Courts have a practice of interpreting contracts, licenses, etc. based on the behavior of the parties involved.
SCO -v- IBM case is a prime example of that principle in action. When IBM had a contract with AT&T over Unix code, both parties spent decades behaving as if AT&T owned the original code it licensed, and IBM owned any home-grown code built into products that also used AT&T code. OldSCO and Novell both carried on the same behavior. So did Caldera (since renamed The SCO Group), at least for a while. Then NewSCO decided to go on a litigation binge, and pulled out a contract interpretation that said any code that had ever touched the original AT&T code became a derivative work of the AT&T code, and that NewSCO had total control over all derivative works. The fact that the courts interpret behavior as an operational definition of the contract gives IBM a right to cite those years of behavior as proof that NewSCO is full of it.
In this instance, there's a reasonable argument to be made for the idea that buying a license means you accept the license holder's right to offer such a license.
Of course, there's also a well-established legal principle that an illegal contract/license has no value whatsoever, and that performance doesn't grant rights that didn't exist when the contract/license was formed.
There's enough hair-splitting there to make it reasonable to ask The Supremes for an opinion.
---- Finally, will this curious little squabble have any impact? I'm curious since I don't think the amount of money this dispute could yield would be worth the executive time it takes and the odd publicity brought to both companies.
I imagine a settlement would be in the $50-100 million range. That's big enough to take seriously. Big enough, in fact, for Cisco's execs to be in legal trouble if they didn't do everything in their power to get it.
But as trademark cases go, you're right that this one looks interesting. Yes, Cisco registered the 'iPhone' mark some time ago, but Apple has a whole slate of 'iWhatever' products in the market, selling well, and developing massive brand awareness. Among other things, Apple could argue that Cisco didn't file 'iPhone' until well after 'iMac' and 'iPod' were established brands, making Cisco look like a speculative name squatter or a company out to create market confusion by releasing a product under a name formulaically similar to Apple's lineup.
Trademark law includes a concept of 'brand dilution' which companies have used to go after typosquatters in the past. In those cases, judges have considered whether there it was likely that a name would mislead consumers. I think Cisco would have a hard time defending itself on that one.
And, as you mentioned, there's the matter of public use. Since the term 'iPhone' has been kicked around among speculators for months, Cisco will probably have to show evidence that it made a credible efffort to keep that mark associated with its own brand. Again, they'll have a hard time arguing that one, IMO.
Even so, executives of publically held companies are legally required to use every resource at their disposal to make money for their shareholders. In cases like this, they do so by asking for a billion dollars up front and 50% of the net income for all future sales forever, then wait for their opponent to make a counter-offer. Both companies benefit from taking this matter far enough through court that they have a legally-defensible basis for whatever number they eventually choose.
First, when you have a market with lots of small, incompatible products, the one with the largest long-term market share ends up becoming the de facto standard. Look at the iPod. Apple was in a good position to have the standard product then, just as it has now.
Second, as another bit of history, the Apple ][ was a remarkably open platform. I still have the owner's manual for one (and the ][ itself for that matter), which contains circuit diagrams for the motherboard, design specs for cards to go in the internal slots, and a complete code listing for the ROM. Yeah, only Apple could make that specific product, but you'd be hard pressed to find a product easier to reverse-engineer for the sake of compatability.
That openness was part of what made the ][ such a popular product, in fact. If the basic machine didn't do something, it was easy for third-party vendors to build a card that would.
Besides (history again), Visicalc was what really made microcomputers take off.
An Apple ][ running Visicalc gave business people the power to crunch numbers in a way they'd never done before. They didn't have to submit a batch job to the mainframe in the basement, they could explore a dozen different ways of arranging the numbers right there at their desks in real time. The cost/benefit ratio on that power was so good that buying the machine and the sofware was a no-brainer.
That took computers from being a toy for electronics geeks to something professional people would have in their homes. It was enough to maintain the growth of a microcomputer market until Apple released the Mac.
The Macintosh touched off the second wave of computer adoption with its WYSIWYG display. That started the movement for desktop publishing. Computers stopped being something for people who crunched numbers and became tools for people who wanted to create documents.
Tim Berners-Lee and the NCSA kicked off the most recent proliferation of home computing with the web. That brought the default feature-set of a computer up to a level that pretty much everyone would desire.
Neither of the first two movements was hurt in any way by the Apple ][ or the Mac being proprietary, or closed systems.
Granted, Apple's management did vastly restrict the number of GUIs out there until Microsoft wrangled a contract interpretation that allowed them to produce Windows, and that opened a floodgate of GUI machines capable of making the web meaningful. But it was really only a matter of time before someone found a legal way to bring something more than a character-mapped command-line interface to market. Blit, Andrew and W predated the Macintosh, and the X project began in 1984, the same year the Mac was released. Sooner or later, someone would have built an interface that was good enough and had an undeniably clean provenance. And since Richard Stallman had been on the track of Free Software since 1979, he almost certainly would have taken a crack at it had Microsoft not gotten there first.
You're interpreting 'holes' to mean specific vulnerabilities, where the GP would have reasonable grounds for claiming a 'hole' is any vector for exploitation.
Due to the deeply and intricately connected nature of Windows, there are legitimate arguments either way. A buffer-overrun in, say, the PNG codec is a single vulnerability, but there are lots of different attack vectors. One vector would be the web browser. Another would be the email client. A third would be any file that reaches the computer by removable media.
To the average user, different paths of exploitation most likely equal different 'holes'.
Yes, there may be network effects to consider when setting the desirability to attack a given platform, but the 'pure market share' idea is just plain bullshit.
Equally tired response #1: webservers -- Apache has the largest market share in httpds, but it lags well behind IIS in exploits.
Equally tired response #2: coefficient of correlation -- If market share is the only metric that matters, what's the CoC for exploitation? It can't be linear (N% market share equals N% of the exploits), because OS X's install base is certainly no less than 1/25th of Windows's, and OS X doesn't have 1/25th the number of exploits Windows does. Nor can the CoC be a square of the install base. That predicts no less than 1/625th of the exploits for OS X that we see for Windows, and the numbers don't support that rating either. How much market share does Apple need to get before it passes this magical tipping point you're talking about and suddenly sees just as many exploits as Windows? It can't be 50% or even beyond, because Apache has held that much install base relative to Windows and still doesn't have 1:1 parity with Windows in wild exploits.
Attack frequency is a function of both popularity and raw vulnerability. How much bang do you get for the buck? How many systems do you have to try before you can find one with a hole, and how much value can you get out of the hole you find?
Are you honestly willing to say that if Macs were 95% exploitable through some hole whose exploitation could be automated and distributed over the internet (just like all the other 'sploit kits script kiddies use), that the platform would remain completely unmolested because there are 'only' a few tens of millions of exploitable systems out there?
Erm, I think you need to recap your history of the personal computer.
When IBM finally decided to sell PCs, Apple had a damn good run at first-mover advantage. IBM wanted to keep Apple from getting the same kind of lock with the Apple ][ that it now has with the iPod, so they decided to rush a disposable launch-vehicle product into the market, then evolve what it considered a 'good' product once its place in the channel was secure. They gave the job of designing the new product to an engineer who had the good sense to run a production capacity baseline, and realized that it would take something like 18 months to open a factory that did nothing but ship empty boxes. Any product design, supplier contracts, and production setup would have to be added to that time.
