Bespoke software (including customisation) and support services is what's going to be profitable in the future, mass market software will become even more commoditised than hardware since there are much lower reproduction costs involved.
Most software has reached the same stage as hardware, 10 year old software is more than adequate to the needs of the vast majority of users.
HP already did that to their high end servers, ditching PA-Risc and Alpha to replace them with the incompatible and poorly performing IA64 caused a lot of customers to migrate away (well if your going to migrate to an incompatible platform anyway, might as well move to one that isn't going to be pulled out from under you).
Desktops, workstations and laptops have long been commoditised, generic hardware which the chinese can manufacture much more cheaply than any american company. Unless you have something to differentiate your product, like Apple, then your margins will be razor thin and you have to compete against the chinese.
No, they shouldn't have. Jumping into a market with 3 much larger, better connected competitors, who have the loyalties of 3rd parties was just stupid.
So instead, they jump into the enterprise software market which already has Oracle, SAP, IBM etc?
Tablets are a very new market, and Apple have their large market share mostly by virtue of being first to market... There is a very good chance of taking a big chunk of the market, especially with a competitively priced product... The Touchpad didn't sell very well at $400, but its selling like hotcakes at $100...
The right price point would have been somewhere in between. If HP really put their weight behind it, they could have sold it for considerably less than the iPad, at or just over cost price.. They could also have made it capable of running Android apps, both WebOS and Android are based on a Linux kernel, so including an android compatible user land wouldn't be a huge task. This would give them quick access to a much larger base of apps, while still having the product differentiation of running their own OS.
Apple are seen by many as a premium brand, so when people see an iPad costing $400 they expect competing devices to cost considerably less for similar spec.
The reason the PC market is low margin, is because of competition, all of the hardware components are competitive, as are the whole machines... windows on the other hand is only available from one place, and they can make or break a pc vendor at will.
Apple are able to differentiate their product, and aren't beholden to microsoft.. Which is why they're the only pc vendor with decent margins.
It's not uncommon for a shipping product to have a huge number of bugs, it was well publicised that windows 2000 had 65,000 known bugs when released...
If there were a large number of really serious bugs then the software would be unusable, which is why they concentrate on the major bugs first... Less serious ones can usually wait.
Couldn't agree more... Apple's products may be made in the same chinese factories, but they offer a complete platform which differentiates them from the commodity dell/hp/asus/acer/lenovo/noname products...
HP just offer generic windows laptops, just like Dell and all the chinese whitebox makers... Why would anyone pay extra for HP?
Also, while the price of most components is subject to competition, the price of windows is only subject to the whims of microsoft, who have the ability to make or break any of the vendors except apple, merely by refusing to give them oem/bulk discounts on windows and therefore pushing the prices of their computers higher than their competitors.
Similarly, these whitebox makers are beholden to the whims of microsoft, look at the netbook market, atom cpus, no more than 2gb ram, screen must be below a certain size to qualify for cheaper windows etc... The very small cheap computers that started the netbook trend are all but gone, and ARM netbooks have not really taken off.
The problem is that the tech industry is moving faster than most other industries, and once a corporation gets to a certain size it usually becomes slow and cumbersome and quickly falls behind... In order to move such a mass, you need a good leader who can recognise the changes coming and force the company to move with the times.
It happens less in other industries because they are generally less slow moving, but you do see examples such as general motors being unable to compete with all the asian car makers...
You'd save even more by ditching skype and using a regular sip provider...
Then you could also ditch the 50W p3 and replace it with a 10W arm, i have such a box which runs asterisk (For sip/iax trunks and internal phones) and has crontab scripts to download large files at night (i have a limited traffic plan during the day, unlimited at night).
Outbound calls are much cheaper with various sip providers, usually far better quality, and since I'm not tied to a single provider i can pick and choose who routes my calls based on quality or price to the specific destinations i call.
Your not all that limited, Debian/Arm has virtually all of the same packages as its x86 counterpart, and then there's gentoo... No need to mess with cross compilers, you can run a compiler on the box itself... I do that with an OpenRD board, its not the fastest at compiling but it gets the job done and runs everything i need.
What i really want however, is something thats better designed as a small server / router, something like a dual core arm as found in ipad2 and hp touchpad etc, coupled with 2 or preferably 4 ethernet ports and 2 sata ports.
Only its not an extra hour, it just has a different arbitrary number assigned to it... Why can't you start work at 8am instead of 9am, and then finish an hour earlier too?
