So I'm no EE but I can tell you that, according to my naked eye, MPEG 4 blows compared to MPEG-2.
I've had DirecTV for about six years (since Paul Allen's Charter purchased my local franchise and started making me crazy). When DirecTV launched HDTV I was all over it, getting a few custom channels (ESPN, ESPN2, HDNet, etc.). Since I'm 50 miles from Boston, which is my natural market, I had the opportunity to "petition" the networks to get the New York feeds. CBS and Fox said fine (Fox owns DirecTV), ABC and NBC stations out of Hartford and Springfield were a$$holes and denied me.
All of the original stations and the CBS/Fox stations are MPEG-2; all the new ones, including local Boston stations and my beloved Red Sox on NESN, are MPEG-4. You can easily tell the difference, especially with DVR recordings. The MPEG-2 channels are fluid and smooth, while the MPEG-4 channels are pixelated and choppy. It's really just a matter of bits.
The proof is when I watch a game (any sport). I typically start an hour or so after the game starts, then by the time I skip all commercials and fast-forward through dead spots, I usually finish around the time the game ends. If I fast forward at 2x on an MPEG-4 channel, it's very smooth. If I fast forward an MPEG-4 channel, it jumps like crazy. It used to be worse, actually; when NESN started you could actually see the artifacts of a batter's swing. Either NESN or the DVR fixed that after a while.
Anyway, I guess my point is that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as lossless compression. Be careful what you wish for.
A week later, and the idea of MS pissing away $50+ billion in this Yahoo! debacle makes me warm and fuzzy. Taking that cash away from MS only serves to more evenly level the playing field. A lot of people, even MS-haters, don't seem to adequately grock just how important that cash stash is when Redmond decides to purchase a market, or just use to intimidate people from trying to compete.
Yahoo! engineers will be flooding Google (or backpacking through the Himalayas), leaving MS with the rotting carcass and egg on its face. Never thought I'd say this but I love Steve Ballmer!!!!!
I thought so too for a long time. JetBlue was my oasis in the desert that is air travel insanity. Alas, about a year ago they started to lose the one thing that made them different from the others -- that little thing called "giving a shit." They're just American or United now.
So depressing actually. My job requires me to travel 100k or more miles in an average year, and has allowed me to see all sorts of wonderful things around the US and the rest of planet (and understand the non-US perspective which is good). But I turn down most of these trips now because air travel is too depressing to contemplate.
The cost of MS Office is a pittance to mid-large companies in the US.
This is patently false. The Office "tax" is taking up an increasingly large part of scarce IT budgets and this is causing a lot of the backlash you see. If you remove the spurious "US" limitation to your point, the backlash is stronger still.
You're trying to use "real-world business perspectives" (which you imply/.ers don't understand) to justify your argument, but you fail because C-level execs are increasingly watching the MS invoices climb and going WTF? They apparently don't agree with you that Bill and Steve are the only smart, tough managers on the planet and thus entitled to 90%+ margins on commodity product.
The part that always gets/. people torqued is the stuff that only technical people see: the intentional use of document formats (as well as APIs, incompletely or corruptly implemented standards, product tying etc.) that cause organizations to find it harder and harder to adopt alternative technology with each new MS purchase or upgrade.
So you can see why we get satisfaction seeing non-technical folks finally starting to share our opinion on why the MS monoculture is bad for everyone. The reasons why aren't important. Whether it's overreaching pricing, content locking, or slimy technology lock-ins, the worm is finally turning -- and that's a good thing.
It's simple, I can now connect it to my own POP server and use their nice Web interface. I don't even use Evolution/Thunderbird anymore because they've just made it too easy for me not to. Much better than my ISP-provided NeoMail/Horde/Squirrelmail UIs.
