...Outlook Express has one of the best email UI I have ever seen....
Ugh. I've always detested OE's interface. Off the top of my head, I can think of several e-mail clients I've used (used, not just tried) that I've preferred:
Eudora 4.x
Eudora 3.x
PegasusMail
Pine
OE's interface is too cutesy, too limited, and it buries the more advanced features in hard-to-find, counter-intuitive places, when it doesn't leave them out entirely.
As someone who has tried to help linux make inroads into the places where I've worked or contracted with, I'd like to see it get picked up by more of the general populace.
But that doesn't require consolidation. Consolidation might be one way to achieve that, but it would necessarily decrease the number of players trying other ways that might also be successful.
Making inroads into the home and/or corporate desktop doesn't require a single, monolithic mega-linux distro that answers all questions and solves all problems. It only requires one distro that demonstrates an ease of answering and solving enough of them that it catches on. It might be something like Linspire, for example, or it might not, but if Linspire were subsumed into the One True Linux distro, there would be one less avenue being explored independently.
When it comes to natural selection, is consolidation banned from the game?
Not at all. Barring geographic or non-natural (as in "human intervention") barriers, many reproductively compatible organisms would interbreed, with the strong likelihood of settling into some new, more successful hybrid that ends up breeding true.
In business, mergers often occur because two companies have complementary strengths. The "offspring" is more competitive and ends up thriving. Of course the result is not always successful, but that's natural selection, too.
It's not vertical integration if the consumer does the integrating. Selling players and distributing music are merely complementary. It would be like manufacturing cars and owning a chain of gas stations. The consumer can integrate the two, but the auto division isn't dependent on the gas division to produce its product. It's the business's supply chain that defines vertical integration, not the consumer's.
It means you need to pay more attention to corporate terminology. Veritical Integration [wikipedia.org] refers to the practice of aligning business units (or in this case software units) in such a way as to allow them to interoperate freely and easily.
If that's the way the term is being used in corporate terminology, then it's being misused. It actually refers to a single company aligning business units in such a way as to operate along a single market process or supply chain. A parent company which owns farms which sell wheat to the parent company's bakery, which in turn supplies bread to a chain of grocery stores also owned by the parent company would be vertically integrated.
The primary purpose of vertical integration is to protect your supply chain from fluctuations in price and availability. Owning both a music player business and a music distribution business is actually horizontal integration. What Apple does do that can be considered vertical integration is producing software that runs their hardware, but only because the Apple hardware business model depends on their software.
Mail order (catalog or phone) items which cross state lines have never been subject to sales tax; only if the shipper and reveiver were in the same state was sales tax charged.
How is ordering over the Internet different?
It isn't. The constitution prevents one state from taxing activities in another state, with interstate commerce being deemed the domain of the federal government. This should cover all sales across state lines regardless of the medium by which the order takes place. Prior to e-commerce, though, the volume was much smaller and much harder to track. Now that it's adding up to real money, and there are already electronic records of everything, state governments are drooling.
The truly disturbing aspect of this trend is this: Sales taxes have always purportedly been a tax on consumers, with merchants being drafted into service as tax collectors. As such, it's a relatively sane method of taxation that is directly, at least in theory, tied to use-of-services.
Clearly, the states are now dispensing with any pretense that sales tax is a tax on consumers, since the consumers involved are citizens of some other state. They just see it as another tax on local businesses, which the businesses will, in turn, pass on to out-of-state, and non-voting consumers. If you, the consumer, think the tax is too high, who do you vote out of office to get it changed? What incentive is there for anyone in that other state to change things? They're benefitting from your money. It is, essentially, the codification of "taxation without representation."
i) Control of DNS is not the same as control of the internet.
Exactly. What's being missed here is that the only reason the Internet is the Internet is because, like any other mechanism of social interaction, it functions by mutual agreement.
In a post-gold standard US, why is $1 worth $1? Because there is a mutual agreement by all of its citizens (by a chain of law to the constitution) that it is. Why do words mean what they mean? Because those who speak a common language agree on the meaning. If enough people disagree, the language evolves through common usage.
The Register article quotes Brazil as arguing that the Internet has become a vital part of the country's infrastructure, so a foreign country shouldn't control it. That's a specious argument. Other than Domain Names, how does anything outside Brazil affect the country's infrastructure? Brazillian ISPs trust upstream DNS servers because they agree to, not because they're forced to. A country's national intranet is entirely under its own control.
Anyone, or any group of like-minded nations, who wants to set up their own root servers and create their own domain name system can do so easily. If enough people agree to use it, it becomes the standard. I'm not even sure it would be the first time a DNS revolution was attempted.