Or companies need to start implementing defence in depth strategies, rather than concentrating purely on border security. Virtually every network i've seen has been based around the idea of a firewall separating it from the outside and virtually no security inside the network, or relying entirely on something like active directory access controls and not for a second considering how easy it is to subvert the whole thing.
The most important question is the bit about "why those customers accepted that arrangement"... And the problem is that quite often, people who understand the technology have no say in the procurement decisions.
It's unlikely that they were supposed to have access, but never believe what software vendors tell you about access control...
Most networks are entirely dependent on perimeter security, and are wide open inside... I'm talking unpatched boxes, weak/blank passwords, poor permissions, common or shared passwords and a multitude of other problems. Once you have access behind the firewall, even comparatively minimal access, its extremely easy to gain access to other devices.
Speaking from experience, having conducted hundreds of penetration tests against corporate networks, consider the following:
You get unprivileged access to a single workstation, you don't have admin access but you can execute programs and open network sockets... Perhaps you can escalate to admin privileges on the local workstation via an unpatched vuln? Chances are your unprivileged access is on an active directory domain, so you can leverage the single sign on features to access other machines, perhaps you can escalate to admin privileges on one of those? Chances are on a network of any size there will be at least one unpatched vuln you could exploit... Once you have SYSTEM privileges on a windows box you can dump the password hashes, including those of any logged in domain users... You might get lucky and a domain admin is logged in, and you can steal his password hash. If not, chances are all the machines were built from a single image so the local admin hash will work on more than just one system. Once you have a hash, you can use it right away, no need to crack it.. Very quickly you have admin on the domain, and if there are other trusted domains it won't take you long to get into those too...
Can't speak for rsa, but most companies i've seen have a single domain and rely on windows access control to deny employees access to stuff they shouldn't see... that doesn't work when you can totally subvert the system.
Security is a cost, both in terms of convenience as well as financial... However the paybacks from security are not obvious, you could make no effort on security whatsoever and still get lucky, or you could make a significant effort and still get hit by sufficiently skilled/determined (or lucky) hackers.
You are right about complexity tho, the more complex you make a system the greater the chance of overlooking something.
Unfortunately, the industry is dominated by large companies that have products to sell, products are generally bought by non technical managers and simplicity is a very hard sell to someone who doesn't understand, so you have lots of vendors selling ever increasing complexity.
Then they are not beholden to Australian laws, but must comply with whatever laws exist in the country where it was sold... Many European countries have very consumer-friendly warranty laws for instance, so if an australian bought a product there they could take advantage of those laws.
I know that, which is why i made the statement "because MS has extremely half-assed ODF support" as opposed to "because MS has no ODF support"... The ODF support in Office 2010 loses formatting, and refuses to save things like cross references and tables of contents despite the fact that ODF can support these. Many documents when saved by Office 2010 directly into ODF format, retain less formatting than when saved in a proprietary binary format, and then converted into ODF by LibreOffice.
Also they only support an older version of the spec, and not the current 1.2 version, and (seemingly as an act of intentional bad faith) created their own formula language in their ODF 1.1 support, instead of doing the same as other implementors of the format (and which their own plugin already does).
If they are business related forms, then they should be stored and managed on a system operated by the business, for accountability reasons if nothing else... Do you think the business doesn't want to keep track of the hours swapped by julie and sally? What if the building catches fire and sally can't be located because she isn't there, while julie is trapped in a burning room with none searching for her because they think she's at home?
Christmas gift exchanges, lotto pools and softball games are not a business critical function and the business has no requirement to provide tools for doing this. Also for such tasks, there are lots of free online services designed for such things that make it much easier for multiple people to share information.
I'm not saying people should be denied word processors and spreadsheets, i'm saying that there are many situations where such tools are simply inappropriate. And that also, for 99% of uses (especially the ones mentioned above) msoffice or libreoffice are grossly over specced, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars on software where 99% of the users will use 1% of the features is insane.
Democrats are as much a part of the status-quo party as the republicans, they work together to ensure that the current system remains in place... They're smart enough to realise that a 1 party system is too obvious, so they split their single party in two to create the illusion that people have choice.
If any outages occur, they will happen if a third party ever gets any sizeable portion of the vote.
Have you ever tried using "business software", especially from a large vendor? Most of it is pretty crap and the employees hate it, but they don't get a choice and are forced to use it.
Trivial tasks, like writing short letters, doing simple calculations or viewing documents sent by others (which should have been sent as pdf)... The same thing that probably 99% of users of such software do, which is why the price tags charged by proprietary vendors are so disgusting.
