Basically, everything being taught now comes from a point of view of no judgement calls. If there is something open to interpretation, either it's not taught, or it's taught from a historical context as opposed to the 'meaning' or 'message' of said lesson.
I, personally, view this as the principle problem in public edutainment. Schools are viewed by the general population as having the first priority of "meeting the needs of the students", or something along those lines. They're always talking about building "high self-esteem" or providing a ground for enlightenment. Though I don't think this is "bad", it's the wrong focus and the wrong approach.
First things first. Public schools first priority should be to teach children how to be "good citizens"-- and no, I don't mean in any fascist sense of "good citizen". Upon completion of twelfth grade, kids should know, at least, the laws they're expected to follow, and the ideals behind these laws. They should be taught about the system of self-government into which they'll be entering, and how to navigate it. The other subjects, such as math, reading, writing, and science, students should know well enough to take care of their own finances, read street signs, write a letter, and not do stupid things like cut into a car battery with a chain-saw.
I'm certainly not saying education should *stop* there, but the priority of public schools should be to make sure that everyone graduating is a functional citizen capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of the citizenry. Meet that level of education first. Otherwise, we're doing children a disservice, by expecting them to be good citizens without providing them the means.
but other than office, as I mentioned, how many people use IE or WMP on the mac?
True, IE is a bit dead on the Mac. Some people still use it, either because they don't yet understand there are alternatives, or because they have some website they visit that's IE only. But mostly, yes, it's dead.
WMP, on the other hand, ends up being necessary. It's not that QT isn't good, but not everyone uses it, so if you want to view a movie, and the movie is only available as WMV, you have no choice. In this way, I think Microsoft makes WMP for the Mac only to push WMV as a "standard". So many media people use Macs that you can't have a media standard succeed without playing on Macs.
I sometimes suspect that this is the only reason Microsoft makes *anything* for OSX. Apple has some entrenched users in certain markets, and if Microsoft didn't provide some level of compatibility, those markets would refuse Microsoft products. Then, their "standards" would be less standard, and they would have a harder time locking people in to their products.
Also note that their OSX products are usually a generation behind (like WMP often is) or lacking features (like Entourage). I think that this is actually the strategy.
MS can say, "You use Macintoshes? Yeah, you can have a Windows server running Exchange, and then Entourage will connect to that." Then, when it doesn't work right, they can say, "Yeah, that's because Macintoshes don't really work right. You should be using Windows machines instead."
Likewise, they can encourage users to distribute video in WMV, audio in WMA, and office documents in DOC, XLS, and PPT, on the idea that Macintosh users all have WMP and Office, so those formats are "standard". When Office for Mac opens the file different, or the Windows Media file didn't open because it was encoded with the version 9 codecs but they only provided the version 8 codecs for OSX (which was a problem for a while), they can claim their formats are good and it's Apple's platform that's bad.
Well, in fairness, he didn't say "steam" was the worst form of combustion, he said "steam power" was the worst form of combustion. It seems fair to assume, as I naturally did, that by "steam power" he was referring to steam engines, and by "combustion" he was talking about combustion engines, and a steam engine is a sort of combustion engine.
But yah, other that the fact you missed the point entirely, good burn.
Personally, I suspect that using Kb/s to measure transfer speeds has been, for some time, an attempt by hardware vendors and ISP and such to fool consumers into believing their products are faster.
For example, a consumer who doesn't know any better needs to download a 3 MB file, and ISPs will tell him he has a 3Mb/s transfer rate, and he thinks that it means he'll get the file in 1 second. Good luck on that.
If you want to sell a network card, which sounds better, 100Mb/s or ~12.5MB/s? And all that's theoretical anyhow. It's like advertising a 100 GB hard drive that will only hold ~80 GB of data. So, yeah, I think the use of Kb/s in consumer products are often intended to make transfers seem faster.
But then again, I can be a little tin-foil-hat-ish at times.
The other big problem is that while the Steam network is down even the offline games are unplayable.
I hope this shows more people why they need to resist DRM schemes.
There's another [related] implication here that shows, to an even greater degree, why people need to resist this sort of DRM: what happens when the makers of Steam just don't feel like running their network anymore?
