There is a massive market of people out there with a computer that is good enough now.
What do most adults do with their home PC? Edit photos, home accounts, type a letter or two, use a browser, collect their email.
We have PCs that are "good enough". The interfaces are "good enough" (wifi, USB2), the recording media devices are "good enough" (recordable DVD, flash drives), and the PCs in terms of speed are now just waiting for the users.
This doesn't bode well for Microsoft's home market, because I really can't see people rushing out to buy new PCs. What's coming up for PCs that would make the average user upgrade?
It's great that people are sending OOo documents to you, either in the old SXW or ODT formats.
The reason is that it makes it visible. One of the problems with using OOo, is that I've had email to-and-fros with someone with various revision in.doc formats, but we were both using OOo.
If people are starting to offer odt/sxws then that's a really good thing - that people are starting to expect those they deal with to have it, or in essence saying "we prefer opendocument, to work best with us, you can download it".
There's nothing I miss in Writer or Calc, and I write detailed technical documentation like system specifications.
I often say this on slashdot, but in the end, every company is out to shape things in their favour. Corporations are not really altruistic by nature. Even if the CEO wants to do something just because it's cool, he has to justify himself to the board.
What you really have to consider, is which outcome you personally prefer. I prefer OpenDocument, because I'd like, long term, for us all to be able to exchange information freely. If that means that IBM and Sun sell a bunch of software, that I have an option to use in a competitive market, and make some money, good luck to them.
I'm not sure. It may technically be proprietary, but the key thing is that Adobe publish, free on their site (not sure about patent stuff) the full details of the specification.
This has meant that whenever I want to produce automated documents, I use PDF because there are 3rd party tools that produce them, and can be made to be 100% compatible.
all of those pictures from our camera phones, and whining live journals may not be a terribly flattering picture of our lives, but for an archeological point of view, it's exactly the sort of evidence you want.
Thank you. I finally have a justification for blogging.
You are wrong when thinking that it is only profit that can drive Computers. If we leave Computers to profit, then we will end up with improved billing systems, but no real progress in physics that will allow us to do large scale computer simulations.
Sure, people built computers to make their businesses run faster. This drove people like motorola, intel, AMD and co to build faster processors, which then went into gaming, which now drives it. Of course, the scientists couldn't possibly gain from all that innovation.
The commercialisation of space will drive everything else forward. Once enough rich, elderly tourists are releasing their home equity for a flight into space, we'll see flights come down in price, as more players enter the market. That means trips will become relatively cheaper, and the science will gain from this.
The liberalisation of the global airline market over the past 20 or so years has seen prices on transatlantic flights remain almost constant. It costs me about the same to do London to New York now than 20 years ago. Bear in mind how much inflation has gone up in the same time. That may mean that businessmen can transact more international business, but at the same time, it means more people can attend FOSS conferences.
You mean the well run public transport systems in Europe that cost even more in public subsidy?
The train companies in the UK charge a ludicrous amount of money, even though they get huge direct and indirect subsidy. Far more than for me to travel by car, and far more than a coach. It's frequently cheaper to fly from London to Glasgow than take the train, even though there are additional taxes on the plane.
Even in France, where they get huge subsidy, It's cheaper for me to drive from Angouleme to Bordeaux than take the TGV.
If I'd just noticed that Google was so much better than MSN, would I think "you know what, I'll stay with MSN, because it might be better in 6 months" or would I think "I'll switch today to google. If Microsoft's offering is better in 6 months, I'll switch back".
This is the whole danger with things like webapps for Microsoft. That people don't have to worry about what OS they are running, as long as they've got a browser.
One thing that Google seem to have done is to snub large corporate shareholders. If they can avoid dealing with them too much, they can avoid the inevitable panics that can occur when a share price slips a little.
Search engines are not the same as movies. Movies are hyped because they have a limited shelf life, especially if they are complete stinkers that won't last once word-of-mouth kick in.
Search engines have almost no friction. If someone tells me that a new search engine, I'll try it. If it's better than what I'm using, I'll switch. I've been from webcrawler to altavista to yahoo to google. I've tried others that have come out, and most give no better or generally worse results than Google.
