F'rinstance, destroy what $270b in wealth? Until one cashes out, it isn't wealth: it's hypothesis.
And I'd like to hear you expound on how MS has paid employees with stock. They've been diluting their own stock, to a ridiculous extent. That scam has worked really well, as long as everyone was duped into driving the price up, and no one cashed out bigtime.
I'm curious how breaking up MS would be a net loss in wealth. Seems to me that there'd be greater competition in the marketplace, allowing other companies to gain a foothold and expand. We'd have more products to choose from. There'd be more people working. All of which sounds to me like a net increase in wealth. Except for Bill. He might experience a decrease. And wouldn't that just suck.
On the other hand, the $309 BILLION dollars that are currently tied up in MSFT stock might be well-applied to investing in other companies, providing them with much-needed capital to innovate and grow.
Unfortunately, there is no way to make that money available to others. For every seller, a buyer: while the market cap can expand and shrink by the whim of the investor, the money is pretty much permanently unavailable to other companies.
Which is a shame. Spreading the investments around might have been helpful. Might fund some competition, f'rinstance.
Although, come to think of it, most of the MS shares are actually employee stock options, created out of thin air and used by MS as a means of (a) avoiding paying cash to employees and (b) dodging taxation [indeed, paying employees with stock creates tax *refunds* (as if MS needs a refund!)].
I think it's arguable that employee stock options are valueless, until such time as the employee gets lucky enough to find someone willing to fork over some coin. Until that point, the stocks don't actually represent money unavailable to other companies...
Disclaimer: These are idle late-night speculations, and are subject to correction by folk with far more investing knowledge than I!
E) -- no. MS will drop their product price or, more likely, offer a reduced-functionality Windows at the same price-point.
F) -- no. That falls under the (C) category: either you purchase MS, with the intent of having someone to blame when things go wrong; or go with Linux, with the intent of saving money.
I can't imagine why anyone would try to base a company on cloning Windows. So I read the interview.
A) Cheap alternative for desktop users -- users say "they wished they had something better without having to pay big big bucks." Win2k is, what, perhaps $200. PetrOS will have to sell for $50 or less, then.
And it'll be obsolete the moment MS changes an API. Or the moment MS makes MSIE crash when it detects PetrOS.
B) Embedded market -- er, no. The embedded market wants Linux, QNX, EPOC and other OSes. They're either free, hard realtime, or extremely small.
C) Servers -- er, no. If you want cheap, then you choose a BSD or Linux. If you want to be able to blame someone, you choose MS. You don't go out and buy some $50 clone of MS.
D) Clustering -- er, no. Not unless you're just goofing around. Kind of money invested in building a cluster, you don't go pick up a $50 clone of Windows to run it!
While this is a pretty cool project, I simply can't see that it's a profitable one...
Keeping in mind, of course, that there are short-term cost efficiencies, and long-term cost efficiencies.
Throwing away your corn cobs may be short-term cost effective. In the long term, though (and especially if you're a big corn-cobbing industry) it's going to become costly as landfills become glutted, transport costs rise, etc.
Installing a power plant that runs on cob fuel might be short-term expensive, but perhaps over the long term it would pay for itself several times over.
Short-term pain for long-term gain? Long-term pain for short-term gain?
It's a balancing act. Pros and cons on every issue.
That all expounded on, I'll conclude with my opinion: in the past, and particularly in the recent past, the emphasis has been on very-short-term gain.
Executives are being paid extravagantly for short-term performance, and are thus making the most immediately-profitable, shortest-term, biggest-payback decisions.
This needs to change. Instead of paying them ten million dollars in bonuses for their performance in the immediate past year, delay it until they've proven for a decade or two that their earlier decisions were the best decisions.
We'll end up with financially healthy companies that have high-quality long-term planning, that don't take the easy way out because it's cheapest *right now*, and that will provide jobs for the next generation.
That's really cool, Ken! You pull it off politely, but forcibly. Good on ya!
However, the problem I have isn't with their website. I accept their cookies for the session, and then delete them after.
Problem I have is that they've completely and utterly failed to actually market the product. I've never seen a newspaper or magazine ad. I've never seen a television commercial. Haven't even seen a web ad. And, especially, I've never actually seen one sitting in a display in any computer store I've visited.