If I buy a CD/DVD, at least I can hold onto that disc, hold onto the computer that runs it, and I'll always have that game/application/data. But if steam, as a business venture, goes under, you've lost HL2. You have the disc and the computer, but it doesn't matter, you've lost the game.
Sure, Valve could release a patch removing the DRM, but they have no obligation to do so, so maybe not. Someone might offer a patch, but that's "illegal".
Funny, I was thinking of putting it in the third category. You know, [relatively] cheap content, and they support themselves by advertising [for their own product, the iPod].
Hymn has been on Slashdot before. My theory is Apple doesn't care all that much. Supposedly, they didn't want DRM in the first place, and they fought the RIAA over it for a while, and finally came to the present compromise (the iTMS DRM is not as restrictive as the RIAA wanted, but more restrictive than Apple wanted).
Now, that's all rumor, so who knows. But if I had to guess, i'd say Apple doesn't care very much about their customers cracking the DRM. Other companies trying to mimic the DRM for use on other online stores or other audio players, however, is a different story.
I wanted to add that, if you don't believe what I've said, look around more closely. If you look at big companies with popular products, you'll notice that their commercials are usually all focussed on branding, and not the product.
Look at McDonalds. Their ad campaigns don't focus around the food. They're about showing people having fun and slogans like "I'm lovin' it" and "We love to see you smile". Budweiser puts on commercials about frogs. Do Gatoraid commercials usually give you evidence or an argument that their drink is the best thing for athletes, or does it just show intense athletes dripping with the stuff. Does Coca Cola try to explain why it's a good drink, or is it usually about young people having fun, and they happen to have a coke in there somehow.
Look at the recent microsoft commercials, where they do the chalk drawings over video of normal people going to school and such. The whole message is "Microsoft cares about you, and believes in your potential!" Really, does that say ANYTHING about Microsoft's products? No.
Advertising these days is all about creating positive emotional attachment to brands.
So you are pretty much saying the goal of marketing is to separate consumers from rational thought regarding your product.
Yes, That's the goal that ad agencies set for themselves these days. Take a look at a coffee ad from the 50's. They'll show you a cup of coffee and tell you "Our brand has a deeper, richer flavor than our competitors."
Now look at a coffee commercial today. It'll show a couple sipping coffee, having a charming little romantic conversation. You won't see the coffee, you'll just see that the couple's drinking out of coffee cups. Nowhere in the commercial will it say anything about the coffee tasting good.
Around 20 years ago (I guess), advertisers started studying what inspired "brand loyalty" of the kind Apple enjoys today. They compared this brand loyalty to methods used by popular religions and successful cults (successful in creating devout followers, but including suicide cults). A pattern emerged.
The trick, apparently, is to try to get your marketing to do several things at once. Among them:
Make people familiar with your product and brand. Make an impression, and make it memorable. It's not so important that they know anything *specific* about your product, though-- knowing it's name is almost enough.
Create the impression of an appealing subculture. Present yourself as part of an oppressed minority, filled with misunderstood individuals who are cool or interesting or moral, or generally in some way "better" than the "masses".
Present your group (brand/religion/cult) as exclusive gate-keepers into this subculture. Basically, you're not "one of us" unless you own a Mac, or run Linux, or shop at the GAP, or drink Starbucks' coffee, or kill yourself drinking poisoned Kool-Aid (depending on the group).
If you can get people hooked on an appealing subculture, large numbers of those people will do some silly things to enter into that subculture, or even just to maintain their status as a "real" member. People will exhibit a general tendency to wear/eat/buy whatever is dictated by that subculture. Advertisers can then tap into this subculture whenever they want to tell you what to wear or where to hang out or what to eat (or whatever).
Oh brave new world with such people in it!
I really think all you guys should be lined up against a wall and shot.
What did I do? I'm just a helpdesk manager.
I could make a decent arguement that a lot of the things that are wrong with America are due to this philosophy of advertising.
I'd like to place at least some of the blame on the people who fall for it. This method wouldn't exist if it weren't so effective. And don't be too quick to think that you're so immune. You just might be so integrated into your advertisement prescribed subculture that you think your subculture is "normal".
GP:...users don't care what operating system lies beneath the surface.