Actually, ideally we need everyone using ODF, and then a selection of applications depending on requirement. Most people would be able to do with a very simple, ultra lightweight application and would probably get on better with it since the toolbars wouldn't be cluttered with advanced features they never use.
If the doctors are already used to the medical forms, which for the reasons you state are done in a database driven system, then it makes sense for other less important forms to be done in the same or a similar system. Not much point wasting the doctor's time filling in trivial forms.
Remember these are Danish hospitals, in a country with state funded healthcare... ODF and PDF is what they require compatibility with, not any proprietary garbage... It is actually businesses using MSO who will be at a disadvantage when trying to do business with the government, because MS has extremely half-assed ODF support. So you have the situation backwards, the cost of MSO + the cost of dealing with its poor compatibility with everything else, vs the cost of LO.
Also the article mentions they are using a virtual desktop infrastructure, whereby they log in on a dumb terminal and a VM server somewhere fires up a desktop image for them and exports the display to their terminal. Now if you consider their requirements, any of those users who don't require any proprietary windows software can be given a linux image with the same software, thus saving the hospital the cost of windows licenses too.
Corruption and bribes exist in the US too, they're just better disguised (e.g. lobbying) and more expensive (so only large corporates can afford them) than in other countries.
This has been going on for a long time, it's just that with the Internet you can very quickly see just how bad it is.. Artificially inflated prices to gouge people.. Products not available in other countries at all, you can understand with physical goods that require distribution, but not for virtual goods on the internet...
And the worst of all, arbitrary restrictions such as region coding, designed to prevent you from importing foreign versions yourself.
All of this basically amounts to racial discrimination as well as restriction of trade and should be outlawed.
Higher prices = higher VAT returned per sale... However if the prices are cheaper, what do you think people will do with the money they saved? Chances are they will just buy something else, so the total VAT works out much the same.
On the other hand, if UK prices are massively higher than other places, people will just import and pay no VAT at all (or pay it to a foreign country instead).
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Bespoke software (including customisation) and support services is what's going to be profitable in the future, mass market software will become even more commoditised than hardware since there are much lower reproduction costs involved.
Most software has reached the same stage as hardware, 10 year old software is more than adequate to the needs of the vast majority of users.
HP already did that to their high end servers, ditching PA-Risc and Alpha to replace them with the incompatible and poorly performing IA64 caused a lot of customers to migrate away (well if your going to migrate to an incompatible platform anyway, might as well move to one that isn't going to be pulled out from under you).
Desktops, workstations and laptops have long been commoditised, generic hardware which the chinese can manufacture much more cheaply than any american company. Unless you have something to differentiate your product, like Apple, then your margins will be razor thin and you have to compete against the chinese.
No, they shouldn't have. Jumping into a market with 3 much larger, better connected competitors, who have the loyalties of 3rd parties was just stupid.
So instead, they jump into the enterprise software market which already has Oracle, SAP, IBM etc?
Tablets are a very new market, and Apple have their large market share mostly by virtue of being first to market... There is a very good chance of taking a big chunk of the market, especially with a competitively priced product... The Touchpad didn't sell very well at $400, but its selling like hotcakes at $100...
The right price point would have been somewhere in between. If HP really put their weight behind it, they could have sold it for considerably less than the iPad, at or just over cost price..
They could also have made it capable of running Android apps, both WebOS and Android are based on a Linux kernel, so including an android compatible user land wouldn't be a huge task. This would give them quick access to a much larger base of apps, while still having the product differentiation of running their own OS.
Apple are seen by many as a premium brand, so when people see an iPad costing $400 they expect competing devices to cost considerably less for similar spec.
The reason the PC market is low margin, is because of competition, all of the hardware components are competitive, as are the whole machines... windows on the other hand is only available from one place, and they can make or break a pc vendor at will.
Apple are able to differentiate their product, and aren't beholden to microsoft.. Which is why they're the only pc vendor with decent margins.
It's not uncommon for a shipping product to have a huge number of bugs, it was well publicised that windows 2000 had 65,000 known bugs when released...
If there were a large number of really serious bugs then the software would be unusable, which is why they concentrate on the major bugs first... Less serious ones can usually wait.
Couldn't agree more... Apple's products may be made in the same chinese factories, but they offer a complete platform which differentiates them from the commodity dell/hp/asus/acer/lenovo/noname products...
