But over the last 8 or 9 years, the community has slowly faded
More people in the US have Macs now than they did then, and a larger percentage of the computer owning public has them. This has been a pretty constant growth trend. You may not see the community, but they did not fade away as you seem to think.
...game ports have tapered off, porting houses have been dissolved and bought out...
This is kind of, sort of true. More companies plan for a Mac version at the outset now so they don't have to do ports. It makes them more money that way. The end result, however, is more games for the Mac, in general. Take a look at the top 10-20 PC games each year. They make up a huge percentage of the games purchased since they have name recognition and are sold boxed at retail locations. How many of those don't have Mac versions/ports each year? For 2006, I think it was one of the top 10, and 3 of the top 20.
...and the Mac once again sucks for gaming.
Most gamers, like me, are casual gamers. I don't know that the Mac has ever been better for casual gaming than it is right now.
I guess I disagree with your basic premise that Mac use and Mac gamin operates on a cycle and is likely to continue in that cycle. Show me the numbers.
The market wasn't large enough to make it financially viable to develop an original high quality Mac-only game The market wasn't large enough to make most ports worthwhile unless the game was a proven hit seller already.
To address your points that actually apply to the market... the market share of Macs has been going up a lot faster than the market share for PCs in the US making mac-only games slightly more profitable. There are a few companies in this niche that have been around for quite a while, but it is a small market. Porting a game after the fact is expensive and really only a viable business model in the situation where initial talent/capital is very, very limited or where the popularity of the game coming out is a big gamble and investors would rather not wager as much on their success. The former companies usually change after a few years of success and the latter are the ones that die and you never hear about after a few years anyway because they were not confident enough in their own product.
The Mac gaming market is unlikely to rely on either. A smart business model for making money on making gaming is to emulate Id or Blizzard or most of the other big shops not owned by Microsoft. You code portably in the beginning with the Mac port as part of the original plan, preferably in house. It helps the quality of the game on both platforms because different bugs are obvious in different circumstances and portable code leads to good coding practices. If you have a popular game, it is well worth it to have a Mac version (financially) and it is a lot cheaper to plan a head and do it right in the beginning than to hire someone else to port it after the fact doing a lot more work at higher prices.
Not sure what you mean here, Apple is about making money just like MS.
Of course they are. There is nothing wrong with making money, and capitalism breeds innovation. Apple, unlike MS, operates within the free market so the competition they bring to the table helps us even if we were are not their customers. Because they have so many technologies in the same niche as Microsoft, they inevitably run up against MS's antitrust actions, which undermine the free market in those specific markets (music, video, images, etc.). Apple has a lot of experience in helping to counter such monopolistic practices, often using vertical integration of markets. By subsidizing some products (which don't directly make money) Apple can undermine some of MS's advantage in those markets and restore something of competition, forcing MS to make better products and often opening an opportunity for other parties as well.
Surely you've got that the wrong way round, Apple dominates the MP3 player market. The move to port iTunes to Windows was to sell more iPods and dominate it more. They would be perfectly free to license MS's WMP technology if they wanted.
Apple released iTunes for Windows before they had dominance in the portable player market. They are just now approaching levels of market share where they are under consideration to see if they have monopolistic influence. Apple bundles/ties iPods+iTunes+iTunes music store+AAC+Fairplay, but only the iPod in that stack is approaching dominance. Meanwhile MS has a well established monopoly in the Desktop OS market, with which they have bundled/tied Windows Media Player, WMA, Playsforsure, and now the Zune. Apple made a move to gain more customers of course, but at the same time they helped others have a chance to enter those markets where MS has a bundled or tied solution, with their monopoly influence. Take the jukebox software market. WMP is still the most popular player installed, despite Apple's dominance in portable players. Because Apple has managed to get enough users on iTunes, however, the idea of downloading different players is a lot more palatable and interoperating with such software using a device or other software, has choices.
I've never seen that spin put on it. How do you explain apple only allowing OSX to run on Apple hardware? Surely licensing OSX on third party hardware would be a better way of breaking MS's monopoly. Again, it's about making money
You don't understand. Apple can't break MS's monopoly on their own. That is part of the nature of a monopoly. Other companies have tried to compete head to head with Windows and they all died, despite several of them being significantly better at the time. A monopoly allows you to introduce artificial problems with your competitor's products so it does not matter if they are better.
The classic strategy for dealing with a monopoly is to not compete in that market, but to bundle your own solution in another market, including a product which would otherwise compete with the monopolized product. Apples strongest product is an OS. Apple doesn't sell OS's as a viable business. They sell computer systems which puts them in competition with Dell and Gateway instead of with MS. Dell and Gateway don't have monopolies and thus can't introduce artificial problems with Apple computers. They bypass the MS monopoly through vertical integration. If Apple removes that tie in, they will go out of business. For those people who really want to run OS X on generic hardware, the only path to that is breaking up MS's monopoly or significantly weakening it. Until it is too weak to kill Apple, they need to maintain that bundling. If, however, the OS market were to become competitive again, with many competing products sharing chunks of the market, Apple would probably be forced by economic realities to unbundle to be competitive.
All the windows boxes dissapear, so the bot-lovers would start targeting linux and OSX.
That would be just fine. You see, the main reason Windows is not secure against these worms is because it is not profitable for MS to make Windows that way. Why would they bother? A worm makes your machine unusable. You throw the whole thing in the bin and go look for a new one. Everything in all the stores you look comes bundled with Windows. You buy an Acer with Windows and hope it is better than the last one, because as an average user, you assume the free market is operating and if there were better options, they'd be in the stores. MS's failure has made them money, not lost them money. Why would they want to change that?
When bot lovers start targeting Linux and OS X they'll find slightly harder targets for the most part, but not enough to make a huge difference. The real difference is what happens next. Instead of sitting on their hands Linux and OS X developers start making real improvements and soon that 99% of the low hanging fruit is gone and botnets are back to being a minor annoyance and fighting a constant battle against OS providers instead of being ignored by them. Why you ask? Because since Apple doesn't have a monopoly and Linux is a project that can never wield monopoly influence more or less by design. Both of them will need to offer security to compete with one another.
The insecurity in the desktop OS market is not directly because of Windows, it is because the market is monopolized, thus innovation in that market is no longer motivated by normal, free market economics. It's like a socialist run industry. Basically it sucks and innovation is not motivated by making customers happy in exchange for money, but by figuring out how to gouge them for more yet and take over a different market. End the monopoly and botnets will go away.
Given that you didn't even provide a link for your assertion that MS has violated US antitrust laws after the case was settled
Umm, They've been convicted in the EU of breaking antitrust law since the settlement and for actions that weren't covered by the US settlement. Also, the arbiter assigned to monitor MS's compliance and MS issued a joint statement last year admitting they were not compliant with the API licensing. I'm happy to provide links if you want to dispute these fairly well known facts, but generally I only provide citations in published works, not forum discussions, unless someone disputes a point and asks for a reference.