P: I do care what OS is beneath the surface. There are many good and bad ways to implement different things. The OS has to deal with this more than a user. A user can somewhat tell if the implementation has an issue with speed. Not only are security and reliability and issue, but much more.
Yeah, but in general users don't care about the internals of an OS, as long as it works. One of the nice things (I think) about unixy OS's right now is that the OS and the DE are separable. You can mix and match Gnome, KDE, and XFce, etc. with Unix, BSD, Linux, etc. But, you can't (right now) have the full Windows DE with the applications over a Linux variant.
If it were universally possible to mix and match DEs and OSs, it would allow you to pick the best DE and the best OS for your purpose without penalty. That could be nice, even though the users themselves probably wouldn't know the difference.
Well, I think the whole "not wanting to step on Microsoft's and Adobe's toes" certainly provided incentive to keep Pages simple.
However, I suspect that there's another big reason, one that was probably at least as influential in the design of the final product. A lot of the Geek/Linux crowd really DON'T understand Apple's design philosophy.
If you look at Microsoft products, for example (and I'm not trying to start a flame-war, just noting a different design method), and version 1.0 is usually crap. I can't think of an MS program that was even usable before version 3.0, and it's usually not very good until version 4.0. Why?
Microsoft will create a version 1.0 application with 1000 features that barely work, and the program will be a PITA to use. By version 4, they've spent years redesigning, taking things out, putting things in, until it's a patchwork program with 700 useful features.
Apple, on the other hand, will put out a comparable application with version 1.0 having only 500 features, but most of them work decently, and the program is fairly pleasant to work with. It won't do everything the Microsoft version 1.0 program will do, but what it does, it's pretty good at. They use this product as a base, and spend years carefully adding features in places that don't disturb the original design. By version 4, it's a solid program with 700 useful features.
So it gets to be a question of what you think is better-- to throw in all sorts of features all at once spend years sorting it out, or use a smaller set of more targeted features as a base and then build off of that?
One thing however is more certain than anything else: if i was in charge of the IT system of a large company, I wouldn't by Cisco or IBM just because I 'remembered' their brands, but the fact that they had stuck their brand our their might make me feel safer with them than with Bobs-Network-Solutions even though I would be fully evaluating all possibilities.
Yeah, well, guess what? That's what branding is about. It's not about "remembering" the brand, it's about the fact that IBM and Cisco make you *feel* "safer". I can't stress "feel" enough. _*FEEL*_
When you're advertising, you want people to be familiar with your product. You want them to remember your company and the product. But the theory of advertising today is that the "holy grail" of advertising is to create an emotional attachment to the brand. Ultimately, it's feeling happy or excited or responsible or safe that sells products. It's not knowledge or beliefs. It's FEELINGS.
Well, at least as far as I can tell, most of the stuff that has bailed out was stupid, superfluous, overly flashy, or otherwise destined for failure anyways.
Sounds pretty much right to me. Seems like a lot of the ventures that failed consisted of people who didn't understand the potential of the internet selling business proposals to other people who didn't understand the internet at all. They were crappy business proposals that would have been thrown out immediately, but because it had the work "internet" somewhere in there, and "internet" was the magic ingredient that always made money, everyone blindly went along.
So you end up mostly with companies who follow one of three models:
Companies like Dell and Barns & Noble, who already had successful businesses, adding an additional distribution channel
Companies like Amazon.com and ebay, who, for the most part, function as an extremely comprehensive mail-order catalogue with good search capabilities
Sites like Slashdot and Fark, or media sites like Cnet or CNN. Basically, sites that offer news, reviews, and cheap content and support themselves through advertising, usually banner ads of some kind.
Maybe there are exceptions. I guess you could add another category for "search engines", but the failure ratio of those are high. Yahoo and Google made it through, but that's about it. Plus, both of those sites border on the 3rd category, so I'm not sure where to put them.
iTMS-- does it count as a dot-com? It's not really a web site, and it might be category 1, since it's a new distribution channel for an existing business. But also it doesn't make money for itself, so it's a funny example.
But yeah, a whole lot of these businesses were ill-conceived silliness banking on those magic internets to generate money out of nowhere.
I'm all one for choice, but Apple needs a clear winner for it to gain corporate acceptance.
