Not trying to be smarmy or anything, but is there anyone out there who hasn't played this already?
I never bothered. My primary machine has been a Mac for a long time and Valve is Mac-phobic. No great loss though, as there are plenty of FPS game makers like Id and Epic to fill the slack. Heck even MS owned companies port to the Mac within a year or so. It's also likely the reason it never made the top 5 best selling PC games of all time.
Is that the case? I thought their big revenues were from site licenses, so they could protect their monopoly by providing Windows for little or nothing to OEM's.
The last statement I saw OEM was still number one pulling in more money than site licenses, business services, and other business software sales combined.
You need to update your economics model. Monopolies are the natural product of an increasing demands industry like software.
Monopolies are the natural product of any free market. Unfortunately leveraging monopolies makes said market unstable and undermines the benefits of competition. This has been well understood for hundreds of years and is the reason we made antitrust laws in the first place.
They aren't bad as long as there is room in the market for alternatives to provide a better fit product, which are clearly present with both Linux and Mac OS surviving.
Ouch, way to fail at understanding what defines a market in economic terms. Can Dell and HP and Sony license OS X for inclusion in their computers? I didn't think so. OS X is not a direct competitor in the market. Linux has basically no market share to speak of and is copyleft licensed specifically to avoid it ever being a financial competitor to Windows (and thus survive in a monopolized environment). You'll need to do a lot more than assert that Windows has valid market competitors, when every court it has come before has ruled otherwise.
Ever since I read the following paper, I've gotten a bit leary on how much we should attack the natural formations of the market.
I read the paper (I'm a speed reader). It looks to me like he argues against breaking up monopolies, but I see no arguments against prosecuting antitrust abuse that leverages those monopolies into new markets (the major problem with monopolies). Further, he fails to address the ineffectiveness and slow movement of the courts in response to antitrust abuses, which has resulted in markets being completely destroyed for years before the courts even address the issue. Basically, it sounds like another Greenspan fan trying to make the same arguments that have been disproved by the real world. In short, I don't see that paper arguing against prosecuting MS for bundling into the antivirus market, just arguing (poorly) that MS should not be broken up when they are convicted.
Bundling is not illegal in and of itself, even by a monopolist. It's only illegal when it clearly has an intentional adverse effect on the competitors.
Bundling is an example of tying, which is a form of antitrust abuse. To be illegal it must be bundling a monopolized product with a product from another, preexisting market. Antivirus clearly falls into this category and is blatantly illegal, much more so than was the case with Netscape (where the product was free).
Though, frankly speaking, IE killing NN wasn't so much due to bundling as it was due to the fact that NN4 just plainly sucked compared to IE5+...
I'm not going to get into a long debate about this, but you should read the court case. MS did a lot to make NN suck in comparison, including illegally creating and using secret APIs and crippling the performance of public ones. That's not to say IE would not have won in a free market, just that the free market was undermined and never given the opportunity to decide. Speculation at this point is fairly pointless.
How is I misunderstood? It's not a different market.
I thought my explanation was fairly clear. I'm assuming English is not your first language?
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that when you buy a Mac, you only get an "operating system."
No, when you buy a Mac you get a complete computer system including hardware, OS, some applications, and support service. The same as if you buy a Dell or an HP system. That's why the computer system market is not monopolized. The desktop operating system is monopolized by Windows. Apple bypasses that monopoly by making their own OS, but does not sell into the desktop OS market (to Dell and HP etc.) and so is not a direct competitor in that market. This is Econ 101 stuff. I suggest you pick up a used college textbook on economics and read it through. It will be worth your while.
As for flying in court, I would love to see you try to accuse MS of being a monopoly because it is bundling software from a different market.
You're obviously confused. Having a monopoly is not illegal. Bundling products does not make you a monopoly or not make you a monopoly. If you do have a monopoly (it is already decided by the courts that they do) then bundling a product from a separate market with the product from the monopolized product is the most common form of illegal tying, which is antitrust abuse. Antitrust abuse is illegal, not having a monopoly. MS has a monopoly and has been convicted numerous times of antitrust abuse including bundling (as well as other forms of tying, price fixing, and other abuses).
What in the world is a "market?" Who defines the crossover between these never before mentioned software "markets?"
Here's where that econ textbook would come in handy. A market is all the interchangeable offerings considered by purchasers. For example, when Dell decides to buy video cards to put in their new desktop, all the different cards they can buy constitute the market. The same goes when Dell decides to purchase an OS to include in their computers.
From a legal perspective, the courts determine what does and does not constitute the boundaries of the market. For example, the EU has been debating if Apple's iPod has monopoly influence and the primary point of contention is defining the market. It comes down to if average consumers consider cell phones as alternatives to iPods for playing music. Given the current trend towards consolidation, they seem likely to rule that cell phones are valid competitors and Apple does not have monopoly influence.
In the case of MS, the market has already been defined by various courts in previous MS antitrust trials, so there is no question. The EU defined the market as "desktop operating systems" which includes any OS's OEMs building computers can buy to include in their computer systems. This includes Linux but not OS X. The US court's market definition was more convoluted, but also did not include OS X. As for antivirus programs, can Dell buy one to run applications on instead of Windows or Linux? No. Do people buy antivirus programs now? Yes. Thus, they constitute a separate, preexisting market.
