This town is a dump. (...) There is no culture here, very few decent places to eat, and the place is full of meth-heads and illegals. (...) It's so chaotic and because there's no consistent driving style (the frequent road-rage shootings don't help). The local economy is shit, and violent home invasions are common. There is some tech industry, (...) along with some shitty defense contractors (...) where engineers go to die. The weather is horrible (...). You can't bicycle here (...) because of the dangerous speeding drivers and lack of safe bike paths. And there's really nothing to do here except for walking around the mall. Even worse, (...) they used to have [an] Avenue (...) that was kinda fun to walk along, which used to have a bunch of quirky little independent shops, but the (...) government drove all those out of business to make room for a bunch of mall stores and high-rises, which of course went south when the economy crashed, so most of the place is boarded up now.
This place sucks, and I can't wait to move out in a couple of months. If a bunch of startups do move here, it's going to be short-lived because cool, hip, young employees aren't going to stick around this cesspool for long.
Fixed that for you... Now, replace Pheonix with just about every city in the US that you can think of -- bar the largest dozen or so.
I'd be wary bringing up the notion of "rational thought" in the presence of a PolySci professor. I hear they find that idea quite revolting.
Of course they do... Most of them are completely incapable of logical reasoning. Much like in all social science fields, they compensate by hiding behind key thinkers in their discipline -- almost all of which, dare I add, were trained mathematicians or physicists.
Except that you're completely missing out on the ongoing disruption in IT. In a few years, Joe six-pack and your mom will be on a tablet or a smart phone as their primary (personal) devise. Not to mention developing countries, which are currently being introduced to IT through tablets and smart phones. Most households, in that context, will not have a PC. And I'd bet the horse on the fact that many business uses of PCs will have been replaced by the smart phones and tablets too -- eg doctors, machine tool programming, sales.
So, by your argument, MS should just wither and die. I don't think they want that to happen.:-)
Apple (...) could (...) produce their own console.
Which one are you thinking about? The iPhone, the iPod touch, the iPad or yet another device that would be redundant with Apple TV when they introduce the app store on the latter?
+1000. Arment's comments and the OP's summary are utter bull crap.
Moreover this is a one-time thing, one long in the making, postponed several times in the past two years or so, and Arment knows it more than any other -- being the author of an iOS app.
There's really nothing to see here. Consumers are basically told: "We're improving security by requiring stuff in the app store; we're dropping apps that aren't secure enough by our standards as a consequence." Period, end of story. Move along, nothing to see.
Siracusa's OS X reviews are always gazillion pages long. I haven't read this one, but the previous few I dug into were thorough and -- if you're a Mac dev -- very interesting.
I looked at the stats you quote a bit and, according to them, there is more piracy in the US than there is in China. In my own country, piracy would also be rampant... I'd be willing to be bet that their methodology is absolute garbage.
I'll double check, but in my own sample, I can only name one friend who jail broke his iPhone. This would mean that any and all apps on other relatives' iDevices would be legit.
There likely is a different consumption pattern, however. Whereas the jail broken iPhone in question may have seen thousands of pirated apps over time, most normal iDevices might see zero or a handful of legit apps.
On aggregate, I can picture this leading to stats like mtiks.com's, along with the completely wrong impression and conclusion.
Ask around. Friends, family, work colleagues. For each, ask how many apps they tried, and how many apps they pirated. I'd wager you'll get the same impression I'm getting: that the dev in the article is full of shit (he's looking for free press coverage), and that the stats you quote are garbage.
If it can make you feel better, try hiring one directly... I tried that a few times, and found it was even worse than outsourcing a specific task to a pre-existing team.
The single worst I hired mentioned he had a few personal projects and he wanted to start his own business someday. I figured I'd encourage the guy by offering him, at his option, to work 4 days per week instead of 5. He picked the full time option, as the pay was slightly higher.
Having hired a few other Indians before him, I didn't worry too much about his pathetic productivity for the first couple of days. Until I saw him bidding on a job on E-lance.
When I confronted him with it, he revealed that he occupied a day job at the outsourcing branch of a major US company. Aka he had two full time jobs and occupied them both by completing tasks on his own account.
We also had a crash in France recently (Orange was down for a whole day), and it made little to no difference on anyone's life -- except control freaks who had to know where you were all the time, and those in need of emergency services.
