I might be way in the minority, but I usually won't buy or keep single songs. It gets too hard to find while sorting through my entire music collection. I don't always like playing through my collection, and I don't like sorting through and finding individual songs that I like. If I have 5,000 to 10,000 songs in your collection, each by a different artist and on different albums, it overloads me a little when I try to decide what I want to listen to. It's much easier to decide, "I'm in the mood for some Bob Dylan" and have several albums worth to shuffle through.
Also, I've mad tons of instances where I bought an album because I liked two songs, only to find that my favorite song on an album was a third that I'd never heard before. It'd just be nice if more bands could craft coherent albums with consistently good songs.
but didn't Microsoft say that Vista's successor is only 2 years away?
That's hilarious. Did they really say that? Isn't Vista's successor supposed to be an entirely new operating system built from the ground up to finally incorporate all those features they've been promising in each new OS since Windows 2000? Vista was supposed to be released in 2004, too, once upon a time.
No, there isn't a clear reason to upgrade to Vista until you're forced to. AFAICT, the new security won't really help most people very much, and the new interface will slow people down for a while and require training. Also, your IT staff will need to reformulate their imagining strategy and deal with new activation issues. The whole thing, AFAICT, is a net loss for most people to upgrade even if the upgrade itself is "free".
No, I'm not some ignorant guy spreading FUD. I'm an IT guy who was seriously considering the upgrade for my own company.
Most likely, they didn't set out to make an exclusive deal with someone. However, none of the carriers really wanted the iPhone. Now, they wouldn't mind the iPhone so much if Apple agreed to cripple it in all the ways each carrier asked, put the individual carrier's branding all over the thing, have the iPhone run the carrier's software, etc. However, Apple was insisting on doing things their own way, and that represents a threat to the carrier's control.
So exclusivity was probably one of the few bargaining chips Apple had to offer to get at&t to agree.
Meh... for some people it's about the event itself. It's exciting, and you have a little story to tell, "I waited in line for 8 hours and was one of the first to..." whatever. It's almost like going to Times Square to watch the ball drop-- it's not fun. Standing in Times Square shoulder to shoulder in the freezing cold pretty well sucks, but loads of people still do it.
Why do people go to concerts? You can just listen to the music at home. Why go to parties or events at all, since most of them don't really achieve anything? People just like being part of fun and exciting events for no reason other than they like to. It's not such a big deal.
I don't really agree with your assessment. The problem isn't that they don't know how to deal with customers. The problem is that they were too afraid that digital channels would encourage "piracy", and so rather than acting to build those distribution channels, they tried to cripple those plug those channels. They stopped people from distributing, made it unattractive with DRM, refused to make reasonable distribution deals, and then files lawsuits against anyone and everyone they could.
Essentially, instead of building a business in the current reality. Instead of using digital distribution in ways that would benefit their customers and would be natural to digital distribution, they tried to enforce their old obsolete business model in a world that didn't fit that model.
No, just about any phone that supports MP3 ringtones allows you to set any MP3 as a ringtone
First of all, there are plenty of phones that specifically disallow use of MP3s as ringtones. Second, what I said was that almost every ringtone sold in the US cuts in the carrier for a portion of the profit. If you make your own ringtone by ripping a CD, then that isn't a ringtone "sale".
But here's the key thing: If Apple wants to sell ringtones, then they're certainly going to have to make a deal with the labels. The record labels don't particularly want users to be able to make their own ringtones. Even if you already paid for the song, the music industry wants you to re-buy the same song for your ringtone.
Therefore, if Apple wants to sell ringtones on iTunes, the record labels may well have negotiated to prevent users from setting their non-ringtone songs as ringtones. I don't know if part of the at&t deal included the restriction and/or a cut of ringtone sales, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised.
Of course, it's speculation on my part, but well-informed speculation.
Anyone that knows Prince and the reason for his name change, knows he changed his name was because of the record labels. He did it in protest of their ability to control him and his music and his name.
I thought he wasn't allowed to use his name because his contract gave his label the marketing rights to the name "Prince". Or something like that.
In the public mind, digital music already is rapidly approaching zero economic value, and this scares the crap out of the Music Industry.
Of course, it's the music industries' own fault. Instead of building up a digital distribution business to add value to customers, they've set out to hurt customers and to cripple their own products, thereby decreasing the value of (non-free) legal copies.
If you want the "public mind" to value your service, make sure your service provides value to the public!
