convergence devices have been around for a while. ipods still sell very well, better than most devices that converge and have lower price points. the market doesn't lie.
i've had the blade phone as well as the samsung 610 on the sprint network. they both give tactile response to your fingers in the form of a slight depression and a clicking that confirms the keystroke. this is tactile response. on the blade or the 610, i don't have to look where i'm typing - because the little click i feel in my finger confirms that the keystroke occurred.
there are unlimited texting plans that cost $10-20 more on your bill per month.
texting/IM/email means you can communicate in meetings, in class, at work, in a theater, during dinner, etc., with marginal interruption of your task at hand. texting/IM/email means you also have record of convo and terms - etc. which you don't get intrinsically with voice. simply put there is a lot of upside to written communication vs. vocal all across the board. the other upside with texting is that you can have sensitive convos via text that you wouldn't want to have via IM on your work computer, or via IM on your shared home system. there is just a lot of upside. The trends point to marked increased US texting usage - probably for these very reasons, despite some of the economic disadvantages.
re: looking to check for spelling. texting on a qwerty pad is similar to typing on a keyboard. you look at the screen - not your fingers. you know you hit the key because you get tactile feedback from the keyboard upon depressing the key. This allows you to go on to the next key ostensibly before you've seen the previous key show up on screen. This is tactile feedback that prevents the need to LOOK AT THE KEYS TO MAKE SURE IT'S BEEN HIT. Without significant tactile feedback from a touchscreen - this slows down dramatically, IMO. So the screen will have to provide some kind of tactile feedback to make texting efficient - and this will introduce another point of complexity and presumably failure for the device.
-price range: current smarphones are around $200. the Q, the blackjack, etc. even with added memory you come in way under the iphone price tag and still get the keypad which imo is a bonus, not a detriment.
the cool factor goes a LONG way. it will sell because it looks cool.
the key to the success of the iphone will be initial public perception once it's in the wild.
the iphone has one potential dealbreaker for me and that is the lack of buttons. texting outstrips voice by orders of magnitude - for a long time abroad (Europe, for example) and a bit more recently in the US. quick and effective texting on my motorola Q now means i can text without looking at the keys - as tactile response allows me to fly over the keypad. i don't have to wait for visual confirmation of a keystroke to continue texting.
the sidekick was popular with teens a couple of years ago for this very reason. It was one of the first phones to relatively inexpensively offer qwerty and seamless communications packages for texting, email, and IM. it didn't matter that the form factor was less than aesthetically pleasing, it mattered that the phone allowed you to communicate quickly and simply, and it also matter that providers soon offered a prepaid service that allowed teens to get the phone and buy minutes/data.
if this screen is somehow at least as tactile and responsive as keys are on a phone pad - then the iphone will dominate communications because apple understands how to woo consumers. this is clearly not a business device, so they need to dominate the consumer market. teens drive a lot of the consumer market and teens text more than they speak (let me expound: by teens i more aptly mean 13-24 market). at an unsubsidized $500, this might be a little high for this market, so apple might have to come downmarket fast. what's interesting here is that the fashion industry does this with runway lines - so called couture. those items are unrealistic for street wear and ridiculously priced - but that drives interest for the "ready to wear" stuff that shows up at your local department store.
the other issue that is interesting to me is that the phone can be used as a vanity phone. if usability is an issue - then people will want to have one, but have a more functional phone on hand for day to day and keep the iphone around when trolling for the ladies. so even if usability suffers you might see significant sales because it will be the it phone to have, even if for show. working in media, there are plenty of film execs who have blackberries but are totally unable to use them, but have them because this is the accessory a film producer is expected to have. so they carry it around and have an assistant check emails, etc.
-third part software is not an issue to the average user. -battery life might be an issue to the average user, but it will not prevent him/her from buying the product. -3g vs 2.5g, etc. this is also not an issue to the average user. they do not care about this. as long as it works - users are familiar with and expect slower bandwidth time on a handheld.
the average user is concerned with the following more than likely:
-does it look hot? will this make me look cooler? (CHECK) -does it work? (?????) this is where the texting comes in. Your average user might say: "It's cool but texting on it makes me frustrated because i have to get used to doing it a new way" (this is important because at $500 you don't get downmarket uptake by the people most likely not to bristle at the new interface - kids/tweens/teens) - or - "It's too slow to text on this thing."
the ipod function will not get used because it will kill battery life. i don't think the average user wants all/a portion of his music collection on his phone anyway. the audience is simply not that interested in that kind of convergence. it increases complexity and the market doesn't want that.
no. teenagers work. most of them work and have no bills and/or debt. Look at teen unemployment in the summers - it's not as high as you think.
teens buy impulse purchases themselves and supplement with parents' money when they make bigger purchases.
