Yup, my father works for IBM and *has* to use a Windows workstation. It seems silly to me on a variety of levels. First, if you're making sales on the idea that Unix is generally superior, then what does it mean that you're using Windows so pervasively throughout your organization? You could argue that Unix is much better for servers but worse on the desktop, but it just doesn't seem right from a PR standpoint.
Also, as you mention, why use a platform that's going to lead to inconsistencies like the CRLF/LF issue? If you're using Linux/Unix servers, why use clients that can only use SMB file shares? Why use a client OS that lacks built-in support for such common protocols as SFTP and SSH? If you develop some little script or application for Unix/Linux servers, it seems like it might be useful if your desktop is capable of running the same application without much work.
And that's not even getting into the IT issue that, if you're well-versed in being the admin for Unix machines, dealing with Windows desktops are going to be a serious PITA.
Really, you could run Windows in an emulator before, and though performance wasn't fantastic, it was often adequate. The larger benefit, I think, is the fact that you can install Windows to run natively on Intel-based Macs. So even if you didn't like OSX for some reason, and you wanted to switch back to Windows, you could do that. You can run Windows at full speed, no virtualization needed, and with full hardware support.
Also, since Macs use Intel chips, you can use something like Codeweavers' Crossover to run Windows applications in OSX without a copy of Windows at all. Admittedly, it's not a perfect solution, but I've used MS Office, IE6, and even played Portal on my Mac without installing Windows.
Ummm... yeah, that's exactly why it makes sense to use OSX as your desktop Unix. It's relatively easy to support and relatively intuitive for users to understand.
If that was all there was to it, why wouldn't they have stopped using Windows already?
These days, IBM is not interested in selling a desktop OS or even selling consumer-grade computers. They're essentially in the business of selling big iron and IT services, and they're often providing Unix/Linux solutions.
Whether they hate Microsoft or love Microsoft, it still makes a lot of sense that if you're providing Unix-based services, you'd also want to be using Unix-based client-machines. It would just be a better solution for a variety of technical and non-technical reasons.
So once you assume that your client-machines are going to be running a Unix-y operating system, it seems like the natural question would be, "who's going to be using Linux and who's going to be using a Mac?" (I'm assuming that there would be a mix, naturally.)
It's really not that strange-- it's not like the old days were Microsoft's OS is talked about as running on "IBM compatible computers". These days, Apple hardware isn't that different from anyone else's, so it's just a question of which operating system they want to run. Since IBM is so tied to Linux/Unix these days, it shouldn't surprise anyone that they're considering moving away from Windows.
I think the more ironic thing is that they're probably considering the move because Macs have become more popular since moving from PowerPC architecture to Intel's chips. To spell out the irony a little bit more, IBM started considering using Apple's computers (partially) as a result of Apple ceasing to use IBM's chips.
I'm probably not fully understanding, but how do you track people, but allow someone to "opt out". What I mean is, let's say you don't want DoubleClick to track you. So for them to abide by a "do not track" list, they need to set up some kind of identifier so that, when you visit a site where they would normally track you, they recognize it's you and stop tracking you. But that means you'd have to send them that identifier in every instance where they would track you, and they'd end up having to track you to make sure they don't track you.
I suppose they could just not store the collecting information, though. And no, I didn't RTFA.
First, HR departments don't care where your degree is from.
This won't really answer the original question put forth, but I thought I'd chime in. I'm not a programmer, but I work in IT. I started in the late 90s as a helpdesk tech, worked my way up to Director of Technology. I didn't go to a technical school. I went to a liberal arts school and got a BA in philosophy.
You might expect that it would work against me, but I've had a couple heads of HR say they were excited to hire me because of my background, because I seemed "well rounded". Of course, working helpdesk doesn't always require you to be a technical badass like being a programmer might. On the other hand, I could talk to people, I was organized, and I could organize others. I could go into a meeting and talk with the geeks, or I could go into a meeting and talk with management.
I know that when you're 18, you think that what it's highly important that you go to the best school in existence for the subject you want to study, but in my experience life is a little bit more twisty than that. People don't know ahead of time what they're going to learn and what they're going to love, and the "best school" isn't always the best school for *you*.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any simple advice on the issue, except to say that it's not just a matter of what school you go to, it's a matter of what you make of your time there.