MS bundling free software undermines what? How in the world is bundling free antivirus software (given, of course, my aforementioned pre-conditions, such as: you are not forced to use it) undermining anything?
Okay, imagine you make and sell antivirus software. You have to pay your developers, which you do with money from your sales. MS decides to take over your market so they create a competitor. They bundle it with Windows (which everyone already has to buy because they're a monopoly). They raise the price of Windows to pay their developers working on it. You go out of business. It doesn't matter if your product is better because people already have to buy MS's product. Sure they can buy MS's and not use it and pay you, but then they've paid twice. This is basi
You misunderstand the situation yourself - bundling free software is not illegal, no matter who does it. Its the manner in which it is bundled, and even then the legality would have to be decided by a court, it is most certainly not a clear cut issue.
Read the Sherman antitrust act and the accompanying guidelines. It is pretty clear. It is illegal to tie a market that is monopolized with a market which is not. The first example of tying, is bundling products, where one is in a monopolized market and another is in a separate, pre-existing market. I can understand it. You can understand it. You better believe MS's army of lawyers understands it. The only questionable part are market definitions... which were already defined with regard to MS's OS in previous court cases.
But it's not a different market, is it? Microsoft are a software company. Antivirus products are software. It's a different sector of the same market.
Unless you can buy an antivirus suite to run your computer instead of an OS, they are not direct competitors and are separate markets from both a legal and economics perspective.
"Linux is the guy who drives a big truck full of car batteries to the nearest power plant, pays to charge them all up, then drives back home and hooks them up to run his house for another couple of days."
I'm sorry...but that analogy fails epicly. If that were true it would mean that linux users would be relying on microsoft to keep their computers running, seeing as how the linux person in your analogy is driving to an MS owned power station to get power.
Actually, no the analogy holds up to that point. I likened MS's desktop OS monopoly to the power distribution monopoly. Not to the power generation market which in most locations is not monopolized because federal and state regulators require the heavily regulated distribution monopolies to buy power from any and all generators of power. To the average user these two markets appear to be the same since you only pay one power bill (just as the average user just buys a computer for one price, not a computer and an OS separately). Mind you, this is only an analogy. In many cases power generators and power distributors are owned by the same corporation and there have been numerous instances of criminal price fixing and collusion between them. That said, my analogy was sound. The average user in both cases buys a product composed of a monopolized product (power distribution or a desktop OS) bundled with a non monopolized product (power generation or a home computer). Linux allows the user to bypass most of the monopoly through their own work, just as charging batteries and transporting them in a truck allows a person to bypass the power distribution monopoly.
I am not disputing that microsoft has a virtual monopoly in the OS market, simply that you are equivocating a virtual monopoly (monopoly by merit of having the majority of the marketshare) with a true monopoly (defined as having exclusive ownership through legal privilege). As long as alternatives exist MS does not have a true monopoly, they have what is effectively a monopoly by merit of being on most computers but that is not the same as them being the only choice.
By your definition there will never ever be a "true" monopoly. This is perilously close to the no true scotsman fallacy.
If MS makes too many bad calls they won't have a virtual monopoly anymore...or do you dispute that simple argument?
From the end user's perspective, MS has been making bad calls for a decade or more and they still have their monopoly. Unless regulators/governments step in or a disruptive technology emerges, MS will not lose their monopoly regardless of how terrible the products they make are.
What monopoly? Last time I checked Mac and Linux existed.
You obviously don't understand what MS's market for desktop OS's is. They sell very few of them as boxed copies to individuals. They have a small market selling site licenses to corporations, but by far their largest market is computer OEMs like Dell. So if you were running Dell, would you license OS X to run on the computers you sell? Nope, because Apple isn't selling them. Hence, OS X and Macs are not a valid competitor. Would you pre-install Linux? Well maybe, but it is not a valid competitor in most cases because of software lock-ins. It has basically no market share and certainly not enough to affect whether or not MS has enough market share to unduly influence other markets (70% is the amount regulators start looking hard at). Generally, if the closest thing you can find to a competitor is a product developed by hobbyists disgusted with having no choices and given away for free... well that's a bloody good sign there is a monopoly at work.
MS has a virtual monopoly by merit of being the most used but that's not the same as an actual monopoly. As long as other choices exist any monopoly argument falls apart.
Legally and economically, you don't have to be the only option to wield undue influence in markets and undermine the benefits of capitalism. You're not going to find any reputable economists not being paid by MS who claim MS does not wield monopoly influence in the desktop OS market and MS has, in fact, been found to have such influence by the US courts, the EU courts, and several other nations. Sorry, but at this point the argument that MS doesn't have a monopoly can only be the result of burying your head in the sand. What, do you think it's all some sort of global conspiracy of lawyers, judges, and economists?
More akin to there being 3 power companies and one following the practices you describe while the others don't, and people just being too lazy, stupid, or in the dark to switch to another company.
Not at all. The analogy holds up very well. MS is the power distribution monopoly in your geographic location. Apple is the guy who sells solar cells and windmills and fuel cell generators which cost a bundle but are economic for some uses in some locations over the very long term and prevent you from having to deal with the power distribution company (but do not distribute power themselves). Linux is the guy who drives a big truck full of car batteries to the nearest power plant, pays to charge them all up, then drives back home and hooks them up to run his house for another couple of days. They are alternatives that allow one to avoid MS, but not much in the way of actual competitors in the same market.