Host your project on github or BitBucket, whatever. They all offer a bug tracker. Using an SCM allows to know when a bug has been introduced after writing the proper test.
Speaking of which, and even more importantly: WRITE THOSE F*CKING UNIT TESTS!
I cannot stress the last point enough. If you're introducing bugs in your releases, either you're not writing unit tests, or not writing the ones that count (aka the higher level ones), and not using every tool at your disposal to avoid bugs in the first place (test coverage, static analyzer, etc.). You should always strive for 100% test coverage and zero trivial bugs when releasing.
It may change in time, but just because someone invents a better keyboard layout, or a more innovative way to type, doesn't mean it will meet common acceptance.
Like text to speech, aka no typing at all.
(Now, imagine yourself dictating your code to your computer...)
I'm not sure you can say Android is winning, even less that it has already won.
For tablets, we're currently discussing an iPad market, rather than a tablet market. Google's new tablet and the Surface might arguably change this. Until then, Android is being trampled.
For phones, the dynamics aren't directly comparable to those that prevailed when the PC won over the Mac. The PC won at a time when, each year, new desktops sold outnumbered all existing desktops sold to that year. Smart phones are enjoying the same kind of growth, but with several twists.
For starters, software counted a lot more than you seem to think in the PC's eventual victory. It arguably is a chicken and egg problem, but MS maneuvered impeccably by having Word/Excel preinstalled more often than WordPerfect/Lotus 123 were. In a matter of years, doc/xls were the de facto standard exchanged by businesses, and nothing would beat a recent Office install to read them. In contrast, design tools were better enough on the Mac that Apple managed to hang onto designers. The point of no return was reached circa 1990: PC gaming then rose to become the gold standard, and this attracted consumers in droves.
On a smart phone, the killer apps are about making calls, text messaging, listening to music, snapping pictures, shooting videos and --most important of all perhaps-- browsing the web. You won't raise an eyebrow spending $20 to buy the ten apps that you cannot do without when switching platform: your data is in the cloud. Compared to Office on the PC, the potential for lock-in is about zero. The whole thing reeks of fickleness.
This brings us to renewal rate. With PCs, you renew when your old hag of a device becomes too slow. With phones, you renew along with your phone contract. This makes the install base much less important than PCs unless you have a very large moat, as impeccably demonstrated by RIM. Today's king can be tomorrow's loser.
To work around this huge potential for market share fickleness, you need to build a moat, and this moat is necessarily something other than the odd app or two which will invariably make its way on competing platforms. Content is one way to lock you in. Apple's moats for iDevices include iTunes and iBook. Google is arguably playing on a level field with Apple here, bar a few million iPods. Integration is another: iCloud, and the fact that iDevices play extremely well with Macs. I'd wager MS will boast the same for the Surface, Win Phones and Win PCs. Maybe Google will sell Chromebooks by millions in a few years and boast equivalent integration for its phone, tablet and laptop too.
Lastly, and perhaps not least, it helps to not compete with those who you sell your phone/tablet OS to. If I were Android phone or tablet maker, I wouldn't be too happy with the idea of Google owning Motorola and releasing devices it makes all by itself. If I were a Win phone or tablet maker, I'd be most unhappy about the Surface, and worried about MS buying a phone maker. Pray tell what parts of the OS either will be optimizing for themselves or under-optimizing for yourself. It's not as if MS ever did that to Office's competitors, no no no.
Anyway, it seems to me that Apple has a moat today, while others are either barely starting to dig theirs (MS), finding that the one they thought they had is useless (RIM), or running around naked on the battle field (Google). In light of this, my own guess is that MS will clobber Android as it claws its way back into the market, while Apple's supply chain maintains it in pole position.
Who buys a computer without a warranty that covers its expected usage period? (...) If you skimped on household insurance as well as buying a computer that isn't covered by a warranty you are up a creek without a paddle when your device breaks down.
Yeah... What was I thinking? I've neither, and I had to shell out €125 the other day because I broke my MacBook's top case while opening it. Surely, had I not refused to cough an extra €200 or so to extend my warrantee period by two years when I bought my Mac in 2007, they wouldn't have told me that the warranty period is long ended and doesn't cover me opening my laptop to clean it.
