It is not a ripoff, Apple is not in the business of selling at cut throat margins by selling volume. They are in the business of selling premium items at a steep markup.
Let's get something out of the way: I agree that Apple has a legal right to charge whatever they want. I also agree that they can and should charge more for a high-quality product. People buy Apple gear because they want a good user experience, without having to worry about a lot of technical mumbo jumbo. They're happy to pay for that experience.
However, their upgrade prices still are a ripoff and have been for a long time. In college, I helped hundreds of people purchase computers of all sorts, and Apple was up to the same tricks then. Apple is not charging 200% markups on RAM and hard disks because they have carefully chosen premium RAM that provides better user experience. They are doing it because they know they can extract money from people who are rich, careless, inexperienced, or afraid. Sure, soak the rich, fine. But having seen the pained faces of countless literature students and other non-technical types, I'm confident this is sleazy.
For me, the dividing line is pretty clear. If the customer would still pay the price if they knew as much as the vendor, then it's a fair deal. If not, the vendor is taking advantage of an information asymmetry. Apple knows they attract a lot of people who don't have a clue about computers, and they take full advantage of them.
A 30% hardware premium to pay for a great UI? Sure. a 200% premium for commodity RAM? Bullshit.
IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE, Synaptic and apt-get are superior to anything that Microsoft has ever offered towards that purpose. Roger?
In the specific case of sysadmins installing patches or installing new software they know the name of, yes. I also love my package manager, and all the good people who do the packaging.
But "THIS SPECIFIC CASE", the case where Bill Gates is taking a look at the typical consumer experience of a normal end user finding and purchasing software and applying necessary system updates for the software, then no, Linux is not obviously superior, and I suspect it's inferior.
Steve Jobs has many talents, and is great at motivating people. But that has little to do with clout and passing down directives. Apple isn't amazing because he's the world's best manager; he's the world's most demanding consumer.
Moreover, even St. Steve works within limits. Bill Gates wanted market share more than usability, and he got it. Jobs wanted the opposite, and got it. But neither of them has gotten both.
Your test is far, far wider than the topic at hand In a word, no. People don't download software for the sake of downloading. They download it because they want to use it. Usability has to be user-focused. But even so:
The more specific test that I am referring to would be more along the lines of "use the manufacturer's tools to locate and install movie editing software". I think that's awfully narrow. The more plausible one is "Locate and install movie editing software." Or possibly "Locate and install movie edting software X." Both of those are real world use cases.
But regardless, I suspect Linux would not come out on top here, not with average users.
Which is fine; it's by geeks and for geeks. Although I definitely appreciate the work done with things like apt-get, people shouldn't feel too superior over Windows, not in relation to this memo from Bill Gates, anyhow.
Reading this reminds me of how AWESOME using Synaptic and apt-get really can be. In a single place you can find updates, new packages, and alternatives to the packages you already have. It resolves dependencies and deletes unused stuff.
Compared to Mr Gates's experience, this really is a marvelous thing.
Only for people who already know how to use synaptic and apt-get.
Imagine we take some normal users into a usability lab. Some get Linux boxes, some Windows boxes. All are asked to install the software needed to edit a home movie. And then to do a little editing.
My bet is that the Windows people will be done sooner, even if you control for previous experience using Windows. Linux is a better user experience for us technical experts that make up the ardent Linux base, but despite Gates's rant, I don't think we've even reached the Windows level of general-audience usability yet.
The founder, then-CEO and General Chief LordofitAll fires off irate messages on a daily basis, but the whole company steadfastly ignores him and continues to crank out crap? It doesn't work like that.
Although he wanted a good user experience (I'm sure they all wanted that), they wanted other things more. Like meeting arbitrary shipping dates. Like maintaining backwards compatibility. Like defending their monopoly. Like meeting market expectations for earnings.
The CEO always has that clout - he passes down the directive and makes sure it gets done, or else he re-organizes and puts managers and programmers in place who will get it done. Spoken like somebody who has never been an executive.
I've been using Linux for more then 10 years. [...] 386's to modern multicore servers [...] hundreds of pc's [...] I have NEVER, EVER seen ANYTHING like what this and some other posts mention. Well, your experience probably explains that. You've forgotten more about Linux installs than most people will ever know. You'll do things naturally that would never occur to J. Random User.
To see what I mean, take a look at the Clemson Linux Initiative. It contains in detail the painful steps necessary to get common laptops working with common distributions. Normal people don't have a hope of figuring out and performing all that jiggery-pokery, and so their experience is "Linux doesn't work."
