Apple have spent years as the company that can do no wrong - virtually every piece of hardware they release is a stonking success. Apple may not corner the market in terms of %age of units sold, but they sure as hell corner the market in terms of %age of profit made.
This is great for anyone who bought Apple shares a few years ago.
Unfortunately, it's rather less great for Apple long-term because sooner or later a company that enjoys that much success tends to become complacent; innovation stagnates and they fall behind.
It's even worse if a single company does so well as to monopolise the market (see also Microsoft between about 1995 - 2005) - then the entire industry is held back because there's only one big player and they aren't really innovating.
I imagine much of the bashing is based on sales technique.
Fifteen, twenty years ago, most sales was based on the idea of flogging features and benefits - the car has this feature, which gives you this benefit - and could be quite aggressive in telling the customer that "you must have this benefit, therefore you must buy this product. Now sign, damn you!".
Modern sales technique is very much more customer-focused - you work towards selling something that makes the customer somehow feel good - and ideally this should permeate every aspect of everything you do from product development through marketing, sales and aftercare.
Apple are absolute masters of this - they advertise based on how you can video chat with your granny, play music or look at photos, they operate stores where you find pleasant, non-intrusive sales staff and there's no shortage of people with stories of how the nice man at the Genius Bar fixed their MacBook/iPad/iPhone even though technically they didn't have to because it had suffered non-warranty damage. Whether or not you like their products, you can't deny that following such a technique has worked pretty well for them.
Thing is, some companies - and for that matter some industries - have been quicker than others to pick up on this. The motor trade - with a few exceptions - has been pretty slow to pick up on it. In the '80s and '90s, all a dealer had to do was buy the right franchise and it was pretty much a license to print money. Today, he has to actually make an effort to make his customer feel good and more than a few of them are in terrible trouble as a result.
I think it depends on the marque, but for many usually the way it works is when you choose your car from the dealer, an order is placed with the manufacturer. Historically, if it was something they kept in the country, you'd get it fairly quickly - though AIUI most manufacturers have gone over to just-in-time manufacturing, which means they don't keep a stock of cars. They build more-or-less everything to order.
This means that whenever you buy a brand new car, there's a lead time associated with it.
Occasionally a dealer may buy a number of cars themselves and sell them. Legally they're sold as "second-hand", even though they've only got delivery mileage on the clock. In such cases, obviously you get whatever the dealer bought, though there's practically no lead time associated with this.
The reason a dealer might do this is because of how payments are structured within the industry. Dealers don't actually need to make a single penny of profit on any car they sell provided they hit the sales targets set by the manufacturer. If they do this, they get bonuses that are so huge they pretty much pay for the business to exist. If they don't - well, they don't get those bonuses. These targets are calculated whenever they're calculated - probably quarterly - and if it's near the end of a quarter and a dealer's not going to reach their target through sales to customers, that's when they buy cars for their own stock. Obviously if the dealer has to do this he'll pick cars that he knows will sell very easily.
Here's a secret that a lot of people on/. seem to be unaware of:
Marketing - the process of getting people to say "I'm interesting in buying something from you" - is hard.
It's not a particularly exact science at the best of times - sure, you can run two different ads and see which one gets the best response, but nobody's yet figured out why it might get the best response and been able to turn that into a formula. Get it wrong, and you can actually turn prospective customers against you.
That being said, there are a few people you can target who are far more likely to buy from you.
One of the easiest markets to sell to is people who have already bought something from you once. Problem is, a manufacturer might know which distributors and even which resellers are stocking their product but they probably only have a vague idea which customers are buying it. On the face of it, using a driver that connects to the Internet (and requires compulsory registration) is a great way for a manufacturer to solve this problem and develop very tightly targeted marketing campaigns.
(This, by the way, is also why you're encouraged to "register" your warranty even though in many countries consumer protection law makes this totally unnecessary)
Of course, as I said if you get it wrong you can turn prospective customers against you. Which is precisely what's happening here.
IIRC there's a get-out explicitly written into the data protection act that states organisations can refuse to supply data if to do so would be disproportionately expensive.
Sounds like what's happened here is the hospital's said "Sorry, disproportionately expensive" and our chap has said "Exactly how disproportionately expensive are we talking here?"
They may have that information already. Doesn't mean they've used it to migrate records to a newer system - or for that matter to develop an easy mechanism for getting data off the old system for the odd time it's needed.
How much do you reckon it'd cost to hire a consultant to put together a bit of code to do this if they don't already have it? Having seen some of the database schemas for bigger systems, I reckon £2000 doesn't sound too far off. It'd probably take a few days just to digest the ER diagrams.
You could give every candidate a two-digit number, print the candidates names and their numbers on a large sheet of paper and have a numeric keypad and a simple 2-line dot matrix displaying the chosen vote and asking the voter to confirm or retry. There. Up to 99 candidates with simple, cheap technology that requires no calibration and doesn't obviously show preference to any particular candidate.