Digging into this, it's a service based on IBM's internal desktop image, which has been deployed to all users in the company -- most on Windows but many on Linux (that's where the 5% number is coming from). The point is that IBM has figured out how to give everyone the same set of tools, irrespective of the underlying operating system. Breaking that lock frees the customer to make choices based on value and performance, not dependencies and pre-reqs. Net/net, IBM will come in and help your company do what they did; you get to choose the specific applications but IBM has certain proven combinations ready to go.
The historic challenge being addressed here is that deploying, managing and supporting so many users is just freakin' expensive, and thus has developed as a pressure point that IT departments must try to manage downward. In the 1990s most organizations subscribed (unquestioningly) to the principle that less heterogeneity will equate to better TCO, since complexity == expense, right? So they just rolled out software from the "integrated innovation" company, essentially outsourcing the management and integration of what are fundamentally disparate desktop systems.
Well we all saw how that worked in practice, as more and more money flows in one direction, and more and more dependencies and requirements are introduced that simply serve to increase exit costs. The primary vendor monetizes these costs in the form of high-margin licenses, which is what Adam Smith says they should do by the way. But Bill & Steve aren't the only smart, motivated managers in businesses or governments, so the pressure is rising for solutions that better match the value received to what you pay for it. This is one of IBM's responses and worthwhile in that regard.
Don't overthink this. If companies really are able to pick their applications independently from the OS, you can follow that thread to its conclusion in about ten seconds.
See this is where I disagree. There are lots of good things you could do, and one does not preclude another. Books and libraries, for example, are terrific. But giving kids access to technology makes them think in a technological way. Since technology is a key tool to raising productivity, and a technology-savvy workforce is needed to exploit (not just tolerate) the tools, putting these things into kids' hands is all goodness. Education is good no matter how you view it.
Also, this particular tool is an opportunity for kids to see what exists beyond their immediate social situation. Don't discount the power of your frame of reference to drag you down or lift you up. As someone raised dirt poor (yes in America -- Massachusetts even), it wasn't until I managed to get into college that my horizons expanded -- through peers, primarily -- to places that included stability, productivity, self-reliance etc. You're essentially giving these kids a window into a different world. Some will take advantage of it and some won't... but there'll be more than you would've had otherwise. You need people like that to raise a society's standards.
I fly all the time on business and discovered JetBlue several years ago for my company's annual Orlando conference (I'm in Boston). Since I bring the wife and kids along, I used to play all the games I could to get free tickets from my miles (mostly American and Delta, both of whom should burn in hell forever). It always ended up costing a bunch of money anyway, and miserable connections through DC or Philly or Atlanta.
Business travel is misery, pure and simple. Last night American kept me on the plane for 5 hours before they took off from LaGuardia coming back from the Red Hat Summit in Nashville.... and the sad thing was that was not even in the top ten worst experiences I have had from American, never mind Delta (lost luggage three trips in a row once) and United (lost luggage going to Shanghai and put it on the next flight.... the next day) or AmericaWest (I can't even start here).
Flying JetBlue was like heaven. Seriously. It was just an epiphany; I mean how can these people do it so right when everyone else does it so wrong? Friendly service, clean aircraft, great snacks... even a free beer (as in beer) every time I've flown ("put your money away sir, this one's on us"). And if you need something from a service perspective, you can do it via phone or e-mail and a real person will help you get exactly what you need.
Well now they go everywhere direct, and are actually making Boston a hub. I recently went to Austin on JetBlue and should have gone to San Jose but didn't realize they fly there. In the last month they have been added to my company's Web booking app and I'm in heaven.
Latest story -- Was trying to bring my boy's godmother in from Phoenix for his high school graduation this month and neither Delta nor American could get me a ticket. (I am Platinum with 500k miles flown on American, every one miserable.) Finally I just said screw it, let me check JetBlue. Of course I find a ticket, direct, exactly for the dates and times I want, for under $300 including all taxes and fees. And I could have saved another $50 if I was willing to be flexible on the time of day, but why bother?
