You have to start thinking beyond phones. For most home users, the computer will be going out of main stream use and back to the realm of geeks. It will be replaced by tablets and appliances that run "apps". In my own house there isn't even a traditional "computer" anymore. (well a couple old ones in boxes). My iPad and Xbox360 do every thing I need at home. (I have a docking station for the iPad as well as one of the thinkgeek keyboard cases)
On my old projection TV I used my Xbox360 mostly to stream Netflix. Well when the TV died last christmas, the TV I bought to replace it has Netflix and a bunch of other apps built in. I don't even need the Xbox anymore.
At work I still have an iMac because I still have to do some coding from time to time and on occasion build/compile a program. But that is less than 5% of my time anymore. Everything else the iPad handles. Shoot, my iPhone handled 80% of the stuff I needed I laptop for 5 years ago. And since the iPad has iWorks for it, that's good enough for my presentation, spreadsheet, and word processing I do.
It was seriously undermined over a decade ago when the first studies on navigation showed that people navigated linearly through a website. Hence why breadcrumbs became so popular. The idea of hyperlinking for most of the web is pretty much dead the exception being Wikipedia. That is the closest thing to the concept of hypertext that exists today.
I manage mobile development for a small shop (10 Developers + Graphics Artist + Photographer/Videographer) as well as created three apps last year using Phonegap to release for iOS & Android.
The apps I developed had "free" ad supported "lite" versions. Basically these were the proof of concept versions that had all the functionality and I wanted to just get out the door. Then I would spend another week or two fine tuning the apps and adding support of handset hardware like the ability to take and save pictures with Phonegap, etc. to create a "full" version with no ads for $.99 or $1.99. What I discovered was that Android users don't buy apps. I had 25k more Android downloads of the lite version of my app yet Android sales were less than 15% of my total sales. After talking with my friends and co-workers who had Android phones I noticed the same trend. Very few had paid apps and if they did it was 1 or 2. They didn't have a lot of free apps either outside of maybe Facebook and Urbanspoon. What I did find interesting was that most of these people owned iPhone Touches and interestingly enough, had bought more apps for their iPod than their phones. It will be interesting how many to see how many of these folks switch from Android to the iPhone because most of my none techie friends admit they WANTED an iPhone, but was going to deal with AT&T. They wanted Verizon (and where some live it's perfectly understandable) They got an Android phone because it was the "closest" Verizon had to an iPhone at the time.
Now at work, the company treated iPhone and Android as "platforms" at the beginning (Fall 2009) through about October of last year and then we had to change how to billed and priced to our clients frankly because Android was eating our lunch in QA. This was due to new handsets every month and a new OS version every quarter. By the time we got the bugs all solved with one, two more popped up. So instead of charging by OS we started CHARGING BY HANDSET/DEVICE. I think that gets lost on a lot of people here. We found that Android turned into developing for blackberry only instead of having 1 or 2 versions of the OS in the wild with blackberry Android had like 6 and a new one every quarter it seemed. Palm was much closer to iPhone with pretty much 1 OS and 2 devices.
We found we could do QA on the iPhone/iPod Touch for $X. We'd been developing for a couple years on the platform and there isn't a lot of hardware differences. Our first iPad apps fell under this, but people complained they were too "iPhone line", which they were just ports of the iPhone app. So we developed a format that worked better on that device, if people want the iPad version it is $Y. Want the iOS family it is $X + $Y. Basically it's 1 price because there is 1 iPhone by 1 manufacture. And it sees updates on a yearly and predictable basis.
With Android, $X will buy you the app + QA for the Nexus One (now S) and the latest stable version of Android. If they want QA on any additional Android Handsets, it costs $Y per handset. Typically they'll want Droid (Verizon), HTC(Sprint/Verizon/others), and Samsung(AT&T/Others). This makes developing for Android typically anywhere from 3x - 5x more expensive for our clients. If the clients are giving the software away free, this is usually not a problem. We did have 2 clients who were charging for their apps actually drop Android on the next version because they found out what I did: not enough people bought them.
