Xbox is over now, anyway. Console gaming is over. Gaming has moved onto mobile systems. There are more iPod touch devices in the world than all of the console games put together. AppleTV outsells Xbox. In a couple of years, iPad will have more GPU than the console games.
- MS Office is a 1980's product (Word and Excel are from 1985, the combined suite debuted in 1989) - Windows is a 1990's product (3.0 was the first version that was not a demo, 95 was when you started booting into it instead of running it part-time) - Xbox is a 2000's product (a time when a good enough GPU for gaming had to come in a large box with fans and a good enough screen for gaming was so expensive you couldn't include it, you just put on a TV out instead)
so we are still left with the question of what Microsoft is going to be selling in the 20-teens.
Apple products are cheaper. If you can't see that, you are fooling yourself. People who are used to spending $600 on a PC every 2 years as well as $300 on software for it and at least $150 to clean off viruses during that time are going into Apple Store and buying an iPad for $399 and $50 of software gets them a video editor, photo editor, word processor, presentations, spreadsheets, and a 3D game. Instead of a Silverlight plug-in that they need to update in order to see Netflix, there is just a free Netflix app you install with 1-click. Then the OS upgrades for the life of the device are free. And there are no viruses, no security software to install. And the Genius Bar is there to help with stuff, for free. And iPad has a 10 hour battery — weighs 700 grams. It should cost twice as much as other consumer PC's. You should be at Best Buy looking at a $499 HP notebook or iPads that start at $899.
The Mac already has 90% of the high-end PC market. That discussion is over. But MacBook Air at $999 caused jaws to drop across the PC industry. That is a high-end workstation with high-end operating system and app platform in a size of a netbook, and half the price of what that kind of notebook used to cost when we called them "sub notebooks." Yes, it is expensive if all you do is surf the Web on it. But that is not all people do with them. They edit movies, they make music, they do all the things that people have always done with Macs.
So you don't have to invent some BS reason that people are buying Apple products. The products are better than all of their competition, and they are also cheaper. In many cases, cheaper to buy, but in all cases, cheaper to own. And when you include training costs, the Apple products can become exponentially cheaper in some cases. There is NO MYSTERY. If you are better, you will sell some, and if you are cheaper, you will sell some. If you are both cheaper and better — you get what Apple has been doing over the past decade.
And further, the Apple tools make you more money! People go into the Apple community and 95% of them don't come out, but it is because they can't afford to, not because they are hypnotized by a cult. Not only is my I-T bill lower than my colleagues who use generic alternatives, but I get more work done, I make more money. I can't afford to buy generic tech — it is too expensive. The software alone is too expensive. The management alone is too expensive.
But Nerd Dogma prevents a lot of people from seeing this. It's easier to make stuff up and feed your denial than to admit that people are just choosing the better product. Right-wing nerds should be especially ashamed to do that, because Apple Store is very much the free market. These Apple devices are being adopted one user at a time, not in lots of 100,000 like Dell used to do.
If you are in I-T, just fucking shut up about Apple. You just keep saying stupid fucking things. How is WebKit a love/hate relationship with open source? How is shipping the only name brand PC with open source software on it a love/hate relationship with open source? Fuck. So stupid.
HP has no future in client PC's. They have to get out ASAP. They don't know a damn thing about competing for the consumer's attention. Consumer PC's are sociology, not specs. Nobody cares what is inside a MacBook Air, they just want one.
What used to be the PC market is now just servers. HP's notebooks are a server in a notebook, they are not comparable to Apple's notebooks. HP should be running for the back room I-T business it knows.
A friend of mine who is a petite woman was told by her doctor not to carry her HP notebook anymore, it was too heavy. She pulled her trapezius muscle carrying it, which is one of the most painful muscle pulls there is. She put the carry bag for the notebook onto a 2 wheeler so she could drag it through the airport. Then she saw my MacBook Air and went out to Apple Store the same day and bought one for herself and for the past year she has been carrying it everywhere in her purse. And it is multiple times faster and more capable than the HP boat anchor it replaced. And she found Mac OS and iWork to be superior to the Windows XP and Office 2003 she was used to, as well as 10 years newer. Is HP going to follow Apple down that road? Is HP going to secure large supplies of flash storage chips, learn how to cut metal to make thin notebooks, and somehow, someway find a way to put some sex into their client systems? Because consumers don't reverse their expectations. They see MacBook Air and iPad and they don't look at a giant HP boat anchor the same way again. They find out how you can just go to Genius Bar to get everything you were getting at Geek Squad for free.
