When you're tempted to compare Windows and Mac security all you have to do is point to the fact that there are Unix user accounts on the Mac since 2001. Game over, Mac wins.
Mac users do not run as root, and in fact root user access is not enabled by default. Just that by itself is much more important than randomized memory paths and UAC prompts and even firewalls.
Microsoft has people doing office work running as root because their poorly managed third-party software platform has not yet adapted to a networked user model.
Apple is also way ahead of Microsoft on quality, design, execution, product management. It is a more tightly built boat.
> Apple's time to patch was about twice as long as Microsoft's in 2006. From the looks of things, they may be working > hard on improving that.
But Apple's bugs were much less severe, and when Apple ships a patch, it goes out to their Software Update system which patches a remarkable number of systems very quickly. Software Update is 8 or more years old, predates Mac OS X. It updates your Mac OS X system with a new version of Mac OS X every quarter or so. The whole platform is a moving target.
> MOAB
MOAB was a practical joke, like Borat or Rush Limbaugh, an art project, realpolitik, a propaganda piece. The joke is on you when you cite it as a technical reference.
C'mon, man... it is a few months until Leopard. These systems don't exist in a vacuum. You are looking right now at the very end of the end of the Intel transition. All of the machines pretend to be their immediate PowerPC predecessors in some way to minimize the fuss. The Intel transition is over and Leopard is coming that is going to mean new machines and probably a whole new model of some kind, like a very small notebook or something that fits between Mac mini and Mac Pro.
Also, the Mac Pro update to 8 processors was very significant because it is like Apple putting their multi-processing money where their mouths are. Big developers have these machines now and they are making their apps work better across 8 processors, which we will probably see in the iMac by 2010 or so. And there are going to be a lot of new Mac Pros purchased just to run Photoshop v10 which just came out. Photoshop is so interactive that a faster machine will be noticed immediately in work output... none of those shops was going to buy a 4-way and pull the processors and put in some Intel part that has been found to be compatible by somebody "on the Internet."
The most interesting Mac hardware rumor for me is that they will have multi-touch screens, like the iPhone. Mac OS X Leopard has the same resolution-independent display from the iPhone, the menu bar or windows can all scale up if you have fat fingers or bad eyesight or both. If you look at Mac OS X Tiger on a 30 inch display, you don't want to push a mouse cursor around that thing, you just want to press icons in the Dock with your finger. You want to push mixer sliders around in Logic, or scrub video in Final Cut just by applying the fingers directly. This is also a feature that DJ's want to replace the turntables in an electronic setup, it is very hip. And it would make Mac users buy new Macs for Leopard and it would take 5 years to come to the PC in a real way. Look at all the stuff that is in iPhone for $500, why can't I get a touch screen on my $1200 iMac? Also it would enable them to make even smaller systems, such as a sub notebook with no track pad.
> Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows > they will be able to run.
For recycling purposes, both Apple and Dell say 7 year life span. Time is up on 32-bit Macs in 2012. I haven't heard anyone seriously suggest that Windows Vista will be replaced with a new version of Windows by 2012. Inside Microsoft they may say so but on one hand who believes them and on the other, when they suggest to ship post-Vista Windows in 2010 people get angry at the idea that the next shake up will come so soon.
> He also says the industry should pay more attention to industrial design when creating new products.
When he bought those products, he should have paid more attention to industrial design. That is how you get manufacturers to pay attention to it... you buy the well-designed products and you don't buy the poorly-designed ones.
Apple has terrible marketing. It is a ridiculous myth that they have good marketing.
What Apple has is good products that have simple integrity that either explains itself to you or it doesn't.
The number of times that actual Apple users have pulled their hair out when they see a new Apple campaign... for years we were all like "tell them it doesn't get viruses" and instead you get iBooks flying around in white space.
> What I can't understand is how they can imagine that this won't create a huge amount of hostility towards them from customers or potential customers.
That is all they have anyway. There is no goodwill to damage. They don't have customers, they have a cartel.
If Michael Dell is talking FOSS then that shit has to stop immediately or who is going to pay MS to play with software all day?
The root of the problem is that MS bet wrong. They thought that the future would be 25 PC's running Windows all around your house, and every house has to have at least one geek to go around and reboot each system regularly. In that case, they only need a PC monopoly and they control the whole house or office. Instead, we have 25 computers alright, but many are phones and iPods and PS2 and many more are in the Google cloud and now AppleTV, and the more you use this stuff the worse your Microsoft PC looks. Both the iPod and Google Search are more reliable than Microsoft Windows.