Instead, he proposed a radical solution: build the initial product from off-the-shelf parts, using third-party assembly houses for the actual production. That would put the new product in the market fast enough for IBM to build a place in the channel, and would buy them time to work on setting up production for an all-IBM product. Trouble was, that model would be vulnerable to copying, so IBM needed something to keep its proprietary lock on the product.
The result was the BIOS chip. That was IBM property pure and simple, and no computer could run (or at least be compatible with IBM's machines) without one.
The plan was approved, and IBM established contracts with a whole slew of outside vendors to supply parts of the initial system, including a tiny little place in Washington called Microsoft.
Then some bastard from a company called Compaq reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS chip and developed a brutally legal clean-room copy.
That opened the floodgates of commodity PCs. Not anything IBM or Microsoft did by choice. In fact, since the OS was the only thing that made an IBM computer distinct in the market, IBM suddenly found itself needing Microsoft more than Microsoft needed IBM.
And that's how a tiny little company with a crap product came to inherit one of the largest and best organized sales channels in the world, and bootstrapped itself into one of the largest companies of all time.
Face it, a company that doesn't know how to review its own security also doesn't know how to rate the reliability of a security contractor. That gives rise to a whole class of snake-oil vendors for whom FUD is another word for 'marketing'.
Case in point: I think it was McAffee that came out with a white paper last year saying that Mac users Really Should Use AV Software, despite the fact that the software in question only catches bugs for which it has known profiles, and there are currently no profiles for Mac bugs operating in the wild. In other words, the software is currently useless by its very design on the Mac platform, and in fact has caused more damage than viruses have on the Mac platform. But McAffee's 'experts' still said people should buy the stuff and use it, because hey, you never know.
Security is best handled by open sharing of information. Now, there's a line to draw between 'sharing exploit-level information with the vendors and category-of-risk information with users' and 'making the exploit public before telling the vendor because a little FUD is good for the soul'. And yes, within that context it's reasonable to say the customer has a responsibility to make a reasonable search for publically-accessible information about product security as part of making an informed purchase decision.
I didn't say they designed chipsets. They do have specific interests with respect to packaging, heat dissipation, and placement on the board, though.
The Mac Pro uses an easy-breakaway magnetic power cord instead of the older plug-in model. In both cases, the cord has LEDs in the terminator that not only tell you when the power is flowing, but also switch from green to orange when the battery is charging. The Mac Pro has built-in accelerometers and a system that parks the hard drive to protect it from impact (and the values are accessible through the API, so third party hackers could write the 'Mac Pro lightsaber' utility). It has a built-in video camera and an illuminated keyboard, and uses the former to check ambient light and set the illumination of the latter. The RAM and hard drive are positioned and mounted for easy access and replacement.
How many of those things would Dell have done on its own?
Shoot, how many years did it take OEMs like Dell to give up on floppy drives and parallel ports after Apple dumped them with the iMac? How long did it take the Windows world to fully adopt USB after Apple said, "okay, we're using this now" ? More to the point, how many years was USB support built into Windows before the OEMs switched over to that technology?
Apple is a vertically integrated systems house, not a component vendor. Apple controls the entire product stack, from mobo design through firmware, OS, middleware, userland, and network services. That control gives Apple the power to solve problems where it makes the most sense, and to build pieces that work and play nicely together. There's a whole market segment willing to pay for that service, whether you're part of that segment or not.
And in case you hadn't noticed, the component-vendor business model isn't doing so well these days. Dell posted something like $160 million in profits last quarter, while Apple posted $480 mil. Dell shipped five times as many units as Apple, but Apple made three times as much money. Microsoft has scrapped the component-vendor model for music players (playsForSure) and started a full-stack model for the Zune (for all the good it did them). They follow the same full-stack model for the XBox, just like Sony and Nintendo do with their consoles.
3) Authentication before making system changes. This, the author implies, is acceptable on OSX, but not Windows? Why?
Well, among other things, he spends most of a page discussing the difference between authentication, which OS X does, and approval, which Vista does.
Authentication means you actually enter a password to prove you're the person who has rights to modify the machine.
Approval means you just click a "yes, go ahead and do it" button.
The article then discusses the weakness of 'approval' from a security standpoint: i.e.: it doesn't stop J. Random Passerby from hosing your system, it just means he has to push the 'Okay' button to do it.
In practice, this means that if the two of us are sitting side by side, you on a Vista box where only you know the admin password, me on a Mac where only I know the admin password, I can change the settings of your machine while you step away for coffee, but you can't change the settings on my machine while I step away for coffee.
Let's get with the program, people! Apple could probably do more for C# adoption in the industry than Microsoft probably can (think USB) because of less momentum.
Uhm.. aside from satisfying your personal One True Language imperative,why should Apple want to push adoption of a language and code base Microsoft owns?
In case you haven't been paying attention for the past few years, Apple has been moving away from the whole 'depending on a competitor (especially Microsoft) to suppply products critical to the Mac user experience' philosophy. We have:
Safari instead of IE
Mail instead of Outlook
Keynote instead of Powerpoint
Pages instead of Word
plus the whole gamut of in-house products like iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, and so forth. The unifying concept behind all those products is "Let's not give Microsoft the power to say, 'whoops, we forgot to upgrade [Word|IE|etc] for Mac again. Don't worry, we'll get the code to the MBU in a couple of years.. maybe.' yet again."
A friend of mine does networks for a major oil company. He brought back pictures of an installation in (I think) Angola.
The first notable point was that the outside of the building seemed to be polka-dotted. Those were the bullet holes. Nobody was firing at the building per se, it was just downrange from one of the local hot spots.
The telecom room for the building was on the second floor. My friend's company rented the fifth floor, and some other company rented the floor above that. There were no data risers in the building. Instead, there was a hole about a foot across that had been knocked through the wall on the second floor, and a couple of six-inch holes on the fifth and sixth floors. The data cables ran out through the wall on the second floor, up the outside of the building (among all the previously mentioned bullet holes), and back in through the walls on the fifth and sixth floors. My friend's company had gone to the extra time and expense of running conduit, but the company above just had a 40' swag of cable hanging there in the breeze.
The telecom room itself looked like the aftermath of a "will it blend" episode. Take 20 drums of assorted wire product and unspool it all, wad it all up into a 10'x12'x8' snarl, then start grabbing random segments and pulling until you can nail that particular chunk of wire to some point on the wall. That's what it looked like. When they needed to fix something, they put one guy upstairs with a handset on the line and a radio, then sent another guy with a radio down to the telecom room to wave a toner around until the guy upstairs started to hear noise.
My friend also told a story about renting a phone line from the Chadian national government. That's all it was.. the same kind of POTS line you have to the phone on your wall, for a cost of something like $10k per month. One of the things he had to do was install a modem on the line (which saw about 95% use since it served a whole office), but the line itself was so unbalanced that he couldn't get a decent signal. He mentioned this to the local telecoms expat, who said, "oh yeah.. come on. You'll enjoy this."
They got their security people and drove over to the phone substation (which was run by the Chadian military and had armed guards outside), and before the truck even stopped, the expat was out and stomping his way past the guards, through the door, and into the wiring frame. As my friend came in behind him (pretty much thinking, "okay, we're dead"), he realized that he could hear voices speaking English througout the building. The military had tapped their line, but since it was used so much, they were running the sound through a loudspeaker rather than just listening to it on a handset.
Halfway down the row of wires, the expat stopped, pointed at the wire that dropped down from the celing and tapped into the frame, and shouted, "IS THIS A WIRETAP? IS IT?" By that time, *everyone* in the facility was there watching, and the colonel who ran the place was saying, "no no! Is not a tap," despite the fact that everyone could hear the voices of the people using the line over the loudspeaker.