On a more constructive note, it doesn't matter if MS ships it free with Windows. IE ships free with Windows, Safari ships free with Mac, Konqueror ships free, etc.
You understand jack and shit about how monopolies are abused and why that abuse is illegal. Bundling products is not illegal. Bundling a monopolized product with a product from a different market is illegal. It's like shooting pistols. It isn't illegal to shoot a pistol. It is illegal to shoot a pistol into a person's head and murder them. It's like trying to defend Seung-Hui Cho murdering 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech by saying all he did was pull the trigger on a gun, just like Alexander Melentiev in the 1980 olympics. One is clearly a crime and one is not, despite them both being the same act in very different circumstances. It sure wouldn't fly in court and it doesn't logically follow as a coherent argument.
So what's wrong with MS providing free software with it's own product? Nobody seems to gripe about Konqueror being default in KDE, even though I presonally dislike it as a web browser.
MS bundling free software undermines the capitalist free market and is illegal antitrust abuse. Konquerer being bundled with KDE undermines nothing and is perfectly legal. Just because you haven't bothered to learn what antitrust abuse is or understand the economics behind it doesn't mean you have a point anymore than someone who can't understand why murder is illegal when competition pistol shooting is not, has a point.
Ok, so they manage to dominate the AV market and drive the competitors away. Now viruses and malware are Microsoft's problem, but I doubt consumers will pay more for Windows when "free anti-virus" is no longer a seen as a benefit. It seems short-sighted to me.
Yeah, because it has worked so poorly in the dozens of other markets they've bundled and killed. Notice the cost of Windows relative to the rest of the computer and other software has been going up and up, with very little in the way of actual improvements or R&D. So long as they don't get effectively busted for the illegal nature of their strategy they will make money doing this and have to pay only a fraction of that money in legal settlements to the anti-virus companies they are killing.
Who do you trust? People who come in from all over the place with their "security experience" who build antivirus software that can protect against exploitation of all the security holes in Microsoft products, or the people who develop the Microsoft products that have those holes in them?
More like, who do you trust, the people who only get paid when you're happier with them than their competitors or the people you have to pay regardless of the quality of their product because they're a monopolist and not subject to the normal pressures of a capitalist free market? It's about motivation. I trust the greedy guys who have to keep me happy to make money over the greedy guys I have to pay no matter what.
Yeah it would be like selling a car and including a jack and wheelbrace. Or providing a repair service for your phone in case you drop it.
The problem with MS antitrust analogies, is people never use a monopoly in those analogies. So it would be like selling a car and a jack together, when you're the only company that sells cars and your tires are known to have huge defects and explode all the time to the point that an entire market has grown up allowing car buyers to work around your defective design and drive normally.
A more understandable analogy yet would be if the power company started shipping emergency generators to all their power customers and started ignoring customer complaints about frequent power outages and bribed the government to stop enforcing regulations about power reliability and raised their rates to all customers to cover the cost of the generators they shipped out. At this point all the current manufacturers of generators would go out of business regardless of how good their generators were, because everyone would already have one supplied by the monopolist power distributor. The power company would also have no real motivation to make their generators well, or improve them, or lower the cost of making them, because they don't have to compete... sort of like the way crappy rotary phones that were rented for tens of thousands of dollars over a person's lifetime dominated the entire time AT&T had a monopoly and then suddenly improved right afterwards.
It gives you a much better idea of what to expect as far as quality and innovation and cost you can expect to bear if MS is allowed by regulators to blithely undermine the free market and ignore antitrust law. Let's all hope Obama appoints some less bribable people and stands up for the people over big business.
Why does everyone seem to think Windows somehow allows malware due to 'holes' in the OS?
Because, statistically speaking, malware running is the result of holes in the OS and most infections are worms that run with no user interaction at all. The malware you describe is called a trojan and, while a serious problem, is still not the most common type of malware infection (note there are more trojans than worms, but each trojan hits a much smaller number of systems).
If it comes free with the OS it will drive away competitors because Joe-sixpack is not going to spend any money to replace something he got for free, even if it sucks.
Agreed. If there were to be real competition for OS's then consumers could choose the OS with the best anti-virus and we'd still have competition. Right now, that is not the case though.
On the other hand, if any feature needs to be part of the OS is precisely a form of protection against malware.
Again, I agree that the technology needs to be there, but not necessarily the data. If the DOJ had a clue they'd see this as an antitrust issue and order Microsoft to implement the technology, but open up the whitelist, blacklist, and detection heuristics as an open spec and then require MS sell their service separate from the OS and on even ground with any other company that wanted to compete. Hell, require the data feed to be an open standard so Macs and Linux could implement it and plug in to the same anti-virus blacklist feeds and we'd have some real progress in the industry, for a change.
If a browser doesn't score a 100 on the Acid3 test, it fails. Period. A browser that scores an 18 doesn't fail any more (at least officially) than one that scores an 88.
Then why do they bother with scores instead of just putting up the word "pass" or "fail"? Each part of the test hits a problem area of rendering and the more points a browser gets, the more of those cases they are compliant for. Higher scores do translate into greater standards compliance for the tested set.
In order to pass, you need a score of 100 and the test page needs to look pixel-for-pixel like the reference rendering (which is a little redundant, but that's what it says on the test page itself).
More than that, it has to run the animation smoothly using the specified reference hardware... at least according to the authors of the test.
