"Look fine" isn't really what people are talking about. It's an issue of conventional use of javascript behaviors, specifically the behaviors which don't work well on touch-screens.
The reason this might be an issue is that general browsing web applications on touch-screen devices isn't very mainstream at the moment (no, it isn't. I understand that you've been browsing the internet on your Palm for years, but you're a geek!), and if the iPhone ends up being popular, that might change.
It's not about standards. The iPhone uses Safari, which is a very standards-compliant browser. The question seems to be more regarding the choice of using flashy little animations and such on mouseover events, which may not show up on a device which doesn't use a mouse as a pointing device.
Even if they were distributing, wouldn't that only require that they make the source available on request? IIRC, it doesn't actually require that the source code be hosted by you at all time, but it's sufficient if you note that it's licensed under the GPL and offer to make code available upon request.
Either way, it would be relatively small potatoes unless they were making modifications and the source code were not available elsewhere. As it is, I don't see why Microsoft couldn't provide an Ubuntu mirror for binaries without providing a mirror for source. Or am I wrong?
AT+T already has almost 60M subscribers. Apple has set a target of selling 10M iphones in 2008. They coupld probably do that within the AT+T client base without getting anyone to switch.
I agree with most of what you say, except I don't think Apple will sell 1/6th of current at&t/Cingular customers. I think it'll take converts, but they'll get converts too. I'm not sure they'll hit their 10M mark, but I don't think they'll flop either.
I'm in favor of choice. I'm just tired of all the FUD from the anti-Apple crowd. "I need lossless!" and "I don't want to use Apple's proprietary format!" and "Apple is watermarking the audio! That's the same as DRM!"
I don't really care whether you buy shit from Apple, but right now Apple has the best possibility of convincing the rest of the big 4 to drop DRM. If Apple is successful, we're more likely to end up with more choice.
And honestly, seriously, do a blind test with the nicest stereo equipment you want, and I doubt you can hear the difference between 256kbps AAC and FLAC. I help run a media processing company, and even the real audiophile musicians who think they can tell the difference can't tell the difference.
I don't care about download time. However, if I have a lossless original, I can encode a high bitrate copy for home listening, and a lower bitrate one for my iPod.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is that "high bitrate copy for home listening" isn't going to need to be more than 256kbps, and if you wanted to transcode the 256kbps AAC to 128kbps AAC, it won't sound much different from encoding the 128 from lossless. Unless you're really going to process the sound a lot (like remastering and crap), the 256kbps AAC is going to be good enough to consider it "lossless" for most practical purposes. Distributing in ALE or FLAC would generally be a waste of bandwidth and disk space.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
You really think you can tell the difference between CD-quality and 256kbps AAC? Doubtful. I call BS. And even if you can tell the difference, and the difference is obvious enough to you that you care, you're one in a billion. For pretty much everyone, 256kbps is near enough to lossless that you could treat it as lossless (even transcode it to another format) and never be able to tell the difference.
And for that miniscule nearly-undetectable drop in quality, you're cutting your download time, increasing the amount of songs you can hold on your mp3 player, and maybe even increasing battery time.
But really, the value of iTunes is the convenience and cleanliness, and there's no reason someone could not make a similar, ad-free thing but for file sharing writ large.
No, there isn't, except for the fact that it would require a fairly large investment, it would meaning risking a lawsuit from the RIAA, and unless you fill it with ads there's no profit in it. Who's going to do that?
Personally, I think iTunes (DRM-less) is the exact right model for legal online music sales. The interface is clean, the selection is large, the quality of the songs is decent, and it's easy to find what you're looking for. On top of all that, the price is low enough that many people will actually pay for the convenience of near-instant decent-quality digital music with a large selection through a clean interface and have it all be *legal*. In other words, it's not the music alone that makes it worth $1/song $10/album-- part of what people are paying for is *convenience*.
And it's been demonstrated time and again that people will pay for convenience. Even the success of higher-priced DRM-free music depends on people paying in order to avoid the hassle of DRM.
Oh geeze, please stop spreading FUD about having the e-mail address in the song. It's a fricken *TAG*. It'd be like if they sold MP3s and put "Purchased on iTunes by yourname@domain.com" in the ID3 tag. Stop whining already!
Same with techonology and innovation: who cares how complex, as long as the f***ing job gets done.