Sorry, Psion, but unless you actually make people aware of the product, and its advantages over PDAs, it is *never* gonna sell well!
But, then, I think they're probably behaving typically British: a big hate-on for North America, so they don't bother with us. Never mind that sales would be 10x those in Europe...
What I'm dying to see are high-resolution, small LCDs.
The only reason large (12-15") LCDs are necessary at this time is because they've got such a crappy resolution.
Most of our paperbacks and textbooks columns no more than 4" to 5" wide. That's because they're high-resolution "displays": the smaller text, at 2400+dpi, more legible than what current LCDs offer.
Now, I'm not expecting 2400dpi LCDs. But I know IBM has demonstrated, several times over the past three years, 200dpi displays.
It's time to have devices with 5" to 7" width displays, at 200dpi. They'd be so much more legible than today's technology that I'm sure a lot of us hold-outs would start considering them as acceptable for bedtime novel-reading.
That they'd be truly novel-sized would be a bonus.
Or, once again, I preach Psion Series 7/Netbook. *TEN* hour battery life. Instant-on. Touch-type keyboard *plus* touchscreen. And the applications one commonly needs (Word, EMail, browser, spreadsheet) plus everything PDAs have.
Now if only it were actually sold in North America. Sheesh.
I think it's rather more a case of globalization: the US is becoming worldly. There are many examples in Europe and Asia where personal privacy takes a back seat to police/government "needs."
And the further aspect is that globalization is being driven by multinational corporations. Trade barriers, government policies, cultural norms: these aren't being knocked about because the common citizen wants to see them destroyed -- they're being abused because it benefits big business.
I hate to come off sounding like a paranoid, but most businesses aren't out there to help you or me. They're there to make a buck, and they'll do that by whatever means possible.
Which, apparently, includes trampling your constitutional rights.
Shame the government sees fit to go along with it. Guess that's what happens when politicians are bought, not elected...
Note that both of them fold up into Very Small Packages. Both have keyboards and touchscreens. And both have MSWord-compatible software, plus EMail, web browsing, and the full set of organizer/PDA software that you'd expect.
And both have battery lives that make them truly useful.
These things are the nearest incarnation of the Perfect Computing Device that I've yet seen. They combine the right amounts of practicality (ie. wordprocessing, email, browsing, and organizer) with the right amount of size (damn small for the 5mx, very small for the Netbook) with the right amount of battery life (ie. a full day).
Now if only Psion would pull its head out of its ass and market the things!
Word2K saves its files in an ASCII format that *looks* like XML, but isn't. It's jam-packed with, you guessed it!, proprietary "extensions." It's not parseable as pure XML.
Add in that the Word DTD isn't, to my knowledge, a publicly-available DTD, and the XML mess that Word produces is just as opaque as the hodgepodge mess that they called RTF.
A common misunderstanding of the ISO900x (and similar) requirements is to think that it demands inflexible, planned-in-advance, detailed-to-the-extreme structures.
It doesn't.
You can run a highly creative shop and still achieve ISO9001 compliance. When documenting the processes, you "build in" the flexibility that's required to maintain the creativity, while at the same time avoid regulating it to such an extent that you squelch the creativity.
It can -- and has -- been done. Standards are a *very* good thing in all work environments. Standards that require source-cause fixing of "bugs" (errors, mistakes, mis-steps, call it what you will) are even better.
I live in British Columbia. We laugh at the piddling things you call "mountains," and we have snow and ice that would drive you to tears.
My small car ('91 Nissan NX 1600) does just fine. An SUV is entirely unnecessary. And judging by the accident statistics, is more dangerous in the winter than any front-wheel drive small car.
Heck, IIRC, the Danish government already requires you to choose from a limited selection of children's names. You *can not* just name your kid whateverthehell you want: it must be a government-sanctioned name...
Wowsa. Far more response to this than I imagined would happen.
Couple of points:
- a number of folk seem to live under the perception that the UK is Europe. News for ya: it ain't. And most of Europe looks at 'em askance: it's an oddball little island country that's out of step with a lot of what's happening in the rest of Europe.
- Not PAL. HDTV.