The expat yanked the wire loose and said, "damn right it isn't a wiretap.. it's rubbish. We spotted it two seconds after you put it in. Here.. let me show you what to do," then proceeded to do a quick lecture-demo on professional wiretapping techniques.
Small point of correction: to the best of my knowledge, the Apple security update dealt with a different set of flaws than the one demonstrated at Black Hat.
At very least, the update closed a set of malicious-header holes Apple discovered independently, during an internal audit it started in response to the firestorm of "is-there/isn't-there a hole?" speculation caused by the Krebs story.
The holes Apple closed may or may not be the same ones Ellch and Maynor claim to have exploited, since as far as I know, Ellch and Maynor have still never presented a complete technical description of the hole they claim to have found.
---- To avoid networking except with known good components;
Components are only part of the story.
According to the Orange Book (the DOD manual for evaluation of trusted computing systems), the security of a machine can be rated no higher than the rating of its least trusted port. That includes everything, including the power cord and the air. A truly high security system demands a generator inside the same Fermi cage as the device itself, and probably armed guards at the door.
The internet is an untrusted and untrustable network. Connecting to it voids your security rating, period. There are no cryptographic protocols or techniques that can possibly make it secure. Read Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies for a complete, technical, and eloquent discussion of why not.
---- to develop their own software in-house so that they can better control the vulnerability testing and patching process
BAD idea. The single biggest source of exploitable holes is roll-your-own software developed by people making things up as they go rather than using well-known, well-analyzed, mature designs. Security experts still prefer 3DES over say, blowfish, even though blowfish is more resistant to analysis. 3DES has a 30-year track record of holding its own in spite of being analyzed every way imaginable, and blowfish doesn't.
You're forgetting two basic facts of security: One, that trust always starts somewhere. Two, that lack of trust is expensive.
Your proposal boils down to a radical lack-of-trust agenda, with two major flaws: The first is that it just doesn't work, because you have to trust someone, somewhere, sometime, and as soon as you do you create an opportunity for expliotation. The second is that you haven't given serious consideration to the costs associated with lack of trust.
Most security experts say that the best general strategy is "trust, but verify."
With regard to vendors patching their own products, you put that theory into action more or less the way the responsible security agencies do now: notify the vendor privately, give them a certain amount of time to respond, then post a public notice of the kind of problem along with a severity rating and a general description of what parts of the product are vulnerable. In other words, give people enough information to know a risk exists, but don't give the script kiddies a fully-automated exploit kit. That gives the public enough information to count the unpatched-vulnerability-days for a given vendor and make a decision about how much to trust that vendor, without artificially escalating the risk users face.
This MOAB stunt is bullshit because Apple's track record of acknowledging and fixing reported vulnerabilities is only one of his secondary concerns. Mostly, he just wants to instill what he considers a healthy level of FUD among Mac users, since in his opinion Mac users are complacent, and complacency itself is (according to him) a security risk. He honestly seems to think that a good helping of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt will be good for everyone.
---- So, seeing how you can't correctly parse other people's statements, [...]
You really need to spend some time exploring the basic mechanics of sentence formation.
Case in point: the subject-predicate sentence. The subject is the actor, and the predicate is acted upon by the subject. When you say something like, "Apple has had poor relations with security researchers," the mechanics of the English language imply that Apple is doing the bad relations, and that the bad relations are happening to the security researchers. That may not be what you intended, but it's a normal (and in fact denotatively correct) interpretation of the sentence.
I've spent far too much time on this page seeing you get snippy because people have interpreted sentences in a linguistically proper way that doesn't happen to match what you claim to have originally meant. There are two common reasons for that kind of behavior:
One, you're mentally entrenched in what you mean to say, and have forgotten that text isn't telepathy. As a result, you're blaming others for your lack of precision and unwillingness to restate your meaning in other terms.
Two, you started off with an intentionally inflammatory statement and are now trying to deny that fact by playing games with the mechanics of language.
In either case, you lose. You are not Humpty Dumpty to say (in a rather scornful tone), "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."
---- Maybe so, but I maintain that they still made the distinction smaller.
That's a nicely moderate statement of a legitimate opinion. What are you doing on Slashdot?;-)
Seriously, we've gotten to the point in the discussion where our terms are so well defined we could subject them to objective testing. In fact, we'd need objective data to take the discussion any further, and I certainly don't have any.
---- And one day she asked us if there was some way she could get better than number one.
Software development process guru Tom DeMarco wrote a book called The Deadline where he describes that as the mindset of a child abuser: if some is good, more is better, and there's no limit to define 'too much'.
Doesn't matter if it's discipline, search rankings, or 'commitment to the project'. They just want More.
Ever heard of a little thing called 'Slashdot effect?' or 'getting dugg?' Those are also advertising media. So is buying ad space or getting content-based attention on sites where your audience already goes. Maybe those options are more expensive, take more thought, and require more work than just dropping a few bucks on Google keywords, but that just feeds back to my comments about people being too cheap, stupid, and lazy to do any real marketing.
---- Thats really funny cause this is what alot of people were saying about Microsoft. Now that its Google, is this now a valid argument?
If you're talking about Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior with respect to Netscape, there's no similarity at all. Microsoft didn't get in trouble for putting its own products on its own desktop. It got in trouble for using its monopoly to force OEMs into deals where they weren't allowed to put anyone else's products on Microsoft's desktop.
You'd only have a valid comparison if Microsoft had bundled Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and a dozen other browsers with the OS, putting their icons right up there on the desktop with the IE icon. And then some whiny little bitch would have to start complaining about "Micorosoft's abuse of its monopoly" because it put the IE icon top-center, with all the other icons are arranged in a row below that.
What we have here are people complaining because Google mentions its own products on its own pages, period. They don't like the idea of a company being an advertiser and a creator of products that can be advertised. The term they're looking for isn't 'anticompetitive behavior', it's 'conflict of interests', and Google has done a pretty good job of avioding that, IMO.
Okay, good point. The 'tips' are visually distinct from the paid ads, which makes the whole issue of people not being able to buy the #1 slot completely moot.
The point stands that Google has made a credible effort to distinguish its references to its own products and services from the core search results. That's enough to keep my main point breathing: that users will continue to trust the search results as long as the search results A) continue to offer a good user experience, and B) are easy to distinguish from any non-search links that appear on the page.
If the 'tip' referring to some Google service is at least as relevant to the original search query as the paid ads on the same page, I can't see it costing Google any more loss of credibility than the paid ads themselves.
Your argument is well-reasoned, but you failed to mark a distinction between "Google artificially directing traffic to its own products" and "Google artificially directing traffic to any website willing to pay."
Let's face it, the whole paid-advertising thing is a direct violation of Google's page rank system. Users know it, and that's why Google makes a clear distinction between paid ads and unpaid search results.
If Google were giving its own products an artifically high page rank, yes, they'd probably lose the trust of the users. But they're not. They're putting their own products in the #1 slot of the "these don't have enough page rank to get listed, but somebody's willing to pay us to put them here anyway" list. You need another argument to show how the difference between "Google, then everyone else willing to pay" and "everyone willing to pay, with Google mixed in there somewhere" will cost the company any meaningful loss of credibility among users.
For that matter, please try to define an alternative solution, in which Google places its ads in the paid search list at a certain value without getting reamed (and probably sued) for artificially inflating the cost of buying the Nth slot in those rankings.
