The same argument could haved been made a while back as to why people would never contribute their time, for free, to an open source software product. People who have a vested or passing interest in collectively making a more open sysem will donate their time in the same way they do for open source software projects.
The incentive is that consumers will be able to more fully hold companies accountable for their actions resulting in fewer patent lawsuits, unfair competitive advantages, etc. This will all result in lower prices for products and a wider variety of products to choose from.
My Treo will make my Dell laptop and Polycom Soundpoint phone buzz if it's within 4 feet of either when I get a call. It's not out of the question that a phone in the wrong place emitting will mess with electronics. Or perhaps distract the pilot at the wrong time.
I think this is a great idea for a wide variety of reasons (which I won't get into now because the poster indicates the decision to do this has already been made, now they have to figure out how to do it best). I recommend looking at the top 20 MBA programs for guidance. Most of them have mandatory laptop requirements with high priced software (for finance etc) provided to each student during the duration of their stay at the University. They have figured out how to get the machines into student hands quickly, how to service the problems, and how to manage software.
SBC offers packages with unlimited long distance. I used Vonage for my small company for a grand total of a month. Had to get rid of it because quailty was horrible.
Don't forget the largest undefended border in the world. You forgot to mention it. Also, what exactly are our politicians supposed to learn? That it's relatively easy to make a IED?
"My impression is that perhaps our border with Canada has, to some degree, been of a bit greater concern than that with Mexico," John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, told a U.S. Senate hearing Thursday on global terror threats.
Google's revenue would be hurt if people beleived that Big Brother were watching their surfing/searching habbits. If people believed that they were being tracked while searching, they would probably start using another service. Since Google's revenue is largely dependent on Adsense, this decrease in searching would lead to lower revenue. It would also allow a new company to more easily dethrone Google.
The market is lowering their price because they believe that Google may have to one day give up search data which will lower their revenue.
I don't follow this industry, but what caught my eye was the low price of the acquisition -- which I guess makes sense given that a HD is a commodity component in a computer.
It also looks like Maxtor really underperformed its peers. P/E of (roughly) of 8 compared to an industry average of (roughly) 14.5. Revenue seems to be roughly the same as Western Digital: $3.95B for Maxtor vs $3.83B for WDC. BUT Maxtor has a much lower EBITDA: $130MM vs $395MM. Operating margins at Maxtor were also pretty bad (-0.67%).
Seagate is much bigger than Maxtor, with almost $10B in revenue, a 34% quarterly growth, and a 11.5 Operating Margin. From the outside, it looks far more healthy. I wonder how much of the acquisition will be written off as Goodwill???
My bet is that Seagate saw an opportunity to purchase market share on the cheap and could care less about the technology etc. within Maxtor. If anything, it'll bring down the operating margins in the short term for the combined company to below Seagate's current margins.
Re:Forbes printing fiction. Nothing new here.
on
Forbes Fictional 15
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All magazines/journals/newspapers are wrong many times when predicting the future about future trends (such as markets, emerging technologies, if a new product will sell etc). Show me one media outlet that has been correct even 50% of the time. Are you seriously suggesting that because they were wrong in some predictions, and now that they use some of the technologies they said wouldn't be successful, they have lost all credibility in your eyes? Because clearly predicting the future is an easy endeavor.
I recently started a small 4 person startup in a shared office space with another 5 person startup. I decided to try Vonage based on cost grounds compared to SBC's small business service. We also have a commercial cable modem service. Unfortunately we had to cancel the service after a couple of months. The call quality became unusable anytime more than 4 or 5 people were using the internet at the same time. Now I'm not a super tech person (but am comfortable with hardware/software), and I was looking for a simple, cheap solution. Vonage was unfortunately not at the quality of service we needed at this time. I suspect that it would work just fine for home use though.