I mean, there is QuickTime, iTunes and now Safari 3 running on Windoze with a Mac look-and-feel ? What will be the next port, iPhoto maybe ?!?
Apple released cross product applications as a way to democratize other markets. For example, Apple wanted to sell music players, but much of the desktop market (the route by which users got music to the device) was strongly leaning towards WMP format due to MS's lock in. So Apple made iTunes cross-platform as a partial counter to MS's dominance. It is very similar to the way they treat their OS, it is a vertical solution that bypasses MS's monopoly.
The same is true for Quicktime and Safari. You suggest iPhoto and you might be correct to do so since MS is trying to take over the image market with bundled HDP tools and OS support for it. It is entirely possible Apple could release a version of iPhoto, perhaps even with deals to bundle it with cameras from third parties. Other possibilities include iCal and iChat to fight exchange and MSN.
I use Firefox on my OS X machines, and most of my coworkers do too. It's just bizzar[sic] to me that Apple would even work so hard to release something like this.
If you had been using Safari, it would have underlined your misspelling in red.:)
I've read it's to grow their developer market for iPhone apps, but they weren't even going to allow that sort of thing in the beginning.
I thought of that too, and here is what I came up with. They have been keeping Safari fairly cross platform so they can target mobiles and help code sharing with Konquerer. Suppose they had planned on using the iPhone to attack IE, one of the biggest pains for Mac users. IE specific Web coding and IE's lack of functionality has been holding back both Mac users and Web use in general for a long time. What if Apple was trying to get Web developers to target the iPhone, and felt a version of Safari for Windows would make them a lot more likely to test for compatibility? Using Web 2.0 as a developer platform for the iPhone, sounds to me like something they always planned, just spun in such a way so that people don't notice it is not really what developers were asking for when they asked for the ability to run 3rd party applications.
Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.
I agree. Unless Safari manages some magical plug-i compatibility with Firefox, it is unlikely to ever be as feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox. don't think Apple is aiming at "feature loaded" so much as "better for normal users." Most users don't care if they can create granular block lists and flip javascript on and off quickly, because most users don't do those things. Safari seems to be aiming at the crowd who wants simple and fast. As for power, well that all depends upon your needs and workflow. Maybe I need to have really easy access to a grammar checker, but I don't know squat about configuring computer programs. With Safari, it "just works" (or does it, on the OS X version it does, not sure about Windows). A real world example of power is taking screenshots of Web UIs. This is something I have to do now and again. In the past, I've used OmniWeb because it allowed me to recode the pages on the fly easily, so I could fudge the sizes of text boxes and eliminate useless whitespace (thereby making a clearer, larger image). With Safari 3, I can just drag those text boxes to the size I want, which is more powerful yet and more usable.
For other workflows, I'm sure Firefox or Opera is more powerful. Apple is aiming at the bulk of users, instead of at all users. I don't now if such an approach will work though, on Windows. The average person on Windows doesn't know anything about browsers and will never download Safari, so unless Apple has a way to get it onto desktops, their seeming target audience and likely target audience are quite different.
The downside to BSD, if there is one, is that there are a lot more software ideologues
My company sells boxes built on Linux and BSD and containing closed source software. We started out using BSD, but there are a lot of downsides to it that have nothing to do with the licensing. There is a lot of functionality on BSD that simply is not as up to date. A lot of tools don't work as well on BSD. The real reason we ended up moving a lot of our devices to Linux, however, was customer demand. A lot of enterprise customers don't know what the BSDs are, but have heard of that "Linux" stuff and know it is good. It is a buzzword, but it sells boxes.
You mean like would I choose Apple's "reputation" over Microsoft's cash flow? That's easy, I might hate M$ but cash talks and a good reputation don't pay the rent.
I think you need to reconsider your position. Take a look at the historical partners of Apple and MS. Notice how MS, while having a larger cash flow also screwed over a lot more of their partners and drove them out of business. They're not someone anyone in their right mind wants to do business with.
I think the bigger question would be whether ATI would bother doing business with Apple again.
I think that would be "yes" since they are doing business with Apple again, just less of it on less favorable terms that don't require Apple to trust them. From a business point of view ATI knows what they need to do to make money on such a deal. They have to honor their confidentiality agreement seriously, something which does not actually cost them any more money. They know what they have to do, because they know they can trust Apple to keep their word, just like they kept their word and dumped them when ATI screwed up.
Apple, on the other hand, does not know they can trust ATI and neither does anyone else. Maybe they'll honor their agreements and maybe they won't, so if you need a partner you can trust, maybe you should look elsewhere.
Companies sue one another all the time and yet while the lawsuit is in court they'll still manage to conduct their daily business with one another mostly amicably so why a mature company would want to do business with one run by a fickle CEO is beyond me.
It is all about reputation. Some companies, especially older, well establish companies will go a long way to maintain a reputation for doing what they say and passing on business with those that cross them. Some tech companies don't get that yet and value their reputation less. Instead of suing over the issue, like so many litigious institutions, Apple simply ended the partnership. I find that laudable.
You seem to be assuming Jobs acted emotionally in this instance. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. Either way, he made sure everyone knew he was serious about leaks and all Apple's suppliers know it. Part of the cost of doing business with Apple is actually honoring the agreements in regard to secrecy. Now all Apple's suppliers know that you are never too big to get dumped. You think the Intel customer manager does not know that and consider it in their negotiations? Ignoring for a moment Apple and ATI, if you were running a business who would you partner with, a company with a reputation for doing what they say, even if it is not expedient at the moment, or a company that you know has ignored their contract terms and screwed over one of their larger customers, by blabbing secrets to the press?
Jobs has done well with the company, but that doesn't mean his arrogance hasn't hurt the company or that the arrogance is stupid.
One of Jobs major methods of promoting the company is through secrecy and well timed manipulation of the press. Anyone can claim that the move he made hurt the company, but there is no easy way to show it on paper, since it was a long-term strategic move. Thus, you have to judge based upon the overall results.
There's no doubt that Steve Jobs has been a great asset, but that doesn't mean he's above criticism (or SEC regulations).
Of course he can be criticized and should be, but I've seen no convincing argument he should be criticized for this particular move. He stood behind his agreement and his partner did not, so he dumped them. I applaud such action. Too often people are willing to sell their reputation for expedience.
Although it's more like Apple holds 2% market share and Ati 50%.
Do a quick Google search for their relative market shares. Apple has 4-7% of the US market sales. ATI has 22-26% of US market sales. If you want to look at global market sales, Apple drops to 3% and ATI drops to 8%, since globally the high end market makes up a much smaller chunk of that market then it does in the US, with on the board solutions predominating.
Now before you waste my time with redefining the market definition to exclude on the board solutions, remember that is the percentage computers we're discussing since that provides the relative size of Apple as a customer. Getting the 5th largest computer maker in the US to sign on to include your product and not to include your competitors (as most large manufacturers do) would be big win for any of the players. Losing it through a move that does not even make any money is sheer idiocy.