Excellent point. Often people focus on the novelty of solutions and forget to ask after the efficacy of the solutions. For example, it's been a big fad to come up with ways to do everything with computers without necessarily thinking through all the details of how well the old solutions work. People say, "Oh, well in the future we can replace teachers with computers!" and they sometimes fail to recognize that being taught by another person is part of the point. That's not to say that computers can't be useful in education, but sometimes the old ways are best.
It's not just an issue of technology, either. Sometimes we throw out old traditions because they're "old and stupid" without considering that these traditions might serve a purpose. Sometimes we've come up with better ways to accomplish the same purpose, and sometimes enough has changed that those purposes don't need to be served anymore. Still, it's worth considering that often, when we have an old established ways of doing things, we settled on doing things that way for a good reason. That reason might just not exist anymore.
In this analogy, QM would be like sitting inside each car tracking who is having what conversation, who is on their cellphone, whether their hands are on the gearshift or on their girlfriend's boob, etc. It's a whole other level that you can't see from the side of the road.
Almost. It'd be a little more like trying to measure whether the driver's hand is on the gearshift or his girlfriend's boob or the steering wheel-- except that you're blind and the only way to know is to grab the guy and see where his hands are, and every time you touch him he gets freaked out and moves his hand. You can tell where is hand was, but measuring the location of his hands move them so you can't really know where they are or where they'll be at any given moment.
It really isn't an issue of "free will". Whether we have "free will" or not, the act of our measuring changes things. Perhaps a better way of showing the problem is to point out that the way we measure things is always to hit it with something. Imagine measuring the location of a puck on an air-hockey table, but doing this in the dark with an air-hockey paddle. When you hit it, you know where it is, but now you've knocked it someplace else.
Now, instead you can use a flashlight and look on the air-hockey table, and but you aren't really doing something different. You're still hitting it with something, but this time light. The light bounces off, and since the light has no mass, the energy transfered to the puck isn't enough to move it. However, if the puck were very small and had very little mass, even the light could move the puck. If the puck were small enough, anything you could bounce off the puck (including light) to see where it is would move the puck enough that any attempt to measure the puck would necessarily move the puck. This would put a lot of restrictions on how you could measure the puck, and once you've measured it, what you could say about it.
That's kind of (sort of) the problem with quantum mechanics. If you get small enough, there's no way to measure things without changing them, and it isn't even clear what you're measuring anymore. It may even be that putting the energy in to measure something creates the thing you've measured. The particle might not even be in the location you're measuring if not for the fact that you've measured.
I don't know about all that, but I gathered the advantage of the silicon balls was that they could give a number of atoms in the sphere. If you base the kilogram on an arbitrary piece of silicon (whatever material you please) and you lose that silicon, then you can't easily replicate that weight again. However, if we posit that the weight of silicon atoms don't change, and you can measure the number of atoms in a silicon sphere, then we'd be able to say, "1 kg = x silicon atoms". Even if you lose that chunk, you can always make a new one.
Of course, I'm not sure I understand how they count the atoms. I'm also not sure how different isotopes of silicon are accounted for. (do they separating out one isotope and use it to make the sphere? Or are they assuming a certain mixture of specific isotopes?) But it seems like the big idea is to give a definition of the kilogram that references a more universal constant that could be replicated.
That's only if the software/media industries get their way. Hopefully, little kids in the future will be confused at how, just 100 years ago, old ladies and 10 year-olds used to get arrested for using software (or listening to music) that they hadn't purchased.
What I always find funny about this picture is that it immediately makes me think, "How was that little creep the one in charge?" I mean, he looks like he's 12 years old... and half-Gollum. If that guy told you what to do, would you listen?
I don't think the purpose in all these hologram labels is to prevent common users from pirating. The real purpose is so that, if Microsoft finds a cache of discs in China (or wherever), they can identify them as fake discs or legitimate discs.
Ok, people are giving snarky answers here, but I'll try to give you a more straight answer.
The only way we have to keep a standard unit is to have an object with that unit and call that the standard. Let's say you were building some sort of a scale that would measure weight in kilograms; you'd have to calibrate it first. This means that you'd have to find an existing weight that was one kilogram, put it on the scale, and mark that this weight is a kilogram. But then how do you find a 1 kilogram weight? You have to measure it on some scale that's already calibrated correctly. This chain continues, and has to end somewhere.
So the two questions I anticipate are:
why not keep an already calibrated scale?
why do we need a particular weight stored somewhere, instead of continually basing the measurement on kilograms measured on other scales?