Fwiw, the math is not in your favor... It is never in your interest to extend a warranty. If a PC/car/whatever maker offers you an extended warranty, you're on the receiving end of an overwhelmingly losing bet. The extended period being offered is, as a rule, the one they know carries about zero risk. When it might, they compensate by overcharging for out-of-warranty extras. And all too typically, they'll wiggle out of their obligations much like insurance companies do when you thought you were covered. If you add up the various costs that you save by not extending warranty periods, you're more than enough to cover the occasional repair, and you get to put the leftovers on a savings account.
Ballmer seems to be citing the ongoing (prior?) battles as areas where MS intends to fight... That's great and all, assuming MS delivers, but they should instead be focussing on the next battles.
The $.99 business model only works for ios devs because there are millions of devices in the wild. How many do they plan to sell? It's not like standard android apps blow up to the size of tablets or --worse-- tv screens is attracting customers by the millions.
Whoever wins the next presidential elections in the US, it will make no difference.
Sure, but keep in mind that with large businesses and financial institutions, which puppet gets elected matters less than the uncertainty of not knowing which puppet gets elected. Mr Market hates uncertainty.
However, hiring overall will remain soft in coming months, particularly with the presidential election in the United States and economic turmoil in the European Union.
It'll be interesting to see if this really is perceived as the problem. At least with the US, we'll see or not see big shifts in the markets after election day which is a means to test that particular part of the claim.
Alternatively, shit hits the fan in financial institutions, and it'll be 2008 all over again before the elections.
Scientology is a lot of things -- scam, dangerous cult, organized crime -- but one thing it is not is a religion.
What makes christianity a religion more than scientology?
Any organization with preachers who put forward baseless ideas that followers need to faithfully accept, deserves the religious label. (And yes, that definition correctly includes most if not all political parties.)
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This town is a dump. (...) There is no culture here, very few decent places to eat, and the place is full of meth-heads and illegals. (...) It's so chaotic and because there's no consistent driving style (the frequent road-rage shootings don't help). The local economy is shit, and violent home invasions are common. There is some tech industry, (...) along with some shitty defense contractors (...) where engineers go to die. The weather is horrible (...). You can't bicycle here (...) because of the dangerous speeding drivers and lack of safe bike paths. And there's really nothing to do here except for walking around the mall. Even worse, (...) they used to have [an] Avenue (...) that was kinda fun to walk along, which used to have a bunch of quirky little independent shops, but the (...) government drove all those out of business to make room for a bunch of mall stores and high-rises, which of course went south when the economy crashed, so most of the place is boarded up now.
This place sucks, and I can't wait to move out in a couple of months. If a bunch of startups do move here, it's going to be short-lived because cool, hip, young employees aren't going to stick around this cesspool for long.
Fixed that for you... Now, replace Pheonix with just about every city in the US that you can think of -- bar the largest dozen or so.
I'd be wary bringing up the notion of "rational thought" in the presence of a PolySci professor. I hear they find that idea quite revolting.
Of course they do... Most of them are completely incapable of logical reasoning. Much like in all social science fields, they compensate by hiding behind key thinkers in their discipline -- almost all of which, dare I add, were trained mathematicians or physicists.
Except that you're completely missing out on the ongoing disruption in IT. In a few years, Joe six-pack and your mom will be on a tablet or a smart phone as their primary (personal) devise. Not to mention developing countries, which are currently being introduced to IT through tablets and smart phones. Most households, in that context, will not have a PC. And I'd bet the horse on the fact that many business uses of PCs will have been replaced by the smart phones and tablets too -- eg doctors, machine tool programming, sales.
So, by your argument, MS should just wither and die. I don't think they want that to happen. :-)
Apple (...) could (...) produce their own console.
Which one are you thinking about? The iPhone, the iPod touch, the iPad or yet another device that would be redundant with Apple TV when they introduce the app store on the latter?
+1000. Arment's comments and the OP's summary are utter bull crap.
Moreover this is a one-time thing, one long in the making, postponed several times in the past two years or so, and Arment knows it more than any other -- being the author of an iOS app.
There's really nothing to see here. Consumers are basically told: "We're improving security by requiring stuff in the app store; we're dropping apps that aren't secure enough by our standards as a consequence." Period, end of story. Move along, nothing to see.