A smart entrepreneurial teen can easily earn 15-20K a summer and anywhere from 3-6K a school semester. I did (the summer cash anyway) - sophomore through senior years in high school. I was also a teen in the 90s.
Even at 6-7 bucks an hour - kids have enough cash to buy the latest cell phone and the latest cd.
i'd contend that not only is society built upon "catering to the lowest common denominator" it depends on that bulk group as the critical mass for the perpetuation of civilization. people who follow orders, do as they are told, are of nominal intelligence, etc.
i've never understood this sentiment, however. that guy "who barely checks his email" is the guy who fixes and maintains the elevators in your building, or prepares your food in a restaurant, or builds the home you'll raise your family in, or in all truth, teaches your children. it's weird to look upon those people in such a fashion because they are "people who can barely check their email".
The very nature of our western civilization depends on these people to "play" their position - to sludge through toxic sewage and repair potholes @ three in the morning so you have the luxury of smooth driving surfaces and clean water.
this is the problem with a lot of smarter people in general. it's this broad-day perpetual masturbatory "how could you not know that? everyone knows that?" attitude - that permeates techies in general.
It's interesting - the adage of absolute power. If only a few IQ points has you feeling so superior - imagine if you had real power over others. Bananas.
Re: your points.
1. IE IS THE INTERNET. Unneeded complexity. To the user there is no reason why their concept of the browser should not be consistent with the internet. To a driver, ignition makes the car run - is it sufficient to have the average user need to understand further principles of ignition and internal combustion in order to be considered an adequate user of a driving vehicle? I contend it is unneeded complexity to have the user even be aware of anything other than what it is they desire off the web. I contend that apple gets it in this regard - it is UNNEEDED complexity. I contend that we can't have it both ways - if we have an educational system that produces drones (as the US system does) then it is important to give them simple tools that work. Can't produce drones, then introduce unnecessary complexity and then complain when they don't comprehend.
2. TURNING OFF THE MONITOR DOESN'T TURN OFF THE COMPUTER. Again. unneeded complexity. apple gets it and got it for a while. the monitor is and can be the computer. Less components are better.
3. REPRODUCTION: as many might argue that reproducing is the point of it all - and reproduction rates tend to vary inversely with IQ (i read that somewhere but i might be wrong) then it might be that these idiots aren't so dumb after all.
I like being contrarian. it's a boring day. let the flames ensue. I do remember reading about how european women on west indian plantations during slavery never understood why survival rates were so low for white babies but they insisted on having slave nannies (who poisoned the babies in turn - after all, they were slaves) LOL. Morlocks and the Eloi - hell, even Fight Club. It's such a dangerous attitude to have - yours - and it's documented EVERYWHERE.
I posted this above: in NY a bartender can be held liable for and even arrested for serving a minor. I know from first hand experience - I bartended in NY during undergrad and a friend was arrested for serving a group of girls with fake IDs. Interestingly enough, I was arrested a while later for being an underage bartender. She was a bit of a douche for posting the stuff online, but her diligence protects her job, possibly her criminal record, not to mention the other unmentionables that occur when you enter the new york city corrections system.
so in short she potentially has a lot to lose. also, the bar owners lose cabaret licenses and liquor licenses - which is a death knell for the business.
let it not be understated that bartending in NY can be very lucrative because of population density and the type of clientele. So this is not trivial to the bartender or the bar owner.
I live in NY and in New York State a bartender can be held liable and even arrested for serving underage customers. I bartended in college and had a friend arrested for serving underage customers and I was myself arrested for being an underage bartender. So it wasn't so much playing police aid as protecting herself from potentially being arrested or otherwise held liable, which includes getting fired and blacklisted as a bartender. Posting on her blog was a little much though - i agree.
new york has become a relatively sedate city and is not a high crime area anymore (not as high as before anyway) - but still uses police tactics from a high crime era. so police troll for arrests/wrongdoing, etc. it's not uncommon to be in a club that is raided - and patrons all have to produce ID - it's an easy way for cops to find people with outstanding warrants and it also drums up business for the city - as clubs found to have underage patrons lose their cabaret licenses and have to pay fines and might even be shut down. All for the great bureaucracy.
i run a small firm - there are four of us - in Los Angeles, NY, and Washington, DC. we are constantly traveling; communication is vital to us and this is a very effective (in terms of functionality and cost) solution.