Anyway, this traveler recommends JetBlue to anyone and you'll thank me later. I guarantee they'll do something good with the wireless buy. Unfortunately TFA points out that Verizon doesn't have to turn over the spectrum until 2010, and my experience with that company shows they'll be in no hurry to do anything good for the customer.
This whole trend of things taking over your system (see: Real, QuickTime, Acrobat, AOL, Yahoo!) was a reaction to MS doing all the same things since day one. It's the whole presumptive arrogance thing, where if you want one thing from MS you are presumed to want everything from MS.... and many competitors see it as self-defense to get/keep their brand "in your face." Of course, its secondary manifestation is "extension hijacking," where the default behavior of products like these is to take over file association for anything they can read or write, no matter how poorly.
IMHO this is all bad form and just the arrogant presumption that vendors must be way smarter than plain old computer users -- even if it's true in a high percentage of cases, it's one of the most annoying trends of the PC era and it was started by MS.
Hmm, why? I dunno, Eclipse, Cloudscape (Derby)... Not to mention all the contributions to individual projects and general support for OSS. Understand a concern about a corporation trying to find a middle path, but give credit for the leadership and consistency.
A cynic might argue that IBM actually makes software people find worth paying for...
One error in the report is that it's a Web-based implementation. It's actually an Eclipse-based implementation. The container for the ODF-compliant editors is IBM Workplace Managed Client. The container itself is a very interesting thing because it lets you build applications of just about any type, which are then deployed with the client over the network (or added to existing deployed clients as the case may be.) It also runs unmodified across Windows and Linux, because the Eclipse/Workplace layer does all the interaction with the OS windows, file system etc.
The point about the ODF support is that, like all standards, it takes interoperability out of the equation and lets vendors compete on the implementations. OpenOffice is essentially a MS Office competitor, using the same desktop-centric deployment and support model, except with open source and cross-OS capabilities. This is good for folks who like the MS Office "way" but want choice. IBM is approaching the problem of desktop productivity tools a little differently, as a locally installed but network managed app. Again, innovating in the implementation because the standard lets you do that.
Take a breath and read this before you Notes haters start slagging. If you really want a chance at removing Exchange for Linux you need to look at Domino. And don't bitch if you haven't seen version 6.5 or later.
The reasons businesses deploy integrated e-mail is that they don't want to deploy multiple products or immature products or both. Domino is regarded by admins as far superior -- it's much more secure, scalable, reliable, runs on all sorts of different hardware and OSs. It just does. Companies run it on Linux (RH, SUSE, and zSeries Linux) with the same never-touch-it reliability as your Apache Web box. It's got all the policies and admin capabilities that you need to manage distributed organizations. I know a lot of people don't love the Notes client but it does a hell of a lot more than Outlook -- you can't live in Outlook if you've figured out Notes. BTW Domino also supports Outlook and a very nice cross-platform DHTML Webmail, supportied on IE/Firefox and Win/Linux/Mac.
Sorry, if you are going to propose POP/IMAP and LDAP and iCAL as an Exchange (or Domino) alternative you will lose. Period. Each of those vendors has sold over 100 million seats. Even if you win 100 conversions, that's still over hundreds of thousands of customers for each of the two leaders.
The real problem you face is that it's tough to get ANY enterprise messaging system replaced once it's deployed. The problem with Exchange is that all the users THINK they love Outlook because that's what they know, or worse, confuse it with that free Windows abomination known as Outlook Express.
The only way to get Outlook and Exchange out is to create a client that is identical to Outlook (which is what Evolution and others attempt to do, with mixed succes), but more importantly works as well against Exchange as Outlook. Problem there is MS will immediately change MAPI so that it breaks.
Look I'm with you guys but you're being impractical. Enterprise e-mail is unbelievably sticky. It can't break and it's got to have all the features people are used to. Exchange 2003 sucks a lot less than older versions -- if you use all of MS' other software and big horkin' machines, you might just get more than 250 users on a box (as opposed to Domino 7 on Linux which will easily get 1000+).