- American cars are shite compared to the sweet stuff being done by... well, everyone else. Mercedes, Renault, Opel, Peugot, etc. And, please, just because some of those are major-pricey items in the USA, doesn't mean there are more affordable vehicles from those manufacturers: you just can get 'em in the US.
- If you haven't experienced the European advanced cellphone technology/culture, you really can't contribute intelligently to any discussion on it. What they're doing -- and the impact it has on how people interact -- is beyond your imagination.
- The big country, low population argument doesn't wash as an excuse. Canada is bigger, with one-tenth the population, and is far ahead of the USA on several fronts; Australia even more so; etc.
Ever notice that the pace of change is accelerating? Only the nimble companies -- and nimble nations -- are going to survive.
The USA is a dinosaur country these days. There are several factors at play here, and these have been identified by the people in this thread.
It's time to rethink corporate and cultural America, before it's too late.
I just got back from Europe. I was flabbergasted with how advanced some of the telecommunications technology is. The USA is in the goddamn stone ages as far as cell, PDA, and television is concerned.
Looks like it's about to be the same in biotechnology. And, hell, with the dumb patent shenanigans that are pretty much squelching innovation, it wouldn't surprise me if there are other technologies that are also being held back in the USA. (Automobiles could be one: the Europeans have some stuff that's pretty damn sweet. And some of the public transit is way better than anything in the US...)
Could be a pretty damn fast trip to third-world status.
Slashdot Mirror
No, please, do go on and on.
F'rinstance, destroy what $270b in wealth? Until one cashes out, it isn't wealth: it's hypothesis.
And I'd like to hear you expound on how MS has paid employees with stock. They've been diluting their own stock, to a ridiculous extent. That scam has worked really well, as long as everyone was duped into driving the price up, and no one cashed out bigtime.
I'm curious how breaking up MS would be a net loss in wealth. Seems to me that there'd be greater competition in the marketplace, allowing other companies to gain a foothold and expand. We'd have more products to choose from. There'd be more people working. All of which sounds to me like a net increase in wealth. Except for Bill. He might experience a decrease. And wouldn't that just suck.
So, do go on. Teach us.
On the other hand, the $309 BILLION dollars that are currently tied up in MSFT stock might be well-applied to investing in other companies, providing them with much-needed capital to innovate and grow.
Unfortunately, there is no way to make that money available to others. For every seller, a buyer: while the market cap can expand and shrink by the whim of the investor, the money is pretty much permanently unavailable to other companies.
Which is a shame. Spreading the investments around might have been helpful. Might fund some competition, f'rinstance.
Although, come to think of it, most of the MS shares are actually employee stock options, created out of thin air and used by MS as a means of (a) avoiding paying cash to employees and (b) dodging taxation [indeed, paying employees with stock creates tax *refunds* (as if MS needs a refund!)].
I think it's arguable that employee stock options are valueless, until such time as the employee gets lucky enough to find someone willing to fork over some coin. Until that point, the stocks don't actually represent money unavailable to other companies...
Disclaimer: These are idle late-night speculations, and are subject to correction by folk with far more investing knowledge than I!
The wife, on the other hand...
...made $150 000 selling pictures of herself masturbating, because her hubby was too damn busy playing Everquest to give her the bone.
E) -- no. MS will drop their product price or, more likely, offer a reduced-functionality Windows at the same price-point.
F) -- no. That falls under the (C) category: either you purchase MS, with the intent of having someone to blame when things go wrong; or go with Linux, with the intent of saving money.
I can't imagine why anyone would try to base a company on cloning Windows. So I read the interview.
A) Cheap alternative for desktop users -- users say "they wished they had something better without having to pay big big bucks." Win2k is, what, perhaps $200. PetrOS will have to sell for $50 or less, then.
And it'll be obsolete the moment MS changes an API. Or the moment MS makes MSIE crash when it detects PetrOS.
B) Embedded market -- er, no. The embedded market wants Linux, QNX, EPOC and other OSes. They're either free, hard realtime, or extremely small.
C) Servers -- er, no. If you want cheap, then you choose a BSD or Linux. If you want to be able to blame someone, you choose MS. You don't go out and buy some $50 clone of MS.