"...respecting the customer..."
I'm sure they do respect their customers. The mistake is in thinking that the users of their free services are Yahoo!'s customers. They aren't. They're the product. The adverstisers, or perhaps piggybacking software companies, are the customers. The free service is the means used to produce Yahoo!'s primary product: eyeballs.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. I've always detested OE's interface. Off the top of my head, I can think of several e-mail clients I've used (used, not just tried) that I've preferred:
OE's interface is too cutesy, too limited, and it buries the more advanced features in hard-to-find, counter-intuitive places, when it doesn't leave them out entirely.
But that doesn't require consolidation. Consolidation might be one way to achieve that, but it would necessarily decrease the number of players trying other ways that might also be successful.
Making inroads into the home and/or corporate desktop doesn't require a single, monolithic mega-linux distro that answers all questions and solves all problems. It only requires one distro that demonstrates an ease of answering and solving enough of them that it catches on. It might be something like Linspire, for example, or it might not, but if Linspire were subsumed into the One True Linux distro, there would be one less avenue being explored independently.
Not at all. Barring geographic or non-natural (as in "human intervention") barriers, many reproductively compatible organisms would interbreed, with the strong likelihood of settling into some new, more successful hybrid that ends up breeding true.
In business, mergers often occur because two companies have complementary strengths. The "offspring" is more competitive and ends up thriving. Of course the result is not always successful, but that's natural selection, too.
I rather thought that was what they were doing.
It's not vertical integration if the consumer does the integrating. Selling players and distributing music are merely complementary. It would be like manufacturing cars and owning a chain of gas stations. The consumer can integrate the two, but the auto division isn't dependent on the gas division to produce its product. It's the business's supply chain that defines vertical integration, not the consumer's.
If that's the way the term is being used in corporate terminology, then it's being misused. It actually refers to a single company aligning business units in such a way as to operate along a single market process or supply chain. A parent company which owns farms which sell wheat to the parent company's bakery, which in turn supplies bread to a chain of grocery stores also owned by the parent company would be vertically integrated.
The primary purpose of vertical integration is to protect your supply chain from fluctuations in price and availability. Owning both a music player business and a music distribution business is actually horizontal integration. What Apple does do that can be considered vertical integration is producing software that runs their hardware, but only because the Apple hardware business model depends on their software.
It isn't. The constitution prevents one state from taxing activities in another state, with interstate commerce being deemed the domain of the federal government. This should cover all sales across state lines regardless of the medium by which the order takes place. Prior to e-commerce, though, the volume was much smaller and much harder to track. Now that it's adding up to real money, and there are already electronic records of everything, state governments are drooling.
The truly disturbing aspect of this trend is this: Sales taxes have always purportedly been a tax on consumers, with merchants being drafted into service as tax collectors. As such, it's a relatively sane method of taxation that is directly, at least in theory, tied to use-of-services.
Clearly, the states are now dispensing with any pretense that sales tax is a tax on consumers, since the consumers involved are citizens of some other state. They just see it as another tax on local businesses, which the businesses will, in turn, pass on to out-of-state, and non-voting consumers. If you, the consumer, think the tax is too high, who do you vote out of office to get it changed? What incentive is there for anyone in that other state to change things? They're benefitting from your money. It is, essentially, the codification of "taxation without representation."
i) Control of DNS is not the same as control of the internet.
Exactly. What's being missed here is that the only reason the Internet is the Internet is because, like any other mechanism of social interaction, it functions by mutual agreement.
In a post-gold standard US, why is $1 worth $1? Because there is a mutual agreement by all of its citizens (by a chain of law to the constitution) that it is. Why do words mean what they mean? Because those who speak a common language agree on the meaning. If enough people disagree, the language evolves through common usage.
The Register article quotes Brazil as arguing that the Internet has become a vital part of the country's infrastructure, so a foreign country shouldn't control it. That's a specious argument. Other than Domain Names, how does anything outside Brazil affect the country's infrastructure? Brazillian ISPs trust upstream DNS servers because they agree to, not because they're forced to. A country's national intranet is entirely under its own control.Anyone, or any group of like-minded nations, who wants to set up their own root servers and create their own domain name system can do so easily. If enough people agree to use it, it becomes the standard. I'm not even sure it would be the first time a DNS revolution was attempted.
"...respecting the customer..." I'm sure they do respect their customers. The mistake is in thinking that the users of their free services are Yahoo!'s customers. They aren't. They're the product. The adverstisers, or perhaps piggybacking software companies, are the customers. The free service is the means used to produce Yahoo!'s primary product: eyeballs.