I can see one possible scary aspect of it-- If the designs for a powerful weapon were made open and available to everyone, and anyone could build one, it could become a problem.
Imagine the sorts of problems that would come into play if anyone could build themselves an Iron Man suit. Criminals would become a lot more dangerous, and people would probably end up killing each other in stupid accidents.
On the positive side, the Youtube videos would be highly entertaining.
unless there is some insanely good reason to switch (twice the compression with no noticeable quality changes or something similar)?
IMHO, it's probably a mistake to think that formats really rise or fall on technical merits. It has a lot to do with politics and trust. The two questions are: Does Sun have enough influence to get others to support this format? -and- Do people trust Sun enough to believe that this format will be around for the long haul?
If this new format were suddenly supported out-of-the-box by Windows, OSX, and major Linux distros, it would have a pretty good chance. But I don't think Sun has the clout to get support on those platforms without users having to download the codec. If MPEG put out this new codec as part of the MPEG5 standard, and it had all the benefits of h264 but was completely royalty free, people would probably gobble it up.
But yeah, if you just release a royalty-free media format and give it a silly name like, "Krogg Barfus", then don't expect people to use it unless it has some serious upsides.
It has nothing to do with EULAs. If they're selling machines with Leopard installed, it's a copyright violation. They're distributing copyrighted material without any license to do so.
It's arguable that Apple can only provide the consistent and stable experience they do because they control the hardware. I don't entirely buy it, and would like to be able to install OSX on generic machines. On the other hand, I wouldn't buy a pre-built Hackintosh machine like what's being advertised unless they also provided their own patches and support for all updates, so that I didn't have to worry about my system ceasing to work because of a security update.
Aside from all this, I definitely think Apple has the right to refuse to sell OSX for non-Apple computers, and the right to refuse to support your Hackintosh.
Probably doesn't hurt that many of our users are software developers, so they're more aware of the risks involved.
Honestly, some of my worst users have been programmers of some kind. I don't want to disparage software developers in general, but the worst users aren't people who don't know anything about computers. The worst are always those who know a little and think they know a lot, or those who know a lot and think they know everything.
In my experience, people with CS degrees *can be* your worst nightmare when working in IT. They've studied computers, and they know more than enough to subvert whatever you're doing. On the other hand, they don't always understand the business forces at play, and they aren't always aware of the issues the IT department is facing. Also, I've known more than a few software developers who are understand how computers are *supposed to* work, and actually make the mistake of thinking software is generally well written and that computers work the way they're "supposed to". Any IT guy worth his salt will tell you that Murphy's Law holds true.
That's not to say that I haven't also seen IT people being snotty, running amok, ignoring genuine business needs, etc. I've seen a lot of incompetent IT workers who simply do a bad job. On the other hand, when I hear people complaining that their IT staff won't let users admin their own machines or set up WiFi access points, my immediate reaction is, "Sounds like your IT people are doing the right thing."
I can't speak for everyone else, but in my experience most of the time when people are screwing around with things it's because they have a need that's unmet.
Then I would guess that you work with good people. I've had to deal with people who have insisted on installing desktop wallpaper changers and special cursors, even though they came with malware. I've had to deal with people trying to open security holes in our network so they can participate in P2P networks so they can download movies and MP3s (forgetting the legal liability, there's still the issue of bandwidth).
I've seen so much stupid and ignorant behavior that has nothing to do with "business needs", and at best it's a benign nuisance. Even when it doesn't actively cause problems, it becomes yet another thing that the helpdesk techs then have to deal with. In my span working professionally in IT, I've seen people take the whole network down for hours, I've seen users expose the whole network to a new virus, and I've had a user get my e-mail IP blacklisted for spam after setting up a rogue SMTP service.
Yes, I've seen someone reinstall Windows on their work machine, losing some important data and work applications, in order to install solitaire. I've had people try to get around our web-filtering to access porn (legal problems), IM (security problems), and P2P (legal problems, bandwidth problems, security problems, and storage problems). These may all fill "unmet needs", but they sure as hell weren't work-based needs
IMO, what you should have done is tried to push for an internal IM server that IT could run with whatever security policies they feel are necessary. I've worked for companies that block IM because of regulatory concerns or because of security concerns. We didn't want people using standard AIM clients, sending unlogged work information over the internet through unencrypted channels, but when push came to shove and people really wanted it, we set up an internal Jabber server.