i was part of the beta. seamless integration with windows mobile is the killer feature for me. i've had my motorola Q for about 8 months and i've needed to log into pocket msn twice (because I switched from original battery to extended life). mail is pushed to my phone and I get IMs etc. - as well as Live Search/Maps etc out of the box. I can honestly say that - having both a gmail account and live hotmail account - that gmail is down way more - which - coupled with the fact that I do most of my emailing and IMing from my mobile unit - have caused me to migrate back to being a dual user from being a gmail user exclusively for a while. i can imagine some of gmails problems are because of scale - so it'll be interesting to see how hotmail reacts when the service is sufficiently wide to test infrastructure.
more chevys are stolen because most stolen cars are used for parts (note: i'm not certain if more chevies than bmws are stolen as i did not check. merely working with parent's example). more chevys on the road means more chevies need parts which means there is a good black market for chevy parts. this is why honda/acura vehicles are high on the stolen list year after year IINM. In other words, your example doesn't indicate that bmws are more secure - in fact it reinforces what has always been said - windows' prime weakness is ubiquity.
i'm in no position to know how more secure apple is than windows until: osx is not tied to custom hardware and has windows' current market share across thousands of hardware configs - and the established knowledge base of how to pick and exploit weaknesses in the software is made readily available.
I'm not certain that ALL of MSFT's web strategies have been failures. I also am not certain that the strategies to success by any of the companies in this list differ greatly: they all are too large to be genuinely innovative - as innovation is a byproduct of necessity - and these companies are not needy by virtue of success. All of these firms buy companies that add value - they buy smaller innovative firms that are forced to be innovative by virtue of lack of size - and they use cash to muscle competitors. It's the clash of the titans. Not to use a cliche - but it's the second mouse to the mousetrap that gets the cheese.
re: microsoft needing to buy another firm to be relevant in search - this is akin to Google knowing that they need to buy youtube in order to be relevant in video.
this doesn't sound like a good deal on paper because microsoft obviously has some marketing issues to resolve. they will devalue the yahoo brand by association. but in looking for ways to muscle into search - they are smartly addressing the notion that their problems in search are culture-based - they need to get good search work from outside. A slashdotter has an awesome sig - something to the effect of: envy is not being born with a competitive advantage and being afraid or unwilling to go out and acquire one.
Microsoft is a very successful company. regardless of one's emotional response to their strategies - they are obviously effective - as Google - in the purchase of youtube, writely, doubleclick, and other firms - has shown a penchant for buying their way to prominence as well - while focusing on core business to generate the revenue that fuels these purchases.
perhaps i meant it in the sense that he is to appear to the world like the man running things when he is in fact the figurehead for a well oiled machine.
thus, the president needs to command the appearance of leadership - he should be what people expect their leader to be like. Isn't it apparent that the President is the #1 PR position for the US government at large?
isn't it like designing a government to have regular, controlled "revolutions" every four years in order to give the illusion of change? Is marching in the street civil disobedience when you have to apply for a city permit and have it approved before you can gather?
If you're worried about honesty - I'm afraid you won't find a politician that meets that criteria. I am not aware of an honest politician and the bigger the office - the greater the deception. unfortunately it goes with the job. What is probably unusual in his case is that his inexperience and the inexperience of his staff shows, in that he isn't properly prepared to cover his lies effectively. It's not a lie if people know you're lying, I suppose. That's what's interesting about Obama - is that often his campaigning inexperience shows - he's not quite sure how to play the game yet - which is damning. If he can't get campaigning right, how is he going to wield personal influence in Washington?
his supposed dishonesty also doesn't obscure the fact that he seems awfully underexperienced to be the figurehead of the United States.
future soldiers will have been trained on these systems the way todays kids are on video games.
I saw a documentary on the development of the joint strike fighter - and the simulator. they bought kids in and let them use it. they incorporated their feedback. they wanted to make it feel as close to a video game as possible... the experience of flying the jsf.
my mother tried texting once. she quickly gave up. i text frequently... but i'm apparently not as cool a texter as my nephew - who at 11 whizzes across a keypad - shooting around a flurry of misspelled words and improvised acronyms. new soldiers will adapt as their entire lives will eventually incorporate this tech.
re: research dollars - wartime seems to be the most fertile time for innovation and military expenditure often seems very fruitful in developing useful tech. to that end, i can't be too critical of it, i guess.
agreed. i didn't read the article, but if 50 grand is correct - that isn't unreasonable at all.
i'm reminded a bit of the google/youtube transaction. at the time, I was consulting at Time Warner - and remember Dick Parsons being irate at the circulating youtube asking price. The sentiment there was - that's way too much; we can build our own better youtube in that time. of course - that hasn't materialized yet and gootube is the king of the vid hill. sometimes it makes sense to pay - and the apple lesson of making something seamless is very important.
