Germans have for decades paid a fee (Gebuehr) for watching television. Yeah, broadcast television. If you have a television, you must pay a fee for watching broadcast TV. And everyone accepts it. It is not a tax, it's a fee. If you don't have a TV, you don't have to pay the fee. Everyone just accepts it as being the same thing as the cost for cable.
There is no reason that the same thing can't work for music. If you have a radio or a computer, you would pay a fee. The fee could be added to the initial sale or import of any computer or radio.
@ Bungie
WOW! You totally think that kind of stuff would happen?
Here's how it could unfold. Cash is becoming a nuisance for businesses. Also, there is value in customer data. Big value. All businesses want to differentiate themselves from other businesses by creating incentive programs for customers to patronize only their establishment, in terms of a brick-and-mortar store like a grocery store; or to use only their data formats in terms of Microsoft's Office suite and Microsoft's OOXML. Currently, for example, Costco allows only members to come into their stores; or, to put it differently, Costco allows only members to buy products at their stores. I could see the day coming when your card has an RFID tag, and if you don't have a card, then a security guard would stop you at the door, because hey, if you don't have a card, why would you be coming into the store in the first place? Or, they could have a security guard inside the store, to direct people to registration, if they don't' have a card, so that shoppers would be required to get a card, and pay a fee for the same. During the sign-up process, you would be told that they system requires you to have a Microsoft Windows computer at home, or a "Microsoft Live" account, which, in turn, would require Microsoft Internet Explorer.
This is a potentially very dark future, in which Microsoft uses its practice of "extend, embrace, and extinguish" to essentially shut down all commerce not tied to Microsoft Windows. From today's front page of Slashdot:
The New York Times is reporting on two new investigations into Microsoft business practices opened by EU antitrust regulators. The new cases center on the company's positioning of Office and Internet Explorer , and were apparently partially prompted by Microsoft's earlier heel-dragging.
What does Microsoft want you to use to write those shopping lists? Microsoft Office. What do they want you to use to browse to the store's website? Microsoft Internet Explorer. Reading these two stories together, you can clearly see how Microsoft's business practice of exclusive integration could reach into every day activities such as shopping. This is a very real risk. Linux and Mac users could be excluded.
And while Microsoft is tying its solution to someone else's shopping cart, Apple is planning on letting you carry your shopping list with you on your own device, and just pointing it at stuff to buy it. No annoying advertising there, and it is not tied to one store or one chain of stores:
Customers with a ShopRite loyalty card will be able to log into a Web site at home and type in their grocery lists; when they get to the store and swipe their card on the MediaCart console, the list will appear. As shoppers scan their items and place them in their cart, the console gives a running price tally and checks items off the shopping list.
Disloyal customers, such as those running GNU Linux, will be shown the door, or barred from entering the store in the first place. Imagine not being able to shop for food because you don't use Microsoft Windows. No thanks. I don't want any viruses in my food or my shopping list.
We had our first meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC user group. Not sure if we even have a name. At any rate, a bunch of us got together at the Linux lab in the San Francisco State University to just goof around with these machines. It is really funny to hear them hiss at each other as they try to figure out how close the nearest XOs are. Yep, they talk to each other. They emit a brief hissing sound when you ask them to calculate the distance between XOs. They listen for the hissing sound (or so I was told, dunno, didn't check into it) and then they calculate how long it took for the sound to reach each other, and then they all report back to each other, and they determine how far apart their fellow XOs are. Hilarious.
They also have built in video, which two of the resident children were really enjoying by making monkey faces, much to the embarrassment of their parents. Insanity, you know, is inherited from your children. heh. One kid composed music on his XO. He is 5. As in less than 6 years old. You can add eyes to the screen, and the screen will talk to you to tell you how many eyes it has. Very entertaining for a 3 year-old. Did I mention that these computers are called One Laptop Per *Child*? They really figured out how to make these computers entertaining *for kids*. This is really a kid-centric device.
The amazing thing is that it brings out the kid in adults.
Macs are not really more expensive than PCs anymore. What you are comparing is the software. There's quite a lot of free or cheap software for the Mac. Unity3D, for example, is $199 and compares well with $10,000 engines for windos. iDVD or iMovie are free with the machine and might serve your purpose for the movie. And so on.
What Linux does offer is bringing computing to people who really couldn't afford a computer otherwise, because it runs on machines that XP wouldn't even boot on. But that's the very low end. In the consumer market, I don't think the difference is that big.
We are choosing FOSS tools for the Digital Tipping Point film project for the same reason that the Internet Archive and Google and many other server farm managers use it: cost savings when scaling. We currently have four machines that are doing some aspect of video work. We spent $800.00 USD on a vanilla white box with 4 GB of RAM and 1.5 TB of storage. A comparable Mac machine would either not be on the market, or would probably have cost about $2,000.00 USD. And actually, iMovie would not have worked for us, because it would not have allowed us to automate compressing video, as BASH has allowed us to do with these free tools.
In other words, we would have been forced to sacrifice hardware horsepower for software features, and we chose hardware horsepower.
... "Please protect your Windows investment! Don't use Microsoft products to access the Internet. Instead, go here to request a free (as in beer) CD with the latest anti-spam and anti-virus software. When your CD arrives, just place it in your CD-ROM, and reboot your computer before going on-line. You will then be able to surf the web in full comfort knowing that no viruses, spyware or spam will take over your machine. When you are ready to return to the full Genuine Windows Vista experience for running your favorite games, such as BSOD, simply reboot your machine and take the CD out of the CD-ROM before the reboot starts."