Make sure you bring their managers into the loop and impress upon them the problems that could crop up when their Access and Excel scripting guru runs amok, and then let 'em do their thing.
I've done this before. It was probably the best thing to do at the time, and it worked out pretty well... up until people wanted the IT staff to take on responsibility for the Access/Excel stuff. I'd advise people to be wary of this sort of thing, because even if you disavow any responsibility, when the shit hits the fan, you *will* be expected to make it all work. It won't matter that you warned everyone ahead of time.
Instead of educating users and providing them the ability to solve problems...
Do you know how much education it takes before people will properly admin even their own machines? Too much, and most people don't care to be properly educated. Most people either (a) don't want to be bothered to admin their own machines; or (b) want to admin their own machines, don't want to spend the time to learn how to do it properly, and then will hassle the IT department to fix their mistakes. Either way, you don't want to hand control over to them.
If people really wanted to spend the time to learn how to admin machines properly, and then wanted to spend their time doing so, then they would have pursued a career in IT.
"It's a symptom of the IT organization being unable to meet or even understand the needs of its customers," he says. "Otherwise, it wouldn't be happening."
I don't think that's true. Lots of people just want to screw around with things and get an ego boost out of flouting authority or trying to show-up the IT staff. You know, there's always going to be that guy who wants to install games on his PC, and figure out how to tunnel past the porn filter. Maybe it's because he wants those things, but also it's because he gets a kick out subverting the rules. Either way, it doesn't mean the IT staff isn't doing their jobs.
i think the music industry would never have been able to get in front of this steamroller
I think your point would be better served to agree that the music industry could have gotten in front of this steamroller, but they would have gotten run over anyway.
I half agree with you and half disagree. The music industry cannot survive as-is in the Internet-age because their business model, centered around distribution, is obsolete. However, that doesn't mean that they can't survive in some form. There's still room for them to act as agents, marketing/branding whatever they can, and making money of merchandizing and general crap.
Also, there can be a business model from the Internet distribution. Being the content host (or even just the tracker site) and providing recommendation engines can still be a feasible business. Whether you charge a nominal fee per transaction, a small subscription fee, or live off ad revenue, there would be a business model there.
Think of it this way, if copyright law was dismantled tomorrow, Apple could still make money off of iTMS. Not having to pay labels, I think they could still have a viable business. You might think people would just find other free sources, but the fact is that customers are willing to pay a little bit of money (at least a little) in order to have a site that's easy to search, has good/uncorrupted content, a good shopping experience, and a decent recommendation engine.
...they're developers (or "developers") whose platform (or phone) is down temporarily...
Yeah, and real developers should know that you don't do testing/developing on a production system, i.e. don't install beta development builds of the iPhone OS on your actual phone.
Doesn't seem like much to me. This has already been on some really popular sites, and only has 60k signatures. When you get 10 times that, you'll be a little more than halfway towards the goal.
That's somewhat true, but not entirely. Pricing is often more complicated than people think. When you buy something, you aren't necessarily being charged cost plus some fixed percentage.
So to avoid getting theoretical, my point is that Verizon has probably done a calculation already of what price will maximize their profits. So let's say (hypothetically) they can provide service for $10/month and make no profit, or they can charge $200/month and make $190 profit. Why wouldn't they just charge $200/month (or more)? Because they wouldn't have as many customers, so they'll make less profit overall.
That's just how these calculations work. So if I can sell a product and make $10,000 profit, but can only sell 2 units-- or I can sell it cheaply enough that I can sell 2 million units, but only make $2 per sale, I'm better off selling it cheaply. So companies try to figure out what the optimal pricing of a product is, where raising the price will lower your overall profits by diminishing the volume of sales, and lowering the price will lower your overall profits because you won't be making enough more sales to make up for the loss of profit per unit.
So my point is, there is probably an optimal price Verizon expects to charge on wireless internet access, regardless of how much it actually costs them to provide this service. If they could somehow provide this service for free, they wouldn't pass those savings on to consumers. Likewise, if providing the service becomes more expensive, there's still no sense in raising your prices beyond the optimal level, because you'll only end up making less money.