The higher score should raise a footnote perhaps, but you shouldn't be too concerned about it.
It's more abut how current the version of Webkit they're including is. From the fact that it scores a 77 means htmlcore is likely a version from sometime last summer. Likewise the javascript performance tells you the javascriptcore is probably more recent.
The question is: why is Apple so quiet about rolling this update out and what it fixes, and since when does a minor Safari update require a reboot?!!
It replaces more than the Safari application. It also, slightly, updates Webkit, which is a core library that numerous programs use. You can get by without rebooting if you just kill the update at the end then restart all the programs that use Webkit... but that's a bit advanced for most people and a reboot is easy.
The erratic behavior of Safari could be caused by damaged resources which were replaced in this update, making it more useful to you than the average bloke.
The WebKit nightly builds have been passing the ACID3 test for months and are still 4 times faster than Safari 3.2 according to the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark. Why is Safari so far behind?
They're probably still working out bugs between Webkit and the applications they have that use it. As I mentioned in the summary, however, most of the javascript improvements seem to have made it in this time. On my machine Safari was getting about 11 on the sunspider test, before this update and is now getting about 3. The nightly of Webkit on the same machine comes in at 1, which is better yet, but not that significantly.
What I really want is some screenshots of what the anti-phishing behavior looks like. For all this talk about Safari 3.2 no one has bothered to try out the new features.
The hard part is finding known phishing sites that are still up and detected by the phishing detection. I think I did get it to work for one page (http://chaseonline.chase.com.ssl.com.kg/) and it was a simple dialogue box, but I haven't been able to repeat it with any other page to confirm. Using Google to look for a test suite comes up with dozens of links to the same whitepaper about testing Firefox, but without any links to the actual test pages used. Aside from that, lots of commercial products with no verifiable results.
But UI "tricks" are an improvement. If find it easier to start your video encoder, or can do other resource-light things while the video encoder is running at a small cost to the actual encoding speed, then you're making better use of your meat co-processor. Which really is a "productivity" gain.
I disagree. UI tricks may be an improvement, or may not be. For example, pulling up the desktop faster makes people think a computer boots faster, but if that desktop is not actually usable until the same amount of time has passed, then it is not an actual improvement, just a trick. The same goes for menus that fade in and graphical elements that appear instantly, but then have a lag before being usable. Speeding up the UI and workflows are a real improvement. "Tricks" is an ambiguous term that could refer to a real or perceived improvement.
BBs have a full qwerty keyboard full of moving parts, and a trackball that can get gummed up. iPhone has 4 buttons. Less moving parts = less points of failure.
Was I the only one that RTFA? The whole study is 10 pages and half of it is graphics. The failures you describe account for one of the 8 categories where the BB lost.
The BlackBerry has its advantages too
Sure it does, but reliability does not seem to be one of them, based on the presented data.
...can make 3G calls without dropping them every 2 minutes (I have friends who have iPhones, and yes this is actually the average amount of time they can hold a call)
Call Quality was one of the categories and it racks up a point every time a user had a dropped call. The BB lost in that category as well.
Reading the comments here has been depressing. No one seems to have read the study, but everyone wants to interject an anecdote about reliability they think helps justify their purchasing decision and, thus, defends their ego. I expected at least one person to say they were surprised by the study, accept the conclusions, and then tell us why that would or would not influence their future purchases.
I wonder what they classify as a "Failure" Because there is no way an iPhone is more stable than a Blackberry.
There is a link to the study in the summary. A failure was a call from a user because the OS or an application had locked up or was not working properly.
If you stop and think about it, it makes a lot of sense that the blackberries/fail/ much more than iPhones.
The reason is because the blackberry is treated as a tool, more likely to be thrown around...
Unless, of course, you RTFA in which case you see iPhones fail more often due to accidental damage, but still have significantly lower failure rates overall.
Also, the lack of mechanical parts (ie buttons) will make it fail slightly less...
Yup and that probably accounts for that one of the eight categories where the BB lost.
Really, why on-earth they compare a business device to iPhone.
Because a lot of geeks are considering both and would like information to help their decision making.
Didn't we have a recent study that iPhone owner are mostly people who made lesser than 50k (no offense to anyone).
Nope. People with incomes under $50k was the largest growing segment of purchasers, but still make up a minority of users. The same is true for the Blackberry, by the way.
I'm a consultant. yes there are consultants who use iPhone but when you get on the shuttle bis[sic] to the airport or even on the airplane, how many people carry BB vs iPhone?
That depends upon where you are, but the BB has been on the market a lot longer and has only just now been passed by the iPhone in sales. I don't see how that is relevant to which is more reliable though.
My nephew was trying to show the picture of his ride and accidently dropped it to the concrete and now the device is an iPod (can't make call). With my last job, I dropped the BB (the brown color model) 3-4 times and it still worked.
Yup. The report said iPhones break due to accidents significantly more that Blackberries... but not nearly enough to make up for the overall higher failure rate of Blackberries. Good numbers to pay attention to if you're looking to buy one and you're accident prone or really careful with your electronics.
Other than that, it still is the best e-mail device...
Yeah, could be. I don't have either one and am not biased (don't care). It just seems there are a lot of BB fans here more interested in talking up their favorite toy rather than looking at the numbers and discussing their relevance.
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Not trying to be smarmy or anything, but is there anyone out there who hasn't played this already?
