Actually I don't see anything devious, underhanded or untoward here. Obviously Google has to put some unpleasantness in their phone deal - if they didn't, and sold the phones for ten dollars over cost, their phone partners would have a royal snit. T-Mobile would not get their subsidized phone sales that they really need to lock in customers and probably would not want to play. At least all the phones are unlocked and the option to avoid subsidized phones is there. The mobile phone ecosystem is too sick to fix all at once.
Let's not be demanding they organically deliver us an entire 4G LTE wireless network over whitespace with flawless coverage replete with free voip and data on a $100 phone. Let's especially not demand that in addition to how much they've already freed up the phone experience on the first day. That kind of thing takes some intermediate steps. This is an intermediate step. If you don't want to pay the early termination fee, buy your phone outright.
Design your marketing structure so that it's not susceptible to a denial of service attack. We wouldn't want some large unscrupulous organization motivating their employees and partners to buy & ebay phones, and so halt the happy google toy train, would we?
Unless you want to pay, and then it's $.25 per gigabyte per year. If you get the $50 package (200 GB) or more, you get a free Eye-Fi card that uses SDIO and can wirelessly upload your pictures (if you have a supported camera) to your PC, server or an online image storage service. Currently plans go up to 1TB of storage, which is quite a lot. That's the personal version, which they did first. The commercial version will be $3.50 a GB but probably offer unlimited storage.
It seems to me you're assigning veiled purposes to Google because that's what we've come to expect from everybody else. As far as I can tell Google is one of the few organizations that doesn't seem to work that way. They tell you what they want, like they told Garmin they wanted more freedom to work with the map data. Then when you tell them no, we don't want to let you do that as Garmin did, they respond like any multibillion dollar corporation would: they get what they want without you.
And they have a GDP per capita of $6000 - 1/8th that of the USA. That's a lot of clickers who buy nothing. Clickers who buy nothing drive down the value per click - but don't decrease the cost of providing the services. That may tax Google's business model.
That's not nearly enough. I get good results with twelve usually, but for porn surfing 16 is not near enough! So I use a Mac or Linux instead. They've got some magical anti-malware internals - probably thirty or forty heuristic engines in there I suspect, but man are they fast! They don't slow the machine down at all.
Here's a post from GigaOM that basically says that Google stabbed Motorola's Droid in the back to deliver this, despite the fact that Droid has a keyboard and Nexus One does not and so it's fair game.
That was picked up by TheRegister which for some bizarre reason sees this as a reason for Moto to run home to the warm embrace of Microsoft, as if the whole Sendo Maneuver had not happened (even though they reported it), and as if Google had actually done something dastardly. Now it's in the Mainstream press [Businessweek.com] and by Tuesday they'll be trying to meme it.
I'm doing what I can but we need more fans of open systems to get out there and make fun of these idiots or they will continue to spew their nonsense and Joe Sixpack might believe them and then we won't get our cool new stuff. Slashdot is popular but there are a lot of other sites out there like cnet, zdnet, Google Groups and Yahoo where this nonsense might take root. People who know stuff need to go from here to there and put the word out that we'd like some shiny new Tegra 2 or Android slates, a Nexus One, and a Droid under our tree at Christmas and anybody that opposes that is a Luddite.
Sure you can. How do you think I managed to get first post? But my comment was not visible for 10 minutes. It was visible for 8 seconds between the time I posted it and the time I read his reply. Not long enough. This fine article, as of the time I clicked reply, still doesn't have a second thread under it. He's a script.
I was impressed with myself for getting the first post on that but wow!
You managed to reply, quote, and post all of that in 8 seconds. You're a script. I've got to give you this though: you're a good one. Topical, username in subject, conclude with moderation suggestion, "threat tables" and inconsistency recognition. Very nice. Skynet is almost here.
If you had replied to me instead of TFA, since you would have been only the second post and since I didn't give you anything to work with, it wouldn't have given you away.
The dirty tricks squad is out in full force to nip this in the bud. There'll be the usual pans from Ina Fried and Mary Jo Foley and other puppets in the press. Then the arm twisting begins.
They might as well just record the meetings and copy the DOJ and Pamela Jones on the transcripts and emails. It's not like we're all not going to read it on Groklaw after the Attorney General subpoenas it as part of the antitrust lawsuit.
Personally I prefer the much more recent statements from Mr. Ballmer:
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
That foresight - it's eerie. It's like he's got some sort of direct view into the future... Maybe we should call him the Oracle of Redmond.
Annnnd... that's what Microsoft gets for bringing out their Silverlight "Flash killer": Enthusiastic support from Adobe for alternative platforms. Way to drive innovation, Microsoft! Why don't you come out with a creative suite next? That would be great.
Office Communicator is pretty slick - I use it at work and with the right camera it's pretty cool. Our guys have enabled federation with key outside partners, so I can actually see in an email who's available for chat for example. I like that. Some of our partners are a little shocked when they send me an email and it pops up a chat window a few seconds later... because they don't know that feature is enabled. Video chat with external folk is blocked, but at least I can get some quick dialog and that has been essential a few times when resolving some rather important customer issues involved dynamic coordination. I can also start a group meeting by chatting a list, share my desktop with the live meeting client, and so on. I don't care for WLM, from a long time back. Telepresence apps are hopelessly fragmented right now - you have to have 7 different apps to be sure you can video chat with someone you need to talk to, and that's bad.
