But Apple didn't leave us guessing as to their real motive:
There was a rumor that Apple would include feature X. Now there is another rumor that they would not include it after all based on some supposed reason Y.
Based on that solid evidence and a 5 second research in wikipedia, we can only conclude that this rumor is a proof that Apple is implementing its own system.
I always like a little rumor / conspiracy theory to spread at the watercooler - but this is really getting out of hand with Apple. There is not even a single fact, we are in UFO-conspiracy territory here.
For a long while I was just happy using Google instead of bookmarks. Most of the time, the next time you do a research you would find even better result than the first time.
Now, that's another matter: with all those click farm that pretend to be review site, or that simply copy-paste tiny amount of information from all over the web, I had to go back to the gold old fashioned bookmark, neatly organized and synchronized. That sucks, but nowadays if you do not want more than intro level information on a subject you need to seriously tinker your search to find the magic keyword combination that is not spammed to death.
Adobe is making tons of money on the Editor to make the flash applications. Flash is to Adobe what iTune is to Apple: a way to get people on its platform.
Microsoft gets the bulk of its money from Windows, so it has no interest of giving people reason not to use it.
You can be born with a lot more than $200,000. Or you can have close relatives that dies. You can win the lottery.
He could have been tricked by his greedy banker to put all his money in Apple stock just before Jobs came back.
You can also -become- a sucker after for example depression, excess of stress, an accident (car crash, stroke,...)
He could have been a dotcom millionaire in a downward spiral.
The share is not a product, it is actually a part of the company itself. As a (standard) shareholder, you actually own a part of the company. That is normal, and actually is your responsibility to look after how it is managed. eg: they could be more profitable by not paying the CEO that amount of money.
Even if you do not care about managing the company you just bought a share, there is a very important difference with being a client (like when you put money in a bank account) or a debtor of the company: as an owner, you are the last one to get your money back when the company goes bust !
That is a very big drawback and the reason behind the existence of "preferred shares" that does not entitle you to a vote, but give you a chance of getting your money back if the worst happen.
On a larger more obvious scale, this is the difference between buying your flat, or renting it. When renting you do not really care what fire insurance policy the building manager has contracted as long as the price is right. As a buyer, you do care, and as a shared owner of the building you want to have your opinion heard.
Big companies don't really need much to stop a small/just starting company. Just sue them, they won't have the financial resources to survive or be competitive. Patents are just one convenient way to do it.
Most classic way is just to partner with the little one and stop paying them or steal them or both. Scaring their client is another one. Another trick is scare some regulatory body; local government is especially good: the ratio of annoyance power vs lobbying effort is amazingly high. That way you can stop their production, prevent them to hire people or extend, fuck up their connection,... for long enough so that they suffer.
New competitor only survives because the big companies don't pay enough attention to them until it is too late.
Even if they could produce the real stuff, that is far more profitable and less cumbersome to sell sugar pills - or nothing at all.
That is a bit like fake rolex. Rolex-quality level fakes exist, stolen rolex exist, but the half homeless vendor with his blanket at the corner of the street is not the guy where you can get those from.
We are talking about people worth billion here. Bill Gates said it himself, once your are past a certain level of wealth, there is really no point having more, because there is nothing you can get with more money that you could not get before. Even if Bill Gates give the 90% of his fortune, that would probably not make any difference to him or his family.
True altruism is giving away something that has value to you in exchange of nothing. That does not mean that what they are doing is bad - of course - and it is still respectful but to them it is the same level as giving away 5$ a month to some random charity. Great but not something Nobel price deserving.
Another point - they do not really try to change the world. They setup a profitable business and give the profit away. So they are strengthening the economic system on one side and soothing its ill effect on the other side: they help the loser of the global market to feel better about it, they do not try to reverse the balance. That's ok, at some point, as long as you don't lose too badly you stop caring about how wealthy you could be and just enjoy life - that's what happen in Europe where you don't need to earn million to get education, healthcare and security. The problem is that the current system is destroying that balance where it exists (like Europe), so I have little hope that somehow it will change anything in Africa.
Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations?
They are already happily outsourcing that job to third party - I mean they not only store that information on somebody else servers, they let people from another company actually manage it.
And they go further than that: they also outsource their software development which more often than you think/hope mean that the third party has a copy of the live database. They even "sell" a whole product to a third party company, including the development team/support/management, building, servers and all the data it contains. And I'm not even talking about what you see when solving support calls - which generally involve a hefty amount of mining actual logs and data.