Same with everything else Linux. I've been very patient, I've manually patched my kernel more times than most windos fanboys even looked at kernel32.dll
Tom, I can see by your low/. number (822) that you obviously know what you are talking about with regard to the technology. And it really is not possible for me to personally address your individual experiences with patching kernels, because i wasn't there to witness it.
But right off the top of my head, it occurs to me that because you are a low/. number, you probably have lived through the really primitive Linux times, and I can understand your frustration. All I can say is that I am a simple end user; I am a lawyer; I have never patched a kernel and couldn't do so to save my life unless it was through using Synaptic or YAST and was part of a regular update. So I have not had the subject experiences of which you speak.
Also, there is an objective component to my point that you are missing. My point is not that Linux can match Windows and the Mac feature for feature. My point is much different. Rather, my point is that all markets are tiered. The consumers buying services at the top of the market are willing to pay a premium for higher-grade performance. The consumers at the bottom of the market don't need or want all the bells and whistles, or at least they are not willing or able to *pay* or all those bells or whistles.
I am a case in point. I am producing a film called the Digital Tipping Point (DTP), about the cultural implications of the global shift to Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Our DTP community is trying to scale up, and we are standardizing on FOSS with a lot of different users. We are using lots and lots of legacy boxes to do this work. We don't have a budget for spending lots of money buying everyone a Mac, even though Mac's video compositors and Adobe's Premier Pro are much better on a functional basis than the FOSS offerings. But with FOSS, we are able to get people set up in multiple time zones to collaborate for peanuts. Our business model is low-budget. We like FOSS for that reason. But lots of people need the functionality of a Mac or Adobe product. We don't. We are a different demographic.
On-line communities are powerful places to be. Just look at Markos Moulitsas (video warning), the founder of the Daily Kos political blog. What started out as a rant against conservative thinking back in 2002 has now become THE place for Democrats to hang out. Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi, and lots of other Democratic leaders have now posted comments on that website, which runs on all Free Open Source Software tools, according to the above-linked interview with Markos.
So if you want to be a participant in the power of on-line communities, maybe you are going to have to give up a wee bit of privacy, depending on the community. But look what you get in return: influence and fun. By contrast, those who do not want to participate risk losing relevance, which is one example of the tragedy of the anti-commons. If you are not willing to share something, then just stay off line. Most communities will require you to give *something* to participate: your thinking, some personal information, *something*. Same thing for communities in the physical world. You have to join a group and shake a few hands to participate in the group.
I can go to eat at local McDonalds or I can order a pizza and have it delivered... Does it mean these two businesses don't compete? People tired of Microsoft's crappy products and business practices want to get away. Distribution methods are two sides of the same coin for them. That coin being getting away from MS.
Most markets are segmented according to varying dynamics such as price level, distribution channels, feature set, and so forth. Your exact question was whether McD's competes with home-delivery pizza. My guess is that while there might be some overlapping demographics, in many cases, the answer is "no, they do not compete". For example, McD's has distinguished itself by offering playland gyms, toy sets, and movie tie-ins. A large percentage of many McD's customers are families. In other areas, McD's caters to interstate freeway travelers who are looking for a reliable, speedy, predictable meal. Pizza vendors might not compete with McD's for that demographic, unless you are talking about Chuck E Cheese, in which case, the answer would be yes, those two spcific businesses *might* compete *in a given geographic region*, such as strip malls in the mid-west.
Pizza vendors are competing for more adult crowds in many (but not all cases). So there would probably not be that much competition between Extreme Pizza (on Fillmore and Post Streets in San Francisco) and McD's on Fillmore and Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, despite the fact that these two restaurants are only a 5 minute walk apart. People in that area of San Francisco, called the Western Addition, often call into Extreme Pizza for football games and other events, but not McD's. Conversely, the McD's has a drive through, which Extreme Pizza does not. McD's is closer to the low-rent area of the Western Addition, but Extreme Pizza, located across Geary Boulevard, a natural dividing line, caters more to the billionaires who order take out just 6 blocks north in the "upper Fillmore" area and who want the kind of chi-chi fancy pizzas with fancy toppings delivered to their homes. Yes, billionaires do eat pizza.
Likewise, the Mac appeals to people who want a status symbol and are willing to pay top dollar for it. Linux is used by the students at this public middle school at Geary and Scott Streets in the Western Addition, whose principal had no funding for student-facing computers, and so used Microsoft money from the California Microsoft anti-trust settlement to acquire an Edubuntu thin client lab (snicker). Seventy-five percent of the students in that school come from households below the federal poverty guidelines, and sixty-five percent of those students are African American, 17% are Latino, 10% are Asian, and 8% are Caucasian. Likewise, a senior center at Fillmore and Turk, close to the McD's, is evaluating an free (as in beer) Edubuntu work station network, because they have no funds for purchasing Microsoft solutions, and certainly not Macs. These are entirely different demographics.
So, to answer your question, no, in many cases, Linux does not compete with the Mac, and competes, instead, with the less expensive Microsoft solutions instead. Of course, as Linux gets better and better, it will tend to commoditize the Apple solutions in many cases, such as the school mentioned above.
First, some basic questions as to measuring Linux installs. Very hard. No bar-code events in many cases.
The other problem that I have with this guy's article is that it is contrary to recent reports even here on/. about the really stunning popularity of Linux AND Mac sales on Amazon.
Also, there is a totally different distribution chain. Macs are sold in stores or on-line. Linux is often distributed through social networks, such as the telecentros in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Extremadura, Spain; or in thin client networks such as at this public middle school in San Francisco; or via free giveaways, such as this guy who gave out 16,000 Linux computers in Berkeley, California; or via the numerous municipal and national migration projects to Linux, such as in Munich, Madrid, and Extremadura Spain; or via Nokia's N880; or the OLPC; or the Asus EEE PC, or the Everex PC.