I'm more interested in the Android tablets than the Mac ones, ARM more than Intel. I'm sure Apple can put together a nice tablet, but they like to get more of a premium for their products than I like to pay - but I'll pay if I have to. Also, Moorestown is looking pretty sweet but I don't think Intel got the power savings they wanted in this revision - it's just not enough of an improvement yet to compete with ARM on battery life, thin form factors and weight. I love Intel products on the server, desktop, and laptop, but for pocket devices the power envelope just isn't there yet. Now that the ARM chips are powerful enough to provide good service and still low power, that's what I'd use.
A 10 inch Tegra or Snapdragon slate with the usual iPhone internal devices and 800x480 video in a slim form factor with good battery life would be just the thing for me - I don't even care if it has Cellular wireless. But it should have the user-facing webcam. If they can get the BOM on that under $300 (I think they can) they can hit a $600 price point at retail and move a bunch of units - and bring back the fashion in cargo pockets and bush jackets.
I'll venture a prediction too: that won't come from a top-tier OEM. Out of nowhere will come a horde of new companies with no existing partner relationships to maintain who will clean up, or Google will do it themselves out of frustration. HD Thoreau was right about this: the farmer is born a slave to the wealth his forebears accumulated and dares not venture far from it. Of course later if it's successful it will turn out that some of the startups were extrapreneurial ventures of engineering teams from major vendors, who will then be bought back in at a huge premium.
The greet & close thing is an interesting posting style - it's congenial and I like it but I hope you won't be offended if I don't respond in kind. It's kind of out of vogue for a blog and makes people feel like they're snooping on a private dialog.
It would be unfortunate if you stopped being our special friend and no longer qualified for it. Your competitors who are still our special friends would have an unfair advantage over you.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on guys.
Actually I don't see anything devious, underhanded or untoward here. Obviously Google has to put some unpleasantness in their phone deal - if they didn't, and sold the phones for ten dollars over cost, their phone partners would have a royal snit. T-Mobile would not get their subsidized phone sales that they really need to lock in customers and probably would not want to play. At least all the phones are unlocked and the option to avoid subsidized phones is there. The mobile phone ecosystem is too sick to fix all at once.
Let's not be demanding they organically deliver us an entire 4G LTE wireless network over whitespace with flawless coverage replete with free voip and data on a $100 phone. Let's especially not demand that in addition to how much they've already freed up the phone experience on the first day. That kind of thing takes some intermediate steps. This is an intermediate step. If you don't want to pay the early termination fee, buy your phone outright.
They don't do it that way because they don't want you to know the phone costs $400 and you're paying an extra $40/month for 24 months.
Design your marketing structure so that it's not susceptible to a denial of service attack. We wouldn't want some large unscrupulous organization motivating their employees and partners to buy & ebay phones, and so halt the happy google toy train, would we?
They sell movies? When did that start? Next you'll be saying they say they sell music. The very idea is ridiculous. Who would pay for that?
Unless you want to pay, and then it's $.25 per gigabyte per year. If you get the $50 package (200 GB) or more, you get a free Eye-Fi card that uses SDIO and can wirelessly upload your pictures (if you have a supported camera) to your PC, server or an online image storage service. Currently plans go up to 1TB of storage, which is quite a lot. That's the personal version, which they did first. The commercial version will be $3.50 a GB but probably offer unlimited storage.
It seems to me you're assigning veiled purposes to Google because that's what we've come to expect from everybody else. As far as I can tell Google is one of the few organizations that doesn't seem to work that way. They tell you what they want, like they told Garmin they wanted more freedom to work with the map data. Then when you tell them no, we don't want to let you do that as Garmin did, they respond like any multibillion dollar corporation would: they get what they want without you.
And they have a GDP per capita of $6000 - 1/8th that of the USA. That's a lot of clickers who buy nothing. Clickers who buy nothing drive down the value per click - but don't decrease the cost of providing the services. That may tax Google's business model.
But the "Don't be evil" story is compelling too.
There are now at least 20 million linux users. That's a large enough market that if somebody could do it he would have - if just to prove he could.
That's not nearly enough. I get good results with twelve usually, but for porn surfing 16 is not near enough! So I use a Mac or Linux instead. They've got some magical anti-malware internals - probably thirty or forty heuristic engines in there I suspect, but man are they fast! They don't slow the machine down at all.
Hashes really aren't useful for metamporphic code and a short signifier for heuristics is fairly meta.
I would mod you insightful, but I already posted (of course). +1 funny.
/recursive memes are funny
//Slashies are really for Fark, not /.
///Stop me before I slashie again
Here's a post from GigaOM that basically says that Google stabbed Motorola's Droid in the back to deliver this, despite the fact that Droid has a keyboard and Nexus One does not and so it's fair game.