Yeah, in my experience (and we are getting off topic here), there is some portion of the "pirate" community that is basically OCD, and want a "complete collection". I've seen people spend loads of time downloading movies they don't watch, and music they don't listen to. Also, there's a portion that will pay to buy the CD (or whatever) if it's something they really like, but will download stuff they want to listen to once but probably wouldn't have bought anyway.
They're still adding new features and improving the way things work internally, and applications, although they run, have some weird glitches with new OS features; namely, older applications sometimes behave strangely when one uses Spaces.
You say that as though it's not par for the course for application development. New versions of the OS come out, and sometimes the APIs grow and change. Lots of programs over the years have only worked on specific versions of Windows, and lots of Java apps have required specific versions of the JRE.
I don't see the problem here. I'd prefer the OS developers to continue to fix bugs, clean up APIs, and add features. The main question I would have is, how hard is it to fix your app if an OS upgrade breaks it? For example, let's say you build your app using Cocoa and then Apple releases "Spaces" and your application now has a glitch when using spaces on Leopard. Now as the developer, how hard is it for you to update your program to fix the glitch? If it's easy, then I'd say Apple is handling things well.
A relatively low flat fee would more than offset the hassle of downloading everything you could possibly want just to save a bit of money.
The question there, though, is whether there is a fee low enough that you'd pay it to save yourself the hassle, but high enough that record companies will feel is profitable enough to make their business worthwhile. It's not a viable business model until you determine a fee that hits that sweet-spot for both parties.
Personally, when the internet first hit, I imagined some kind of "entertainment service provider" would sprint up. Basically, you pay a fee for the service, and in return you get access to books, TV shows, movies, and music. I imagined this sort of thing replacing cable companies. Every now and then I revisit the idea and think it'd be great for the customers. Imagine paying a flat fee for the internet, and if you chose, paying an additional fee to another company (not necessarily your ISP) for access to high-speed servers with pretty much every piece of entertainment known to man. On top of that, you could run a recommendation system that could suggest cross-media matches. "You like this movie? Then you might also like this book!"
It'd be great, and if they had a good enough catalog, kept up to date, for cheap enough, then I feel confident people would pay for it. But it won't happen any time soon. Even if someone could create a business model that would keep it profitable, the licensing issues would be a legal nightmare.
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Ok, then why didn't they release a Linux version of Notes a long time ago?
Yup, my father works for IBM and *has* to use a Windows workstation. It seems silly to me on a variety of levels. First, if you're making sales on the idea that Unix is generally superior, then what does it mean that you're using Windows so pervasively throughout your organization? You could argue that Unix is much better for servers but worse on the desktop, but it just doesn't seem right from a PR standpoint.
Also, as you mention, why use a platform that's going to lead to inconsistencies like the CRLF/LF issue? If you're using Linux/Unix servers, why use clients that can only use SMB file shares? Why use a client OS that lacks built-in support for such common protocols as SFTP and SSH? If you develop some little script or application for Unix/Linux servers, it seems like it might be useful if your desktop is capable of running the same application without much work.
And that's not even getting into the IT issue that, if you're well-versed in being the admin for Unix machines, dealing with Windows desktops are going to be a serious PITA.
Really, you could run Windows in an emulator before, and though performance wasn't fantastic, it was often adequate. The larger benefit, I think, is the fact that you can install Windows to run natively on Intel-based Macs. So even if you didn't like OSX for some reason, and you wanted to switch back to Windows, you could do that. You can run Windows at full speed, no virtualization needed, and with full hardware support.
Also, since Macs use Intel chips, you can use something like Codeweavers' Crossover to run Windows applications in OSX without a copy of Windows at all. Admittedly, it's not a perfect solution, but I've used MS Office, IE6, and even played Portal on my Mac without installing Windows.
Ummm... yeah, that's exactly why it makes sense to use OSX as your desktop Unix. It's relatively easy to support and relatively intuitive for users to understand.
If that was all there was to it, why wouldn't they have stopped using Windows already?
These days, IBM is not interested in selling a desktop OS or even selling consumer-grade computers. They're essentially in the business of selling big iron and IT services, and they're often providing Unix/Linux solutions.
Whether they hate Microsoft or love Microsoft, it still makes a lot of sense that if you're providing Unix-based services, you'd also want to be using Unix-based client-machines. It would just be a better solution for a variety of technical and non-technical reasons.