It is a totally different business model. The fundamental problem with TFA is that it does not understand this fundamental different.
The innovations to which I referred in my original comment all share something in common: they are recombinations of basic building blocks. The genius of FOSS lies in its simplicity and modularity. Most proprietary software is an integrated solution. It is presented as a package which can NOT be readily altered. Not only is it illegal to alter the package, but it is probably not desirable to do so in most cases, as altering one package will break a dependency elsewhere.
The brilliance of FOSS is that it can be bolted together in nearly infinite combinations and still work. The brilliance of Apt is not just what it does, but the community surrounding it. There is a strange and beautiful symmetry in the modularity of the packages and the willingness of the community to work together to create something like the Debian pool and Apt, a package manager that allows us to use seemingly unrelated packages created by groups of people with no command-and-control central authority. And yet it all works. Most of the time.
So the emphasis of critics on the lack of "new feature sets" in FOSS is misplaced, because the emphasis in FOSS is not just complex feature sets, but interoperability, which is the most important feature of all.
And, coincidentally, look at how smoothly some of those tools I mention function. dvgrab is elegant. It just works. transcode manages to decode and re-encode a wide variety of video files. Annodex, a tool for annotating and indexing continuous media, is simply brilliant and very forward-looking and innovative. Look at the brilliance of the Digg GUI, built out of ordinary tools, and yet it is revolutionizing the media with its ability to hand editorial control of the news to the masses. Digg is nothing less than game-changing. And it's all FOSS.
...and then their economy became the second largest economy in the world when they improved what had otherwise been explored, but not optimized.
I see your point, but you were a bit off the mark. Digg and Slashdot and YouTube are entirely new. They have shifted the power a bit more from the center to the fringes of the information network. So you might have a point if you say that the Cinelerra GUI is not as spiffy as the Adobe equivalent; and yet the high cost of Adobe Premier Pro limits what a community-based project can do with the software on a large scale, due to the prohibitively high cost of per-seat licenses.
Toyota is gaining on GM as the world's largest automanufacturer because they addressed the wishes of customers who were overshot by GM's offerings. They took simple things and made them better, and, as a result, they are gaining on GM. Almost all movies made today in Hollywood are rendered on Linux because of the stability and reliability and the scalability. So I guess it depends on what you mean by innovation. I don't see anything in the proprietary world as successful as Slashdot or Digg or YouTube, all of which run on Linux. It is the modularity and flexibility of the code that is the basis of innovation with much of the FOSS code out there. Our Digital Tipping Point BASH developer, Jonathan Grindstaff, has said that he is sure he would not have been able to get as creative with his BASH video glue tools with proprietary software as with dvgrab, transcode, and ffmpeg2theora.
Here's another way to put it. Adobe Premier Pro is really excellent at facilitating the user to manipulate video within the offered feature set. But if you want to go outside that feature set, you are out of luck. The end user of Adobe Premier Pro looks at the feature set, and asks "what can I do with these tools?" Jonathan Grindstaff was able to ask, "what do we need to do?" and then go find FOSS tools to create his own feature set.
...not. Same for Cinelerra and Kino and Jahshakah and Firefox and Wengophone and apt-get and dvgrab and transcode and ffmpeg2theora and Annodex and YouTube and Facebook and, oh well, you get the point.
As it so happens, I am producing a distributed film with FOSS called the Digital Tipping Point, and our community would never have been able to create all these great BASH scripts to automate the process of capturing, compressing, and uploading the video to the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection without the freedom of FOSS. Oh, and coincidentally, neither the Internet or the Internet Archive would exist without FOSS.
This guy clearly does not know what he is talking about.
...it sure is nice to have Google Apps to pen ODF files in case I get stuck on a Windows machine where I can't install OOo for whatever reason (friend's work computer, etc). But yeah, I mostly use OOo.
But they did just fine for the teenagers who bought them in droves, because they teenagers didn't care about sound quality back then -- they cared about mobility!!!
Ahem, I don't think that has changed since. Just see the kids playing MP3s in the streets out of the tiny, little, terrible "speakers" embedded in the mobile phone;)
My point exactly. And very few of those kids are using Microsoft's DRM'd solutions. Microsoft's business partners, the big record labels, are losing their revenue base. Magnatune provides DRM-free solutions that will play anywhere, but Magnatune is not a great business partner for Microsoft, since Magnatune music will play on any device.
Then, as now, kids want mobility. And they are price-sensitive customers who don't care where they get their music or what devices they play them on. Or how good the sound quality is. A Linux device will be just as good as a name-brand device with Microsoft Mobile on it.
Disruptive innovations often start out underperforming the market leaders' products.
So do many failed innovations.
Your response is a misdirection. The point that I am making here is that the mere fact that a product or service underperforms today is not always good evidence of its future performance. The point is to look at the product, its vendor, and how the vendor is positioning the product in the market. If the vendor does a good job of matching a product or a service to the proper customer base, they can succeed. The theory of disruptive innovation helps us answer a key question: how is it that so many great companies have failed?
Before Christensen, the answer was that management failed to follow the needs of their current customers. Christensen shifted the focus by helping to identify the relationship between great companies and emerging demographics. Google is a great company today because it saw that you don't try to sell Linux to the same customers who buy Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office the same way that Microsoft sells those products: in a desktop computer or notebook used by power users. At least not at first. Instead, rent Linux to them 1/10th of a second at a time.
And then they grew up and bought home stereo systems. Their children meanwhile bought boomboxes. When they grew up, they too bought home stereo systems. Their children bought Walkmen... Lather, rinse, repeat.