race and religion and gender are in fact very relevant - as well as the aesthetics that are commonly associated with what a president should look like. I imagine that to the average voter, those things, along with party affiliation, matter more than policy.
how long do you expect a software firm to provide support for a previous version of software? this is an interesting point because as far as I know, Msft still provides support to some financial firms I consult for and they still use 2000 professional.
in my estimation the problem with MSFT hasn't been that they don't support previous versions. It's been that legacy support built in to newer versions of software causes bloat and problems. IMO their problem is trying to please everyone - staying with the times while holding the hands of those not interested in keeping up.
I concur re: the moto Q on every point, especially with the ability to swap out batteries. The original battery designed to maintain the slim profile was not really effective, but the extended life battery makes this an awesome and easy to use device.
in addition the lack of a keypad on the iphone is a dealbreaker for me and i suspect will make it less than ideal for the enterprise environment where field texting and email are integral aspects of the mobile workforce. further the lack of a touchscreen on the Q is a huge feature for me as all the problems I've ever had with previous pdas all had to do with the touchscreen.
Also, you can't beat the moto Q price - what's it like now - $100 with a two year contract? bananas.
i don't think this phone will work well for the uses of the general consumer either. texting outstrips voice in the US handily and even moreso in other parts of the world in terms of frequency of use. i cannot imagine a scenario where a touchscreen is faster than a qwerty pad in terms of text entry although i suppose it's possible. Even if it is as fast as a conventional keypad, the increased rate of failure from repeatedly striking the screen still works against it, again making it a dealbreaker. In short the touchscreen is a liability to a power user, not a benefit, IMHO.
All that notwithstanding, this phone will sell well. I have no doubt.
I also think that this phone will probably see more duty as a vanity phone - the phone you take to important meetings/dinners/events - the tuxedo of your phone suite. Phones in general are more accessible to masses with more and more high end features in lower end models. it's not unreasonable to see multiple phones per user - with SIM cards swapped out... i.e. a ruggedized phone for running/blading/biking in the park, a no frills high feature set work phone for school/work, and a sweet looking phone when you're trying to get lucky with the ladies. In that scenario - the idea of screen failure is not important as you won't be an iphone power user but you'll still enjoy the social/aesthetic/cool factor benefits of having one.
So in a sense this might be the redefining of phone use - in the sense that situational communicators will emerge and be the norm and most users will swap out SIM cards to headsets as situations require. I think we've all come to the consensus that an ideal all in one solution will be hard to come by.
You can buy cool. A giant company can even create cool. However, a press release that says big companies are going to create a competitor to something cool is not the way to do it. That's a decidedly staid way of doing business.
Imagine some uncool kid at school announcing that he was about to compete with the cool kid(s) for cool. That's absurd. The smarter thing to do is to throw smart money from behind the scenes at a seemingly grassroots/startup site - and manipulate the odds. Underhanded, yes. Evil, yes. But definitely cool.
Someone made the point of referring to kids that copy off you in school. there are two components - the initial theft, and the subsequent deception to those that matter. So the reference was to how sad it was to the kid who cheated on you in art class or whatever, but it's effective cheating if it works and you get what you want, i.e. good grade, or whatever.
In high school, I was good friends with a guy whose mother, a college professor, wrote high college applications. He had middling scores - but he got in everywhere he applied, including reaches. Is that an effective cheat? definitely. It made me wonder if I was the only kid who didn't have his parents write their stuff.
the mistake here was announcing it. Lame. Put the site out - throw cash at it and buy mindshare through effective BTS partnering - and then try to stay in the closet about it as long as you can (hopefully by spinning it off publicly or something before the press gets wind of the deception and kills ur userbase). Evil, yes. but way cool.
i work in the industry and i've taken several courses in economics. your point about pricing most consumers outside of the market is inaccurate. the best price is always free - no industry can complete with free, and p2p offers free. the current pricing structure, itunes or no, cannot compete with p2p. that's my (and no one else's) point.
i guess i could say something snide about taking a course now or i could use some euphemism that was cool in 79 or thereabouts. lol.