Also, "I reboot my computer... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. However, maybe I'm giving too much credit here. I expect that he knows, and that he means something different. He's not asking, "What's the technical reason that I must reboot?" He's saying, "From a user perspective, why would I want to reboot?"
And if that's his point, he's right. The users aren't there for the computer; the computer is there for the users. A technical answer can explain why a bad experience happens, but it never justifies its continued existence.
yet they still make the same product today (e.g. Starbucks) That's not exactly true. Another poster mentions that at least in his area, McDonald's drive-throughs now give you cream and sugar in the cup. Score one for the legal system.
Starbucks, on the other hand, gives you your coffee when you're standing, gives you a counter on which to put it when you are adding cream, and gives you tables to put it on afterwards. And unlike in a car, there's plenty of room to dodge and for the coffee to drain away from your skin.
and normal use is to not spill it. Normal use for a single cup is for some percentage of people not to spill. 99.9%? 99.99%? Regardless, normal usage includes some spilling.
When you serve several hundred million cups of coffee a year to people in cars, no matter how small the percentage of spillers is, you will have a numerically significant number of people who spill. And some will spill enough, and be wearing the right fabrics, and not be agile enough. And they will end up needing medical care, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical care.
Why is it McDonald's responsibility to idiot proof their products to guard against the massive stupidity of their customers? First, this is not massive stupidity. Her behavior was reasonable and natural. They handed her a cup of coffee and some cream. She put the cream in the coffee. Why would she expect that to lead to permanent physical damage requiring reconstructive surgery?
Second, McDonald's has chosen to sell to the general public. There is no exam, no license required, no training needed to shop there. They are therefore obligated to sell a product that is safe for the public to use. When they don't, and could have foreseen that, they must take responsibility for their actions.
No kidding. If you can't handle the cup, don't buy it, or don't open the thing until it cools off. That's obviously true. It's also true that you shouldn't continue to make a product that puts people using it normally in the hospital.
Here there are two obvious truths. The problem isn't that one of them is wrong; it's that people get to an obvious truth and stop thinking.
McDonald's wasn't putting anyone in the hospital. People who couldn't handle a cup were putting themselves into the hospital. Whatever happened to personal accountability? The jury found her 20% responsible, and McDonald's 80% responsible.
Remember that she was some old lady who was handed a buck's worth of coffee, whereas they're a large company that carefully designs every aspect of the experience that they sell hundreds of millions of times a year. Although she may not have had an opportunity to carefully study human error rates, the slipperiness of different cup designs, or the particular effects of 180+ degree coffee on human skin, they certainly did.
Most importantly, she may not have been aware of the risk, but McDonald's certainly was, as they had been told about actual accidents.
Regardless, the western legal model of having 100 responsibility units is retarded. Any product user is responsible for using it well. And any product designer is responsible for making it such that people naturally use it well. Barring active negligence, any failure is a failure for both.
I didn't see anywhere in the press release where they claim that; if the press release is true, then the issue isn't whether Google couldn't cook one up on its own, but rather that they didn't--instead of that they made a deal with this company to use their product instead. Not as I read it. They made some sort of co-marketing deal, but I didn't see anything about a deal to use Limit None's product instead of building their own.
If they had a deal like that, then they would be looking at a straightforward contract violation dispute, instead of this ridiculous "misappropriation of technology" suit.
If the open source team had worked with LimitNone, agreed to help with its promotion, then turned around and released a competing version, yes, LimitNone would probably sue. For what? Mopery and dopery? If the promotion was a quid pro quo exchange for technical assistance, then as long as the promotion happened, then LimitNone doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Not that stops people from suing. As my lawyer reminds me from time to time, "It doesn't mean they can't sue, just that they can't win."
Anyone partnering with a large company should learn lessons from this - remember a large companie's main responsibility is to it's shareholders - they are the people who want a return on thier investment and usually at any cost! Anybody partnering with anybody should know this. The core of good business relationships is keeping in mind not just your interests, but those of the people you're making deals with.
Whether or not Google actually stole anything, I dunno. But saying that Google had no intention of developing a competing product isn't a promise of anything, especially at Google, where engineers are famously independent.
It was ridiculous to think that Google would ignore Exchange users indefinitely. Limit None should have realized that they were only offering a temporary and limited solution to Google's problems. By thinking only about their desires ($19 per copy) and not about Google's (organize the world's information), they overplayed a weak hand.