And the time of CIO's buying lots of 10,000 HP PC's is winding down. Companies are giving their users their slice of the I-T budget, and 50% or more of them are going to Apple Store.
In 5 years, there will only be 2 PC makers: Apple and Microsoft. And I'm not sure about Microsoft. There is no place for HP in client systems.
HP killed TouchPad by not making their own software for the 10 years previous. They can't correct for the fact that they put their balls into Microsoft's hands by putting WebKit and Linux on some ARM hardware. They just simply did not have enough software to compete with Apple and Microsoft at their own games.
Google is 75% Mac users, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. Chrome OS is not even close to a replacement for Mac OS X. Chrome OS does not even replace iOS yet.
Apple leads in all PC quality surveys, as well as all PC customer service surveys. If you are too stupid to work the Genius Bar and AppleCare ($149 for years 2 and 3 on a mini) then maybe you *should* buy from HP.
There is no alternate universe where the bottom doesn't fall out of the generic PC market and kill the quality of all IBM and HP PC's, should they still be making them. That is a fact of life that IBM and HP had to deal with in their own way. IBM spun off their PC's and HP kept them and ran them into the ground. In both cases, quality went down. It was always going to go down. You can't go from an average sales price of around $1000 to an average sales price of around $500 without losing quality.
People used to say that if Apple were to make Intel PC's they would crush the Windows PC makers. Well, Apple started making Intel PC's in 2006 and they crushed the Windows PC makers, who all had to run down to the $500 low-end market to survive. People used to say that if Apple were to make a $500 low-end PC, they would crush the Windows PC makers. Well, in 2010, Apple started making a $500 low-end PC and they crushed the Windows PC makers. ALL Windows PC makers. Doesn't matter what brand is on the Windows PC. Whether at IBM or Lenovo, whether at HP or a spin-off, the market is what matters. If the market won't support building a quality PC, you have to build junk. If you build junk, that reflects on your other businesses and your brand. So HP either has to become a junk brand or get out of PC's. Since they make most of their money on something other than PC's, get out! Get out now. Get out 5 years ago!
The quality would have gone down at IBM also. You can't get blood from a stone. The Windows PC market is running at an average sales price of $450. You can't build a quality PC for that price. That is actually cheaper than the original iPod from 2001, which in 2011 dollars is about $500.
There is no $20 billion investment. It is $20 billion over 5 years. That is only $4 billion per year. If that sounds large, remember that iPhone sales just double all by themselves every single year. If you think Sprint can sell n iPhones in 2012, then they can sell 2n in 2013, 4n in 2014, 8n in 2015, and 16n in 2016. They could easily sell over 20 million iPhones in 2016 all by themselves.
The only way I could see an exclusive iPhone for Sprint making sense is if it was a new low-end model made for the prepay market, which Tim Cook said about a year ago that they would do at some point in the future. I believe Sprint has more prepay customers (at least as a percentage) than the other carriers. I have a friend who has an iPod touch and a free prepay phone, and she would really rather just have a prepay phone inside her iPod touch.
An iPhone cannot remember a network it has never been on. The issue here is not that she didn't want to login to Wi-Fi the second time, it is that she did not want to login to Wi-Fi the first time.
If she does not know what Wi-Fi is, she did not turn it off to save battery. That is why Apple put in good battery management rather than leave it to the user to run Tasker like a fucking idiot. Most iPhone users do not even understand that turning off Wi-Fi would save a little battery. They are lawyers and homemakers and artists and managers and waiters and other people who did not play dungeons and dragons when they were kids.
If you go into Wi-Fi with an iPhone, it will ask if you want to join the network. But if you don't know what the password for that network is, iPhone cannot read the mind of the sysadmin and get it for you. At least not yet. If his wife doesn't want to be bothered with Wi-Fi, she does not know the passwords for the networks she is in.
With all due respect, that is completely fucking stupid.
All of the things you listed cost money that Sprint does not have because 1) they do not carry the #1 best-selling phone of the last 4 years, which is iPhone; 2) they do not carry the only high-end $600 phone that is still available today, which is iPhone, they only have $300 and $100 phones with much lower profits; 3) they do not carry the phone with the most-profitable contract (iPhone,) which makes twice what any other phone contract makes; and 4) they have lost a ton of subscribers whose #1 reason for leaving was to buy iPhone on another carrier.
So your idea that they pretend iPhone doesn't exist is not only impractical, but does not even qualify as rational. If you were Sprint's CEO and you articulated that strategy, you would be impeached and possibly committed to a mental hospital within hours of opening your mouth.