We didn't hear too many complaints from our clients when it explain it to them, but to be fair, this is how we priced Blackberry before with $X for the app, $Y per handset for QA so it wasn't like they had seen it before.
even seen the postgres wiki? Some of the best documentation of any software (closed/open) anywhere. The documentation is probably one reason why you don't see a lot of books on the subject. Anytime I've had a question, I've usually found it in the documentation.
Unfortunately, the project I'm working on now is MySQL based because that's what is readily available for proof of concept. But we're still in the rapid development/proof of concept. I also made damn sure to stay away from anything MySQL specific as I fully plan on switching to PostgreSQL if we get the Okay to do a full production version.
It's all relative. If you only have $5 and spend $4 of it, then you've made a huge investment. If you have a $1B and spend $40M, it's like taking the spare change from the sofa and buying a couple lottery tickets.
It's more like the starting of the race to define the "next-gen" of console gaming. All the content is going to be available as DLC only with some sort of subscription required to access/play. Question is will you even own the content or will it be rental only or some combination there of. But the idea of cloud gaming probably has a few bigwigs raising an eyebrow. One, all the games are hosted on the OnLive hardware. If it's only available via OnLive, that makes piracy MUCH harder. Secondly, you have subscriptions which provide an on going source of revenue that comes in month after month and in any business, cash flow is king.
As far as that goes, we still have the Atlas platform (Remember the Gemini Program) as well as the Delta IV. Both are proven designs that could be retrofitted and man rated to carry the orion capsule.
If you look at the AA role, you might have a point, but what are the chances of us seeing Air to Air engagements this day in age? Maybe in the opening moves before one side's airbases are decimated from cruise missile/drone attacks. Most of the combat today is air to ground. And in that role Guns still have their place. There have several instances where F-15's and F-16's have used their guns for danger close strafing runs in Afghanistan where allied troops were too close to the enemy for bombs.
I've read a number of after action reports that pretty much say the same thing: the Air Force doesn't need F-22's, it's needs more A-10's or a drone to replace it. The most effective aircraft since 1990 are still the B-52 and A-10. And the A-10 was built around its gun. The A-10 can do two things: carry a shit load of mixed ordinance and loiter around a battlefield for on-call CAS. F-15's and F-16's don't carry near the array of weapons and can remain on station for about 20 - 30 minutes before they have to go gas up again and come back. That usually takes an hour or more for a four ship group to refuel and come back.
I know the Reaper is a step towards a replacement for the A-10, but it carries about the same amount of ordinance as an F-16.
Thing is in the US is Sales taxes are imposed at the state and local levels (county/city). This is much like how each country in Europe set's its own VAT tax rate. From what I've read about proposed VAT taxes in the US is that it would be another tax levied in addition to other taxes, not replacing a sales tax or income tax.
This would be like the EU coming and dictating that every transaction in the EU would include an additional x% in VAT collected and sent to Brussels to be used by the Parliament to fund EU projects. (I know not exactly how it works, but...)
Last year I created a couple mobile apps for both iOS and Android that were priced with a free "lite" version with ads and then the "full" version with some added features and no ads for $.99 or $1.99. I spent about 3x the amount of time troubleshooting the minor differences between Android handsets and OS versions and Android and Android sales of the full versions were less than 15%. This was despite having 15k more Android downloads.
And the amount of money from ads all platforms barely covered the costs of my developer accounts. I made my money from sales of the "full" versions.
After talking with my friends and co-workers with Android phones, something dawned on me: they didn't buy apps. Not like iPhone users. And they don't really download many apps either outside of maybe The Weather Channel and Facebook or a twitter app. My next mobile application I'm getting ready to release will be iOS only.
This is something I have to explain to customers when we do mobile development, especially explaining our pricing for Android. We only give QA on the Nexus One/(now S). Each additional handset costs extra and typically most will want QA against Droid(Verizon), HTC Evo(Sprint), and Samsung (AT&T/T-Mobile). That makes the Android platform usually between 3 to 5 times the cost to develop for iPhone/iPod. Usually we treat the iPad as a separate device just as we'll treat these new tablets running Android as each being a different "platform".
