Let's say Ford makes car parts and cars. Chevy decides to use Ford's engine in their car, which turns out to be very popular. Then Chevy gets a patent on their car, and uses it to try to sue Ford for making cars. At this point it's obvious Chevy has gone insane, and it's in Ford's best interest to let them go out of business.
Do I need to remind you that they were also running Windows? It was what they knew. No doubt some consultant got paid well for recommending that solution.
Linux used to be a special thing, it had a proficiency bar to get involved. It wasn't enough to want it, you had to actually be able to install it, and that was a filter many couldn't get over. Now Android/Linux is sold on (I checked today) 70% of the phones at WalMart. It moves more units than desktop or laptop PCs. You charge it and turn it on and it works. Fortunately there is an actual historical model for what is happening here.
Long ago when I first used the Internet - and this is long before browsers - you had to be a military professional, a college IT student, a member of the military-industrial conspiracy (heh.) or somesuch to get direct access to the Internet at all. You had to be Serious and Educated mostly, or at least in a significant responsible position. And back then each September each college would get new students who had never heard of pulltab cancer boy and all the other Internet memes, and had to be schooled on etiquette. So September was always dreaded as the time when this stupid crap would come up again.
And then CompuServe came online - and after that, AOL. And September came every day. AOL was the worst, and the day AOL joined the Internet is recorded as the dawn of the "Eternal September" where the Internet became annoying because fools came not in a September flood, but every day.
Yet somehow the Internet has also become so much more than we ever dreamt of back then, as making things easy for these folk has brought innovations in utility and usability and compatibility to the few of us who were there when instead of DNS we had "The List". And so Android brings Linux people who don't know csh - but it also brings us Angry Birds Space, and office applications and replacement keyboards that scan barcodes and Android platforms we can send to the edge of space or use for our scientific control and measurement operations.
In all I would say that democratizing Linux with Android has drawbacks, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
If you can control the words you can control the discussion. Once, long ago, IBM attempted to take control of the PC discussion by renaming motherboards "planar boards" and hard drives "fixed disks". It was a sad, cynical episode in IBM's evolution and one they've thankfully let go. Others have yet to learn the lesson that shifting the meaning of words for corporate profit has a cost in Karma that adds up.
The comparison is valid. Apple is, like all companies, competing against all of the rest of the world. If 10,000 companies each take on average 0.01% mobile market share with Android, there is no market share left for Apple.
The argument that Windows 8 is going to put over Windows Phone with its similar interface and Microsoft's marketing billions misses an important point. We've been hearing that for years, and it hasn't started working yet. Windows 7 was "optimized for touch" on launch, and the following CES had 35 Windows 7 tablets on display - not one of which ever amounted to anything even though each had actual full Windows on it and would run all Windows legacy apps and connect to all your other printers and other devices too. Windows 8 is a phone interface that doesn't work well on a PC. Microsoft used to have a 40% share of mobile, and now they have at best 2%, so this strategy is so obviously negatively effective that it is suicidal. Their massive market presence didn't prevent them from falling so far off the map that they are reported as part of the "other" category now.
What would turn the corner for them isn't massive marketing dollars. It isn't forcing everybody to use a phone interface, ruining sales of their desktop and server OS in a forlorn hope of going mobile. It isn't hiring a Bangalore blog center to post in every Internet forum "I have iPhone but am moving to the awesome Lumia 920, ditching my iPad for a SurfaceRT". It isn't buying Facebook Likes and Twitter followers and retweets. It isn't bribing people to stand in line on launch day with concert tickets, or building a three-story standup nightclub and open bar at Burning Man. It isn't bribing every tech news site on the Internet with so many advertising dollars they lose their editorial integrity. It isn't giving away a free copy of Office RT with every tablet. It could be done, but this isn't how they will succeed if they do.
HTC now is (as far as I know) now the only company with full access to apple's patents.
Microsoft and Apple have a full patent cross license going back to, I believe, 1994. They are in cahoots on this whole anti-Android campaign.
HTC ran out of fight, is all. They sold out and now will find themselves following Nokia on the road to hell. When they get there they'll get to meet Microsoft's other mobile partners.
This is about messaging, and the message has to be simple: "Sony stuff doesn't work with your other stuff because they want to sell you more Sony stuff." And if you want to, you can replace the word "Sony" there with the word "Microsoft". This is a strategy that used to work, and they both still use it, and it doesn't work any more.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure Samsung's biggest chip customer is... Samsung.
Let's say Ford makes car parts and cars. Chevy decides to use Ford's engine in their car, which turns out to be very popular. Then Chevy gets a patent on their car, and uses it to try to sue Ford for making cars. At this point it's obvious Chevy has gone insane, and it's in Ford's best interest to let them go out of business.
Samsung makes competing products, so not selling to Apple might be in their interest.
You're already PWNed. Exposed to the real Internet that rig has a lifespan of three minutes.
