Um... car companies *do* sell their cars to rental fleets at a discount, in part to ensure exclusive fleet deals. Whether or not the rental companies pass the discount on to you, nothing to do with the car company.
I've certainly bought (and emphatically *not* bought) cars based on my experience with rentals (or as I call 'em, extended test drives on $employer's dime).
The ethics lie not in the loss that theft incurs, but in the basic idea that you *should* pay money for music you enjoy.
Given that some individuals choose to make a living by performing music, this is necessarily the case, and has been for many hundreds of years since the emergence of professional musicians. In European history, this goes back to bards, seannachies and troubadours.
While you may dispute the value of having professional musicians (and if you do, you also accept that you'd be listening to music made by people who live in your neighbourhood), to be able to support professional musicians, someone has to pay money - directly or indirectly (through buying advertised products).
In previous times, this would have been through patronage of rich individuals or the church, but the result was what the patron paid for. The only reason why you can hear Handel's Fireworks Music is that George I wanted to have some music for his fireworks party.
Starting (mostly) in the 18th Century, composers turned to the general populace - particularly the growing middle class - for the source of their income. Mozart wrote operas which were at least in part funded by ticket sales. Chopin and Liszt wrote pieces for their own concert tours.
Much of the raison d'etre of popular music is that it sells to the public. Would you be able to hear The Joshua Tree if U2 had stayed a local Dublin band, playing in pubs? Of course not.
That's the thing that so many people forget about the music business - it's a business. That's the point - making profit. Talk about the real production cost of CDs is entirely irrelevant, other than to ensure that it's low enough compared to the sale price to make it worth investing money in.
And when it comes down to it, the one thing that any professional musician wants is to be paid.
See, what you don't realise is that with most grownup marketeers[1], effective targeting means you get less ads, not more, and you also get less crap that doesn't bear even the flimsiest relationship to anything you might actually buy.
If an ad costs me 0.10 to run, why would I run it to people who I don't think are going to buy? If it's for a service only available in some areas, why would I waste money running it for people who don't live there, or who aren't the kind of people who buy it.
Good marketing uses data to screen out prospects - qualifying the prospects and saving money doing so.
Old advertising maxim: 50% of my spend is wasted. If only I knew which 50%.
[1] Accepted, many online 'marketeers' are not grownups
Why should the trademark name 'Apple' have been approved?
Because it was a unique and non-descriptive name of a computer company.
Further, the Apple computer company went through very, very drawn out and expensive litigation with the Apple Corp which was the holding company for most of the Beatles IP, to be allowed to use the Apple name.
The settlement was that Apple Computer couldn't make anything music related - hence the Sosumi sound.
You write them for busy/lazy journalists in exactly the form and style of a news piece - in particular, using the inverted pyramid form so it can be cut off at pretty much any point and still make sense - and hope that they'll make few if any changes before running it.
Certainly any quotes that are there can usefully be picked up without having to re-interview your CEO who's going say exactly the same thing anyway.
A good journalist will at least fact check, even on the busiest of days, but if you're a tight to deadline journo and there's space going unfilled, having the core of an article written for you is helpful.
OTOH, Pete Waterman is *still* churning out acts that are hits (and has been a judge on two major UK Popstars talent shows along with his old mate Simon Cowell). And still happily copying classical structures.
And if you think this is a phenomenon of the last 2|5|10|20 years, bear in mind such formulae as the 12 bar blues and the 4 chord trick (I, VI, IV, V, repeat).
But much of the gloss of pop music is (as suggested by parent post) in the arrangements, not the composition. Look at the number of covers in that compilation. Covers from the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. I would guess that much of the software we're talking about analyses arrangements and applies collaborative filtering based on what's selling at the moment.
In the end though, it doesn't matter. Pop music is primarily entertainment, defined by commercial success. Don't mistake it for Art.
Here is how the pricing dynamic and competitive matrix works if you manufacture computer hardware (boxes, rather than peripherals).
You *can* compete on price. But you'll never permanently be the cheapest.
You *can* compete on performance. But you'll never hold a permanent lead.
In both cases, your brand of being cheapest or most powerful is never going to be truely believed as you'll get your backside kicked from time to time, and you'll have to both ship vast numbers of boxes, and screw your costs down to an unbelievable level to make it pay. Both of which are Hard(tm).
The low-margin, volume business is really, really tough, and if you're hit by an unexpected change in your cost structure (say the Yen/Dollar exchange rate changing by a fraction of a cent beyond your window), then you're in a hole.