HP just offer generic windows laptops, just like Dell and all the chinese whitebox makers... Why would anyone pay extra for HP?
Also, while the price of most components is subject to competition, the price of windows is only subject to the whims of microsoft, who have the ability to make or break any of the vendors except apple, merely by refusing to give them oem/bulk discounts on windows and therefore pushing the prices of their computers higher than their competitors.
Similarly, these whitebox makers are beholden to the whims of microsoft, look at the netbook market, atom cpus, no more than 2gb ram, screen must be below a certain size to qualify for cheaper windows etc... The very small cheap computers that started the netbook trend are all but gone, and ARM netbooks have not really taken off.
The problem is that the tech industry is moving faster than most other industries, and once a corporation gets to a certain size it usually becomes slow and cumbersome and quickly falls behind... In order to move such a mass, you need a good leader who can recognise the changes coming and force the company to move with the times.
It happens less in other industries because they are generally less slow moving, but you do see examples such as general motors being unable to compete with all the asian car makers...
You'd save even more by ditching skype and using a regular sip provider...
Then you could also ditch the 50W p3 and replace it with a 10W arm, i have such a box which runs asterisk (For sip/iax trunks and internal phones) and has crontab scripts to download large files at night (i have a limited traffic plan during the day, unlimited at night).
Outbound calls are much cheaper with various sip providers, usually far better quality, and since I'm not tied to a single provider i can pick and choose who routes my calls based on quality or price to the specific destinations i call.
Your not all that limited, Debian/Arm has virtually all of the same packages as its x86 counterpart, and then there's gentoo...
No need to mess with cross compilers, you can run a compiler on the box itself... I do that with an OpenRD board, its not the fastest at compiling but it gets the job done and runs everything i need.
What i really want however, is something thats better designed as a small server / router, something like a dual core arm as found in ipad2 and hp touchpad etc, coupled with 2 or preferably 4 ethernet ports and 2 sata ports.
Only its not an extra hour, it just has a different arbitrary number assigned to it...
Why can't you start work at 8am instead of 9am, and then finish an hour earlier too?
Or companies need to start implementing defence in depth strategies, rather than concentrating purely on border security.
Virtually every network i've seen has been based around the idea of a firewall separating it from the outside and virtually no security inside the network, or relying entirely on something like active directory access controls and not for a second considering how easy it is to subvert the whole thing.
The most important question is the bit about "why those customers accepted that arrangement"... And the problem is that quite often, people who understand the technology have no say in the procurement decisions.
It's unlikely that they were supposed to have access, but never believe what software vendors tell you about access control...
Most networks are entirely dependent on perimeter security, and are wide open inside... I'm talking unpatched boxes, weak/blank passwords, poor permissions, common or shared passwords and a multitude of other problems.
Once you have access behind the firewall, even comparatively minimal access, its extremely easy to gain access to other devices.
Speaking from experience, having conducted hundreds of penetration tests against corporate networks, consider the following:
You get unprivileged access to a single workstation, you don't have admin access but you can execute programs and open network sockets...
Perhaps you can escalate to admin privileges on the local workstation via an unpatched vuln?
Chances are your unprivileged access is on an active directory domain, so you can leverage the single sign on features to access other machines, perhaps you can escalate to admin privileges on one of those?
Chances are on a network of any size there will be at least one unpatched vuln you could exploit...
Once you have SYSTEM privileges on a windows box you can dump the password hashes, including those of any logged in domain users... You might get lucky and a domain admin is logged in, and you can steal his password hash. If not, chances are all the machines were built from a single image so the local admin hash will work on more than just one system.
Once you have a hash, you can use it right away, no need to crack it..
Very quickly you have admin on the domain, and if there are other trusted domains it won't take you long to get into those too...
Can't speak for rsa, but most companies i've seen have a single domain and rely on windows access control to deny employees access to stuff they shouldn't see... that doesn't work when you can totally subvert the system.
Security is a cost, both in terms of convenience as well as financial...
However the paybacks from security are not obvious, you could make no effort on security whatsoever and still get lucky, or you could make a significant effort and still get hit by sufficiently skilled/determined (or lucky) hackers.
You are right about complexity tho, the more complex you make a system the greater the chance of overlooking something.
Unfortunately, the industry is dominated by large companies that have products to sell, products are generally bought by non technical managers and simplicity is a very hard sell to someone who doesn't understand, so you have lots of vendors selling ever increasing complexity.
