There are several reasons this is not an iPod killer per se. Mostly because it does not beat the iPod in any of the areas in which the iPod excels: being a very small, very light, fairly durable, tightly enclosed music device with good battery life and a nice interface. MS's stuff is going to be necessarily larger, necesarily heavier, necesarily more precarious unless they ruggedize the HELL out of those LCDs and reinforce the plastic grating over the speaker. Battery life will probably be about the same as a portable DVD player, and if the interface is anything like Pocket Media Player, it's got NOTHING on the iPod.
In short: this looks like it has exactly the same features and price point as the device I traded in for my iPod, a Toshiba PocketPC. And just like the PocketPC, it'll have limited appeal which becomes even MORE limited when Joe Q. Fancydevice realizes how hard it is to get first run movies onto it...i mean, how fast can the processor be in these things and still keep battery life?
Still, competition is good for the industry. The market pressure will force Apple to make iTunes even better (and there's room for that). But I don't think they have too much to worry about...a bigass laptop wannabe is NOT in the same league as a tiny little music device.
As of Jan 2004, Google has less than 40% of the search market, nearly tied with MSN and Yahoo.
From your link:
The audience reach chart above reflects unique visits to the various search engines, not the overall volume of search activity. For example, a person might visit Yahoo only once in a given month and would be counted toward Yahoo's share. The same person might also visit Google every day in the same month and conduct several searches per day at Google. Despite this, the person would still count only once in the Google figure above, which shows the percent of "unique visitors" in a given month that came to the site.
Search volume is important. Rates of growth are important. That site does not take them into account.
They'll win because they'll integrate their search engine into every aspect of Windows and other MS products - IE, Office, the file explorer, Windows Media, etc. To use Google, you'll have to launch IE, and it will only work from there, not other applications.
Bundling really doesn't buy them all that much here. Tying it into Office and Media Player are bells and whistles - they'll get some hits off it, I'm sure, but it's not a significant share of all the searching that people will do.
Netscape lost to bundling because it's a PITA to download a whole application - especially one as large as late netscape versions over 1990's bandwidth. Going to a website, by contrast, takes very little effort.
SVG plugin is just silly, SVG is XML, browsers should handle that. SVG uses CSS, browsers should handle that. SVG being XML has a DOM, browsers should handle that and so allow Javascript to manipulate it easily. So SVG should be in the browser.
Absolutely. If XUL goes in the browser, SVG (which could kick its heiny in creating rich interfaces if properly implemented) should definitely go in too.
So you're suggesting we dump html and move to flash? Ignore the open standard and move to something proprietary? I really don't think that's a good idea.
There is a W3C standard for a Flash-alike: SVG. So far there's no full Free implementation yet.
The main challenge of writing good anti-virus software isn't coding - it's knowledge-gathering and timely releases. The open-source development model does not therefore buy you a lot of utility, and probably loses you some.
Everybody goes through a phase where they bitch about SQL. So did I. And I built a clever OO DataModel module that abstracted it into pretty heirarchies and all sorts of clever crap.
To be fair, Date and Pascal hate OO even more than SQL. Their argument is that SQL sucks at modeling relational algebra because it's based on set theory rather than predicate logic. Your point about SQL being too entrenched to be displaced and proven by use may still be correct, though.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several reasons this is not an iPod killer per se. Mostly because it does not beat the iPod in any of the areas in which the iPod excels: being a very small, very light, fairly durable, tightly enclosed music device with good battery life and a nice interface. MS's stuff is going to be necessarily larger, necesarily heavier, necesarily more precarious unless they ruggedize the HELL out of those LCDs and reinforce the plastic grating over the speaker. Battery life will probably be about the same as a portable DVD player, and if the interface is anything like Pocket Media Player, it's got NOTHING on the iPod.
In short: this looks like it has exactly the same features and price point as the device I traded in for my iPod, a Toshiba PocketPC. And just like the PocketPC, it'll have limited appeal which becomes even MORE limited when Joe Q. Fancydevice realizes how hard it is to get first run movies onto it...i mean, how fast can the processor be in these things and still keep battery life?
Still, competition is good for the industry. The market pressure will force Apple to make iTunes even better (and there's room for that). But I don't think they have too much to worry about...a bigass laptop wannabe is NOT in the same league as a tiny little music device.
From your link:
Search volume is important. Rates of growth are important. That site does not take them into account.
They'll win because they'll integrate their search engine into every aspect of Windows and other MS products - IE, Office, the file explorer, Windows Media, etc. To use Google, you'll have to launch IE, and it will only work from there, not other applications.
Bundling really doesn't buy them all that much here. Tying it into Office and Media Player are bells and whistles - they'll get some hits off it, I'm sure, but it's not a significant share of all the searching that people will do.
Netscape lost to bundling because it's a PITA to download a whole application - especially one as large as late netscape versions over 1990's bandwidth. Going to a website, by contrast, takes very little effort.
Search Error
MSN Search is temporarily unable to process your request.
Please try again in a few minutes.
Ha ha!
Hustler and National Review. Proceedings of the ACM now and again.
SVG plugin is just silly, SVG is XML, browsers should handle that. SVG uses CSS, browsers should handle that. SVG being XML has a DOM, browsers should handle that and so allow Javascript to manipulate it easily. So SVG should be in the browser.
Absolutely. If XUL goes in the browser, SVG (which could kick its heiny in creating rich interfaces if properly implemented) should definitely go in too.
So you're suggesting we dump html and move to flash? Ignore the open standard and move to something proprietary? I really don't think that's a good idea. There is a W3C standard for a Flash-alike: SVG. So far there's no full Free implementation yet.
The main challenge of writing good anti-virus software isn't coding - it's knowledge-gathering and timely releases. The open-source development model does not therefore buy you a lot of utility, and probably loses you some.
Everybody goes through a phase where they bitch about SQL. So did I. And I built a clever OO DataModel module that abstracted it into pretty heirarchies and all sorts of clever crap.
To be fair, Date and Pascal hate OO even more than SQL. Their argument is that SQL sucks at modeling relational algebra because it's based on set theory rather than predicate logic. Your point about SQL being too entrenched to be displaced and proven by use may still be correct, though.
Is it worth $4,000? Depends what you're looking for.
From the writeup it sounds like it's mostly corporate/gov't/military types looking to get a look at The Enemy from the inside.