Companies do not exist to make products to satisfy geeks. PA Semi had products no one was buying in huge numbers, and the owners of the company would have made the assessment that selling off to Apple resulted in a better deal for them than in trying to sell chips no one seemed to want. It would be nice if they had found a huge buyer or two with use for their chips in great volumes for them to stay independent, but the Apple deal was actually good for them. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have sold up.
Big difference. You have exactly 3 targets for console, but pretty much millions for PCs. For a PC, you have to target the guys with the latest and greatest, and guy who have a generation old equipment, and maybe some with 2 generations old equipment. To guarantee accpetable performance, you have to make sure you game is playable on those PCs, and you have to keep up with developments in PCs. For consoles, you will be developing for the same console for 7 or so years.
It's obvious that most computer security practices are the equivalent of cracking the metaphorical nut with a sledgehammer. My personal pet hate is the password aging practice. It specifically does one of two things. It discourages people from choosing strong passwords because strong passwords are more difficult to create and remember than weak ones. The second is that users may resort to writing passwords down because some expert decided they needed to change their password every 30 days. And often you get thet password change prompt right when you are about to go on a long holiday, which guarantees that you will not be able to remember it
One reason for this is that organisations have to show that they are serious about security, and practices like password aging are easy 'objective' metrics to demonstrate, even if they do not provide a measurable improvement in security.
I have had phones that came with huge manuals on how to use them. Apple made a phone that pretty much came with a leaflet, and said "Go on, see if you can't figure it out". Once you learnt how to pinch and slide your finger across the screen, you could do anything with the phone. The iPhone's paradigm has pretty quickly become the standard touch screen phone paradigm since then, yet touch screen phones existed for a long time before Apple decided to make one.
Cheap doesn't mean not properly designed! Google doesn't do redundancy on a micro scale. For them it's pointless. In fact, from what I know, Google knows their hardware will fail, so they have written their software to handle hardware failures gracefully. When something like this happens, they write a report, and get someone about to work out a fix so that the outage doesn't recur.
You call it a huge step backwards, I call it a huge step forward. No one should have to deal with the crap that computers make them deal with for the most part. I shouldn't have to scour the internet far and wide to find applications and hope that they are not trojaned. As Steve Jobs pointed out, Apple set out to make a device that can do internet as well or better than any other device/computer, does email, photos, music, video/movies, ebook reader. They wanted to make this as painless as possible. I think computers took off in the home in spite of their difficulty of use. But I think we may be beginning to see the end of the general purpose computer in the home for most people. Firstly, game consoles have made computer gaming really niche. The internet grew without any thought or planning, which may or may not have been a good thing, but it probably now feels out of control for most people. They want the internet to be made simple again, and this device does that. We are moving into the post PC world.
If someone puts a keylogger on your system, then nothing can protect you. I don't think VbV is a panacea, but one thing it allows is for me to set up my own prompt. If the prompt is wrong, then I know I am about to be scammed. I get the same prompt whenever I buy something online, whatever the website. It might not be perfect, but it does reduce the chance that my card is used online without my permission.
I agree that Apple gets the marketing right, but I think that's not what Apple really gets right. What Apple really gets right is making products that are simple and not annoying to use for the masses. Compare the original iPod to its mp3 playing peers. Until Apple made the iPhone and the iPod Touch, no other player came close. That and the iTunes store tie up, and Apple really got it right. It makes marketing the damn product easy. How memorable are the iPhone ads. In fact, how many ads do you know where all someone is doing is showing you what the device can do, easily? Imagine such an ad for the Sony Ericsson W960i http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/w960i. The phone has many of the features on an iPhone, but even Sony Ericsson would not be caught dead demonstrating it on TV.
The technology is important, but isn't everything. Making it work for people is more important than any ingenuity that went into making the product
This will not help consumers. Phone companies will just pass on the cost or "innovate" around it. Seriously, there is no need for this. Companies can work around this so easily that it's not worth the trouble to government to pursue this. For example, they can conveniently charge a service fee of say 1/36th of the face value of the calling card, which they can fully reimburse if the customer makes calls amounting to that value in each month. So after 3 years, the cars are essentially valueless anyway. So the end result of government imposing a silly rule is that phone companies just increase the complexity in the way they operate calling cards.
I think there exist people who are never happy with anything that is meant to have broad appeal. The cliche "you can't please everyone" is very apt here.