Yes, iPads are cheaper than iPhones. That is because low-end PC's cost less than high-end smartphones.
They are not buying in volume. There is no way that Sprint wrote a $20 billion check to Apple and won't pay them anything again for 5 years. They will pay as they go.
If you want to sell 30 billion iPhones over 4 years, you do this:
- 2 million in 2012 - 4 million in 2013 - 8 million in 2014 - 16 million in 2015
the reason it is easy is that iPhone sales double organically every year. The same effort that you put in to sell 2 million in 2012 results in 16 million sales in 2015.
This is a very minimum commitment, and for a carrier that runs a nonstandard network, they are lucky that Apple made them a CDMA phone at all.
iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
If you are making something that everybody needs to see, you use HTML5 or you fail. It is that simple. The whole fucking point of the Web is to be the one platform that is universal.
Tell the bozo developer to go to w3.org not microsoft.com. And tell him computing is centered in Silicon Valley, motherfucker, not Washington.
The premises are right, but it is Adobe's fault. How could it by anyone else's? Flash is their 100% proprietary platform. They and only they are responsible.
The end of Flash is only Steve Jobs' fault to the extent that the guy who stood up to Joe McCarthy and said "at long last sir, have you no shame?" is responsible for the end of McCarthyism. Everybody was thinking it, and somebody had the guts to say it, and the air went out of the balloon. But if it wasn't them who said it, somebody else would. They had both already overstayed their welcome.
The same thing is going to happen with other Adobe products, because they bought their only competitor and their software quality crashed, it is abysmal. There are incredible bugs in Creative Suite that never get fixed, and each new version adds more bugs. I have worked for years as a Photoshop pro, I know it inside out, but I no longer love it. It's not lovable anymore. It's barely tolerable. When someone else provides a solution, Adobe's users will flock to it, and Adobe management will blame everybody but themselves.
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Xbox is over now, anyway. Console gaming is over. Gaming has moved onto mobile systems. There are more iPod touch devices in the world than all of the console games put together. AppleTV outsells Xbox. In a couple of years, iPad will have more GPU than the console games.
- MS Office is a 1980's product (Word and Excel are from 1985, the combined suite debuted in 1989)
- Windows is a 1990's product (3.0 was the first version that was not a demo, 95 was when you started booting into it instead of running it part-time)
- Xbox is a 2000's product (a time when a good enough GPU for gaming had to come in a large box with fans and a good enough screen for gaming was so expensive you couldn't include it, you just put on a TV out instead)
so we are still left with the question of what Microsoft is going to be selling in the 20-teens.
Apple products are cheaper. If you can't see that, you are fooling yourself. People who are used to spending $600 on a PC every 2 years as well as $300 on software for it and at least $150 to clean off viruses during that time are going into Apple Store and buying an iPad for $399 and $50 of software gets them a video editor, photo editor, word processor, presentations, spreadsheets, and a 3D game. Instead of a Silverlight plug-in that they need to update in order to see Netflix, there is just a free Netflix app you install with 1-click. Then the OS upgrades for the life of the device are free. And there are no viruses, no security software to install. And the Genius Bar is there to help with stuff, for free. And iPad has a 10 hour battery — weighs 700 grams. It should cost twice as much as other consumer PC's. You should be at Best Buy looking at a $499 HP notebook or iPads that start at $899.
The Mac already has 90% of the high-end PC market. That discussion is over. But MacBook Air at $999 caused jaws to drop across the PC industry. That is a high-end workstation with high-end operating system and app platform in a size of a netbook, and half the price of what that kind of notebook used to cost when we called them "sub notebooks." Yes, it is expensive if all you do is surf the Web on it. But that is not all people do with them. They edit movies, they make music, they do all the things that people have always done with Macs.
So you don't have to invent some BS reason that people are buying Apple products. The products are better than all of their competition, and they are also cheaper. In many cases, cheaper to buy, but in all cases, cheaper to own. And when you include training costs, the Apple products can become exponentially cheaper in some cases. There is NO MYSTERY. If you are better, you will sell some, and if you are cheaper, you will sell some. If you are both cheaper and better — you get what Apple has been doing over the past decade.
And further, the Apple tools make you more money! People go into the Apple community and 95% of them don't come out, but it is because they can't afford to, not because they are hypnotized by a cult. Not only is my I-T bill lower than my colleagues who use generic alternatives, but I get more work done, I make more money. I can't afford to buy generic tech — it is too expensive. The software alone is too expensive. The management alone is too expensive.