Last year we tried to treat "Android" as a platform, but we ended up losing money on that side of the business because every time we turned around there were a half dozen new handsets and a new OS version to deal with.
Thing is for Apple, it's not about having the latest and greatest features it's about making sure the features that you do have work and work well. That is why a vast number of consumers are buying their products even when they are more expensive.
This was somewhere that DLC could have been big. You get Rockband and as they license new content, sell it for 800MS points ($10) or 1200 points ($15) because you don't need to redo the game engine for each release. I think that would have solved some of the issues with saturation.
I don't find using the iPad any better/worse than a laptop.
And if you're in a job/position where you need multiple monitors, then you aren't the target market for a tablet. But there are a lot more people out there who more or less need a calendar, email, address book, and the ability to maybe write up a document from time to time. For those folks, a tablet can easily replace a notebook.
For most users the answer is "Yes, these are the devices of the future of computing".
I bought my iPad about a year ago. By July I stopped carrying a laptop. I didn't need it anymore and once I was able to get printing from the iPad, it did everything I needed at home and 95% of what I needed at work. I still have to dive into code/troubleshoot technical problems at work, but even that is getting less often. I still have an iMac there. I bought one of those bluetooth keyboard cases from think geek over christmas, but before that I used a docking station at home and the wireless keyboard at the office.
But as far as email, word processing, spreadsheets, and even presentations go, I can do all of that on my iPad now. Even our SVN hosting has an iPad/iPhone app that I can check bug report status messages, assign tasks, etc.. If Barebones came out with BBEdit for iPad, I probably could get away with not even having a computer at work. (None of the work I do involves compiling anymore).
At my company we had to change our pricing for mobile application development. If our customers want iOS, the price is X and includes QA for iPhone, iPod, and iPad. If you want Android, the price starts at $X with the Nexus being the device that undergoes QA. Each additional platform (handset/device) they want a QA agreement on is an additional $X. On average this makes Android 3X more expensive as they'll want at least a motorola(Verizon), HTC (Sprint/T-Mobile), and Samsung handset tested and approved.
We'll just be treating the new tablets each as a separate platform for QA/billing purposes.
I bought my last computer for my home in 2007. These days all my home computing needs are served by two devices: Xbox (used to stream Netflix primarily these days) and my iPad. And the next TV I buy will probably have Netflix built in...
At work I'm completely out of the day to day development. I haven't written a line of code since July and I've turned over code review to someone at the start of this year. My sole concern now is overall systems architecture and generally answering hardware/networking questions the programmers have sometimes. The rest of my day is spent looking at statistics and customer requests/complaints figuring out what changes should/need to be done for the next version of our product.
But they get banned from Xbox Live, which is a paid for after market service. If you mod your Xbox, you are still free to play it at home off-line or via lan. They do nothing to stop that.
All they do is ban the console from XBox Live. And personally I like that feature since it makes it harder for the average person to cheat with mods.
XBL does this to a degree with achievements. I'm not sure about actual game saves. But in games like Reach, if my console kicked the bucket tomorrow and I got a new one, it would remember that I had beaten the game on legendary, I have the rank of brigadier, and what other stuff I had unlocked. I even get access to that stuff if I recover my gamertag on a friend's Xbox.
I'm not sure if it would remember the exact spot I stopped during my last campaign save or not, but that's moot point to me.
Dear Netflix,
Subtle suggestion noted. Perhaps we can discuss the details of our offering you a superior service sooner rather than later. We would like to propose that in exchange for offering you a faster connection to our consumers, by prioritizing your traffic over others, you openly endorse us as your ISP of choice in the regions we serve and pay us the sum of $5 per subscriber per month for the privilege. We will of course be offering this service to our customers for the sum of an additional $19.99 per month. This additional service fee will allow our customers free streaming to On Demand Video Service. You can make this On Demand Service, powered by Netflix, for the mere sum of $15M per month to co-locate within our network. We will of course then be willing to offer you the sum of $1.99 per subscriber per month. I think you'll agree that we can both come out ahead in this particular arrangement. You of course, will be free to make similar agreements with other ISP in regions that we do not service, and we will not consider this to be an issue.