The reason iPhone has such buzz is that millions of iPod users found their iPod to be a better device all-around than their phone and they asked Apple to make "an iPod phone." The same thing is happening with the Mac... many people are trying it for the first time because after owning an iPod they are actually willing to believe that the Apple PC might be a much better PC than Windows, then they try it and it is. Microsoft can't generate any of this kind of buzz because their products just plain suck. They can't build a great Windows v6.0 because instead they shipped Vista v1.0.
> Imagine if all over the world tonight, young people decided to take colored chalk in hand and write "MS: Put Up or Shut Up!" on sidewalks from > Munich through Paris and London, to Tokyo and on around to SF, LA, Austin, NY, etc...
If that many people cared about Microsoft, then Microsoft wouldn't be embarrassing themselves by whoring software patents.
> Ironically, McCarthy underestimated the number of Communists working in the state department - the 'true' number > derived from Venona intercepts was even higher.
That is completely irrelevant. McCarthy pulled his number out of his ass. In fact, he pulled it out of his ass a few times and it was a different number each time.
Then he named names, which he also pulled out of his ass.
I can tell you for certain that there are murderers and rapists living in your city, out on the loose. I don't even need to know what city you live in. There are murderers and rapists loose in every city. However if I say there are 122 murderers loose in Philadelphia and I don't have a list of names and I start picking people randomly out of the Philly phone book then it really doesn't matter if later down the line a study finds that there are actually 375 murders loose in Philadelphia. McCarthy was not at all involved in the actual enumeration of communists in the US gov't. He was completely and totally involved in his own self-aggrandization.
> A few years later a Senator from Massachusetts (initials were JFK) claimed that the Soviet Union had close to 200 missiles > ready to launch against the US - the truth was that the Soviets had 6 ICBM's ready by mid-1960. So maybe it is safe to say > that Microsoft is to software what Kennedy was to politics?
Also irrelevant. That is not at all what Kennedy is remembered for, while McCarthy is CHIEFLY remembered for pulling a "number of communists" out of his ass and then witch-hunting around all the while refusing to provide any documentation to back up his claims. McCarthy is not the only political figure ever to exaggerate or be wrong... he is famous for making it up as he went along and for getting very publicly caught at it.
If Ballmer can't back up his number of patent claims with actual documentation of same then the original analogy of McCarthy and Ballmer is apt and valid. If Ballmer says "238 patent infringements" and then he can't give you a 238 page memo to go with that then he will have "pulled a McCarthy."
If somebody shoots Ballmer in the back of the head over this, then he will have "pulled a Kennedy."
If you compare Windows Vista Ultimate ($399 on DVD) to a Mac mini ($599 on x64 PC) then it begs the question: why the fuck would you ship an operating system on a DVD? As a technical challenge? To generate a SKU? Certainly not to meet the needs of a typical PC user. By the time you get the DVD it is out of date, however the Mac mini updates itself over the Internet as soon as you plug it in.
If you are making a Linux distribution you ought to be shipping on a PC, not a DVD. The "technically advanced user" can easily wipe the disk on a Mac mini and install any kind of x64 compatible operating system, however the other 99% of users cannot take a bare PC and make it into a reliable and complete system such as the Mac mini. Therefore, if you are selling Linux as an operating system, it's the 99% who can't install from DVD who are your audience... the other 1% are already going to roll their own.
As the hard disk and DVD are replaced by chips this is only going to become more and more obvious. The iPhone is smaller than a DVD in a couple of dimensions and requires no setup. That is only going to make the average user even less tolerant of the poorly integrated hardware and software in most of the PC business.
Microsoft can fuck their users over in outrageous ways which simply couldn't happen if the company was responsible to them financially.
For example, they do not equip even their Windows Vista Ultimate with a basic 1970's user account. In the 1970's you were on a small network managed by a guy wearing suspenders who had taken the vows yet you had a more secure environment than a 21st century Microsoft PC which connects to a global Internet with bot nets and who knows what.
Even the whole idea of shipping PC's with the head and body separate, it is ridiculous, done for financial reasons, not technical. When you look at what comes pre-installed on a Mac and imagine the "commodity" version of that, in your mind's eye you see a PC builder such as Dell should also be one of the main Linux distributions. The Mac software install is like a greatest hits of non-Microsoft computing, and includes software from thousands of Apple engineers, and thousands of community engineers also. In addition to maintaining the "Mac" part of Mac OS X, Apple-the-PC-builder maintains its own Unix distribution because every user needs that due to the Internet and also it is free software, it is like a Unix decoder ring for every Mac user so that they can interact on the network with every other user of every other platform. On a Microsoft PC it is all Microsoft-generated clones of the software that SHOULD be on your Dell or HP PC, and the quality is low, the compatibility is low. The idea that you buy a $499 PC and it doesn't have Apache on there it is actually a kind of sin. But it is even worse that you can buy a PC at all that doesn't set you up with a proper user account, that is like selling people cardboard helmets painted to look steel.
