Even John Carmack who used to be very much against multi-cores for gamins recently elaborated much on this area in his keynote. Practically any modern (lets call it nextgen:D) gaming platform is now multi-core.
Carmack had no choice, even on PCs. Both Intel and AMD have been telling Game Developer Conference attendees for at least two years that future performance improvements are going to be largely based upon multiple cores not clock rate. He could accept that his codebase was "obsolete"(*) and needed to be rewritten for threading/multi-core or his future products could be viewed as defficient when compared to others.
(*) In some ways Id's code obsoletes more quickly than others. Keep in mind that their business is more about licensing engines to other game companies than developing games themselves. This is why their games can be so bleeding edge and have such steep hardware requirements. They are not selling to the sweet spot of what today's gamers have, they are selling to developers that will not be releasing a game for a couple of years. By then the sweet spot has caught up. However they have to stay far ahead of it.
The truth about being non-religious about an OS is that I use Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and OpenBSD when and where I feel appropriate. I don't hate or love any of the above, they have strengths and weaknesses and are individually better suited for different tasks.
Regarding non-religious about the iPod, I love my iPod and would buy another as a replacement today but I have zero brand loyalty. If and when a better device appears I would choose that as a replacement. That has been my position since I bought my iPod years ago, I ripped everthing using MP3 rather than the default AAC due to this.
Some, not all, definitely have an emotional thing for/against Apple, emotional or political thing for/against Mac OS X, Linux, etc. I do not, and some who disagree with me do not either.
I think a more accurate measure would be sales with Christmas excluded, or quarter to same last year. Unfortunately, the article doesn't provide that, either. A little disappointing for The Guardian.
The article did use a very useful metric: "Tomi Ahonen, a technology brand expert and author, said: 'For the first time the iPod has had two consecutive falls after 17 quarters of growth." And it does answer your question, in the same quarter last year it had experienced some growth rather than two downward quarters.
There is plenty of AAC lock-in, though. If I had started out with an iPod and my collection of ripped CDs was all AAC files, I would be locked in to players that play AAC files.
You don't have to use AAC, Apple's iTunes software allows you to rip as MP3.
What? Obviously Apple and Wall Street are not expecting iPods to sell during July as well as they do during Christmas.
Pay more attention to the article not the GP's paraphrasing and things will be clearer: "Tomi Ahonen, a technology brand expert and author, said: 'For the first time the iPod has had two consecutive falls after 17 quarters of growth."
Rating this post a 5: Informative just proves the moderation system here is still broken. You have decided you don't like the iPod and have built a huge pile of reasoning behind it, but you clearly don't speak for the majority.
Thank you for making my prediction come true: "I'm sure the Apple faithful will violently disagree"
Did you following confuse you: "I own an iPod, I love it, I would buy another. I own PCs and Macs and use iTunes on both platforms. However I am not religious about music players or operating systems."?;-)
Also, could you provide an actual link to this "small scale and localized" study?
It wasn't my project, I just sat in on a live presentation of the results.
It would have to be a large, national study to have any real weight.
No one said it had real weight, just that it had interesting results that would justify such a national study. My point is merely that the GP's use of the word "fashion" is not poorly chosen as I expected some of his critics to argue.
As other responses have pointed out there is no DRM lock-in for iPod. It plays MP3 and non-DRM'd AAC, things you rip or download from somewhere other than Apple. Apple's online music store does have DRM, but the lock-in notion is a myth. I believe that Steve Jobs mentioned at some point that the typical customer purchases $70 worth of music. That is not a lock-in. People have transitioned from one media to another (LP, tape, CD) with more of an investment than that. It's even less of an issue because your computer will keep playing these old DRM'd files after you have moved on to something else.
I doubt Wall Street is worried about summer sales being lower than Christmas sales...
You are so wrong. Apple's stock price is all about iPod. For years their stock has been fairly flat as new computers are introduced, Macs that are the best machines they ever offered. However iPod news, or even rumors, can cause huge movements. The business press even often describes Apple as the maker of iPod and Macintosh computers, Mac ironically getting second billing. iPod brought Apple stock to the $30s and well beyond, and a lot of that is speculation about continued growth in the portable digital music/video player market. If there is any hint that Apple has lost it's technological or mindshare lead then Apple stock will dive. Keep in mind that stock price is not about the health of a company, it is speculation on the future growth of a company. Those are two very different things. Apple can be healthy, profitable, and selling more Mac and iPods than every before *and* their stock could dive. If iPod ever gets a viable competitor I expect Apple stock will go back below $30.