I suspect Verizon turned down the iPhone deal, as much as anything else, because Apple wasn't interested in selling Verizon's "V-Cast" crap and all that. In the mind of most carriers, buying a phone and a service contract isn't enough. They want you to buy ringtones and over-the-air music and all sorts of other services and products where they get a cut.
The fact is, most carriers would probably be weary of the iPhone because iPhone users will probably only pay the carrier for the phone/data service, and nothing more. AFAIK it's not even clear how ringtone purchases will work on the iPhone, and whether at&t will get a cut. As it is, carriers usually get something like 50% of the gross from ringtones, and believe it or not that's a lot of money.
Apple isn't making the phone unlocked partially because they want access to a cell network. I have an unlocked KRZR, and my cell company won't even let me buy a data plan without switching to a locked phone. Now how would Apple get a carrier to allow them to do things like their "visual voicemail" without striking a deal with a carrier?
Also, if Apple prevents you from using your own MP3s as ringtones, I bet it's because at&t and the labels wanted a cut. I don't know anything about this specific deal, but practically every ringtone sold in the US cuts the carrier in somehow, and being able to sell ringtones at all requires striking some sort of deal with record labels.
My hope, personally, isn't that Apple strikes a deal and unlocks the phone for use with other carriers. My hope is that, within the next 5-10 years, we have ubiquitous wireless internet access that uses standard protocols open to any device, and that's fast enough to use for reliable VOIP. At that point, Apple won't even have to deal with cell phone providers.
It sounds like they gave a number of people the same page with different logos. It doesn't sound to me like they gave the same people the same page with different logos. So they asked people to rate the reliability of the results, and people who were given the Google logo rated the same results better than people who were given a no-name logo.
This really is just an extension of Microsoft's business model.
They're going to release a product, leverage their OS monopoly to drive everyone else out of business, establish a monopoly, and then stop development?
Seriously, though, this would really piss me off if i were running Dell, HP, etc.
I do agree that the post rate for iPhone stories is getting absurd, though. Only 2 more days and the wait will be over... the wait for everyone to stop posting their random idiotic speculation about how good/bad/shiny it's going to be!
Yeah, but then you'll just get a lot of random idiotic reviews about how good/bad/shiny it is. And then a bunch of random idiotic speculation about how good/bad/shiny the software updates will be, and a bunch of random idiotic speculation about how good/bad/shiny the iPhone 2 will be.
Yeah, yeah, he was talking about the original ones, but for crying out loud, that was more than five years ago.
Yeah, and in general I don't see many people running computers that they bought 9 years ago (it released in 1998). I mean, what was the top speed back then, 300Mhz? When's the last time you've seen someone running a 300 Mhz machine? Still, I have seen these old machines sitting around, still being used. I certainly wouldn't call it a "failure".
Re:products did not end with a whimper
on
All Things iPhone
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· Score: 1
What's more, it's clear that Apple has had the iPhone in some level of development (however preliminary) for years. Jobs has said on many occasions, going back to the Newton's introduction, that the problem with PDAs were that the functionality should be built into phones. My guess is that Jobs had been eyeballing the iPod for possible integration into a PDA/Phone device since 2001, but that he didn't want to release an Apple-branded phone until the thing was damn near perfect.
I don't think the iPhone is being released now as some sudden desire to enter the cell phone business. I think Jobs has been planning this for a long time, and it's being released now only because the technology was there. You basically needed good touch-screens, a bright display, small components for cameras, phones, audio processing, and storage. 2 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to sell all these components with 8GB of storage into a case that small for as cheap as $600.
So really, the timing of the iPhone's release seems to be a confluence of events that made it possible to build the product roughly as Jobs envisioned it. Say what you will about Steve Jobs, that he's a egomaniacal asshole or whatever else, but you have to admit at least that he manages to drive Apple towards building good products. Also, he seems to get big companies to agree to deals that they wouldn't normally. First he gets the record labels to sell their products for cheaper than they wanted with less-restrictive DRM than he wanted. Next he gets one of the "big 4" labels to drop DRM. Now he gets at&t to allow virtually unfettered access to the Internet on a phone, as well as encouraging a non-network means of putting data on a phone (including ringtones!). If you don't understand how the iPhone flies in the face of conventional cellphone carrier business practices, then you don't understand the business very well.
So basically, although Apple allowed Motorola to sync with iTunes, the ROKR definitely wasn't what jobs had in mind.
It's not new. I know it always seems like things are getting worse as we put a smiley-face on the past. Remember the past...? When people were all civil and wise, and used good rational discussions to settle their disputes? Yeah, that never happened.