Maybe a few years ago this kind of apologizing for MS was more excusable. The Internet took MS by surprise in the mid-90's so much so that Windows 95 did not have a Web browser included, and Bill Gates 1995 book "The Road Ahead" mentioned the Internet once while dedicating a chapter to CD-ROM. So by Windows 2000 everybody is going, OK, they are getting their shit together now, but they have stumbled around like a drunk since then.
Also, even if you are an ignorant bastard and don't know about all the Unix software that is missing from every Dell or HP PC, you can see the same thing going on with the Mac. Apache and PHP are wonderful Photoshop accessories but also great accessories for business or whatever you are doing because it probably involves the Internet due to the century we are living in.
In short, you have to be an illegal monopoly to ship non-Internet-capable computers in 2007 when Unix itself is free. Nobody else but an illegal monopoly could get away with it.
I would love to see an economic and technical analysis of what Microsoft would look like if they licensed Windows+Office for $3 for each version.
A lot of the problems that people have with them might go away. You could say, well it's closed source but it's cheap at least. You could say well, it's low-quality but it's cheap at least.
The products themselves would probably be leaner. Office would be more consistent and approachable, like a typewriter, with less bloat. Windows would probably use an open source core OS like Apple does, for all the same reasons. And it would have to be reliable and satisfy users because if not somebody will do a DR-DOS.
The market for upscale computing would probably be healthier also, consisting of more than just Apple. Maybe HP would have done its own Mac OS X with their Unix. Also, I can imagine that by now the free Linux movement would have felt some impetus to, say, standardize on a Window Manager, if they want to compete with Windows+Office at $3 a pop on the commodity desktop.
If all PC's were about $200 and included $3 of OS and office suite then you could sell a billion of those. That is the replacement for the typewriter that the world is still waiting on.
> But Nintendo's most effective marketing trick was to give away its killer app, Wii Sports, with every $250 console.
In other words, every single Wii has the sports games, they are part of the personality of the Wii. This reminds me of iLife on the Mac. People see Wii bowling and want a Wii in the same way they see iMovie or iPhoto and want a Mac. It explains the whole box in a way that everybody can understand. Then if you are a football fan you are obviously going to get a football game to add on to your Wii, if you are into music and audio you are going to replace GarageBand with something bigger. But you still have the core set of things that every Wii or Mac can do.
The personality that a device can get when it is well designed and does a lot of things out of the box is what makes people understand what-the-hell-is-that-thing? If you know what the components are and you're familiar with a wide range of technology it is obvious that a Wii is not an Xbox but most people just see two boxes, basically identical. They are going to compare what Day 1 with each box is like... the Wii explains itself better.
I saw on the news where somebody just showed up at a senior's center in their town with a Wii and installed it in the movie room and now there are bowling nights. They didn't have to get a Wii plus the sports game plus 10 other add-on accessories to make it work. It isn't a razor blade handle.
So much technology lacks design, they don't do enough thinking first. Then at the other end, most stuff is also terribly unfinished. You have to put it together yourself or add things to it just to do anything useful with it. The Wii is refreshingly finished.
Those are their "elevator pitch" downsides to the iPhone for corporate users? That's it? These are painfully weak points.
> not having buttons, which would make it difficult to dial while driving says Gartner's Ken Dulaney.
Dialing while driving is illegal in many states. If you need to do it, you should have a hands-free. Doesn't matter what phone you have. And not having buttons has not hurt the Web. Most people will get the iPhone's Web-like UI much more than most phone's attempts to ape the pocket calculator.
> removable battery
The reason this analyst concern will not play out is that iPhone actually has a removable battery, however the removable one is optional. You buy it from a third-party and plug it onto the iPod dock and your iPhone will run for 36 hours. This is the same as iPod today. There are many different accessory batteries from many different manufacturers. Some mimic a full iPod dock, they are very easy to deal with if you are that kind of user, for example if you go camping.
So what is called the lack of a removable battery in iPod/iPhone is actually seen by users (whether consciously or not) as an extra large-capacity internal battery that removes the requirement that they manage batteries unless they are the equivalent of an "off-road" power user. Compare to other phones that ship you a mini-battery to reduce size and price and the battery you really want is extra and hardly anybody buys it. It is a scam for most users.