So once you assume that your client-machines are going to be running a Unix-y operating system, it seems like the natural question would be, "who's going to be using Linux and who's going to be using a Mac?" (I'm assuming that there would be a mix, naturally.)
It's really not that strange-- it's not like the old days were Microsoft's OS is talked about as running on "IBM compatible computers". These days, Apple hardware isn't that different from anyone else's, so it's just a question of which operating system they want to run. Since IBM is so tied to Linux/Unix these days, it shouldn't surprise anyone that they're considering moving away from Windows.
I think the more ironic thing is that they're probably considering the move because Macs have become more popular since moving from PowerPC architecture to Intel's chips. To spell out the irony a little bit more, IBM started considering using Apple's computers (partially) as a result of Apple ceasing to use IBM's chips.
I'm probably not fully understanding, but how do you track people, but allow someone to "opt out". What I mean is, let's say you don't want DoubleClick to track you. So for them to abide by a "do not track" list, they need to set up some kind of identifier so that, when you visit a site where they would normally track you, they recognize it's you and stop tracking you. But that means you'd have to send them that identifier in every instance where they would track you, and they'd end up having to track you to make sure they don't track you.
I suppose they could just not store the collecting information, though. And no, I didn't RTFA.
First, HR departments don't care where your degree is from.
This won't really answer the original question put forth, but I thought I'd chime in. I'm not a programmer, but I work in IT. I started in the late 90s as a helpdesk tech, worked my way up to Director of Technology. I didn't go to a technical school. I went to a liberal arts school and got a BA in philosophy.
You might expect that it would work against me, but I've had a couple heads of HR say they were excited to hire me because of my background, because I seemed "well rounded". Of course, working helpdesk doesn't always require you to be a technical badass like being a programmer might. On the other hand, I could talk to people, I was organized, and I could organize others. I could go into a meeting and talk with the geeks, or I could go into a meeting and talk with management.
I know that when you're 18, you think that what it's highly important that you go to the best school in existence for the subject you want to study, but in my experience life is a little bit more twisty than that. People don't know ahead of time what they're going to learn and what they're going to love, and the "best school" isn't always the best school for *you*.
Unfortunately, I can't think of any simple advice on the issue, except to say that it's not just a matter of what school you go to, it's a matter of what you make of your time there.
I can see one possible scary aspect of it-- If the designs for a powerful weapon were made open and available to everyone, and anyone could build one, it could become a problem. Imagine the sorts of problems that would come into play if anyone could build themselves an Iron Man suit. Criminals would become a lot more dangerous, and people would probably end up killing each other in stupid accidents. On the positive side, the Youtube videos would be highly entertaining.
unless there is some insanely good reason to switch (twice the compression with no noticeable quality changes or something similar)?
IMHO, it's probably a mistake to think that formats really rise or fall on technical merits. It has a lot to do with politics and trust. The two questions are: Does Sun have enough influence to get others to support this format? -and- Do people trust Sun enough to believe that this format will be around for the long haul?
If this new format were suddenly supported out-of-the-box by Windows, OSX, and major Linux distros, it would have a pretty good chance. But I don't think Sun has the clout to get support on those platforms without users having to download the codec. If MPEG put out this new codec as part of the MPEG5 standard, and it had all the benefits of h264 but was completely royalty free, people would probably gobble it up.
But yeah, if you just release a royalty-free media format and give it a silly name like, "Krogg Barfus", then don't expect people to use it unless it has some serious upsides.
It has nothing to do with EULAs. If they're selling machines with Leopard installed, it's a copyright violation. They're distributing copyrighted material without any license to do so.
It's arguable that Apple can only provide the consistent and stable experience they do because they control the hardware. I don't entirely buy it, and would like to be able to install OSX on generic machines. On the other hand, I wouldn't buy a pre-built Hackintosh machine like what's being advertised unless they also provided their own patches and support for all updates, so that I didn't have to worry about my system ceasing to work because of a security update.
Aside from all this, I definitely think Apple has the right to refuse to sell OSX for non-Apple computers, and the right to refuse to support your Hackintosh.
Probably doesn't hurt that many of our users are software developers, so they're more aware of the risks involved.
Honestly, some of my worst users have been programmers of some kind. I don't want to disparage software developers in general, but the worst users aren't people who don't know anything about computers. The worst are always those who know a little and think they know a lot, or those who know a lot and think they know everything.