There's loads of ways you can do it; a touchscreen is probably the most complex, delicate, expensive way you could do it and this is for machines that have to work, that are used once every few years then left in warehouses with fluctuating temperatures, shipped everywhere, handled by people who don't really care then set up by people who don't really understand (or for that matter care to understand) them.
Yes and no. There are strict rules about who gets what and in what order in the event that a company goes into administration or otherwise gets wound up. You might not get everything you otherwise would have, but that's not the same as having no protections at all.
There are, but I've only covered the administration process. If a company is declared insolvent - depending on the country they're operating in it and the exact circumstances it can be illegal to continue to do anything that will incur further expenses.
If that happens, the next thing is the receivers come in and cut off the electricity.
Then again, you seem to make a living doing things like moving people onto Google Apps, while I just worked up a point-by-point case backed by solid data showing why switching to Google Apps has cost one of my clients a significant amount of money in real terms as well as exposing them to other avoidable business risks.
Not necessarily Google Apps, as it happens - for a lot of people it's not a terribly good fit. For those it is it works really well, but you could say the same thing about pretty much any possible solution. For a small business that doesn't have (or want) multiple internet connections and/or redundant servers in two different datacentres, it's pretty damn good. The area I'm in is absolutely chock full of small and micro businesses; there aren't very many that would even put one server in a datacentre.
This is generally true for free services such as Facebook - and for that matter if you take a free account from Google. It's seldom true for paid services.
A variant of this theme has always been my problem with all these on-line backup services: in the small print, most (all?) of them seem to have no obligation if they decide to shut things down to give you even a reasonable opportunity to restore anything you need first.
It wouldn't do you any good even if they did have such an obligation. If the worst happens and they go into administration, many of the legal protections that would normally exist evaporate.
Obviously most cloud services can't fall into either the trustworthy or the direct control category, which is why I think it's crazy that so many people and businesses rely on them for actually important things rather than mere convenience.
For the exact same reason businesses outsource other functions that are vital to their operation and involve processing highly confidential information (eg. payroll, sales, marketing.... the list of things you can outsource that on first glance seems ludicrous goes on and on). Because while there are risks associated with it, they have to be weighed against the risk of trying to do everything yourself. Sometimes the risk of trying to do everything yourself is the greater one.
He can't possibly be talking about the Zune. It came out in 2006; the iPod came out in 2001 and was on its fifth revision by the time the Zune came out.
It was just one single product that made me change my mind. A single product that kept on putting up intrusive ads - ads with no obvious way to close them, ads which were overlaid across the page I wanted to read, ads which quite obviously used Javascript that hadn't been tested on Safari under OS X because they broke horribly.
(I particularly draw your attention to that last bit. The product in question was MacKeeper).
Another way to look at this is one of the fanciest ARM SoCs around (and one where we don't actually know the price because it's a closely guarded secret; all we can do is guess) is probably the better part of 10% cheaper.
In an industry where parts that are 2% cheaper are almost guaranteed to be preferred.
It probably shouldn't be. One of the first rules of branding is you maintain consistency so people associate your brand with a consistent experience.
Some companies concentrate on their own name as the brand - Starbucks, for example. Every Starbucks franchise places similar boards outside the shop, sells exactly the same products and has almost identical fixtures & fittings.
But Microsoft don't just concentrate on their name; they use their products as brands in their own right. So they've got a perfectly good brand in Windows that they spend millions on with practically every OEM running ads saying "(OEM) recommends Windows 7 Home" - then they go and sabotage it with lots of different versions of Windows and now a version that is guaranteed to have software compatibility issues compared with all the others.
Every week I hear of people saying "I'm thinking of buying an Apple". Frankly, I can understand why. There's no single reason that's the killer though; usually it's a death by a thousand cuts.
iOS is not marketed as "OS X". It's marketed as iOS.
And for good reason - there's a very real risk of confusing the market when you've got two (technically very similar) operating systems sold under the same name where some software will work on both and some won't.
I didn't say anything about the sort of machine it made it into. Only the sort of chip. Certainly at the time (don't know about now), Apple were putting mobile chips in the iMac.
Slashdot Mirror
That could actually form the basis of a pretty good presentation, provided your lecturer doesn't mind you doing it as a meta-presentation:
"On the importance of reading research papers properly"
Apple have spent years as the company that can do no wrong - virtually every piece of hardware they release is a stonking success. Apple may not corner the market in terms of %age of units sold, but they sure as hell corner the market in terms of %age of profit made.
This is great for anyone who bought Apple shares a few years ago.
Unfortunately, it's rather less great for Apple long-term because sooner or later a company that enjoys that much success tends to become complacent; innovation stagnates and they fall behind.