Pages isn't a bid to win corporate acceptance. If you want a clear winner for corporate acceptance, Office X has been the clear winner for years.
Like the parent of your post said, Pages isn't built to be a MS Word killer. It's also not supposed to be an Adobe InDesign killer. And neither iPhoto or Preview are meant to replace Photoshop.
However, Pages does seem to be pretty good at what it does, which is simple/easy word-processing and page layout design, and I'm sure many people will find it to be a pretty good value at $80.
Note that nobody has EVER been prosecuted for downloading content (kiddie porn not withstanding). It is ONLY the offering for download or otherwise distributing content that people have been prosecuted for.
That's because, regardless of what the RIAA/MPAA would have you believe, the idea of a "copyright" was not intended to force you to pay for your entertainment. The idea of a "copyright" was meant to control *distribution*.
In other words, it was a move to keep publishers from reprinting and *selling* the works of other publishers and authors without compensation. In no way was it intended to make it "illegal" to read a book without a license.
Well, I don't think it matters what it is, just so long as you have both a consumer and professional version-- the "iExtreme Express mini photo shuffle Special Edition" and the "PowerExtreme Express mini photo shuffle Special Edition".
Or a Newton OS Mac PDA phone iPod Airport Express thingy with no broadcast flag and dual processors.
You forgot to insert the words "Extreme" or "mini". This product wouldn't be news unless it's the "Newton OS Mac PDA phone iPod Airport Express thingy Extreme mini".
BTW - I wasn't aware that this was a Mac rumors site. I thought it was Slashdot (News for Nerds/Stuff that Matters + iPods)?
I am a Mac user, and I look around at Mac rumor sites sometimes, so what I'm about to say shouldn't be taken as holding anti-Mac sentiments.
I agree that I'm bothered by this degree of Mac-rumor-mongering on the/. front page. I don't mind that it's a Mac rumor, but that it's a silly and unsubstantiated Mac rumor. Every indication is that a G5 Powerbook is a ways off still. Some 1x1 gif inserted by an advertiser titled "powerbook_g5.gif" is quite a little thing to inspire such wild speculation.
The Mac rumor mill is known for it's wild speculation, and it's known be to wrong pretty much all the time. For the past year and a half, every 2 weeks someone else comes up with some sort of "conclusive evidence" that the Powerbook G5 release is imminent. And we're still waiting, and they still aren't coming anytime soon. Ok, I expect that from the Mac rumor mill, but I expect more Slashdot.
Well, yeah, most of the people I know with computers in their kitchens have big houses in the suburbs with big kitchens. Or I do know someone who has one in her kitchen because he apartment is basically a kitchen with a bed in it.
Ok, I'm a geek and I love to have the Internet wherever I am but why in the kitchen?
I would tend to agree, but I know people with computers in their kitchens. Think about looking up recipes on the internet while you cook. There are people who spend lots of time in the kitchen.
Like I don't have enough shit on my crappy counter space...
I think that's part of the point. If you're going to put a computer in the kitchen, you need something unobtrusive. Of the people I know with computers in the kitchen, most have the actual unit hidden under the counter in some cabinet, with only a keyboard, mouse, and small LCD (sometimes mounted to the cabinet somehow) exposed. However, something as small as the mini might put it above the counter.
Oh come on. Not many people have enough photos and MP3s to fill even 10GB nevermind 120GB or 160GB. I am still using a 10GB HD in my XP machine. Yeah, my music is stored elsewhere but it's still less than 7GB of MP3s and 10GB more for SHN/FLAC (which most people aren't into). I want to know how many regular computer userse have 100GB of music and photos. Geeks are in the minority when it comes to computer purchases from major vendors that would be hurt by this "gamble". I'm sure it won't be anything for them to worry about.
Well, it'd take a whole lot of photos to fill up 100 GB, considering that most consumer-level cameras take 1-2MB pics. But I know people with several hundred MB of photos. I know non-techies and non-geeks with more than 15GB of music. (It's only a few hundred albums, which isn't that unusual.) Now, most of the people I know who have >25GB of music have lots of copyright violations, too, but I've seen 70 GB mp3 collections.