When you compare AC adapters on phones, the iPhone will just plug in to anywhere that has an iPod dock. If you give a corporate user an iPhone they may not even ask you for an AC adapter. They may have an iPod dock in three or four rooms in their home and also in their car. Putting juice into iPhone will not be a challenge for any user.
> Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis, also thinks the iPhone won't be a good option for enterprise > customers because enterprises won't be able to write applications for the phone
The iPhone can run Web applications, out-of-the-box. It has a full desktop-class Web browser. It has Wi-Fi "n"... you can take an iPhone out of the box and be on the corporate Intranet before your coffee cools. No other handheld has a real Web browser.
Similarly, alone among all phones and handhelds, the iPhone has a desktop-class API and development environment with a huge community of knowledgeable developers who at this point simply lack iPhone specific information due to the newness of the device. However the iPhone is not the first time Cocoa has been ported, and one Cocoa developer can do outrageous stuff because it is high-level. Apps made for iPhone will have the gloss and animations and similar for free. Apple will be happy to sell corporations a bunch of Macs so they can develop their iPhone apps and deploy with iTunes. The features that are seen as "locked down" will appeal to corporations. They will be able to install a custom VPN through iTunes and know it can't be monkeyed with easily outside the office.
Also the iPhone is running Unix, just a 500 MB installation of OS X on its 4-8 GB disk, just like AppleTV. Not the hardest thing in the world to hack. Linux runs on iPods.
In the worst case scenario for Jobs, he did not even do enough to get into the Republican party. Bill Gates will send Jobs a bottle of champagne with a note that reads "join the club."
> The real solution here is to urge Congress and the FCC to force mobile phone carriers to allow users to purchase and connect any compatible > equipment of their choice to the network - just like they did in the 1960s to Ma Bell.
We already have this, it's called the Internet. It is device agnostic. Your iPhone or PSP or PC can all use it. Other networks are just filling in the dead spots in Wi-Fi right now. Enjoy them while they last.
> So what does that say about the huge about of shit Apple has been dishing regarding Vista?
If Apple was the only one bad-mouthing Vista then you would have the beginning of an argument.
As it is, Vista not only speaks for itself but has been panned in every single review. There are diehard MS Kool-Aid drinkers who have panned Vista. The Vista product chief himself said Vista is so bad he would use a Mac if he didn't work at Microsoft.
> I know many people with Razrs who do NOT install applications on their phones. Why? Because they don't know how.
I know many people with Macs who do NOT install applications for the same exact reason. Even though it is drag-and-drop and you can put apps anywhere.
To many people, an "application install" goes like this:
1) type "http://www.google.com/" into your Web browser 2) start using your new Web application
The iPhone has that locked up. It is the first handheld that is going to exploit this little thing called the World Wide Web. Other handheld Web browsers have thus far been an embarrassment. WebKit is a W3C wet dream.
> Personally, I don't believe Joe Public wants to pay $500 for a phone, but we'll see.
If the iPhone only had the iPod features and was replacing iPod video for $349 it would sell and sell and sell. "Touch your music" and "widescreen video" and it would sell and sell and sell.
So they have to convince people that phone, the real Web, Email, calendaring, Google apps, and other features are worth $150 more.
I don't think that is going to be hard at all. $150 is what you pay for anti-virus for your Microsoft software.
Also the PC market share stuff does not include Apple Store, or it will exclude education, or it will be just sales to business, there are all kinds of ways of making Apple look smaller.
Macs also have almost exactly twice the average working life of other PC's, so when you look at installed base the Mac market doubles in size compared to the PC market. Mac users also buy many more peripherals and require much less support.
Similarly, when comparing "profit margins" Apple will be compared against Dell, but not against Dell+Microsoft which would be necessary to gather the whole profit margin from that box because Microsoft makes a profit on every Dell PC. On the Apple side, their seemingly larger profit margin includes both the Dell part of the box and the Microsoft part. Microsoft's huge profits and cash hoard had to come from somewhere.
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When you're tempted to compare Windows and Mac security all you have to do is point to the fact that there are Unix user accounts on the Mac since 2001. Game over, Mac wins.
Mac users do not run as root, and in fact root user access is not enabled by default. Just that by itself is much more important than randomized memory paths and UAC prompts and even firewalls.
Microsoft has people doing office work running as root because their poorly managed third-party software platform has not yet adapted to a networked user model.
Apple is also way ahead of Microsoft on quality, design, execution, product management. It is a more tightly built boat.