I price software as part of my job and I can tell you all this mathematical/economic cost/value stuff is speculation.
What my company does (and it's one that does this well) is start by projecting a market opportunity for what you're thinking of selling, and what you could collect at x% of that opportunity, high/low range. If it's enough to cover your costs at the corporation's internal rate of return (IRR), you can go forward into competition for investment dollars against other software projects, and if you win you get the cash to start product requirements and design.
But there are LOTS of sticky problems with this seemingly logical approach. First, you have to invest serious time and cash getting to the point where you can even make a credible proposal. This usually means taking some of the profit from your in-market (Horizon 1 or H1) products and using them for a bunch of 2-5 year proposals (Horizon 3 or H3), in the hopes that one or more of them will be winners and get fully funded by the corporation as strategic initiatives. Otherwise they die in embryonic stage, or, slightly better outcome, get combined as a feature/function of another H3 initiative.
Horizon 2 (H2) products -- perhaps the most interesting set -- are in early-stage and/or non-consolodated markets, have consumed a bunch of your H1 $$$ already, and are supposed to be growing at a rate commensurate with their status as strategic investments. This is still a dangerous place, as many H2 products are killed and their carcasses stripped for other uses. People often disappear as part of these activities too, which can be the most painful part.
So naturally the IRRs are very different for H1, H2, and H3 projects. "Hits" are as rare in this business as any other creative and/or competitive pursuit (music, publishing, performing, athletics). If you're not operating at an obscene margin with successful H1 products (90%+), you can't fund the future. So if someone complains about high maintenance or upgrade costs for software that has most of its development costs behind it, well, we're not going to get too upset. We'll strive to invest to improve and innovate the products so people pay their renewals instead of supporting themselves on older versions, or going to a newer version of a competitor's offering. But this is iteration, not revolution. And we'll do a market analysis based on what customers will pay, based on value but also on exit costs and alternatives, and we'll charge every penny of that to maximize returns.
Now -- the big problems with this, and the reasons it's all such an inexact science, is that we get market projections from analyst sources who are invariably wrong, and usually by a lot. This happens scarily frequently on H1 markets, so you can see what H2/H3 problems occur. Plus, it's often almost impossible to even define a logical market definition for a segment, because maybe it overlaps a couple existing segments, maybe it obsoletes one thing but not another, maybe it's altogether something new.
And maybe you get it ALL right and build a thriving software business, but some startup comes out of nowhere and kicks your ass anyway. Or MS copies your stuff in crude form and makes it part of the OS. Or some OSS equivalent gets giddyup and suppresses your prices below what's required to be profitable.
That's why so few of these things ever turn out to be real moneymakers, and why you don't see prices for successful software getting cut once the investment is recouped. When you have one, you do whatever you can to extend its lifecycle to infinity. Customers actually help you a lot here, because once you have them using your software to solve problems, and getting getting value out of your deployed software, they don't want someone (especially you) coming along telling them, "Aw, that stuff is garbage, I have something way better here for you." Because that means they have to migrate and retrain and invest and disrupt and (most importantly), TAKE RISK. Customers don't lik
I blame Microsoft for setting the standard for "I now own your computer sucker." You can't load a product these days without it assuming that you are bent over and ready to accept everything the vendor feels like doing. Adobe is only following in the footsteps of Real and AOL and others who install download managers and e-wallets and toolbar enhancements. It all started with MS, which makes you suffer through all their programs instantiating when you start Windows, so they are all "snappier" to load than the otherwise superior products from just about anyone else... this is a social problem not a technological one.
Lotus finds that Microsoft is touting a ridiculous benchmark study that shows Exchange a gazillion times faster than Domino in serving POP mail. Of course, methodology is bunk -- never mind the fact that no one would ever use these products in these configurations for these purposes. But headline says, simply, "Exchange a gazillion times faster than Domino." Lotus plays the cease-and-desist game, gets the claims modified and clarified but desired pain is inflicted.
