"
Therefore, in a Libertarian America, I presume you would see something pretty similar to what you had before the state began to provide education."
And when was this? How were things back then?
"Wealthy philanthropists would pay for scholarships and endow schools."
These guys can't even afford to pay for 1,000 students, let alone 100,000 or 1,000,000! Schooling costs billions and these guys don't have enough money... I think you are thinking of the schools and universities in the 1600's to 1800's. Those were largely paid for by monarchs who were richer than even the richest capitalist now (relatively speaking). Furthermore, the number of people educated back then was very small: only the elite and the priviledged went to school, let alone learn to write. Nowadays everyone goes to school!!!
"Hmm... not exactly Badnarik's idea of heaven, eh? But the fact that I disagree with their policies doesn't automatically mean I have to believe that a Libertarian society would be worse than hell. As a thought experiment, it's actually quite fun to look at something near the opposite end of the political spectrum now and again and try to see past your ideology and work out where they're coming from."
So-called (American) Libertarians draw all their ideology from pure capitalism. Everything has to do with capitalism. Capitalism calls for privatization of everything, including water, river, forests, roads, and so forth, and schools, libraries, etc are no different... I haven't seen any meaningful argument against public schools or public libraries or whatever, unless you simply go with the economic argument that these institutions are inefficient (which is true since they try to be egalitarian i.e. a public school can't discriminate and turn away the poor people, while private schools can)...
Actually, the Libertarian proposals will accelerate the destruction of the environment. I'm sure the Libertarians will want to sell the land on a free market (i.e. anyone can bid) and this will surely mean that the wealthy businesses will buy them out. For instance, if Alaska is sold off, I'm pretty certain that most of it will be bought by oil companies--not your private conservation group. These groups don't have the same amoutn of money as even one oil company or one mining company.
If Alaska is sold off, most of it (at least the "valuable parts") will be sold out within days! Since you yourself claim that the land is not worth as much, the price will be low. This will simply mean that the oil companies will buy out huge swaths of land for almost nothing... I guess you don't think there is much oil in Alaska...
Journalism and media clearly impacts freedom and democracy. The vast majority of the population relies on the media for their information. You can easily manipulate the population by simply messing with the information. Good media will keey an eye on these things. Unfortunately, there has never been any good journalism. Journalism generally degenerates into nationalism during tough times.
Propaganda is the most powerful tool to control adult humans. You can easily get someone to kill another by using propaganda--try doing that with some other means!
This is nothing new. As tech companies become large and powerful, they will start influencing government. Companies like Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and others, are some of the largest corporations in USA and hence they will influence govt. The tech industry, and hence the corporations, were small in the past so their power was limited. Other than IBM, very few tech companies would have been considered powerful from the 60's to the 80's.
Influencing govt is nothing new. One just needs to look at how some of the historically large corporations in USA (eg. oil companies), such as ExonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton (aka KBR), and others, have influenced US govt to the point of controlling their military.
As the computer industry, and consequently the corporations, increase in size, theiry lobbying power will increase...
"To far too many people in the world, salaries already count more than the quality of the work they perform. Generally, except in monopolies, companies care about quality of work and the resulting profit. I've seen bidding systems of all kinds, and I don't see a problem, providing that in each case, parameters are established to determine who qualifies to bid."
I am not so sure about this. How many jobs have you interviewed for or worked at, where the salary is the last thing that is discussed? I don't know about your experiences but my impression is that the vast majority of tech jobs consider salary as the last characteristic. My opinion of the present is that job contracts are not offered on the basis of salary. Now, I'm not saying that a guy who asks for $100k/yr for a $40k/yr job will get it; all I'm saying is that salary usually enters the equation after other factors are used to consider candidates.
Under a bidding system, I expect salary (basically "price") to overtake the other factors. This will happen because price is what is used to distinguish the employees. No one has developed any popular market systems where other factors can be used (for example, capitalists have been trying to price pollution into a bidding/market system and they haven't gotten anywhere (right now, pollution has a cost of zero)).
"
The original story was about the same nurses already working for the hospital, trying to get them to work extra shifts for extra money. If they're already qualified to work there, a couple hundred of the comments posted here don't apply.