> Apple's time to patch was about twice as long as Microsoft's in 2006. From the looks of things, they may be working
> hard on improving that.
But Apple's bugs were much less severe, and when Apple ships a patch, it goes out to their Software Update system which patches a remarkable number of systems very quickly. Software Update is 8 or more years old, predates Mac OS X. It updates your Mac OS X system with a new version of Mac OS X every quarter or so. The whole platform is a moving target.
> MOAB
MOAB was a practical joke, like Borat or Rush Limbaugh, an art project, realpolitik, a propaganda piece. The joke is on you when you cite it as a technical reference.
C'mon, man ... it is a few months until Leopard. These systems don't exist in a vacuum. You are looking right now at the very end of the end of the Intel transition. All of the machines pretend to be their immediate PowerPC predecessors in some way to minimize the fuss. The Intel transition is over and Leopard is coming that is going to mean new machines and probably a whole new model of some kind, like a very small notebook or something that fits between Mac mini and Mac Pro.
... none of those shops was going to buy a 4-way and pull the processors and put in some Intel part that has been found to be compatible by somebody "on the Internet."
Also, the Mac Pro update to 8 processors was very significant because it is like Apple putting their multi-processing money where their mouths are. Big developers have these machines now and they are making their apps work better across 8 processors, which we will probably see in the iMac by 2010 or so. And there are going to be a lot of new Mac Pros purchased just to run Photoshop v10 which just came out. Photoshop is so interactive that a faster machine will be noticed immediately in work output
The most interesting Mac hardware rumor for me is that they will have multi-touch screens, like the iPhone. Mac OS X Leopard has the same resolution-independent display from the iPhone, the menu bar or windows can all scale up if you have fat fingers or bad eyesight or both. If you look at Mac OS X Tiger on a 30 inch display, you don't want to push a mouse cursor around that thing, you just want to press icons in the Dock with your finger. You want to push mixer sliders around in Logic, or scrub video in Final Cut just by applying the fingers directly. This is also a feature that DJ's want to replace the turntables in an electronic setup, it is very hip. And it would make Mac users buy new Macs for Leopard and it would take 5 years to come to the PC in a real way. Look at all the stuff that is in iPhone for $500, why can't I get a touch screen on my $1200 iMac? Also it would enable them to make even smaller systems, such as a sub notebook with no track pad.
You should have known better than to buy an audio video consumer electronics device from a company that makes typewriter software.
What the fuck does Microsoft know about music or movies or TV?
> Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows
> they will be able to run.
For recycling purposes, both Apple and Dell say 7 year life span. Time is up on 32-bit Macs in 2012. I haven't heard anyone seriously suggest that Windows Vista will be replaced with a new version of Windows by 2012. Inside Microsoft they may say so but on one hand who believes them and on the other, when they suggest to ship post-Vista Windows in 2010 people get angry at the idea that the next shake up will come so soon.
> He also says the industry should pay more attention to industrial design when creating new products.
... you buy the well-designed products and you don't buy the poorly-designed ones.
When he bought those products, he should have paid more attention to industrial design. That is how you get manufacturers to pay attention to it
It's always bullshit to say "235" anything and not be able to back it up with a list 235 items long.
... just doesn't want to show it right now.
Ballmer could just as easily have said that Microsoft has perfected the fusion reactor but
Or that he has a gun in his pocket you better do what he says. No, really. He really, really does.
Or that the next version of Windows is coming soon and will be really, really good. And people will care, they will really care.
Apple has terrible marketing. It is a ridiculous myth that they have good marketing.
... for years we were all like "tell them it doesn't get viruses" and instead you get iBooks flying around in white space.
What Apple has is good products that have simple integrity that either explains itself to you or it doesn't.
The number of times that actual Apple users have pulled their hair out when they see a new Apple campaign
> What I can't understand is how they can imagine that this won't create a huge amount of hostility towards them from customers or potential customers.
... many people are trying it for the first time because after owning an iPod they are actually willing to believe that the Apple PC might be a much better PC than Windows, then they try it and it is. Microsoft can't generate any of this kind of buzz because their products just plain suck. They can't build a great Windows v6.0 because instead they shipped Vista v1.0.
That is all they have anyway. There is no goodwill to damage. They don't have customers, they have a cartel.
If Michael Dell is talking FOSS then that shit has to stop immediately or who is going to pay MS to play with software all day?