My point exactly. At one time, steel production in North America was dominated by large integrated steel mills. They produced all types of steel, from rebar at the bottom, to sheet metal at the top. Then along came mini-mills. They used recycled steel, rather than raw ore, to create steel. But they were not able to produce blemish-free steel, no matter how hard they tried. So, rather than compete with the integrated mills for the production of the high margin sheet metal, they produced rebar, because surface blemished don't matter for rebar. Eventually, the mini-mills were able to produce rebar at prices that the integrated mills couldn't match, so the integrated mills exited the rebar market.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because rebar customers are disloyal, price-sensitive customers. But more and more mini-mills sprung up, and the price of rebar collapsed, as the mini-mills fought with each other over price. So the smart managers of the mini-mills focused on creating steel for angle iron, which requires slightly better surface quality than rebar, but still far less quality than structural steel or sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the angle iron market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because now angle iron customers had become disloyal, price-sensitive customers. Mini-mills turned to the production of angle iron by the droves, and the price of angle iron collapsed. So smart managers of the mini-mills turned to structural steel, which requires slightly better surface quality than angle iron, but far less than sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the structural steel market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
This time, their investors did not rejoice.
The pattern was becoming clear. Large, integrated mills had huge cost structures, and they could not compete with the mini-mills on price, but the mini-mills were showing no end to their ability to produce high quality steel out of low-grade raw materials. The big mills were hugely expensive, required huge labor pools to run. Not a single integrated mill has been built in North America since the mid-seventies as a result, and all the dominant integrated mills have closed.
Microsoft employs 70,000 people, and has a market capitalization of about $335 billion as of the market's close today. Google has a market capitalization of about $216 billion
Disruptive innovations often start out underperforming the market leaders' products. This has happened time and time again in history. The classic example is Sony's transistor radios. When they first came out in the 1960s, they had poor sound volume, poor reception, and poor sound quality. But they did just fine for the teenagers who bought them in droves, because they teenagers didn't care about sound quality back then -- they cared about mobility!!! They wanted to listen to their rebel music away from their parents' reach, because their parents disapproved of the music.
It's exactly the same with Google Apps and Free Open Source Software and the OLPC XO. They all underperform Microsoft apps, but they appeal to a different crowd. No analysis of Google Apps or FOSS or the OLPC XO is on the right track without looking at one key question: who are the best customers of these technologies? If they are the same group as the market leader, then they will fail for exactly the same reason that Walt Mossberg doesn't like Ubuntu: he says that he reviews products for mainstream consumers, and FOSS is just now starting to get to feature parity with Microsoft products.
And yet, boatloads of people are starting to buy FOSS-powered products. Sure, they are much smaller boarts than the boatloads of people buying Microsoft products, but the point is that people are PAYING for FOSS goods and services.
The best example is Google search. Google "rents" Linux to us all 1/10th of a second at a time. Google sells advertising, and so they commoditize the compliment: web traffic. Google is more concerned with keeping the Internet Free and Open than they are concerned with what platform you use to browse the Internet, at least until Microsoft locks down the browser and blocks out Google, which they are trying to do with "LiveSearch" (an effort that is failing). ,
Bottom line: if you want to understand why FOSS and Google will beat Microsoft, look at the customers who are using their products. They are not Microsoft's customers. At least not yet. But tomorrow they will be.
Oh, and BTW, when was the last time you bought an RCA product? What about a Sony product? Yet when Sony was young, it was mocked as "cheap Japanese crap." Think of that next time someone mocks Google Apps.
...in exchange for all of the help that they get? Probably not. Seeing that most developers want their free labor to at least result in open source code, I can't imagine that this effort is going to be all that popular with the best developers.
Microsoft likes to throw around the word "open" a lot these days, but most smart people in the industry remain skeptical. Take, for example, what open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver has to say about Microsoft's supposed open OOXML format:
The legacy binary formats remain closed. If a file is one which was converted from an older format of Microsoft Office by DIS29500 and allowed to wrap the old file in xml, it remains unreadable for everyone else. OOXML is still a closed spec tied into to many proprietary formats.
So how open is open? Unless the code is considered open under OSI standards or Free under FSF guidelines, it's really still just a pig with lipstick and a dress.
I am also a fan of Christensen's. In fact, I am producing a documentary based on his work. Our film is called the Digital Tipping Point. I would love to find out a bit more of your interests in this topic. Please feel free to email me at einfeldt - at , _- gmail dot com if you would like to discuss this topic off of this page.
My point is that Microsoft has, in the past, been the archetypal command-and-control Cathedral, within the meaning of Eric Raymond's essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Any collaboration that happened lacked one central core characteristic of FOSS production: sharing source code outside the Cathedral-builders' team. Microsoft never has released the source code to its flagship Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office products to the unwashed masses. Their business model cannot sustain that model.
Contrast this model with businesses that have made billions from the sale of FOSS-related products and services: Google, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and Novell. In each of these cases, these businesses are earning revenue by commoditizing complementary activities that support their core businesses. They improve and share source code for FOSS projects. They sell hotdogs, and so are interested in driving down the cost of mustard and relish.
I thought that it was both amusing and disingenuous that Bill Gates, the man who wrote the infamous open letter to hobbyists, would have the boldness to claim that Microsoft "shares ideas". I found his claim entertaining, and I thought maybe some Slashdotters would also chuckle at the quote.
This news actually can be helpful to gamers, and should NOT be used as the basis for any Jack Thompson-like legislation. Guess what!! Sexy women make me hot! But that does not mean that I have the moral imperative to make inappropriate advances toward women, nor does it warrant laws requiring women to wear chaste clothing in public, as long as the clothes pass basic obscenity laws, at least in secular societies like the US (no offense intended toward countries following Sharia laws). In other words, humans can develop a moral imperative that is independent of our more base (and fun) impulses. Certainly that is true of adults, and should be expected of them.