"
Yes... but what *I* think will happen is that these full-time employees will lose their "power" OVER TIME. I am assuming bidding will generate lower salaries than overtime (otherwise why not pay someone overtime). In such a case, what will happen is that the wages might decline over time. People who are desperate or need the extra money badly will keep bidding lower and lower, possibly bidding even lower than the full-time/base salary. When that happens, why wouldn't the employer simply create an "overtime bidding position" from a full-time position? What's to stop them from firing one full-time employee and replacing them with 8 overtime employees? This is precisely what has been happening over the last few decades (downsizing in the 90's; outsourcing now; I guess bid-based job contracts in the future?; etc). The employees will basically lose power. So that's the problem I see--I just don't know what the solution to all this is.
"
This is all about finding a way to take care of patients at a time when health care professionals are in high demand. And we all complain about high health care costs as it is. Hospitals need extra help and cannot find it. Overtime from within is an acceptable and traditional practice.
"
Your view is sort of interesting in that you have exposure to all sides. It all depends on how you look at it. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing (even in a socialist-like system in Canada, it's the same) so, as a taxpayer/user, you definitely want to reduce costs. On the other hand, if you are an employee, the proposed bidding system will lower your salaries. So, as an employee, you don't want to lower costs (at least wages/salaries). So it all depends on where you stand. I typically favour employees on most issues (since I'm left-leaning) so this bidding system isn't too attractive to me. In any case, I personally think there is going to be a big battle in the healthcare field soon. Costs are just skyrocketing and it has to stop. I'm not sure who is going to pay but it could be the employees.
I personally don't think the charts are very helpful. Showing size vs time isn't that benefitial. I think Raymond should have shown a histogram or the frequency (vs day/time) or something like that.
I agree with most of your observations. For instance, the gap in the graph could indeed be a change in technique more than anything else.
I also think the graphs are misleading and are simply measuring the effectiveness of Microsoft's corporate filters rather than actual spam. Since we are not looking at the original spam data (i.e. we are only looking at what went through filter), the main point to draw from the graphs is whether the spammers are getting mroe effective in defeating corporate filters.
So, I agree with most of what you are saying. I have the same feelings...
I think the graph isn't too helpful. Size vs time may be interesting to look at but it doesn't really say much. I think a more useful plot would be a frequency chart or a histogram or something like that.
I'm not dissing the work--just saying how it could have been better...
Bidding is fine except for one thing: it shifts power to the employer. You can always find some desperate yet competent person to do a job. A good example of people in these categories are newly graduated students, immigrants with huge debts/penalties to pay or people with lower cost of living (eg. in rural areas in other states/provinces). These people will always undercut others (of course, I am assuming the job can be done by them--which is true for the vast majority of tech jobs (only a small percentage are senior, architect/designer/etc jobs requiring experience). Now, if you enter a bidding proces and are undercut then that will make you look badly to the employer. The employer might at some point ask 'why shouldn't I do everything through the bidding process?'.
The root problem is that the employer is a large aggregate body while the employee is just a small ant. This is the key reason for having unions in the first place. You don't have unions in the tech industry because the salaries are high enough that employees aren't being marginalized (i.e. employees actually have a lot of power, relative to most jobs).
Having said this, bidding for jobs in already here and will simply spread. It is inevitable! Business contracts (not talking about job contracts) are generally won through some bidding process. Therefore, it wouldn't be unusual to have job contracts also won through bidding. Already employees in certain industries work by bidding all the time (an example is artists and the art industry in general).
I think the key change that will occur as bidding gains prominence is that salary will matter more than "skill" in the future. Right now, "skills" are what get you hired but I imagine salary will start to play a major role under bidding (since modern capitalist bidding is all based on price; no way to quantify skills). This is not to say that someone who can't do the job will be hired but that the difference between getting hte job and not getting it will depend far more on the salary than now...
The only solution to piracy is to move to a service-oriented model. Microsoft is moving towards this and I think all companies eventually will. For now, things like online activation will become more popular. These things are costly for a small company but perhaps some company will provide registration services to these companies (a business opportunity for an entrepreneur?).
As internet access proliferates, piracy will just keep increasing. It's possible to host pirated stuff in some foreign "lawless" (in a computer industry sense) country. I can probably list at least 60 countries where this can be done right now.
The increase in piracy is inevitable IMO. If piracy doesn't increase then it likely means that governments are cracking down on civil liberties. Civil liberties are more important than piracy and the only way for the software industry to do well is to move to a service-oriented or subscription-based system. In other words, DRM is very bad and should be rejected on civil liberty grounds; however, online activation is ok IMO...