Which really underscores the stupidity of Steve's arrogance.
Yeah, because Apple stock is so low compared to when he took charge.
I'm sure ATI wanted that contract, it was a nice contract, but Apple is NOTHING in the great scheme of the PC market.
Let's see, Apple is about 5% of the graphics card market share. ATI has about 25% of the market right now, so they would represent a 20% increase in sales for ATI, hmmm, I think that might be worth a little bit of work to get the contract. Gee what do we have to do to manage such a contract... not violate our confidentiality agreement, that does sound pretty hard.
And there aren't that many major players in the high-end graphic chip game.
There are enough so that Apple has a few choices.
Why play the prima donna, when he might have to deal with them in the future?
If people violate your trust and undermine your market position, why would you keep doing business with them? If, at some point in the future Apple does do business with ATI again, do you think ATI will take keeping things confidential seriously or do you think they'll stupidly lose a giant contract while gaining nothing again? What about all of Apple's other suppliers for components? Do you think they will take confidentiality seriously? By punishing ATI, Apple showed they were serious and would not put up with that kind of stupidity. Now their statements to suppliers are credible instead of hot air.
When Apple added indexed searching was there a competitor in the market on OS X? Does Apple have a monopoly on desktop OS's? Do you see how both of those points are critical to antitrust action?
Now, Microsoft decides to include desktop searching functions as well.
They are too late. The waited until a separate market for indexed searching already existed. Now if they want to enter that market the law says they have win based upon merit, not bundling. Technically, MS must either include Google desktop with all Windows installs, or they must offer their own feature as a download. In both cases they are obligated to fully document and provide access to any APIs they use. Google is asking for a lot less than that, but technically that is what it takes for the playing field to be level and that is what Google is entitled to.
Google is then planning to sue Microsoft for unfair competition because their Desktop Search Application is no longer useful?
Google is suing because MS entered the existing market, but is not competing on the merits of their product. Which does a better job, Google desktop or the built in Windows feature? Will it matter or will 90% of all people use the MS version because it is built in, even if it is twice as slow and applies to half as many file types? You call that a win for the consumer and for the free market... people getting inferior products with the development cost bundled into a product they already have to buy to get their work done?
Google has a ton of applications that are universally useful; why must they target something that MIcrosoft finally got right?
Google was there first. MS is the one targeting an existing product of Google's. Why can't MS play fair and obey the law, just once... oh yeah because our system is corrupt so they don't have to, and because most americans are too stupid to understand the economics of monopolies and to apathetic to care who buys which politicians.
They note that people were arrested, hence it is a criminal offense.
Yeah it says they were arrested "on suspicion of selling counterfeit CDs" which is not a criminal offense anywhere I know of and nor do I see why it would be? The only principal broken is copyright infringement and that is purely a civil matter. Maybe they have relevant local laws (I wouldn't be surprised) but they bloody well shouldn't have such laws. Such an action is so vaguely and slightly detrimental to society that helping bolster a criminal organization's profits by wasting police time on it is absurd.
By your logic, until all murders and rapes were solved the police would never look at speeding, vandalism, theft, fraud, etc.
No, by my logic manpower should be devoted where it is needed first. Put as many people as are useful on the murders and rapes and robberies. If you still have people left, look into the fraud and vandalism. Don't waste manpower on copyright infringement, especially when the result of you not doing so is the company hiring private investigators to do it for them at no taxpayer expense.
Kind of like if my bike was stolen and I see it in somebody's garage on the other side of town. I tell the cops and they hopefully follow up on my tip.
Except in most places, if you bike is not worth more than $500, they tell you they'll make a note of it, but they don't have the manpower to actually investigate so you're out of luck. Maybe if you were rich you could get a local law passed to protect your bike riding interests, like a eco-friendly transportation law, making it worth the cops time to investigate. As it is, however, they're too busy stopping people from infringing the criminally obtained copyrights they have on music CDs. Too bad you did not make a lot of money on your criminal actions so you could buy politicians and influence.
Oh, so like Apple's thriving iPod market and the amazing interoperability it's known for, right?
It is very much like that. The difference is MS is still a monopoly as determined by the courts and has illegally abused that monopoly many times and been convicted and still has not stopped. Apple has a lot less of the portable digital music player market than MS has of the desktop OS market. Apple is currently being investigating because their market share is right about at the borderline level where some localities begin investigating antirust issues. And in my mind, that is a good thing. Apple should not be able to force iTunes or the iTunes store or Fairplay onto people just because they happen to have won the portable music player market.
I'd hesitate to call myself a "free market zealot," but I think the antitrust stuff against Microsoft have gone too far, generally. Not being able to include Media Player in Europe seems just stupid, when MS has made no effort to stop third-party media programs from working.
You've just demonstrated that you don't understand the economics of monopolies or how that pertains to MS's actions. Why do we have a free market instead of a socialist one? What is the advantage? I'll tell you. The free market uses competition and greed to motivate innovation and good decision making. The free market is inefficient, but the end result for the people is a lot better.
Monopolies break the free market. Normally, in a given market the best product wins (often after much back and forth). Whatever product is most suited to consumers needs at the time, gets the most money. Simple. With a monopoly in one market, you can create artificial problems with competitors offerings in other markets. That means in that second market, the best product does not win. The end result is higher prices and worse products because innovation is not motivated. If not for MS's monopoly we would have had a great deal more innovation in numerous markets and all the offerings would be better than what you can get today.
The second problem with monopolies is that they spread. A monopoly in the desktop OS market can be leveraged into a monopoly in the server OS market and the web browser market and the media player market and the game console market and every other market until you don't have a free market anymore, you just have feudalism between a dozen or so surviving monopolies. Monopolies unchecked break the free market then destroy it. That is why every country makes leveraging monopolies into new markets illegal.
By simply including it in the base install (from which it is removable anyway), they're apparently creating unfair competition?
Yes. Can real media include their player with every copy of Windows sold? No?Don't you think that unfairly advantages MS? Even if Real's player was better in may way (I'm not saying it is) most people would still use the inferior one. Further, Real has to fund their player. When bundled you force everyone buying Windows to pay for the development of WMP by bundling the costs as well. That is illegal.
Is it anticompetitive to include Windows on a freshly-purchased PC?
No, the sellers of the PCs don't have a monopoly. They can bundle whatever they want. It is illegal to leverage a monopoly via bundling. They aren't leveraging anything. You can still buy a PC from Apple, or Dell, or someone else.
What this boils down to is that MS bundled a search application with Vista and it directly competes with Google Desktop.
Yep. And now, instead of the best desktop search winning, the bundled one will. Consumers may or may not get the better one right now, but now there is no motivation for MS to improve that search in the future. They don't have to compete in the free market and it doesn't make them any more money, so innovation in that market dies, or at best is reduced to a slow crawl.