If Google had a de facto monopoly on search, it wouldn't mean squat. A company that wants to promote its photo app on Google isn't competing with Google in the search market. It's using Google as an advertising medium. The only way for antitrust law to come into play is if Google gets some kind of monopoly on 'advertising media', and there's no way that can possibly happen.
Nothing Google does in its search results page prevents a company from running print ads in trade magazines or doing TV and radio spots. If you want to restrict the discussion to 'online advertising', nothing Google does on its search results page will prevent a company from hiring an actual marketing agent who's willing to do the legwork of finding the top 100 websites visited by the company's core audience and buying ad space there, or better still, working deals that will see the company's product discussed in the direct content of those sites (thus gaining the product a high page rank in Google's non-paid search results, and avoiding the "nobody actually talks about our product but we're going to buy our way onto the search page anyway" games entirely).
This whole "Google won't let me buy the top slot, waah-waah-waah" bullshit is the sound made by people who are too cheap, stupid, or lazy to get out there and do some actual MARKETING. They want to click a "send me business" button and have the world beat a path to their door, largely based on the hard-earned-and-diligently-maintained reputation Google has won for providing relevant and trustworthy search results.
People also have this strange notion that 'top slot' has some magical value that no other slot has. Seriously: I defy anyone to show me a meaningful financial breakdown of the difference in value between "number one slot on Google's paid search list" and "number two slot on Google's paid search list." If Google is 'harming' its competitors by keeping the #1 slot for itself, someone please define that 'harm' in actual shillings and pence. If you can't, there's no way you could establish standing to file a lawsuit, let alone claim any damages.
Besides, Google putting its own products at the top of the paid links list is the very antithesis of anticompetitive behavior. When you see the link to Google's product, you also see links to other products that compete directly with Google's stuff. Please explain how we entered the Bizarro World where 'giving everyone the URLs to all your competitors' has come to be construed as 'anticompetitive behavior'. Christ on a pogo stick, people, show me three other companies that devote half as many resources to 'promoting competing products' as Google.
Quick tip: next time shove the corncob up your ass lengthwise instead of sideways.
To the extent that your reply was itself anything but a string of unsupported insults, the remaining two words ('market share') don't automatically lend themselves to the intepretation you suggest in your second round of verbal diarrhea.
As for evidence that Apple's market share is growing in consumer space, Apple's market share numbers have been growing steadily for a couple of years. Granted they're still only around 4%, which makes them anything but the powerhouse in home computing, but the rise does suggest a trend toward growing popularity somewhere. A recent study of third-party resellers said that those vendors are seeing about 20-30% conversion from Windows among Mac buyers. Apple's numbers at the Apple Store run about 50%, which makes sense since the third-party vendors tend to serve more repeat and business customers, while the Apple Store gets a higher share of walk-ins. The gist of it all is that Apple's share in consumer space does seem to be growing, based on the numbers out there. That doesn't make Apple the big dog, but any growth of a competing product is something for Microsoft to take seriously.
Now, as to my own previous post, it is in fact possible for someone to say something that doesn't fit entirely within the boundaries you expected, and still have a point. This knowledge may serve you well in the future, if and when you ever grow up.
My point was that 'market share' is only one way to look at the market, and not necessarily the best one. Market share counts units shipped, but doesn't say anything about how much money a company made shipping those units. It's easy to gain market share by dumping products into the market below cost and eating the loss.. Microsoft has been doing that for years with the Xbox, and the entire dotcom bubble was fueled on the idea that companies would, in effect, sell dollar bills for 75 cents to generate 'brand awareness', then apply that 'brand' to some profitable (but unspecified) line of business later. The first part worked just fine, but most companies didn't survive long enough to do the second.
Dell matters to Microsoft because 80% of Microsoft's OS sales come from OEM license deals, and OS sales are a big chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Dell makes its money in the $1.5-3K price range, and uses those profits to subsidize the low-priced machines that give Dell (and Microsoft) such a big 'market share'.
Right now, market evidence suggests that Apple is starting to eat Dell's lunch in the $1.5-3K price range. The loss of that comparatively small chunk of 'market share' translates to a large loss of profit, which in turn undercuts Dell's ability to keep the pipeline of low-cost entry machines on life support. If Dell can't make a decent business case to continue producing its low-end machines, the loss of that pipeline threatens a large chunk of Dell's 'market share', which in turn threatens Microsoft's 'market share'. Again, that's something for Microsoft to take seriously.
Loss of market share (or more precisely, loss of installed base) hurts Microsoft in more than just direct revenue. It also undercuts Microsoft's ability to lock customers into its OS-and-bundled-software package with proprietary formats and protocols. The more solidly Microsoft can maintain a monoculture, the easier it is for Microsoft to kill competing products simply by making its own products default to something proprietary. The more heterogenous the computing environment gets, the harder it is for Microsoft to lock out competing products that way. And if consumers are using non-proprietary formats and protocols, they have less need to stay on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill, which hits the only profitable business unit Microsoft has.
In the business license market, where Microsoft makes most of the money it doesn't make in OEM licensing, it's easy for the IT department to blow off complaints from the guy in the
General rule: 20% of the market generates 80% of the profit. We saw that last quarter in hardware sales when Apple posted something like a $580 million profit, while Dell made a profit of $510 million selling something like five times as many units. Dell's #1 in unit sales, but Apple made more money.
I also doubt that Microsoft is 'scared' of OS X, but Apple is getting traction in the high-profit end of the market. Microsoft is more worried by loss of proprietary format and protocol lock-in, and if OS X becomes more popular at the executive level, Microsoft's marketing team will have to work harder to sell products that don't work and play nicely in a heterogenous computing environment.
Besides, Microsoft has a long-standing strategy of selling products by feature checklist. And like it or not, OS X defined the current checklist for user interface. Aero is a response to Aqua in the sense that Microsoft doesn't want to lose any points in the checklist comparisons tech writers are so accustomed to doing.
As for a new UI in Leopard, it's very likely that the look and feel of the widgets will change, and Apple will probably roll out products that take advantage of all the new technology under the hood. The first reflects Apple's determination to maintain a distinct brand identity, and the second is just normal software evolution.
For those of you who've known The Reg for a while, that statement should be enough. For those of you who are newer to it, he leans more toward sensationalism and opinion masquerading as journalism than toward things like taking statements in context and checking his facts.
He's the one who started the non-conflict between Richard Stallman and Miguel de Icaza over Mono. The original article is here. Stallman's response, which begins with "Your article about me, GNOME and.Net was inaccurate starting from the title. Those quotations which are accurate are taken out of context, leading to total misunderstanding," is can be found here.
Orlowski also had (and possibly still has, I stop reading whenever I see his name in the byline) a grudge against Google. He did a whole series of pieces about 'googlewashing', in which he accused Google of censorship, and another series in which he argued that Google News isn't Real Journalism.
On the few occasions where I've exchanged email with him personally, I found him rude, hasty, liberal with insults, and generally a putz. Back in Usenet days, he would have been called a classic flamer.
To the extent that there are real facts in this article, I don't know what they are, and I don't trust Orlowski to have presented them in any way but the one that makes him look like a daring investigative reporter breaking the scandal of the century.
Even assuming the premise of the article is true, and that Itunes Store sales have fallen dramatically, Apple will be the last one to care. The iTunes Store doesn't do much more than break even.
And for the sake of completeness, I should state my own bias by mentioning that I've spent a couple hundred bucks at the iTunes store over the last year. I'll probably do the same next year, for whatever that happens to be worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Courts have a practice of interpreting contracts, licenses, etc. based on the behavior of the parties involved.