To answer the first question, a scale would be harder to maintain accurately. It could break, and calibrations don't hold forever. You'd have to re-calibrate it every so often, and how do you do that without an object known to be exactly 1kg?
The answer to the second question (which I imagine might have been your question all along) is a little more complicated. Let's imagine that we have no exact 1kg object stored anywhere that we use as the standard. So one guy in a lab is using an iron ball as his 1kg weight, calibrating scales with it, and selling scales to others. The iron ball slowly rusts over time, and the weight of the ball changes a little. Someone takes one of the scales calibrated with the rusty balls and does the same thing, but this time with his own hunk of iron, but the environmental conditions in this guy's lab aren't as controlled, and he tends to get water condensation on his iron ball, meaning it rusts faster and each calibration varies depending on how much water has collected.
Now, imagine it keeps on like this for 75 years, with different guys selling scales, getting their original measure from someone else, and then using their less-than-perfect means to continue calibrating and making scales. After 75 years, there are some drastically different "kilograms" floating around I buy a scale, measure out 1 kilogram, take it to a different scale and get 1.5 kilograms, while another says.75 kilograms. In this case, who's kilogram is "correct"? When the issue was raised, people would say, "Oh, if only we had a standard "kilogram" to compare them to!"
And so we have someone keep a physical reference object under very controlled conditions and of materials that will prevent corrosion or other corruption to the material.
Its not about a data plan, the story is that in order to use WIFI on your phone(a non AT&T network feature), you will be forced to sign up for an expensive data plan.
But what if they said instead that, "In order to buy the phone, you must buy the data plan. WiFi comes with the iPhone, but the iPhone isn't available without the data plan."
Personally, given how vague and anonymous the claim is that "One anonymous AT&T store manager said users will get their WiFi...when they sign a contract locking them into a data plan and EDGE," I'm not sure how to take that. It might even mean that at&t is going to provide WiFi service as part of a package deal with EDGE service.
In other words, until you know what this claim means and whether it's true, there's nothing to complain about.
You raise a lot of issues with Outlook, and your complaints are valid. However, no one has bothered to come up with something better. You say there are far better ways to organize your day, and you're right. On the other hand, when you're dealing with how most companies use Outlook, it isn't just about you organizing *your* day, but loads of people organizing their own days and other people's days.
Maybe a good manager could do better with a handwritten calendar, but once a company gets used to using Outlook, good luck getting them to drop it.
It's funny to me because I always hear people claim that it wouldn't be too hard to replicate, but nobody seems to be making headway. People actually use the webmail, shared folders, "send as" rights delegation (or whatever it's called), active directory integration, push to mobile devices, meeting invites, etc. Exchange and Outlook might "suck ass", but they still achieve all these features out of the box with minimal configuration. This is one case where Microsoft is actually serving the business needs of their customers.
And they run Exchange for somewhat dodgier reasons
It may be hard to imagine, but there's a very clear reason why people use the Exchange/Outlook combination: nothing else has done such a good job at integrating contacts, e-mail, and calendars. Seriously, I've talked to a lot of Linux guys and OSS advocates who cannot grasp the value in it, but it really ends up being very useful and functional. For all the criticisms you might have of Microsoft, their products in general, and even Exchange in particular, it's difficult to find a client/server package that can replace Outlook/Exchange.
In fact, I would go as far as to place "insufficient Outlook/Exchange replacements" as one of the big stumbling blocks for Linux/OOo migration. Evolution does a decent job, but still not perfect, and is only available for Linux. A Windows version has been in the works for some time, but AFAIK it's not even in beta yet.
It's not even that Outlook or Exchange is perfect. Certainly not. There's lots of room for improvement, but neither the OSS community nor any other company is really filling the need.
And Google's a monopoly on their search engine, Nintendo has a monopoly on their own system, and Toyota has a monopoly on its own cars. Wait... so what are we saying?
ANYway, my point is that Google would have a much harder time making a case that Apple should be prevented from bundling spotlight because they haven't previously been found to have engaged in Anti-competitive behavior (found guilty in court).
Slashdot Mirror
"Look fine" isn't really what people are talking about. It's an issue of conventional use of javascript behaviors, specifically the behaviors which don't work well on touch-screens.