But Nerd Dogma prevents a lot of people from seeing this. It's easier to make stuff up and feed your denial than to admit that people are just choosing the better product. Right-wing nerds should be especially ashamed to do that, because Apple Store is very much the free market. These Apple devices are being adopted one user at a time, not in lots of 100,000 like Dell used to do.
If you are in I-T, just fucking shut up about Apple. You just keep saying stupid fucking things. How is WebKit a love/hate relationship with open source? How is shipping the only name brand PC with open source software on it a love/hate relationship with open source? Fuck. So stupid.
HP has no future in client PC's. They have to get out ASAP. They don't know a damn thing about competing for the consumer's attention. Consumer PC's are sociology, not specs. Nobody cares what is inside a MacBook Air, they just want one.
What used to be the PC market is now just servers. HP's notebooks are a server in a notebook, they are not comparable to Apple's notebooks. HP should be running for the back room I-T business it knows.
A friend of mine who is a petite woman was told by her doctor not to carry her HP notebook anymore, it was too heavy. She pulled her trapezius muscle carrying it, which is one of the most painful muscle pulls there is. She put the carry bag for the notebook onto a 2 wheeler so she could drag it through the airport. Then she saw my MacBook Air and went out to Apple Store the same day and bought one for herself and for the past year she has been carrying it everywhere in her purse. And it is multiple times faster and more capable than the HP boat anchor it replaced. And she found Mac OS and iWork to be superior to the Windows XP and Office 2003 she was used to, as well as 10 years newer. Is HP going to follow Apple down that road? Is HP going to secure large supplies of flash storage chips, learn how to cut metal to make thin notebooks, and somehow, someway find a way to put some sex into their client systems? Because consumers don't reverse their expectations. They see MacBook Air and iPad and they don't look at a giant HP boat anchor the same way again. They find out how you can just go to Genius Bar to get everything you were getting at Geek Squad for free.
And the time of CIO's buying lots of 10,000 HP PC's is winding down. Companies are giving their users their slice of the I-T budget, and 50% or more of them are going to Apple Store.
In 5 years, there will only be 2 PC makers: Apple and Microsoft. And I'm not sure about Microsoft. There is no place for HP in client systems.
HP killed TouchPad by not making their own software for the 10 years previous. They can't correct for the fact that they put their balls into Microsoft's hands by putting WebKit and Linux on some ARM hardware. They just simply did not have enough software to compete with Apple and Microsoft at their own games.
Yeah, the only logical buyer for HP's PC business is the company that should have owned it all along: Microsoft.
Google is 75% Mac users, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. Chrome OS is not even close to a replacement for Mac OS X. Chrome OS does not even replace iOS yet.
Apple leads in all PC quality surveys, as well as all PC customer service surveys. If you are too stupid to work the Genius Bar and AppleCare ($149 for years 2 and 3 on a mini) then maybe you *should* buy from HP.
The iPhone 4 does not have a poor antenna any more than the earth is flat or President Obama is a socialist.
There is no alternate universe where the bottom doesn't fall out of the generic PC market and kill the quality of all IBM and HP PC's, should they still be making them. That is a fact of life that IBM and HP had to deal with in their own way. IBM spun off their PC's and HP kept them and ran them into the ground. In both cases, quality went down. It was always going to go down. You can't go from an average sales price of around $1000 to an average sales price of around $500 without losing quality.
People used to say that if Apple were to make Intel PC's they would crush the Windows PC makers. Well, Apple started making Intel PC's in 2006 and they crushed the Windows PC makers, who all had to run down to the $500 low-end market to survive. People used to say that if Apple were to make a $500 low-end PC, they would crush the Windows PC makers. Well, in 2010, Apple started making a $500 low-end PC and they crushed the Windows PC makers. ALL Windows PC makers. Doesn't matter what brand is on the Windows PC. Whether at IBM or Lenovo, whether at HP or a spin-off, the market is what matters. If the market won't support building a quality PC, you have to build junk. If you build junk, that reflects on your other businesses and your brand. So HP either has to become a junk brand or get out of PC's. Since they make most of their money on something other than PC's, get out! Get out now. Get out 5 years ago!
The quality would have gone down at IBM also. You can't get blood from a stone. The Windows PC market is running at an average sales price of $450. You can't build a quality PC for that price. That is actually cheaper than the original iPod from 2001, which in 2011 dollars is about $500.