SCO -v- IBM case is a prime example of that principle in action. When IBM had a contract with AT&T over Unix code, both parties spent decades behaving as if AT&T owned the original code it licensed, and IBM owned any home-grown code built into products that also used AT&T code. OldSCO and Novell both carried on the same behavior. So did Caldera (since renamed The SCO Group), at least for a while. Then NewSCO decided to go on a litigation binge, and pulled out a contract interpretation that said any code that had ever touched the original AT&T code became a derivative work of the AT&T code, and that NewSCO had total control over all derivative works. The fact that the courts interpret behavior as an operational definition of the contract gives IBM a right to cite those years of behavior as proof that NewSCO is full of it.
In this instance, there's a reasonable argument to be made for the idea that buying a license means you accept the license holder's right to offer such a license.
Of course, there's also a well-established legal principle that an illegal contract/license has no value whatsoever, and that performance doesn't grant rights that didn't exist when the contract/license was formed.
There's enough hair-splitting there to make it reasonable to ask The Supremes for an opinion.
---- Finally, will this curious little squabble have any impact? I'm curious since I don't think the amount of money this dispute could yield would be worth the executive time it takes and the odd publicity brought to both companies.
I imagine a settlement would be in the $50-100 million range. That's big enough to take seriously. Big enough, in fact, for Cisco's execs to be in legal trouble if they didn't do everything in their power to get it.
But as trademark cases go, you're right that this one looks interesting. Yes, Cisco registered the 'iPhone' mark some time ago, but Apple has a whole slate of 'iWhatever' products in the market, selling well, and developing massive brand awareness. Among other things, Apple could argue that Cisco didn't file 'iPhone' until well after 'iMac' and 'iPod' were established brands, making Cisco look like a speculative name squatter or a company out to create market confusion by releasing a product under a name formulaically similar to Apple's lineup.
Trademark law includes a concept of 'brand dilution' which companies have used to go after typosquatters in the past. In those cases, judges have considered whether there it was likely that a name would mislead consumers. I think Cisco would have a hard time defending itself on that one.
And, as you mentioned, there's the matter of public use. Since the term 'iPhone' has been kicked around among speculators for months, Cisco will probably have to show evidence that it made a credible efffort to keep that mark associated with its own brand. Again, they'll have a hard time arguing that one, IMO.
Even so, executives of publically held companies are legally required to use every resource at their disposal to make money for their shareholders. In cases like this, they do so by asking for a billion dollars up front and 50% of the net income for all future sales forever, then wait for their opponent to make a counter-offer. Both companies benefit from taking this matter far enough through court that they have a legally-defensible basis for whatever number they eventually choose.
Okay, I see your argument, but I still disagree.
First, when you have a market with lots of small, incompatible products, the one with the largest long-term market share ends up becoming the de facto standard. Look at the iPod. Apple was in a good position to have the standard product then, just as it has now.
Second, as another bit of history, the Apple ][ was a remarkably open platform. I still have the owner's manual for one (and the ][ itself for that matter), which contains circuit diagrams for the motherboard, design specs for cards to go in the internal slots, and a complete code listing for the ROM. Yeah, only Apple could make that specific product, but you'd be hard pressed to find a product easier to reverse-engineer for the sake of compatability.
That openness was part of what made the ][ such a popular product, in fact. If the basic machine didn't do something, it was easy for third-party vendors to build a card that would.
Besides (history again), Visicalc was what really made microcomputers take off.
An Apple ][ running Visicalc gave business people the power to crunch numbers in a way they'd never done before. They didn't have to submit a batch job to the mainframe in the basement, they could explore a dozen different ways of arranging the numbers right there at their desks in real time. The cost/benefit ratio on that power was so good that buying the machine and the sofware was a no-brainer.
That took computers from being a toy for electronics geeks to something professional people would have in their homes. It was enough to maintain the growth of a microcomputer market until Apple released the Mac.
The Macintosh touched off the second wave of computer adoption with its WYSIWYG display. That started the movement for desktop publishing. Computers stopped being something for people who crunched numbers and became tools for people who wanted to create documents.
Tim Berners-Lee and the NCSA kicked off the most recent proliferation of home computing with the web. That brought the default feature-set of a computer up to a level that pretty much everyone would desire.
Neither of the first two movements was hurt in any way by the Apple ][ or the Mac being proprietary, or closed systems.
Granted, Apple's management did vastly restrict the number of GUIs out there until Microsoft wrangled a contract interpretation that allowed them to produce Windows, and that opened a floodgate of GUI machines capable of making the web meaningful. But it was really only a matter of time before someone found a legal way to bring something more than a character-mapped command-line interface to market. Blit, Andrew and W predated the Macintosh, and the X project began in 1984, the same year the Mac was released. Sooner or later, someone would have built an interface that was good enough and had an undeniably clean provenance. And since Richard Stallman had been on the track of Free Software since 1979, he almost certainly would have taken a crack at it had Microsoft not gotten there first.
Vocabulary issue, I think.
You're interpreting 'holes' to mean specific vulnerabilities, where the GP would have reasonable grounds for claiming a 'hole' is any vector for exploitation.
Due to the deeply and intricately connected nature of Windows, there are legitimate arguments either way. A buffer-overrun in, say, the PNG codec is a single vulnerability, but there are lots of different attack vectors. One vector would be the web browser. Another would be the email client. A third would be any file that reaches the computer by removable media.
To the average user, different paths of exploitation most likely equal different 'holes'.
Old meme, long-since discredited.
Yes, there may be network effects to consider when setting the desirability to attack a given platform, but the 'pure market share' idea is just plain bullshit.
Equally tired response #1: webservers -- Apache has the largest market share in httpds, but it lags well behind IIS in exploits.
Equally tired response #2: coefficient of correlation -- If market share is the only metric that matters, what's the CoC for exploitation? It can't be linear (N% market share equals N% of the exploits), because OS X's install base is certainly no less than 1/25th of Windows's, and OS X doesn't have 1/25th the number of exploits Windows does. Nor can the CoC be a square of the install base. That predicts no less than 1/625th of the exploits for OS X that we see for Windows, and the numbers don't support that rating either. How much market share does Apple need to get before it passes this magical tipping point you're talking about and suddenly sees just as many exploits as Windows? It can't be 50% or even beyond, because Apache has held that much install base relative to Windows and still doesn't have 1:1 parity with Windows in wild exploits.
Attack frequency is a function of both popularity and raw vulnerability. How much bang do you get for the buck? How many systems do you have to try before you can find one with a hole, and how much value can you get out of the hole you find?
Are you honestly willing to say that if Macs were 95% exploitable through some hole whose exploitation could be automated and distributed over the internet (just like all the other 'sploit kits script kiddies use), that the platform would remain completely unmolested because there are 'only' a few tens of millions of exploitable systems out there?
Get real.
Erm, I think you need to recap your history of the personal computer.
When IBM finally decided to sell PCs, Apple had a damn good run at first-mover advantage. IBM wanted to keep Apple from getting the same kind of lock with the Apple ][ that it now has with the iPod, so they decided to rush a disposable launch-vehicle product into the market, then evolve what it considered a 'good' product once its place in the channel was secure. They gave the job of designing the new product to an engineer who had the good sense to run a production capacity baseline, and realized that it would take something like 18 months to open a factory that did nothing but ship empty boxes. Any product design, supplier contracts, and production setup would have to be added to that time.