Lotus marketing looks into the issue and discovers that its EULA does not prohibit this behavior. Everyone else's EULA does. Lotus changes EULA.
Chalk one up for the bad guys. We'd all like to live in a world without locks and alarms, but it ain't practical.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had DirecTV for about six years (since Paul Allen's Charter purchased my local franchise and started making me crazy). When DirecTV launched HDTV I was all over it, getting a few custom channels (ESPN, ESPN2, HDNet, etc.). Since I'm 50 miles from Boston, which is my natural market, I had the opportunity to "petition" the networks to get the New York feeds. CBS and Fox said fine (Fox owns DirecTV), ABC and NBC stations out of Hartford and Springfield were a$$holes and denied me.
All of the original stations and the CBS/Fox stations are MPEG-2; all the new ones, including local Boston stations and my beloved Red Sox on NESN, are MPEG-4. You can easily tell the difference, especially with DVR recordings. The MPEG-2 channels are fluid and smooth, while the MPEG-4 channels are pixelated and choppy. It's really just a matter of bits.
The proof is when I watch a game (any sport). I typically start an hour or so after the game starts, then by the time I skip all commercials and fast-forward through dead spots, I usually finish around the time the game ends. If I fast forward at 2x on an MPEG-4 channel, it's very smooth. If I fast forward an MPEG-4 channel, it jumps like crazy. It used to be worse, actually; when NESN started you could actually see the artifacts of a batter's swing. Either NESN or the DVR fixed that after a while.
Anyway, I guess my point is that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as lossless compression. Be careful what you wish for.
Yahoo! engineers will be flooding Google (or backpacking through the Himalayas), leaving MS with the rotting carcass and egg on its face. Never thought I'd say this but I love Steve Ballmer!!!!!
I thought so too for a long time. JetBlue was my oasis in the desert that is air travel insanity. Alas, about a year ago they started to lose the one thing that made them different from the others -- that little thing called "giving a shit." They're just American or United now.
So depressing actually. My job requires me to travel 100k or more miles in an average year, and has allowed me to see all sorts of wonderful things around the US and the rest of planet (and understand the non-US perspective which is good). But I turn down most of these trips now because air travel is too depressing to contemplate.
You're trying to use "real-world business perspectives" (which you imply /.ers don't understand) to justify your argument, but you fail because C-level execs are increasingly watching the MS invoices climb and going WTF? They apparently don't agree with you that Bill and Steve are the only smart, tough managers on the planet and thus entitled to 90%+ margins on commodity product.
The part that always gets /. people torqued is the stuff that only technical people see: the intentional use of document formats (as well as APIs, incompletely or corruptly implemented standards, product tying etc.) that cause organizations to find it harder and harder to adopt alternative technology with each new MS purchase or upgrade.
So you can see why we get satisfaction seeing non-technical folks finally starting to share our opinion on why the MS monoculture is bad for everyone. The reasons why aren't important. Whether it's overreaching pricing, content locking, or slimy technology lock-ins, the worm is finally turning -- and that's a good thing.
Oh and BTW I don't see any ads at all in my GMail.
Digging into this, it's a service based on IBM's internal desktop image, which has been deployed to all users in the company -- most on Windows but many on Linux (that's where the 5% number is coming from). The point is that IBM has figured out how to give everyone the same set of tools, irrespective of the underlying operating system. Breaking that lock frees the customer to make choices based on value and performance, not dependencies and pre-reqs. Net/net, IBM will come in and help your company do what they did; you get to choose the specific applications but IBM has certain proven combinations ready to go.
