Was the key to the strategy glancingly mentioned in the article as "...Sculley started a semiautonomous division to produce a successful portable computer"
It seems that big chunks of autonomy are necessary to developing really high quality products that are significantly different from the main corporate line. IIRC the IBM AS/400 line was the end result of a similar process: almost a separate computer company, it is said.
It would be interesting to test the hypothesis by comparing the failed development of the Apple Portable to the successful development of the Powerbook.
You could embed the USB stick into almost any molded plastic form, turning USB sticks into the next Pez dispenser of the collectable world.... consider the possibilities!
Not a bad idea, but that requires two huge leaps in technology: implants that the body won't reject, and connecting to the optic nerve... which as Wallace tells Grommit, would be "...just a harmless bit of brain alteration."
In contrast, going from a plenoptic camera to glasses requires no real fundamenta advances; just good solid moneymaking engineering based on existing nightvision, 3-d, and (assumed) plenoptic tech.
The next step is to pair the cameras and the LED image emitters, similar to night-vision goggles, to make a really kewl pair of corrective lenses. Truly the ultimate nerdwear!
> I decided to have a little fun with this.... I took these, pulled out some code into common libraries, and wrote a code generator to produce much of the rest from input files
Ah, congratulations, how delightful! I *loved* code generators. Ya bring back memories... at my first really good gig, management just stood out of the way while I wrote a mainframe BASIC program that generated COBOL reporting programs as fast as they could think of new stuff they wanted out of their data; the reports were basically the same anyway except for the sort, select, summarization and output. So the generator wasn't really as hard as it might sound.
Of course, this was in a commercially competitive environment where we were rewarded by results, not by metrics. Those were true Dilbert Moments... ever so much more satisfying than Kodak Moments!
>The iPod would need a better processor (an Intel ARM based processor) for starts as well as a better OS
I'm sure your facts are correct, but the same was truthfully said of PCs in the early days and other "Innovator's-Dilemma"-class dinosaur slayers.
The "Death From Below" strategy starts with cheap, weak stuff that it's not profitable or otherwise rational for the dinos to resist. The significant difference today is that MS is headed by the most successful businessman in history; is he willing to break his business model to stay on top? Who knows ? The the organ grinder PC may factor into the mix as well.
>Okay, but who are you referring to as the industry dinosaurs for your scenario, the MPAA studios or TiVo and the other DVR manufacturers?
Wintel.
The iPod is a cheap computer, with limited functionality compared to your desktop or your laptop. Its only advantages are its customer-pleasing price, its focus on functions customers want, and its ability to creep up to desktop functionality... when it wants to.
In a rational world, Corporate Coding Standards, enforced by code reviews, would have something to do with maintanability. In some organizations, they are... probably those that live or die by the quality & maintainability of their code.
But quite the opposite was true in the large insurance company (nearly 1000 programmers alone) where I held my last salaried programming gig. Their Coding Standards were all about Not Rocking The Boat. They included several elements of "How To Write Unmaintainable Code" as Enforcable Standards. Remember when "Structured Programming" was a new idea? I got me bottom kicked for arguing that coding units should not end with a wholly unnecessary "Go To End"... because the STANDARD was that ALL modules exits were via "Go To End".
Fortunately, their coding quality algorithm had to do with number of lines of code changed... again, nothing to do with actual quality. Deleting redundant code merely enabled me and the software to work faster & better, which did not count as quality. When I learned to comment out redundant line, so they counted as "lines changed", my coding quality scores vastly improved!
Perhaps the insurance industry is so darn profitable that optimizing its software is not nearly as important as maintaining internal discipline. The ideal employee was the scion of two current employees who had met in the cafeteria, and was engaged to another employee who they'd met the same way (I Kid You Not!) If these programming methods imposed excessive costs, they just upped their premiums.
Hmmmm, perhaps I should have said "relatively" perfect & enduring. If the half-life of an AOL disk is 20 years, there will still be several thousand of those buggers functional in 4006, bearing a usuable but embarassing browser.
There is a fundamental difference between physical books and electronic media. In 2000 years, nearly all paper books will have cycled through the biosphere a dozen times, which destroys the information on them. In contrast archived web pages will very likely still exist as information. Perhaps they will be readable only via old browsers but those browsers themselves are only information, similarly archived and available to researchers who care to figure them out.
There is no need to wikify or continually update works such as the Rubiyat, which have reached their final form long ago. Translations of course require continual update as language changes over the centuries, but the original text of Beowulf is the same today as it was 200 years ago (...plus or minus findings of new texts.)
iPod seems to be turning into the canonical example of attacking an industry leader from below, as detailed in Clayton M. Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" a decade back.