Rhetoric full of logical fallacies has been capturing the attention of the masses for as long as we have recorded history. Go back to Lincoln, back to the American Revolution, back through the Renaissance, past Caesar and Rome, back to Pericles, Plato, Homer. However far back you go, you'll find liars, crooks, and worst of all politicians using false rhetoric to sway people towards bad decisions.
Basically it boils down to the fact that terrestrial broadcasters pay no royalties whatsoever to the recording companies, but the recording industry wants to extort as much money as they can from the internet music business. Which, in turn, will most likely drive most internet radio out of the game.
Well (stating the obvious) I think the record companies are a bit torn and have a love-hate relationship with the internet. On the one hand, they love the idea of cutting distribution costs and creating new channels for advertising and distribution. On the other hand, the internet creates a decentralized means of marketing and distribution that they can't necessarily control or profit from. The internet threatens to make them less powerful and even perhaps obsolete.
Because of all this, they tend to want to invest in the Internet, but also they want to tear it apart and prevent people from using it. Normal broadcasters are different. They're mostly owned by a few big companies with tight business ties to the record industry. Regular broadcasters can be controlled and manipulated by their business interests, but internet broadcasters are able to be more independent. Driving Internet radio out of the game and forcing listeners back to normal radio is purposeful. Make it more expensive to run an Internet broadcast, and then only big media companies will be able to afford to run them. Control goes back to big media.
I seem to remember something said back in January about Cingular giving Apple "unprecedented" direct access to their network, and that 3rd party apps were a "security" concern. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds to me like they were concerned straight-off that if people were allowed to hack the iPhone, people might be able to do things with Cingular's network that Cingular didn't want.
Absolutely true. Tradition itself is not a sufficient reason not to do something. Like i said, some traditions are outdated. I don't think we disagree.
The reason I gave the story I did was that this idea (that out-of-date traditions might occasionally be discarded) tends to lead people to think that traditions and conventions are completely ineffective means to guide a person toward a healthy life. People use this sort of thinking to justify ignoring traditions as well as encouraging others to discard all conventions, and therefore rely solely on what you personally understand and think and feel. Often, this results in people discarding a lot of built-up wisdom and useful guides-to-life, and living in unhealthy ways.
That's a good story about how traditions can become out-of-date, but it doesn't follow that therefore traditions in general are bad. In fact, if you continued to harm the monkeys whenever one of them reached for a banana, they'd be pretty smart to continue to prevent other monkeys from taking the banana.
I'lll give you my own story:
A man lives in a village where his parents always told him "never eat blue berries, because they're bad luck!" They tell him, "Never walk under ladders, or you might drop dead!" One old man says, "Don't break mirrors, or the gods might curse you!" The man goes around asking where all these ideas come from, and no one gives him a satisfactory answer. They tell him, "That's just what my parents told me." or "That's what people have always said." So this man, fed up with superstition, goes and eats some of the blue berries, and they taste pretty good. He breaks a mirror in his bedroom and nothing bad happens. He walks under a ladder and startles the person working above him, and the worker drops his hammer, which knocks the man on his head.
He feels dazed, but he didn't drop dead. He says to himself, "Well, that last one wasn't so good, but it was my own fault. There's nothing supernatural about that!" He starts feeling queasy, runs home, and begins throwing up and having violent diarrhea. About three hours into his fit of vomiting, the man begins to question whether the berries might be poisonous. As the illness subsides, the man decides he should get some rest, so he heads into his bedroom. On the way to his bed, his foot is pierced by a small shard of glass, painted silver on one side.
Years later, the man has some children. He tells them, "Don't walk under ladders! Something bad might happen!" He says, "Don't break mirrors because it's bad luck." He tells his children, "Don't eat the blue berries because there's something evil about them."
I'm not suggesting we should never question tradition, but very often traditions have evolved over long periods of time, through a lot of human trial and error, to provide rules and guidelines that provide safer and healthier living. As our world changes, our traditions have to adapt. Different ways of life, different climates, and different contexts might call for different sets of traditions, and traditions can't simply be taken piecemeal out of context. Still, it's not always smart to dismiss something you don't understand only because it's "just a stupid tradition."
It's THE word to use in academia these days. Seriously. Talk to any grad student for half an hour and they'll use the word "hegemony" at least 5 times.
Mostly, it seems to have come from people talking about US hegemony is world politics and the world economy, but it seems to have become really popular among professors in general. Whenever I hear someone use it, I feel like they must have just discovered the word and think it'll make the seem smart if they use it a lot.