It's even worse if a single company does so well as to monopolise the market (see also Microsoft between about 1995 - 2005) - then the entire industry is held back because there's only one big player and they aren't really innovating.
I imagine much of the bashing is based on sales technique.
Fifteen, twenty years ago, most sales was based on the idea of flogging features and benefits - the car has this feature, which gives you this benefit - and could be quite aggressive in telling the customer that "you must have this benefit, therefore you must buy this product. Now sign, damn you!".
Modern sales technique is very much more customer-focused - you work towards selling something that makes the customer somehow feel good - and ideally this should permeate every aspect of everything you do from product development through marketing, sales and aftercare.
Apple are absolute masters of this - they advertise based on how you can video chat with your granny, play music or look at photos, they operate stores where you find pleasant, non-intrusive sales staff and there's no shortage of people with stories of how the nice man at the Genius Bar fixed their MacBook/iPad/iPhone even though technically they didn't have to because it had suffered non-warranty damage. Whether or not you like their products, you can't deny that following such a technique has worked pretty well for them.
Thing is, some companies - and for that matter some industries - have been quicker than others to pick up on this. The motor trade - with a few exceptions - has been pretty slow to pick up on it. In the '80s and '90s, all a dealer had to do was buy the right franchise and it was pretty much a license to print money. Today, he has to actually make an effort to make his customer feel good and more than a few of them are in terrible trouble as a result.
I think it depends on the marque, but for many usually the way it works is when you choose your car from the dealer, an order is placed with the manufacturer. Historically, if it was something they kept in the country, you'd get it fairly quickly - though AIUI most manufacturers have gone over to just-in-time manufacturing, which means they don't keep a stock of cars. They build more-or-less everything to order.
This means that whenever you buy a brand new car, there's a lead time associated with it.
Occasionally a dealer may buy a number of cars themselves and sell them. Legally they're sold as "second-hand", even though they've only got delivery mileage on the clock. In such cases, obviously you get whatever the dealer bought, though there's practically no lead time associated with this.
The reason a dealer might do this is because of how payments are structured within the industry. Dealers don't actually need to make a single penny of profit on any car they sell provided they hit the sales targets set by the manufacturer. If they do this, they get bonuses that are so huge they pretty much pay for the business to exist. If they don't - well, they don't get those bonuses. These targets are calculated whenever they're calculated - probably quarterly - and if it's near the end of a quarter and a dealer's not going to reach their target through sales to customers, that's when they buy cars for their own stock. Obviously if the dealer has to do this he'll pick cars that he knows will sell very easily.
Here's a secret that a lot of people on /. seem to be unaware of:
Marketing - the process of getting people to say "I'm interesting in buying something from you" - is hard.
It's not a particularly exact science at the best of times - sure, you can run two different ads and see which one gets the best response, but nobody's yet figured out why it might get the best response and been able to turn that into a formula. Get it wrong, and you can actually turn prospective customers against you.
That being said, there are a few people you can target who are far more likely to buy from you.
One of the easiest markets to sell to is people who have already bought something from you once. Problem is, a manufacturer might know which distributors and even which resellers are stocking their product but they probably only have a vague idea which customers are buying it. On the face of it, using a driver that connects to the Internet (and requires compulsory registration) is a great way for a manufacturer to solve this problem and develop very tightly targeted marketing campaigns.
(This, by the way, is also why you're encouraged to "register" your warranty even though in many countries consumer protection law makes this totally unnecessary)
Of course, as I said if you get it wrong you can turn prospective customers against you. Which is precisely what's happening here.
IIRC there's a get-out explicitly written into the data protection act that states organisations can refuse to supply data if to do so would be disproportionately expensive.
Sounds like what's happened here is the hospital's said "Sorry, disproportionately expensive" and our chap has said "Exactly how disproportionately expensive are we talking here?"
They may have that information already. Doesn't mean they've used it to migrate records to a newer system - or for that matter to develop an easy mechanism for getting data off the old system for the odd time it's needed.
How much do you reckon it'd cost to hire a consultant to put together a bit of code to do this if they don't already have it? Having seen some of the database schemas for bigger systems, I reckon £2000 doesn't sound too far off. It'd probably take a few days just to digest the ER diagrams.
You could give every candidate a two-digit number, print the candidates names and their numbers on a large sheet of paper and have a numeric keypad and a simple 2-line dot matrix displaying the chosen vote and asking the voter to confirm or retry. There. Up to 99 candidates with simple, cheap technology that requires no calibration and doesn't obviously show preference to any particular candidate.
There's loads of ways you can do it; a touchscreen is probably the most complex, delicate, expensive way you could do it and this is for machines that have to work, that are used once every few years then left in warehouses with fluctuating temperatures, shipped everywhere, handled by people who don't really care then set up by people who don't really understand (or for that matter care to understand) them.