In business computing, PCs broke the dominance of mainframes in the computing environment by introducing relatively cheap gadgets that were more expensive and less profitable per business function than the industry leaders, who quite logically ignored them; and then PCs crept up the functionality curve to wipe out the dinosaurs.
In autos, the Japanese starting importing cheap cars to the US that were less profitable that our domestic industry leaders, who quite logically failed to respond effectively. While GM etc always made cheap cars too, they didn't try to match Japan's cheap-and-good model; Toyota etc crept up the functionality curve nearly to wipe out the dinosaurs.
Now in computing: the iPod, started cheap, and is creeping up the functionality curve.
The question is, will the industry leaders recognize and respond effectively? Or rather, can they? I don't intend to be making a yet another cheap flame of the world's leading software company, which cannot be ignorant of the what's going on, but responding may require breaking their business model.
Precisely! Technology extends the range of options, but does not have to do away with the old options. Most of my gaming is via computer, but that doesn't make card night with old friends any less valuable.
>I have about 10 copies of the Rubiyat of Omar Kayyan - none any less than 80 years old. Something about the different artwork, leather covers, hand-written notes that conveys a continuity, a chain of humanity to them.
I share the feeling (... and covet your collection, twice the size of mine.)
The Rubiyat is an especially suitable example of the enduring value of physical books, for its poetry is far more than the bare text freely available on the web. Its commentary on the human condition is all the more poignant and effective when spoken in a variety of books of varying conditions, each of whose original owner "... indeed is gone with all his Rose" (V). The various book designs and scars of time make each volume like one of the Pots (verses LXXXII+)
that comment on the Maker: "They sneer at me for leaning all awry; Why? did the Hand of the Great Maker Err?" Web-pages can be made perfect and enduring; physical books can only decay.
The physical experience of leafing through the poetry, on the gress, with a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a "Thou" beside you in the wilderness... that's what Omar is talkin' about!
The comparison in inapposite, because bullets can't do mid-course corrections.
I'm not saying that 100 km ain't pretty darn good; it's just that spacecraft are not at all comparable to bullets, at least until the reaction mass is used up.
ME: Competitors in Canada & Europe have a great advantage which we are literally killing ourselves to maintain for them
YOU:... the unemployment in Europe and Canada is higher than it is in the US.
Irrelevant. Competitors pay employed people, not unemployed people, and they can pay them less (...or pay the same wages and get a better quality employee...) because the employer doesn't fund the health care system. This is simple economics
>but you factor the crushing tax burden in instead...
You don't get something for nothing. Private health insurance in our nation is extremely inefficient; compare Medicaid's 2% overhead with the healthcare industry's 30% overhead. One main difference is that our healthcare industry has a huge incentive to deny payment; they invest heavily in facilities to justify denying payment which is a truly perverse system, wouldn't you think?
>nevermind the difficulty of firing someone in a near-socalist state
"Socialism" snore... Europe and Japan are eating our lunch, and you're calling them socialist. Well, they may be socialists but they're also better capitalists than we are at the moment, judging by Nokia, Toyota, Airbus, etc.
... the US legal system is broken. The cost of medical overhead - outrageous lawsuits, malpractice insurance, and FDA aproval are really the root problems of heath care cost. The lack of such nonsense is the reason Canadian drugs & treatment is so much cheaper.
Misstated.
It is true that American administrative costs are about 30%, far more than in any other modern industrial society, but those admin costs are not due to malpractice insurance or awards. It's the overhead of running insurance companies, especially the huge bureaucracy required to deny claims.
Your FDA claim is difficult to sustain; suffice it to say that Canadians are just as motivated as Americans to avoid bad drugs... and on the record, better at it.
> why not just offer the job without heath care benifits and/or hire co-ops/interns?
Perhaps you have never hired anyone.
If you are serious about your business, you don't just grab a homeless person off the street or whoever Manpower sends over. Your training time, resources and above all REPUTATION are valuable. You want good employees and they want health care.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the key to the strategy glancingly mentioned in the article as "...Sculley started a semiautonomous division to produce a successful portable computer"
It seems that big chunks of autonomy are necessary to developing really high quality products that are significantly different from the main corporate line. IIRC the IBM AS/400 line was the end result of a similar process: almost a separate computer company, it is said.
It would be interesting to test the hypothesis by comparing the failed development of the Apple Portable to the successful development of the Powerbook.
Is the site unenlightened, or am I?
>what design would you make first?
I would say that the 3-D art should be related to the name of the band. "Barenaked Ladies" would definitely be my 1st choice!
Go a step further. USB sticks are 3-dimensional!
You could embed the USB stick into almost any molded plastic form, turning USB sticks into the next Pez dispenser of the collectable world .... consider the possibilities!