Proponents of greater restrictions on gaming for kids are missing the point that the best form of restriction on gaming is an opportunity for the parents to be more involved in their kids' lives. A blanket ban on violent games is not narrowly tailored to suit the problem; whereas parental involvement in kids' lives is both narrowly tailored to suit the problem AND a part of what we should expect of parents: know your kids. Spend time with your kids. Don't try to legislate away your role in shaping your own child's skills at impulse control, which is a basic skill for success in any civilized society.
Wal-Mart is not stupid. They know that as the price of PCs falls, their sales volume rises. They have a vested interested in commoditizing PCs. With Microsoft, Wal-Mart gets a limited mark-up. With Linux PCs made by small vendors, Wal-Mart gets to call the shots. Wal-Mart has dollars signs in their eyes, and those dollars signs are dancing with Tux.
BTW, I have no business relation with the family that runs Zareason, but I did buy about $8,400.00 worth of products from them, and Zareason did a fine job of shipping the products to the public middle school that I ordered on behalf of. More details on that purchase here:
So you can buy it there with a clean conscience. heh.
BTW, I have no business relation with the family that runs Zareason, but I did buy about $8,400.00 worth of products from them, and Zareason did a fine job of shipping the products to the public middle school that I ordered on behalf of. More details on that purchase here:
So you can buy it there with a clean conscience. heh.
BTW, I have no business relation with the family that runs Zareason, but I did buy about $8,400.00 worth of products from them, and Zareason did a fine job of shipping the products to the public middle school that I ordered on behalf of. More details on that purchase here:
Slashdot Mirror
Germans have for decades paid a fee (Gebuehr) for watching television. Yeah, broadcast television. If you have a television, you must pay a fee for watching broadcast TV. And everyone accepts it. It is not a tax, it's a fee. If you don't have a TV, you don't have to pay the fee. Everyone just accepts it as being the same thing as the cost for cable.
There is no reason that the same thing can't work for music. If you have a radio or a computer, you would pay a fee. The fee could be added to the initial sale or import of any computer or radio.
Here's how it could unfold. Cash is becoming a nuisance for businesses. Also, there is value in customer data. Big value. All businesses want to differentiate themselves from other businesses by creating incentive programs for customers to patronize only their establishment, in terms of a brick-and-mortar store like a grocery store; or to use only their data formats in terms of Microsoft's Office suite and Microsoft's OOXML. Currently, for example, Costco allows only members to come into their stores; or, to put it differently, Costco allows only members to buy products at their stores. I could see the day coming when your card has an RFID tag, and if you don't have a card, then a security guard would stop you at the door, because hey, if you don't have a card, why would you be coming into the store in the first place? Or, they could have a security guard inside the store, to direct people to registration, if they don't' have a card, so that shoppers would be required to get a card, and pay a fee for the same. During the sign-up process, you would be told that they system requires you to have a Microsoft Windows computer at home, or a "Microsoft Live" account, which, in turn, would require Microsoft Internet Explorer.
This is a potentially very dark future, in which Microsoft uses its practice of "extend, embrace, and extinguish" to essentially shut down all commerce not tied to Microsoft Windows. From today's front page of Slashdot: What does Microsoft want you to use to write those shopping lists? Microsoft Office. What do they want you to use to browse to the store's website? Microsoft Internet Explorer. Reading these two stories together, you can clearly see how Microsoft's business practice of exclusive integration could reach into every day activities such as shopping. This is a very real risk. Linux and Mac users could be excluded.
And while Microsoft is tying its solution to someone else's shopping cart, Apple is planning on letting you carry your shopping list with you on your own device, and just pointing it at stuff to buy it. No annoying advertising there, and it is not tied to one store or one chain of stores: Disloyal customers, such as those running GNU Linux, will be shown the door, or barred from entering the store in the first place. Imagine not being able to shop for food because you don't use Microsoft Windows. No thanks. I don't want any viruses in my food or my shopping list.
We had our first meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC user group. Not sure if we even have a name. At any rate, a bunch of us got together at the Linux lab in the San Francisco State University to just goof around with these machines. It is really funny to hear them hiss at each other as they try to figure out how close the nearest XOs are. Yep, they talk to each other. They emit a brief hissing sound when you ask them to calculate the distance between XOs. They listen for the hissing sound (or so I was told, dunno, didn't check into it) and then they calculate how long it took for the sound to reach each other, and then they all report back to each other, and they determine how far apart their fellow XOs are. Hilarious.
They also have built in video, which two of the resident children were really enjoying by making monkey faces, much to the embarrassment of their parents. Insanity, you know, is inherited from your children. heh. One kid composed music on his XO. He is 5. As in less than 6 years old. You can add eyes to the screen, and the screen will talk to you to tell you how many eyes it has. Very entertaining for a 3 year-old. Did I mention that these computers are called One Laptop Per *Child*? They really figured out how to make these computers entertaining *for kids*. This is really a kid-centric device.
The amazing thing is that it brings out the kid in adults.
In other words, we would have been forced to sacrifice hardware horsepower for software features, and we chose hardware horsepower.
... "Please protect your Windows investment! Don't use Microsoft products to access the Internet. Instead, go here to request a free (as in beer) CD with the latest anti-spam and anti-virus software. When your CD arrives, just place it in your CD-ROM, and reboot your computer before going on-line. You will then be able to surf the web in full comfort knowing that no viruses, spyware or spam will take over your machine. When you are ready to return to the full Genuine Windows Vista experience for running your favorite games, such as BSOD, simply reboot your machine and take the CD out of the CD-ROM before the reboot starts."