The historic challenge being addressed here is that deploying, managing and supporting so many users is just freakin' expensive, and thus has developed as a pressure point that IT departments must try to manage downward. In the 1990s most organizations subscribed (unquestioningly) to the principle that less heterogeneity will equate to better TCO, since complexity == expense, right? So they just rolled out software from the "integrated innovation" company, essentially outsourcing the management and integration of what are fundamentally disparate desktop systems.
Well we all saw how that worked in practice, as more and more money flows in one direction, and more and more dependencies and requirements are introduced that simply serve to increase exit costs. The primary vendor monetizes these costs in the form of high-margin licenses, which is what Adam Smith says they should do by the way. But Bill & Steve aren't the only smart, motivated managers in businesses or governments, so the pressure is rising for solutions that better match the value received to what you pay for it. This is one of IBM's responses and worthwhile in that regard.
Don't overthink this. If companies really are able to pick their applications independently from the OS, you can follow that thread to its conclusion in about ten seconds.
Also, this particular tool is an opportunity for kids to see what exists beyond their immediate social situation. Don't discount the power of your frame of reference to drag you down or lift you up. As someone raised dirt poor (yes in America -- Massachusetts even), it wasn't until I managed to get into college that my horizons expanded -- through peers, primarily -- to places that included stability, productivity, self-reliance etc. You're essentially giving these kids a window into a different world. Some will take advantage of it and some won't... but there'll be more than you would've had otherwise. You need people like that to raise a society's standards.
Most misspelled word ever...
I fly all the time on business and discovered JetBlue several years ago for my company's annual Orlando conference (I'm in Boston). Since I bring the wife and kids along, I used to play all the games I could to get free tickets from my miles (mostly American and Delta, both of whom should burn in hell forever). It always ended up costing a bunch of money anyway, and miserable connections through DC or Philly or Atlanta.
Business travel is misery, pure and simple. Last night American kept me on the plane for 5 hours before they took off from LaGuardia coming back from the Red Hat Summit in Nashville.... and the sad thing was that was not even in the top ten worst experiences I have had from American, never mind Delta (lost luggage three trips in a row once) and United (lost luggage going to Shanghai and put it on the next flight.... the next day) or AmericaWest (I can't even start here).
Flying JetBlue was like heaven. Seriously. It was just an epiphany; I mean how can these people do it so right when everyone else does it so wrong? Friendly service, clean aircraft, great snacks... even a free beer (as in beer) every time I've flown ("put your money away sir, this one's on us"). And if you need something from a service perspective, you can do it via phone or e-mail and a real person will help you get exactly what you need.
Well now they go everywhere direct, and are actually making Boston a hub. I recently went to Austin on JetBlue and should have gone to San Jose but didn't realize they fly there. In the last month they have been added to my company's Web booking app and I'm in heaven.
Latest story -- Was trying to bring my boy's godmother in from Phoenix for his high school graduation this month and neither Delta nor American could get me a ticket. (I am Platinum with 500k miles flown on American, every one miserable.) Finally I just said screw it, let me check JetBlue. Of course I find a ticket, direct, exactly for the dates and times I want, for under $300 including all taxes and fees. And I could have saved another $50 if I was willing to be flexible on the time of day, but why bother?
Anyway, this traveler recommends JetBlue to anyone and you'll thank me later. I guarantee they'll do something good with the wireless buy. Unfortunately TFA points out that Verizon doesn't have to turn over the spectrum until 2010, and my experience with that company shows they'll be in no hurry to do anything good for the customer.
This whole trend of things taking over your system (see: Real, QuickTime, Acrobat, AOL, Yahoo!) was a reaction to MS doing all the same things since day one. It's the whole presumptive arrogance thing, where if you want one thing from MS you are presumed to want everything from MS.... and many competitors see it as self-defense to get/keep their brand "in your face." Of course, its secondary manifestation is "extension hijacking," where the default behavior of products like these is to take over file association for anything they can read or write, no matter how poorly.