I, myself, have around 15 GB of music (all legit), over a GB of photos, and a lot of documents and such. My 40 GB drive is starting to run low, and very little of it is due to wasted space or poor file-management.
If they ever made a "Quicktime Movie Store" (video equivalent to iTMS), I could easily see myself filling a 160 GB drive. In fact, if I had a larger drive, I might rip some of my DVDs for when I'm "on the road". (I've been considering an upgrade)
But I recall someone had the point that the 1-button forces developers to get away from all this right-click or control-click nonsense, and actually design a good interface where things are intuitively found.
I'll agree with this. I've seen programs (the Norton Antivirus corporate windows management console comes to mind) where you have different options if you right-click in different places, but it's not intuitively obvious which options belong on which context menus.
I do think Apple should consider multi-button mouses, but not to deal with the applications in any way (i.e. not for context menus). I think they should consider putting Expose buttons on the mouse. Now that would be helpful.
OK, I'm a mac user. I use a one button mouse, and I've gotten used to it enough that I don't even notice it (and I switch between Windows/Linux machines and my Mac all the time). Usually, I tend to defend the one button mouse, saying, "I use it, it's fine," but also, I side with those who say, "But, of course, in this day and age, who can't figure out the two buttons on a standard mouse?!"
However, working in IT for the past few years, I was amazed at how many questions I've gotten about the difference between the two buttons. Like, "Oh, it makes those boxes come up?" Or "What's a right-click?" Granted, these aren't techies, they're just people. But in the last three weeks, I've had two different users comment, "I've never understood what the other button was for." They'd just been using their Windows machines for years, never understanding the concept of a "context menu".
To clarify, I'm not saying that it's better to have one button, but I agree that it's not clear that the one-button mouse is "wrong".
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I, personally, view this as the principle problem in public edutainment. Schools are viewed by the general population as having the first priority of "meeting the needs of the students", or something along those lines. They're always talking about building "high self-esteem" or providing a ground for enlightenment. Though I don't think this is "bad", it's the wrong focus and the wrong approach.
First things first. Public schools first priority should be to teach children how to be "good citizens"-- and no, I don't mean in any fascist sense of "good citizen". Upon completion of twelfth grade, kids should know, at least, the laws they're expected to follow, and the ideals behind these laws. They should be taught about the system of self-government into which they'll be entering, and how to navigate it. The other subjects, such as math, reading, writing, and science, students should know well enough to take care of their own finances, read street signs, write a letter, and not do stupid things like cut into a car battery with a chain-saw.
I'm certainly not saying education should *stop* there, but the priority of public schools should be to make sure that everyone graduating is a functional citizen capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of the citizenry. Meet that level of education first. Otherwise, we're doing children a disservice, by expecting them to be good citizens without providing them the means.
True, IE is a bit dead on the Mac. Some people still use it, either because they don't yet understand there are alternatives, or because they have some website they visit that's IE only. But mostly, yes, it's dead.
WMP, on the other hand, ends up being necessary. It's not that QT isn't good, but not everyone uses it, so if you want to view a movie, and the movie is only available as WMV, you have no choice. In this way, I think Microsoft makes WMP for the Mac only to push WMV as a "standard". So many media people use Macs that you can't have a media standard succeed without playing on Macs.
I sometimes suspect that this is the only reason Microsoft makes *anything* for OSX. Apple has some entrenched users in certain markets, and if Microsoft didn't provide some level of compatibility, those markets would refuse Microsoft products. Then, their "standards" would be less standard, and they would have a harder time locking people in to their products.
Also note that their OSX products are usually a generation behind (like WMP often is) or lacking features (like Entourage). I think that this is actually the strategy.
MS can say, "You use Macintoshes? Yeah, you can have a Windows server running Exchange, and then Entourage will connect to that." Then, when it doesn't work right, they can say, "Yeah, that's because Macintoshes don't really work right. You should be using Windows machines instead."
Likewise, they can encourage users to distribute video in WMV, audio in WMA, and office documents in DOC, XLS, and PPT, on the idea that Macintosh users all have WMP and Office, so those formats are "standard". When Office for Mac opens the file different, or the Windows Media file didn't open because it was encoded with the version 9 codecs but they only provided the version 8 codecs for OSX (which was a problem for a while), they can claim their formats are good and it's Apple's platform that's bad.