Given the complaints I've seen elsewhere, I think that the quality is closer to alpha stage development. Usually, "public beta" is done on software that's almost ready for use, but has minor bugs.
The standard everywhere I've worked has been:
milestone - a development snapshot at some point for some feature set. Not feature complete or debugged.
alpha - not feature complete, not debugged. Significant milestone - let a partner company or two take a look and give feedback.
beta - feature complete - but not fully debugged, let selected users pound on it and find some more bugs.
release candidate - we think we have all the important bugs out, barring appearance a new, big one, we ship this.
gold master - the release candidate we did not find enough bugs in and are shipping out.
recommended version - the gold master we shipped plus whatever important patches have been developed since that time.
The reports I've seen are that there are a lot of serious bugs in rendering and stability, and now, major security problems.
That sounds right for a beta to me. All of the things you list are in the category of bugs, not missing features that are supposed to be in. Beta code is not yet fully tested and has not been pounded on by users. It will almost always have these type of bugs.
So it's wrong for the police to bust people who are counterfeiting AND selling CD's for a profit?
It is a civil offense and does not represent any real danger to society. Violent crimes and murder are both up over the last two years. And the police are spending their time helping the RIAA stop people who aren't even committing a criminal offense. This would be like the CableTV company calling the police when you dispute a bill with them and looking through your wallet for the money and any proof that you owe them. This is our tax dollars paying to help the RIAA gather evidence to sue people. They should have to hire PIs like everyone else.
I don't know about you, but this seems like an absurd waste of taxpayer dollars. Are all the crack dealers behind bars already? Does Oregon have so much manpower in their police force and such wealthy people that they can spend the people's money on helping a cartel, convicted numerous times of criminal activities, ensure their revenue stream by assisting them in their civil suits? What is the deal here? Most of the time police will not even investigate criminal wire fraud cases under a thousand dollars, but they will waste their time with this. That seems to me like a clear abuse of power and it says to the american people that having money to lobby and pay campaign contributions is the only way to get the police to act on your behalf. Now what does it say that you don't see anything wrong with this?
Downloading an MP3? Not piracy. Piracy involves money.
Let me clarify things for you:
legal - downloading music from random people.
noncommercial copyright infringement - a civil offense - making copies not for profit, like uploading music to random people.
commercial copyright infringement - a civil offense - making copies for profit, like selling counterfeit CDs.
stealing - a criminal offense - taking items from another person without their permission... not making copies of them.
piracy - an international crime - killing and robbing people on the high seas. This still happens today.
It is sad that one organization with too much money can so manipulate the media and our government that it is necessary to have a glossary of how not to misuse simple terms. Calling any sort of copyright infringement "piracy" is absurd an belittles people who suffer from real crimes. You might as well refer to copying CDs and selling them as "child rape." It has a similar amount of accuracy and still belittles people who are really suffering.
Nope. Open GL is the API for the graphics. OpenAL is the sound. COLLADA is a 3D modeling standard used by Sony and not by anyone else. OpenKODE is the closest thing to a dev-kit, but it is not used for mac gaming development that I've ever heard of. What is really needed is all of it put together in a nice package with dev tools built around it that target multiple platforms, reusing as many resources as possible. Instead we usually see dev kits designed for just one.
The architectures are all completely different, as are the available resources.
There are development kits that target the Playstation 3 and Windows PCs using DirectX for the latter. Why are those easier to come by than a dev kit that targets the PS 3 and other OpenGL environments?
Interesting link. It would be nice if there were some citations in the article. Is that written by the same economist Thomas DiLorenzo that was the huge white supremacist? It seems an unusual name for two economists to share. I'll have to add that to my research pile for when I get time.
Bean counters at the new Apple friendly companies start asking why they are spending so much money developing games for the Mac with such relatively poor sales Mac versions of the company's games start to get delayed or canceled
Umm, take a look at the top 10 selling games of 2006. Notice how many had a mac version? Yeah, pretty much all of them. Take a look at 2005, hmm same story. 2004, was different with a lot fewer. Times have changed.
If you are making games and you're pretty sure it will be a success an Mac version costs a lot less than it makes in sales. If you plan for it from the outset, the development costs even less. There are three kinds of people who don't want to plan a Mac version at the outset: 1) people who have little capital/talent to start with, 2) people who don't know if their game will be a flop, 3) people owned by Microsoft who are more interested in maintaining the Windows monopoly than selling games.
Gaming for Apple is just something that isn't in the company's culture.
Agreed. Sony is developing open standard OpenGL stuff for the PS3. Nintendo is developing for OpenGL. Apple game developers are using OpenGL, but no one has put together a cross-platform development kit that really sings. That should have been Apple.
This latest outbreak of Apple interest in gaming is in for an even tougher time now that they have been dumped into x86 land and every sane x86 game dev house is perfectly happy letting Mac users reboot into Windows to play their games.
That is not sane by any stretch of the imagination. Users, in general, do not install OS's. They sure don't use bootcamp and they don't pay for a copy of Windows that did not come with their computer. With Vista requiring an extra expensive version to work in a VM and OS X users not in the habit of quitting programs, let alone rebooting to perform a task there is no way that will fly. Any game developer who counts on Mac users running bootcamp will have sales to mac users that approximate a lead balloon. I can see one or two clueless gaming houses trying that, but they'd have to be pretty clueless. "To install our game just follow the simple steps of repartitioning your computer, buying Windows, licensing and installing it, then quitting everything and rebooting every time you want to play and every time you're done playing." That will work for a few technical, hardcore gamers. Hardcore gamers are too few to matter. The casual gamer is the market and that just is not going to work.
However, when I write web pages, I'm not doing it to make a point or stand up for standards for the sake of standards, I'm doing it so that my clients can serve their clients best.
I never said you should do otherwise. The point is, what "standard do you write to?" Surely you have some formal spec for your pages. What is it that works in IE version X, first and foremost? I don't see that there is a lot of choice to use a workflow other than what I detailed, unless you spend all your time alternating between writing and testing to reverse engineer what works with the IE version you're targeting.
This means that I make things appear squeaky clean on what the vast majority of their visitors use (IE in case you're wondering) and ensure that things degrade gracefully (in those cases where it can't be exactly the same) on others.
So you target 60% of the market by aiming at IE 6, and then let it suck for everyone else, while in the process encouraging MS to continue to keep things broken. I can understand that compromise. Then maybe you spend an additional 50% of unnecessary work trying to get it to look good in IE 4, 5, 7 and Firefox. What fun, and what a huge waste.
Whether that's the way it should be or not doesn't make one iota of difference. that's the way it is.
Congratulations on spending extra development time to work around MS, while at the same time helping to make things worse for all other Web developers. What will you do when non-IE phone and PDA browsers make up 50% of the market?
Perhaps there are some people who can tell their clients, "well, it looks right on the browsers that 15% (10%, 20%, whatever) of your user base is using and it's wonky on what the other 85% use...