Yours Truly, [Insert ISP Here]
Seems like MS takes the approach of "Fine, mod your console if you like, but if you get caught you can't use it on XBL". And since XBL is a subscription service they set their rules, but you agree to them by paying for the service.
I suspect Sony will learn the lesson and the PS4 will see the introduction of a subscription based PSN. Especially since the next generation of games will likely all be purchased through app stores as opposed to optical media.
What we did is started treating each android handset as a different "platform". If our customers want mobile apps for iOS or Blackberry, we treat the OS as the platform, but with Android it was becoming extremely expensive to develop for compared to iOS and Blackberry.
Last year we lost money on android apps, we made money on iOS & Blackberry. This year so far it's looking like we'll at least break even on Android. But our customers are grumbling about the cost of "android" if they choose to support more than 1 or 2 handsets.
Most of my friends with Droid phones got them because Verizon didn't offer the iPhone. I look for most of them to switch to the iPhone as their next phone because that's what they really wanted, but hated AT&T. I just passed 2 years with my iPhone and AT&T going month to month with my old iPhone 3G phone. I'm waiting until next month to see, but it's very possible that I may be a verizon customer by march.
One of my clients is a coffee shop that offers 3 hours of wifi with purchase. I built the software that allows people to log in using their rewards card or by typing their name and an employee granting access. It's been working well for over 5 years on a FBSD box.
The question then becomes, do they count as an ISP? Will they have to maintain records and if so, for a small business like theirs is it going to be worth the hassle?
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You have to start thinking beyond phones. For most home users, the computer will be going out of main stream use and back to the realm of geeks. It will be replaced by tablets and appliances that run "apps". In my own house there isn't even a traditional "computer" anymore. (well a couple old ones in boxes). My iPad and Xbox360 do every thing I need at home. (I have a docking station for the iPad as well as one of the thinkgeek keyboard cases)
On my old projection TV I used my Xbox360 mostly to stream Netflix. Well when the TV died last christmas, the TV I bought to replace it has Netflix and a bunch of other apps built in. I don't even need the Xbox anymore.
At work I still have an iMac because I still have to do some coding from time to time and on occasion build/compile a program. But that is less than 5% of my time anymore. Everything else the iPad handles. Shoot, my iPhone handled 80% of the stuff I needed I laptop for 5 years ago. And since the iPad has iWorks for it, that's good enough for my presentation, spreadsheet, and word processing I do.
It was seriously undermined over a decade ago when the first studies on navigation showed that people navigated linearly through a website. Hence why breadcrumbs became so popular. The idea of hyperlinking for most of the web is pretty much dead the exception being Wikipedia. That is the closest thing to the concept of hypertext that exists today.
...when your phone was going to require antivirus/malware tools. All this does is give Apple a bullet point with their walled garden approach.
You can buy the track preformed from Video Games Live off iTunes. It's a great song.
I manage mobile development for a small shop (10 Developers + Graphics Artist + Photographer/Videographer) as well as created three apps last year using Phonegap to release for iOS & Android.
The apps I developed had "free" ad supported "lite" versions. Basically these were the proof of concept versions that had all the functionality and I wanted to just get out the door. Then I would spend another week or two fine tuning the apps and adding support of handset hardware like the ability to take and save pictures with Phonegap, etc. to create a "full" version with no ads for $.99 or $1.99. What I discovered was that Android users don't buy apps. I had 25k more Android downloads of the lite version of my app yet Android sales were less than 15% of my total sales. After talking with my friends and co-workers who had Android phones I noticed the same trend. Very few had paid apps and if they did it was 1 or 2. They didn't have a lot of free apps either outside of maybe Facebook and Urbanspoon. What I did find interesting was that most of these people owned iPhone Touches and interestingly enough, had bought more apps for their iPod than their phones. It will be interesting how many to see how many of these folks switch from Android to the iPhone because most of my none techie friends admit they WANTED an iPhone, but was going to deal with AT&T. They wanted Verizon (and where some live it's perfectly understandable) They got an Android phone because it was the "closest" Verizon had to an iPhone at the time.