The reason this might be an issue is that general browsing web applications on touch-screen devices isn't very mainstream at the moment (no, it isn't. I understand that you've been browsing the internet on your Palm for years, but you're a geek!), and if the iPhone ends up being popular, that might change.
It's not about standards. The iPhone uses Safari, which is a very standards-compliant browser. The question seems to be more regarding the choice of using flashy little animations and such on mouseover events, which may not show up on a device which doesn't use a mouse as a pointing device.
Even if they were distributing, wouldn't that only require that they make the source available on request? IIRC, it doesn't actually require that the source code be hosted by you at all time, but it's sufficient if you note that it's licensed under the GPL and offer to make code available upon request.
Either way, it would be relatively small potatoes unless they were making modifications and the source code were not available elsewhere. As it is, I don't see why Microsoft couldn't provide an Ubuntu mirror for binaries without providing a mirror for source. Or am I wrong?
AT+T already has almost 60M subscribers. Apple has set a target of selling 10M iphones in 2008. They coupld probably do that within the AT+T client base without getting anyone to switch. I agree with most of what you say, except I don't think Apple will sell 1/6th of current at&t/Cingular customers. I think it'll take converts, but they'll get converts too. I'm not sure they'll hit their 10M mark, but I don't think they'll flop either.
I'm in favor of choice. I'm just tired of all the FUD from the anti-Apple crowd. "I need lossless!" and "I don't want to use Apple's proprietary format!" and "Apple is watermarking the audio! That's the same as DRM!"
I don't really care whether you buy shit from Apple, but right now Apple has the best possibility of convincing the rest of the big 4 to drop DRM. If Apple is successful, we're more likely to end up with more choice.
And honestly, seriously, do a blind test with the nicest stereo equipment you want, and I doubt you can hear the difference between 256kbps AAC and FLAC. I help run a media processing company, and even the real audiophile musicians who think they can tell the difference can't tell the difference.
I don't care about download time. However, if I have a lossless original, I can encode a high bitrate copy for home listening, and a lower bitrate one for my iPod.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is that "high bitrate copy for home listening" isn't going to need to be more than 256kbps, and if you wanted to transcode the 256kbps AAC to 128kbps AAC, it won't sound much different from encoding the 128 from lossless. Unless you're really going to process the sound a lot (like remastering and crap), the 256kbps AAC is going to be good enough to consider it "lossless" for most practical purposes. Distributing in ALE or FLAC would generally be a waste of bandwidth and disk space.
Sell the songs in CD (or better) lossless format, with no DRM, and then I'll be a customer!!!
You really think you can tell the difference between CD-quality and 256kbps AAC? Doubtful. I call BS. And even if you can tell the difference, and the difference is obvious enough to you that you care, you're one in a billion. For pretty much everyone, 256kbps is near enough to lossless that you could treat it as lossless (even transcode it to another format) and never be able to tell the difference.
And for that miniscule nearly-undetectable drop in quality, you're cutting your download time, increasing the amount of songs you can hold on your mp3 player, and maybe even increasing battery time.
But really, the value of iTunes is the convenience and cleanliness, and there's no reason someone could not make a similar, ad-free thing but for file sharing writ large.
No, there isn't, except for the fact that it would require a fairly large investment, it would meaning risking a lawsuit from the RIAA, and unless you fill it with ads there's no profit in it. Who's going to do that?
Personally, I think iTunes (DRM-less) is the exact right model for legal online music sales. The interface is clean, the selection is large, the quality of the songs is decent, and it's easy to find what you're looking for. On top of all that, the price is low enough that many people will actually pay for the convenience of near-instant decent-quality digital music with a large selection through a clean interface and have it all be *legal*. In other words, it's not the music alone that makes it worth $1/song $10/album-- part of what people are paying for is *convenience*.
And it's been demonstrated time and again that people will pay for convenience. Even the success of higher-priced DRM-free music depends on people paying in order to avoid the hassle of DRM.
Oh geeze, please stop spreading FUD about having the e-mail address in the song. It's a fricken *TAG*. It'd be like if they sold MP3s and put "Purchased on iTunes by yourname@domain.com" in the ID3 tag. Stop whining already!
Same with techonology and innovation: who cares how complex, as long as the f***ing job gets done.
Excellent point. Often people focus on the novelty of solutions and forget to ask after the efficacy of the solutions. For example, it's been a big fad to come up with ways to do everything with computers without necessarily thinking through all the details of how well the old solutions work. People say, "Oh, well in the future we can replace teachers with computers!" and they sometimes fail to recognize that being taught by another person is part of the point. That's not to say that computers can't be useful in education, but sometimes the old ways are best.