All that is just assuming external threat. What about all the contractors, the underpaid call center guy,... all those chinese wall and other security measure are left wide open for the people that pick the call a 3AM a Sunday.
How worse is the cloud really - there are a lot of third party manipulating confidential data and a lot of trust is already required from the various CxO.
They save on shipping cost, but need to pay for staffed physical shops in various expensive place (downtown, expensive mall,...) . On the other hand they have a physical window, while the amazon has not. That's competition, their idea against the other idea.
Taxes on the other hand is State vs State competition and not in their control. Now with internet, mail-order companies have turn into serious competitor, so that becomes more and more problematic to their business model and they complain more loudly.
It is indeed free market at its best. However, yes Amazon has a moral obligation but they cannot let moral interfere with their bottom line. Because showing moral in this case, that would be illegal for a publicly traded company.
Moral obligation is discutable BUT assuming that we live in society that helps the weak at home and abroad instead of letting natural selection do its job, we may assume that a big proud american company would want to compete on merit rather than cheating with fiscal shenanigan and lobbying - especially within the US.
The change was proposed by the community. Sun lack of direction/focus has put enough misery on the release of Java 7 so the choice was to either to split the release in 2 part or release Java Vista some day in the future.
That has been years since the Java community is largely working outside of Sun, now Oracle, guidance. Innovation in the java world happens in third party open source frameworks that are born, mature and even reach legacy level before they make it into the Java JDK. Look at dependency injection, ORM, alternative languages on the JDK,...
Obviously with a new boss around, especially with one with more teeth than the apathetic Sun, there is some territorial pissing going on between the big players: Apache, JBoss, IBM,... but the split of the JDK is not such instance.
ISP monopoly is not the only thing that is affected. Who is going to be able to make another Facebook or Google without serious money ? There is a danger that the current crop of big player will also have their market share secured thanks to a premium access to their user.
Wait until the day after the day net neutrality has gone away and the only way to access the internet at a comfortable speed will be using the service of those monopolies.
In the meanwhile, once Microsoft abandon Bing - what will index the internet, apart from Google ? Internet is growing fast, and it takes colossal amount of money to index a fraction of it. And that is without Google trying to something evil about its monopoly: exclusive indexing in exchange for better ads rate (I know a few companies that would kill for that kind of deal), Google-only access through paywal,...
Facebook, nowadays it is optional, something you do at home. However, I remember that only 10 years ago, I did not have internet at work, and I worked in IT - let's talk about that 10 years from now.
The change are welcome in Agile indeed. That does not mean that there is no consequence of that change. A lot of changed requirement means a later release and if you keep changing, you will never release anything. But there is no methodology that can prevent that.
To take a car analogy - using Agile is like using a GPS: it is a methodology that tells you were you are, and can adapt if you take a wrong turn or if you change the destination. Like the GPS, if you cannot make up your mind where you are going (or do follow the indication of the GPS gives - been there,...) you will not get anywhere.
What can be racist is what you do/imply with them. You can for example use those facts as a base to research how to improve the situation: better assistance, work equality rules,... In that case, it is not racist. Similar to the fact that only women (at bird) get pregnant is not sexist if use to target your pregnancy line of clothes, but it is if you use it as an argument not to hire a woman.
By only selecting facts that paint defavourably black people in a completely off topic discussion the GP is however very suspicious.
Maybe, but Apple is less interested in keeping that headstart than keeping the luxury segment of the market. They simply do not have enough different products to even pose a serious challenge in market share (in $ share, that's another matter). The real battle will be between Android and MS - Google already make money with each IOS device on the market, so Apple is not their real enemy here, just a partner that does not focus enough on the market that Google want to reach (i.e. everybody, including flash user and poor indian workers that buy a 10$ phone).
What will be interesting is to see how the 2 business models clashes. One company is selling OS - the other one is selling eyeballs and produce an OS as a tool to get those eyeballs. Google seems to have the upper hand, but MS is not bad at providing OEM with the right tools. I hope they do not screw up - competition is good.
No country want to protect the IP of other countries. That is simply not profitable to do it... unless you enter in vast trade agreements and you get compensated (your own IP is protected, access to market, you don't get nuked, etc)
China could destroy the US economy overnight (at the cost of its own economy) and seriously affect the bottom line of our great leaders. That means that the US has less bargaining chips and less will to bargain.
Java and Flash can be delivered and upgraded seamlessly in a browser (with Java WebStart and well a bookmark for flash) And seriously - who download flash applications at all ? For java, ok there are some heavyweight applications, mostly server-side. Do you want to download Websphere on the AppStore ? The client side one are mostly IDE or dev related app you would not expect on the App Store anyway.