Now at work, the company treated iPhone and Android as "platforms" at the beginning (Fall 2009) through about October of last year and then we had to change how to billed and priced to our clients frankly because Android was eating our lunch in QA. This was due to new handsets every month and a new OS version every quarter. By the time we got the bugs all solved with one, two more popped up. So instead of charging by OS we started CHARGING BY HANDSET/DEVICE. I think that gets lost on a lot of people here. We found that Android turned into developing for blackberry only instead of having 1 or 2 versions of the OS in the wild with blackberry Android had like 6 and a new one every quarter it seemed. Palm was much closer to iPhone with pretty much 1 OS and 2 devices.
We found we could do QA on the iPhone/iPod Touch for $X. We'd been developing for a couple years on the platform and there isn't a lot of hardware differences. Our first iPad apps fell under this, but people complained they were too "iPhone line", which they were just ports of the iPhone app. So we developed a format that worked better on that device, if people want the iPad version it is $Y. Want the iOS family it is $X + $Y. Basically it's 1 price because there is 1 iPhone by 1 manufacture. And it sees updates on a yearly and predictable basis.
With Android, $X will buy you the app + QA for the Nexus One (now S) and the latest stable version of Android. If they want QA on any additional Android Handsets, it costs $Y per handset. Typically they'll want Droid (Verizon), HTC(Sprint/Verizon/others), and Samsung(AT&T/Others). This makes developing for Android typically anywhere from 3x - 5x more expensive for our clients. If the clients are giving the software away free, this is usually not a problem. We did have 2 clients who were charging for their apps actually drop Android on the next version because they found out what I did: not enough people bought them.
We didn't hear too many complaints from our clients when it explain it to them, but to be fair, this is how we priced Blackberry before with $X for the app, $Y per handset for QA so it wasn't like they had seen it before.
even seen the postgres wiki? Some of the best documentation of any software (closed/open) anywhere. The documentation is probably one reason why you don't see a lot of books on the subject. Anytime I've had a question, I've usually found it in the documentation.
Unfortunately, the project I'm working on now is MySQL based because that's what is readily available for proof of concept. But we're still in the rapid development/proof of concept. I also made damn sure to stay away from anything MySQL specific as I fully plan on switching to PostgreSQL if we get the Okay to do a full production version.
It's all relative. If you only have $5 and spend $4 of it, then you've made a huge investment. If you have a $1B and spend $40M, it's like taking the spare change from the sofa and buying a couple lottery tickets.
It's more like the starting of the race to define the "next-gen" of console gaming. All the content is going to be available as DLC only with some sort of subscription required to access/play. Question is will you even own the content or will it be rental only or some combination there of. But the idea of cloud gaming probably has a few bigwigs raising an eyebrow. One, all the games are hosted on the OnLive hardware. If it's only available via OnLive, that makes piracy MUCH harder. Secondly, you have subscriptions which provide an on going source of revenue that comes in month after month and in any business, cash flow is king.
As far as that goes, we still have the Atlas platform (Remember the Gemini Program) as well as the Delta IV. Both are proven designs that could be retrofitted and man rated to carry the orion capsule.
If you look at the AA role, you might have a point, but what are the chances of us seeing Air to Air engagements this day in age? Maybe in the opening moves before one side's airbases are decimated from cruise missile/drone attacks. Most of the combat today is air to ground. And in that role Guns still have their place. There have several instances where F-15's and F-16's have used their guns for danger close strafing runs in Afghanistan where allied troops were too close to the enemy for bombs.