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convergence devices have been around for a while. ipods still sell very well, better than most devices that converge and have lower price points. the market doesn't lie.
i've had the blade phone as well as the samsung 610 on the sprint network. they both give tactile response to your fingers in the form of a slight depression and a clicking that confirms the keystroke. this is tactile response. on the blade or the 610, i don't have to look where i'm typing - because the little click i feel in my finger confirms that the keystroke occurred.
there are unlimited texting plans that cost $10-20 more on your bill per month.
texting/IM/email means you can communicate in meetings, in class, at work, in a theater, during dinner, etc., with marginal interruption of your task at hand. texting/IM/email means you also have record of convo and terms - etc. which you don't get intrinsically with voice. simply put there is a lot of upside to written communication vs. vocal all across the board. the other upside with texting is that you can have sensitive convos via text that you wouldn't want to have via IM on your work computer, or via IM on your shared home system. there is just a lot of upside. The trends point to marked increased US texting usage - probably for these very reasons, despite some of the economic disadvantages.
re: looking to check for spelling. texting on a qwerty pad is similar to typing on a keyboard. you look at the screen - not your fingers. you know you hit the key because you get tactile feedback from the keyboard upon depressing the key. This allows you to go on to the next key ostensibly before you've seen the previous key show up on screen. This is tactile feedback that prevents the need to LOOK AT THE KEYS TO MAKE SURE IT'S BEEN HIT. Without significant tactile feedback from a touchscreen - this slows down dramatically, IMO. So the screen will have to provide some kind of tactile feedback to make texting efficient - and this will introduce another point of complexity and presumably failure for the device.
i predict blockbuster too.
-price range: current smarphones are around $200. the Q, the blackjack, etc. even with added memory you come in way under the iphone price tag and still get the keypad which imo is a bonus, not a detriment.
the cool factor goes a LONG way. it will sell because it looks cool.
the key to the success of the iphone will be initial public perception once it's in the wild.
the iphone has one potential dealbreaker for me and that is the lack of buttons. texting outstrips voice by orders of magnitude - for a long time abroad (Europe, for example) and a bit more recently in the US. quick and effective texting on my motorola Q now means i can text without looking at the keys - as tactile response allows me to fly over the keypad. i don't have to wait for visual confirmation of a keystroke to continue texting.
the sidekick was popular with teens a couple of years ago for this very reason. It was one of the first phones to relatively inexpensively offer qwerty and seamless communications packages for texting, email, and IM. it didn't matter that the form factor was less than aesthetically pleasing, it mattered that the phone allowed you to communicate quickly and simply, and it also matter that providers soon offered a prepaid service that allowed teens to get the phone and buy minutes/data.
if this screen is somehow at least as tactile and responsive as keys are on a phone pad - then the iphone will dominate communications because apple understands how to woo consumers. this is clearly not a business device, so they need to dominate the consumer market. teens drive a lot of the consumer market and teens text more than they speak (let me expound: by teens i more aptly mean 13-24 market). at an unsubsidized $500, this might be a little high for this market, so apple might have to come downmarket fast. what's interesting here is that the fashion industry does this with runway lines - so called couture. those items are unrealistic for street wear and ridiculously priced - but that drives interest for the "ready to wear" stuff that shows up at your local department store.
the other issue that is interesting to me is that the phone can be used as a vanity phone. if usability is an issue - then people will want to have one, but have a more functional phone on hand for day to day and keep the iphone around when trolling for the ladies. so even if usability suffers you might see significant sales because it will be the it phone to have, even if for show. working in media, there are plenty of film execs who have blackberries but are totally unable to use them, but have them because this is the accessory a film producer is expected to have. so they carry it around and have an assistant check emails, etc.
-third part software is not an issue to the average user.
-battery life might be an issue to the average user, but it will not prevent him/her from buying the product.
-3g vs 2.5g, etc. this is also not an issue to the average user. they do not care about this. as long as it works - users are familiar with and expect slower bandwidth time on a handheld.
the average user is concerned with the following more than likely:
-does it look hot? will this make me look cooler? (CHECK)
-does it work? (?????) this is where the texting comes in. Your average user might say: "It's cool but texting on it makes me frustrated because i have to get used to doing it a new way" (this is important because at $500 you don't get downmarket uptake by the people most likely not to bristle at the new interface - kids/tweens/teens) - or - "It's too slow to text on this thing."
the ipod function will not get used because it will kill battery life. i don't think the average user wants all/a portion of his music collection on his phone anyway. the audience is simply not that interested in that kind of convergence. it increases complexity and the market doesn't want that.
no. teenagers work. most of them work and have no bills and/or debt. Look at teen unemployment in the summers - it's not as high as you think.
teens buy impulse purchases themselves and supplement with parents' money when they make bigger purchases.
A smart entrepreneurial teen can easily earn 15-20K a summer and anywhere from 3-6K a school semester. I did (the summer cash anyway) - sophomore through senior years in high school. I was also a teen in the 90s.