Then they are not beholden to Australian laws, but must comply with whatever laws exist in the country where it was sold... Many European countries have very consumer-friendly warranty laws for instance, so if an australian bought a product there they could take advantage of those laws.
I know that, which is why i made the statement "because MS has extremely half-assed ODF support" as opposed to "because MS has no ODF support"...
The ODF support in Office 2010 loses formatting, and refuses to save things like cross references and tables of contents despite the fact that ODF can support these. Many documents when saved by Office 2010 directly into ODF format, retain less formatting than when saved in a proprietary binary format, and then converted into ODF by LibreOffice.
Also they only support an older version of the spec, and not the current 1.2 version, and (seemingly as an act of intentional bad faith) created their own formula language in their ODF 1.1 support, instead of doing the same as other implementors of the format (and which their own plugin already does).
If they are business related forms, then they should be stored and managed on a system operated by the business, for accountability reasons if nothing else... Do you think the business doesn't want to keep track of the hours swapped by julie and sally?
What if the building catches fire and sally can't be located because she isn't there, while julie is trapped in a burning room with none searching for her because they think she's at home?
Christmas gift exchanges, lotto pools and softball games are not a business critical function and the business has no requirement to provide tools for doing this.
Also for such tasks, there are lots of free online services designed for such things that make it much easier for multiple people to share information.
I'm not saying people should be denied word processors and spreadsheets, i'm saying that there are many situations where such tools are simply inappropriate. And that also, for 99% of uses (especially the ones mentioned above) msoffice or libreoffice are grossly over specced, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars on software where 99% of the users will use 1% of the features is insane.
Democrats are as much a part of the status-quo party as the republicans, they work together to ensure that the current system remains in place... They're smart enough to realise that a 1 party system is too obvious, so they split their single party in two to create the illusion that people have choice.
If any outages occur, they will happen if a third party ever gets any sizeable portion of the vote.
Have you ever tried using "business software", especially from a large vendor? Most of it is pretty crap and the employees hate it, but they don't get a choice and are forced to use it.
Trivial tasks, like writing short letters, doing simple calculations or viewing documents sent by others (which should have been sent as pdf)... The same thing that probably 99% of users of such software do, which is why the price tags charged by proprietary vendors are so disgusting.
Actually, ideally we need everyone using ODF, and then a selection of applications depending on requirement. Most people would be able to do with a very simple, ultra lightweight application and would probably get on better with it since the toolbars wouldn't be cluttered with advanced features they never use.
If the doctors are already used to the medical forms, which for the reasons you state are done in a database driven system, then it makes sense for other less important forms to be done in the same or a similar system. Not much point wasting the doctor's time filling in trivial forms.
On the other hand, ODF is the only approved editable format for use by the Danish government (citation: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2010/02/02/denmark-adopts-odf-and-pdfa-40016263/) in which case your compatibility will actually be better with LO than with MSO.
Remember these are Danish hospitals, in a country with state funded healthcare... ODF and PDF is what they require compatibility with, not any proprietary garbage... It is actually businesses using MSO who will be at a disadvantage when trying to do business with the government, because MS has extremely half-assed ODF support. So you have the situation backwards, the cost of MSO + the cost of dealing with its poor compatibility with everything else, vs the cost of LO.
Also the article mentions they are using a virtual desktop infrastructure, whereby they log in on a dumb terminal and a VM server somewhere fires up a desktop image for them and exports the display to their terminal. Now if you consider their requirements, any of those users who don't require any proprietary windows software can be given a linux image with the same software, thus saving the hospital the cost of windows licenses too.
Corruption and bribes exist in the US too, they're just better disguised (e.g. lobbying) and more expensive (so only large corporates can afford them) than in other countries.
This has been going on for a long time, it's just that with the Internet you can very quickly see just how bad it is..
Artificially inflated prices to gouge people..
Products not available in other countries at all, you can understand with physical goods that require distribution, but not for virtual goods on the internet...
And the worst of all, arbitrary restrictions such as region coding, designed to prevent you from importing foreign versions yourself.
All of this basically amounts to racial discrimination as well as restriction of trade and should be outlawed.
There is, check on ebay.co.uk... Lots of sellers bulk buy from the US and sell them in the UK.
Higher prices = higher VAT returned per sale...
However if the prices are cheaper, what do you think people will do with the money they saved? Chances are they will just buy something else, so the total VAT works out much the same.
On the other hand, if UK prices are massively higher than other places, people will just import and pay no VAT at all (or pay it to a foreign country instead).