But yah, other that the fact you missed the point entirely, good burn.
For example, a consumer who doesn't know any better needs to download a 3 MB file, and ISPs will tell him he has a 3Mb/s transfer rate, and he thinks that it means he'll get the file in 1 second. Good luck on that.
If you want to sell a network card, which sounds better, 100Mb/s or ~12.5MB/s? And all that's theoretical anyhow. It's like advertising a 100 GB hard drive that will only hold ~80 GB of data. So, yeah, I think the use of Kb/s in consumer products are often intended to make transfers seem faster.
But then again, I can be a little tin-foil-hat-ish at times.
If I buy a CD/DVD, at least I can hold onto that disc, hold onto the computer that runs it, and I'll always have that game/application/data. But if steam, as a business venture, goes under, you've lost HL2. You have the disc and the computer, but it doesn't matter, you've lost the game.
Sure, Valve could release a patch removing the DRM, but they have no obligation to do so, so maybe not. Someone might offer a patch, but that's "illegal".
Funny, I was thinking of putting it in the third category. You know, [relatively] cheap content, and they support themselves by advertising [for their own product, the iPod].
Now, that's all rumor, so who knows. But if I had to guess, i'd say Apple doesn't care very much about their customers cracking the DRM. Other companies trying to mimic the DRM for use on other online stores or other audio players, however, is a different story.
Look at McDonalds. Their ad campaigns don't focus around the food. They're about showing people having fun and slogans like "I'm lovin' it" and "We love to see you smile". Budweiser puts on commercials about frogs. Do Gatoraid commercials usually give you evidence or an argument that their drink is the best thing for athletes, or does it just show intense athletes dripping with the stuff. Does Coca Cola try to explain why it's a good drink, or is it usually about young people having fun, and they happen to have a coke in there somehow.
Look at the recent microsoft commercials, where they do the chalk drawings over video of normal people going to school and such. The whole message is "Microsoft cares about you, and believes in your potential!" Really, does that say ANYTHING about Microsoft's products? No.
Advertising these days is all about creating positive emotional attachment to brands.
Yes, That's the goal that ad agencies set for themselves these days. Take a look at a coffee ad from the 50's. They'll show you a cup of coffee and tell you "Our brand has a deeper, richer flavor than our competitors."
Now look at a coffee commercial today. It'll show a couple sipping coffee, having a charming little romantic conversation. You won't see the coffee, you'll just see that the couple's drinking out of coffee cups. Nowhere in the commercial will it say anything about the coffee tasting good.
Around 20 years ago (I guess), advertisers started studying what inspired "brand loyalty" of the kind Apple enjoys today. They compared this brand loyalty to methods used by popular religions and successful cults (successful in creating devout followers, but including suicide cults). A pattern emerged.
The trick, apparently, is to try to get your marketing to do several things at once. Among them:
If you can get people hooked on an appealing subculture, large numbers of those people will do some silly things to enter into that subculture, or even just to maintain their status as a "real" member. People will exhibit a general tendency to wear/eat/buy whatever is dictated by that subculture. Advertisers can then tap into this subculture whenever they want to tell you what to wear or where to hang out or what to eat (or whatever).
Oh brave new world with such people in it!
I really think all you guys should be lined up against a wall and shot.
What did I do? I'm just a helpdesk manager.
I could make a decent arguement that a lot of the things that are wrong with America are due to this philosophy of advertising.
I'd like to place at least some of the blame on the people who fall for it. This method wouldn't exist if it weren't so effective. And don't be too quick to think that you're so immune. You just might be so integrated into your advertisement prescribed subculture that you think your subculture is "normal".
P: I do care what OS is beneath the surface. There are many good and bad ways to implement different things. The OS has to deal with this more than a user. A user can somewhat tell if the implementation has an issue with speed. Not only are security and reliability and issue, but much more.
Yeah, but in general users don't care about the internals of an OS, as long as it works. One of the nice things (I think) about unixy OS's right now is that the OS and the DE are separable. You can mix and match Gnome, KDE, and XFce, etc. with Unix, BSD, Linux, etc. But, you can't (right now) have the full Windows DE with the applications over a Linux variant.