Why can't AT&T insist that people use said minutes rather than get cash. It's not like AT&T has refused to let people call. This is not a reasonable suit.
So, by your own admission, Turkish people want to be more conservative, and so the people in the west should stop them? Playing devil's advocate here, but if that's what the Turkish people, then we should leave them be.
The biggest benefit of a 4 way stop is that you all stop at the intersection. So you shouldn't be going at a crazy speed if something goes wrong, like people driving off at the same time. Of course, this only works if everyone stops at a 4 way stop.
It has struck me how much more affordable Microsoft Office has become over the last few years for home use. A lot of this is no doubt because Openoffice.org is good enough for most people. Soon, Microsoft may be forced to give it away for home use, or sell it for a true pittance, and depend on business sales to make any money from Office. Microsoft's biggest threat on the Office front is that Openoffice.org (or another free office suite) becomes good enough that users don't want to pay extra for something they do not do much more than simple documents and simple spreadsheets with. I wonder why Dell et al are not offering users such an option. Microsoft is also experimenting with ad supported Office to try and counter the free office suites.
It can multitask. It does that very well. Apple doesn't allow other apps to multitask, and purposely didn't create a way for other apps to because it saves battery, and it prevents apps from taking over the phone.
I have thought about the allergies thing, and whilst it might be that the sterile environments lead to increased allergies, it might just be that back in the day, we didn't test for allergies, so we had lots of unexplained deaths in infants. Nowadays, kids are assessed for allergies pretty much on birth, so we can avoid exposing them to allergens rather earlier, and thus there is the appearance of an allergy epidemic.
The idea of the market is that you should set the price at which the seller maximises their benefit. In the short term, high prices from Google should encourage competition to try and lower prices and perhaps capture some of those excess profits. If Google prices low enough to not entice competition, then in the long term, we could have a worse outcome overall, because there is no profit incentive for someone to come up with a new innovation. In the short term, high prices seem to not benefit consumers, but in the long term, they should, because they could bring competition.
Online is a superior replacement for newspapers. For starters, you can have exactly the same content as in the dead tree media. Secondly, you can update stories that are online. With newspapers, you can either release an evening edition, or have to wait until the next day to update stories for new developments. You also get a potentially wider readership with online because you can reach non local areas. Very few newspaper have a national or even international reach.
A J2ME runtime will not save them. It's essentially useless for the market they are going for. I think they underestimated how much they needed to do to compete better with the likes of Apple/RIM/Windows Mobile/Android.
Chasing market share is not the only route to success. Apple is chasing profits, which they are making hand over fist right now. Apple doesn't want to sell 100m phone. To pull that off, they would have to sell some not-so-smart phones, which is not really their cup of tea. Apple is making bigger profits that Nokia in its handset division, with a much smaller market share in phones overall. Apple does this is most markets it competes in, with the exception of mp3 players, where it is pretty dominant. Making computers? 10% market share in the US (although they have about 30%+ in revenue share). All their competitors envy them. Every single one of them. Same in the phone space. Small market share overall, much larger revenue share. You have to remember, Apple is not interested in a pure volume business. Apple can't, and won't try to match Nokia in that regard.
That's one way of looking at it. The other is to say Apple has the most successful single smartphone out right now. Nokia may sell more, but Apple is selling 3 variations of one phone which look and work exactly the same. (OK, maybe two if you count the 3G as different from the 3GS) For that reason alone, its return on investment is stellar. They design one phone, and sell 20 million of them at premium prices, and everything just works. Getting 15% of the market with exactly one product is the stuff companies sweat over, and Apple seems to be able to do without breaking a sweat. Blackberry has at least 10 models out there, and Nokia is in the same boat. These are Apple's two largest competitors in the smartphone space. Everyone else barely registers. Apple has a very smart strategy!
I sort of get your point, but it's not a free market problem. It's more the absence of the free market that is a problem.
Verizon, and other mobile phone companies have been granted monopolies to use certain parts of the spectrum to provide communications services. Maybe this is for practical reasons. On the other hand, they will tend to argue that government not allowing them to behave in certain ways is undemocratic and not in keeping with free market principles. We need to call BS on that. Verizon can either act in a responsible way, or Americans should exercise their rights over the spectrum Verizon uses by withdrawing their authorisation for Verizon to use it exclusively.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies do not exist to make products to satisfy geeks. PA Semi had products no one was buying in huge numbers, and the owners of the company would have made the assessment that selling off to Apple resulted in a better deal for them than in trying to sell chips no one seemed to want. It would be nice if they had found a huge buyer or two with use for their chips in great volumes for them to stay independent, but the Apple deal was actually good for them. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have sold up.