I'm not so sure about that.... if what you are saying were true, the person described in the original story is going to be in a lot of trouble.
I think the way it'll play out is that those who use the pirated software are part of the underground so it is unlikely they will sue anyone. Granted, it can happen but unlikely IMO...
Having said all that, I'm not endorsing purposely damaging stuff just to prevent piracy. Doing so results in you joining the dark side and you will be just as bad as the pirate.
"As quite a few people have started realising, the web is the platform of the future. There will always be room for locally run 3d graphics apps/games, but the web just makes sense for business apps."
Actually games will also move to that framework. Already, you have the MMORPGs and it is only a matter of time before most games follow that.
Most of these analysts are business analysts. Even the market research firms (like IDC) have most of their customers on Wall Street. All that matters are capitalist benefits like productivity improvements, lower costs, etc, or higher profits. No one really cares about innovation or anything like that. If you can rehash some old product and sell it for $100 that's as cool as developing a totally new product and selling it for $100...
A lot of end-users actually like those help agents. I just recently installed them for a few users. I guess they keep people entertained while using office for 8 hours a day or something:)
" What would be truly innovative is for Microsoft to make their office software truly compatible with multiple platforms and competing programs."
That is totally anti-capitalist and anti-profit. Doing so would lower your profits and since Microsoft is a profit-maximizing entity, it will never do that...
"
It always irritates me when they try to incorporate new "features" into their products that do little more than lock the competition out of the game."
All companies do that. Microsoft isn't even the worst; Companies like Oracle and IBM are far worse. It's actually something that is taught in business courses. Using proprietary formats and locking out the competition is called a 'barrier to entry'. One of the goals of your business should be to erect as many barriers to entry as possible... Another barrier to entry is patents. A lot of people don't understand why there are a million patents being filed over seemingly irrelevant things but the point is to prevent others from entering your market.
Whether you think all this is good or bad is another story; all I'll say is that this is how business (in particular profit-seeking entities) are...
"
Before I start laughing so hard I fall from my chair, may I remind you that the last time they wanted to integrate online capabilities into their software they gave us IE and Outlook?"
But you do realize that IE totally destroyed its competition and has upwards of 90% of the market share?
Outlook also has gained massive acceptance with many workers using it for their e-mail/contacts/etc. I don't know the market share for Outlook but it's also pretty large.
If these products were bad, no one would have gone from Netscape or Mosaic to Internet Explorer; and no one would use Outlook. There have always been easily available, often lower cost, products from competitors but people don't/didn't use them... could it be that some of these products were actually good?
Yep... good job bringing that point up because it is important for this story. I think most people know all that but they just don't think about it....
Netscape really went down, not because of the browser (they weren't making much money on it), but because their servers never took off.
I think the server is run by the company, not Microsoft. It makes no sense for MS to handle the server because no corporation out there would want to compromise their data by sharing that with outside sources.
If MS is storing the data, I can guarantee you that this would never take off. Most companies won't even share data with their (low-level) employees, let alone an external corporation like Microsoft...
I don't think this will be over THE internet...rather it is probably for LANs and WANs. You will probably run the application server on some local network.
I don't think we are at a stage where something like this can work well over the internet. Not only is it insecure (virus attacks, some user accidentally sending/sharing files with wrong people, etc), but the network performance also isn't there. Many companies have network bottlenecks and I don't know if anyone would seriously want to deploy internet-based office suite that is used by everyone in the company. So far, most network oriented deployments are specialized applications (eg. CRM, accounting systems, etc) with few users. Deploying a general purpose system (like Office) over the network with many users will likely be a big issue...
I think you are going to be proven wrong... my feeling is that there is going to be some key changes in the future with 3D acceleration. I'm expecting window systems to radically change in the future when 3D features of graphics cards are used. Let's face it: we have 3D cards, which are not used for anything. Doesn't it seem plausible that the windowing system will start using the unused capabilities of modern video cards? Doesn't it also seem logical to have everything in 3D rather than 2D (which is old school)? For instance, having everything as vectors (as under 3D) would significantly improve desktop quality as it pertains to resizing windows, changing icons, chaging colours, etc. Arguably, the display may also improve significantly (things like pixellation and blurriness on some monitors/laptops won't be as bad).
So to sum up, I think there is a revolutionary elephant knocking on the doors of window systems. That elephant is none other than 3D features of modern graphics cards...