Actually, we tell clients it works according to the standards and degrades gracefully for broken browsers like IE. Since 90% of our clients use Firefox (Web interfaces for security professionals in charge of tier 1 ISPs) they are happy with that. If they feel like using IE they can, they just won't see all the pretty stuff. We actually had a bug that made a major feature unusable in IE and no one noticed for over a year until someone tried to use an old Windows terminal in a server room and found the problem.
I want to eat.
I'm having steak and some really good beer tonight, thanks.
I understand the situation of some Web developers, but I'm not sure I understand what they do when they can't rely upon specs. I suppose they hand code all of it or waste enormous amounts of time figuring out what IE does. Thank you MS for breaking the Web.
How do you think the government got interested in MS in the first place had it not been via lobbying?
Like most antitrust cases, the one against MS took the form of civil suits against them, which consolidated and then the feds stepped in. I don't know of any documented lobbying at that stage although if you have links I'd look at them. As near as I can tell the lobbying started when MS suddenly started giving huge donations to both major parties, and then a few of the litigants (who had established lobbying channels for unrelated reasons) became involved.
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More people in the US have Macs now than they did then, and a larger percentage of the computer owning public has them. This has been a pretty constant growth trend. You may not see the community, but they did not fade away as you seem to think.
...game ports have tapered off, porting houses have been dissolved and bought out...This is kind of, sort of true. More companies plan for a Mac version at the outset now so they don't have to do ports. It makes them more money that way. The end result, however, is more games for the Mac, in general. Take a look at the top 10-20 PC games each year. They make up a huge percentage of the games purchased since they have name recognition and are sold boxed at retail locations. How many of those don't have Mac versions/ports each year? For 2006, I think it was one of the top 10, and 3 of the top 20.
...and the Mac once again sucks for gaming.Most gamers, like me, are casual gamers. I don't know that the Mac has ever been better for casual gaming than it is right now.
I guess I disagree with your basic premise that Mac use and Mac gamin operates on a cycle and is likely to continue in that cycle. Show me the numbers.
To address your points that actually apply to the market... the market share of Macs has been going up a lot faster than the market share for PCs in the US making mac-only games slightly more profitable. There are a few companies in this niche that have been around for quite a while, but it is a small market. Porting a game after the fact is expensive and really only a viable business model in the situation where initial talent/capital is very, very limited or where the popularity of the game coming out is a big gamble and investors would rather not wager as much on their success. The former companies usually change after a few years of success and the latter are the ones that die and you never hear about after a few years anyway because they were not confident enough in their own product.
The Mac gaming market is unlikely to rely on either. A smart business model for making money on making gaming is to emulate Id or Blizzard or most of the other big shops not owned by Microsoft. You code portably in the beginning with the Mac port as part of the original plan, preferably in house. It helps the quality of the game on both platforms because different bugs are obvious in different circumstances and portable code leads to good coding practices. If you have a popular game, it is well worth it to have a Mac version (financially) and it is a lot cheaper to plan a head and do it right in the beginning than to hire someone else to port it after the fact doing a lot more work at higher prices.
Not sure what you mean here, Apple is about making money just like MS.
Of course they are. There is nothing wrong with making money, and capitalism breeds innovation. Apple, unlike MS, operates within the free market so the competition they bring to the table helps us even if we were are not their customers. Because they have so many technologies in the same niche as Microsoft, they inevitably run up against MS's antitrust actions, which undermine the free market in those specific markets (music, video, images, etc.). Apple has a lot of experience in helping to counter such monopolistic practices, often using vertical integration of markets. By subsidizing some products (which don't directly make money) Apple can undermine some of MS's advantage in those markets and restore something of competition, forcing MS to make better products and often opening an opportunity for other parties as well.
Surely you've got that the wrong way round, Apple dominates the MP3 player market. The move to port iTunes to Windows was to sell more iPods and dominate it more. They would be perfectly free to license MS's WMP technology if they wanted.
Apple released iTunes for Windows before they had dominance in the portable player market. They are just now approaching levels of market share where they are under consideration to see if they have monopolistic influence. Apple bundles/ties iPods+iTunes+iTunes music store+AAC+Fairplay, but only the iPod in that stack is approaching dominance. Meanwhile MS has a well established monopoly in the Desktop OS market, with which they have bundled/tied Windows Media Player, WMA, Playsforsure, and now the Zune. Apple made a move to gain more customers of course, but at the same time they helped others have a chance to enter those markets where MS has a bundled or tied solution, with their monopoly influence. Take the jukebox software market. WMP is still the most popular player installed, despite Apple's dominance in portable players. Because Apple has managed to get enough users on iTunes, however, the idea of downloading different players is a lot more palatable and interoperating with such software using a device or other software, has choices.
I've never seen that spin put on it. How do you explain apple only allowing OSX to run on Apple hardware? Surely licensing OSX on third party hardware would be a better way of breaking MS's monopoly. Again, it's about making money
You don't understand. Apple can't break MS's monopoly on their own. That is part of the nature of a monopoly. Other companies have tried to compete head to head with Windows and they all died, despite several of them being significantly better at the time. A monopoly allows you to introduce artificial problems with your competitor's products so it does not matter if they are better.
The classic strategy for dealing with a monopoly is to not compete in that market, but to bundle your own solution in another market, including a product which would otherwise compete with the monopolized product. Apples strongest product is an OS. Apple doesn't sell OS's as a viable business. They sell computer systems which puts them in competition with Dell and Gateway instead of with MS. Dell and Gateway don't have monopolies and thus can't introduce artificial problems with Apple computers. They bypass the MS monopoly through vertical integration. If Apple removes that tie in, they will go out of business. For those people who really want to run OS X on generic hardware, the only path to that is breaking up MS's monopoly or significantly weakening it. Until it is too weak to kill Apple, they need to maintain that bundling. If, however, the OS market were to become competitive again, with many competing products sharing chunks of the market, Apple would probably be forced by economic realities to unbundle to be competitive.
Only if it would sell more Macs....
Apple is all about making money, but their market
That would be just fine. You see, the main reason Windows is not secure against these worms is because it is not profitable for MS to make Windows that way. Why would they bother? A worm makes your machine unusable. You throw the whole thing in the bin and go look for a new one. Everything in all the stores you look comes bundled with Windows. You buy an Acer with Windows and hope it is better than the last one, because as an average user, you assume the free market is operating and if there were better options, they'd be in the stores. MS's failure has made them money, not lost them money. Why would they want to change that?
When bot lovers start targeting Linux and OS X they'll find slightly harder targets for the most part, but not enough to make a huge difference. The real difference is what happens next. Instead of sitting on their hands Linux and OS X developers start making real improvements and soon that 99% of the low hanging fruit is gone and botnets are back to being a minor annoyance and fighting a constant battle against OS providers instead of being ignored by them. Why you ask? Because since Apple doesn't have a monopoly and Linux is a project that can never wield monopoly influence more or less by design. Both of them will need to offer security to compete with one another.