Alternatively, you can do something different (to coin a phrase). You can build something high-margin, based on brand values (ease of use & looks in this case) which can't be so easily attacked. That way, you don't need a huge market share (just enough to be on the right side of Metcalfe's law) to make good, steady cash-cow profits.
And unexpected changes in your cost structure mean you make $99 instead of $100 per sale, rather than going from a $0.50 profit to a $0.50 loss per unit.
Apple's ambition is absolutely not to be Dell (although they're happy to learn lessons in manufacturing and sales from Dell's BTO operation) and depend on low-margin volume, but to be Sony.
That's why the iMac was so important to Apple - it (re)-established that brand and let Apple charge the premium.
You don't want to pay for looks? Fine. You're not in the target market. Apple couldn't care less what you think and won't really invest in changing your mind.
Try actually *buying* one... staff Dixon's Group stores (including Dixons & Currys) claim never to have heard of it.
Our local (Edinburgh) Currys superstore has a total of *one* in stock, which the sales staff seem to be doing their best to not sell (compared to the sky+ boxes).
(They didn't have images in their records for the last 2000 years;
Funny, I thought the Book of Kells was produced c.800 CE (well within the last 2000 years) and was illustrated. The illustrations being a major part in the significance of the work (because they're an insight into the artistic heritage of the Celtic world).
frankly, if something's really So Important That It Must Be Saved, it can be done in the good queen's English.)
Nope, the 5300 laptop. It was the flames that did it... Although they did replace it no questions asked with a Powerbook 1400 - one of the 1st shipment of PPC-based lappies in the UK.
Even if your hardware lets the magic smoke out, top class customer service keeps a lot of customers.
They charge $20 for a point release, they charge $129 for a full release, and Apple doesn't otherwise do upgrades.
Yes, that is the reason why so many people are pissed off with Apple over 10.2 (that and the redundant 'OS Upgrade' vouchers that came in the 10.1 box)
Particularly as, despite what Steve claimed, 10.2 really doesn't offer that much that's new at an OS level.
The employee stock options aside, remember that MS (as with all public companies) is the property of its stockholders.
In ownership terms, there is no Microsoft to do that (plus even in today's market, it would be an unaffordable exercise). However, if a senior management team could afford to do it then sure, it could be taken back into private hands.
But given that the value in owning MS shares is entirely based on their expected increase in price on the open market, it would be somewhat pointless.
In 3G (remember this is infrastructure), again with selected competitors as of April 2002 (source) Nokia+Ericsson: 64% Lucent: 3% Siemens/NEC: 19% Nortel: 8% Alcatel: 4% Motorola: 1%
Also remember that Verizon are owned by Vodaphone who will want to use their existing European-based suppliers for GSM migration, and US carriers such as Cingular are already giving their GSM migration work to European firms like Nokia.
Numbers 1-77 of your needs are provided by software. It may not be obvious, it may not be branded, but it's all software.
Same goes for a large number of systems which need to co-operate to get your credit card to work either in stores or ATMs - they're all dependent on software.
Italy has a pretty low saturation of mobile phones compared to (say) Finland, where the market penetration is over 100% of adults (ie there are more adults with more than 1 mobile phone than there are with none).
And you wonder why the 2 globally dominant mobile phone operators in both consumer sales and network kit (Nokia and Ericsson) are Finnish...
In the vast majority of profitable markets, they're as close as they're going to get to achieving the old Mission Statement
Once market saturation of PCs had occurred, selling into that market is no longer a cash cow, but a steady, lower residual income of gentle upgrades (now that the Win9x codebase is dead, and Office is as developed as it is, there is no good reason for most organisations to do more than patch and buy new licenses for new machines). So to keep stockholders happy (who remember are not paid dividends - it's all based on shareprice growth), they have to find another market where there could be double digit %age growth year on year.
Unfortunately for them, they're entering markets with some extremely focused competitors who already dominate the space. In competing against Sony, Nokia and Ericsson (none of whom are likely to miss tricks the way IBM did in the 1980s), Microsoft are discovering what it's like to be on the receiving end.
Forgot to mention - state all your assumptions. That way if you don't include something that the beancounters consider significant, you can respond by adding it in and recutting the calculations, rather than by losing the entire proposal.
What some of the above posters haven't grasped is that you're being asked for a business case, not a 'Is Linux technically better than MS?' paper.
If you're being judged by business people, you need to speak their language, which all boils down to $CURRENCY_UNITS.