Well of course many businesses don't want to see the iPhone succeed. Think of Palm, Microsoft, RIM, Motorola, and any companies making smartphones or smartphone operating systems. Think of Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Now think of how many companies are related to these companies, or how many companies rely on these companies through some sort of contract or advertising.
So it should be obvious that there are loads of companies who don't want to see Apple and at&t succeed with this particular venture. But also it's not as though Apple and at&t are tiny little companies that have a hard time fending for themselves.
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I might be way in the minority, but I usually won't buy or keep single songs. It gets too hard to find while sorting through my entire music collection. I don't always like playing through my collection, and I don't like sorting through and finding individual songs that I like. If I have 5,000 to 10,000 songs in your collection, each by a different artist and on different albums, it overloads me a little when I try to decide what I want to listen to. It's much easier to decide, "I'm in the mood for some Bob Dylan" and have several albums worth to shuffle through.
Also, I've mad tons of instances where I bought an album because I liked two songs, only to find that my favorite song on an album was a third that I'd never heard before. It'd just be nice if more bands could craft coherent albums with consistently good songs.
but didn't Microsoft say that Vista's successor is only 2 years away?
That's hilarious. Did they really say that? Isn't Vista's successor supposed to be an entirely new operating system built from the ground up to finally incorporate all those features they've been promising in each new OS since Windows 2000? Vista was supposed to be released in 2004, too, once upon a time.
No, there isn't a clear reason to upgrade to Vista until you're forced to. AFAICT, the new security won't really help most people very much, and the new interface will slow people down for a while and require training. Also, your IT staff will need to reformulate their imagining strategy and deal with new activation issues. The whole thing, AFAICT, is a net loss for most people to upgrade even if the upgrade itself is "free".
No, I'm not some ignorant guy spreading FUD. I'm an IT guy who was seriously considering the upgrade for my own company.
Most likely, they didn't set out to make an exclusive deal with someone. However, none of the carriers really wanted the iPhone. Now, they wouldn't mind the iPhone so much if Apple agreed to cripple it in all the ways each carrier asked, put the individual carrier's branding all over the thing, have the iPhone run the carrier's software, etc. However, Apple was insisting on doing things their own way, and that represents a threat to the carrier's control.
So exclusivity was probably one of the few bargaining chips Apple had to offer to get at&t to agree.
Meh... for some people it's about the event itself. It's exciting, and you have a little story to tell, "I waited in line for 8 hours and was one of the first to..." whatever. It's almost like going to Times Square to watch the ball drop-- it's not fun. Standing in Times Square shoulder to shoulder in the freezing cold pretty well sucks, but loads of people still do it.
Why do people go to concerts? You can just listen to the music at home. Why go to parties or events at all, since most of them don't really achieve anything? People just like being part of fun and exciting events for no reason other than they like to. It's not such a big deal.
I don't really agree with your assessment. The problem isn't that they don't know how to deal with customers. The problem is that they were too afraid that digital channels would encourage "piracy", and so rather than acting to build those distribution channels, they tried to cripple those plug those channels. They stopped people from distributing, made it unattractive with DRM, refused to make reasonable distribution deals, and then files lawsuits against anyone and everyone they could.
Essentially, instead of building a business in the current reality. Instead of using digital distribution in ways that would benefit their customers and would be natural to digital distribution, they tried to enforce their old obsolete business model in a world that didn't fit that model.
No, just about any phone that supports MP3 ringtones allows you to set any MP3 as a ringtone
First of all, there are plenty of phones that specifically disallow use of MP3s as ringtones. Second, what I said was that almost every ringtone sold in the US cuts in the carrier for a portion of the profit. If you make your own ringtone by ripping a CD, then that isn't a ringtone "sale".
But here's the key thing: If Apple wants to sell ringtones, then they're certainly going to have to make a deal with the labels. The record labels don't particularly want users to be able to make their own ringtones. Even if you already paid for the song, the music industry wants you to re-buy the same song for your ringtone.
Therefore, if Apple wants to sell ringtones on iTunes, the record labels may well have negotiated to prevent users from setting their non-ringtone songs as ringtones. I don't know if part of the at&t deal included the restriction and/or a cut of ringtone sales, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised.
Of course, it's speculation on my part, but well-informed speculation.
Anyone that knows Prince and the reason for his name change, knows he changed his name was because of the record labels. He did it in protest of their ability to control him and his music and his name.
