with OSHA costs a lot, too. And that cost keeps going up. Ask any medium to large sized business how much it costs them to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley Act rules for example, that legislation was one of the bigger recently added weights keeping US companies from being globally competitive.
There's some research suggesting corporate CEOs are, in fact, much more likely to be psychopaths than the average. I find it amusing that one of the best discussions of that subject I've read is in Cracked magazine discussing the Global Economy.
Slashdot Mirror
i can still die a happy camper
Getting more involved in these movements should speed that part up for you.
I'm not sure whether that fits Moore's MO--would rolling over in the grave be something he could borrow from the Charlton Comics, but then get indignant about when other people used it?
The drop in stock price is one of "the reasons highlighted" for why the company is likely to go out of business. Those words weren't used as an explanation for why the stores are doing poorly.
The two are not necessarily disconnected though. One of the last alteratives to Best Buy in this area was a chain named Tweeter. The event that caused them to accelerate toward fully out of business was not being able to finance purchasing inventory for their usual holiday season sale. The original reason for why companies sold stock (back before it was primarily around allowing early investors to cash out) was to raise capital for expansion. Depression of the stock price can itself be a cause for a company to do badly, since it reflects on things like the company's credit worthiness. This is not an insignificant thing for a retail store with a lot of cash tied up in its inventory.
Best Buy has over 1000 stores. Microcenter has, as you state, 23. That they don't really count here is a statistical observation; the odds that someone in the US lives near a Microcenter is pretty small. Microcenter's main competitive advantage, as I see it, in their staying small is that they've only entered profitable markets. For example, here in Baltimore, the closest Microcenter is over an hour drive away. That's because they haven't even considered this city a big enough market. Instead they only have stores in the denser areas near Washington DC and northern Virigina, where there are more tech buyers per square mile nearby than here.
It's generally believed that all of Apple's stores are doing well. They have a higher margin business and waste a lot less money in inventory, rent, and stock logistics than Best Buy. At last count there were 361 of them in the world. It's possible to build a successful retail store selling tech items in some places, but I doubt there are over a 1000 places that will work at. Best Buy has bet there are, and has been losing that bet for years now.
TVs are one of the worst things you can purchase based on how it looks in the store. Display models are intentionally miscalibrated to be distorted in a way that's eye catching. Standard procedure if you want a TV that looks like the media it plays intended is adjust them to fix the worst problems. High brightness sells, but it makes everything look bright--even things that are supposed to be black.
If you have some number of computers or help other people with theirs, the main things worth keeping some stock on are cables (USB and network) and a power supply. Recently I've added HDMI cables to that list too. They're all relatively inexpensive, have high markup when you do buy them retail, and are likely things to need. When I use up my last spare network cable or lose a power supply and install the spare, I order a replacement unit/batch the next time it's convienent. The way people use these items as examples to justify why retail should exist boggles my mind a bit. Keeping a small stock of items that are cheap online, expensive at retail, and commonly used is easy to justify as a sensible investment.
TFA talks about loss of control over margins at Best Buy. Apple Stores are known to have some of the highest margins in retail. Their success demonstrate that people are willing to pay high margins for products if they feel they're getting good service for it--which is certainly not the Best Buy experience.
Also, it's rarely the case that there is a large advantage to purchasing an Apple product outside of their stores, due to their extensive price controls at all retailers. As you can also see from that chart, Apple makes an ever higher margin for the products they sell online. They could adjust their price to match the lower overhead and sell them cheaper direct. The fact that they don't is an interesting component to their overall strategy.
And the laser beam death ray. His sort of hovercraft was much faster than Jefferson's starship.
The interviewer didn't even get the band's name right--it's not "Alan Parson’s Project". It is a magazine aimed at electronics installers, not music fans.
His work with Pink Floyd did produce the second biggest selling album ever though. The Alan Parsons Project isn't too well known outside of people who remember pop radio circa 1982. Whereas you can still find DSOTM prism t-shirts at major retailers, just saw one last year in a Target store.
And like McIntosh Laboratory, Cisco's iPhone, and the way the Mighty Mouse turned into the Magic Mouse. It's hard to feel sorry for Apple when they keep making the same class of mistake.
When I read he's got cat's eyes, I though of a different song.
You just ripped of one of the regular Joker plots that Batman has to foil.
Of course, this whole attack the superbowl thing is a re-used plot, too.
Facebook has customer service? When did that happen?
The difference between Facebook and all of its fallen ex-competitors is the applications system. That puts a giant stack of external developers working on improving their platform. There are plenty of less technical people who aren't even aware of the line where Facebook proper ends and their favored Zynga games begin. At this point, people who want to offer something different in the social networking space aren't as motivated to build a competitor to Facebook, because in so many cases it's possible to just build an application instead, putting the new ideas in there. Social networks take a while to support themselves; creating an app instead means you have no serious infrastructure to run, and FB does the billing etc. for you. You just have to figure out how to sell something usefully.
Combine that with the fact that any competitor is facing a profitable organization with piles of cash, and it will be quite hard to displace Facebook now. Google had a shot at it with Plus, which was launched during a period when Facebook frustration was leading many people to search for alternatives. But Google has blown it with controvery around their "real name" and privacy policies, which seems to make them no better than Facebook now, in the areas Facebook was the easiest to improve on. And Plus is certainly a regression in feature set if you consider all of the applications available for both platforms.