Instead, he proposed a radical solution: build the initial product from off-the-shelf parts, using third-party assembly houses for the actual production. That would put the new product in the market fast enough for IBM to build a place in the channel, and would buy them time to work on setting up production for an all-IBM product. Trouble was, that model would be vulnerable to copying, so IBM needed something to keep its proprietary lock on the product.
The result was the BIOS chip. That was IBM property pure and simple, and no computer could run (or at least be compatible with IBM's machines) without one.
The plan was approved, and IBM established contracts with a whole slew of outside vendors to supply parts of the initial system, including a tiny little place in Washington called Microsoft.
Then some bastard from a company called Compaq reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS chip and developed a brutally legal clean-room copy.
That opened the floodgates of commodity PCs. Not anything IBM or Microsoft did by choice. In fact, since the OS was the only thing that made an IBM computer distinct in the market, IBM suddenly found itself needing Microsoft more than Microsoft needed IBM.
And that's how a tiny little company with a crap product came to inherit one of the largest and best organized sales channels in the world, and bootstrapped itself into one of the largest companies of all time.
There are still problems.
Face it, a company that doesn't know how to review its own security also doesn't know how to rate the reliability of a security contractor. That gives rise to a whole class of snake-oil vendors for whom FUD is another word for 'marketing'.
Case in point: I think it was McAffee that came out with a white paper last year saying that Mac users Really Should Use AV Software, despite the fact that the software in question only catches bugs for which it has known profiles, and there are currently no profiles for Mac bugs operating in the wild. In other words, the software is currently useless by its very design on the Mac platform, and in fact has caused more damage than viruses have on the Mac platform. But McAffee's 'experts' still said people should buy the stuff and use it, because hey, you never know.
Security is best handled by open sharing of information. Now, there's a line to draw between 'sharing exploit-level information with the vendors and category-of-risk information with users' and 'making the exploit public before telling the vendor because a little FUD is good for the soul'. And yes, within that context it's reasonable to say the customer has a responsibility to make a reasonable search for publically-accessible information about product security as part of making an informed purchase decision.
I didn't say they designed chipsets. They do have specific interests with respect to packaging, heat dissipation, and placement on the board, though.
The Mac Pro uses an easy-breakaway magnetic power cord instead of the older plug-in model. In both cases, the cord has LEDs in the terminator that not only tell you when the power is flowing, but also switch from green to orange when the battery is charging. The Mac Pro has built-in accelerometers and a system that parks the hard drive to protect it from impact (and the values are accessible through the API, so third party hackers could write the 'Mac Pro lightsaber' utility). It has a built-in video camera and an illuminated keyboard, and uses the former to check ambient light and set the illumination of the latter. The RAM and hard drive are positioned and mounted for easy access and replacement.
How many of those things would Dell have done on its own?
Shoot, how many years did it take OEMs like Dell to give up on floppy drives and parallel ports after Apple dumped them with the iMac? How long did it take the Windows world to fully adopt USB after Apple said, "okay, we're using this now" ? More to the point, how many years was USB support built into Windows before the OEMs switched over to that technology?
Get a new meme.
Apple is a vertically integrated systems house, not a component vendor. Apple controls the entire product stack, from mobo design through firmware, OS, middleware, userland, and network services. That control gives Apple the power to solve problems where it makes the most sense, and to build pieces that work and play nicely together. There's a whole market segment willing to pay for that service, whether you're part of that segment or not.
And in case you hadn't noticed, the component-vendor business model isn't doing so well these days. Dell posted something like $160 million in profits last quarter, while Apple posted $480 mil. Dell shipped five times as many units as Apple, but Apple made three times as much money. Microsoft has scrapped the component-vendor model for music players (playsForSure) and started a full-stack model for the Zune (for all the good it did them). They follow the same full-stack model for the XBox, just like Sony and Nintendo do with their consoles.
Well, among other things, he spends most of a page discussing the difference between authentication, which OS X does, and approval, which Vista does.
Authentication means you actually enter a password to prove you're the person who has rights to modify the machine.
Approval means you just click a "yes, go ahead and do it" button.
The article then discusses the weakness of 'approval' from a security standpoint: i.e.: it doesn't stop J. Random Passerby from hosing your system, it just means he has to push the 'Okay' button to do it.
In practice, this means that if the two of us are sitting side by side, you on a Vista box where only you know the admin password, me on a Mac where only I know the admin password, I can change the settings of your machine while you step away for coffee, but you can't change the settings on my machine while I step away for coffee.
Uhm.. aside from satisfying your personal One True Language imperative,why should Apple want to push adoption of a language and code base Microsoft owns?
In case you haven't been paying attention for the past few years, Apple has been moving away from the whole 'depending on a competitor (especially Microsoft) to suppply products critical to the Mac user experience' philosophy. We have:
plus the whole gamut of in-house products like iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, and so forth. The unifying concept behind all those products is "Let's not give Microsoft the power to say, 'whoops, we forgot to upgrade [Word|IE|etc] for Mac again. Don't worry, we'll get the code to the MBU in a couple of years.. maybe.' yet again."
A friend of mine does networks for a major oil company. He brought back pictures of an installation in (I think) Angola.
The first notable point was that the outside of the building seemed to be polka-dotted. Those were the bullet holes. Nobody was firing at the building per se, it was just downrange from one of the local hot spots.
The telecom room for the building was on the second floor. My friend's company rented the fifth floor, and some other company rented the floor above that. There were no data risers in the building. Instead, there was a hole about a foot across that had been knocked through the wall on the second floor, and a couple of six-inch holes on the fifth and sixth floors. The data cables ran out through the wall on the second floor, up the outside of the building (among all the previously mentioned bullet holes), and back in through the walls on the fifth and sixth floors. My friend's company had gone to the extra time and expense of running conduit, but the company above just had a 40' swag of cable hanging there in the breeze.
The telecom room itself looked like the aftermath of a "will it blend" episode. Take 20 drums of assorted wire product and unspool it all, wad it all up into a 10'x12'x8' snarl, then start grabbing random segments and pulling until you can nail that particular chunk of wire to some point on the wall. That's what it looked like. When they needed to fix something, they put one guy upstairs with a handset on the line and a radio, then sent another guy with a radio down to the telecom room to wave a toner around until the guy upstairs started to hear noise.
My friend also told a story about renting a phone line from the Chadian national government. That's all it was.. the same kind of POTS line you have to the phone on your wall, for a cost of something like $10k per month. One of the things he had to do was install a modem on the line (which saw about 95% use since it served a whole office), but the line itself was so unbalanced that he couldn't get a decent signal. He mentioned this to the local telecoms expat, who said, "oh yeah.. come on. You'll enjoy this."
They got their security people and drove over to the phone substation (which was run by the Chadian military and had armed guards outside), and before the truck even stopped, the expat was out and stomping his way past the guards, through the door, and into the wiring frame. As my friend came in behind him (pretty much thinking, "okay, we're dead"), he realized that he could hear voices speaking English througout the building. The military had tapped their line, but since it was used so much, they were running the sound through a loudspeaker rather than just listening to it on a handset.
Halfway down the row of wires, the expat stopped, pointed at the wire that dropped down from the celing and tapped into the frame, and shouted, "IS THIS A WIRETAP? IS IT?" By that time, *everyone* in the facility was there watching, and the colonel who ran the place was saying, "no no! Is not a tap," despite the fact that everyone could hear the voices of the people using the line over the loudspeaker.
The expat yanked the wire loose and said, "damn right it isn't a wiretap.. it's rubbish. We spotted it two seconds after you put it in. Here.. let me show you what to do," then proceeded to do a quick lecture-demo on professional wiretapping techniques.