Not just business, but also government has been destroyed by MBA.
There is no $20 billion investment. It is $20 billion over 5 years. That is only $4 billion per year. If that sounds large, remember that iPhone sales just double all by themselves every single year. If you think Sprint can sell n iPhones in 2012, then they can sell 2n in 2013, 4n in 2014, 8n in 2015, and 16n in 2016. They could easily sell over 20 million iPhones in 2016 all by themselves.
The only way I could see an exclusive iPhone for Sprint making sense is if it was a new low-end model made for the prepay market, which Tim Cook said about a year ago that they would do at some point in the future. I believe Sprint has more prepay customers (at least as a percentage) than the other carriers. I have a friend who has an iPod touch and a free prepay phone, and she would really rather just have a prepay phone inside her iPod touch.
You're right. This is like an article that says McDonald's is going to spend $20 billion on beef patties over the next 5 years.
OMG is there even that much money in the world? Where are they going to get it all?
An iPhone cannot remember a network it has never been on. The issue here is not that she didn't want to login to Wi-Fi the second time, it is that she did not want to login to Wi-Fi the first time.
If she does not know what Wi-Fi is, she did not turn it off to save battery. That is why Apple put in good battery management rather than leave it to the user to run Tasker like a fucking idiot. Most iPhone users do not even understand that turning off Wi-Fi would save a little battery. They are lawyers and homemakers and artists and managers and waiters and other people who did not play dungeons and dragons when they were kids.
If you go into Wi-Fi with an iPhone, it will ask if you want to join the network. But if you don't know what the password for that network is, iPhone cannot read the mind of the sysadmin and get it for you. At least not yet. If his wife doesn't want to be bothered with Wi-Fi, she does not know the passwords for the networks she is in.
With all due respect, that is completely fucking stupid.
All of the things you listed cost money that Sprint does not have because 1) they do not carry the #1 best-selling phone of the last 4 years, which is iPhone; 2) they do not carry the only high-end $600 phone that is still available today, which is iPhone, they only have $300 and $100 phones with much lower profits; 3) they do not carry the phone with the most-profitable contract (iPhone,) which makes twice what any other phone contract makes; and 4) they have lost a ton of subscribers whose #1 reason for leaving was to buy iPhone on another carrier.
So your idea that they pretend iPhone doesn't exist is not only impractical, but does not even qualify as rational. If you were Sprint's CEO and you articulated that strategy, you would be impeached and possibly committed to a mental hospital within hours of opening your mouth.
Creaky old Slashdot users.
Yes, $20 billion loss leaders. The contracts on those phones will bring in $75 billion in revenue at least.
You're saying the public doesn't love Apple? They have a weird way of showing it.
Yes, iPads are cheaper than iPhones. That is because low-end PC's cost less than high-end smartphones.
They are not buying in volume. There is no way that Sprint wrote a $20 billion check to Apple and won't pay them anything again for 5 years. They will pay as they go.
If you want to sell 30 billion iPhones over 4 years, you do this:
- 2 million in 2012
- 4 million in 2013
- 8 million in 2014
- 16 million in 2015
the reason it is easy is that iPhone sales double organically every year. The same effort that you put in to sell 2 million in 2012 results in 16 million sales in 2015.
This is a very minimum commitment, and for a carrier that runs a nonstandard network, they are lucky that Apple made them a CDMA phone at all.
iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
If you are making something that everybody needs to see, you use HTML5 or you fail. It is that simple. The whole fucking point of the Web is to be the one platform that is universal.
Tell the bozo developer to go to w3.org not microsoft.com. And tell him computing is centered in Silicon Valley, motherfucker, not Washington.
The premises are right, but it is Adobe's fault. How could it by anyone else's? Flash is their 100% proprietary platform. They and only they are responsible.
The end of Flash is only Steve Jobs' fault to the extent that the guy who stood up to Joe McCarthy and said "at long last sir, have you no shame?" is responsible for the end of McCarthyism. Everybody was thinking it, and somebody had the guts to say it, and the air went out of the balloon. But if it wasn't them who said it, somebody else would. They had both already overstayed their welcome.
The same thing is going to happen with other Adobe products, because they bought their only competitor and their software quality crashed, it is abysmal. There are incredible bugs in Creative Suite that never get fixed, and each new version adds more bugs. I have worked for years as a Photoshop pro, I know it inside out, but I no longer love it. It's not lovable anymore. It's barely tolerable. When someone else provides a solution, Adobe's users will flock to it, and Adobe management will blame everybody but themselves.