Even at 6-7 bucks an hour - kids have enough cash to buy the latest cell phone and the latest cd.
i'd contend that not only is society built upon "catering to the lowest common denominator" it depends on that bulk group as the critical mass for the perpetuation of civilization. people who follow orders, do as they are told, are of nominal intelligence, etc.
i've never understood this sentiment, however. that guy "who barely checks his email" is the guy who fixes and maintains the elevators in your building, or prepares your food in a restaurant, or builds the home you'll raise your family in, or in all truth, teaches your children. it's weird to look upon those people in such a fashion because they are "people who can barely check their email".
The very nature of our western civilization depends on these people to "play" their position - to sludge through toxic sewage and repair potholes @ three in the morning so you have the luxury of smooth driving surfaces and clean water.
this is the problem with a lot of smarter people in general. it's this broad-day perpetual masturbatory "how could you not know that? everyone knows that?" attitude - that permeates techies in general.
It's interesting - the adage of absolute power. If only a few IQ points has you feeling so superior - imagine if you had real power over others. Bananas.
Re: your points.
1. IE IS THE INTERNET. Unneeded complexity. To the user there is no reason why their concept of the browser should not be consistent with the internet. To a driver, ignition makes the car run - is it sufficient to have the average user need to understand further principles of ignition and internal combustion in order to be considered an adequate user of a driving vehicle? I contend it is unneeded complexity to have the user even be aware of anything other than what it is they desire off the web. I contend that apple gets it in this regard - it is UNNEEDED complexity. I contend that we can't have it both ways - if we have an educational system that produces drones (as the US system does) then it is important to give them simple tools that work. Can't produce drones, then introduce unnecessary complexity and then complain when they don't comprehend.
2. TURNING OFF THE MONITOR DOESN'T TURN OFF THE COMPUTER. Again. unneeded complexity. apple gets it and got it for a while. the monitor is and can be the computer. Less components are better.
3. REPRODUCTION: as many might argue that reproducing is the point of it all - and reproduction rates tend to vary inversely with IQ (i read that somewhere but i might be wrong) then it might be that these idiots aren't so dumb after all.
I like being contrarian. it's a boring day. let the flames ensue. I do remember reading about how european women on west indian plantations during slavery never understood why survival rates were so low for white babies but they insisted on having slave nannies (who poisoned the babies in turn - after all, they were slaves) LOL. Morlocks and the Eloi - hell, even Fight Club. It's such a dangerous attitude to have - yours - and it's documented EVERYWHERE.
I posted this above: in NY a bartender can be held liable for and even arrested for serving a minor. I know from first hand experience - I bartended in NY during undergrad and a friend was arrested for serving a group of girls with fake IDs. Interestingly enough, I was arrested a while later for being an underage bartender. She was a bit of a douche for posting the stuff online, but her diligence protects her job, possibly her criminal record, not to mention the other unmentionables that occur when you enter the new york city corrections system.
so in short she potentially has a lot to lose. also, the bar owners lose cabaret licenses and liquor licenses - which is a death knell for the business.
let it not be understated that bartending in NY can be very lucrative because of population density and the type of clientele. So this is not trivial to the bartender or the bar owner.
I live in NY and in New York State a bartender can be held liable and even arrested for serving underage customers. I bartended in college and had a friend arrested for serving underage customers and I was myself arrested for being an underage bartender. So it wasn't so much playing police aid as protecting herself from potentially being arrested or otherwise held liable, which includes getting fired and blacklisted as a bartender. Posting on her blog was a little much though - i agree.
new york has become a relatively sedate city and is not a high crime area anymore (not as high as before anyway) - but still uses police tactics from a high crime era. so police troll for arrests/wrongdoing, etc. it's not uncommon to be in a club that is raided - and patrons all have to produce ID - it's an easy way for cops to find people with outstanding warrants and it also drums up business for the city - as clubs found to have underage patrons lose their cabaret licenses and have to pay fines and might even be shut down. All for the great bureaucracy.
i run a small firm - there are four of us - in Los Angeles, NY, and Washington, DC. we are constantly traveling; communication is vital to us and this is a very effective (in terms of functionality and cost) solution.
i was part of the beta. seamless integration with windows mobile is the killer feature for me. i've had my motorola Q for about 8 months and i've needed to log into pocket msn twice (because I switched from original battery to extended life). mail is pushed to my phone and I get IMs etc. - as well as Live Search/Maps etc out of the box. I can honestly say that - having both a gmail account and live hotmail account - that gmail is down way more - which - coupled with the fact that I do most of my emailing and IMing from my mobile unit - have caused me to migrate back to being a dual user from being a gmail user exclusively for a while. i can imagine some of gmails problems are because of scale - so it'll be interesting to see how hotmail reacts when the service is sufficiently wide to test infrastructure.