Big difference. You have exactly 3 targets for console, but pretty much millions for PCs. For a PC, you have to target the guys with the latest and greatest, and guy who have a generation old equipment, and maybe some with 2 generations old equipment. To guarantee accpetable performance, you have to make sure you game is playable on those PCs, and you have to keep up with developments in PCs. For consoles, you will be developing for the same console for 7 or so years.
It's obvious that most computer security practices are the equivalent of cracking the metaphorical nut with a sledgehammer. My personal pet hate is the password aging practice. It specifically does one of two things. It discourages people from choosing strong passwords because strong passwords are more difficult to create and remember than weak ones. The second is that users may resort to writing passwords down because some expert decided they needed to change their password every 30 days. And often you get thet password change prompt right when you are about to go on a long holiday, which guarantees that you will not be able to remember it
One reason for this is that organisations have to show that they are serious about security, and practices like password aging are easy 'objective' metrics to demonstrate, even if they do not provide a measurable improvement in security.
Obligatory............whoosh
I have had phones that came with huge manuals on how to use them. Apple made a phone that pretty much came with a leaflet, and said "Go on, see if you can't figure it out". Once you learnt how to pinch and slide your finger across the screen, you could do anything with the phone. The iPhone's paradigm has pretty quickly become the standard touch screen phone paradigm since then, yet touch screen phones existed for a long time before Apple decided to make one.
Cheap doesn't mean not properly designed! Google doesn't do redundancy on a micro scale. For them it's pointless. In fact, from what I know, Google knows their hardware will fail, so they have written their software to handle hardware failures gracefully. When something like this happens, they write a report, and get someone about to work out a fix so that the outage doesn't recur.
You call it a huge step backwards, I call it a huge step forward. No one should have to deal with the crap that computers make them deal with for the most part. I shouldn't have to scour the internet far and wide to find applications and hope that they are not trojaned. As Steve Jobs pointed out, Apple set out to make a device that can do internet as well or better than any other device/computer, does email, photos, music, video/movies, ebook reader. They wanted to make this as painless as possible. I think computers took off in the home in spite of their difficulty of use. But I think we may be beginning to see the end of the general purpose computer in the home for most people. Firstly, game consoles have made computer gaming really niche. The internet grew without any thought or planning, which may or may not have been a good thing, but it probably now feels out of control for most people. They want the internet to be made simple again, and this device does that. We are moving into the post PC world.
If someone puts a keylogger on your system, then nothing can protect you. I don't think VbV is a panacea, but one thing it allows is for me to set up my own prompt. If the prompt is wrong, then I know I am about to be scammed. I get the same prompt whenever I buy something online, whatever the website. It might not be perfect, but it does reduce the chance that my card is used online without my permission.
I agree that Apple gets the marketing right, but I think that's not what Apple really gets right. What Apple really gets right is making products that are simple and not annoying to use for the masses. Compare the original iPod to its mp3 playing peers. Until Apple made the iPhone and the iPod Touch, no other player came close. That and the iTunes store tie up, and Apple really got it right. It makes marketing the damn product easy. How memorable are the iPhone ads. In fact, how many ads do you know where all someone is doing is showing you what the device can do, easily? Imagine such an ad for the Sony Ericsson W960i http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/products/mobilephones/overview/w960i. The phone has many of the features on an iPhone, but even Sony Ericsson would not be caught dead demonstrating it on TV.
The technology is important, but isn't everything. Making it work for people is more important than any ingenuity that went into making the product
This will not help consumers. Phone companies will just pass on the cost or "innovate" around it. Seriously, there is no need for this. Companies can work around this so easily that it's not worth the trouble to government to pursue this. For example, they can conveniently charge a service fee of say 1/36th of the face value of the calling card, which they can fully reimburse if the customer makes calls amounting to that value in each month. So after 3 years, the cars are essentially valueless anyway. So the end result of government imposing a silly rule is that phone companies just increase the complexity in the way they operate calling cards.
I think there exist people who are never happy with anything that is meant to have broad appeal. The cliche "you can't please everyone" is very apt here.
Why can't AT&T insist that people use said minutes rather than get cash. It's not like AT&T has refused to let people call. This is not a reasonable suit.