Unfortunately even mundane technology companies need to be skilled in the art of keeping stuff private from a determined adversary.
Do I need to remind you that they were also running Windows? It was what they knew. No doubt some consultant got paid well for recommending that solution.
Mod parent up.
Linux used to be a special thing, it had a proficiency bar to get involved. It wasn't enough to want it, you had to actually be able to install it, and that was a filter many couldn't get over. Now Android/Linux is sold on (I checked today) 70% of the phones at WalMart. It moves more units than desktop or laptop PCs. You charge it and turn it on and it works. Fortunately there is an actual historical model for what is happening here.
Long ago when I first used the Internet - and this is long before browsers - you had to be a military professional, a college IT student, a member of the military-industrial conspiracy (heh.) or somesuch to get direct access to the Internet at all. You had to be Serious and Educated mostly, or at least in a significant responsible position. And back then each September each college would get new students who had never heard of pulltab cancer boy and all the other Internet memes, and had to be schooled on etiquette. So September was always dreaded as the time when this stupid crap would come up again.
And then CompuServe came online - and after that, AOL. And September came every day. AOL was the worst, and the day AOL joined the Internet is recorded as the dawn of the "Eternal September" where the Internet became annoying because fools came not in a September flood, but every day.
Yet somehow the Internet has also become so much more than we ever dreamt of back then, as making things easy for these folk has brought innovations in utility and usability and compatibility to the few of us who were there when instead of DNS we had "The List". And so Android brings Linux people who don't know csh - but it also brings us Angry Birds Space, and office applications and replacement keyboards that scan barcodes and Android platforms we can send to the edge of space or use for our scientific control and measurement operations.
In all I would say that democratizing Linux with Android has drawbacks, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
If you can control the words you can control the discussion. Once, long ago, IBM attempted to take control of the PC discussion by renaming motherboards "planar boards" and hard drives "fixed disks". It was a sad, cynical episode in IBM's evolution and one they've thankfully let go. Others have yet to learn the lesson that shifting the meaning of words for corporate profit has a cost in Karma that adds up.
The comparison is valid. Apple is, like all companies, competing against all of the rest of the world. If 10,000 companies each take on average 0.01% mobile market share with Android, there is no market share left for Apple.
Sony will be lucky to see the end of 2014 as an independent company. They have made a habit of strategic error and poor customer service.
The argument that Windows 8 is going to put over Windows Phone with its similar interface and Microsoft's marketing billions misses an important point. We've been hearing that for years, and it hasn't started working yet. Windows 7 was "optimized for touch" on launch, and the following CES had 35 Windows 7 tablets on display - not one of which ever amounted to anything even though each had actual full Windows on it and would run all Windows legacy apps and connect to all your other printers and other devices too. Windows 8 is a phone interface that doesn't work well on a PC. Microsoft used to have a 40% share of mobile, and now they have at best 2%, so this strategy is so obviously negatively effective that it is suicidal. Their massive market presence didn't prevent them from falling so far off the map that they are reported as part of the "other" category now.
What would turn the corner for them isn't massive marketing dollars. It isn't forcing everybody to use a phone interface, ruining sales of their desktop and server OS in a forlorn hope of going mobile. It isn't hiring a Bangalore blog center to post in every Internet forum "I have iPhone but am moving to the awesome Lumia 920, ditching my iPad for a SurfaceRT". It isn't buying Facebook Likes and Twitter followers and retweets. It isn't bribing people to stand in line on launch day with concert tickets, or building a three-story standup nightclub and open bar at Burning Man. It isn't bribing every tech news site on the Internet with so many advertising dollars they lose their editorial integrity. It isn't giving away a free copy of Office RT with every tablet. It could be done, but this isn't how they will succeed if they do.
They spend more on patent wars then they do on research.
I'm sure they're as happy about that as we are.
HTC now is (as far as I know) now the only company with full access to apple's patents.
Microsoft and Apple have a full patent cross license going back to, I believe, 1994. They are in cahoots on this whole anti-Android campaign.
HTC ran out of fight, is all. They sold out and now will find themselves following Nokia on the road to hell. When they get there they'll get to meet Microsoft's other mobile partners.
Them too.
Since Linux/Android is growing logarithmically, units more than two years old are not a significant fraction of the installed base.
On release day I dubbed Plays For Sure "Plays For Now". That turned prophetic.
Yup.
We don't have that option here any more. And our local paper is now more of a leaflet.
This is about messaging, and the message has to be simple: "Sony stuff doesn't work with your other stuff because they want to sell you more Sony stuff." And if you want to, you can replace the word "Sony" there with the word "Microsoft". This is a strategy that used to work, and they both still use it, and it doesn't work any more.
BBBut they have Beelions to spend on marketing...
Sony's motto does seem to be "buy our stuff because it doesn't work with your other stuff." Memory stick, really?
The solution may be closer than we thought.
Obviously the physical media necessary to saturate that costs a lot of money. SAN SSD is not cheap yet.