But where is the competition from HP / Dell / Asus / Microsoft / OSS ? apt-get has been an example for years - so Apple is hardly doing something new here.
I'm using a Mac and I don't like the choice that Apple is making for me. But at the end of the day, Apple does deliver a superior user experience (hardware+software) - but I would switch overnight if I could buy similar stuff from a mainstream PC vendors. They have done a very good competition to the iPhone so they could do it...
Windows and every OS come bundled with a Browser. Microsoft is only "prevented" to do it in Europe, only very recently, and even then, the OS give you access to a browser, just not IE by default.
During the IE vs Netscape browser war - long ago when a browser was a brand new stuff - Microsoft was not only bundling IE with Windows, but also threatening OEM and lobbying Big PC Seller so that they would not install Netscape next to it. They also made sure that IE could not be removed from the system at all. That would have been OK if that had been IBM with OS/2, but when you have 90+ market shares, at a time where you could not even find a PC Vendor that would sell you a computer without Windows (MS tax, remember?), that was a very nasty move.
Now, Apple is a very different beast. They sell a vertically integrated product, from hardware to software. It is a departure from every other PC sellers that outsource the OS to MS. But overall, Apple only represents a fraction of the PC market. You have a choice, and actually it is easier not to buy Apple at all. People are just pissed at Apple because they will not sell OSX for non Apple hardware and they only have a limited selection of configuration compared to other vendor like Dell.
If they lock down Mac OSX today or tomorrow, customer will just buy something else and they will end up shooting themselves in the foot. And if it works, that just mean that their customer are happy with the restriction, unlike/. people but they run linux anyway. 15 years ago, Apple was dying because they made the wrong decision at some point - that can still happen.
Zinga are sharks... they won't lose a cash cow to defend Adobe view of the world - they will just rip off some farmville look alike running on some Apple sanctified technology (I thought they already had a App on IOS, could be mistaken). And Google does not care either way - they make their money on availability, HTML5 or Flash, they don't care - using iAds however...
Supply/Demand is quite blind to who win and who lose. Sure something will replace oil before you run out - somehow, I'm sure that the US will be happy to stay a superpower and will want to make sure that they are in a position of having the supply and the demand coming from other countries.
Supply/Demand is also only good for stuff that are controlled by the market like oil. Deforestation, is quite the opposite. The higher the demand/price for food, the more incentive you have to deforest. Regardless if you think that deforestation is good or bad, when the forest runs out, the people depending on it will need to do something. You need to make sure that they do something that is in your interest.
Making everything OPT-In is not very realistic. Nobody would every risk to create a service like Google Street Map which is in a grey area.
What would be better is that all companies scrapping data from public places should register in a single central location where a User can see the information collected about him - for free - and then check/authorize what can be done with that info.
What do you mean without QA issues ?? There is tons of QA issues but they deal with it, if that's what you mean.
One of the way they deal with it is to limit the scope by specifying min spec. Another way of dealing with it is to charge a lot more for a PC app than for a mobile app.
Well, TFA says that they can deal with it aswell, and anyway they did deal with it in the days of WinME and J2ME.
I guess it is still regrettable that so early in the development of Android there is already so much fragmentation when the market leader (in term of $ spent buying apps) is not afflicted by the same problem.
Slashdot Mirror
But Apple didn't leave us guessing as to their real motive:
There was a rumor that Apple would include feature X. Now there is another rumor that they would not include it after all based on some supposed reason Y. Based on that solid evidence and a 5 second research in wikipedia, we can only conclude that this rumor is a proof that Apple is implementing its own system.
I always like a little rumor / conspiracy theory to spread at the watercooler - but this is really getting out of hand with Apple. There is not even a single fact, we are in UFO-conspiracy territory here.
Now, that's another matter: with all those click farm that pretend to be review site, or that simply copy-paste tiny amount of information from all over the web, I had to go back to the gold old fashioned bookmark, neatly organized and synchronized. That sucks, but nowadays if you do not want more than intro level information on a subject you need to seriously tinker your search to find the magic keyword combination that is not spammed to death.
Microsoft gets the bulk of its money from Windows, so it has no interest of giving people reason not to use it.
That is unfair to say that, when there are companies literally bombarding you day and night with ads for that kind of life and free credit money.
He could have been tricked by his greedy banker to put all his money in Apple stock just before Jobs came back.