The root of the problem is that MS bet wrong. They thought that the future would be 25 PC's running Windows all around your house, and every house has to have at least one geek to go around and reboot each system regularly. In that case, they only need a PC monopoly and they control the whole house or office. Instead, we have 25 computers alright, but many are phones and iPods and PS2 and many more are in the Google cloud and now AppleTV, and the more you use this stuff the worse your Microsoft PC looks. Both the iPod and Google Search are more reliable than Microsoft Windows.
The reason iPhone has such buzz is that millions of iPod users found their iPod to be a better device all-around than their phone and they asked Apple to make "an iPod phone." The same thing is happening with the Mac
> Imagine if all over the world tonight, young people decided to take colored chalk in hand and write "MS: Put Up or Shut Up!" on sidewalks from
> Munich through Paris and London, to Tokyo and on around to SF, LA, Austin, NY, etc...
If that many people cared about Microsoft, then Microsoft wouldn't be embarrassing themselves by whoring software patents.
Microsoft is as hip as typewriters.
> Ironically, McCarthy underestimated the number of Communists working in the state department - the 'true' number
... he is famous for making it up as he went along and for getting very publicly caught at it.
> derived from Venona intercepts was even higher.
That is completely irrelevant. McCarthy pulled his number out of his ass. In fact, he pulled it out of his ass a few times and it was a different number each time.
Then he named names, which he also pulled out of his ass.
I can tell you for certain that there are murderers and rapists living in your city, out on the loose. I don't even need to know what city you live in. There are murderers and rapists loose in every city. However if I say there are 122 murderers loose in Philadelphia and I don't have a list of names and I start picking people randomly out of the Philly phone book then it really doesn't matter if later down the line a study finds that there are actually 375 murders loose in Philadelphia. McCarthy was not at all involved in the actual enumeration of communists in the US gov't. He was completely and totally involved in his own self-aggrandization.
> A few years later a Senator from Massachusetts (initials were JFK) claimed that the Soviet Union had close to 200 missiles
> ready to launch against the US - the truth was that the Soviets had 6 ICBM's ready by mid-1960. So maybe it is safe to say
> that Microsoft is to software what Kennedy was to politics?
Also irrelevant. That is not at all what Kennedy is remembered for, while McCarthy is CHIEFLY remembered for pulling a "number of communists" out of his ass and then witch-hunting around all the while refusing to provide any documentation to back up his claims. McCarthy is not the only political figure ever to exaggerate or be wrong
If Ballmer can't back up his number of patent claims with actual documentation of same then the original analogy of McCarthy and Ballmer is apt and valid. If Ballmer says "238 patent infringements" and then he can't give you a 238 page memo to go with that then he will have "pulled a McCarthy."
If somebody shoots Ballmer in the back of the head over this, then he will have "pulled a Kennedy."
> If IBM really had a big patent case against MS they would have pursued it long before this.
Doesn't IBM deliberately stay out of that kind of thing? They only hurt you with software patents if you try to hurt them.
There is a well known point in the tech company death spiral where the most valuable thing about you is your patents.
If you compare Windows Vista Ultimate ($399 on DVD) to a Mac mini ($599 on x64 PC) then it begs the question: why the fuck would you ship an operating system on a DVD? As a technical challenge? To generate a SKU? Certainly not to meet the needs of a typical PC user. By the time you get the DVD it is out of date, however the Mac mini updates itself over the Internet as soon as you plug it in.
... the other 1% are already going to roll their own.
If you are making a Linux distribution you ought to be shipping on a PC, not a DVD. The "technically advanced user" can easily wipe the disk on a Mac mini and install any kind of x64 compatible operating system, however the other 99% of users cannot take a bare PC and make it into a reliable and complete system such as the Mac mini. Therefore, if you are selling Linux as an operating system, it's the 99% who can't install from DVD who are your audience
As the hard disk and DVD are replaced by chips this is only going to become more and more obvious. The iPhone is smaller than a DVD in a couple of dimensions and requires no setup. That is only going to make the average user even less tolerant of the poorly integrated hardware and software in most of the PC business.
> The gadget is priced at around $100 and seems a good alternative for Photoshoppers."
In the same way that a cut finger is an alternative to a pencil.
Actual art tablets that are specifically designed to use with Photoshop (and vice versa) start at $99.
Microsoft can fuck their users over in outrageous ways which simply couldn't happen if the company was responsible to them financially.
For example, they do not equip even their Windows Vista Ultimate with a basic 1970's user account. In the 1970's you were on a small network managed by a guy wearing suspenders who had taken the vows yet you had a more secure environment than a 21st century Microsoft PC which connects to a global Internet with bot nets and who knows what.
