... wouldn't it be cooler if there was a conceptual innovation offered rather than only a smaller mousetrap? The iPod concept is about 5 years old by now. The iTMS is not exactly the only kid on the block (even though its market share is).
The argument that Fuddruckers should have made it more evident that this was not their work, I can see. That is not nice but in the end the Flash game includes credits, so one could argue that no blatant plagiarism took place.
Now as to the whole bandwidth stealing thing:
If you put it on the web, they will come...one way or another.
If you don't want them to come, build in an authentication/sign-up scheme like one of the previous posters suggested. I don't see this as being worse from anything anyone does on the web.
/.ers regulary link to nytimes and wired stories directly, depriving those sites of many, many hits that could be ad revenue relevant. The only saving grace here is that/. indicates the domain after the link.
Oh and I forgot:
all this is NOT "price fixing", since nobody forces the retailer to mark the product up by a certain amount. The necessities of competition and the market dictate what the markup needs to be.
In reality, however, there are retail margins that are so razor-thin, that it can be really hard on retailers. Apple is a good example here, too. The dealer margins are really low. That's why outlets specializing in Aple products sell all the other gadgets (iPod cases etc.) and specialize in service, since that brings in the dollars.
One could say that independent Apple retailers sell Apple products in order to get customers for their other offerings in the door.
Doesn't seem to be a good business model but apparently it works (at least until the full range of Apple products gets sold at Big Box stores in quantity).
Many manufacturers have agreements with their distributors specifying a Minimum Advertised Price (MAP). This is why you will never find Sony or Apple gear advertised outside of maybe a 1-5% difference of Manufacturer's Suggested Retail price (MSRP). These agreements can go as far as specifying the Actual Selling Price.
Mind you this only really works with items that are somewhat high profile ("AAA") as in those cases the market will actually bear these prices for an extended period. And in cases where the actual top level distribution is very tightly controlled (Apple, for example), there may be only so many places where a retailer can purchase the goods. Since a retailer needs to make a specific margin on a product they sell, the "Street Price" can be controlled through wholesale pricing, under above mentioned circumstances.
If you look at very large distributors/retailers who can take advantage of volume discounts, they sometimes print or say "Call for price" in their advertising which means they have some sort of agreement with the manufacturer or want to maintain a "friendly" relationship with their supplier.
Note: I use the terms manufacturer and distributor sort of loosely here, you get the idea though.
As long as Apple continues to make hardware that "Just Works (TM)", people will continue to buy Apple-branded hardware.
Sure they have had some glitches, but compare the quality of a Powerbook and the way Bluetooth and WLAN etc. work in Apple hardware, with the pain to use some of these in Wintel laptops (Dell anyone?). IBM has by far the best handle on this (but for how much longer) And this has been said before: A lot of this is of course related to Windows OS but Apple can only offer a superior user experience by having a very tight grip on the hardware the OS runs on, Intel or PPC or whatever.
So yes, I believe that people will continue buying Apple hardware, mainly because it will offer the best user experience when bundled with Apple OS and software.
...if you have a US T-Mobile hotspot account you can use it to access German T-Mobile hotspots without additional cost. The only change is in the login (login@t-mobile.us or something like that).
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What is the next BIG thing?
Now as to the whole bandwidth stealing thing:
If you put it on the web, they will come...one way or another.
If you don't want them to come, build in an authentication/sign-up scheme like one of the previous posters suggested. I don't see this as being worse from anything anyone does on the web.
Nothing beats proper backup and/or syncing tools and procedure.
all this is NOT "price fixing", since nobody forces the retailer to mark the product up by a certain amount. The necessities of competition and the market dictate what the markup needs to be.
In reality, however, there are retail margins that are so razor-thin, that it can be really hard on retailers. Apple is a good example here, too. The dealer margins are really low. That's why outlets specializing in Aple products sell all the other gadgets (iPod cases etc.) and specialize in service, since that brings in the dollars.
One could say that independent Apple retailers sell Apple products in order to get customers for their other offerings in the door.
Doesn't seem to be a good business model but apparently it works (at least until the full range of Apple products gets sold at Big Box stores in quantity).
For the record: yes, I do use Macs :)
Mind you this only really works with items that are somewhat high profile ("AAA") as in those cases the market will actually bear these prices for an extended period. And in cases where the actual top level distribution is very tightly controlled (Apple, for example), there may be only so many places where a retailer can purchase the goods. Since a retailer needs to make a specific margin on a product they sell, the "Street Price" can be controlled through wholesale pricing, under above mentioned circumstances.
If you look at very large distributors/retailers who can take advantage of volume discounts, they sometimes print or say "Call for price" in their advertising which means they have some sort of agreement with the manufacturer or want to maintain a "friendly" relationship with their supplier.
Note: I use the terms manufacturer and distributor sort of loosely here, you get the idea though.
Sure they have had some glitches, but compare the quality of a Powerbook and the way Bluetooth and WLAN etc. work in Apple hardware, with the pain to use some of these in Wintel laptops (Dell anyone?). IBM has by far the best handle on this (but for how much longer)
And this has been said before: A lot of this is of course related to Windows OS but Apple can only offer a superior user experience by having a very tight grip on the hardware the OS runs on, Intel or PPC or whatever.
So yes, I believe that people will continue buying Apple hardware, mainly because it will offer the best user experience when bundled with Apple OS and software.
...if you have a US T-Mobile hotspot account you can use it to access German T-Mobile hotspots without additional cost. The only change is in the login (login@t-mobile.us or something like that).
shows polls and updates as the votes get tallied