I never bothered. My primary machine has been a Mac for a long time and Valve is Mac-phobic. No great loss though, as there are plenty of FPS game makers like Id and Epic to fill the slack. Heck even MS owned companies port to the Mac within a year or so. It's also likely the reason it never made the top 5 best selling PC games of all time.
Is that the case? I thought their big revenues were from site licenses, so they could protect their monopoly by providing Windows for little or nothing to OEM's.
The last statement I saw OEM was still number one pulling in more money than site licenses, business services, and other business software sales combined.
You need to update your economics model. Monopolies are the natural product of an increasing demands industry like software.
Monopolies are the natural product of any free market. Unfortunately leveraging monopolies makes said market unstable and undermines the benefits of competition. This has been well understood for hundreds of years and is the reason we made antitrust laws in the first place.
They aren't bad as long as there is room in the market for alternatives to provide a better fit product, which are clearly present with both Linux and Mac OS surviving.
Ouch, way to fail at understanding what defines a market in economic terms. Can Dell and HP and Sony license OS X for inclusion in their computers? I didn't think so. OS X is not a direct competitor in the market. Linux has basically no market share to speak of and is copyleft licensed specifically to avoid it ever being a financial competitor to Windows (and thus survive in a monopolized environment). You'll need to do a lot more than assert that Windows has valid market competitors, when every court it has come before has ruled otherwise.
Ever since I read the following paper, I've gotten a bit leary on how much we should attack the natural formations of the market.
I read the paper (I'm a speed reader). It looks to me like he argues against breaking up monopolies, but I see no arguments against prosecuting antitrust abuse that leverages those monopolies into new markets (the major problem with monopolies). Further, he fails to address the ineffectiveness and slow movement of the courts in response to antitrust abuses, which has resulted in markets being completely destroyed for years before the courts even address the issue. Basically, it sounds like another Greenspan fan trying to make the same arguments that have been disproved by the real world. In short, I don't see that paper arguing against prosecuting MS for bundling into the antivirus market, just arguing (poorly) that MS should not be broken up when they are convicted.
Bundling is not illegal in and of itself, even by a monopolist. It's only illegal when it clearly has an intentional adverse effect on the competitors.
Bundling is an example of tying, which is a form of antitrust abuse. To be illegal it must be bundling a monopolized product with a product from another, preexisting market. Antivirus clearly falls into this category and is blatantly illegal, much more so than was the case with Netscape (where the product was free).
Though, frankly speaking, IE killing NN wasn't so much due to bundling as it was due to the fact that NN4 just plainly sucked compared to IE5+...
I'm not going to get into a long debate about this, but you should read the court case. MS did a lot to make NN suck in comparison, including illegally creating and using secret APIs and crippling the performance of public ones. That's not to say IE would not have won in a free market, just that the free market was undermined and never given the opportunity to decide. Speculation at this point is fairly pointless.
How is I misunderstood? It's not a different market.
I thought my explanation was fairly clear. I'm assuming English is not your first language?
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that when you buy a Mac, you only get an "operating system."
No, when you buy a Mac you get a complete computer system including hardware, OS, some applications, and support service. The same as if you buy a Dell or an HP system. That's why the computer system market is not monopolized. The desktop operating system is monopolized by Windows. Apple bypasses that monopoly by making their own OS, but does not sell into the desktop OS market (to Dell and HP etc.) and so is not a direct competitor in that market. This is Econ 101 stuff. I suggest you pick up a used college textbook on economics and read it through. It will be worth your while.
As for flying in court, I would love to see you try to accuse MS of being a monopoly because it is bundling software from a different market.
You're obviously confused. Having a monopoly is not illegal. Bundling products does not make you a monopoly or not make you a monopoly. If you do have a monopoly (it is already decided by the courts that they do) then bundling a product from a separate market with the product from the monopolized product is the most common form of illegal tying, which is antitrust abuse. Antitrust abuse is illegal, not having a monopoly. MS has a monopoly and has been convicted numerous times of antitrust abuse including bundling (as well as other forms of tying, price fixing, and other abuses).
What in the world is a "market?" Who defines the crossover between these never before mentioned software "markets?"
Here's where that econ textbook would come in handy. A market is all the interchangeable offerings considered by purchasers. For example, when Dell decides to buy video cards to put in their new desktop, all the different cards they can buy constitute the market. The same goes when Dell decides to purchase an OS to include in their computers.
From a legal perspective, the courts determine what does and does not constitute the boundaries of the market. For example, the EU has been debating if Apple's iPod has monopoly influence and the primary point of contention is defining the market. It comes down to if average consumers consider cell phones as alternatives to iPods for playing music. Given the current trend towards consolidation, they seem likely to rule that cell phones are valid competitors and Apple does not have monopoly influence.
In the case of MS, the market has already been defined by various courts in previous MS antitrust trials, so there is no question. The EU defined the market as "desktop operating systems" which includes any OS's OEMs building computers can buy to include in their computer systems. This includes Linux but not OS X. The US court's market definition was more convoluted, but also did not include OS X. As for antivirus programs, can Dell buy one to run applications on instead of Windows or Linux? No. Do people buy antivirus programs now? Yes. Thus, they constitute a separate, preexisting market.
MS bundling free software undermines what? How in the world is bundling free antivirus software (given, of course, my aforementioned pre-conditions, such as: you are not forced to use it) undermining anything?