The insecurity in the desktop OS market is not directly because of Windows, it is because the market is monopolized, thus innovation in that market is no longer motivated by normal, free market economics. It's like a socialist run industry. Basically it sucks and innovation is not motivated by making customers happy in exchange for money, but by figuring out how to gouge them for more yet and take over a different market. End the monopoly and botnets will go away.
Umm, They've been convicted in the EU of breaking antitrust law since the settlement and for actions that weren't covered by the US settlement. Also, the arbiter assigned to monitor MS's compliance and MS issued a joint statement last year admitting they were not compliant with the API licensing. I'm happy to provide links if you want to dispute these fairly well known facts, but generally I only provide citations in published works, not forum discussions, unless someone disputes a point and asks for a reference.
Apple released cross product applications as a way to democratize other markets. For example, Apple wanted to sell music players, but much of the desktop market (the route by which users got music to the device) was strongly leaning towards WMP format due to MS's lock in. So Apple made iTunes cross-platform as a partial counter to MS's dominance. It is very similar to the way they treat their OS, it is a vertical solution that bypasses MS's monopoly.
The same is true for Quicktime and Safari. You suggest iPhoto and you might be correct to do so since MS is trying to take over the image market with bundled HDP tools and OS support for it. It is entirely possible Apple could release a version of iPhoto, perhaps even with deals to bundle it with cameras from third parties. Other possibilities include iCal and iChat to fight exchange and MSN.
If you had been using Safari, it would have underlined your misspelling in red. :)
I've read it's to grow their developer market for iPhone apps, but they weren't even going to allow that sort of thing in the beginning.I thought of that too, and here is what I came up with. They have been keeping Safari fairly cross platform so they can target mobiles and help code sharing with Konquerer. Suppose they had planned on using the iPhone to attack IE, one of the biggest pains for Mac users. IE specific Web coding and IE's lack of functionality has been holding back both Mac users and Web use in general for a long time. What if Apple was trying to get Web developers to target the iPhone, and felt a version of Safari for Windows would make them a lot more likely to test for compatibility? Using Web 2.0 as a developer platform for the iPhone, sounds to me like something they always planned, just spun in such a way so that people don't notice it is not really what developers were asking for when they asked for the ability to run 3rd party applications.
I agree. Unless Safari manages some magical plug-i compatibility with Firefox, it is unlikely to ever be as feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox. don't think Apple is aiming at "feature loaded" so much as "better for normal users." Most users don't care if they can create granular block lists and flip javascript on and off quickly, because most users don't do those things. Safari seems to be aiming at the crowd who wants simple and fast. As for power, well that all depends upon your needs and workflow. Maybe I need to have really easy access to a grammar checker, but I don't know squat about configuring computer programs. With Safari, it "just works" (or does it, on the OS X version it does, not sure about Windows). A real world example of power is taking screenshots of Web UIs. This is something I have to do now and again. In the past, I've used OmniWeb because it allowed me to recode the pages on the fly easily, so I could fudge the sizes of text boxes and eliminate useless whitespace (thereby making a clearer, larger image). With Safari 3, I can just drag those text boxes to the size I want, which is more powerful yet and more usable.
For other workflows, I'm sure Firefox or Opera is more powerful. Apple is aiming at the bulk of users, instead of at all users. I don't now if such an approach will work though, on Windows. The average person on Windows doesn't know anything about browsers and will never download Safari, so unless Apple has a way to get it onto desktops, their seeming target audience and likely target audience are quite different.
My company sells boxes built on Linux and BSD and containing closed source software. We started out using BSD, but there are a lot of downsides to it that have nothing to do with the licensing. There is a lot of functionality on BSD that simply is not as up to date. A lot of tools don't work as well on BSD. The real reason we ended up moving a lot of our devices to Linux, however, was customer demand. A lot of enterprise customers don't know what the BSDs are, but have heard of that "Linux" stuff and know it is good. It is a buzzword, but it sells boxes.
I think you need to reconsider your position. Take a look at the historical partners of Apple and MS. Notice how MS, while having a larger cash flow also screwed over a lot more of their partners and drove them out of business. They're not someone anyone in their right mind wants to do business with.
I think that would be "yes" since they are doing business with Apple again, just less of it on less favorable terms that don't require Apple to trust them. From a business point of view ATI knows what they need to do to make money on such a deal. They have to honor their confidentiality agreement seriously, something which does not actually cost them any more money. They know what they have to do, because they know they can trust Apple to keep their word, just like they kept their word and dumped them when ATI screwed up.
Apple, on the other hand, does not know they can trust ATI and neither does anyone else. Maybe they'll honor their agreements and maybe they won't, so if you need a partner you can trust, maybe you should look elsewhere.
Companies sue one another all the time and yet while the lawsuit is in court they'll still manage to conduct their daily business with one another mostly amicably so why a mature company would want to do business with one run by a fickle CEO is beyond me.It is all about reputation. Some companies, especially older, well establish companies will go a long way to maintain a reputation for doing what they say and passing on business with those that cross them. Some tech companies don't get that yet and value their reputation less. Instead of suing over the issue, like so many litigious institutions, Apple simply ended the partnership. I find that laudable.
You seem to be assuming Jobs acted emotionally in this instance. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. Either way, he made sure everyone knew he was serious about leaks and all Apple's suppliers know it. Part of the cost of doing business with Apple is actually honoring the agreements in regard to secrecy. Now all Apple's suppliers know that you are never too big to get dumped. You think the Intel customer manager does not know that and consider it in their negotiations? Ignoring for a moment Apple and ATI, if you were running a business who would you partner with, a company with a reputation for doing what they say, even if it is not expedient at the moment, or a company that you know has ignored their contract terms and screwed over one of their larger customers, by blabbing secrets to the press?
One of Jobs major methods of promoting the company is through secrecy and well timed manipulation of the press. Anyone can claim that the move he made hurt the company, but there is no easy way to show it on paper, since it was a long-term strategic move. Thus, you have to judge based upon the overall results.
There's no doubt that Steve Jobs has been a great asset, but that doesn't mean he's above criticism (or SEC regulations).Of course he can be criticized and should be, but I've seen no convincing argument he should be criticized for this particular move. He stood behind his agreement and his partner did not, so he dumped them. I applaud such action. Too often people are willing to sell their reputation for expedience.
What does the SEC have to do with this?
Do a quick Google search for their relative market shares. Apple has 4-7% of the US market sales. ATI has 22-26% of US market sales. If you want to look at global market sales, Apple drops to 3% and ATI drops to 8%, since globally the high end market makes up a much smaller chunk of that market then it does in the US, with on the board solutions predominating.
Now before you waste my time with redefining the market definition to exclude on the board solutions, remember that is the percentage computers we're discussing since that provides the relative size of Apple as a customer. Getting the 5th largest computer maker in the US to sign on to include your product and not to include your competitors (as most large manufacturers do) would be big win for any of the players. Losing it through a move that does not even make any money is sheer idiocy.