While you may have a template to work off if the upgrade to Win2k or NT was properly planned (and if you don't have it, it might be worth retrospectively doing this), here are the steps you'll need to go through in your business case:
Eat the elephant in bites - break the question down by services. Mail, web, proxying, fileservers, desktop (etc).
For each of the above, can Linux meet the requirements that the business. You'll need to understand what they are in more detail than what we do now. You may find that there are genuine business requirements that the MS kit won't support.
For each of the above separately, calculate the annual maintenance costs of each platform at today's prices in licensing, training, depreciation, server room space, network capacity, admin (including handling security holes!) and any differences in speed of use - a task an average user does 10 times a day if extended by 20 seconds at time, times N staff at a daily total cost (nb > salary) can be a boatload of cash.
For each of the above separately, calculate the cost of the project to change, including all external help, retraining (as opposed to ongoing training - although redesigning the training is also a real cost) both users and admins, hardware costs, network reconfiguration, project management and opportunity cost of projects which can't go ahead while you're doing your rollout.
Now it gets interesting. Put together a rollout plan, one service at a time. You need to work out how much the effect of having to support both systems will cost. Also, there are cost benefits of having a number of systems running on a single platform - they will diminish on the Win side as they grow on the Linux side, but not necessarily evenly.
The money bit
Now it gets really interesting. Assuming that you'll be calculating the costs/benefits over a number of years to produce a programme budget and calculating a break-even point some time in the future, you'll need to take into account that you're using money which would otherwise produce a return doing something else, and also that there will be inflation in the mean time.
Talk to your beancounters, and ask them what DCF rate is standard usage in the company - this is the rate by which the company assumes that money will lose its value. If you don't get one, use 10% as a fallback (but make it clear that that's your assumption). With a 10% DCF rate, a dollar will be worth a dollar today, 90 cents next year, 81 the year after, 73 in year 4 and so on - discount factors of 1, 0.9, 0.81, 0.73, 0.66 etc.
For each year, take the net operating savings (ie leaving out the initial project investment) that Linux will bring and multiply that by that year's discount factor. This will be the savings at Net Present Value (NPV - a term all beancounters consider as the real value). Keep a cumulative total.
Divide the cumulative NPV value by the programme cost of the change. This is your Return on Investment (RoI), expressed as a ratio or a percentage. When/if it reaches 1:1, you've hit breakeven. Be very clear about when you expect to hit this point - when it comes will largely determine whether you get the go-ahead.
It's a common usage, but not (strictly) grammatically correct. If you're being strict, it would be the computers memory was increased.
Fortunately, human languages are (mostly) more forgiving of incorrect punctuation than (say) Perl or Python. Human languages are also subject to evolution by usage, although less so than before the codification of the 18th century.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple to buy Universal.
Um... car companies *do* sell their cars to rental fleets at a discount, in part to ensure exclusive fleet deals. Whether or not the rental companies pass the discount on to you, nothing to do with the car company.
I've certainly bought (and emphatically *not* bought) cars based on my experience with rentals (or as I call 'em, extended test drives on $employer's dime).
Given that some individuals choose to make a living by performing music, this is necessarily the case, and has been for many hundreds of years since the emergence of professional musicians. In European history, this goes back to bards, seannachies and troubadours.
While you may dispute the value of having professional musicians (and if you do, you also accept that you'd be listening to music made by people who live in your neighbourhood), to be able to support professional musicians, someone has to pay money - directly or indirectly (through buying advertised products).
In previous times, this would have been through patronage of rich individuals or the church, but the result was what the patron paid for. The only reason why you can hear Handel's Fireworks Music is that George I wanted to have some music for his fireworks party.
Starting (mostly) in the 18th Century, composers turned to the general populace - particularly the growing middle class - for the source of their income. Mozart wrote operas which were at least in part funded by ticket sales. Chopin and Liszt wrote pieces for their own concert tours.
Much of the raison d'etre of popular music is that it sells to the public. Would you be able to hear The Joshua Tree if U2 had stayed a local Dublin band, playing in pubs? Of course not.
That's the thing that so many people forget about the music business - it's a business. That's the point - making profit. Talk about the real production cost of CDs is entirely irrelevant, other than to ensure that it's low enough compared to the sale price to make it worth investing money in.
And when it comes down to it, the one thing that any professional musician wants is to be paid.
See, what you don't realise is that with most grownup marketeers[1], effective targeting means you get less ads, not more, and you also get less crap that doesn't bear even the flimsiest relationship to anything you might actually buy.