I'm sure the Apple faithful (*) will violently disagree, but the parent's use of the word "fad" is not poorly chosen. Recently local MBA students (**) in a marketing class surveyed hundreds of kids in local high schools regard digital music players. Stress "digital music players", they did not ask about iPod, they did not lead the respondents(***). The kids were pretty well informed, there was a lot of comparing and contrasting of various players at school. iPods were the most popular device, no surprise there, but there was a surprise. The most popular reason for choosing the iPod over competitors was fashion, a status symbol. It was not ease of use, although ease of use was identified as a category iPod wins in. For technology and features Creative was the winner, the lack of radio was a negative for the iPod.
The team that did the survey and focus groups was very quick to point out that this was just a class project, small scale and localized. However it was similar to a pilot program that found interesting results and could be used to justify a larger national study.
(*) I own an iPod, I love it, I would buy another. I own PCs and Macs and use iTunes on both platforms. However I am not religious about music players or operating systems.
(**) Working professionals who have real jobs in industry, under the supervision of a marketing professor who does this sort of thing for rather large firms. This was a class project, not a consulting project.
(***) I was not involved in the project but did I sit in on the presentation of the results. My recollection is that the questions went something like:
Do you own a digital music player?
What models did you consider?
What model did you purchase?
Why did you purchase that model?
etc.
Biz school different, those who teach also do ...
on
The Science of eBay
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You always have to wonder why business professors -- if they know so much about how to read the market -- aren't out there making a fortune instead of making less as a professor.
Business programs are very different than scientific and engineering programs. I have BS and MS degrees in Computer Science. The MS degree was from a school near JPL, lots of part-time consulting gigs for profs and students. Now I'm working on an MBA. The relationship with industry is far more intimate with the business school. Prior to business school I believed in the "those who teach" line as well, now I know that the kernel of truth in that joke distorts the true big picture.
In my marketing class some of the cases we studied were anonymized consulting projects the prof had run. These were projects intitiated by execs at big oil, big movie studio, etc. And no, I'm not at some big name ivy league school. State university, well regarded but not one of the big names.
Several of the profs are semi-retired and having fun teaching after making millions. One is on his third career. 20 years in the Marines, 10 years with the company he founded, now teaching and consulting. Most of the professors do consulting for industry. They are hired to study organization problems, marketing/sale problems, etc. MBA and PhD candiates are often some of the grunts for these projects.
Networking. I did not fully realize the importance of networking before business school, but for business it is essential. Teaching is an amazing networking tool. You are generating hundreds of managers and execs who will be inclined to come back to the prof with their problems.
In a perfect world, people would realize that's why men evolved to have a foreskin in the first place and teach their sons to clean under there instead of mutilating genitalia...
Studies have shown that chicks prefer them without foreskin. That pretty much ends the debate.
He makes mention early in the book that you never know when the ministry spies were "plugged in" to your telescreen, but you always had to act like you were being watched, just in case.
During the North African campaign of World War 2 Rommel discovered that a mine field with 10% live and 90% dummy mines slowed down the British as much as 100% live.
Apple is doing to Linux in the desktop market what Linux did to Microsoft in the server market. Basically blunt it's move into that new market segment.
OSX is a vendor lock-in solution, and not many people like that.
Consumer market: No, they don't care.
Server market: "Many" is an overstatement, Sun shows vendor lockin is a viable strategy. "Lock-in" is a gross overstatement. Mac OS X runs FOSS UNIX-based software just like Linux, you do *not* have to use proprietary solutions like WebObjects.
OSX is substantially slower on most benchmarks than Linux and Windows. OSX isn't a serious solution.
Of course you referring to benchmarks using the new Core Xeon based machines rather than the PowerPC machines that are no longer available?
This is actually the best solution I've seen. It will only work, however, if those who abuse those communal machines are quickly and publicly fired.
I think, well hope, that making the machines highly visibles helps to prevent it from getting that bad. Ideally peer pressure would encourage the slackers to mend their evils ways, the peers don't want to have to pull the slacker's weight. Also, the fear of being discovered to be a slacker may improve the behavior.
Have communal machines conveniently, but visibly, sprinkled around the office. Let these communal machines have complete access to the internet but no access to company resources. Work machines would have a whitelist. The nice thing with this solution is that the responsible employee that is just going to spend a few minutes reading mail or news can do so, but the irresponsible employee who spends excessive amounts of time will be noticed by fellow employess. A publicly visible monitory also will reduce the porn site hits.
Have you guys, or someone you know of, considered "sprinkling" communal machines with universal access around the office? Restrict work machines to a whitelist, put the communal machines on a separate subnet without access to company resources,...
You don't get a choice if they're all doing the same thing.