more chevys are stolen because most stolen cars are used for parts (note: i'm not certain if more chevies than bmws are stolen as i did not check. merely working with parent's example). more chevys on the road means more chevies need parts which means there is a good black market for chevy parts. this is why honda/acura vehicles are high on the stolen list year after year IINM. In other words, your example doesn't indicate that bmws are more secure - in fact it reinforces what has always been said - windows' prime weakness is ubiquity.
i'm in no position to know how more secure apple is than windows until: osx is not tied to custom hardware and has windows' current market share across thousands of hardware configs - and the established knowledge base of how to pick and exploit weaknesses in the software is made readily available.
GLOBAL WEBMAIL MARKET
i nterface-for-yahoo-mail-im-coming/
YAHOO: 250 million
MSFT: 228 million
AOL MAIL: 50 million
GOOGLE: 51 million
US WEBMAIL MARKET
YAHOO: 79 million
MSFT: 45 million
AOL MAIL: 40 million
GOOGLE: 10 million
source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/09/single-ajax-
I'm not certain that ALL of MSFT's web strategies have been failures. I also am not certain that the strategies to success by any of the companies in this list differ greatly: they all are too large to be genuinely innovative - as innovation is a byproduct of necessity - and these companies are not needy by virtue of success. All of these firms buy companies that add value - they buy smaller innovative firms that are forced to be innovative by virtue of lack of size - and they use cash to muscle competitors. It's the clash of the titans. Not to use a cliche - but it's the second mouse to the mousetrap that gets the cheese.
re: microsoft needing to buy another firm to be relevant in search - this is akin to Google knowing that they need to buy youtube in order to be relevant in video.
this doesn't sound like a good deal on paper because microsoft obviously has some marketing issues to resolve. they will devalue the yahoo brand by association. but in looking for ways to muscle into search - they are smartly addressing the notion that their problems in search are culture-based - they need to get good search work from outside. A slashdotter has an awesome sig - something to the effect of: envy is not being born with a competitive advantage and being afraid or unwilling to go out and acquire one.
Microsoft is a very successful company. regardless of one's emotional response to their strategies - they are obviously effective - as Google - in the purchase of youtube, writely, doubleclick, and other firms - has shown a penchant for buying their way to prominence as well - while focusing on core business to generate the revenue that fuels these purchases.
perhaps i meant it in the sense that he is to appear to the world like the man running things when he is in fact the figurehead for a well oiled machine.
thus, the president needs to command the appearance of leadership - he should be what people expect their leader to be like. Isn't it apparent that the President is the #1 PR position for the US government at large?
isn't it like designing a government to have regular, controlled "revolutions" every four years in order to give the illusion of change? Is marching in the street civil disobedience when you have to apply for a city permit and have it approved before you can gather?
If you're worried about honesty - I'm afraid you won't find a politician that meets that criteria. I am not aware of an honest politician and the bigger the office - the greater the deception. unfortunately it goes with the job. What is probably unusual in his case is that his inexperience and the inexperience of his staff shows, in that he isn't properly prepared to cover his lies effectively. It's not a lie if people know you're lying, I suppose. That's what's interesting about Obama - is that often his campaigning inexperience shows - he's not quite sure how to play the game yet - which is damning. If he can't get campaigning right, how is he going to wield personal influence in Washington?
his supposed dishonesty also doesn't obscure the fact that he seems awfully underexperienced to be the figurehead of the United States.
future soldiers will have been trained on these systems the way todays kids are on video games.
I saw a documentary on the development of the joint strike fighter - and the simulator. they bought kids in and let them use it. they incorporated their feedback. they wanted to make it feel as close to a video game as possible... the experience of flying the jsf.
my mother tried texting once. she quickly gave up. i text frequently... but i'm apparently not as cool a texter as my nephew - who at 11 whizzes across a keypad - shooting around a flurry of misspelled words and improvised acronyms. new soldiers will adapt as their entire lives will eventually incorporate this tech.
re: research dollars - wartime seems to be the most fertile time for innovation and military expenditure often seems very fruitful in developing useful tech. to that end, i can't be too critical of it, i guess.
agreed. i didn't read the article, but if 50 grand is correct - that isn't unreasonable at all.