Yeah, because Apple stock is so low compared to when he took charge.
I'm sure ATI wanted that contract, it was a nice contract, but Apple is NOTHING in the great scheme of the PC market.Let's see, Apple is about 5% of the graphics card market share. ATI has about 25% of the market right now, so they would represent a 20% increase in sales for ATI, hmmm, I think that might be worth a little bit of work to get the contract. Gee what do we have to do to manage such a contract... not violate our confidentiality agreement, that does sound pretty hard.
And there aren't that many major players in the high-end graphic chip game.There are enough so that Apple has a few choices.
Why play the prima donna, when he might have to deal with them in the future?If people violate your trust and undermine your market position, why would you keep doing business with them? If, at some point in the future Apple does do business with ATI again, do you think ATI will take keeping things confidential seriously or do you think they'll stupidly lose a giant contract while gaining nothing again? What about all of Apple's other suppliers for components? Do you think they will take confidentiality seriously? By punishing ATI, Apple showed they were serious and would not put up with that kind of stupidity. Now their statements to suppliers are credible instead of hot air.
When Apple added indexed searching was there a competitor in the market on OS X? Does Apple have a monopoly on desktop OS's? Do you see how both of those points are critical to antitrust action?
Now, Microsoft decides to include desktop searching functions as well.They are too late. The waited until a separate market for indexed searching already existed. Now if they want to enter that market the law says they have win based upon merit, not bundling. Technically, MS must either include Google desktop with all Windows installs, or they must offer their own feature as a download. In both cases they are obligated to fully document and provide access to any APIs they use. Google is asking for a lot less than that, but technically that is what it takes for the playing field to be level and that is what Google is entitled to.
Google is then planning to sue Microsoft for unfair competition because their Desktop Search Application is no longer useful?Google is suing because MS entered the existing market, but is not competing on the merits of their product. Which does a better job, Google desktop or the built in Windows feature? Will it matter or will 90% of all people use the MS version because it is built in, even if it is twice as slow and applies to half as many file types? You call that a win for the consumer and for the free market... people getting inferior products with the development cost bundled into a product they already have to buy to get their work done?
Google has a ton of applications that are universally useful; why must they target something that MIcrosoft finally got right?Google was there first. MS is the one targeting an existing product of Google's. Why can't MS play fair and obey the law, just once... oh yeah because our system is corrupt so they don't have to, and because most americans are too stupid to understand the economics of monopolies and to apathetic to care who buys which politicians.
Yeah it says they were arrested "on suspicion of selling counterfeit CDs" which is not a criminal offense anywhere I know of and nor do I see why it would be? The only principal broken is copyright infringement and that is purely a civil matter. Maybe they have relevant local laws (I wouldn't be surprised) but they bloody well shouldn't have such laws. Such an action is so vaguely and slightly detrimental to society that helping bolster a criminal organization's profits by wasting police time on it is absurd.
By your logic, until all murders and rapes were solved the police would never look at speeding, vandalism, theft, fraud, etc.No, by my logic manpower should be devoted where it is needed first. Put as many people as are useful on the murders and rapes and robberies. If you still have people left, look into the fraud and vandalism. Don't waste manpower on copyright infringement, especially when the result of you not doing so is the company hiring private investigators to do it for them at no taxpayer expense.
Kind of like if my bike was stolen and I see it in somebody's garage on the other side of town. I tell the cops and they hopefully follow up on my tip.Except in most places, if you bike is not worth more than $500, they tell you they'll make a note of it, but they don't have the manpower to actually investigate so you're out of luck. Maybe if you were rich you could get a local law passed to protect your bike riding interests, like a eco-friendly transportation law, making it worth the cops time to investigate. As it is, however, they're too busy stopping people from infringing the criminally obtained copyrights they have on music CDs. Too bad you did not make a lot of money on your criminal actions so you could buy politicians and influence.
Oh, so like Apple's thriving iPod market and the amazing interoperability it's known for, right?
It is very much like that. The difference is MS is still a monopoly as determined by the courts and has illegally abused that monopoly many times and been convicted and still has not stopped. Apple has a lot less of the portable digital music player market than MS has of the desktop OS market. Apple is currently being investigating because their market share is right about at the borderline level where some localities begin investigating antirust issues. And in my mind, that is a good thing. Apple should not be able to force iTunes or the iTunes store or Fairplay onto people just because they happen to have won the portable music player market.
I'd hesitate to call myself a "free market zealot," but I think the antitrust stuff against Microsoft have gone too far, generally. Not being able to include Media Player in Europe seems just stupid, when MS has made no effort to stop third-party media programs from working.
You've just demonstrated that you don't understand the economics of monopolies or how that pertains to MS's actions. Why do we have a free market instead of a socialist one? What is the advantage? I'll tell you. The free market uses competition and greed to motivate innovation and good decision making. The free market is inefficient, but the end result for the people is a lot better.
Monopolies break the free market. Normally, in a given market the best product wins (often after much back and forth). Whatever product is most suited to consumers needs at the time, gets the most money. Simple. With a monopoly in one market, you can create artificial problems with competitors offerings in other markets. That means in that second market, the best product does not win. The end result is higher prices and worse products because innovation is not motivated. If not for MS's monopoly we would have had a great deal more innovation in numerous markets and all the offerings would be better than what you can get today.
The second problem with monopolies is that they spread. A monopoly in the desktop OS market can be leveraged into a monopoly in the server OS market and the web browser market and the media player market and the game console market and every other market until you don't have a free market anymore, you just have feudalism between a dozen or so surviving monopolies. Monopolies unchecked break the free market then destroy it. That is why every country makes leveraging monopolies into new markets illegal.
By simply including it in the base install (from which it is removable anyway), they're apparently creating unfair competition?
Yes. Can real media include their player with every copy of Windows sold? No?Don't you think that unfairly advantages MS? Even if Real's player was better in may way (I'm not saying it is) most people would still use the inferior one. Further, Real has to fund their player. When bundled you force everyone buying Windows to pay for the development of WMP by bundling the costs as well. That is illegal.
Is it anticompetitive to include Windows on a freshly-purchased PC?
No, the sellers of the PCs don't have a monopoly. They can bundle whatever they want. It is illegal to leverage a monopoly via bundling. They aren't leveraging anything. You can still buy a PC from Apple, or Dell, or someone else.
What this boils down to is that MS bundled a search application with Vista and it directly competes with Google Desktop.
Yep. And now, instead of the best desktop search winning, the bundled one will. Consumers may or may not get the better one right now, but now there is no motivation for MS to improve that search in the future. They don't have to compete in the free market and it doesn't make them any more money, so innovation in that market dies, or at best is reduced to a slow crawl.
The standard everywhere I've worked has been:
- milestone - a development snapshot at some point for some feature set. Not feature complete or debugged.