I thought he wasn't allowed to use his name because his contract gave his label the marketing rights to the name "Prince". Or something like that.
Ha! Good point. Even when he was "formally known as Prince", he was still known as "Prince". He just wasn't officially allowed to use the name.
In the public mind, digital music already is rapidly approaching zero economic value, and this scares the crap out of the Music Industry.
Of course, it's the music industries' own fault. Instead of building up a digital distribution business to add value to customers, they've set out to hurt customers and to cripple their own products, thereby decreasing the value of (non-free) legal copies.
If you want the "public mind" to value your service, make sure your service provides value to the public!
I suspect Verizon turned down the iPhone deal, as much as anything else, because Apple wasn't interested in selling Verizon's "V-Cast" crap and all that. In the mind of most carriers, buying a phone and a service contract isn't enough. They want you to buy ringtones and over-the-air music and all sorts of other services and products where they get a cut.
The fact is, most carriers would probably be weary of the iPhone because iPhone users will probably only pay the carrier for the phone/data service, and nothing more. AFAIK it's not even clear how ringtone purchases will work on the iPhone, and whether at&t will get a cut. As it is, carriers usually get something like 50% of the gross from ringtones, and believe it or not that's a lot of money.
Apple isn't making the phone unlocked partially because they want access to a cell network. I have an unlocked KRZR, and my cell company won't even let me buy a data plan without switching to a locked phone. Now how would Apple get a carrier to allow them to do things like their "visual voicemail" without striking a deal with a carrier?
Also, if Apple prevents you from using your own MP3s as ringtones, I bet it's because at&t and the labels wanted a cut. I don't know anything about this specific deal, but practically every ringtone sold in the US cuts the carrier in somehow, and being able to sell ringtones at all requires striking some sort of deal with record labels.
My hope, personally, isn't that Apple strikes a deal and unlocks the phone for use with other carriers. My hope is that, within the next 5-10 years, we have ubiquitous wireless internet access that uses standard protocols open to any device, and that's fast enough to use for reliable VOIP. At that point, Apple won't even have to deal with cell phone providers.
It sounds like they gave a number of people the same page with different logos. It doesn't sound to me like they gave the same people the same page with different logos. So they asked people to rate the reliability of the results, and people who were given the Google logo rated the same results better than people who were given a no-name logo.
I guess. That was my reading.
It was the same results with the same layout, only the logo at the top changed.
This really is just an extension of Microsoft's business model.
They're going to release a product, leverage their OS monopoly to drive everyone else out of business, establish a monopoly, and then stop development?
Seriously, though, this would really piss me off if i were running Dell, HP, etc.
I do agree that the post rate for iPhone stories is getting absurd, though. Only 2 more days and the wait will be over... the wait for everyone to stop posting their random idiotic speculation about how good/bad/shiny it's going to be!
Yeah, but then you'll just get a lot of random idiotic reviews about how good/bad/shiny it is. And then a bunch of random idiotic speculation about how good/bad/shiny the software updates will be, and a bunch of random idiotic speculation about how good/bad/shiny the iPhone 2 will be.
Yeah, yeah, he was talking about the original ones, but for crying out loud, that was more than five years ago.
Yeah, and in general I don't see many people running computers that they bought 9 years ago (it released in 1998). I mean, what was the top speed back then, 300Mhz? When's the last time you've seen someone running a 300 Mhz machine? Still, I have seen these old machines sitting around, still being used. I certainly wouldn't call it a "failure".
What's more, it's clear that Apple has had the iPhone in some level of development (however preliminary) for years. Jobs has said on many occasions, going back to the Newton's introduction, that the problem with PDAs were that the functionality should be built into phones. My guess is that Jobs had been eyeballing the iPod for possible integration into a PDA/Phone device since 2001, but that he didn't want to release an Apple-branded phone until the thing was damn near perfect.
I don't think the iPhone is being released now as some sudden desire to enter the cell phone business. I think Jobs has been planning this for a long time, and it's being released now only because the technology was there. You basically needed good touch-screens, a bright display, small components for cameras, phones, audio processing, and storage. 2 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to sell all these components with 8GB of storage into a case that small for as cheap as $600.
So really, the timing of the iPhone's release seems to be a confluence of events that made it possible to build the product roughly as Jobs envisioned it. Say what you will about Steve Jobs, that he's a egomaniacal asshole or whatever else, but you have to admit at least that he manages to drive Apple towards building good products. Also, he seems to get big companies to agree to deals that they wouldn't normally. First he gets the record labels to sell their products for cheaper than they wanted with less-restrictive DRM than he wanted. Next he gets one of the "big 4" labels to drop DRM. Now he gets at&t to allow virtually unfettered access to the Internet on a phone, as well as encouraging a non-network means of putting data on a phone (including ringtones!). If you don't understand how the iPhone flies in the face of conventional cellphone carrier business practices, then you don't understand the business very well.