But right off the top of my head, it occurs to me that because you are a low
Also, there is an objective component to my point that you are missing. My point is not that Linux can match Windows and the Mac feature for feature. My point is much different. Rather, my point is that all markets are tiered. The consumers buying services at the top of the market are willing to pay a premium for higher-grade performance. The consumers at the bottom of the market don't need or want all the bells and whistles, or at least they are not willing or able to *pay* or all those bells or whistles.
I am a case in point. I am producing a film called the Digital Tipping Point (DTP), about the cultural implications of the global shift to Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Our DTP community is trying to scale up, and we are standardizing on FOSS with a lot of different users. We are using lots and lots of legacy boxes to do this work. We don't have a budget for spending lots of money buying everyone a Mac, even though Mac's video compositors and Adobe's Premier Pro are much better on a functional basis than the FOSS offerings. But with FOSS, we are able to get people set up in multiple time zones to collaborate for peanuts. Our business model is low-budget. We like FOSS for that reason. But lots of people need the functionality of a Mac or Adobe product. We don't. We are a different demographic.
On-line communities are powerful places to be. Just look at Markos Moulitsas (video warning), the founder of the Daily Kos political blog. What started out as a rant against conservative thinking back in 2002 has now become THE place for Democrats to hang out. Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi, and lots of other Democratic leaders have now posted comments on that website, which runs on all Free Open Source Software tools, according to the above-linked interview with Markos.
So if you want to be a participant in the power of on-line communities, maybe you are going to have to give up a wee bit of privacy, depending on the community. But look what you get in return: influence and fun. By contrast, those who do not want to participate risk losing relevance, which is one example of the tragedy of the anti-commons. If you are not willing to share something, then just stay off line. Most communities will require you to give *something* to participate: your thinking, some personal information, *something*. Same thing for communities in the physical world. You have to join a group and shake a few hands to participate in the group.
Pizza vendors are competing for more adult crowds in many (but not all cases). So there would probably not be that much competition between Extreme Pizza (on Fillmore and Post Streets in San Francisco) and McD's on Fillmore and Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, despite the fact that these two restaurants are only a 5 minute walk apart. People in that area of San Francisco, called the Western Addition, often call into Extreme Pizza for football games and other events, but not McD's. Conversely, the McD's has a drive through, which Extreme Pizza does not. McD's is closer to the low-rent area of the Western Addition, but Extreme Pizza, located across Geary Boulevard, a natural dividing line, caters more to the billionaires who order take out just 6 blocks north in the "upper Fillmore" area and who want the kind of chi-chi fancy pizzas with fancy toppings delivered to their homes. Yes, billionaires do eat pizza.
Likewise, the Mac appeals to people who want a status symbol and are willing to pay top dollar for it. Linux is used by the students at this public middle school at Geary and Scott Streets in the Western Addition, whose principal had no funding for student-facing computers, and so used Microsoft money from the California Microsoft anti-trust settlement to acquire an Edubuntu thin client lab (snicker). Seventy-five percent of the students in that school come from households below the federal poverty guidelines, and sixty-five percent of those students are African American, 17% are Latino, 10% are Asian, and 8% are Caucasian. Likewise, a senior center at Fillmore and Turk, close to the McD's, is evaluating an free (as in beer) Edubuntu work station network, because they have no funds for purchasing Microsoft solutions, and certainly not Macs. These are entirely different demographics.
So, to answer your question, no, in many cases, Linux does not compete with the Mac, and competes, instead, with the less expensive Microsoft solutions instead. Of course, as Linux gets better and better, it will tend to commoditize the Apple solutions in many cases, such as the school mentioned above.
First, some basic questions as to measuring Linux installs. Very hard. No bar-code events in many cases.
/. about the really stunning popularity of Linux AND Mac sales on Amazon.
Also, there is a totally different distribution chain. Macs are sold in stores or on-line. Linux is often distributed through social networks, such as the telecentros in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Extremadura, Spain; or in thin client networks such as at this public middle school in San Francisco; or via free giveaways, such as this guy who gave out 16,000 Linux computers in Berkeley, California; or via the numerous municipal and national migration projects to Linux, such as in Munich, Madrid, and Extremadura Spain; or via Nokia's N880; or the OLPC; or the Asus EEE PC, or the Everex PC.
The other problem that I have with this guy's article is that it is contrary to recent reports even here on
It is a totally different business model. The fundamental problem with TFA is that it does not understand this fundamental different.
The innovations to which I referred in my original comment all share something in common: they are recombinations of basic building blocks. The genius of FOSS lies in its simplicity and modularity. Most proprietary software is an integrated solution. It is presented as a package which can NOT be readily altered. Not only is it illegal to alter the package, but it is probably not desirable to do so in most cases, as altering one package will break a dependency elsewhere.
The brilliance of FOSS is that it can be bolted together in nearly infinite combinations and still work. The brilliance of Apt is not just what it does, but the community surrounding it. There is a strange and beautiful symmetry in the modularity of the packages and the willingness of the community to work together to create something like the Debian pool and Apt, a package manager that allows us to use seemingly unrelated packages created by groups of people with no command-and-control central authority. And yet it all works. Most of the time.
So the emphasis of critics on the lack of "new feature sets" in FOSS is misplaced, because the emphasis in FOSS is not just complex feature sets, but interoperability, which is the most important feature of all.
And, coincidentally, look at how smoothly some of those tools I mention function. dvgrab is elegant. It just works. transcode manages to decode and re-encode a wide variety of video files. Annodex, a tool for annotating and indexing continuous media, is simply brilliant and very forward-looking and innovative. Look at the brilliance of the Digg GUI, built out of ordinary tools, and yet it is revolutionizing the media with its ability to hand editorial control of the news to the masses. Digg is nothing less than game-changing. And it's all FOSS.