I think scripted code is the way to go. I personally think the ideal application is similar to a computer game. What I mean by that is, you'll have the core application written well and optimized (eg. core engine of a game) but you will have all the "extra stuff" done using scripts (eg. AI in a game). This is sort of how Mozilla is and I think it'll be the future.
I think this is best because you can minimize bugs, optimize for speed, and so on, if you keep the core small. The scripts will easily allow anyone to modify the appearance, theme, or add features. Allow some scripting language will also allow more people to create plug-ins or add features.
We are still in the early stages of this paradigm so things aren't THAT great. Mozilla seems clunky; scripting seems lame; performance isn't better; etc. However, things will improve pretty rapidly. Since hardware (particularly CPU and memory) is improving quickly, scripts will not impact performance in the future (as long as the core stuff is solid).
As far as code sharing is concerned, things may be repeated a lot but if we have the cpu power (we do), and if we have the RAM (we do), and if we have the permanent storage using hard drives/memory stick/whatever (we do), none of this matters. Modern computers' CPUs are underutilized, video cards are not used much, and hard drive space isn't a problem either (hard drives are at 250MB/$1--haven't checked prices in a while though). The only problem I see is RAM but we should see some improvements on that end too.
lol that's true:) A lot of people seem to be content to let the owners control it well into the future; while another bunch don't like the ownership plan...
My point is that you don't need to have these special shares. The founders already own a huge chunk of Google and if they want to keep control of it, they can keep their shares (as opposed to selling it). By creating the special shares, the founders want both: control and wealth. The first is achieved by owning the class B (or whatever) shares, while the latter is achieved by selling the common shares.
In the short term none of this will matter. But the long-run is another story. The time will come when the owners will do a bad job and have to be replaced. If they owned voting rights then they will always control the company. Short and medium term investors wouldn't care about the voting rights but long-term ones will definitely do.
Google issuing multiple types of shares is very lame. I'm neither interested in buying the company nor do I have the money, but having common shares with very little voting power, while having another voting class that is held by the insiders is old school. It's very unusual in the tech industry and it is very elitist.
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" Therefore, in a Libertarian America, I presume you would see something pretty similar to what you had before the state began to provide education." And when was this? How were things back then?
"Wealthy philanthropists would pay for scholarships and endow schools." These guys can't even afford to pay for 1,000 students, let alone 100,000 or 1,000,000! Schooling costs billions and these guys don't have enough money... I think you are thinking of the schools and universities in the 1600's to 1800's. Those were largely paid for by monarchs who were richer than even the richest capitalist now (relatively speaking). Furthermore, the number of people educated back then was very small: only the elite and the priviledged went to school, let alone learn to write. Nowadays everyone goes to school!!! "Hmm... not exactly Badnarik's idea of heaven, eh? But the fact that I disagree with their policies doesn't automatically mean I have to believe that a Libertarian society would be worse than hell. As a thought experiment, it's actually quite fun to look at something near the opposite end of the political spectrum now and again and try to see past your ideology and work out where they're coming from." So-called (American) Libertarians draw all their ideology from pure capitalism. Everything has to do with capitalism. Capitalism calls for privatization of everything, including water, river, forests, roads, and so forth, and schools, libraries, etc are no different... I haven't seen any meaningful argument against public schools or public libraries or whatever, unless you simply go with the economic argument that these institutions are inefficient (which is true since they try to be egalitarian i.e. a public school can't discriminate and turn away the poor people, while private schools can)...
Actually, the Libertarian proposals will accelerate the destruction of the environment. I'm sure the Libertarians will want to sell the land on a free market (i.e. anyone can bid) and this will surely mean that the wealthy businesses will buy them out. For instance, if Alaska is sold off, I'm pretty certain that most of it will be bought by oil companies--not your private conservation group. These groups don't have the same amoutn of money as even one oil company or one mining company.
If Alaska is sold off, most of it (at least the "valuable parts") will be sold out within days! Since you yourself claim that the land is not worth as much, the price will be low. This will simply mean that the oil companies will buy out huge swaths of land for almost nothing... I guess you don't think there is much oil in Alaska...
Journalism and media clearly impacts freedom and democracy. The vast majority of the population relies on the media for their information. You can easily manipulate the population by simply messing with the information. Good media will keey an eye on these things. Unfortunately, there has never been any good journalism. Journalism generally degenerates into nationalism during tough times.