If an ad costs me 0.10 to run, why would I run it to people who I don't think are going to buy? If it's for a service only available in some areas, why would I waste money running it for people who don't live there, or who aren't the kind of people who buy it.
Good marketing uses data to screen out prospects - qualifying the prospects and saving money doing so.
Old advertising maxim: 50% of my spend is wasted. If only I knew which 50%.
[1] Accepted, many online 'marketeers' are not grownups
Further, the Apple computer company went through very, very drawn out and expensive litigation with the Apple Corp which was the holding company for most of the Beatles IP, to be allowed to use the Apple name.
The settlement was that Apple Computer couldn't make anything music related - hence the Sosumi sound.
Suprisingly, this is how press releases work.
You write them for busy/lazy journalists in exactly the form and style of a news piece - in particular, using the inverted pyramid form so it can be cut off at pretty much any point and still make sense - and hope that they'll make few if any changes before running it.
Certainly any quotes that are there can usefully be picked up without having to re-interview your CEO who's going say exactly the same thing anyway.
A good journalist will at least fact check, even on the busiest of days, but if you're a tight to deadline journo and there's space going unfilled, having the core of an article written for you is helpful.
If the facts check out, why re-invent the wheel?
They weren't called The Hit Factory for nothing...
OTOH, Pete Waterman is *still* churning out acts that are hits (and has been a judge on two major UK Popstars talent shows along with his old mate Simon Cowell). And still happily copying classical structures.
And if you think this is a phenomenon of the last 2|5|10|20 years, bear in mind such formulae as the 12 bar blues and the 4 chord trick (I, VI, IV, V, repeat).
But much of the gloss of pop music is (as suggested by parent post) in the arrangements, not the composition. Look at the number of covers in that compilation. Covers from the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. I would guess that much of the software we're talking about analyses arrangements and applies collaborative filtering based on what's selling at the moment.
In the end though, it doesn't matter. Pop music is primarily entertainment, defined by commercial success. Don't mistake it for Art.
Sounds like an identity from Looney Labs' Chrononaughts to me...
Here is how the pricing dynamic and competitive matrix works if you manufacture computer hardware (boxes, rather than peripherals).
You *can* compete on price. But you'll never permanently be the cheapest.
You *can* compete on performance. But you'll never hold a permanent lead.
In both cases, your brand of being cheapest or most powerful is never going to be truely believed as you'll get your backside kicked from time to time, and you'll have to both ship vast numbers of boxes, and screw your costs down to an unbelievable level to make it pay. Both of which are Hard(tm).
The low-margin, volume business is really, really tough, and if you're hit by an unexpected change in your cost structure (say the Yen/Dollar exchange rate changing by a fraction of a cent beyond your window), then you're in a hole.
Alternatively, you can do something different (to coin a phrase). You can build something high-margin, based on brand values (ease of use & looks in this case) which can't be so easily attacked. That way, you don't need a huge market share (just enough to be on the right side of Metcalfe's law) to make good, steady cash-cow profits.
And unexpected changes in your cost structure mean you make $99 instead of $100 per sale, rather than going from a $0.50 profit to a $0.50 loss per unit.
Apple's ambition is absolutely not to be Dell (although they're happy to learn lessons in manufacturing and sales from Dell's BTO operation) and depend on low-margin volume, but to be Sony.
That's why the iMac was so important to Apple - it (re)-established that brand and let Apple charge the premium.
You don't want to pay for looks? Fine. You're not in the target market. Apple couldn't care less what you think and won't really invest in changing your mind.
Sure, TiVo aren't pulling out, just Thompson.
Try actually *buying* one... staff Dixon's Group stores (including Dixons & Currys) claim never to have heard of it.
Our local (Edinburgh) Currys superstore has a total of *one* in stock, which the sales staff seem to be doing their best to not sell (compared to the sky+ boxes).
Funny, I thought the Book of Kells was produced c.800 CE (well within the last 2000 years) and was illustrated. The illustrations being a major part in the significance of the work (because they're an insight into the artistic heritage of the Celtic world).
Oh, and it wasn't in English either.
Nope, the 5300 laptop. It was the flames that did it... Although they did replace it no questions asked with a Powerbook 1400 - one of the 1st shipment of PPC-based lappies in the UK.
Even if your hardware lets the magic smoke out, top class customer service keeps a lot of customers.
Yes, that is the reason why so many people are pissed off with Apple over 10.2 (that and the redundant 'OS Upgrade' vouchers that came in the 10.1 box)
Particularly as, despite what Steve claimed, 10.2 really doesn't offer that much that's new at an OS level.