IMHO this is all bad form and just the arrogant presumption that vendors must be way smarter than plain old computer users -- even if it's true in a high percentage of cases, it's one of the most annoying trends of the PC era and it was started by MS.
Hmm, why? I dunno, Eclipse, Cloudscape (Derby)... Not to mention all the contributions to individual projects and general support for OSS. Understand a concern about a corporation trying to find a middle path, but give credit for the leadership and consistency.
A cynic might argue that IBM actually makes software people find worth paying for...
One error in the report is that it's a Web-based implementation. It's actually an Eclipse-based implementation. The container for the ODF-compliant editors is IBM Workplace Managed Client. The container itself is a very interesting thing because it lets you build applications of just about any type, which are then deployed with the client over the network (or added to existing deployed clients as the case may be.) It also runs unmodified across Windows and Linux, because the Eclipse/Workplace layer does all the interaction with the OS windows, file system etc.
The point about the ODF support is that, like all standards, it takes interoperability out of the equation and lets vendors compete on the implementations. OpenOffice is essentially a MS Office competitor, using the same desktop-centric deployment and support model, except with open source and cross-OS capabilities. This is good for folks who like the MS Office "way" but want choice. IBM is approaching the problem of desktop productivity tools a little differently, as a locally installed but network managed app. Again, innovating in the implementation because the standard lets you do that.
Take a breath and read this before you Notes haters start slagging. If you really want a chance at removing Exchange for Linux you need to look at Domino. And don't bitch if you haven't seen version 6.5 or later.
The reasons businesses deploy integrated e-mail is that they don't want to deploy multiple products or immature products or both. Domino is regarded by admins as far superior -- it's much more secure, scalable, reliable, runs on all sorts of different hardware and OSs. It just does. Companies run it on Linux (RH, SUSE, and zSeries Linux) with the same never-touch-it reliability as your Apache Web box. It's got all the policies and admin capabilities that you need to manage distributed organizations. I know a lot of people don't love the Notes client but it does a hell of a lot more than Outlook -- you can't live in Outlook if you've figured out Notes. BTW Domino also supports Outlook and a very nice cross-platform DHTML Webmail, supportied on IE/Firefox and Win/Linux/Mac.
Sorry, if you are going to propose POP/IMAP and LDAP and iCAL as an Exchange (or Domino) alternative you will lose. Period. Each of those vendors has sold over 100 million seats. Even if you win 100 conversions, that's still over hundreds of thousands of customers for each of the two leaders.
The real problem you face is that it's tough to get ANY enterprise messaging system replaced once it's deployed. The problem with Exchange is that all the users THINK they love Outlook because that's what they know, or worse, confuse it with that free Windows abomination known as Outlook Express.
The only way to get Outlook and Exchange out is to create a client that is identical to Outlook (which is what Evolution and others attempt to do, with mixed succes), but more importantly works as well against Exchange as Outlook. Problem there is MS will immediately change MAPI so that it breaks.
Look I'm with you guys but you're being impractical. Enterprise e-mail is unbelievably sticky. It can't break and it's got to have all the features people are used to. Exchange 2003 sucks a lot less than older versions -- if you use all of MS' other software and big horkin' machines, you might just get more than 250 users on a box (as opposed to Domino 7 on Linux which will easily get 1000+).
Wow, and I thought it was just an irrelevant state... Like Idaho or Arkansas.
I price software as part of my job and I can tell you all this mathematical/economic cost/value stuff is speculation.
What my company does (and it's one that does this well) is start by projecting a market opportunity for what you're thinking of selling, and what you could collect at x% of that opportunity, high/low range. If it's enough to cover your costs at the corporation's internal rate of return (IRR), you can go forward into competition for investment dollars against other software projects, and if you win you get the cash to start product requirements and design.