I've read a number of after action reports that pretty much say the same thing: the Air Force doesn't need F-22's, it's needs more A-10's or a drone to replace it. The most effective aircraft since 1990 are still the B-52 and A-10. And the A-10 was built around its gun. The A-10 can do two things: carry a shit load of mixed ordinance and loiter around a battlefield for on-call CAS. F-15's and F-16's don't carry near the array of weapons and can remain on station for about 20 - 30 minutes before they have to go gas up again and come back. That usually takes an hour or more for a four ship group to refuel and come back.
I know the Reaper is a step towards a replacement for the A-10, but it carries about the same amount of ordinance as an F-16.
Thing is in the US is Sales taxes are imposed at the state and local levels (county/city). This is much like how each country in Europe set's its own VAT tax rate. From what I've read about proposed VAT taxes in the US is that it would be another tax levied in addition to other taxes, not replacing a sales tax or income tax.
This would be like the EU coming and dictating that every transaction in the EU would include an additional x% in VAT collected and sent to Brussels to be used by the Parliament to fund EU projects. (I know not exactly how it works, but...)
Last year I created a couple mobile apps for both iOS and Android that were priced with a free "lite" version with ads and then the "full" version with some added features and no ads for $.99 or $1.99. I spent about 3x the amount of time troubleshooting the minor differences between Android handsets and OS versions and Android and Android sales of the full versions were less than 15%. This was despite having 15k more Android downloads.
And the amount of money from ads all platforms barely covered the costs of my developer accounts. I made my money from sales of the "full" versions.
After talking with my friends and co-workers with Android phones, something dawned on me: they didn't buy apps. Not like iPhone users. And they don't really download many apps either outside of maybe The Weather Channel and Facebook or a twitter app. My next mobile application I'm getting ready to release will be iOS only.
This is something I have to explain to customers when we do mobile development, especially explaining our pricing for Android. We only give QA on the Nexus One/(now S). Each additional handset costs extra and typically most will want QA against Droid(Verizon), HTC Evo(Sprint), and Samsung (AT&T/T-Mobile). That makes the Android platform usually between 3 to 5 times the cost to develop for iPhone/iPod. Usually we treat the iPad as a separate device just as we'll treat these new tablets running Android as each being a different "platform".
Last year we tried to treat "Android" as a platform, but we ended up losing money on that side of the business because every time we turned around there were a half dozen new handsets and a new OS version to deal with.
Thing is for Apple, it's not about having the latest and greatest features it's about making sure the features that you do have work and work well. That is why a vast number of consumers are buying their products even when they are more expensive.
This was somewhere that DLC could have been big. You get Rockband and as they license new content, sell it for 800MS points ($10) or 1200 points ($15) because you don't need to redo the game engine for each release. I think that would have solved some of the issues with saturation.
It's not that hard to pair a bluetooth keyboard with the iPad and suspect the same for the android tablets. You can even get iPad cases with a built in keyboard: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/keyboards-mice/e65a/?pfm=Carousel_iPad_Keyboard_Case_4
I don't find using the iPad any better/worse than a laptop.
And if you're in a job/position where you need multiple monitors, then you aren't the target market for a tablet. But there are a lot more people out there who more or less need a calendar, email, address book, and the ability to maybe write up a document from time to time. For those folks, a tablet can easily replace a notebook.
For most users the answer is "Yes, these are the devices of the future of computing".
I bought my iPad about a year ago. By July I stopped carrying a laptop. I didn't need it anymore and once I was able to get printing from the iPad, it did everything I needed at home and 95% of what I needed at work. I still have to dive into code/troubleshoot technical problems at work, but even that is getting less often. I still have an iMac there. I bought one of those bluetooth keyboard cases from think geek over christmas, but before that I used a docking station at home and the wireless keyboard at the office.
But as far as email, word processing, spreadsheets, and even presentations go, I can do all of that on my iPad now. Even our SVN hosting has an iPad/iPhone app that I can check bug report status messages, assign tasks, etc.. If Barebones came out with BBEdit for iPad, I probably could get away with not even having a computer at work. (None of the work I do involves compiling anymore).