So, by your own admission, Turkish people want to be more conservative, and so the people in the west should stop them? Playing devil's advocate here, but if that's what the Turkish people, then we should leave them be.
The biggest benefit of a 4 way stop is that you all stop at the intersection. So you shouldn't be going at a crazy speed if something goes wrong, like people driving off at the same time. Of course, this only works if everyone stops at a 4 way stop.
It has struck me how much more affordable Microsoft Office has become over the last few years for home use. A lot of this is no doubt because Openoffice.org is good enough for most people. Soon, Microsoft may be forced to give it away for home use, or sell it for a true pittance, and depend on business sales to make any money from Office. Microsoft's biggest threat on the Office front is that Openoffice.org (or another free office suite) becomes good enough that users don't want to pay extra for something they do not do much more than simple documents and simple spreadsheets with. I wonder why Dell et al are not offering users such an option. Microsoft is also experimenting with ad supported Office to try and counter the free office suites.
It can multitask. It does that very well. Apple doesn't allow other apps to multitask, and purposely didn't create a way for other apps to because it saves battery, and it prevents apps from taking over the phone.
I have thought about the allergies thing, and whilst it might be that the sterile environments lead to increased allergies, it might just be that back in the day, we didn't test for allergies, so we had lots of unexplained deaths in infants. Nowadays, kids are assessed for allergies pretty much on birth, so we can avoid exposing them to allergens rather earlier, and thus there is the appearance of an allergy epidemic.
The idea of the market is that you should set the price at which the seller maximises their benefit. In the short term, high prices from Google should encourage competition to try and lower prices and perhaps capture some of those excess profits. If Google prices low enough to not entice competition, then in the long term, we could have a worse outcome overall, because there is no profit incentive for someone to come up with a new innovation. In the short term, high prices seem to not benefit consumers, but in the long term, they should, because they could bring competition.
Online is a superior replacement for newspapers. For starters, you can have exactly the same content as in the dead tree media. Secondly, you can update stories that are online. With newspapers, you can either release an evening edition, or have to wait until the next day to update stories for new developments. You also get a potentially wider readership with online because you can reach non local areas. Very few newspaper have a national or even international reach.
Using GPL software is not a problem. It's developing software that is based on GPL software where companies run into trouble at time.
I know exactly what you mean. Nothing as evil in the automotive world as badge engineering in my opinion. But happens all the time.
A J2ME runtime will not save them. It's essentially useless for the market they are going for. I think they underestimated how much they needed to do to compete better with the likes of Apple/RIM/Windows Mobile/Android.
Chasing market share is not the only route to success. Apple is chasing profits, which they are making hand over fist right now. Apple doesn't want to sell 100m phone. To pull that off, they would have to sell some not-so-smart phones, which is not really their cup of tea. Apple is making bigger profits that Nokia in its handset division, with a much smaller market share in phones overall. Apple does this is most markets it competes in, with the exception of mp3 players, where it is pretty dominant. Making computers? 10% market share in the US (although they have about 30%+ in revenue share). All their competitors envy them. Every single one of them. Same in the phone space. Small market share overall, much larger revenue share. You have to remember, Apple is not interested in a pure volume business. Apple can't, and won't try to match Nokia in that regard.
That's one way of looking at it. The other is to say Apple has the most successful single smartphone out right now. Nokia may sell more, but Apple is selling 3 variations of one phone which look and work exactly the same. (OK, maybe two if you count the 3G as different from the 3GS) For that reason alone, its return on investment is stellar. They design one phone, and sell 20 million of them at premium prices, and everything just works. Getting 15% of the market with exactly one product is the stuff companies sweat over, and Apple seems to be able to do without breaking a sweat. Blackberry has at least 10 models out there, and Nokia is in the same boat. These are Apple's two largest competitors in the smartphone space. Everyone else barely registers. Apple has a very smart strategy!
I sort of get your point, but it's not a free market problem. It's more the absence of the free market that is a problem.
Verizon, and other mobile phone companies have been granted monopolies to use certain parts of the spectrum to provide communications services. Maybe this is for practical reasons. On the other hand, they will tend to argue that government not allowing them to behave in certain ways is undemocratic and not in keeping with free market principles. We need to call BS on that. Verizon can either act in a responsible way, or Americans should exercise their rights over the spectrum Verizon uses by withdrawing their authorisation for Verizon to use it exclusively.