You're asking the wrong question. You should first sit down and ask yourself what interests you and what you would enjoy doing for a living. Maybe you dig airplanes so you want to get a job working on the computer systems on new planes from Boeing. Or maybe you like security software so go find a job at Symantec. You get the point.
After you've figured out what interests you, go talk to alumni from your school who work in the industry you're heading into. Ask them how they like their job, what salary expectatios you should have with your experience etc.
Whatever you end up doing, make sure you enjoy it. Good luck job hunting! I hope you land somewhere interesting and enjoyable.
To follow up the reply to my post: This is the article I got the data from. From my read, Gartner defines "wireless data-centric" for these numbers. So the Treo 650 is included I beleive.
I'll go ahead and ask the MBA question. What's the commercial alternative out there? How much does it cost per year? How much can a customer save with your soution? Put those numbers into a NPV model and pitch it to customers.
Other question that come to mind are: what's the pain you're solving and who is the customer?
I'll go ahead and ask the MBA question. What's the competing commercial product? How much does it cost per year? How much will a theater chain save with your solution? Quantiffy those answers into a simple NPV model and pitch it to execs at theater chains.
Although I don't fully agree with all of your reasons, I certainly respect them as they make sense. Perhaps it's just a matter of perspective. As a businessman, I want to bundle as many products together to both upsell and lock in a customer. It makes sense for me to vertically integrate. As a consumer I (personally) don't have time to individually install and maintain lots of SW packages and so want everything out of the box. I suspect that most mainstream consumers feel the same way because they are looking for benefits (play movies, play music, etc) rather than features (what I think you are looking for - can I not use Media Player, can I get a base install, etc).
On the other hand, I see your point that many people would like to just have a base install and choose what to layer on top of it.
As to the OEM deals. Most consumers (I believe)do not have the sophistication to install a fresh OS. And Dell etc need to provide a solution that works out of the box. Only now is Linux (in my opinion) becoming easy enough for a smart, but not technical, user to install. Dell etc made a mistake in their contracts with MS when they required payment to MS regardless of which OS was installed.
Is not MS upfront that you can't run linux SW on their platform? Developers are aware upfront of MS incompatibility features. Does MS make attempts to hide this from users or developers? They may toss marketing messages that say "Open source sucks", but that's different from not telling developers/users about incompatibilities.
btw, this is actually a pretty interesting discussion. Thanks for helping me understand your point of view rather than flaming me!
But that's not marketing, that's using personal connections to get your way. I agree that you can cross the line into illegal activities and that should not be tolerated at all. But as long as you do not do any illegal activities, what is wrong with using marketing tools to sway the market instead of a fuller feature set?
Great point. What about this case. I use a razor to shave. They tell me up front that I have to buy their brand of razor blades. Gilette makes no effort to allow other's to make cheaper razor blades. Does that make Gilette evil as well? Or not evil because they disclosed it upfornt?
Why should marketing only go so far? I'm not sure I agree. It's another competitive tool. The warchest has all kinds of tools: features, marketing, people, etc. I can decide to not push so hard on the features but excel at marketing and people to execute a strategy. Or I can build a better feature set and get the best people to do that. Or I can do all three etc.
I recently changed the transmissoin fluid in my Honda. Turns out that Honda is the only maker of a special type of transmission fluid (so I'm told) so I had to pay a premium to get it. Honda marketed better to my demographic, but neglected to tell me about the transmission fluid incompatibility. Does that make Honda evil as well?
I respectfully disagree. They release a product that will enter the market and is "good enough". Sometimes they miss this mark (3rd times the charm!) and sometimes they exceed this mark. For example, they were the first company with a suite of products that were bundeled together called office. And it was priced at a point that was below what it cost to get the pieces from a competitor. We can argue all day as to which product was technically better, but what cannot be argued is that the combination of price/features hit the mark. Hence Office dominating its market.
They realized that the user experience created a high barried to entry for new products, and a high barrier to exit for the user.
Bottom line, people care about what gets them most of the way there at a price that most can afford. MS hit that mark.