Okay, imagine you make and sell antivirus software. You have to pay your developers, which you do with money from your sales. MS decides to take over your market so they create a competitor. They bundle it with Windows (which everyone already has to buy because they're a monopoly). They raise the price of Windows to pay their developers working on it. You go out of business. It doesn't matter if your product is better because people already have to buy MS's product. Sure they can buy MS's and not use it and pay you, but then they've paid twice. This is basi
You misunderstand the situation yourself - bundling free software is not illegal, no matter who does it. Its the manner in which it is bundled, and even then the legality would have to be decided by a court, it is most certainly not a clear cut issue.
Read the Sherman antitrust act and the accompanying guidelines. It is pretty clear. It is illegal to tie a market that is monopolized with a market which is not. The first example of tying, is bundling products, where one is in a monopolized market and another is in a separate, pre-existing market. I can understand it. You can understand it. You better believe MS's army of lawyers understands it. The only questionable part are market definitions... which were already defined with regard to MS's OS in previous court cases.
But it's not a different market, is it? Microsoft are a software company. Antivirus products are software. It's a different sector of the same market.
Unless you can buy an antivirus suite to run your computer instead of an OS, they are not direct competitors and are separate markets from both a legal and economics perspective.
"Linux is the guy who drives a big truck full of car batteries to the nearest power plant, pays to charge them all up, then drives back home and hooks them up to run his house for another couple of days."
I'm sorry...but that analogy fails epicly. If that were true it would mean that linux users would be relying on microsoft to keep their computers running, seeing as how the linux person in your analogy is driving to an MS owned power station to get power.
Actually, no the analogy holds up to that point. I likened MS's desktop OS monopoly to the power distribution monopoly. Not to the power generation market which in most locations is not monopolized because federal and state regulators require the heavily regulated distribution monopolies to buy power from any and all generators of power. To the average user these two markets appear to be the same since you only pay one power bill (just as the average user just buys a computer for one price, not a computer and an OS separately). Mind you, this is only an analogy. In many cases power generators and power distributors are owned by the same corporation and there have been numerous instances of criminal price fixing and collusion between them. That said, my analogy was sound. The average user in both cases buys a product composed of a monopolized product (power distribution or a desktop OS) bundled with a non monopolized product (power generation or a home computer). Linux allows the user to bypass most of the monopoly through their own work, just as charging batteries and transporting them in a truck allows a person to bypass the power distribution monopoly.
I am not disputing that microsoft has a virtual monopoly in the OS market, simply that you are equivocating a virtual monopoly (monopoly by merit of having the majority of the marketshare) with a true monopoly (defined as having exclusive ownership through legal privilege). As long as alternatives exist MS does not have a true monopoly, they have what is effectively a monopoly by merit of being on most computers but that is not the same as them being the only choice.
By your definition there will never ever be a "true" monopoly. This is perilously close to the no true scotsman fallacy.
If MS makes too many bad calls they won't have a virtual monopoly anymore...or do you dispute that simple argument?
From the end user's perspective, MS has been making bad calls for a decade or more and they still have their monopoly. Unless regulators/governments step in or a disruptive technology emerges, MS will not lose their monopoly regardless of how terrible the products they make are.
What monopoly? Last time I checked Mac and Linux existed.
You obviously don't understand what MS's market for desktop OS's is. They sell very few of them as boxed copies to individuals. They have a small market selling site licenses to corporations, but by far their largest market is computer OEMs like Dell. So if you were running Dell, would you license OS X to run on the computers you sell? Nope, because Apple isn't selling them. Hence, OS X and Macs are not a valid competitor. Would you pre-install Linux? Well maybe, but it is not a valid competitor in most cases because of software lock-ins. It has basically no market share and certainly not enough to affect whether or not MS has enough market share to unduly influence other markets (70% is the amount regulators start looking hard at). Generally, if the closest thing you can find to a competitor is a product developed by hobbyists disgusted with having no choices and given away for free... well that's a bloody good sign there is a monopoly at work.
MS has a virtual monopoly by merit of being the most used but that's not the same as an actual monopoly. As long as other choices exist any monopoly argument falls apart.
Legally and economically, you don't have to be the only option to wield undue influence in markets and undermine the benefits of capitalism. You're not going to find any reputable economists not being paid by MS who claim MS does not wield monopoly influence in the desktop OS market and MS has, in fact, been found to have such influence by the US courts, the EU courts, and several other nations. Sorry, but at this point the argument that MS doesn't have a monopoly can only be the result of burying your head in the sand. What, do you think it's all some sort of global conspiracy of lawyers, judges, and economists?
More akin to there being 3 power companies and one following the practices you describe while the others don't, and people just being too lazy, stupid, or in the dark to switch to another company.
Not at all. The analogy holds up very well. MS is the power distribution monopoly in your geographic location. Apple is the guy who sells solar cells and windmills and fuel cell generators which cost a bundle but are economic for some uses in some locations over the very long term and prevent you from having to deal with the power distribution company (but do not distribute power themselves). Linux is the guy who drives a big truck full of car batteries to the nearest power plant, pays to charge them all up, then drives back home and hooks them up to run his house for another couple of days. They are alternatives that allow one to avoid MS, but not much in the way of actual competitors in the same market.