Even the whole idea of shipping PC's with the head and body separate, it is ridiculous, done for financial reasons, not technical. When you look at what comes pre-installed on a Mac and imagine the "commodity" version of that, in your mind's eye you see a PC builder such as Dell should also be one of the main Linux distributions. The Mac software install is like a greatest hits of non-Microsoft computing, and includes software from thousands of Apple engineers, and thousands of community engineers also. In addition to maintaining the "Mac" part of Mac OS X, Apple-the-PC-builder maintains its own Unix distribution because every user needs that due to the Internet and also it is free software, it is like a Unix decoder ring for every Mac user so that they can interact on the network with every other user of every other platform. On a Microsoft PC it is all Microsoft-generated clones of the software that SHOULD be on your Dell or HP PC, and the quality is low, the compatibility is low. The idea that you buy a $499 PC and it doesn't have Apache on there it is actually a kind of sin. But it is even worse that you can buy a PC at all that doesn't set you up with a proper user account, that is like selling people cardboard helmets painted to look steel.
Maybe a few years ago this kind of apologizing for MS was more excusable. The Internet took MS by surprise in the mid-90's so much so that Windows 95 did not have a Web browser included, and Bill Gates 1995 book "The Road Ahead" mentioned the Internet once while dedicating a chapter to CD-ROM. So by Windows 2000 everybody is going, OK, they are getting their shit together now, but they have stumbled around like a drunk since then.
Also, even if you are an ignorant bastard and don't know about all the Unix software that is missing from every Dell or HP PC, you can see the same thing going on with the Mac. Apache and PHP are wonderful Photoshop accessories but also great accessories for business or whatever you are doing because it probably involves the Internet due to the century we are living in.
In short, you have to be an illegal monopoly to ship non-Internet-capable computers in 2007 when Unix itself is free. Nobody else but an illegal monopoly could get away with it.
I would love to see an economic and technical analysis of what Microsoft would look like if they licensed Windows+Office for $3 for each version.
A lot of the problems that people have with them might go away. You could say, well it's closed source but it's cheap at least. You could say well, it's low-quality but it's cheap at least.
The products themselves would probably be leaner. Office would be more consistent and approachable, like a typewriter, with less bloat. Windows would probably use an open source core OS like Apple does, for all the same reasons. And it would have to be reliable and satisfy users because if not somebody will do a DR-DOS.
The market for upscale computing would probably be healthier also, consisting of more than just Apple. Maybe HP would have done its own Mac OS X with their Unix. Also, I can imagine that by now the free Linux movement would have felt some impetus to, say, standardize on a Window Manager, if they want to compete with Windows+Office at $3 a pop on the commodity desktop.
If all PC's were about $200 and included $3 of OS and office suite then you could sell a billion of those. That is the replacement for the typewriter that the world is still waiting on.
> But Nintendo's most effective marketing trick was to give away its killer app, Wii Sports, with every $250 console.
... the Wii explains itself better.
In other words, every single Wii has the sports games, they are part of the personality of the Wii. This reminds me of iLife on the Mac. People see Wii bowling and want a Wii in the same way they see iMovie or iPhoto and want a Mac. It explains the whole box in a way that everybody can understand. Then if you are a football fan you are obviously going to get a football game to add on to your Wii, if you are into music and audio you are going to replace GarageBand with something bigger. But you still have the core set of things that every Wii or Mac can do.
The personality that a device can get when it is well designed and does a lot of things out of the box is what makes people understand what-the-hell-is-that-thing? If you know what the components are and you're familiar with a wide range of technology it is obvious that a Wii is not an Xbox but most people just see two boxes, basically identical. They are going to compare what Day 1 with each box is like
I saw on the news where somebody just showed up at a senior's center in their town with a Wii and installed it in the movie room and now there are bowling nights. They didn't have to get a Wii plus the sports game plus 10 other add-on accessories to make it work. It isn't a razor blade handle.
So much technology lacks design, they don't do enough thinking first. Then at the other end, most stuff is also terribly unfinished. You have to put it together yourself or add things to it just to do anything useful with it. The Wii is refreshingly finished.
Those are their "elevator pitch" downsides to the iPhone for corporate users? That's it? These are painfully weak points.
... you can take an iPhone out of the box and be on the corporate Intranet before your coffee cools. No other handheld has a real Web browser.
> not having buttons, which would make it difficult to dial while driving says Gartner's Ken Dulaney.
Dialing while driving is illegal in many states. If you need to do it, you should have a hands-free. Doesn't matter what phone you have. And not having buttons has not hurt the Web. Most people will get the iPhone's Web-like UI much more than most phone's attempts to ape the pocket calculator.