Honestly though, many people only take their coffee piping hot. And if every Tom, Dick, and Harry sued because something was too sharp, too hot, too cold, too blunt, too fast, too powerful, where would we be now. I should sue VW because I got a ticket for going 100mph. To me, this turns on designing for actual use, for normal operator error.
McDonald's put special holes in their building to sell stuff to people in cars. The put scalding-hot coffee in flimsy, slippery cups with flimsy, slippery lids, and then give you cream and sugar separately. And they do this to early-morning, pre-caffeine zombies. It should not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you do this millions of times a day, some people are going to end up in the hospital without expecting it.
VW plans for normal operator error in a host of ways. Good visibility. Good lights. Good user feedback through gauges, car feel, and road feel. Brakes and steering built to handle emergencies. Seat belts, frames, air bags, and a bunch of other little touches optimized for survival after error.
McDonald's, on the other hand, even after being told that they were putting people in the hospital unnecessarily, shrugged and carried on.
I doubt that, a typical Googlebotting does more than that... Doubt all you want, but that's basically my point.
The Slashdot I had data on was from a few years back, but it was circa 100 pageviews/min. From what I can tell, Slashdot's traffic has been pretty steady the last few years. So I doubled the one I had data on. I did a little more rummaging, and as far as I can tell, my point stands: Slashdot has nothing on Oprah.
What does "Non-Profit Budget" mean, anyway? There are non-profits bigger than the company I work for. Non-profit isn't the same as poorly financed. But it generally means there's little connection between demand and payment. For-profit businesses generally only do things that they expect will make them money. So commercial web sites try to serve pages that get them something.
Non-profits, on the other hand, try to fulfill a mission with whatever resources they have at hand. Demand almost always exceeds supply, and many can't or won't charge to bring them back in balance. This leads to endemic under-funding and miserly budgeting.
Web sites are especially prone to this. They can't control demand, and unlike most non-profit services, they can't limit supply. So you make do. Or you deliver with lowered quality, which Wikipedia has had fits of.
Remember when CmdrTaco called wikipedia a fad and said they couldn't scale? Plenty of smart people said that. Even some people working on the project suspected that.
Wikipedia was in theory impossible, and unproven in practice. Even now, the main difference is that most people just accept that it works without understanding how.
Slashdot is great at taking down sites on crappy shared hosting, but anything with a decently configured dedicated server will likely survive just fine. Sounds right to me. I don't have any terribly recent data on a slashdotting, but I think the Slashdot-as-server-killer meme is pretty stale.
Looking at some old data and extrapolating, I'd guess a modern slashdotting would peak at 200 pageviews/min, or ~3 pv/sec. Get mentioned on Good Morning America or Oprah, on the other hand, and you're looking at 20-200 pageviews/sec. I'd guess that getting on Digg's front page is somewhere in the 20-40 pv/sec range.
A slashdotting was a big deal back when every nerd used it and the Internet was mainly nerds. Neither is true anymore.
But why would they think it was a bad thing to expose? The whole "Look what we can do with so little" angle seems appealing; efficiency is something to boast about nowadays. Turn it around. What does Google gain from exposing data about their internal performance?
Maybe they do well because they are amazingly CPU-efficient on a per-query basis. Maybe it's the opposite; they may be masters at lavishing CPU on every query, but know how to do that very cheaply. Most likely, it's a clever mix of the two.
Regardless, Google's engineering-fu and operations-fu are mighty, and a major competitive advantage. Releasing detailed data doesn't boost their reputation, as everybody already knows they are great. But it does give potential competitors an idea of what works well, making it easier for them to catch up with Google. As a rule, expect that any details you see from inside Google are old, boring, or vague. As Intel's Andy Grove said, "Only the paranoid survive."
The only chunk of his recent stuff I've seen was him in The Aristocrats, which blew me away. Maybe his powers dimmed some over the years, or maybe he cared less about putting on a show, but either way, he was still a master.
I think it's great that he got to work up until the end. That's a privilege granted to very few performers. Tonight I'll raise a glass to him.
My favorite crazy LHC theory is explained in glorious detail in this video. The guy seems reasonable to start, but he manages to pull in more kook-memes than you'd think possible. Delicious!
Slashdot Mirror
It is not a ripoff, Apple is not in the business of selling at cut throat margins by selling volume. They are in the business of selling premium items at a steep markup.