Propaganda is the most powerful tool to control adult humans. You can easily get someone to kill another by using propaganda--try doing that with some other means!
This is nothing new. As tech companies become large and powerful, they will start influencing government. Companies like Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and others, are some of the largest corporations in USA and hence they will influence govt. The tech industry, and hence the corporations, were small in the past so their power was limited. Other than IBM, very few tech companies would have been considered powerful from the 60's to the 80's.
Influencing govt is nothing new. One just needs to look at how some of the historically large corporations in USA (eg. oil companies), such as ExonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton (aka KBR), and others, have influenced US govt to the point of controlling their military.
As the computer industry, and consequently the corporations, increase in size, theiry lobbying power will increase...
"To far too many people in the world, salaries already count more than the quality of the work they perform. Generally, except in monopolies, companies care about quality of work and the resulting profit. I've seen bidding systems of all kinds, and I don't see a problem, providing that in each case, parameters are established to determine who qualifies to bid." I am not so sure about this. How many jobs have you interviewed for or worked at, where the salary is the last thing that is discussed? I don't know about your experiences but my impression is that the vast majority of tech jobs consider salary as the last characteristic. My opinion of the present is that job contracts are not offered on the basis of salary. Now, I'm not saying that a guy who asks for $100k/yr for a $40k/yr job will get it; all I'm saying is that salary usually enters the equation after other factors are used to consider candidates.
Under a bidding system, I expect salary (basically "price") to overtake the other factors. This will happen because price is what is used to distinguish the employees. No one has developed any popular market systems where other factors can be used (for example, capitalists have been trying to price pollution into a bidding/market system and they haven't gotten anywhere (right now, pollution has a cost of zero)).
" The original story was about the same nurses already working for the hospital, trying to get them to work extra shifts for extra money. If they're already qualified to work there, a couple hundred of the comments posted here don't apply. " Yes... but what *I* think will happen is that these full-time employees will lose their "power" OVER TIME. I am assuming bidding will generate lower salaries than overtime (otherwise why not pay someone overtime). In such a case, what will happen is that the wages might decline over time. People who are desperate or need the extra money badly will keep bidding lower and lower, possibly bidding even lower than the full-time/base salary. When that happens, why wouldn't the employer simply create an "overtime bidding position" from a full-time position? What's to stop them from firing one full-time employee and replacing them with 8 overtime employees? This is precisely what has been happening over the last few decades (downsizing in the 90's; outsourcing now; I guess bid-based job contracts in the future?; etc). The employees will basically lose power. So that's the problem I see--I just don't know what the solution to all this is.
" This is all about finding a way to take care of patients at a time when health care professionals are in high demand. And we all complain about high health care costs as it is. Hospitals need extra help and cannot find it. Overtime from within is an acceptable and traditional practice. " Your view is sort of interesting in that you have exposure to all sides. It all depends on how you look at it. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing (even in a socialist-like system in Canada, it's the same) so, as a taxpayer/user, you definitely want to reduce costs. On the other hand, if you are an employee, the proposed bidding system will lower your salaries. So, as an employee, you don't want to lower costs (at least wages/salaries). So it all depends on where you stand. I typically favour employees on most issues (since I'm left-leaning) so this bidding system isn't too attractive to me. In any case, I personally think there is going to be a big battle in the healthcare field soon. Costs are just skyrocketing and it has to stop. I'm not sure who is going to pay but it could be the employees.
I personally don't think the charts are very helpful. Showing size vs time isn't that benefitial. I think Raymond should have shown a histogram or the frequency (vs day/time) or something like that.
I agree with most of your observations. For instance, the gap in the graph could indeed be a change in technique more than anything else.
I also think the graphs are misleading and are simply measuring the effectiveness of Microsoft's corporate filters rather than actual spam. Since we are not looking at the original spam data (i.e. we are only looking at what went through filter), the main point to draw from the graphs is whether the spammers are getting mroe effective in defeating corporate filters.
So, I agree with most of what you are saying. I have the same feelings...
I think the graph isn't too helpful. Size vs time may be interesting to look at but it doesn't really say much. I think a more useful plot would be a frequency chart or a histogram or something like that.
I'm not dissing the work--just saying how it could have been better...
500 per day? You must be one popular fellow ;)
(As an aside, the article on Raymond's site says that this is the e-mail he receives after it passes through the corporate filters).