That was picked up by TheRegister which for some bizarre reason sees this as a reason for Moto to run home to the warm embrace of Microsoft, as if the whole Sendo Maneuver had not happened (even though they reported it), and as if Google had actually done something dastardly. Now it's in the Mainstream press [Businessweek.com] and by Tuesday they'll be trying to meme it.
I'm doing what I can but we need more fans of open systems to get out there and make fun of these idiots or they will continue to spew their nonsense and Joe Sixpack might believe them and then we won't get our cool new stuff. Slashdot is popular but there are a lot of other sites out there like cnet, zdnet, Google Groups and Yahoo where this nonsense might take root. People who know stuff need to go from here to there and put the word out that we'd like some shiny new Tegra 2 or Android slates, a Nexus One, and a Droid under our tree at Christmas and anybody that opposes that is a Luddite.
Sure you can. How do you think I managed to get first post? But my comment was not visible for 10 minutes. It was visible for 8 seconds between the time I posted it and the time I read his reply. Not long enough. This fine article, as of the time I clicked reply, still doesn't have a second thread under it. He's a script.
I was impressed with myself for getting the first post on that but wow!
You managed to reply, quote, and post all of that in 8 seconds. You're a script. I've got to give you this though: you're a good one. Topical, username in subject, conclude with moderation suggestion, "threat tables" and inconsistency recognition. Very nice. Skynet is almost here.
If you had replied to me instead of TFA, since you would have been only the second post and since I didn't give you anything to work with, it wouldn't have given you away.
Give my regards to Minerva.
At all?
Missed one. I guess maybe Bing is useful after all. It's a humor engine.
I didn't mod it funny.
Hey, maybe for a change we could get a nice whistleblower to leak some documents. That would be great.
The dirty tricks squad is out in full force to nip this in the bud. There'll be the usual pans from Ina Fried and Mary Jo Foley and other puppets in the press. Then the arm twisting begins.
They might as well just record the meetings and copy the DOJ and Pamela Jones on the transcripts and emails. It's not like we're all not going to read it on Groklaw after the Attorney General subpoenas it as part of the antitrust lawsuit.
Personally I prefer the much more recent statements from Mr. Ballmer:
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
That foresight - it's eerie. It's like he's got some sort of direct view into the future... Maybe we should call him the Oracle of Redmond.
Annnnd... that's what Microsoft gets for bringing out their Silverlight "Flash killer": Enthusiastic support from Adobe for alternative platforms. Way to drive innovation, Microsoft! Why don't you come out with a creative suite next? That would be great.
If it's delivered by a retail vendor before Christmas, I'll buy you a beer.
Office Communicator is pretty slick - I use it at work and with the right camera it's pretty cool. Our guys have enabled federation with key outside partners, so I can actually see in an email who's available for chat for example. I like that. Some of our partners are a little shocked when they send me an email and it pops up a chat window a few seconds later... because they don't know that feature is enabled. Video chat with external folk is blocked, but at least I can get some quick dialog and that has been essential a few times when resolving some rather important customer issues involved dynamic coordination. I can also start a group meeting by chatting a list, share my desktop with the live meeting client, and so on. I don't care for WLM, from a long time back. Telepresence apps are hopelessly fragmented right now - you have to have 7 different apps to be sure you can video chat with someone you need to talk to, and that's bad.
I'm more interested in the Android tablets than the Mac ones, ARM more than Intel. I'm sure Apple can put together a nice tablet, but they like to get more of a premium for their products than I like to pay - but I'll pay if I have to. Also, Moorestown is looking pretty sweet but I don't think Intel got the power savings they wanted in this revision - it's just not enough of an improvement yet to compete with ARM on battery life, thin form factors and weight. I love Intel products on the server, desktop, and laptop, but for pocket devices the power envelope just isn't there yet. Now that the ARM chips are powerful enough to provide good service and still low power, that's what I'd use.
A 10 inch Tegra or Snapdragon slate with the usual iPhone internal devices and 800x480 video in a slim form factor with good battery life would be just the thing for me - I don't even care if it has Cellular wireless. But it should have the user-facing webcam. If they can get the BOM on that under $300 (I think they can) they can hit a $600 price point at retail and move a bunch of units - and bring back the fashion in cargo pockets and bush jackets.
I'll venture a prediction too: that won't come from a top-tier OEM. Out of nowhere will come a horde of new companies with no existing partner relationships to maintain who will clean up, or Google will do it themselves out of frustration. HD Thoreau was right about this: the farmer is born a slave to the wealth his forebears accumulated and dares not venture far from it. Of course later if it's successful it will turn out that some of the startups were extrapreneurial ventures of engineering teams from major vendors, who will then be bought back in at a huge premium.
The greet & close thing is an interesting posting style - it's congenial and I like it but I hope you won't be offended if I don't respond in kind. It's kind of out of vogue for a blog and makes people feel like they're snooping on a private dialog.
Items 1, 3, 7, 12, 15 and 17 are all Google services as are 24, 25, 29, 30, 36 and 40. And so on.
It would be unfortunate if you stopped being our special friend and no longer qualified for it. Your competitors who are still our special friends would have an unfair advantage over you.