Let's get something out of the way: I agree that Apple has a legal right to charge whatever they want. I also agree that they can and should charge more for a high-quality product. People buy Apple gear because they want a good user experience, without having to worry about a lot of technical mumbo jumbo. They're happy to pay for that experience.
However, their upgrade prices still are a ripoff and have been for a long time. In college, I helped hundreds of people purchase computers of all sorts, and Apple was up to the same tricks then. Apple is not charging 200% markups on RAM and hard disks because they have carefully chosen premium RAM that provides better user experience. They are doing it because they know they can extract money from people who are rich, careless, inexperienced, or afraid. Sure, soak the rich, fine. But having seen the pained faces of countless literature students and other non-technical types, I'm confident this is sleazy.
For me, the dividing line is pretty clear. If the customer would still pay the price if they knew as much as the vendor, then it's a fair deal. If not, the vendor is taking advantage of an information asymmetry. Apple knows they attract a lot of people who don't have a clue about computers, and they take full advantage of them.
A 30% hardware premium to pay for a great UI? Sure. a 200% premium for commodity RAM? Bullshit.
IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE, Synaptic and apt-get are superior to anything that Microsoft has ever offered towards that purpose. Roger?
In the specific case of sysadmins installing patches or installing new software they know the name of, yes. I also love my package manager, and all the good people who do the packaging.
But "THIS SPECIFIC CASE", the case where Bill Gates is taking a look at the typical consumer experience of a normal end user finding and purchasing software and applying necessary system updates for the software, then no, Linux is not obviously superior, and I suspect it's inferior.
Steve Jobs has many talents, and is great at motivating people. But that has little to do with clout and passing down directives. Apple isn't amazing because he's the world's best manager; he's the world's most demanding consumer.
Moreover, even St. Steve works within limits. Bill Gates wanted market share more than usability, and he got it. Jobs wanted the opposite, and got it. But neither of them has gotten both.
But regardless, I suspect Linux would not come out on top here, not with average users.
Which is fine; it's by geeks and for geeks. Although I definitely appreciate the work done with things like apt-get, people shouldn't feel too superior over Windows, not in relation to this memo from Bill Gates, anyhow.
Compared to Mr Gates's experience, this really is a marvelous thing.
Only for people who already know how to use synaptic and apt-get.Imagine we take some normal users into a usability lab. Some get Linux boxes, some Windows boxes. All are asked to install the software needed to edit a home movie. And then to do a little editing.
My bet is that the Windows people will be done sooner, even if you control for previous experience using Windows. Linux is a better user experience for us technical experts that make up the ardent Linux base, but despite Gates's rant, I don't think we've even reached the Windows level of general-audience usability yet.
Although he wanted a good user experience (I'm sure they all wanted that), they wanted other things more. Like meeting arbitrary shipping dates. Like maintaining backwards compatibility. Like defending their monopoly. Like meeting market expectations for earnings.
To see what I mean, take a look at the Clemson Linux Initiative. It contains in detail the painful steps necessary to get common laptops working with common distributions. Normal people don't have a hope of figuring out and performing all that jiggery-pokery, and so their experience is "Linux doesn't work."
And if that's his point, he's right. The users aren't there for the computer; the computer is there for the users. A technical answer can explain why a bad experience happens, but it never justifies its continued existence.
Starbucks, on the other hand, gives you your coffee when you're standing, gives you a counter on which to put it when you are adding cream, and gives you tables to put it on afterwards. And unlike in a car, there's plenty of room to dodge and for the coffee to drain away from your skin.
and normal use is to not spill it. Normal use for a single cup is for some percentage of people not to spill. 99.9%? 99.99%? Regardless, normal usage includes some spilling.When you serve several hundred million cups of coffee a year to people in cars, no matter how small the percentage of spillers is, you will have a numerically significant number of people who spill. And some will spill enough, and be wearing the right fabrics, and not be agile enough. And they will end up needing medical care, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical care.
Second, McDonald's has chosen to sell to the general public. There is no exam, no license required, no training needed to shop there. They are therefore obligated to sell a product that is safe for the public to use. When they don't, and could have foreseen that, they must take responsibility for their actions.
Here there are two obvious truths. The problem isn't that one of them is wrong; it's that people get to an obvious truth and stop thinking.
Remember that she was some old lady who was handed a buck's worth of coffee, whereas they're a large company that carefully designs every aspect of the experience that they sell hundreds of millions of times a year. Although she may not have had an opportunity to carefully study human error rates, the slipperiness of different cup designs, or the particular effects of 180+ degree coffee on human skin, they certainly did.