...and then their economy became the second largest economy in the world when they improved what had otherwise been explored, but not optimized.
I see your point, but you were a bit off the mark. Digg and Slashdot and YouTube are entirely new. They have shifted the power a bit more from the center to the fringes of the information network. So you might have a point if you say that the Cinelerra GUI is not as spiffy as the Adobe equivalent; and yet the high cost of Adobe Premier Pro limits what a community-based project can do with the software on a large scale, due to the prohibitively high cost of per-seat licenses.
Toyota is gaining on GM as the world's largest automanufacturer because they addressed the wishes of customers who were overshot by GM's offerings. They took simple things and made them better, and, as a result, they are gaining on GM. Almost all movies made today in Hollywood are rendered on Linux because of the stability and reliability and the scalability. So I guess it depends on what you mean by innovation. I don't see anything in the proprietary world as successful as Slashdot or Digg or YouTube, all of which run on Linux. It is the modularity and flexibility of the code that is the basis of innovation with much of the FOSS code out there. Our Digital Tipping Point BASH developer, Jonathan Grindstaff, has said that he is sure he would not have been able to get as creative with his BASH video glue tools with proprietary software as with dvgrab, transcode, and ffmpeg2theora.
Here's another way to put it. Adobe Premier Pro is really excellent at facilitating the user to manipulate video within the offered feature set. But if you want to go outside that feature set, you are out of luck. The end user of Adobe Premier Pro looks at the feature set, and asks "what can I do with these tools?" Jonathan Grindstaff was able to ask, "what do we need to do?" and then go find FOSS tools to create his own feature set.
...not. Same for Cinelerra and Kino and Jahshakah and Firefox and Wengophone and apt-get and dvgrab and transcode and ffmpeg2theora and Annodex and YouTube and Facebook and, oh well, you get the point.
As it so happens, I am producing a distributed film with FOSS called the Digital Tipping Point, and our community would never have been able to create all these great BASH scripts to automate the process of capturing, compressing, and uploading the video to the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection without the freedom of FOSS. Oh, and coincidentally, neither the Internet or the Internet Archive would exist without FOSS.
This guy clearly does not know what he is talking about.
...it sure is nice to have Google Apps to pen ODF files in case I get stuck on a Windows machine where I can't install OOo for whatever reason (friend's work computer, etc). But yeah, I mostly use OOo.
Then, as now, kids want mobility. And they are price-sensitive customers who don't care where they get their music or what devices they play them on. Or how good the sound quality is. A Linux device will be just as good as a name-brand device with Microsoft Mobile on it.
Your response is a misdirection. The point that I am making here is that the mere fact that a product or service underperforms today is not always good evidence of its future performance. The point is to look at the product, its vendor, and how the vendor is positioning the product in the market. If the vendor does a good job of matching a product or a service to the proper customer base, they can succeed. The theory of disruptive innovation helps us answer a key question: how is it that so many great companies have failed?
Before Christensen, the answer was that management failed to follow the needs of their current customers. Christensen shifted the focus by helping to identify the relationship between great companies and emerging demographics. Google is a great company today because it saw that you don't try to sell Linux to the same customers who buy Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office the same way that Microsoft sells those products: in a desktop computer or notebook used by power users. At least not at first. Instead, rent Linux to them 1/10th of a second at a time.
My point exactly. At one time, steel production in North America was dominated by large integrated steel mills. They produced all types of steel, from rebar at the bottom, to sheet metal at the top. Then along came mini-mills. They used recycled steel, rather than raw ore, to create steel. But they were not able to produce blemish-free steel, no matter how hard they tried. So, rather than compete with the integrated mills for the production of the high margin sheet metal, they produced rebar, because surface blemished don't matter for rebar. Eventually, the mini-mills were able to produce rebar at prices that the integrated mills couldn't match, so the integrated mills exited the rebar market.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because rebar customers are disloyal, price-sensitive customers. But more and more mini-mills sprung up, and the price of rebar collapsed, as the mini-mills fought with each other over price. So the smart managers of the mini-mills focused on creating steel for angle iron, which requires slightly better surface quality than rebar, but still far less quality than structural steel or sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the angle iron market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
And their investors rejoiced.
Because now angle iron customers had become disloyal, price-sensitive customers. Mini-mills turned to the production of angle iron by the droves, and the price of angle iron collapsed. So smart managers of the mini-mills turned to structural steel, which requires slightly better surface quality than angle iron, but far less than sheet metal. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the integrated mills exited the structural steel market because they couldn't compete with the mini-mills on price.
This time, their investors did not rejoice.
The pattern was becoming clear. Large, integrated mills had huge cost structures, and they could not compete with the mini-mills on price, but the mini-mills were showing no end to their ability to produce high quality steel out of low-grade raw materials. The big mills were hugely expensive, required huge labor pools to run. Not a single integrated mill has been built in North America since the mid-seventies as a result, and all the dominant integrated mills have closed.
Microsoft employs 70,000 people, and has a market capitalization of about $335 billion as of the market's close today. Google has a market capitalization of about $216 billion
Disruptive innovations often start out underperforming the market leaders' products. This has happened time and time again in history. The classic example is Sony's transistor radios. When they first came out in the 1960s, they had poor sound volume, poor reception, and poor sound quality. But they did just fine for the teenagers who bought them in droves, because they teenagers didn't care about sound quality back then -- they cared about mobility!!! They wanted to listen to their rebel music away from their parents' reach, because their parents disapproved of the music.