- alpha - not feature complete, not debugged. Significant milestone - let a partner company or two take a look and give feedback.
- beta - feature complete - but not fully debugged, let selected users pound on it and find some more bugs.
- release candidate - we think we have all the important bugs out, barring appearance a new, big one, we ship this.
- gold master - the release candidate we did not find enough bugs in and are shipping out.
- recommended version - the gold master we shipped plus whatever important patches have been developed since that time.
The reports I've seen are that there are a lot of serious bugs in rendering and stability, and now, major security problems.That sounds right for a beta to me. All of the things you list are in the category of bugs, not missing features that are supposed to be in. Beta code is not yet fully tested and has not been pounded on by users. It will almost always have these type of bugs.
It is a civil offense and does not represent any real danger to society. Violent crimes and murder are both up over the last two years. And the police are spending their time helping the RIAA stop people who aren't even committing a criminal offense. This would be like the CableTV company calling the police when you dispute a bill with them and looking through your wallet for the money and any proof that you owe them. This is our tax dollars paying to help the RIAA gather evidence to sue people. They should have to hire PIs like everyone else.
I don't know about you, but this seems like an absurd waste of taxpayer dollars. Are all the crack dealers behind bars already? Does Oregon have so much manpower in their police force and such wealthy people that they can spend the people's money on helping a cartel, convicted numerous times of criminal activities, ensure their revenue stream by assisting them in their civil suits? What is the deal here? Most of the time police will not even investigate criminal wire fraud cases under a thousand dollars, but they will waste their time with this. That seems to me like a clear abuse of power and it says to the american people that having money to lobby and pay campaign contributions is the only way to get the police to act on your behalf. Now what does it say that you don't see anything wrong with this?
Let me clarify things for you:
It is sad that one organization with too much money can so manipulate the media and our government that it is necessary to have a glossary of how not to misuse simple terms. Calling any sort of copyright infringement "piracy" is absurd an belittles people who suffer from real crimes. You might as well refer to copying CDs and selling them as "child rape." It has a similar amount of accuracy and still belittles people who are really suffering.
Nope. Open GL is the API for the graphics. OpenAL is the sound. COLLADA is a 3D modeling standard used by Sony and not by anyone else. OpenKODE is the closest thing to a dev-kit, but it is not used for mac gaming development that I've ever heard of. What is really needed is all of it put together in a nice package with dev tools built around it that target multiple platforms, reusing as many resources as possible. Instead we usually see dev kits designed for just one.
The architectures are all completely different, as are the available resources.There are development kits that target the Playstation 3 and Windows PCs using DirectX for the latter. Why are those easier to come by than a dev kit that targets the PS 3 and other OpenGL environments?
Interesting link. It would be nice if there were some citations in the article. Is that written by the same economist Thomas DiLorenzo that was the huge white supremacist? It seems an unusual name for two economists to share. I'll have to add that to my research pile for when I get time.
Umm, take a look at the top 10 selling games of 2006. Notice how many had a mac version? Yeah, pretty much all of them. Take a look at 2005, hmm same story. 2004, was different with a lot fewer. Times have changed.
If you are making games and you're pretty sure it will be a success an Mac version costs a lot less than it makes in sales. If you plan for it from the outset, the development costs even less. There are three kinds of people who don't want to plan a Mac version at the outset: 1) people who have little capital/talent to start with, 2) people who don't know if their game will be a flop, 3) people owned by Microsoft who are more interested in maintaining the Windows monopoly than selling games.
Gaming for Apple is just something that isn't in the company's culture.Agreed. Sony is developing open standard OpenGL stuff for the PS3. Nintendo is developing for OpenGL. Apple game developers are using OpenGL, but no one has put together a cross-platform development kit that really sings. That should have been Apple.
This latest outbreak of Apple interest in gaming is in for an even tougher time now that they have been dumped into x86 land and every sane x86 game dev house is perfectly happy letting Mac users reboot into Windows to play their games.That is not sane by any stretch of the imagination. Users, in general, do not install OS's. They sure don't use bootcamp and they don't pay for a copy of Windows that did not come with their computer. With Vista requiring an extra expensive version to work in a VM and OS X users not in the habit of quitting programs, let alone rebooting to perform a task there is no way that will fly. Any game developer who counts on Mac users running bootcamp will have sales to mac users that approximate a lead balloon. I can see one or two clueless gaming houses trying that, but they'd have to be pretty clueless. "To install our game just follow the simple steps of repartitioning your computer, buying Windows, licensing and installing it, then quitting everything and rebooting every time you want to play and every time you're done playing." That will work for a few technical, hardcore gamers. Hardcore gamers are too few to matter. The casual gamer is the market and that just is not going to work.
I never said you should do otherwise. The point is, what "standard do you write to?" Surely you have some formal spec for your pages. What is it that works in IE version X, first and foremost? I don't see that there is a lot of choice to use a workflow other than what I detailed, unless you spend all your time alternating between writing and testing to reverse engineer what works with the IE version you're targeting.
This means that I make things appear squeaky clean on what the vast majority of their visitors use (IE in case you're wondering) and ensure that things degrade gracefully (in those cases where it can't be exactly the same) on others.So you target 60% of the market by aiming at IE 6, and then let it suck for everyone else, while in the process encouraging MS to continue to keep things broken. I can understand that compromise. Then maybe you spend an additional 50% of unnecessary work trying to get it to look good in IE 4, 5, 7 and Firefox. What fun, and what a huge waste.
Whether that's the way it should be or not doesn't make one iota of difference. that's the way it is.Congratulations on spending extra development time to work around MS, while at the same time helping to make things worse for all other Web developers. What will you do when non-IE phone and PDA browsers make up 50% of the market?
Perhaps there are some people who can tell their clients, "well, it looks right on the browsers that 15% (10%, 20%, whatever) of your user base is using and it's wonky on what the other 85% use...Actually, we tell clients it works according to the standards and degrades gracefully for broken browsers like IE. Since 90% of our clients use Firefox (Web interfaces for security professionals in charge of tier 1 ISPs) they are happy with that. If they feel like using IE they can, they just won't see all the pretty stuff. We actually had a bug that made a major feature unusable in IE and no one noticed for over a year until someone tried to use an old Windows terminal in a server room and found the problem.
I want to eat.I'm having steak and some really good beer tonight, thanks.
I understand the situation of some Web developers, but I'm not sure I understand what they do when they can't rely upon specs. I suppose they hand code all of it or waste enormous amounts of time figuring out what IE does. Thank you MS for breaking the Web.
Like most antitrust cases, the one against MS took the form of civil suits against them, which consolidated and then the feds stepped in. I don't know of any documented lobbying at that stage although if you have links I'd look at them. As near as I can tell the lobbying started when MS suddenly started giving huge donations to both major parties, and then a few of the litigants (who had established lobbying channels for unrelated reasons) became involved.