If it's good, they can release it on day 1, and they'll see a massive uptake in market share by day 7.
The key thing here is that we have technologies like pagerank that sorts out which content is considered most noteworthy or not.
If a subject is big enough like "holidays", the chances of your worthless content getting to the top of google's pile is unlikely. There's too much good writing on the subject.
However, people will often settle for less good content over none. If you put in certain quite narrow keywords, you'll get a page of mine to do with restaurants in my town up. It's not fantastically written, but it's up at the top because there's not much that gives a better result for those keywords.
It's not going to be like VHS to DVD, where the quality was so much better, you could jump to a scene, freeze frame, and it didn't degrade like a VHS tape did. blu-ray is about more pixels.
Also, DVD gave an advantage to almost everyone. You didn't need a better TV to watch it.
It's going to come, but the jump from HD being with single geeks with lots of money to families is going to take a very long time.
You also need to be on HD to see much benefit. Which means that either people buy new TVs to watch blu-ray or wait until their current TV dies.
I don't have money to burn, and the resolution of my TV isn't that much of an issue to me. If I want super high resolution, I'll go to the cinema. With all the talk about connectors, format wars, region encoding and the like, I'm waiting until it sorts itself out.
It's even worst than that. Most countries could be self-sufficient on food. But often, it's governments that are the problem.
Remember all those people starving in Ethiopia in 1985? Even though there was plenty of food elsewhere in the country, and the people were being deliberately starved.
Why did people in Soviet Russia queue for bread? Because the supply chain was run by government.
The famine in China in the 1950s was a result of government intervention.
It doesn't matter. Plenty of candidates comment on stuff that's way outside their jurisdiction or they are largely powerless to change, just to win votes. We have MPs in the UK parliament raising things called "Early Day Motions" and having a vote on them. They don't actually change anything, but they can show to voters who don't know that they feel strongly about a subject.
And Access is not capable to manage more that two thousand rows. It comes all from my expierence.
Your "experience" knows that? You want me to post a 5,000 row database on a website proving your claim to be completely wrong. I'd make it a million but I'd rather spare my bandwidth bill. Access scales up to 2GB, as far as I recall (it may be larger). But you'd be insane to use Access to build a 2GB database.
If you'd actually built anything with Access, you'd know that whilst it has some serious limitations, it is very fast for RAD. I've built some multiuser systems that run just fine. Not the major core system for a company, as this would be crazy, but small databases, or projection tools pulling in data from a number of sources. Stuff that's run nicely for years. It hooks up nicely to SQL Server, so any built GUI can be used to work with a backend.
I have seen it seriously misused - companies trying to use it to store massive server-based databases, or scaling it beyond a small number of concurrent users. But it has it's uses, and I've yet to see a RAD database tool as good as it.
The key reason I've heard for not switching to OOo has nothing to do with features. It's more to do with 100% compatibility - that people want to know they can communicate with other people.
As for "man hours spent installing, configuring and training people", it sounds like you've never used OpenOffice.org. Installing is easier than MS Office. Training people is really no sweat. If you've used a word processor, adapting your brain to writer is hardly a challenge. With regards to features, I've been using it to produce technical and systems specifications - something that's more advanced than what the majority of users make it do. Most people are still using Word like Word 6.
Some of their value stuff is not as good, but the thing is that some things struggle to be anything but uniform. I buy the value plum tomatoes, because it's a tomato in a tin. It's not like ice cream, where you can add more cream, more fruit etc.
Chicken too. Unless you are going to sell organic/free-range or corn fed, what's the difference between a "chicken" and a "value chicken"?
A lot of people just want the illusion of quality. I don't understand why people pay so much more for an Audi A4 when a Skoda Favorit has the same floorplan and engine.
1) Rapid internet word-of mouth. The internet means that there are DVD forums, telling you about which makes are OK, and which are not. Such communication between people with such differing views was difficult before (And often deliberately avoided by advertiser-led print media).