On a more constructive note, it doesn't matter if MS ships it free with Windows. IE ships free with Windows, Safari ships free with Mac, Konqueror ships free, etc.
You understand jack and shit about how monopolies are abused and why that abuse is illegal. Bundling products is not illegal. Bundling a monopolized product with a product from a different market is illegal. It's like shooting pistols. It isn't illegal to shoot a pistol. It is illegal to shoot a pistol into a person's head and murder them. It's like trying to defend Seung-Hui Cho murdering 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech by saying all he did was pull the trigger on a gun, just like Alexander Melentiev in the 1980 olympics. One is clearly a crime and one is not, despite them both being the same act in very different circumstances. It sure wouldn't fly in court and it doesn't logically follow as a coherent argument.
So what's wrong with MS providing free software with it's own product? Nobody seems to gripe about Konqueror being default in KDE, even though I presonally dislike it as a web browser.
MS bundling free software undermines the capitalist free market and is illegal antitrust abuse. Konquerer being bundled with KDE undermines nothing and is perfectly legal. Just because you haven't bothered to learn what antitrust abuse is or understand the economics behind it doesn't mean you have a point anymore than someone who can't understand why murder is illegal when competition pistol shooting is not, has a point.
Ok, so they manage to dominate the AV market and drive the competitors away. Now viruses and malware are Microsoft's problem, but I doubt consumers will pay more for Windows when "free anti-virus" is no longer a seen as a benefit. It seems short-sighted to me.
Yeah, because it has worked so poorly in the dozens of other markets they've bundled and killed. Notice the cost of Windows relative to the rest of the computer and other software has been going up and up, with very little in the way of actual improvements or R&D. So long as they don't get effectively busted for the illegal nature of their strategy they will make money doing this and have to pay only a fraction of that money in legal settlements to the anti-virus companies they are killing.
Who do you trust? People who come in from all over the place with their "security experience" who build antivirus software that can protect against exploitation of all the security holes in Microsoft products, or the people who develop the Microsoft products that have those holes in them?
More like, who do you trust, the people who only get paid when you're happier with them than their competitors or the people you have to pay regardless of the quality of their product because they're a monopolist and not subject to the normal pressures of a capitalist free market? It's about motivation. I trust the greedy guys who have to keep me happy to make money over the greedy guys I have to pay no matter what.
Yeah it would be like selling a car and including a jack and wheelbrace. Or providing a repair service for your phone in case you drop it.
The problem with MS antitrust analogies, is people never use a monopoly in those analogies. So it would be like selling a car and a jack together, when you're the only company that sells cars and your tires are known to have huge defects and explode all the time to the point that an entire market has grown up allowing car buyers to work around your defective design and drive normally.
A more understandable analogy yet would be if the power company started shipping emergency generators to all their power customers and started ignoring customer complaints about frequent power outages and bribed the government to stop enforcing regulations about power reliability and raised their rates to all customers to cover the cost of the generators they shipped out. At this point all the current manufacturers of generators would go out of business regardless of how good their generators were, because everyone would already have one supplied by the monopolist power distributor. The power company would also have no real motivation to make their generators well, or improve them, or lower the cost of making them, because they don't have to compete... sort of like the way crappy rotary phones that were rented for tens of thousands of dollars over a person's lifetime dominated the entire time AT&T had a monopoly and then suddenly improved right afterwards.
It gives you a much better idea of what to expect as far as quality and innovation and cost you can expect to bear if MS is allowed by regulators to blithely undermine the free market and ignore antitrust law. Let's all hope Obama appoints some less bribable people and stands up for the people over big business.
Why does everyone seem to think Windows somehow allows malware due to 'holes' in the OS?
Because, statistically speaking, malware running is the result of holes in the OS and most infections are worms that run with no user interaction at all. The malware you describe is called a trojan and, while a serious problem, is still not the most common type of malware infection (note there are more trojans than worms, but each trojan hits a much smaller number of systems).
If it comes free with the OS it will drive away competitors because Joe-sixpack is not going to spend any money to replace something he got for free, even if it sucks.
Agreed. If there were to be real competition for OS's then consumers could choose the OS with the best anti-virus and we'd still have competition. Right now, that is not the case though.
On the other hand, if any feature needs to be part of the OS is precisely a form of protection against malware.
Again, I agree that the technology needs to be there, but not necessarily the data. If the DOJ had a clue they'd see this as an antitrust issue and order Microsoft to implement the technology, but open up the whitelist, blacklist, and detection heuristics as an open spec and then require MS sell their service separate from the OS and on even ground with any other company that wanted to compete. Hell, require the data feed to be an open standard so Macs and Linux could implement it and plug in to the same anti-virus blacklist feeds and we'd have some real progress in the industry, for a change.
If a browser doesn't score a 100 on the Acid3 test, it fails. Period. A browser that scores an 18 doesn't fail any more (at least officially) than one that scores an 88.
Then why do they bother with scores instead of just putting up the word "pass" or "fail"? Each part of the test hits a problem area of rendering and the more points a browser gets, the more of those cases they are compliant for. Higher scores do translate into greater standards compliance for the tested set.
In order to pass, you need a score of 100 and the test page needs to look pixel-for-pixel like the reference rendering (which is a little redundant, but that's what it says on the test page itself).
More than that, it has to run the animation smoothly using the specified reference hardware... at least according to the authors of the test.
The higher score should raise a footnote perhaps, but you shouldn't be too concerned about it.