You can also -become- a sucker after for example depression, excess of stress, an accident (car crash, stroke, ...)
He could have been a dotcom millionaire in a downward spiral.
The share is not a product, it is actually a part of the company itself. As a (standard) shareholder, you actually own a part of the company. That is normal, and actually is your responsibility to look after how it is managed. eg: they could be more profitable by not paying the CEO that amount of money.
Even if you do not care about managing the company you just bought a share, there is a very important difference with being a client (like when you put money in a bank account) or a debtor of the company: as an owner, you are the last one to get your money back when the company goes bust !
That is a very big drawback and the reason behind the existence of "preferred shares" that does not entitle you to a vote, but give you a chance of getting your money back if the worst happen.
On a larger more obvious scale, this is the difference between buying your flat, or renting it. When renting you do not really care what fire insurance policy the building manager has contracted as long as the price is right. As a buyer, you do care, and as a shared owner of the building you want to have your opinion heard.
Big companies don't really need much to stop a small/just starting company. Just sue them, they won't have the financial resources to survive or be competitive. Patents are just one convenient way to do it.
Most classic way is just to partner with the little one and stop paying them or steal them or both. Scaring their client is another one. Another trick is scare some regulatory body; local government is especially good: the ratio of annoyance power vs lobbying effort is amazingly high. That way you can stop their production, prevent them to hire people or extend, fuck up their connection, ... for long enough so that they suffer.
New competitor only survives because the big companies don't pay enough attention to them until it is too late.
Even if they could produce the real stuff, that is far more profitable and less cumbersome to sell sugar pills - or nothing at all.
That is a bit like fake rolex. Rolex-quality level fakes exist, stolen rolex exist, but the half homeless vendor with his blanket at the corner of the street is not the guy where you can get those from.
We are talking about people worth billion here. Bill Gates said it himself, once your are past a certain level of wealth, there is really no point having more, because there is nothing you can get with more money that you could not get before. Even if Bill Gates give the 90% of his fortune, that would probably not make any difference to him or his family.
True altruism is giving away something that has value to you in exchange of nothing. That does not mean that what they are doing is bad - of course - and it is still respectful but to them it is the same level as giving away 5$ a month to some random charity. Great but not something Nobel price deserving.
Another point - they do not really try to change the world. They setup a profitable business and give the profit away. So they are strengthening the economic system on one side and soothing its ill effect on the other side: they help the loser of the global market to feel better about it, they do not try to reverse the balance. That's ok, at some point, as long as you don't lose too badly you stop caring about how wealthy you could be and just enjoy life - that's what happen in Europe where you don't need to earn million to get education, healthcare and security. The problem is that the current system is destroying that balance where it exists (like Europe), so I have little hope that somehow it will change anything in Africa.
They are already happily outsourcing that job to third party - I mean they not only store that information on somebody else servers, they let people from another company actually manage it. ... all those chinese wall and other security measure are left wide open for the people that pick the call a 3AM a Sunday.
And they go further than that: they also outsource their software development which more often than you think/hope mean that the third party has a copy of the live database. They even "sell" a whole product to a third party company, including the development team/support/management, building, servers and all the data it contains. And I'm not even talking about what you see when solving support calls - which generally involve a hefty amount of mining actual logs and data.
All that is just assuming external threat. What about all the contractors, the underpaid call center guy,
How worse is the cloud really - there are a lot of third party manipulating confidential data and a lot of trust is already required from the various CxO.
Taxes on the other hand is State vs State competition and not in their control. Now with internet, mail-order companies have turn into serious competitor, so that becomes more and more problematic to their business model and they complain more loudly.
It is indeed free market at its best. However, yes Amazon has a moral obligation but they cannot let moral interfere with their bottom line. Because showing moral in this case, that would be illegal for a publicly traded company. Moral obligation is discutable BUT assuming that we live in society that helps the weak at home and abroad instead of letting natural selection do its job, we may assume that a big proud american company would want to compete on merit rather than cheating with fiscal shenanigan and lobbying - especially within the US.
That has been years since the Java community is largely working outside of Sun, now Oracle, guidance. Innovation in the java world happens in third party open source frameworks that are born, mature and even reach legacy level before they make it into the Java JDK. Look at dependency injection, ORM, alternative languages on the JDK, ...
Obviously with a new boss around, especially with one with more teeth than the apathetic Sun, there is some territorial pissing going on between the big players: Apache, JBoss, IBM, ... but the split of the JDK is not such instance.