Market forces make sure that will not happen. Cartels almost always fail because someone not at the top gets desparate and cheats, in this case a poor performing insurance company will offer "download only on an accident", draw a lot of business from others, and the others will dial back their download policy to be comptetive.
As I mentioned in a previous post, rental car agencies can't fine you for speeding. This was probably ruled back in 2001 when it first started happening. The precident says they can't because they are not a law enforcement entity.
It won't be a fine. It will be well worded elements of a contract, perhaps a discount for slower driving.
Yes, and competition and market forces have prevented computer software from phoning home. The one thing you should never do is underestimate the stupidity and ignorance of the American people.
True, your post proves that. Unlike computer software packages, auto insurance companies are essentially interchangable and there is essentially no switching cost to the consumer. So they compete on service and perception, market forces work well under such circumstances.
Don't want to let your insurance company read the data your car is record? Too bad, no insurance for you.
Sure. Post a bond rather than get insurance, well at least in California where mandatory insurance requires one or the other, if you want to drive like a maniac. I don't want to pay more to subsidize your insurance, collectivism. And yes, driving like a maniac would probably be required for the insurance company to drop you. They would probably be perfectly happy with charging you a higher rate for the typical lapses, oaccasional speeding, etc. The "none of their business" argument is somewhat BS, you are asking them to put up "their" money as a "bond". As long as they only plug in for cause, when a citation is reported, an accident occurs, etc I think they are within their "fair use". Now if they require you to visit once a month for a plugin, well, that's just hysteria, ain't gonna happen. If nothing else competition and market forces will prevent it.
""5 years of collecting any kind of data we want, without telling anyone!""
"If the data is a loop of recent events and data is not leaving your car how are they watching you?"
Because in the event of an accident the police can easily download the events off the black box and use it against you in court. It's happened several times already.
That's not the collecting 5 years of data. the statement that I questioned. Secondly, I bet you are being told if the police are touching your vehicle. Alternatively your insurance company may have right to the data and they may turn it over, but you had agreed to that, so you were told. My question stands.
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Even John Carmack who used to be very much against multi-cores for gamins recently elaborated much on this area in his keynote. Practically any modern (lets call it nextgen :D) gaming platform is now multi-core.
Carmack had no choice, even on PCs. Both Intel and AMD have been telling Game Developer Conference attendees for at least two years that future performance improvements are going to be largely based upon multiple cores not clock rate. He could accept that his codebase was "obsolete"(*) and needed to be rewritten for threading/multi-core or his future products could be viewed as defficient when compared to others.
(*) In some ways Id's code obsoletes more quickly than others. Keep in mind that their business is more about licensing engines to other game companies than developing games themselves. This is why their games can be so bleeding edge and have such steep hardware requirements. They are not selling to the sweet spot of what today's gamers have, they are selling to developers that will not be releasing a game for a couple of years. By then the sweet spot has caught up. However they have to stay far ahead of it.
The truth about being non-religious about an OS is that I use Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and OpenBSD when and where I feel appropriate. I don't hate or love any of the above, they have strengths and weaknesses and are individually better suited for different tasks.
Regarding non-religious about the iPod, I love my iPod and would buy another as a replacement today but I have zero brand loyalty. If and when a better device appears I would choose that as a replacement. That has been my position since I bought my iPod years ago, I ripped everthing using MP3 rather than the default AAC due to this.
Some, not all, definitely have an emotional thing for/against Apple, emotional or political thing for/against Mac OS X, Linux, etc. I do not, and some who disagree with me do not either.
I think a more accurate measure would be sales with Christmas excluded, or quarter to same last year. Unfortunately, the article doesn't provide that, either. A little disappointing for The Guardian.
The article did use a very useful metric: "Tomi Ahonen, a technology brand expert and author, said: 'For the first time the iPod has had two consecutive falls after 17 quarters of growth." And it does answer your question, in the same quarter last year it had experienced some growth rather than two downward quarters.
There is plenty of AAC lock-in, though. If I had started out with an iPod and my collection of ripped CDs was all AAC files, I would be locked in to players that play AAC files.
You don't have to use AAC, Apple's iTunes software allows you to rip as MP3.
What? Obviously Apple and Wall Street are not expecting iPods to sell during July as well as they do during Christmas.
Pay more attention to the article not the GP's paraphrasing and things will be clearer: "Tomi Ahonen, a technology brand expert and author, said: 'For the first time the iPod has had two consecutive falls after 17 quarters of growth."
Rating this post a 5: Informative just proves the moderation system here is still broken. You have decided you don't like the iPod and have built a huge pile of reasoning behind it, but you clearly don't speak for the majority.