It's more abut how current the version of Webkit they're including is. From the fact that it scores a 77 means htmlcore is likely a version from sometime last summer. Likewise the javascript performance tells you the javascriptcore is probably more recent.
The question is: why is Apple so quiet about rolling this update out and what it fixes, and since when does a minor Safari update require a reboot?!!
It replaces more than the Safari application. It also, slightly, updates Webkit, which is a core library that numerous programs use. You can get by without rebooting if you just kill the update at the end then restart all the programs that use Webkit... but that's a bit advanced for most people and a reboot is easy.
The erratic behavior of Safari could be caused by damaged resources which were replaced in this update, making it more useful to you than the average bloke.
The WebKit nightly builds have been passing the ACID3 test for months and are still 4 times faster than Safari 3.2 according to the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark. Why is Safari so far behind?
They're probably still working out bugs between Webkit and the applications they have that use it. As I mentioned in the summary, however, most of the javascript improvements seem to have made it in this time. On my machine Safari was getting about 11 on the sunspider test, before this update and is now getting about 3. The nightly of Webkit on the same machine comes in at 1, which is better yet, but not that significantly.
What I really want is some screenshots of what the anti-phishing behavior looks like. For all this talk about Safari 3.2 no one has bothered to try out the new features.
The hard part is finding known phishing sites that are still up and detected by the phishing detection. I think I did get it to work for one page (http://chaseonline.chase.com.ssl.com.kg/) and it was a simple dialogue box, but I haven't been able to repeat it with any other page to confirm. Using Google to look for a test suite comes up with dozens of links to the same whitepaper about testing Firefox, but without any links to the actual test pages used. Aside from that, lots of commercial products with no verifiable results.
TFA doesn't call this out at all - does this update the Mac version only or is Windows also at 3.2?
TFA provides a link to download the Windows version.
But UI "tricks" are an improvement. If find it easier to start your video encoder, or can do other resource-light things while the video encoder is running at a small cost to the actual encoding speed, then you're making better use of your meat co-processor. Which really is a "productivity" gain.
I disagree. UI tricks may be an improvement, or may not be. For example, pulling up the desktop faster makes people think a computer boots faster, but if that desktop is not actually usable until the same amount of time has passed, then it is not an actual improvement, just a trick. The same goes for menus that fade in and graphical elements that appear instantly, but then have a lag before being usable. Speeding up the UI and workflows are a real improvement. "Tricks" is an ambiguous term that could refer to a real or perceived improvement.
BBs have a full qwerty keyboard full of moving parts, and a trackball that can get gummed up. iPhone has 4 buttons. Less moving parts = less points of failure.
Was I the only one that RTFA? The whole study is 10 pages and half of it is graphics. The failures you describe account for one of the 8 categories where the BB lost.
The BlackBerry has its advantages too
Sure it does, but reliability does not seem to be one of them, based on the presented data.
...can make 3G calls without dropping them every 2 minutes (I have friends who have iPhones, and yes this is actually the average amount of time they can hold a call)
Call Quality was one of the categories and it racks up a point every time a user had a dropped call. The BB lost in that category as well.
Reading the comments here has been depressing. No one seems to have read the study, but everyone wants to interject an anecdote about reliability they think helps justify their purchasing decision and, thus, defends their ego. I expected at least one person to say they were surprised by the study, accept the conclusions, and then tell us why that would or would not influence their future purchases.
I wonder what they classify as a "Failure" Because there is no way an iPhone is more stable than a Blackberry.
There is a link to the study in the summary. A failure was a call from a user because the OS or an application had locked up or was not working properly.
If you stop and think about it, it makes a lot of sense that the blackberries /fail/ much more than iPhones.
The reason is because the blackberry is treated as a tool, more likely to be thrown around...
Unless, of course, you RTFA in which case you see iPhones fail more often due to accidental damage, but still have significantly lower failure rates overall.
Also, the lack of mechanical parts (ie buttons) will make it fail slightly less...
Yup and that probably accounts for that one of the eight categories where the BB lost.
Really, why on-earth they compare a business device to iPhone.
Because a lot of geeks are considering both and would like information to help their decision making.
Didn't we have a recent study that iPhone owner are mostly people who made lesser than 50k (no offense to anyone).
Nope. People with incomes under $50k was the largest growing segment of purchasers, but still make up a minority of users. The same is true for the Blackberry, by the way.
I'm a consultant. yes there are consultants who use iPhone but when you get on the shuttle bis[sic] to the airport or even on the airplane, how many people carry BB vs iPhone?
That depends upon where you are, but the BB has been on the market a lot longer and has only just now been passed by the iPhone in sales. I don't see how that is relevant to which is more reliable though.
My nephew was trying to show the picture of his ride and accidently dropped it to the concrete and now the device is an iPod (can't make call). With my last job, I dropped the BB (the brown color model) 3-4 times and it still worked.
Yup. The report said iPhones break due to accidents significantly more that Blackberries... but not nearly enough to make up for the overall higher failure rate of Blackberries. Good numbers to pay attention to if you're looking to buy one and you're accident prone or really careful with your electronics.
Other than that, it still is the best e-mail device...
Yeah, could be. I don't have either one and am not biased (don't care). It just seems there are a lot of BB fans here more interested in talking up their favorite toy rather than looking at the numbers and discussing their relevance.