i'm reminded a bit of the google/youtube transaction. at the time, I was consulting at Time Warner - and remember Dick Parsons being irate at the circulating youtube asking price. The sentiment there was - that's way too much; we can build our own better youtube in that time. of course - that hasn't materialized yet and gootube is the king of the vid hill. sometimes it makes sense to pay - and the apple lesson of making something seamless is very important.
race and religion and gender are in fact very relevant - as well as the aesthetics that are commonly associated with what a president should look like. I imagine that to the average voter, those things, along with party affiliation, matter more than policy.
how long do you expect a software firm to provide support for a previous version of software? this is an interesting point because as far as I know, Msft still provides support to some financial firms I consult for and they still use 2000 professional.
in my estimation the problem with MSFT hasn't been that they don't support previous versions. It's been that legacy support built in to newer versions of software causes bloat and problems. IMO their problem is trying to please everyone - staying with the times while holding the hands of those not interested in keeping up.
I concur re: the moto Q on every point, especially with the ability to swap out batteries. The original battery designed to maintain the slim profile was not really effective, but the extended life battery makes this an awesome and easy to use device.
in addition the lack of a keypad on the iphone is a dealbreaker for me and i suspect will make it less than ideal for the enterprise environment where field texting and email are integral aspects of the mobile workforce. further the lack of a touchscreen on the Q is a huge feature for me as all the problems I've ever had with previous pdas all had to do with the touchscreen.
Also, you can't beat the moto Q price - what's it like now - $100 with a two year contract? bananas.
i don't think this phone will work well for the uses of the general consumer either. texting outstrips voice in the US handily and even moreso in other parts of the world in terms of frequency of use. i cannot imagine a scenario where a touchscreen is faster than a qwerty pad in terms of text entry although i suppose it's possible. Even if it is as fast as a conventional keypad, the increased rate of failure from repeatedly striking the screen still works against it, again making it a dealbreaker. In short the touchscreen is a liability to a power user, not a benefit, IMHO.
All that notwithstanding, this phone will sell well. I have no doubt.
I also think that this phone will probably see more duty as a vanity phone - the phone you take to important meetings/dinners/events - the tuxedo of your phone suite. Phones in general are more accessible to masses with more and more high end features in lower end models. it's not unreasonable to see multiple phones per user - with SIM cards swapped out... i.e. a ruggedized phone for running/blading/biking in the park, a no frills high feature set work phone for school/work, and a sweet looking phone when you're trying to get lucky with the ladies. In that scenario - the idea of screen failure is not important as you won't be an iphone power user but you'll still enjoy the social/aesthetic/cool factor benefits of having one.
So in a sense this might be the redefining of phone use - in the sense that situational communicators will emerge and be the norm and most users will swap out SIM cards to headsets as situations require. I think we've all come to the consensus that an ideal all in one solution will be hard to come by.
my $0.02.
agreed. i think that's why people turn car radio volume down when concentrating on street signs or attempting to find a particular address.
edit: In high school, I was good friends with a guy whose mother, a college professor, wrote HIS high college applications.
I sort of agree.
You can buy cool. A giant company can even create cool. However, a press release that says big companies are going to create a competitor to something cool is not the way to do it. That's a decidedly staid way of doing business.
Imagine some uncool kid at school announcing that he was about to compete with the cool kid(s) for cool. That's absurd. The smarter thing to do is to throw smart money from behind the scenes at a seemingly grassroots/startup site - and manipulate the odds. Underhanded, yes. Evil, yes. But definitely cool.
Someone made the point of referring to kids that copy off you in school. there are two components - the initial theft, and the subsequent deception to those that matter. So the reference was to how sad it was to the kid who cheated on you in art class or whatever, but it's effective cheating if it works and you get what you want, i.e. good grade, or whatever.
In high school, I was good friends with a guy whose mother, a college professor, wrote high college applications. He had middling scores - but he got in everywhere he applied, including reaches. Is that an effective cheat? definitely. It made me wonder if I was the only kid who didn't have his parents write their stuff.
the mistake here was announcing it. Lame. Put the site out - throw cash at it and buy mindshare through effective BTS partnering - and then try to stay in the closet about it as long as you can (hopefully by spinning it off publicly or something before the press gets wind of the deception and kills ur userbase). Evil, yes. but way cool.
good night and good luck.
i work in the industry and i've taken several courses in economics. your point about pricing most consumers outside of the market is inaccurate. the best price is always free - no industry can complete with free, and p2p offers free. the current pricing structure, itunes or no, cannot compete with p2p. that's my (and no one else's) point.
i guess i could say something snide about taking a course now or i could use some euphemism that was cool in 79 or thereabouts. lol.