Siracusa's OS X reviews are always gazillion pages long. I haven't read this one, but the previous few I dug into were thorough and -- if you're a Mac dev -- very interesting.
And sucrose is one glucose bound to a fructose, the latter of which gets metabolized in the liver -- per the video I linked to.
I looked at the stats you quote a bit and, according to them, there is more piracy in the US than there is in China. In my own country, piracy would also be rampant... I'd be willing to be bet that their methodology is absolute garbage.
I'll double check, but in my own sample, I can only name one friend who jail broke his iPhone. This would mean that any and all apps on other relatives' iDevices would be legit.
There likely is a different consumption pattern, however. Whereas the jail broken iPhone in question may have seen thousands of pirated apps over time, most normal iDevices might see zero or a handful of legit apps.
On aggregate, I can picture this leading to stats like mtiks.com's, along with the completely wrong impression and conclusion.
Ask around. Friends, family, work colleagues. For each, ask how many apps they tried, and how many apps they pirated. I'd wager you'll get the same impression I'm getting: that the dev in the article is full of shit (he's looking for free press coverage), and that the stats you quote are garbage.
If it can make you feel better, try hiring one directly... I tried that a few times, and found it was even worse than outsourcing a specific task to a pre-existing team.
The single worst I hired mentioned he had a few personal projects and he wanted to start his own business someday. I figured I'd encourage the guy by offering him, at his option, to work 4 days per week instead of 5. He picked the full time option, as the pay was slightly higher.
Having hired a few other Indians before him, I didn't worry too much about his pathetic productivity for the first couple of days. Until I saw him bidding on a job on E-lance.
When I confronted him with it, he revealed that he occupied a day job at the outsourcing branch of a major US company. Aka he had two full time jobs and occupied them both by completing tasks on his own account.
Sounds like Atkins. According to some specialists, though, fructose (aka sugar, HFCS, etc.) is the carb you should be really worrying about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
We also had a crash in France recently (Orange was down for a whole day), and it made little to no difference on anyone's life -- except control freaks who had to know where you were all the time, and those in need of emergency services.
A similar feature is also built into Textmate, in case OP uses a Mac.
Host your project on github or BitBucket, whatever. They all offer a bug tracker. Using an SCM allows to know when a bug has been introduced after writing the proper test.
Speaking of which, and even more importantly: WRITE THOSE F*CKING UNIT TESTS!
I cannot stress the last point enough. If you're introducing bugs in your releases, either you're not writing unit tests, or not writing the ones that count (aka the higher level ones), and not using every tool at your disposal to avoid bugs in the first place (test coverage, static analyzer, etc.). You should always strive for 100% test coverage and zero trivial bugs when releasing.
First rule of politics: never believe anything until it's officially denied.
With a text to speech app?
Presumably because it's faster to sign than it is to type, in much the same way as it's faster to speak than it is to type.
No?
It may change in time, but just because someone invents a better keyboard layout, or a more innovative way to type, doesn't mean it will meet common acceptance.
Like text to speech, aka no typing at all.
(Now, imagine yourself dictating your code to your computer...)
I'm not sure you can say Android is winning, even less that it has already won.
For tablets, we're currently discussing an iPad market, rather than a tablet market. Google's new tablet and the Surface might arguably change this. Until then, Android is being trampled.
For phones, the dynamics aren't directly comparable to those that prevailed when the PC won over the Mac. The PC won at a time when, each year, new desktops sold outnumbered all existing desktops sold to that year. Smart phones are enjoying the same kind of growth, but with several twists.
For starters, software counted a lot more than you seem to think in the PC's eventual victory. It arguably is a chicken and egg problem, but MS maneuvered impeccably by having Word/Excel preinstalled more often than WordPerfect/Lotus 123 were. In a matter of years, doc/xls were the de facto standard exchanged by businesses, and nothing would beat a recent Office install to read them. In contrast, design tools were better enough on the Mac that Apple managed to hang onto designers. The point of no return was reached circa 1990: PC gaming then rose to become the gold standard, and this attracted consumers in droves.