If it were universally possible to mix and match DEs and OSs, it would allow you to pick the best DE and the best OS for your purpose without penalty. That could be nice, even though the users themselves probably wouldn't know the difference.
However, I suspect that there's another big reason, one that was probably at least as influential in the design of the final product. A lot of the Geek/Linux crowd really DON'T understand Apple's design philosophy.
If you look at Microsoft products, for example (and I'm not trying to start a flame-war, just noting a different design method), and version 1.0 is usually crap. I can't think of an MS program that was even usable before version 3.0, and it's usually not very good until version 4.0. Why?
Microsoft will create a version 1.0 application with 1000 features that barely work, and the program will be a PITA to use. By version 4, they've spent years redesigning, taking things out, putting things in, until it's a patchwork program with 700 useful features.
Apple, on the other hand, will put out a comparable application with version 1.0 having only 500 features, but most of them work decently, and the program is fairly pleasant to work with. It won't do everything the Microsoft version 1.0 program will do, but what it does, it's pretty good at. They use this product as a base, and spend years carefully adding features in places that don't disturb the original design. By version 4, it's a solid program with 700 useful features.
So it gets to be a question of what you think is better-- to throw in all sorts of features all at once spend years sorting it out, or use a smaller set of more targeted features as a base and then build off of that?
Yeah, well, guess what? That's what branding is about. It's not about "remembering" the brand, it's about the fact that IBM and Cisco make you *feel* "safer". I can't stress "feel" enough. _*FEEL*_
When you're advertising, you want people to be familiar with your product. You want them to remember your company and the product. But the theory of advertising today is that the "holy grail" of advertising is to create an emotional attachment to the brand. Ultimately, it's feeling happy or excited or responsible or safe that sells products. It's not knowledge or beliefs. It's FEELINGS.
Sounds pretty much right to me. Seems like a lot of the ventures that failed consisted of people who didn't understand the potential of the internet selling business proposals to other people who didn't understand the internet at all. They were crappy business proposals that would have been thrown out immediately, but because it had the work "internet" somewhere in there, and "internet" was the magic ingredient that always made money, everyone blindly went along.
So you end up mostly with companies who follow one of three models:
- Companies like Dell and Barns & Noble, who already had successful businesses, adding an additional distribution channel
- Companies like Amazon.com and ebay, who, for the most part, function as an extremely comprehensive mail-order catalogue with good search capabilities
- Sites like Slashdot and Fark, or media sites like Cnet or CNN. Basically, sites that offer news, reviews, and cheap content and support themselves through advertising, usually banner ads of some kind.
Maybe there are exceptions. I guess you could add another category for "search engines", but the failure ratio of those are high. Yahoo and Google made it through, but that's about it. Plus, both of those sites border on the 3rd category, so I'm not sure where to put them.iTMS-- does it count as a dot-com? It's not really a web site, and it might be category 1, since it's a new distribution channel for an existing business. But also it doesn't make money for itself, so it's a funny example.
But yeah, a whole lot of these businesses were ill-conceived silliness banking on those magic internets to generate money out of nowhere.
Pages isn't a bid to win corporate acceptance. If you want a clear winner for corporate acceptance, Office X has been the clear winner for years.
Like the parent of your post said, Pages isn't built to be a MS Word killer. It's also not supposed to be an Adobe InDesign killer. And neither iPhoto or Preview are meant to replace Photoshop.
However, Pages does seem to be pretty good at what it does, which is simple/easy word-processing and page layout design, and I'm sure many people will find it to be a pretty good value at $80.
That's because, regardless of what the RIAA/MPAA would have you believe, the idea of a "copyright" was not intended to force you to pay for your entertainment. The idea of a "copyright" was meant to control *distribution*.
In other words, it was a move to keep publishers from reprinting and *selling* the works of other publishers and authors without compensation. In no way was it intended to make it "illegal" to read a book without a license.
P: What kind of problems? Did you sell military secrets to the Chinese?
Wait... so, he says he has just as many problems with the government as you do, and you ask him if he's committed espionage and treason?
What did you do?!
You mean the "special edition"? That just means that it's painted ugly colors and is backed by an over-the-hill pop band.