>you will be going to jail for science
Somehow the idea lacks the grandeur of Galileo's 'Eppur si muove' ("It is still a men's magazine")
Won't advertizements in magazines turn off subscribers?
Let's hope the Science Fiction Book Club is never so tacky as to stick0 inserts in their books.
>bionic eye replacement.
Not a bad idea, but that requires two huge leaps in technology: implants that the body won't reject, and connecting to the optic nerve ... which as Wallace tells Grommit, would be "...just a harmless bit of brain alteration."
In contrast, going from a plenoptic camera to glasses requires no real fundamenta advances; just good solid moneymaking engineering based on existing nightvision, 3-d, and (assumed) plenoptic tech.
The next step is to pair the cameras and the LED image emitters, similar to night-vision goggles, to make a really kewl pair of corrective lenses. Truly the ultimate nerdwear!
> I decided to have a little fun with this .... I took these, pulled out some code into common libraries, and wrote a code generator to produce much of the rest from input files
Ah, congratulations, how delightful! I *loved* code generators. Ya bring back memories ... at my first really good gig, management just stood out of the way while I wrote a mainframe BASIC program that generated COBOL reporting programs as fast as they could think of new stuff they wanted out of their data; the reports were basically the same anyway except for the sort, select, summarization and output. So the generator wasn't really as hard as it might sound.
Of course, this was in a commercially competitive environment where we were rewarded by results, not by metrics. Those were true Dilbert Moments ... ever so much more satisfying than Kodak Moments!
>I'd rather argue against a hundred idiots than have one agree with me.
I must agree with you ... sorry!
>The iPod would need a better processor (an Intel ARM based processor) for starts as well as a better OS
I'm sure your facts are correct, but the same was truthfully said of PCs in the early days and other "Innovator's-Dilemma"-class dinosaur slayers.
The "Death From Below" strategy starts with cheap, weak stuff that it's not profitable or otherwise rational for the dinos to resist. The significant difference today is that MS is headed by the most successful businessman in history; is he willing to break his business model to stay on top? Who knows ? The the organ grinder PC may factor into the mix as well.
>Okay, but who are you referring to as the industry dinosaurs for your scenario, the MPAA studios or TiVo and the other DVR manufacturers?
Wintel.
The iPod is a cheap computer, with limited functionality compared to your desktop or your laptop. Its only advantages are its customer-pleasing price, its focus on functions customers want, and its ability to creep up to desktop functionality ... when it wants to.
... for enforcing the Corporate Coding Standards.
In a rational world, Corporate Coding Standards, enforced by code reviews, would have something to do with maintanability. In some organizations, they are ... probably those that live or die by the quality & maintainability of their code.
But quite the opposite was true in the large insurance company (nearly 1000 programmers alone) where I held my last salaried programming gig. Their Coding Standards were all about Not Rocking The Boat. They included several elements of "How To Write Unmaintainable Code" as Enforcable Standards. Remember when "Structured Programming" was a new idea? I got me bottom kicked for arguing that coding units should not end with a wholly unnecessary "Go To End" ... because the STANDARD was that ALL modules exits were via "Go To End".
Fortunately, their coding quality algorithm had to do with number of lines of code changed ... again, nothing to do with actual quality. Deleting redundant code merely enabled me and the software to work faster & better, which did not count as quality. When I learned to comment out redundant line, so they counted as "lines changed", my coding quality scores vastly improved!
Perhaps the insurance industry is so darn profitable that optimizing its software is not nearly as important as maintaining internal discipline. The ideal employee was the scion of two current employees who had met in the cafeteria, and was engaged to another employee who they'd met the same way (I Kid You Not!) If these programming methods imposed excessive costs, they just upped their premiums.
It was a soul-destroying experience.
>In another 2000 years...
Hmmmm, perhaps I should have said "relatively" perfect & enduring. If the half-life of an AOL disk is 20 years, there will still be several thousand of those buggers functional in 4006, bearing a usuable but embarassing browser.
There is a fundamental difference between physical books and electronic media. In 2000 years, nearly all paper books will have cycled through the biosphere a dozen times, which destroys the information on them. In contrast archived web pages will very likely still exist as information. Perhaps they will be readable only via old browsers but those browsers themselves are only information, similarly archived and available to researchers who care to figure them out.
There is no need to wikify or continually update works such as the Rubiyat, which have reached their final form long ago. Translations of course require continual update as language changes over the centuries, but the original text of Beowulf is the same today as it was 200 years ago (...plus or minus findings of new texts.)
"... when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
The RIAA - Now More Than Ever!
iPod seems to be turning into the canonical example of attacking an industry leader from below, as detailed in Clayton M. Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" a decade back.