;-)
Thank you for making my prediction come true: "I'm sure the Apple faithful will violently disagree"
Did you following confuse you: "I own an iPod, I love it, I would buy another. I own PCs and Macs and use iTunes on both platforms. However I am not religious about music players or operating systems."?
Also, could you provide an actual link to this "small scale and localized" study?
It wasn't my project, I just sat in on a live presentation of the results.
It would have to be a large, national study to have any real weight.
No one said it had real weight, just that it had interesting results that would justify such a national study. My point is merely that the GP's use of the word "fashion" is not poorly chosen as I expected some of his critics to argue.
As other responses have pointed out there is no DRM lock-in for iPod. It plays MP3 and non-DRM'd AAC, things you rip or download from somewhere other than Apple. Apple's online music store does have DRM, but the lock-in notion is a myth. I believe that Steve Jobs mentioned at some point that the typical customer purchases $70 worth of music. That is not a lock-in. People have transitioned from one media to another (LP, tape, CD) with more of an investment than that. It's even less of an issue because your computer will keep playing these old DRM'd files after you have moved on to something else.
I doubt Wall Street is worried about summer sales being lower than Christmas sales...
You are so wrong. Apple's stock price is all about iPod. For years their stock has been fairly flat as new computers are introduced, Macs that are the best machines they ever offered. However iPod news, or even rumors, can cause huge movements. The business press even often describes Apple as the maker of iPod and Macintosh computers, Mac ironically getting second billing. iPod brought Apple stock to the $30s and well beyond, and a lot of that is speculation about continued growth in the portable digital music/video player market. If there is any hint that Apple has lost it's technological or mindshare lead then Apple stock will dive. Keep in mind that stock price is not about the health of a company, it is speculation on the future growth of a company. Those are two very different things. Apple can be healthy, profitable, and selling more Mac and iPods than every before *and* their stock could dive. If iPod ever gets a viable competitor I expect Apple stock will go back below $30.
I'm sure the Apple faithful (*) will violently disagree, but the parent's use of the word "fad" is not poorly chosen. Recently local MBA students (**) in a marketing class surveyed hundreds of kids in local high schools regard digital music players. Stress "digital music players", they did not ask about iPod, they did not lead the respondents(***). The kids were pretty well informed, there was a lot of comparing and contrasting of various players at school. iPods were the most popular device, no surprise there, but there was a surprise. The most popular reason for choosing the iPod over competitors was fashion, a status symbol. It was not ease of use, although ease of use was identified as a category iPod wins in. For technology and features Creative was the winner, the lack of radio was a negative for the iPod.
The team that did the survey and focus groups was very quick to point out that this was just a class project, small scale and localized. However it was similar to a pilot program that found interesting results and could be used to justify a larger national study.
(*) I own an iPod, I love it, I would buy another. I own PCs and Macs and use iTunes on both platforms. However I am not religious about music players or operating systems.
(**) Working professionals who have real jobs in industry, under the supervision of a marketing professor who does this sort of thing for rather large firms. This was a class project, not a consulting project.
(***) I was not involved in the project but did I sit in on the presentation of the results. My recollection is that the questions went something like:
Do you own a digital music player?
What models did you consider?
What model did you purchase?
Why did you purchase that model?
etc.
You always have to wonder why business professors -- if they know so much about how to read the market -- aren't out there making a fortune instead of making less as a professor.
Business programs are very different than scientific and engineering programs. I have BS and MS degrees in Computer Science. The MS degree was from a school near JPL, lots of part-time consulting gigs for profs and students. Now I'm working on an MBA. The relationship with industry is far more intimate with the business school. Prior to business school I believed in the "those who teach" line as well, now I know that the kernel of truth in that joke distorts the true big picture.
In my marketing class some of the cases we studied were anonymized consulting projects the prof had run. These were projects intitiated by execs at big oil, big movie studio, etc. And no, I'm not at some big name ivy league school. State university, well regarded but not one of the big names.
Several of the profs are semi-retired and having fun teaching after making millions. One is on his third career. 20 years in the Marines, 10 years with the company he founded, now teaching and consulting. Most of the professors do consulting for industry. They are hired to study organization problems, marketing/sale problems, etc. MBA and PhD candiates are often some of the grunts for these projects.
Networking. I did not fully realize the importance of networking before business school, but for business it is essential. Teaching is an amazing networking tool. You are generating hundreds of managers and execs who will be inclined to come back to the prof with their problems.
In a perfect world, people would realize that's why men evolved to have a foreskin in the first place and teach their sons to clean under there instead of mutilating genitalia...
Studies have shown that chicks prefer them without foreskin. That pretty much ends the debate.