It's exactly the same with Google Apps and Free Open Source Software and the OLPC XO. They all underperform Microsoft apps, but they appeal to a different crowd. No analysis of Google Apps or FOSS or the OLPC XO is on the right track without looking at one key question: who are the best customers of these technologies? If they are the same group as the market leader, then they will fail for exactly the same reason that Walt Mossberg doesn't like Ubuntu: he says that he reviews products for mainstream consumers, and FOSS is just now starting to get to feature parity with Microsoft products.
And yet, boatloads of people are starting to buy FOSS-powered products. Sure, they are much smaller boarts than the boatloads of people buying Microsoft products, but the point is that people are PAYING for FOSS goods and services.
The best example is Google search. Google "rents" Linux to us all 1/10th of a second at a time. Google sells advertising, and so they commoditize the compliment: web traffic. Google is more concerned with keeping the Internet Free and Open than they are concerned with what platform you use to browse the Internet, at least until Microsoft locks down the browser and blocks out Google, which they are trying to do with "LiveSearch" (an effort that is failing).
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Bottom line: if you want to understand why FOSS and Google will beat Microsoft, look at the customers who are using their products. They are not Microsoft's customers. At least not yet. But tomorrow they will be.
Oh, and BTW, when was the last time you bought an RCA product? What about a Sony product? Yet when Sony was young, it was mocked as "cheap Japanese crap." Think of that next time someone mocks Google Apps.
Microsoft likes to throw around the word "open" a lot these days, but most smart people in the industry remain skeptical. Take, for example, what open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver has to say about Microsoft's supposed open OOXML format: So how open is open? Unless the code is considered open under OSI standards or Free under FSF guidelines, it's really still just a pig with lipstick and a dress.
I am also a fan of Christensen's. In fact, I am producing a documentary based on his work. Our film is called the Digital Tipping Point. I would love to find out a bit more of your interests in this topic. Please feel free to email me at einfeldt - at , _- gmail dot com if you would like to discuss this topic off of this page.
My point is that Microsoft has, in the past, been the archetypal command-and-control Cathedral, within the meaning of Eric Raymond's essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Any collaboration that happened lacked one central core characteristic of FOSS production: sharing source code outside the Cathedral-builders' team. Microsoft never has released the source code to its flagship Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office products to the unwashed masses. Their business model cannot sustain that model.
Contrast this model with businesses that have made billions from the sale of FOSS-related products and services: Google, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and Novell. In each of these cases, these businesses are earning revenue by commoditizing complementary activities that support their core businesses. They improve and share source code for FOSS projects. They sell hotdogs, and so are interested in driving down the cost of mustard and relish.
I thought that it was both amusing and disingenuous that Bill Gates, the man who wrote the infamous open letter to hobbyists, would have the boldness to claim that Microsoft "shares ideas". I found his claim entertaining, and I thought maybe some Slashdotters would also chuckle at the quote.
This news actually can be helpful to gamers, and should NOT be used as the basis for any Jack Thompson-like legislation. Guess what!! Sexy women make me hot! But that does not mean that I have the moral imperative to make inappropriate advances toward women, nor does it warrant laws requiring women to wear chaste clothing in public, as long as the clothes pass basic obscenity laws, at least in secular societies like the US (no offense intended toward countries following Sharia laws). In other words, humans can develop a moral imperative that is independent of our more base (and fun) impulses. Certainly that is true of adults, and should be expected of them.
Proponents of greater restrictions on gaming for kids are missing the point that the best form of restriction on gaming is an opportunity for the parents to be more involved in their kids' lives. A blanket ban on violent games is not narrowly tailored to suit the problem; whereas parental involvement in kids' lives is both narrowly tailored to suit the problem AND a part of what we should expect of parents: know your kids. Spend time with your kids. Don't try to legislate away your role in shaping your own child's skills at impulse control, which is a basic skill for success in any civilized society.
Wal-Mart has been experimenting with Linux PCs for a long, long time. Here are just a few examples:
2002 Walmart sells Lindows PCs:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/general-10/wal-mart-ships-linux-pcs-23619/
2003 Microtel computers with SUSE Linux:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,111557-page,1/article.html
2004 Linspire computers on sale at Wal-Mart for $498.00
http://www.news.com/Wal-Mart-debuts-498-Linux-laptop/2100-1044_3-5498006.html
May of 2007, Dell computers on sale at Wal-Mart:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/15701
Wal-Mart is not stupid. They know that as the price of PCs falls, their sales volume rises. They have a vested interested in commoditizing PCs. With Microsoft, Wal-Mart gets a limited mark-up. With Linux PCs made by small vendors, Wal-Mart gets to call the shots. Wal-Mart has dollars signs in their eyes, and those dollars signs are dancing with Tux.
...Try buying it from this mom and pop shop:
http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16160&cat=0&page=1
BTW, I have no business relation with the family that runs Zareason, but I did buy about $8,400.00 worth of products from them, and Zareason did a fine job of shipping the products to the public middle school that I ordered on behalf of. More details on that purchase here:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/1446254
There is a little mom n pop shop in Berkeley called Zareason that is selling these things, too.. So you can get the gPC there guilt free. Heh.
http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16160&cat=0&page=1
So you can buy it there with a clean conscience. heh.
BTW, I have no business relation with the family that runs Zareason, but I did buy about $8,400.00 worth of products from them, and Zareason did a fine job of shipping the products to the public middle school that I ordered on behalf of. More details on that purchase here:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/1446254
...called Zareason:
http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16160&cat=0&page=1
So you can buy it there with a clean conscience. heh.
BTW, I have no business relation with the family that runs Zareason, but I did buy about $8,400.00 worth of products from them, and Zareason did a fine job of shipping the products to the public middle school that I ordered on behalf of. More details on that purchase here:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/1446254