> removable battery
The reason this analyst concern will not play out is that iPhone actually has a removable battery, however the removable one is optional. You buy it from a third-party and plug it onto the iPod dock and your iPhone will run for 36 hours. This is the same as iPod today. There are many different accessory batteries from many different manufacturers. Some mimic a full iPod dock, they are very easy to deal with if you are that kind of user, for example if you go camping.
So what is called the lack of a removable battery in iPod/iPhone is actually seen by users (whether consciously or not) as an extra large-capacity internal battery that removes the requirement that they manage batteries unless they are the equivalent of an "off-road" power user. Compare to other phones that ship you a mini-battery to reduce size and price and the battery you really want is extra and hardly anybody buys it. It is a scam for most users.
When you compare AC adapters on phones, the iPhone will just plug in to anywhere that has an iPod dock. If you give a corporate user an iPhone they may not even ask you for an AC adapter. They may have an iPod dock in three or four rooms in their home and also in their car. Putting juice into iPhone will not be a challenge for any user.
> Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis, also thinks the iPhone won't be a good option for enterprise
> customers because enterprises won't be able to write applications for the phone
The iPhone can run Web applications, out-of-the-box. It has a full desktop-class Web browser. It has Wi-Fi "n"
Similarly, alone among all phones and handhelds, the iPhone has a desktop-class API and development environment with a huge community of knowledgeable developers who at this point simply lack iPhone specific information due to the newness of the device. However the iPhone is not the first time Cocoa has been ported, and one Cocoa developer can do outrageous stuff because it is high-level. Apps made for iPhone will have the gloss and animations and similar for free. Apple will be happy to sell corporations a bunch of Macs so they can develop their iPhone apps and deploy with iTunes. The features that are seen as "locked down" will appeal to corporations. They will be able to install a custom VPN through iTunes and know it can't be monkeyed with easily outside the office.
Also the iPhone is running Unix, just a 500 MB installation of OS X on its 4-8 GB disk, just like AppleTV. Not the hardest thing in the world to hack. Linux runs on iPods.
In the worst case scenario for Jobs, he did not even do enough to get into the Republican party. Bill Gates will send Jobs a bottle of champagne with a note that reads "join the club."
> The real solution here is to urge Congress and the FCC to force mobile phone carriers to allow users to purchase and connect any compatible
> equipment of their choice to the network - just like they did in the 1960s to Ma Bell.
We already have this, it's called the Internet. It is device agnostic. Your iPhone or PSP or PC can all use it. Other networks are just filling in the dead spots in Wi-Fi right now. Enjoy them while they last.
> So what does that say about the huge about of shit Apple has been dishing regarding Vista?
If Apple was the only one bad-mouthing Vista then you would have the beginning of an argument.
As it is, Vista not only speaks for itself but has been panned in every single review. There are diehard MS Kool-Aid drinkers who have panned Vista. The Vista product chief himself said Vista is so bad he would use a Mac if he didn't work at Microsoft.
> I know many people with Razrs who do NOT install applications on their phones. Why? Because they don't know how.
I know many people with Macs who do NOT install applications for the same exact reason. Even though it is drag-and-drop and you can put apps anywhere.
To many people, an "application install" goes like this:
1) type "http://www.google.com/" into your Web browser
2) start using your new Web application
The iPhone has that locked up. It is the first handheld that is going to exploit this little thing called the World Wide Web. Other handheld Web browsers have thus far been an embarrassment. WebKit is a W3C wet dream.
> Personally, I don't believe Joe Public wants to pay $500 for a phone, but we'll see.
If the iPhone only had the iPod features and was replacing iPod video for $349 it would sell and sell and sell. "Touch your music" and "widescreen video" and it would sell and sell and sell.
So they have to convince people that phone, the real Web, Email, calendaring, Google apps, and other features are worth $150 more.
I don't think that is going to be hard at all. $150 is what you pay for anti-virus for your Microsoft software.
Also the PC market share stuff does not include Apple Store, or it will exclude education, or it will be just sales to business, there are all kinds of ways of making Apple look smaller.
Macs also have almost exactly twice the average working life of other PC's, so when you look at installed base the Mac market doubles in size compared to the PC market. Mac users also buy many more peripherals and require much less support.
Similarly, when comparing "profit margins" Apple will be compared against Dell, but not against Dell+Microsoft which would be necessary to gather the whole profit margin from that box because Microsoft makes a profit on every Dell PC. On the Apple side, their seemingly larger profit margin includes both the Dell part of the box and the Microsoft part. Microsoft's huge profits and cash hoard had to come from somewhere.