Most laptops have them embedded. Other than that, any VOIP client or multi-person game player will have a mic. I'm sure there are more.
;-)
My headset and free standing Mics have mute switches. Now if only the web cam on those iMacs had a shutter.
He makes mention early in the book that you never know when the ministry spies were "plugged in" to your telescreen, but you always had to act like you were being watched, just in case.
During the North African campaign of World War 2 Rommel discovered that a mine field with 10% live and 90% dummy mines slowed down the British as much as 100% live.
Apple is doing to Linux in the desktop market what Linux did to Microsoft in the server market. Basically blunt it's move into that new market segment.
OSX is a vendor lock-in solution, and not many people like that.
Consumer market: No, they don't care.
Server market: "Many" is an overstatement, Sun shows vendor lockin is a viable strategy. "Lock-in" is a gross overstatement. Mac OS X runs FOSS UNIX-based software just like Linux, you do *not* have to use proprietary solutions like WebObjects.
OSX is substantially slower on most benchmarks than Linux and Windows. OSX isn't a serious solution.
Of course you referring to benchmarks using the new Core Xeon based machines rather than the PowerPC machines that are no longer available?
Granted, it would be much clearer as Windows Media-based, but I believe that's what the summary was alluding to.
FWIW, the summary repeatedly referred to the MP3 market. That gives neither Microsoft (.WMA) nor Apple (.AAC) a homefield advantage.
This is actually the best solution I've seen. It will only work, however, if those who abuse those communal machines are quickly and publicly fired.
I think, well hope, that making the machines highly visibles helps to prevent it from getting that bad. Ideally peer pressure would encourage the slackers to mend their evils ways, the peers don't want to have to pull the slacker's weight. Also, the fear of being discovered to be a slacker may improve the behavior.
Have communal machines conveniently, but visibly, sprinkled around the office. Let these communal machines have complete access to the internet but no access to company resources. Work machines would have a whitelist. The nice thing with this solution is that the responsible employee that is just going to spend a few minutes reading mail or news can do so, but the irresponsible employee who spends excessive amounts of time will be noticed by fellow employess. A publicly visible monitory also will reduce the porn site hits.
Have you guys, or someone you know of, considered "sprinkling" communal machines with universal access around the office? Restrict work machines to a whitelist, put the communal machines on a separate subnet without access to company resources, ...
You don't get a choice if they're all doing the same thing.
Market forces make sure that will not happen. Cartels almost always fail because someone not at the top gets desparate and cheats, in this case a poor performing insurance company will offer "download only on an accident", draw a lot of business from others, and the others will dial back their download policy to be comptetive.
As I mentioned in a previous post, rental car agencies can't fine you for speeding. This was probably ruled back in 2001 when it first started happening. The precident says they can't because they are not a law enforcement entity.
It won't be a fine. It will be well worded elements of a contract, perhaps a discount for slower driving.
Yes, and competition and market forces have prevented computer software from phoning home. The one thing you should never do is underestimate the stupidity and ignorance of the American people.
True, your post proves that. Unlike computer software packages, auto insurance companies are essentially interchangable and there is essentially no switching cost to the consumer. So they compete on service and perception, market forces work well under such circumstances.
Don't want to let your insurance company read the data your car is record? Too bad, no insurance for you.
Sure. Post a bond rather than get insurance, well at least in California where mandatory insurance requires one or the other, if you want to drive like a maniac. I don't want to pay more to subsidize your insurance, collectivism. And yes, driving like a maniac would probably be required for the insurance company to drop you. They would probably be perfectly happy with charging you a higher rate for the typical lapses, oaccasional speeding, etc. The "none of their business" argument is somewhat BS, you are asking them to put up "their" money as a "bond". As long as they only plug in for cause, when a citation is reported, an accident occurs, etc I think they are within their "fair use". Now if they require you to visit once a month for a plugin, well, that's just hysteria, ain't gonna happen. If nothing else competition and market forces will prevent it.
Now somebody has to explain to me why they require several years to inform customers. 2007, or 2008 would be quite reachable as target dates.
I think you missed the part that mentioned common stamndards, perhaps a common interface as well.
""5 years of collecting any kind of data we want, without telling anyone!""
"If the data is a loop of recent events and data is not leaving your car how are they watching you?"
Because in the event of an accident the police can easily download the events off the black box and use it against you in court. It's happened several times already.
That's not the collecting 5 years of data. the statement that I questioned. Secondly, I bet you are being told if the police are touching your vehicle. Alternatively your insurance company may have right to the data and they may turn it over, but you had agreed to that, so you were told. My question stands.