So what are you saying? The MPAA and RIAA will find that they have super powers and they'll defeat consumers, only to then star in two crappy sequals?
Well, I don't think it matters what it is, just so long as you have both a consumer and professional version-- the "iExtreme Express mini photo shuffle Special Edition" and the "PowerExtreme Express mini photo shuffle Special Edition".
You forgot to insert the words "Extreme" or "mini". This product wouldn't be news unless it's the "Newton OS Mac PDA phone iPod Airport Express thingy Extreme mini".
I am a Mac user, and I look around at Mac rumor sites sometimes, so what I'm about to say shouldn't be taken as holding anti-Mac sentiments.
I agree that I'm bothered by this degree of Mac-rumor-mongering on the /. front page. I don't mind that it's a Mac rumor, but that it's a silly and unsubstantiated Mac rumor. Every indication is that a G5 Powerbook is a ways off still. Some 1x1 gif inserted by an advertiser titled "powerbook_g5.gif" is quite a little thing to inspire such wild speculation.
The Mac rumor mill is known for it's wild speculation, and it's known be to wrong pretty much all the time. For the past year and a half, every 2 weeks someone else comes up with some sort of "conclusive evidence" that the Powerbook G5 release is imminent. And we're still waiting, and they still aren't coming anytime soon. Ok, I expect that from the Mac rumor mill, but I expect more Slashdot.
Well, yeah, most of the people I know with computers in their kitchens have big houses in the suburbs with big kitchens. Or I do know someone who has one in her kitchen because he apartment is basically a kitchen with a bed in it.
I would tend to agree, but I know people with computers in their kitchens. Think about looking up recipes on the internet while you cook. There are people who spend lots of time in the kitchen.
Like I don't have enough shit on my crappy counter space...
I think that's part of the point. If you're going to put a computer in the kitchen, you need something unobtrusive. Of the people I know with computers in the kitchen, most have the actual unit hidden under the counter in some cabinet, with only a keyboard, mouse, and small LCD (sometimes mounted to the cabinet somehow) exposed. However, something as small as the mini might put it above the counter.
Oh come on. Not many people have enough photos and MP3s to fill even 10GB nevermind 120GB or 160GB. I am still using a 10GB HD in my XP machine. Yeah, my music is stored elsewhere but it's still less than 7GB of MP3s and 10GB more for SHN/FLAC (which most people aren't into). I want to know how many regular computer userse have 100GB of music and photos. Geeks are in the minority when it comes to computer purchases from major vendors that would be hurt by this "gamble". I'm sure it won't be anything for them to worry about.
Well, it'd take a whole lot of photos to fill up 100 GB, considering that most consumer-level cameras take 1-2MB pics. But I know people with several hundred MB of photos. I know non-techies and non-geeks with more than 15GB of music. (It's only a few hundred albums, which isn't that unusual.) Now, most of the people I know who have >25GB of music have lots of copyright violations, too, but I've seen 70 GB mp3 collections.
I, myself, have around 15 GB of music (all legit), over a GB of photos, and a lot of documents and such. My 40 GB drive is starting to run low, and very little of it is due to wasted space or poor file-management.
If they ever made a "Quicktime Movie Store" (video equivalent to iTMS), I could easily see myself filling a 160 GB drive. In fact, if I had a larger drive, I might rip some of my DVDs for when I'm "on the road". (I've been considering an upgrade)
I'll agree with this. I've seen programs (the Norton Antivirus corporate windows management console comes to mind) where you have different options if you right-click in different places, but it's not intuitively obvious which options belong on which context menus.
I do think Apple should consider multi-button mouses, but not to deal with the applications in any way (i.e. not for context menus). I think they should consider putting Expose buttons on the mouse. Now that would be helpful.
However, working in IT for the past few years, I was amazed at how many questions I've gotten about the difference between the two buttons. Like, "Oh, it makes those boxes come up?" Or "What's a right-click?" Granted, these aren't techies, they're just people. But in the last three weeks, I've had two different users comment, "I've never understood what the other button was for." They'd just been using their Windows machines for years, never understanding the concept of a "context menu".
To clarify, I'm not saying that it's better to have one button, but I agree that it's not clear that the one-button mouse is "wrong".