Yes, most MS products piss me off many times is not so subtle ways. But they get the job done. I can't think of any SW that doesn't piss me off in subtle ways (open source or otherwise).
It's not "good" or "evil". It's called Marketing 101. MS realized that marketing was critical to move a product. I call that "smart". If you build it and don't tell anybody or really market it to the mainstream user base, then odds are that you will not gain market share (not always true, but true 90% of the time). Which is why it's good that Firefox is being presented to a more mainstream audience both in the press and through targeted advertising.
Using words like "good" and "evil" to describe what's happening misses why MS is successful and really doesn't help you change the situation.
I disagree that they have sacrificed product quality and user benefit over and over again. Well, maybe not about the product quality... Most people find their applications "good enough". Which, when you think about it is enough. It's impossible to get to 100% user benefit mark, so you get to a reasonable level and call it a product.
They may have tipped the playing field in their favor, but certainly not because they sacrificed product quality and user benefit. If anything, they realized what all businesses/people realize -- a level playing field both sucks and never exists. Somebody is always better than another people/company and they would be foolish not to exploit that (think job interview, sports, whatever). So MS realized that marketing was important -> educate the market -> influence market -> sell product.
They certainly went too far with certain tactics, but saying "sacrificing product quality and user benefit" tipped the playing field in their favor is just not true.
So I'm a Physics grad (UC Berkeley grad) as are most of my friends (dad (fusion) and mom (solid state) are also profs as well). I think the question is "how hard are the engineering challenges?",not "what are the physics challenges". And the engineering hurdles are still high. Witness the difficulty in other countries getting their nuclear programs working. They did it (N Korea, S Africa, etc), but only with official state sanctioning. And it still took enormous resources.
That's not to say that it isn't possible, or that we should ignore the threat. Just that it is a difficult engineering excersise which takes expertise and money and time.
Slashdot Mirror
The incentive is that consumers will be able to more fully hold companies accountable for their actions resulting in fewer patent lawsuits, unfair competitive advantages, etc. This will all result in lower prices for products and a wider variety of products to choose from.
My Treo will make my Dell laptop and Polycom Soundpoint phone buzz if it's within 4 feet of either when I get a call. It's not out of the question that a phone in the wrong place emitting will mess with electronics. Or perhaps distract the pilot at the wrong time.
I think this is a great idea for a wide variety of reasons (which I won't get into now because the poster indicates the decision to do this has already been made, now they have to figure out how to do it best). I recommend looking at the top 20 MBA programs for guidance. Most of them have mandatory laptop requirements with high priced software (for finance etc) provided to each student during the duration of their stay at the University. They have figured out how to get the machines into student hands quickly, how to service the problems, and how to manage software.
SBC offers packages with unlimited long distance. I used Vonage for my small company for a grand total of a month. Had to get rid of it because quailty was horrible.
Don't forget the largest undefended border in the world. You forgot to mention it. Also, what exactly are our politicians supposed to learn? That it's relatively easy to make a IED?
"My impression is that perhaps our border with Canada has, to some degree, been of a bit greater concern than that with Mexico," John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, told a U.S. Senate hearing Thursday on global terror threats.
Google's revenue would be hurt if people beleived that Big Brother were watching their surfing/searching habbits. If people believed that they were being tracked while searching, they would probably start using another service. Since Google's revenue is largely dependent on Adsense, this decrease in searching would lead to lower revenue. It would also allow a new company to more easily dethrone Google.
The market is lowering their price because they believe that Google may have to one day give up search data which will lower their revenue.
It also looks like Maxtor really underperformed its peers. P/E of (roughly) of 8 compared to an industry average of (roughly) 14.5. Revenue seems to be roughly the same as Western Digital: $3.95B for Maxtor vs $3.83B for WDC. BUT Maxtor has a much lower EBITDA: $130MM vs $395MM. Operating margins at Maxtor were also pretty bad (-0.67%).