In my experience, people with CS degrees *can be* your worst nightmare when working in IT. They've studied computers, and they know more than enough to subvert whatever you're doing. On the other hand, they don't always understand the business forces at play, and they aren't always aware of the issues the IT department is facing. Also, I've known more than a few software developers who are understand how computers are *supposed to* work, and actually make the mistake of thinking software is generally well written and that computers work the way they're "supposed to". Any IT guy worth his salt will tell you that Murphy's Law holds true.
That's not to say that I haven't also seen IT people being snotty, running amok, ignoring genuine business needs, etc. I've seen a lot of incompetent IT workers who simply do a bad job. On the other hand, when I hear people complaining that their IT staff won't let users admin their own machines or set up WiFi access points, my immediate reaction is, "Sounds like your IT people are doing the right thing."
I can't speak for everyone else, but in my experience most of the time when people are screwing around with things it's because they have a need that's unmet.
Then I would guess that you work with good people. I've had to deal with people who have insisted on installing desktop wallpaper changers and special cursors, even though they came with malware. I've had to deal with people trying to open security holes in our network so they can participate in P2P networks so they can download movies and MP3s (forgetting the legal liability, there's still the issue of bandwidth).
I've seen so much stupid and ignorant behavior that has nothing to do with "business needs", and at best it's a benign nuisance. Even when it doesn't actively cause problems, it becomes yet another thing that the helpdesk techs then have to deal with. In my span working professionally in IT, I've seen people take the whole network down for hours, I've seen users expose the whole network to a new virus, and I've had a user get my e-mail IP blacklisted for spam after setting up a rogue SMTP service.
Yes, I've seen someone reinstall Windows on their work machine, losing some important data and work applications, in order to install solitaire. I've had people try to get around our web-filtering to access porn (legal problems), IM (security problems), and P2P (legal problems, bandwidth problems, security problems, and storage problems). These may all fill "unmet needs", but they sure as hell weren't work-based needs
IMO, what you should have done is tried to push for an internal IM server that IT could run with whatever security policies they feel are necessary. I've worked for companies that block IM because of regulatory concerns or because of security concerns. We didn't want people using standard AIM clients, sending unlogged work information over the internet through unencrypted channels, but when push came to shove and people really wanted it, we set up an internal Jabber server.
Make sure you bring their managers into the loop and impress upon them the problems that could crop up when their Access and Excel scripting guru runs amok, and then let 'em do their thing.
I've done this before. It was probably the best thing to do at the time, and it worked out pretty well... up until people wanted the IT staff to take on responsibility for the Access/Excel stuff. I'd advise people to be wary of this sort of thing, because even if you disavow any responsibility, when the shit hits the fan, you *will* be expected to make it all work. It won't matter that you warned everyone ahead of time.
Instead of educating users and providing them the ability to solve problems...
Do you know how much education it takes before people will properly admin even their own machines? Too much, and most people don't care to be properly educated. Most people either (a) don't want to be bothered to admin their own machines; or (b) want to admin their own machines, don't want to spend the time to learn how to do it properly, and then will hassle the IT department to fix their mistakes. Either way, you don't want to hand control over to them.
If people really wanted to spend the time to learn how to admin machines properly, and then wanted to spend their time doing so, then they would have pursued a career in IT.
I don't think that's true. Lots of people just want to screw around with things and get an ego boost out of flouting authority or trying to show-up the IT staff. You know, there's always going to be that guy who wants to install games on his PC, and figure out how to tunnel past the porn filter. Maybe it's because he wants those things, but also it's because he gets a kick out subverting the rules. Either way, it doesn't mean the IT staff isn't doing their jobs.
i think the music industry would never have been able to get in front of this steamroller
I think your point would be better served to agree that the music industry could have gotten in front of this steamroller, but they would have gotten run over anyway.
I half agree with you and half disagree. The music industry cannot survive as-is in the Internet-age because their business model, centered around distribution, is obsolete. However, that doesn't mean that they can't survive in some form. There's still room for them to act as agents, marketing/branding whatever they can, and making money of merchandizing and general crap.
Also, there can be a business model from the Internet distribution. Being the content host (or even just the tracker site) and providing recommendation engines can still be a feasible business. Whether you charge a nominal fee per transaction, a small subscription fee, or live off ad revenue, there would be a business model there.