It's not just an issue of technology, either. Sometimes we throw out old traditions because they're "old and stupid" without considering that these traditions might serve a purpose. Sometimes we've come up with better ways to accomplish the same purpose, and sometimes enough has changed that those purposes don't need to be served anymore. Still, it's worth considering that often, when we have an old established ways of doing things, we settled on doing things that way for a good reason. That reason might just not exist anymore.
In this analogy, QM would be like sitting inside each car tracking who is having what conversation, who is on their cellphone, whether their hands are on the gearshift or on their girlfriend's boob, etc. It's a whole other level that you can't see from the side of the road.
Almost. It'd be a little more like trying to measure whether the driver's hand is on the gearshift or his girlfriend's boob or the steering wheel-- except that you're blind and the only way to know is to grab the guy and see where his hands are, and every time you touch him he gets freaked out and moves his hand. You can tell where is hand was, but measuring the location of his hands move them so you can't really know where they are or where they'll be at any given moment.
It really isn't an issue of "free will". Whether we have "free will" or not, the act of our measuring changes things. Perhaps a better way of showing the problem is to point out that the way we measure things is always to hit it with something. Imagine measuring the location of a puck on an air-hockey table, but doing this in the dark with an air-hockey paddle. When you hit it, you know where it is, but now you've knocked it someplace else.
Now, instead you can use a flashlight and look on the air-hockey table, and but you aren't really doing something different. You're still hitting it with something, but this time light. The light bounces off, and since the light has no mass, the energy transfered to the puck isn't enough to move it. However, if the puck were very small and had very little mass, even the light could move the puck. If the puck were small enough, anything you could bounce off the puck (including light) to see where it is would move the puck enough that any attempt to measure the puck would necessarily move the puck. This would put a lot of restrictions on how you could measure the puck, and once you've measured it, what you could say about it.
That's kind of (sort of) the problem with quantum mechanics. If you get small enough, there's no way to measure things without changing them, and it isn't even clear what you're measuring anymore. It may even be that putting the energy in to measure something creates the thing you've measured. The particle might not even be in the location you're measuring if not for the fact that you've measured.
It seems that this new solution is completely disregarding Hawking's proposal and replacing it with a new, stretched solution.
Don't worry. If there's no information loss in the universe, then Hawking's proposal won't disappear.
20 meg hard drive doesn't sound that old. Hell, my second computer only had a 10 meg hard drive. My first one didn't even have a hard drive.
And I'm sure I'll be out-geeked here by some guy who's first computer used punch-cards.
I don't know about all that, but I gathered the advantage of the silicon balls was that they could give a number of atoms in the sphere. If you base the kilogram on an arbitrary piece of silicon (whatever material you please) and you lose that silicon, then you can't easily replicate that weight again. However, if we posit that the weight of silicon atoms don't change, and you can measure the number of atoms in a silicon sphere, then we'd be able to say, "1 kg = x silicon atoms". Even if you lose that chunk, you can always make a new one.
Of course, I'm not sure I understand how they count the atoms. I'm also not sure how different isotopes of silicon are accounted for. (do they separating out one isotope and use it to make the sphere? Or are they assuming a certain mixture of specific isotopes?) But it seems like the big idea is to give a definition of the kilogram that references a more universal constant that could be replicated.
That's only if the software/media industries get their way. Hopefully, little kids in the future will be confused at how, just 100 years ago, old ladies and 10 year-olds used to get arrested for using software (or listening to music) that they hadn't purchased.
What I always find funny about this picture is that it immediately makes me think, "How was that little creep the one in charge?" I mean, he looks like he's 12 years old... and half-Gollum. If that guy told you what to do, would you listen?
I don't think the purpose in all these hologram labels is to prevent common users from pirating. The real purpose is so that, if Microsoft finds a cache of discs in China (or wherever), they can identify them as fake discs or legitimate discs.
???
Is a perfect sphere of silicon even possible? I heard silicon atoms are lumpy.
Ok, people are giving snarky answers here, but I'll try to give you a more straight answer.