Bidding is fine except for one thing: it shifts power to the employer. You can always find some desperate yet competent person to do a job. A good example of people in these categories are newly graduated students, immigrants with huge debts/penalties to pay or people with lower cost of living (eg. in rural areas in other states/provinces). These people will always undercut others (of course, I am assuming the job can be done by them--which is true for the vast majority of tech jobs (only a small percentage are senior, architect/designer/etc jobs requiring experience). Now, if you enter a bidding proces and are undercut then that will make you look badly to the employer. The employer might at some point ask 'why shouldn't I do everything through the bidding process?'.
The root problem is that the employer is a large aggregate body while the employee is just a small ant. This is the key reason for having unions in the first place. You don't have unions in the tech industry because the salaries are high enough that employees aren't being marginalized (i.e. employees actually have a lot of power, relative to most jobs).
Having said this, bidding for jobs in already here and will simply spread. It is inevitable! Business contracts (not talking about job contracts) are generally won through some bidding process. Therefore, it wouldn't be unusual to have job contracts also won through bidding. Already employees in certain industries work by bidding all the time (an example is artists and the art industry in general).
I think the key change that will occur as bidding gains prominence is that salary will matter more than "skill" in the future. Right now, "skills" are what get you hired but I imagine salary will start to play a major role under bidding (since modern capitalist bidding is all based on price; no way to quantify skills). This is not to say that someone who can't do the job will be hired but that the difference between getting hte job and not getting it will depend far more on the salary than now...
The only solution to piracy is to move to a service-oriented model. Microsoft is moving towards this and I think all companies eventually will. For now, things like online activation will become more popular. These things are costly for a small company but perhaps some company will provide registration services to these companies (a business opportunity for an entrepreneur?).
As internet access proliferates, piracy will just keep increasing. It's possible to host pirated stuff in some foreign "lawless" (in a computer industry sense) country. I can probably list at least 60 countries where this can be done right now.
The increase in piracy is inevitable IMO. If piracy doesn't increase then it likely means that governments are cracking down on civil liberties. Civil liberties are more important than piracy and the only way for the software industry to do well is to move to a service-oriented or subscription-based system. In other words, DRM is very bad and should be rejected on civil liberty grounds; however, online activation is ok IMO...
I'm not so sure about that.... if what you are saying were true, the person described in the original story is going to be in a lot of trouble.
I think the way it'll play out is that those who use the pirated software are part of the underground so it is unlikely they will sue anyone. Granted, it can happen but unlikely IMO...
Having said all that, I'm not endorsing purposely damaging stuff just to prevent piracy. Doing so results in you joining the dark side and you will be just as bad as the pirate.
This is a very important point... a lot of the crackers do it for the challenge and fun associated with it.
"As quite a few people have started realising, the web is the platform of the future. There will always be room for locally run 3d graphics apps/games, but the web just makes sense for business apps." Actually games will also move to that framework. Already, you have the MMORPGs and it is only a matter of time before most games follow that.
Most of these analysts are business analysts. Even the market research firms (like IDC) have most of their customers on Wall Street. All that matters are capitalist benefits like productivity improvements, lower costs, etc, or higher profits. No one really cares about innovation or anything like that. If you can rehash some old product and sell it for $100 that's as cool as developing a totally new product and selling it for $100...
A lot of end-users actually like those help agents. I just recently installed them for a few users. I guess they keep people entertained while using office for 8 hours a day or something :)
" What would be truly innovative is for Microsoft to make their office software truly compatible with multiple platforms and competing programs."
That is totally anti-capitalist and anti-profit. Doing so would lower your profits and since Microsoft is a profit-maximizing entity, it will never do that...
" It always irritates me when they try to incorporate new "features" into their products that do little more than lock the competition out of the game."
All companies do that. Microsoft isn't even the worst; Companies like Oracle and IBM are far worse. It's actually something that is taught in business courses. Using proprietary formats and locking out the competition is called a 'barrier to entry'. One of the goals of your business should be to erect as many barriers to entry as possible... Another barrier to entry is patents. A lot of people don't understand why there are a million patents being filed over seemingly irrelevant things but the point is to prevent others from entering your market.
Whether you think all this is good or bad is another story; all I'll say is that this is how business (in particular profit-seeking entities) are...
" Before I start laughing so hard I fall from my chair, may I remind you that the last time they wanted to integrate online capabilities into their software they gave us IE and Outlook?"