Seagate is much bigger than Maxtor, with almost $10B in revenue, a 34% quarterly growth, and a 11.5 Operating Margin. From the outside, it looks far more healthy. I wonder how much of the acquisition will be written off as Goodwill???
My bet is that Seagate saw an opportunity to purchase market share on the cheap and could care less about the technology etc. within Maxtor. If anything, it'll bring down the operating margins in the short term for the combined company to below Seagate's current margins.
All magazines/journals/newspapers are wrong many times when predicting the future about future trends (such as markets, emerging technologies, if a new product will sell etc). Show me one media outlet that has been correct even 50% of the time. Are you seriously suggesting that because they were wrong in some predictions, and now that they use some of the technologies they said wouldn't be successful, they have lost all credibility in your eyes? Because clearly predicting the future is an easy endeavor.
I recently started a small 4 person startup in a shared office space with another 5 person startup. I decided to try Vonage based on cost grounds compared to SBC's small business service. We also have a commercial cable modem service. Unfortunately we had to cancel the service after a couple of months. The call quality became unusable anytime more than 4 or 5 people were using the internet at the same time. Now I'm not a super tech person (but am comfortable with hardware/software), and I was looking for a simple, cheap solution. Vonage was unfortunately not at the quality of service we needed at this time. I suspect that it would work just fine for home use though.
You're asking the wrong question. You should first sit down and ask yourself what interests you and what you would enjoy doing for a living. Maybe you dig airplanes so you want to get a job working on the computer systems on new planes from Boeing. Or maybe you like security software so go find a job at Symantec. You get the point.
After you've figured out what interests you, go talk to alumni from your school who work in the industry you're heading into. Ask them how they like their job, what salary expectatios you should have with your experience etc.
Whatever you end up doing, make sure you enjoy it. Good luck job hunting! I hope you land somewhere interesting and enjoyable.
http://www.personaltechpipeline.com/162600033
To follow up the reply to my post: This is the article I got the data from. From my read, Gartner defines "wireless data-centric" for these numbers. So the Treo 650 is included I beleive.Q1 2005 stats
PalmOne: 614,750 units shipped (from 834,591 same period last year). Market share 18% from 30%
RIM: 711,000 units shipped (from 405,000 same period last yesr). Market share 20.8% from 14.8%.
RIM subscribers at 3MM from 1MM 16 months ago.
20% of RIM sales are from Europe
Actually, I posted it twice by mistake. The first time I hit post I got an error... so I tried to post it again. You need to calm down.
I'll go ahead and ask the MBA question. What's the commercial alternative out there? How much does it cost per year? How much can a customer save with your soution? Put those numbers into a NPV model and pitch it to customers. Other question that come to mind are: what's the pain you're solving and who is the customer?
I'll go ahead and ask the MBA question. What's the competing commercial product? How much does it cost per year? How much will a theater chain save with your solution? Quantiffy those answers into a simple NPV model and pitch it to execs at theater chains.
I've had this so called "technology" since Windows 3.0. My computer would blue out the whole screen to save energy.
Although I don't fully agree with all of your reasons, I certainly respect them as they make sense. Perhaps it's just a matter of perspective. As a businessman, I want to bundle as many products together to both upsell and lock in a customer. It makes sense for me to vertically integrate. As a consumer I (personally) don't have time to individually install and maintain lots of SW packages and so want everything out of the box. I suspect that most mainstream consumers feel the same way because they are looking for benefits (play movies, play music, etc) rather than features (what I think you are looking for - can I not use Media Player, can I get a base install, etc).
On the other hand, I see your point that many people would like to just have a base install and choose what to layer on top of it.
As to the OEM deals. Most consumers (I believe)do not have the sophistication to install a fresh OS. And Dell etc need to provide a solution that works out of the box. Only now is Linux (in my opinion) becoming easy enough for a smart, but not technical, user to install. Dell etc made a mistake in their contracts with MS when they required payment to MS regardless of which OS was installed.