2) Retail is more powerful, and more "refund-friendly". If you shop at Tesco in the UK, they typically will do a return with no quibbling. So, you know that if it doesn't work, they'll take it back real simple.
3) Cost of electronics. People will take a risk on a £30-40 DVD player, particularly if it's a second one for their bedroom. And they've learnt that a lot of the low-brand stuff is more than good enough.
While I generally agree, it's not across the board. Some expensive cars have no equivalent "budget" option. Try and find a washing machine that's built as well as a Miele (although you will pay for it). Likewise, BMW. But then, those companies have decided that they'd rather be original and focus on quality, than be a "brand".
I'm sure that's reassuring for you, but it's not even close to being a rule. Cars, DVD writers and the like are often sold under different names to appeal to different market segments, or to appeal to brand loyalists.
Often, the product is identical except for the badge.
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What do most adults do with their home PC? Edit photos, home accounts, type a letter or two, use a browser, collect their email.
We have PCs that are "good enough". The interfaces are "good enough" (wifi, USB2), the recording media devices are "good enough" (recordable DVD, flash drives), and the PCs in terms of speed are now just waiting for the users.
This doesn't bode well for Microsoft's home market, because I really can't see people rushing out to buy new PCs. What's coming up for PCs that would make the average user upgrade?
The reason is that it makes it visible. One of the problems with using OOo, is that I've had email to-and-fros with someone with various revision in .doc formats, but we were both using OOo.
If people are starting to offer odt/sxws then that's a really good thing - that people are starting to expect those they deal with to have it, or in essence saying "we prefer opendocument, to work best with us, you can download it".
There's nothing I miss in Writer or Calc, and I write detailed technical documentation like system specifications.
What you really have to consider, is which outcome you personally prefer. I prefer OpenDocument, because I'd like, long term, for us all to be able to exchange information freely. If that means that IBM and Sun sell a bunch of software, that I have an option to use in a competitive market, and make some money, good luck to them.
This has meant that whenever I want to produce automated documents, I use PDF because there are 3rd party tools that produce them, and can be made to be 100% compatible.
Thank you. I finally have a justification for blogging.
You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor!
You are wrong when thinking that it is only profit that can drive Computers. If we leave Computers to profit, then we will end up with improved billing systems, but no real progress in physics that will allow us to do large scale computer simulations.
Sure, people built computers to make their businesses run faster. This drove people like motorola, intel, AMD and co to build faster processors, which then went into gaming, which now drives it. Of course, the scientists couldn't possibly gain from all that innovation.
The commercialisation of space will drive everything else forward. Once enough rich, elderly tourists are releasing their home equity for a flight into space, we'll see flights come down in price, as more players enter the market. That means trips will become relatively cheaper, and the science will gain from this.
The liberalisation of the global airline market over the past 20 or so years has seen prices on transatlantic flights remain almost constant. It costs me about the same to do London to New York now than 20 years ago. Bear in mind how much inflation has gone up in the same time. That may mean that businessmen can transact more international business, but at the same time, it means more people can attend FOSS conferences.
The train companies in the UK charge a ludicrous amount of money, even though they get huge direct and indirect subsidy. Far more than for me to travel by car, and far more than a coach. It's frequently cheaper to fly from London to Glasgow than take the train, even though there are additional taxes on the plane.
Even in France, where they get huge subsidy, It's cheaper for me to drive from Angouleme to Bordeaux than take the TGV.
If I'd just noticed that Google was so much better than MSN, would I think "you know what, I'll stay with MSN, because it might be better in 6 months" or would I think "I'll switch today to google. If Microsoft's offering is better in 6 months, I'll switch back".
This is the whole danger with things like webapps for Microsoft. That people don't have to worry about what OS they are running, as long as they've got a browser.
One thing that Google seem to have done is to snub large corporate shareholders. If they can avoid dealing with them too much, they can avoid the inevitable panics that can occur when a share price slips a little.
Search engines are not the same as movies. Movies are hyped because they have a limited shelf life, especially if they are complete stinkers that won't last once word-of-mouth kick in.