The only way we have to keep a standard unit is to have an object with that unit and call that the standard. Let's say you were building some sort of a scale that would measure weight in kilograms; you'd have to calibrate it first. This means that you'd have to find an existing weight that was one kilogram, put it on the scale, and mark that this weight is a kilogram. But then how do you find a 1 kilogram weight? You have to measure it on some scale that's already calibrated correctly. This chain continues, and has to end somewhere.
So the two questions I anticipate are:
To answer the first question, a scale would be harder to maintain accurately. It could break, and calibrations don't hold forever. You'd have to re-calibrate it every so often, and how do you do that without an object known to be exactly 1kg?
The answer to the second question (which I imagine might have been your question all along) is a little more complicated. Let's imagine that we have no exact 1kg object stored anywhere that we use as the standard. So one guy in a lab is using an iron ball as his 1kg weight, calibrating scales with it, and selling scales to others. The iron ball slowly rusts over time, and the weight of the ball changes a little. Someone takes one of the scales calibrated with the rusty balls and does the same thing, but this time with his own hunk of iron, but the environmental conditions in this guy's lab aren't as controlled, and he tends to get water condensation on his iron ball, meaning it rusts faster and each calibration varies depending on how much water has collected.
Now, imagine it keeps on like this for 75 years, with different guys selling scales, getting their original measure from someone else, and then using their less-than-perfect means to continue calibrating and making scales. After 75 years, there are some drastically different "kilograms" floating around I buy a scale, measure out 1 kilogram, take it to a different scale and get 1.5 kilograms, while another says .75 kilograms. In this case, who's kilogram is "correct"? When the issue was raised, people would say, "Oh, if only we had a standard "kilogram" to compare them to!"
And so we have someone keep a physical reference object under very controlled conditions and of materials that will prevent corrosion or other corruption to the material.
Its not about a data plan, the story is that in order to use WIFI on your phone(a non AT&T network feature), you will be forced to sign up for an expensive data plan.
But what if they said instead that, "In order to buy the phone, you must buy the data plan. WiFi comes with the iPhone, but the iPhone isn't available without the data plan."
Personally, given how vague and anonymous the claim is that "One anonymous AT&T store manager said users will get their WiFi...when they sign a contract locking them into a data plan and EDGE," I'm not sure how to take that. It might even mean that at&t is going to provide WiFi service as part of a package deal with EDGE service.
In other words, until you know what this claim means and whether it's true, there's nothing to complain about.
You raise a lot of issues with Outlook, and your complaints are valid. However, no one has bothered to come up with something better. You say there are far better ways to organize your day, and you're right. On the other hand, when you're dealing with how most companies use Outlook, it isn't just about you organizing *your* day, but loads of people organizing their own days and other people's days.
Maybe a good manager could do better with a handwritten calendar, but once a company gets used to using Outlook, good luck getting them to drop it.
It's funny to me because I always hear people claim that it wouldn't be too hard to replicate, but nobody seems to be making headway. People actually use the webmail, shared folders, "send as" rights delegation (or whatever it's called), active directory integration, push to mobile devices, meeting invites, etc. Exchange and Outlook might "suck ass", but they still achieve all these features out of the box with minimal configuration. This is one case where Microsoft is actually serving the business needs of their customers.
And they run Exchange for somewhat dodgier reasons
It may be hard to imagine, but there's a very clear reason why people use the Exchange/Outlook combination: nothing else has done such a good job at integrating contacts, e-mail, and calendars. Seriously, I've talked to a lot of Linux guys and OSS advocates who cannot grasp the value in it, but it really ends up being very useful and functional. For all the criticisms you might have of Microsoft, their products in general, and even Exchange in particular, it's difficult to find a client/server package that can replace Outlook/Exchange.
In fact, I would go as far as to place "insufficient Outlook/Exchange replacements" as one of the big stumbling blocks for Linux/OOo migration. Evolution does a decent job, but still not perfect, and is only available for Linux. A Windows version has been in the works for some time, but AFAIK it's not even in beta yet.
It's not even that Outlook or Exchange is perfect. Certainly not. There's lots of room for improvement, but neither the OSS community nor any other company is really filling the need.
Apple is certainly a monopoly on its own systems.
And Google's a monopoly on their search engine, Nintendo has a monopoly on their own system, and Toyota has a monopoly on its own cars. Wait... so what are we saying?
ANYway, my point is that Google would have a much harder time making a case that Apple should be prevented from bundling spotlight because they haven't previously been found to have engaged in Anti-competitive behavior (found guilty in court).