D) Clustering -- er, no. Not unless you're just goofing around. Kind of money invested in building a cluster, you don't go pick up a $50 clone of Windows to run it!
While this is a pretty cool project, I simply can't see that it's a profitable one...
Keeping in mind, of course, that there are short-term cost efficiencies, and long-term cost efficiencies.
:)
Throwing away your corn cobs may be short-term cost effective. In the long term, though (and especially if you're a big corn-cobbing industry) it's going to become costly as landfills become glutted, transport costs rise, etc.
Installing a power plant that runs on cob fuel might be short-term expensive, but perhaps over the long term it would pay for itself several times over.
Short-term pain for long-term gain? Long-term pain for short-term gain?
It's a balancing act. Pros and cons on every issue.
That all expounded on, I'll conclude with my opinion: in the past, and particularly in the recent past, the emphasis has been on very-short-term gain.
Executives are being paid extravagantly for short-term performance, and are thus making the most immediately-profitable, shortest-term, biggest-payback decisions.
This needs to change. Instead of paying them ten million dollars in bonuses for their performance in the immediate past year, delay it until they've proven for a decade or two that their earlier decisions were the best decisions.
We'll end up with financially healthy companies that have high-quality long-term planning, that don't take the easy way out because it's cheapest *right now*, and that will provide jobs for the next generation.
Plus, my portfolio will probably be happier.
That's really cool, Ken! You pull it off politely, but forcibly. Good on ya!
However, the problem I have isn't with their website. I accept their cookies for the session, and then delete them after.
Problem I have is that they've completely and utterly failed to actually market the product. I've never seen a newspaper or magazine ad. I've never seen a television commercial. Haven't even seen a web ad. And, especially, I've never actually seen one sitting in a display in any computer store I've visited.
Sorry, Psion, but unless you actually make people aware of the product, and its advantages over PDAs, it is *never* gonna sell well!
But, then, I think they're probably behaving typically British: a big hate-on for North America, so they don't bother with us. Never mind that sales would be 10x those in Europe...
What I'm dying to see are high-resolution, small LCDs.
The only reason large (12-15") LCDs are necessary at this time is because they've got such a crappy resolution.
Most of our paperbacks and textbooks columns no more than 4" to 5" wide. That's because they're high-resolution "displays": the smaller text, at 2400+dpi, more legible than what current LCDs offer.
Now, I'm not expecting 2400dpi LCDs. But I know IBM has demonstrated, several times over the past three years, 200dpi displays.
It's time to have devices with 5" to 7" width displays, at 200dpi. They'd be so much more legible than today's technology that I'm sure a lot of us hold-outs would start considering them as acceptable for bedtime novel-reading.
That they'd be truly novel-sized would be a bonus.
Or, once again, I preach Psion Series 7/Netbook. *TEN* hour battery life. Instant-on. Touch-type keyboard *plus* touchscreen. And the applications one commonly needs (Word, EMail, browser, spreadsheet) plus everything PDAs have.
Now if only it were actually sold in North America. Sheesh.
It's not a case of "the US is not the world."
I think it's rather more a case of globalization: the US is becoming worldly. There are many examples in Europe and Asia where personal privacy takes a back seat to police/government "needs."
And the further aspect is that globalization is being driven by multinational corporations. Trade barriers, government policies, cultural norms: these aren't being knocked about because the common citizen wants to see them destroyed -- they're being abused because it benefits big business.
I hate to come off sounding like a paranoid, but most businesses aren't out there to help you or me. They're there to make a buck, and they'll do that by whatever means possible.
Which, apparently, includes trampling your constitutional rights.
Shame the government sees fit to go along with it. Guess that's what happens when politicians are bought, not elected...
The Series 5mx.
The Netbook
Note that both of them fold up into Very Small Packages. Both have keyboards and touchscreens. And both have MSWord-compatible software, plus EMail, web browsing, and the full set of organizer/PDA software that you'd expect.
And both have battery lives that make them truly useful.
These things are the nearest incarnation of the Perfect Computing Device that I've yet seen. They combine the right amounts of practicality (ie. wordprocessing, email, browsing, and organizer) with the right amount of size (damn small for the 5mx, very small for the Netbook) with the right amount of battery life (ie. a full day).