Think of it this way, if copyright law was dismantled tomorrow, Apple could still make money off of iTMS. Not having to pay labels, I think they could still have a viable business. You might think people would just find other free sources, but the fact is that customers are willing to pay a little bit of money (at least a little) in order to have a site that's easy to search, has good/uncorrupted content, a good shopping experience, and a decent recommendation engine.
Yeah, and real developers should know that you don't do testing/developing on a production system, i.e. don't install beta development builds of the iPhone OS on your actual phone.
Funny, my first thought was of Spiderman's enemy, the Lizard.
Doesn't seem like much to me. This has already been on some really popular sites, and only has 60k signatures. When you get 10 times that, you'll be a little more than halfway towards the goal.
That's somewhat true, but not entirely. Pricing is often more complicated than people think. When you buy something, you aren't necessarily being charged cost plus some fixed percentage.
So to avoid getting theoretical, my point is that Verizon has probably done a calculation already of what price will maximize their profits. So let's say (hypothetically) they can provide service for $10/month and make no profit, or they can charge $200/month and make $190 profit. Why wouldn't they just charge $200/month (or more)? Because they wouldn't have as many customers, so they'll make less profit overall.
That's just how these calculations work. So if I can sell a product and make $10,000 profit, but can only sell 2 units-- or I can sell it cheaply enough that I can sell 2 million units, but only make $2 per sale, I'm better off selling it cheaply. So companies try to figure out what the optimal pricing of a product is, where raising the price will lower your overall profits by diminishing the volume of sales, and lowering the price will lower your overall profits because you won't be making enough more sales to make up for the loss of profit per unit.
So my point is, there is probably an optimal price Verizon expects to charge on wireless internet access, regardless of how much it actually costs them to provide this service. If they could somehow provide this service for free, they wouldn't pass those savings on to consumers. Likewise, if providing the service becomes more expensive, there's still no sense in raising your prices beyond the optimal level, because you'll only end up making less money.
Yeah, in my experience (and we are getting off topic here), there is some portion of the "pirate" community that is basically OCD, and want a "complete collection". I've seen people spend loads of time downloading movies they don't watch, and music they don't listen to. Also, there's a portion that will pay to buy the CD (or whatever) if it's something they really like, but will download stuff they want to listen to once but probably wouldn't have bought anyway.
They're still adding new features and improving the way things work internally, and applications, although they run, have some weird glitches with new OS features; namely, older applications sometimes behave strangely when one uses Spaces.
You say that as though it's not par for the course for application development. New versions of the OS come out, and sometimes the APIs grow and change. Lots of programs over the years have only worked on specific versions of Windows, and lots of Java apps have required specific versions of the JRE.
I don't see the problem here. I'd prefer the OS developers to continue to fix bugs, clean up APIs, and add features. The main question I would have is, how hard is it to fix your app if an OS upgrade breaks it? For example, let's say you build your app using Cocoa and then Apple releases "Spaces" and your application now has a glitch when using spaces on Leopard. Now as the developer, how hard is it for you to update your program to fix the glitch? If it's easy, then I'd say Apple is handling things well.
A relatively low flat fee would more than offset the hassle of downloading everything you could possibly want just to save a bit of money.
The question there, though, is whether there is a fee low enough that you'd pay it to save yourself the hassle, but high enough that record companies will feel is profitable enough to make their business worthwhile. It's not a viable business model until you determine a fee that hits that sweet-spot for both parties.
Personally, when the internet first hit, I imagined some kind of "entertainment service provider" would sprint up. Basically, you pay a fee for the service, and in return you get access to books, TV shows, movies, and music. I imagined this sort of thing replacing cable companies. Every now and then I revisit the idea and think it'd be great for the customers. Imagine paying a flat fee for the internet, and if you chose, paying an additional fee to another company (not necessarily your ISP) for access to high-speed servers with pretty much every piece of entertainment known to man. On top of that, you could run a recommendation system that could suggest cross-media matches. "You like this movie? Then you might also like this book!"
It'd be great, and if they had a good enough catalog, kept up to date, for cheap enough, then I feel confident people would pay for it. But it won't happen any time soon. Even if someone could create a business model that would keep it profitable, the licensing issues would be a legal nightmare.