But there are LOTS of sticky problems with this seemingly logical approach. First, you have to invest serious time and cash getting to the point where you can even make a credible proposal. This usually means taking some of the profit from your in-market (Horizon 1 or H1) products and using them for a bunch of 2-5 year proposals (Horizon 3 or H3), in the hopes that one or more of them will be winners and get fully funded by the corporation as strategic initiatives. Otherwise they die in embryonic stage, or, slightly better outcome, get combined as a feature/function of another H3 initiative.
Horizon 2 (H2) products -- perhaps the most interesting set -- are in early-stage and/or non-consolodated markets, have consumed a bunch of your H1 $$$ already, and are supposed to be growing at a rate commensurate with their status as strategic investments. This is still a dangerous place, as many H2 products are killed and their carcasses stripped for other uses. People often disappear as part of these activities too, which can be the most painful part.
So naturally the IRRs are very different for H1, H2, and H3 projects. "Hits" are as rare in this business as any other creative and/or competitive pursuit (music, publishing, performing, athletics). If you're not operating at an obscene margin with successful H1 products (90%+), you can't fund the future. So if someone complains about high maintenance or upgrade costs for software that has most of its development costs behind it, well, we're not going to get too upset. We'll strive to invest to improve and innovate the products so people pay their renewals instead of supporting themselves on older versions, or going to a newer version of a competitor's offering. But this is iteration, not revolution. And we'll do a market analysis based on what customers will pay, based on value but also on exit costs and alternatives, and we'll charge every penny of that to maximize returns.
Now -- the big problems with this, and the reasons it's all such an inexact science, is that we get market projections from analyst sources who are invariably wrong, and usually by a lot. This happens scarily frequently on H1 markets, so you can see what H2/H3 problems occur. Plus, it's often almost impossible to even define a logical market definition for a segment, because maybe it overlaps a couple existing segments, maybe it obsoletes one thing but not another, maybe it's altogether something new.
And maybe you get it ALL right and build a thriving software business, but some startup comes out of nowhere and kicks your ass anyway. Or MS copies your stuff in crude form and makes it part of the OS. Or some OSS equivalent gets giddyup and suppresses your prices below what's required to be profitable.
That's why so few of these things ever turn out to be real moneymakers, and why you don't see prices for successful software getting cut once the investment is recouped. When you have one, you do whatever you can to extend its lifecycle to infinity. Customers actually help you a lot here, because once you have them using your software to solve problems, and getting getting value out of your deployed software, they don't want someone (especially you) coming along telling them, "Aw, that stuff is garbage, I have something way better here for you." Because that means they have to migrate and retrain and invest and disrupt and (most importantly), TAKE RISK. Customers don't lik
"They can't force developing countries like us to solely use legal software since we can't afford it. They want us to gradually reduce our use of it."
Gradually reduce the use of legal software? Or just Micros~1 software?
I thought they were going to let me vote. It would have been far more interesting to see the results of a poll about "Would you have allowed....?"
I blame Microsoft for setting the standard for "I now own your computer sucker." You can't load a product these days without it assuming that you are bent over and ready to accept everything the vendor feels like doing. Adobe is only following in the footsteps of Real and AOL and others who install download managers and e-wallets and toolbar enhancements. It all started with MS, which makes you suffer through all their programs instantiating when you start Windows, so they are all "snappier" to load than the otherwise superior products from just about anyone else... this is a social problem not a technological one.
Lotus finds that Microsoft is touting a ridiculous benchmark study that shows Exchange a gazillion times faster than Domino in serving POP mail. Of course, methodology is bunk -- never mind the fact that no one would ever use these products in these configurations for these purposes. But headline says, simply, "Exchange a gazillion times faster than Domino." Lotus plays the cease-and-desist game, gets the claims modified and clarified but desired pain is inflicted.
Lotus marketing looks into the issue and discovers that its EULA does not prohibit this behavior. Everyone else's EULA does. Lotus changes EULA.
Chalk one up for the bad guys. We'd all like to live in a world without locks and alarms, but it ain't practical.