So basically, although Apple allowed Motorola to sync with iTunes, the ROKR definitely wasn't what jobs had in mind.
It's not new. I know it always seems like things are getting worse as we put a smiley-face on the past. Remember the past...? When people were all civil and wise, and used good rational discussions to settle their disputes? Yeah, that never happened.
Rhetoric full of logical fallacies has been capturing the attention of the masses for as long as we have recorded history. Go back to Lincoln, back to the American Revolution, back through the Renaissance, past Caesar and Rome, back to Pericles, Plato, Homer. However far back you go, you'll find liars, crooks, and worst of all politicians using false rhetoric to sway people towards bad decisions.
Basically it boils down to the fact that terrestrial broadcasters pay no royalties whatsoever to the recording companies, but the recording industry wants to extort as much money as they can from the internet music business. Which, in turn, will most likely drive most internet radio out of the game.
Well (stating the obvious) I think the record companies are a bit torn and have a love-hate relationship with the internet. On the one hand, they love the idea of cutting distribution costs and creating new channels for advertising and distribution. On the other hand, the internet creates a decentralized means of marketing and distribution that they can't necessarily control or profit from. The internet threatens to make them less powerful and even perhaps obsolete.
Because of all this, they tend to want to invest in the Internet, but also they want to tear it apart and prevent people from using it. Normal broadcasters are different. They're mostly owned by a few big companies with tight business ties to the record industry. Regular broadcasters can be controlled and manipulated by their business interests, but internet broadcasters are able to be more independent. Driving Internet radio out of the game and forcing listeners back to normal radio is purposeful. Make it more expensive to run an Internet broadcast, and then only big media companies will be able to afford to run them. Control goes back to big media.
Sounds about right.
I seem to remember something said back in January about Cingular giving Apple "unprecedented" direct access to their network, and that 3rd party apps were a "security" concern. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds to me like they were concerned straight-off that if people were allowed to hack the iPhone, people might be able to do things with Cingular's network that Cingular didn't want.
Absolutely true. Tradition itself is not a sufficient reason not to do something. Like i said, some traditions are outdated. I don't think we disagree.
The reason I gave the story I did was that this idea (that out-of-date traditions might occasionally be discarded) tends to lead people to think that traditions and conventions are completely ineffective means to guide a person toward a healthy life. People use this sort of thinking to justify ignoring traditions as well as encouraging others to discard all conventions, and therefore rely solely on what you personally understand and think and feel. Often, this results in people discarding a lot of built-up wisdom and useful guides-to-life, and living in unhealthy ways.
That's a good story about how traditions can become out-of-date, but it doesn't follow that therefore traditions in general are bad. In fact, if you continued to harm the monkeys whenever one of them reached for a banana, they'd be pretty smart to continue to prevent other monkeys from taking the banana.
I'lll give you my own story:
I'm not suggesting we should never question tradition, but very often traditions have evolved over long periods of time, through a lot of human trial and error, to provide rules and guidelines that provide safer and healthier living. As our world changes, our traditions have to adapt. Different ways of life, different climates, and different contexts might call for different sets of traditions, and traditions can't simply be taken piecemeal out of context. Still, it's not always smart to dismiss something you don't understand only because it's "just a stupid tradition."
I can live with those sorts of "enhancements", just so long as they don't put a CGI jamaican frog-man into any of the scenes.
It's THE word to use in academia these days. Seriously. Talk to any grad student for half an hour and they'll use the word "hegemony" at least 5 times.
Mostly, it seems to have come from people talking about US hegemony is world politics and the world economy, but it seems to have become really popular among professors in general. Whenever I hear someone use it, I feel like they must have just discovered the word and think it'll make the seem smart if they use it a lot.
Well of course many businesses don't want to see the iPhone succeed. Think of Palm, Microsoft, RIM, Motorola, and any companies making smartphones or smartphone operating systems. Think of Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Now think of how many companies are related to these companies, or how many companies rely on these companies through some sort of contract or advertising.
So it should be obvious that there are loads of companies who don't want to see Apple and at&t succeed with this particular venture. But also it's not as though Apple and at&t are tiny little companies that have a hard time fending for themselves.