Search engines have almost no friction. If someone tells me that a new search engine, I'll try it. If it's better than what I'm using, I'll switch. I've been from webcrawler to altavista to yahoo to google. I've tried others that have come out, and most give no better or generally worse results than Google.
If it's good, they can release it on day 1, and they'll see a massive uptake in market share by day 7.
If a subject is big enough like "holidays", the chances of your worthless content getting to the top of google's pile is unlikely. There's too much good writing on the subject.
However, people will often settle for less good content over none. If you put in certain quite narrow keywords, you'll get a page of mine to do with restaurants in my town up. It's not fantastically written, but it's up at the top because there's not much that gives a better result for those keywords.
Also, DVD gave an advantage to almost everyone. You didn't need a better TV to watch it.
It's going to come, but the jump from HD being with single geeks with lots of money to families is going to take a very long time.
I don't have money to burn, and the resolution of my TV isn't that much of an issue to me. If I want super high resolution, I'll go to the cinema. With all the talk about connectors, format wars, region encoding and the like, I'm waiting until it sorts itself out.
Remember all those people starving in Ethiopia in 1985? Even though there was plenty of food elsewhere in the country, and the people were being deliberately starved.
Why did people in Soviet Russia queue for bread? Because the supply chain was run by government.
The famine in China in the 1950s was a result of government intervention.
It doesn't matter. Plenty of candidates comment on stuff that's way outside their jurisdiction or they are largely powerless to change, just to win votes. We have MPs in the UK parliament raising things called "Early Day Motions" and having a vote on them. They don't actually change anything, but they can show to voters who don't know that they feel strongly about a subject.
My point was more about how some cars have the same floorplan, engine and yet cost considerably different prices.
Your "experience" knows that? You want me to post a 5,000 row database on a website proving your claim to be completely wrong. I'd make it a million but I'd rather spare my bandwidth bill. Access scales up to 2GB, as far as I recall (it may be larger). But you'd be insane to use Access to build a 2GB database.
If you'd actually built anything with Access, you'd know that whilst it has some serious limitations, it is very fast for RAD. I've built some multiuser systems that run just fine. Not the major core system for a company, as this would be crazy, but small databases, or projection tools pulling in data from a number of sources. Stuff that's run nicely for years. It hooks up nicely to SQL Server, so any built GUI can be used to work with a backend.
I have seen it seriously misused - companies trying to use it to store massive server-based databases, or scaling it beyond a small number of concurrent users. But it has it's uses, and I've yet to see a RAD database tool as good as it.
As for "man hours spent installing, configuring and training people", it sounds like you've never used OpenOffice.org. Installing is easier than MS Office. Training people is really no sweat. If you've used a word processor, adapting your brain to writer is hardly a challenge. With regards to features, I've been using it to produce technical and systems specifications - something that's more advanced than what the majority of users make it do. Most people are still using Word like Word 6.
I've typically asked around on usenet.
Chicken too. Unless you are going to sell organic/free-range or corn fed, what's the difference between a "chicken" and a "value chicken"?
A lot of people just want the illusion of quality. I don't understand why people pay so much more for an Audi A4 when a Skoda Favorit has the same floorplan and engine.
2) Retail is more powerful, and more "refund-friendly". If you shop at Tesco in the UK, they typically will do a return with no quibbling. So, you know that if it doesn't work, they'll take it back real simple.
3) Cost of electronics. People will take a risk on a £30-40 DVD player, particularly if it's a second one for their bedroom. And they've learnt that a lot of the low-brand stuff is more than good enough.
While I generally agree, it's not across the board. Some expensive cars have no equivalent "budget" option. Try and find a washing machine that's built as well as a Miele (although you will pay for it). Likewise, BMW. But then, those companies have decided that they'd rather be original and focus on quality, than be a "brand".
Cars are frequently based on the same floorplan and engine.
I'm sure that's reassuring for you, but it's not even close to being a rule. Cars, DVD writers and the like are often sold under different names to appeal to different market segments, or to appeal to brand loyalists.
Often, the product is identical except for the badge.