Most importantly, she may not have been aware of the risk, but McDonald's certainly was, as they had been told about actual accidents.
Regardless, the western legal model of having 100 responsibility units is retarded. Any product user is responsible for using it well. And any product designer is responsible for making it such that people naturally use it well. Barring active negligence, any failure is a failure for both.
If they had a deal like that, then they would be looking at a straightforward contract violation dispute, instead of this ridiculous "misappropriation of technology" suit.
If the open source team had worked with LimitNone, agreed to help with its promotion, then turned around and released a competing version, yes, LimitNone would probably sue. For what? Mopery and dopery? If the promotion was a quid pro quo exchange for technical assistance, then as long as the promotion happened, then LimitNone doesn't have a leg to stand on.Not that stops people from suing. As my lawyer reminds me from time to time, "It doesn't mean they can't sue, just that they can't win."
Whether or not Google actually stole anything, I dunno. But saying that Google had no intention of developing a competing product isn't a promise of anything, especially at Google, where engineers are famously independent.
It was ridiculous to think that Google would ignore Exchange users indefinitely. Limit None should have realized that they were only offering a temporary and limited solution to Google's problems. By thinking only about their desires ($19 per copy) and not about Google's (organize the world's information), they overplayed a weak hand.
McDonald's put special holes in their building to sell stuff to people in cars. The put scalding-hot coffee in flimsy, slippery cups with flimsy, slippery lids, and then give you cream and sugar separately. And they do this to early-morning, pre-caffeine zombies. It should not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you do this millions of times a day, some people are going to end up in the hospital without expecting it.
VW plans for normal operator error in a host of ways. Good visibility. Good lights. Good user feedback through gauges, car feel, and road feel. Brakes and steering built to handle emergencies. Seat belts, frames, air bags, and a bunch of other little touches optimized for survival after error.
McDonald's, on the other hand, even after being told that they were putting people in the hospital unnecessarily, shrugged and carried on.
The Slashdot I had data on was from a few years back, but it was circa 100 pageviews/min. From what I can tell, Slashdot's traffic has been pretty steady the last few years. So I doubled the one I had data on. I did a little more rummaging, and as far as I can tell, my point stands: Slashdot has nothing on Oprah.
Non-profits, on the other hand, try to fulfill a mission with whatever resources they have at hand. Demand almost always exceeds supply, and many can't or won't charge to bring them back in balance. This leads to endemic under-funding and miserly budgeting.
Web sites are especially prone to this. They can't control demand, and unlike most non-profit services, they can't limit supply. So you make do. Or you deliver with lowered quality, which Wikipedia has had fits of.
Wikipedia was in theory impossible, and unproven in practice. Even now, the main difference is that most people just accept that it works without understanding how.
Looking at some old data and extrapolating, I'd guess a modern slashdotting would peak at 200 pageviews/min, or ~3 pv/sec. Get mentioned on Good Morning America or Oprah, on the other hand, and you're looking at 20-200 pageviews/sec. I'd guess that getting on Digg's front page is somewhere in the 20-40 pv/sec range.
A slashdotting was a big deal back when every nerd used it and the Internet was mainly nerds. Neither is true anymore.
Maybe they do well because they are amazingly CPU-efficient on a per-query basis. Maybe it's the opposite; they may be masters at lavishing CPU on every query, but know how to do that very cheaply. Most likely, it's a clever mix of the two.
Regardless, Google's engineering-fu and operations-fu are mighty, and a major competitive advantage. Releasing detailed data doesn't boost their reputation, as everybody already knows they are great. But it does give potential competitors an idea of what works well, making it easier for them to catch up with Google. As a rule, expect that any details you see from inside Google are old, boring, or vague. As Intel's Andy Grove said, "Only the paranoid survive."
The only chunk of his recent stuff I've seen was him in The Aristocrats, which blew me away. Maybe his powers dimmed some over the years, or maybe he cared less about putting on a show, but either way, he was still a master.
I think it's great that he got to work up until the end. That's a privilege granted to very few performers. Tonight I'll raise a glass to him.
My favorite crazy LHC theory is explained in glorious detail in this video. The guy seems reasonable to start, but he manages to pull in more kook-memes than you'd think possible. Delicious!
Wow. His principal's favorite web site: http://www.khaaan.com/
My rep didn't listen. Perhaps my senators will listen a little better, but I want to be as clear as possible.