In business computing, PCs broke the dominance of mainframes in the computing environment by introducing relatively cheap gadgets that were more expensive and less profitable per business function than the industry leaders, who quite logically ignored them; and then PCs crept up the functionality curve to wipe out the dinosaurs.
In autos, the Japanese starting importing cheap cars to the US that were less profitable that our domestic industry leaders, who quite logically failed to respond effectively. While GM etc always made cheap cars too, they didn't try to match Japan's cheap-and-good model; Toyota etc crept up the functionality curve nearly to wipe out the dinosaurs.
Now in computing: the iPod, started cheap, and is creeping up the functionality curve.
The question is, will the industry leaders recognize and respond effectively? Or rather, can they? I don't intend to be making a yet another cheap flame of the world's leading software company, which cannot be ignorant of the what's going on, but responding may require breaking their business model.
... geeks think in binary, not BCD!
... such as a Car, a Shoe, a Candy Bar or an iPod.
Then respectfully ask "Can't you just complete this prototype and release it?"
Some will get it. Some won't.
A game, perhaps FRP, in which one of the "spells" were "alter the other guy's GUI" ... would be amusing.
Precisely! Technology extends the range of options, but does not have to do away with the old options. Most of my gaming is via computer, but that doesn't make card night with old friends any less valuable.
>I have about 10 copies of the Rubiyat of Omar Kayyan - none any less than 80 years old. Something about the different artwork, leather covers, hand-written notes that conveys a continuity, a chain of humanity to them.
I share the feeling (... and covet your collection, twice the size of mine.)
The Rubiyat is an especially suitable example of the enduring value of physical books, for its poetry is far more than the bare text freely available on the web. Its commentary on the human condition is all the more poignant and effective when spoken in a variety of books of varying conditions, each of whose original owner "... indeed is gone with all his Rose" (V). The various book designs and scars of time make each volume like one of the Pots (verses LXXXII+) that comment on the Maker: "They sneer at me for leaning all awry; Why? did the Hand of the Great Maker Err?" Web-pages can be made perfect and enduring; physical books can only decay.
The physical experience of leafing through the poetry, on the gress, with a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and a "Thou" beside you in the wilderness ... that's what Omar is talkin' about!
>if I shot a bullet at a target...
The comparison in inapposite, because bullets can't do mid-course corrections.
I'm not saying that 100 km ain't pretty darn good; it's just that spacecraft are not at all comparable to bullets, at least until the reaction mass is used up.
>At least the Baseball players who learn to cash in on a child's game aren't Coke-swilling computer nerds
Insert Daryl Strawberry joke here
>I'm all for Open Dating, although I don't think that means what you think it means.
Insert FSF/GNU Joke Here
> And the Dating Rights Managment is something that women are already applying all over the world.
Insert RIAA/Microsoft Joke Here.
ME: Competitors in Canada & Europe have a great advantage which we are literally killing ourselves to maintain for them
YOU: ... the unemployment in Europe and Canada is higher than it is in the US.
Irrelevant. Competitors pay employed people, not unemployed people, and they can pay them less (...or pay the same wages and get a better quality employee...) because the employer doesn't fund the health care system. This is simple economics
>but you factor the crushing tax burden in instead...
You don't get something for nothing. Private health insurance in our nation is extremely inefficient; compare Medicaid's 2% overhead with the healthcare industry's 30% overhead. One main difference is that our healthcare industry has a huge incentive to deny payment; they invest heavily in facilities to justify denying payment which is a truly perverse system, wouldn't you think?
>nevermind the difficulty of firing someone in a near-socalist state
"Socialism" snore ... Europe and Japan are eating our lunch, and you're calling them socialist. Well, they may be socialists but they're also better capitalists than we are at the moment, judging by Nokia, Toyota, Airbus, etc.
Misstated.
It is true that American administrative costs are about 30%, far more than in any other modern industrial society, but those admin costs are not due to malpractice insurance or awards. It's the overhead of running insurance companies, especially the huge bureaucracy required to deny claims.
Your FDA claim is difficult to sustain; suffice it to say that Canadians are just as motivated as Americans to avoid bad drugs ... and on the record, better at it.
> why not just offer the job without heath care benifits and/or hire co-ops/interns?
Perhaps you have never hired anyone.
If you are serious about your business, you don't just grab a homeless person off the street or whoever Manpower sends over. Your training time, resources and above all REPUTATION are valuable. You want good employees and they want health care.
>Dr Longo's team took yeast cells and knocked out two key genes
Forget the mice. I want to brew with that Yeast Of Immortality. What better vector for gene therapy than a nice cold pint?