Now if only Psion would pull its head out of its ass and market the things!
...in this lawsuit was, I'm sure, working up the gumption to admit that she actually bought a Charley Pride album. Shudder.
Alas, Microsoft *has not* moved to XML.
Word2K saves its files in an ASCII format that *looks* like XML, but isn't. It's jam-packed with, you guessed it!, proprietary "extensions." It's not parseable as pure XML.
Add in that the Word DTD isn't, to my knowledge, a publicly-available DTD, and the XML mess that Word produces is just as opaque as the hodgepodge mess that they called RTF.
A common misunderstanding of the ISO900x (and similar) requirements is to think that it demands inflexible, planned-in-advance, detailed-to-the-extreme structures.
It doesn't.
You can run a highly creative shop and still achieve ISO9001 compliance. When documenting the processes, you "build in" the flexibility that's required to maintain the creativity, while at the same time avoid regulating it to such an extent that you squelch the creativity.
It can -- and has -- been done. Standards are a *very* good thing in all work environments. Standards that require source-cause fixing of "bugs" (errors, mistakes, mis-steps, call it what you will) are even better.
Opps. Touche'. :)
(OTOH, ain't it true? Stomping stem cell research is going to make the USA a laggard on this most-promising line of research...)
WTF? How'd my name get associated with biomedical?! I swear to god, I didn't write anything about it!
Er, you mean the flat-rate, always-on, wireless Internet access that I saw? Yah, damn, that's some inferior...
Boooolshit.
I live in British Columbia. We laugh at the piddling things you call "mountains," and we have snow and ice that would drive you to tears.
My small car ('91 Nissan NX 1600) does just fine. An SUV is entirely unnecessary. And judging by the accident statistics, is more dangerous in the winter than any front-wheel drive small car.
Hell, I'm very amused by this:
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=4, Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Overrated=1, Total=8.
Obviously, we're not all on the same page!
Heck, IIRC, the Danish government already requires you to choose from a limited selection of children's names. You *can not* just name your kid whateverthehell you want: it must be a government-sanctioned name...
Weird.
Wowsa. Far more response to this than I imagined would happen.
Couple of points:
- a number of folk seem to live under the perception that the UK is Europe. News for ya: it ain't. And most of Europe looks at 'em askance: it's an oddball little island country that's out of step with a lot of what's happening in the rest of Europe.
- Not PAL. HDTV.
- American cars are shite compared to the sweet stuff being done by... well, everyone else. Mercedes, Renault, Opel, Peugot, etc. And, please, just because some of those are major-pricey items in the USA, doesn't mean there are more affordable vehicles from those manufacturers: you just can get 'em in the US.
- If you haven't experienced the European advanced cellphone technology/culture, you really can't contribute intelligently to any discussion on it. What they're doing -- and the impact it has on how people interact -- is beyond your imagination.
- The big country, low population argument doesn't wash as an excuse. Canada is bigger, with one-tenth the population, and is far ahead of the USA on several fronts; Australia even more so; etc.
Ever notice that the pace of change is accelerating? Only the nimble companies -- and nimble nations -- are going to survive.
The USA is a dinosaur country these days. There are several factors at play here, and these have been identified by the people in this thread.
It's time to rethink corporate and cultural America, before it's too late.
Who the fuck wants to use a 50 year old TV or 16 year old cellphone? Jesus. Give your head a shake!
I just got back from Europe. I was flabbergasted with how advanced some of the telecommunications technology is. The USA is in the goddamn stone ages as far as cell, PDA, and television is concerned.
Looks like it's about to be the same in biotechnology. And, hell, with the dumb patent shenanigans that are pretty much squelching innovation, it wouldn't surprise me if there are other technologies that are also being held back in the USA. (Automobiles could be one: the Europeans have some stuff that's pretty damn sweet. And some of the public transit is way better than anything in the US...)
Could be a pretty damn fast trip to third-world status.
You wanna check out the Psion Netbook, then.
It's got the useful applications. Colour 640x480 screen with instant zoom/reduce, so that you can make real use of the workspace. Instant-on. Etc.
I believe I've found [some pictures] of the NASA prototype!