Limiting the amount of time someone can cause you trouble is not the same thing as stopping them. And the last time I personally ran into this sort of problem, the person frustrated with IT who just hooked up their personal hardware was a C-level executive, which made handling the violation a tricky internal company politics issue. The threat of firing someone isn't always enough to keep them from doing something.
Saying that the kernel level or low-level library work was the "heavy lifting" is a kernel-centric point of view. Apple's PCs are vastly more popular than any pure BSD OS. There's an alternate view that's easy to argue for, that the real "heavy" part here is the UI level work. To many end-users, that's the only part that really matters. And if making things pretty for the masses were the easy part, that would be ubiquitous while kernels are rare. Instead, it's kernel and library level code that there are multiple viable alternatives for. The continued inability of the Linux desktop to hit critical mass also suggests the kernel/library level is not the most important or most difficult to build layer to a desktop computing stack.
I feel that all Pink/Taligent/Copland proved is that throwing too many engineers at OS design leads into something too complicated to ever ship. The public info on that whole mess suggests that massive second-system design creep had a significant role in its failure. The fact that Be produced a feasible alternative here, with a smaller team and relatively short development cycle, proves the problem was tractable. It just wasn't possible to solve within a dysfunctional Apple. The point at which IBM also got involved is one of the larger examples of "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" in software history.
To support the idea that BSD wasn't a critical component here, it's worth pointing out that Apple considered several alternatives to the BSD derived NeXT the birthed OS X from. BeOS, Solaris, and even Windows NT were all considered at some point. Had the owners of Be lowered their financial expectations, it easily could have been OS X derived from Be instead. The main benefit of basing things on NeXT instead was that it brought Jobs back into day to day operation again. He was the right guy to be heading the expansion into friendlier consumer electronics that revived Apple's financials, and that mattered quite a bit more than the origin of the kernel.
As far as I know the differences in directory layout you've mentioned flowed from RedHat's RPM packaging down to Mandrake. They did some useful innovation in addressing the desktop section of the market that RedHat abandoned; part of their problem is that they never offered a compelling server alternative to RedHat that was different enough to distinguish itself.
In the case of PostgreSQL, there definitely wasn't any conscious decision on the part of RedHat/Mandrake here. By default when compiled from source, PostgreSQL expects the database configuration file to be in the same directory as the database itself. RedHat and Mandrake don't change that; Debian goes to a lot of trouble to move those to /etc instead. And even that's not complete, one of the configuration files needed for replication setup (recovery.conf) still goes into the database directory, even on Debian.
The sort of problems companies are running into with the "IT can't support that" mindset are the myriad back-door ways to get devices running. IT won't let your iPhone on the network due to wireless security issues? Plug your own Wi-Fi router into the wired network port at your desk, have the phone connect to that network through that instead. It's not just that people are showing up at work with their iDevices. Home users are now exposed to enough networking trivia that they feel (rightly) that they can do some things that used to be IT department only territory. 10 years ago, the idea that the average home user would know something about Ethernet, routers, and NAT firewalls seemed impossible; we're there now though.
The obvious downside is that making your network secure is a dramatically harder problem than just making it work, and the gap there isn't obvious even to most sophisticated home users. And, as you point out, sometimes the overhead around the IT department compared with DIY is due to business regulatory issues, things that individual people don't worry about. People bypass that infrastructure at considerable peril to the business; that doesn't stop them though.
Apple's struggles in the mid 80's were on a couple of fronts. They didn't have a compelling set of business software, and botched the launch of the Macintosh Office with everything from slow availability to a terrible ad campaign. The Apple ][ and Mac divisions fought each other internally. And they built more expensive computers and demanded higher margins on them than their competitors, during a period where there was a massive price shake-out in the home computing market. The fundamental issue wasn't ignorance of what business users expected. It was failure to execute on delivering it, which went from product strategy mistakes to massive inventory mismanagement. John Sculley's "Odyssey" covers this period of Apple's history closely. The tried to win over the business market but just didn't do a very good job of it.
Nowadays, Apple is selling to consumers in droves and doesn't care at all about whatever traditional business IT departments want. They're not trying and failing this time; they're not even trying. The demand is coming up from individual people and pushing toward IT. In the 80's, there just wasn't enough demand to offset their production and R&D overhead.
The other major factor impacting both initial setup cost and operating overhead is the general cost of doing business in the US. From taxes to safety, an enormous amount of resources go into that here. Complying with OSHA rules makes for a more expensive factory because safer tools/processes costs more; but it's also the case that the paperwork around complying with OSHA costs a lot, too. And that cost keeps going up. Ask any medium to large sized business how much it costs them to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley Act rules for example, that legislation was one of the bigger recently added weights keeping US companies from being globally competitive.
There's some research suggesting corporate CEOs are, in fact, much more likely to be psychopaths than the average. I find it amusing that one of the best discussions of that subject I've read is in Cracked magazine discussing the Global Economy.
Do we really need the badges?
We don't need no stinkin' badges!. Or badgers.
Sure, you have one large cock to service wireless users with, but you haven't described how you will scale it to handle multiple access points.
already on it.