The employee stock options aside, remember that MS (as with all public companies) is the property of its stockholders.
In ownership terms, there is no Microsoft to do that (plus even in today's market, it would be an unaffordable exercise). However, if a senior management team could afford to do it then sure, it could be taken back into private hands.
But given that the value in owning MS shares is entirely based on their expected increase in price on the open market, it would be somewhat pointless.
Infrastructure's a major business, and one which Nokia and Ericsson have a major degree of control over.
In 2G, market share by value of contracts (with some selected competitors for comparison) (Source: Merrill Lynch 4th Jan 2001):
GSM:
Nokia+Ericsson: 59%
Lucent: 4%
Motorola: 18%
Nortel: 12%
TDMA:
Nokia+Ericsson: 61%
Lucent: 12%
Motorola: 0%
Nortel: 18%
In 3G (remember this is infrastructure), again with selected competitors as of April 2002 (source)
Nokia+Ericsson: 64%
Lucent: 3%
Siemens/NEC: 19%
Nortel: 8%
Alcatel: 4%
Motorola: 1%
Also remember that Verizon are owned by Vodaphone who will want to use their existing European-based suppliers for GSM migration, and US carriers such as Cingular are already giving their GSM migration work to European firms like Nokia.
You can.
Numbers 1-77 of your needs are provided by software. It may not be obvious, it may not be branded, but it's all software. Same goes for a large number of systems which need to co-operate to get your credit card to work either in stores or ATMs - they're all dependent on software.
Oops, yes. Ericsson are Swedish. The causes and logic are similar.
True. And part of the logic for that standardisation was a competitive one.
Well the XBox is interesting, mostly because it's being absolutely caned in sales by Sony and it's shedding 3rd party developers.
Same way Sony has - by having critical mass in both sales and developers, and being plain better.
Italy has a pretty low saturation of mobile phones compared to (say) Finland, where the market penetration is over 100% of adults (ie there are more adults with more than 1 mobile phone than there are with none).
And you wonder why the 2 globally dominant mobile phone operators in both consumer sales and network kit (Nokia and Ericsson) are Finnish...
I think it was pretty inevitable as MS realised:
Unfortunately for them, they're entering markets with some extremely focused competitors who already dominate the space. In competing against Sony, Nokia and Ericsson (none of whom are likely to miss tricks the way IBM did in the 1980s), Microsoft are discovering what it's like to be on the receiving end.
Forgot to mention - state all your assumptions. That way if you don't include something that the beancounters consider significant, you can respond by adding it in and recutting the calculations, rather than by losing the entire proposal.
What some of the above posters haven't grasped is that you're being asked for a business case, not a 'Is Linux technically better than MS?' paper.
If you're being judged by business people, you need to speak their language, which all boils down to $CURRENCY_UNITS.
While you may have a template to work off if the upgrade to Win2k or NT was properly planned (and if you don't have it, it might be worth retrospectively doing this), here are the steps you'll need to go through in your business case:
The money bit
Now it gets really interesting. Assuming that you'll be calculating the costs/benefits over a number of years to produce a programme budget and calculating a break-even point some time in the future, you'll need to take into account that you're using money which would otherwise produce a return doing something else, and also that there will be inflation in the mean time.
Talk to your beancounters, and ask them what DCF rate is standard usage in the company - this is the rate by which the company assumes that money will lose its value. If you don't get one, use 10% as a fallback (but make it clear that that's your assumption). With a 10% DCF rate, a dollar will be worth a dollar today, 90 cents next year, 81 the year after, 73 in year 4 and so on - discount factors of 1, 0.9, 0.81, 0.73, 0.66 etc.
For each year, take the net operating savings (ie leaving out the initial project investment) that Linux will bring and multiply that by that year's discount factor. This will be the savings at Net Present Value (NPV - a term all beancounters consider as the real value). Keep a cumulative total.
Divide the cumulative NPV value by the programme cost of the change. This is your Return on Investment (RoI), expressed as a ratio or a percentage. When/if it reaches 1:1, you've hit breakeven. Be very clear about when you expect to hit this point - when it comes will largely determine whether you get the go-ahead.
It's a common usage, but not (strictly) grammatically correct. If you're being strict, it would be the computers memory was increased.
Fortunately, human languages are (mostly) more forgiving of incorrect punctuation than (say) Perl or Python. Human languages are also subject to evolution by usage, although less so than before the codification of the 18th century.