Is not MS upfront that you can't run linux SW on their platform? Developers are aware upfront of MS incompatibility features. Does MS make attempts to hide this from users or developers? They may toss marketing messages that say "Open source sucks", but that's different from not telling developers/users about incompatibilities.
btw, this is actually a pretty interesting discussion. Thanks for helping me understand your point of view rather than flaming me!
But that's not marketing, that's using personal connections to get your way. I agree that you can cross the line into illegal activities and that should not be tolerated at all. But as long as you do not do any illegal activities, what is wrong with using marketing tools to sway the market instead of a fuller feature set?
Great point. What about this case. I use a razor to shave. They tell me up front that I have to buy their brand of razor blades. Gilette makes no effort to allow other's to make cheaper razor blades. Does that make Gilette evil as well? Or not evil because they disclosed it upfornt?
Why should marketing only go so far? I'm not sure I agree. It's another competitive tool. The warchest has all kinds of tools: features, marketing, people, etc. I can decide to not push so hard on the features but excel at marketing and people to execute a strategy. Or I can build a better feature set and get the best people to do that. Or I can do all three etc.
I recently changed the transmissoin fluid in my Honda. Turns out that Honda is the only maker of a special type of transmission fluid (so I'm told) so I had to pay a premium to get it. Honda marketed better to my demographic, but neglected to tell me about the transmission fluid incompatibility. Does that make Honda evil as well?
I respectfully disagree. They release a product that will enter the market and is "good enough". Sometimes they miss this mark (3rd times the charm!) and sometimes they exceed this mark. For example, they were the first company with a suite of products that were bundeled together called office. And it was priced at a point that was below what it cost to get the pieces from a competitor. We can argue all day as to which product was technically better, but what cannot be argued is that the combination of price/features hit the mark. Hence Office dominating its market.
They realized that the user experience created a high barried to entry for new products, and a high barrier to exit for the user.
Bottom line, people care about what gets them most of the way there at a price that most can afford. MS hit that mark.
Yes, most MS products piss me off many times is not so subtle ways. But they get the job done. I can't think of any SW that doesn't piss me off in subtle ways (open source or otherwise).
It's not "good" or "evil". It's called Marketing 101. MS realized that marketing was critical to move a product. I call that "smart". If you build it and don't tell anybody or really market it to the mainstream user base, then odds are that you will not gain market share (not always true, but true 90% of the time). Which is why it's good that Firefox is being presented to a more mainstream audience both in the press and through targeted advertising.
Using words like "good" and "evil" to describe what's happening misses why MS is successful and really doesn't help you change the situation.
I disagree that they have sacrificed product quality and user benefit over and over again. Well, maybe not about the product quality... Most people find their applications "good enough". Which, when you think about it is enough. It's impossible to get to 100% user benefit mark, so you get to a reasonable level and call it a product.
They may have tipped the playing field in their favor, but certainly not because they sacrificed product quality and user benefit. If anything, they realized what all businesses/people realize -- a level playing field both sucks and never exists. Somebody is always better than another people/company and they would be foolish not to exploit that (think job interview, sports, whatever). So MS realized that marketing was important -> educate the market -> influence market -> sell product.
They certainly went too far with certain tactics, but saying "sacrificing product quality and user benefit" tipped the playing field in their favor is just not true.
So I'm a Physics grad (UC Berkeley grad) as are most of my friends (dad (fusion) and mom (solid state) are also profs as well). I think the question is "how hard are the engineering challenges?",not "what are the physics challenges". And the engineering hurdles are still high. Witness the difficulty in other countries getting their nuclear programs working. They did it (N Korea, S Africa, etc), but only with official state sanctioning. And it still took enormous resources.
That's not to say that it isn't possible, or that we should ignore the threat. Just that it is a difficult engineering excersise which takes expertise and money and time.