ISP monopoly is not the only thing that is affected. Who is going to be able to make another Facebook or Google without serious money ? There is a danger that the current crop of big player will also have their market share secured thanks to a premium access to their user.
In the meanwhile, once Microsoft abandon Bing - what will index the internet, apart from Google ? Internet is growing fast, and it takes colossal amount of money to index a fraction of it. And that is without Google trying to something evil about its monopoly: exclusive indexing in exchange for better ads rate (I know a few companies that would kill for that kind of deal), Google-only access through paywal, ...
Facebook, nowadays it is optional, something you do at home. However, I remember that only 10 years ago, I did not have internet at work, and I worked in IT - let's talk about that 10 years from now.
Had google asked them to put a banner like "reading this website gives you Cancer", they would have had no other choice.
To take a car analogy - using Agile is like using a GPS: it is a methodology that tells you were you are, and can adapt if you take a wrong turn or if you change the destination. Like the GPS, if you cannot make up your mind where you are going (or do follow the indication of the GPS gives - been there, ...) you will not get anywhere.
What can be racist is what you do/imply with them. You can for example use those facts as a base to research how to improve the situation: better assistance, work equality rules, ... In that case, it is not racist. Similar to the fact that only women (at bird) get pregnant is not sexist if use to target your pregnancy line of clothes, but it is if you use it as an argument not to hire a woman.
By only selecting facts that paint defavourably black people in a completely off topic discussion the GP is however very suspicious.
What will be interesting is to see how the 2 business models clashes. One company is selling OS - the other one is selling eyeballs and produce an OS as a tool to get those eyeballs. Google seems to have the upper hand, but MS is not bad at providing OEM with the right tools. I hope they do not screw up - competition is good.
China could destroy the US economy overnight (at the cost of its own economy) and seriously affect the bottom line of our great leaders. That means that the US has less bargaining chips and less will to bargain.
But where is the competition from HP / Dell / Asus / Microsoft / OSS ? apt-get has been an example for years - so Apple is hardly doing something new here.
I'm using a Mac and I don't like the choice that Apple is making for me. But at the end of the day, Apple does deliver a superior user experience (hardware+software) - but I would switch overnight if I could buy similar stuff from a mainstream PC vendors. They have done a very good competition to the iPhone so they could do it ...
During the IE vs Netscape browser war - long ago when a browser was a brand new stuff - Microsoft was not only bundling IE with Windows, but also threatening OEM and lobbying Big PC Seller so that they would not install Netscape next to it. They also made sure that IE could not be removed from the system at all. That would have been OK if that had been IBM with OS/2, but when you have 90+ market shares, at a time where you could not even find a PC Vendor that would sell you a computer without Windows (MS tax, remember?), that was a very nasty move.
Now, Apple is a very different beast. They sell a vertically integrated product, from hardware to software. It is a departure from every other PC sellers that outsource the OS to MS. But overall, Apple only represents a fraction of the PC market. You have a choice, and actually it is easier not to buy Apple at all. People are just pissed at Apple because they will not sell OSX for non Apple hardware and they only have a limited selection of configuration compared to other vendor like Dell.
If they lock down Mac OSX today or tomorrow, customer will just buy something else and they will end up shooting themselves in the foot. And if it works, that just mean that their customer are happy with the restriction, unlike /. people but they run linux anyway. 15 years ago, Apple was dying because they made the wrong decision at some point - that can still happen.
Zinga are sharks ... they won't lose a cash cow to defend Adobe view of the world - they will just rip off some farmville look alike running on some Apple sanctified technology (I thought they already had a App on IOS, could be mistaken). And Google does not care either way - they make their money on availability, HTML5 or Flash, they don't care - using iAds however ...
Supply/Demand is also only good for stuff that are controlled by the market like oil. Deforestation, is quite the opposite. The higher the demand/price for food, the more incentive you have to deforest. Regardless if you think that deforestation is good or bad, when the forest runs out, the people depending on it will need to do something. You need to make sure that they do something that is in your interest.
What would be better is that all companies scrapping data from public places should register in a single central location where a User can see the information collected about him - for free - and then check/authorize what can be done with that info.
One of the way they deal with it is to limit the scope by specifying min spec. Another way of dealing with it is to charge a lot more for a PC app than for a mobile app.
Well, TFA says that they can deal with it aswell, and anyway they did deal with it in the days of WinME and J2ME.
I guess it is still regrettable that so early in the development of Android there is already so much fragmentation when the market leader (in term of $ spent buying apps) is not afflicted by the same problem.