Yes and no. There are strict rules about who gets what and in what order in the event that a company goes into administration or otherwise gets wound up. You might not get everything you otherwise would have, but that's not the same as having no protections at all.
There are, but I've only covered the administration process. If a company is declared insolvent - depending on the country they're operating in it and the exact circumstances it can be illegal to continue to do anything that will incur further expenses.
If that happens, the next thing is the receivers come in and cut off the electricity.
Then again, you seem to make a living doing things like moving people onto Google Apps, while I just worked up a point-by-point case backed by solid data showing why switching to Google Apps has cost one of my clients a significant amount of money in real terms as well as exposing them to other avoidable business risks.
Not necessarily Google Apps, as it happens - for a lot of people it's not a terribly good fit. For those it is it works really well, but you could say the same thing about pretty much any possible solution. For a small business that doesn't have (or want) multiple internet connections and/or redundant servers in two different datacentres, it's pretty damn good. The area I'm in is absolutely chock full of small and micro businesses; there aren't very many that would even put one server in a datacentre.
This is generally true for free services such as Facebook - and for that matter if you take a free account from Google. It's seldom true for paid services.
Hong Kong, but their hosting was with Carpathia, who AFAICT are a US company.
A variant of this theme has always been my problem with all these on-line backup services: in the small print, most (all?) of them seem to have no obligation if they decide to shut things down to give you even a reasonable opportunity to restore anything you need first.
It wouldn't do you any good even if they did have such an obligation. If the worst happens and they go into administration, many of the legal protections that would normally exist evaporate.
Obviously most cloud services can't fall into either the trustworthy or the direct control category, which is why I think it's crazy that so many people and businesses rely on them for actually important things rather than mere convenience.
For the exact same reason businesses outsource other functions that are vital to their operation and involve processing highly confidential information (eg. payroll, sales, marketing.... the list of things you can outsource that on first glance seems ludicrous goes on and on). Because while there are risks associated with it, they have to be weighed against the risk of trying to do everything yourself. Sometimes the risk of trying to do everything yourself is the greater one.
How does a thief get rid of 15 tonnes of grain? Can you just show up at a processor and say "Will you buy this truckload of wheat off me?"?
If Linus Torvalds can't get together the necessary people to get Linux to run decently on the rMBP, there is something very wrong with the world.
Something similar has already been done, albeit not with horses
Because with shared hosting, keeping on top of OS updates is Somebody Else's Problem.
He can't possibly be talking about the Zune. It came out in 2006; the iPod came out in 2001 and was on its fifth revision by the time the Zune came out.
I never bothered with an ad blocker for years.
It was just one single product that made me change my mind. A single product that kept on putting up intrusive ads - ads with no obvious way to close them, ads which were overlaid across the page I wanted to read, ads which quite obviously used Javascript that hadn't been tested on Safari under OS X because they broke horribly.
(I particularly draw your attention to that last bit. The product in question was MacKeeper).
Another way to look at this is one of the fanciest ARM SoCs around (and one where we don't actually know the price because it's a closely guarded secret; all we can do is guess) is probably the better part of 10% cheaper.
In an industry where parts that are 2% cheaper are almost guaranteed to be preferred.
Microsoft have never had first-mover advantage in anything. It's never bothered them before.
Pick up a copy of "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
Read it.
Then read it again.
Then keep it on your bedside and dip into it from time to time.
It's mostly aimed at salesmen, but the advice it contains is invaluable for people in all walks of life.
It probably shouldn't be. One of the first rules of branding is you maintain consistency so people associate your brand with a consistent experience.
Some companies concentrate on their own name as the brand - Starbucks, for example. Every Starbucks franchise places similar boards outside the shop, sells exactly the same products and has almost identical fixtures & fittings.
But Microsoft don't just concentrate on their name; they use their products as brands in their own right. So they've got a perfectly good brand in Windows that they spend millions on with practically every OEM running ads saying "(OEM) recommends Windows 7 Home" - then they go and sabotage it with lots of different versions of Windows and now a version that is guaranteed to have software compatibility issues compared with all the others.
Every week I hear of people saying "I'm thinking of buying an Apple". Frankly, I can understand why. There's no single reason that's the killer though; usually it's a death by a thousand cuts.
iOS is not marketed as "OS X". It's marketed as iOS.
And for good reason - there's a very real risk of confusing the market when you've got two (technically very similar) operating systems sold under the same name where some software will work on both and some won't.
Pretty sure ARM SoCs sell for a tiny fraction of that. And embedded is one industry where people will change suppliers for the sake of a few cents.
I didn't say anything about the sort of machine it made it into. Only the sort of chip. Certainly at the time (don't know about now), Apple were putting mobile chips in the iMac.