At my company we had to change our pricing for mobile application development. If our customers want iOS, the price is X and includes QA for iPhone, iPod, and iPad. If you want Android, the price starts at $X with the Nexus being the device that undergoes QA. Each additional platform (handset/device) they want a QA agreement on is an additional $X. On average this makes Android 3X more expensive as they'll want at least a motorola(Verizon), HTC (Sprint/T-Mobile), and Samsung handset tested and approved.
We'll just be treating the new tablets each as a separate platform for QA/billing purposes.
I bought my last computer for my home in 2007. These days all my home computing needs are served by two devices: Xbox (used to stream Netflix primarily these days) and my iPad. And the next TV I buy will probably have Netflix built in...
At work I'm completely out of the day to day development. I haven't written a line of code since July and I've turned over code review to someone at the start of this year. My sole concern now is overall systems architecture and generally answering hardware/networking questions the programmers have sometimes. The rest of my day is spent looking at statistics and customer requests/complaints figuring out what changes should/need to be done for the next version of our product.
But they get banned from Xbox Live, which is a paid for after market service. If you mod your Xbox, you are still free to play it at home off-line or via lan. They do nothing to stop that.
All they do is ban the console from XBox Live. And personally I like that feature since it makes it harder for the average person to cheat with mods.
XBL does this to a degree with achievements. I'm not sure about actual game saves. But in games like Reach, if my console kicked the bucket tomorrow and I got a new one, it would remember that I had beaten the game on legendary, I have the rank of brigadier, and what other stuff I had unlocked. I even get access to that stuff if I recover my gamertag on a friend's Xbox.
I'm not sure if it would remember the exact spot I stopped during my last campaign save or not, but that's moot point to me.
Dear Netflix, Subtle suggestion noted. Perhaps we can discuss the details of our offering you a superior service sooner rather than later. We would like to propose that in exchange for offering you a faster connection to our consumers, by prioritizing your traffic over others, you openly endorse us as your ISP of choice in the regions we serve and pay us the sum of $5 per subscriber per month for the privilege. We will of course be offering this service to our customers for the sum of an additional $19.99 per month. This additional service fee will allow our customers free streaming to On Demand Video Service. You can make this On Demand Service, powered by Netflix, for the mere sum of $15M per month to co-locate within our network. We will of course then be willing to offer you the sum of $1.99 per subscriber per month. I think you'll agree that we can both come out ahead in this particular arrangement. You of course, will be free to make similar agreements with other ISP in regions that we do not service, and we will not consider this to be an issue. Yours Truly, [Insert ISP Here]
Fixed that for you.
Seems like MS takes the approach of "Fine, mod your console if you like, but if you get caught you can't use it on XBL". And since XBL is a subscription service they set their rules, but you agree to them by paying for the service.
I suspect Sony will learn the lesson and the PS4 will see the introduction of a subscription based PSN. Especially since the next generation of games will likely all be purchased through app stores as opposed to optical media.
What we did is started treating each android handset as a different "platform". If our customers want mobile apps for iOS or Blackberry, we treat the OS as the platform, but with Android it was becoming extremely expensive to develop for compared to iOS and Blackberry.
Last year we lost money on android apps, we made money on iOS & Blackberry. This year so far it's looking like we'll at least break even on Android. But our customers are grumbling about the cost of "android" if they choose to support more than 1 or 2 handsets.
Most of my friends with Droid phones got them because Verizon didn't offer the iPhone. I look for most of them to switch to the iPhone as their next phone because that's what they really wanted, but hated AT&T. I just passed 2 years with my iPhone and AT&T going month to month with my old iPhone 3G phone. I'm waiting until next month to see, but it's very possible that I may be a verizon customer by march.
One of my clients is a coffee shop that offers 3 hours of wifi with purchase. I built the software that allows people to log in using their rewards card or by typing their name and an employee granting access. It's been working well for over 5 years on a FBSD box.
The question then becomes, do they count as an ISP? Will they have to maintain records and if so, for a small business like theirs is it going to be worth the hassle?