On a smart phone, the killer apps are about making calls, text messaging, listening to music, snapping pictures, shooting videos and --most important of all perhaps-- browsing the web. You won't raise an eyebrow spending $20 to buy the ten apps that you cannot do without when switching platform: your data is in the cloud. Compared to Office on the PC, the potential for lock-in is about zero. The whole thing reeks of fickleness.
This brings us to renewal rate. With PCs, you renew when your old hag of a device becomes too slow. With phones, you renew along with your phone contract. This makes the install base much less important than PCs unless you have a very large moat, as impeccably demonstrated by RIM. Today's king can be tomorrow's loser.
To work around this huge potential for market share fickleness, you need to build a moat, and this moat is necessarily something other than the odd app or two which will invariably make its way on competing platforms. Content is one way to lock you in. Apple's moats for iDevices include iTunes and iBook. Google is arguably playing on a level field with Apple here, bar a few million iPods. Integration is another: iCloud, and the fact that iDevices play extremely well with Macs. I'd wager MS will boast the same for the Surface, Win Phones and Win PCs. Maybe Google will sell Chromebooks by millions in a few years and boast equivalent integration for its phone, tablet and laptop too.
Lastly, and perhaps not least, it helps to not compete with those who you sell your phone/tablet OS to. If I were Android phone or tablet maker, I wouldn't be too happy with the idea of Google owning Motorola and releasing devices it makes all by itself. If I were a Win phone or tablet maker, I'd be most unhappy about the Surface, and worried about MS buying a phone maker. Pray tell what parts of the OS either will be optimizing for themselves or under-optimizing for yourself. It's not as if MS ever did that to Office's competitors, no no no.
Anyway, it seems to me that Apple has a moat today, while others are either barely starting to dig theirs (MS), finding that the one they thought they had is useless (RIM), or running around naked on the battle field (Google). In light of this, my own guess is that MS will clobber Android as it claws its way back into the market, while Apple's supply chain maintains it in pole position.
Who buys a computer without a warranty that covers its expected usage period? (...) If you skimped on household insurance as well as buying a computer that isn't covered by a warranty you are up a creek without a paddle when your device breaks down.
Yeah... What was I thinking? I've neither, and I had to shell out €125 the other day because I broke my MacBook's top case while opening it. Surely, had I not refused to cough an extra €200 or so to extend my warrantee period by two years when I bought my Mac in 2007, they wouldn't have told me that the warranty period is long ended and doesn't cover me opening my laptop to clean it.
Fwiw, the math is not in your favor... It is never in your interest to extend a warranty. If a PC/car/whatever maker offers you an extended warranty, you're on the receiving end of an overwhelmingly losing bet. The extended period being offered is, as a rule, the one they know carries about zero risk. When it might, they compensate by overcharging for out-of-warranty extras. And all too typically, they'll wiggle out of their obligations much like insurance companies do when you thought you were covered. If you add up the various costs that you save by not extending warranty periods, you're more than enough to cover the occasional repair, and you get to put the leftovers on a savings account.
Ballmer seems to be citing the ongoing (prior?) battles as areas where MS intends to fight... That's great and all, assuming MS delivers, but they should instead be focussing on the next battles.
The $.99 business model only works for ios devs because there are millions of devices in the wild. How many do they plan to sell? It's not like standard android apps blow up to the size of tablets or --worse-- tv screens is attracting customers by the millions.
Whoever wins the next presidential elections in the US, it will make no difference.
Sure, but keep in mind that with large businesses and financial institutions, which puppet gets elected matters less than the uncertainty of not knowing which puppet gets elected. Mr Market hates uncertainty.
However, hiring overall will remain soft in coming months, particularly with the presidential election in the United States and economic turmoil in the European Union.
It'll be interesting to see if this really is perceived as the problem. At least with the US, we'll see or not see big shifts in the markets after election day which is a means to test that particular part of the claim.
Alternatively, shit hits the fan in financial institutions, and it'll be 2008 all over again before the elections.
Scientology is a lot of things -- scam, dangerous cult, organized crime -- but one thing it is not is a religion.
What makes christianity a religion more than scientology?
Any organization with preachers who put forward baseless ideas that followers need to faithfully accept, deserves the religious label. (And yes, that definition correctly includes most if not all political parties.)
First rule of politics: never believe anything until it is officially denied.