Small point of correction: to the best of my knowledge, the Apple security update dealt with a different set of flaws than the one demonstrated at Black Hat.
At very least, the update closed a set of malicious-header holes Apple discovered independently, during an internal audit it started in response to the firestorm of "is-there/isn't-there a hole?" speculation caused by the Krebs story.
The holes Apple closed may or may not be the same ones Ellch and Maynor claim to have exploited, since as far as I know, Ellch and Maynor have still never presented a complete technical description of the hole they claim to have found.
Are you volunteering?
Why does "somebody should do something about this" always seem to mean "somebody not me"?
---- To avoid networking except with known good components;
Components are only part of the story.
According to the Orange Book (the DOD manual for evaluation of trusted computing systems), the security of a machine can be rated no higher than the rating of its least trusted port. That includes everything, including the power cord and the air. A truly high security system demands a generator inside the same Fermi cage as the device itself, and probably armed guards at the door.
The internet is an untrusted and untrustable network. Connecting to it voids your security rating, period. There are no cryptographic protocols or techniques that can possibly make it secure. Read Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies for a complete, technical, and eloquent discussion of why not.
---- to develop their own software in-house so that they can better control the vulnerability testing and patching process
BAD idea. The single biggest source of exploitable holes is roll-your-own software developed by people making things up as they go rather than using well-known, well-analyzed, mature designs. Security experts still prefer 3DES over say, blowfish, even though blowfish is more resistant to analysis. 3DES has a 30-year track record of holding its own in spite of being analyzed every way imaginable, and blowfish doesn't.
You're forgetting two basic facts of security: One, that trust always starts somewhere. Two, that lack of trust is expensive.
Your proposal boils down to a radical lack-of-trust agenda, with two major flaws: The first is that it just doesn't work, because you have to trust someone, somewhere, sometime, and as soon as you do you create an opportunity for expliotation. The second is that you haven't given serious consideration to the costs associated with lack of trust.
Most security experts say that the best general strategy is "trust, but verify."
With regard to vendors patching their own products, you put that theory into action more or less the way the responsible security agencies do now: notify the vendor privately, give them a certain amount of time to respond, then post a public notice of the kind of problem along with a severity rating and a general description of what parts of the product are vulnerable. In other words, give people enough information to know a risk exists, but don't give the script kiddies a fully-automated exploit kit. That gives the public enough information to count the unpatched-vulnerability-days for a given vendor and make a decision about how much to trust that vendor, without artificially escalating the risk users face.
This MOAB stunt is bullshit because Apple's track record of acknowledging and fixing reported vulnerabilities is only one of his secondary concerns. Mostly, he just wants to instill what he considers a healthy level of FUD among Mac users, since in his opinion Mac users are complacent, and complacency itself is (according to him) a security risk. He honestly seems to think that a good helping of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt will be good for everyone.
Completely offtopic, but:
---- So, seeing how you can't correctly parse other people's statements, [...]
You really need to spend some time exploring the basic mechanics of sentence formation.
Case in point: the subject-predicate sentence. The subject is the actor, and the predicate is acted upon by the subject. When you say something like, "Apple has had poor relations with security researchers," the mechanics of the English language imply that Apple is doing the bad relations, and that the bad relations are happening to the security researchers. That may not be what you intended, but it's a normal (and in fact denotatively correct) interpretation of the sentence.
I've spent far too much time on this page seeing you get snippy because people have interpreted sentences in a linguistically proper way that doesn't happen to match what you claim to have originally meant. There are two common reasons for that kind of behavior:
One, you're mentally entrenched in what you mean to say, and have forgotten that text isn't telepathy. As a result, you're blaming others for your lack of precision and unwillingness to restate your meaning in other terms.
Two, you started off with an intentionally inflammatory statement and are now trying to deny that fact by playing games with the mechanics of language.
In either case, you lose. You are not Humpty Dumpty to say (in a rather scornful tone), "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."
---- Maybe so, but I maintain that they still made the distinction smaller.
;-)
That's a nicely moderate statement of a legitimate opinion. What are you doing on Slashdot?
Seriously, we've gotten to the point in the discussion where our terms are so well defined we could subject them to objective testing. In fact, we'd need objective data to take the discussion any further, and I certainly don't have any.
Fun thread. Thanks!
---- And one day she asked us if there was some way she could get better than number one.
Software development process guru Tom DeMarco wrote a book called The Deadline where he describes that as the mindset of a child abuser: if some is good, more is better, and there's no limit to define 'too much'.
Doesn't matter if it's discipline, search rankings, or 'commitment to the project'. They just want More.
---- Its the Internet advertising medium.
No it isn't.. not by a long shot.
Ever heard of a little thing called 'Slashdot effect?' or 'getting dugg?' Those are also advertising media. So is buying ad space or getting content-based attention on sites where your audience already goes. Maybe those options are more expensive, take more thought, and require more work than just dropping a few bucks on Google keywords, but that just feeds back to my comments about people being too cheap, stupid, and lazy to do any real marketing.
---- Thats really funny cause this is what alot of people were saying about Microsoft. Now that its Google, is this now a valid argument?
If you're talking about Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior with respect to Netscape, there's no similarity at all. Microsoft didn't get in trouble for putting its own products on its own desktop. It got in trouble for using its monopoly to force OEMs into deals where they weren't allowed to put anyone else's products on Microsoft's desktop.
You'd only have a valid comparison if Microsoft had bundled Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and a dozen other browsers with the OS, putting their icons right up there on the desktop with the IE icon. And then some whiny little bitch would have to start complaining about "Micorosoft's abuse of its monopoly" because it put the IE icon top-center, with all the other icons are arranged in a row below that.
What we have here are people complaining because Google mentions its own products on its own pages, period. They don't like the idea of a company being an advertiser and a creator of products that can be advertised. The term they're looking for isn't 'anticompetitive behavior', it's 'conflict of interests', and Google has done a pretty good job of avioding that, IMO.
Okay, good point. The 'tips' are visually distinct from the paid ads, which makes the whole issue of people not being able to buy the #1 slot completely moot.
The point stands that Google has made a credible effort to distinguish its references to its own products and services from the core search results. That's enough to keep my main point breathing: that users will continue to trust the search results as long as the search results A) continue to offer a good user experience, and B) are easy to distinguish from any non-search links that appear on the page.
If the 'tip' referring to some Google service is at least as relevant to the original search query as the paid ads on the same page, I can't see it costing Google any more loss of credibility than the paid ads themselves.
Your argument is well-reasoned, but you failed to mark a distinction between "Google artificially directing traffic to its own products" and "Google artificially directing traffic to any website willing to pay."
Let's face it, the whole paid-advertising thing is a direct violation of Google's page rank system. Users know it, and that's why Google makes a clear distinction between paid ads and unpaid search results.
If Google were giving its own products an artifically high page rank, yes, they'd probably lose the trust of the users. But they're not. They're putting their own products in the #1 slot of the "these don't have enough page rank to get listed, but somebody's willing to pay us to put them here anyway" list. You need another argument to show how the difference between "Google, then everyone else willing to pay" and "everyone willing to pay, with Google mixed in there somewhere" will cost the company any meaningful loss of credibility among users.
For that matter, please try to define an alternative solution, in which Google places its ads in the paid search list at a certain value without getting reamed (and probably sued) for artificially inflating the cost of buying the Nth slot in those rankings.
I think your reality check bounced..