But you do realize that IE totally destroyed its competition and has upwards of 90% of the market share?
Outlook also has gained massive acceptance with many workers using it for their e-mail/contacts/etc. I don't know the market share for Outlook but it's also pretty large.
If these products were bad, no one would have gone from Netscape or Mosaic to Internet Explorer; and no one would use Outlook. There have always been easily available, often lower cost, products from competitors but people don't/didn't use them... could it be that some of these products were actually good?
Yep... good job bringing that point up because it is important for this story. I think most people know all that but they just don't think about it....
Netscape really went down, not because of the browser (they weren't making much money on it), but because their servers never took off.
I think the server is run by the company, not Microsoft. It makes no sense for MS to handle the server because no corporation out there would want to compromise their data by sharing that with outside sources.
If MS is storing the data, I can guarantee you that this would never take off. Most companies won't even share data with their (low-level) employees, let alone an external corporation like Microsoft...
I don't think this will be over THE internet...rather it is probably for LANs and WANs. You will probably run the application server on some local network.
I don't think we are at a stage where something like this can work well over the internet. Not only is it insecure (virus attacks, some user accidentally sending/sharing files with wrong people, etc), but the network performance also isn't there. Many companies have network bottlenecks and I don't know if anyone would seriously want to deploy internet-based office suite that is used by everyone in the company. So far, most network oriented deployments are specialized applications (eg. CRM, accounting systems, etc) with few users. Deploying a general purpose system (like Office) over the network with many users will likely be a big issue...
I think you are going to be proven wrong... my feeling is that there is going to be some key changes in the future with 3D acceleration. I'm expecting window systems to radically change in the future when 3D features of graphics cards are used. Let's face it: we have 3D cards, which are not used for anything. Doesn't it seem plausible that the windowing system will start using the unused capabilities of modern video cards? Doesn't it also seem logical to have everything in 3D rather than 2D (which is old school)? For instance, having everything as vectors (as under 3D) would significantly improve desktop quality as it pertains to resizing windows, changing icons, chaging colours, etc. Arguably, the display may also improve significantly (things like pixellation and blurriness on some monitors/laptops won't be as bad).
So to sum up, I think there is a revolutionary elephant knocking on the doors of window systems. That elephant is none other than 3D features of modern graphics cards...
I think scripted code is the way to go. I personally think the ideal application is similar to a computer game. What I mean by that is, you'll have the core application written well and optimized (eg. core engine of a game) but you will have all the "extra stuff" done using scripts (eg. AI in a game). This is sort of how Mozilla is and I think it'll be the future.
I think this is best because you can minimize bugs, optimize for speed, and so on, if you keep the core small. The scripts will easily allow anyone to modify the appearance, theme, or add features. Allow some scripting language will also allow more people to create plug-ins or add features.
We are still in the early stages of this paradigm so things aren't THAT great. Mozilla seems clunky; scripting seems lame; performance isn't better; etc. However, things will improve pretty rapidly. Since hardware (particularly CPU and memory) is improving quickly, scripts will not impact performance in the future (as long as the core stuff is solid).
As far as code sharing is concerned, things may be repeated a lot but if we have the cpu power (we do), and if we have the RAM (we do), and if we have the permanent storage using hard drives/memory stick/whatever (we do), none of this matters. Modern computers' CPUs are underutilized, video cards are not used much, and hard drive space isn't a problem either (hard drives are at 250MB/$1--haven't checked prices in a while though). The only problem I see is RAM but we should see some improvements on that end too.
lol that's true :) A lot of people seem to be content to let the owners control it well into the future; while another bunch don't like the ownership plan...
My point is that you don't need to have these special shares. The founders already own a huge chunk of Google and if they want to keep control of it, they can keep their shares (as opposed to selling it). By creating the special shares, the founders want both: control and wealth. The first is achieved by owning the class B (or whatever) shares, while the latter is achieved by selling the common shares.
In the short term none of this will matter. But the long-run is another story. The time will come when the owners will do a bad job and have to be replaced. If they owned voting rights then they will always control the company. Short and medium term investors wouldn't care about the voting rights but long-term ones will definitely do.
Google issuing multiple types of shares is very lame. I'm neither interested in buying the company nor do I have the money, but having common shares with very little voting power, while having another voting class that is held by the insiders is old school. It's very unusual in the tech industry and it is very elitist.