If Google had a de facto monopoly on search, it wouldn't mean squat. A company that wants to promote its photo app on Google isn't competing with Google in the search market. It's using Google as an advertising medium. The only way for antitrust law to come into play is if Google gets some kind of monopoly on 'advertising media', and there's no way that can possibly happen.
Nothing Google does in its search results page prevents a company from running print ads in trade magazines or doing TV and radio spots. If you want to restrict the discussion to 'online advertising', nothing Google does on its search results page will prevent a company from hiring an actual marketing agent who's willing to do the legwork of finding the top 100 websites visited by the company's core audience and buying ad space there, or better still, working deals that will see the company's product discussed in the direct content of those sites (thus gaining the product a high page rank in Google's non-paid search results, and avoiding the "nobody actually talks about our product but we're going to buy our way onto the search page anyway" games entirely).
This whole "Google won't let me buy the top slot, waah-waah-waah" bullshit is the sound made by people who are too cheap, stupid, or lazy to get out there and do some actual MARKETING. They want to click a "send me business" button and have the world beat a path to their door, largely based on the hard-earned-and-diligently-maintained reputation Google has won for providing relevant and trustworthy search results.
People also have this strange notion that 'top slot' has some magical value that no other slot has. Seriously: I defy anyone to show me a meaningful financial breakdown of the difference in value between "number one slot on Google's paid search list" and "number two slot on Google's paid search list." If Google is 'harming' its competitors by keeping the #1 slot for itself, someone please define that 'harm' in actual shillings and pence. If you can't, there's no way you could establish standing to file a lawsuit, let alone claim any damages.
Besides, Google putting its own products at the top of the paid links list is the very antithesis of anticompetitive behavior. When you see the link to Google's product, you also see links to other products that compete directly with Google's stuff. Please explain how we entered the Bizarro World where 'giving everyone the URLs to all your competitors' has come to be construed as 'anticompetitive behavior'. Christ on a pogo stick, people, show me three other companies that devote half as many resources to 'promoting competing products' as Google.
Wow..
Quick tip: next time shove the corncob up your ass lengthwise instead of sideways.
To the extent that your reply was itself anything but a string of unsupported insults, the remaining two words ('market share') don't automatically lend themselves to the intepretation you suggest in your second round of verbal diarrhea.
As for evidence that Apple's market share is growing in consumer space, Apple's market share numbers have been growing steadily for a couple of years. Granted they're still only around 4%, which makes them anything but the powerhouse in home computing, but the rise does suggest a trend toward growing popularity somewhere. A recent study of third-party resellers said that those vendors are seeing about 20-30% conversion from Windows among Mac buyers. Apple's numbers at the Apple Store run about 50%, which makes sense since the third-party vendors tend to serve more repeat and business customers, while the Apple Store gets a higher share of walk-ins. The gist of it all is that Apple's share in consumer space does seem to be growing, based on the numbers out there. That doesn't make Apple the big dog, but any growth of a competing product is something for Microsoft to take seriously.
Now, as to my own previous post, it is in fact possible for someone to say something that doesn't fit entirely within the boundaries you expected, and still have a point. This knowledge may serve you well in the future, if and when you ever grow up.
My point was that 'market share' is only one way to look at the market, and not necessarily the best one. Market share counts units shipped, but doesn't say anything about how much money a company made shipping those units. It's easy to gain market share by dumping products into the market below cost and eating the loss.. Microsoft has been doing that for years with the Xbox, and the entire dotcom bubble was fueled on the idea that companies would, in effect, sell dollar bills for 75 cents to generate 'brand awareness', then apply that 'brand' to some profitable (but unspecified) line of business later. The first part worked just fine, but most companies didn't survive long enough to do the second.
Dell matters to Microsoft because 80% of Microsoft's OS sales come from OEM license deals, and OS sales are a big chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Dell makes its money in the $1.5-3K price range, and uses those profits to subsidize the low-priced machines that give Dell (and Microsoft) such a big 'market share'.
Right now, market evidence suggests that Apple is starting to eat Dell's lunch in the $1.5-3K price range. The loss of that comparatively small chunk of 'market share' translates to a large loss of profit, which in turn undercuts Dell's ability to keep the pipeline of low-cost entry machines on life support. If Dell can't make a decent business case to continue producing its low-end machines, the loss of that pipeline threatens a large chunk of Dell's 'market share', which in turn threatens Microsoft's 'market share'. Again, that's something for Microsoft to take seriously.
Loss of market share (or more precisely, loss of installed base) hurts Microsoft in more than just direct revenue. It also undercuts Microsoft's ability to lock customers into its OS-and-bundled-software package with proprietary formats and protocols. The more solidly Microsoft can maintain a monoculture, the easier it is for Microsoft to kill competing products simply by making its own products default to something proprietary. The more heterogenous the computing environment gets, the harder it is for Microsoft to lock out competing products that way. And if consumers are using non-proprietary formats and protocols, they have less need to stay on the Microsoft upgrade treadmill, which hits the only profitable business unit Microsoft has.
In the business license market, where Microsoft makes most of the money it doesn't make in OEM licensing, it's easy for the IT department to blow off complaints from the guy in the
General rule: 20% of the market generates 80% of the profit. We saw that last quarter in hardware sales when Apple posted something like a $580 million profit, while Dell made a profit of $510 million selling something like five times as many units. Dell's #1 in unit sales, but Apple made more money.
I also doubt that Microsoft is 'scared' of OS X, but Apple is getting traction in the high-profit end of the market. Microsoft is more worried by loss of proprietary format and protocol lock-in, and if OS X becomes more popular at the executive level, Microsoft's marketing team will have to work harder to sell products that don't work and play nicely in a heterogenous computing environment.
Besides, Microsoft has a long-standing strategy of selling products by feature checklist. And like it or not, OS X defined the current checklist for user interface. Aero is a response to Aqua in the sense that Microsoft doesn't want to lose any points in the checklist comparisons tech writers are so accustomed to doing.
As for a new UI in Leopard, it's very likely that the look and feel of the widgets will change, and Apple will probably roll out products that take advantage of all the new technology under the hood. The first reflects Apple's determination to maintain a distinct brand identity, and the second is just normal software evolution.
The writer is Andrew Orlowski, folks.
.Net was inaccurate starting from the title. Those quotations which are accurate are taken out of context, leading to total misunderstanding," is can be found here.
For those of you who've known The Reg for a while, that statement should be enough. For those of you who are newer to it, he leans more toward sensationalism and opinion masquerading as journalism than toward things like taking statements in context and checking his facts.
He's the one who started the non-conflict between Richard Stallman and Miguel de Icaza over Mono. The original article is here. Stallman's response, which begins with "Your article about me, GNOME and
Orlowski also had (and possibly still has, I stop reading whenever I see his name in the byline) a grudge against Google. He did a whole series of pieces about 'googlewashing', in which he accused Google of censorship, and another series in which he argued that Google News isn't Real Journalism.
On the few occasions where I've exchanged email with him personally, I found him rude, hasty, liberal with insults, and generally a putz. Back in Usenet days, he would have been called a classic flamer.
To the extent that there are real facts in this article, I don't know what they are, and I don't trust Orlowski to have presented them in any way but the one that makes him look like a daring investigative reporter breaking the scandal of the century.
Even assuming the premise of the article is true, and that Itunes Store sales have fallen dramatically, Apple will be the last one to care. The iTunes Store doesn't do much more than break even.
And for the sake of completeness, I should state my own bias by mentioning that I've spent a couple hundred bucks at the iTunes store over the last year. I'll probably do the same next year, for whatever that happens to be worth.