Its the only company I know of whose supporters are delighted by its refusal to sell its products to people who want to buy them. It is also probably the only company which in the fact of what looks like lots of customer demand for its products, simply refuses to meet it.
It seems, admittedly from anecdotal evidence, that there are large numbers of people who want to buy OSX and run it on the hardware of their choice. Any normal company and any normal management team would stop bleating about controlling the total user experience (which is anyway nonsense, the Tiger experience has been no stabler, and no more immune from hardware incompatibilities than the XP experience) and just sell its customers what they want.
People keep saying in reply to this sort of thing: but Apple is a hardware company. It may be. If it is, people will carry on buying its hardware. What's the problem? Sell them the OS they seem to want, as well.
People also quote Jobs as referring to people who want to buy the software standalone as parasites. This is one of the maddest things ever to come out of California. We are talking customers . Guys with money who want to give it to you! Just take it!
I had a vineyard. I invented a new way of making red wine. It was the greatest red wine in the world. I had a restaurant next to my vineyard, where I served dinner, and my wine along with it. People kept coming up to me and saying, "this is great, but I really would like to drink your wine with my own cooking, at home. "
"No", I said, as I pulled on my fresh black turtleneck for the evening. "No way. I am in the business of offering a controlled experience, every aspect of it is controlled, right down to the grain of the wood in the tables you are sitting at, and you can only drink my wine in my restaurant."
"Well that's jolly good for you", said my customers, "but in that case I will buy my wine elsewhere. And it may not be quite as good now, but it will get better as the other vineyards learn from you. Because you see, I am not going to stop drinking my wine with my own cooking at home. Its really important to me, and you cannot stop me from doing it" .
"The only thing you can do, is stop me drinking YOUR wine with my cooking. Think about it."
And that is how I lost the chance to become one of the leading winemakers of the world. But I am still running quite a good local restaurant, with a vineyard attached.
Think it was on a visit to the old fortress at Verdun that I heard the following. The French had been struck by the fact that for the defenders, one of the worst parts of the battle was the noise the defenders in the fortress had to endure. This gave them two lessons, one about the Maginot line design, the second, that maybe LF sound could be used as a weapon. They were obsessed with avoiding the horrors and losses of trench warfare. The story, which may be just a myth, was that they had developed such a weapon, but abandonned further research when, in trials, it killed the developers.
Imagine the product liability suits from such a sub-woofer....
Not that it will stop me from using BSD, but the design is simply in execrable taste. What on earth were they thinking of? Something cool, bluish and understated would have been the thing. No shortage of examples. Even the new Mandrake is better. Or Mepis
Yes, this is an interesting and important document, but you have to be a bit careful about what it is saying. Its not saying anything about the formats the documents have to be saved in. Its just saying that you have to use packages which support open formats. Now, in the case of Office packages, these are, for word processing, rtf, text or pdf. In the case of spreadsheets, csv or odf. And so on. So MS Office is compliant, because it does support these. Whether you actually use it to save in these formats is up to you.
There is however one interesting kind of package which is not compliant. There are a number of UK suppliers of format locked stuff. One is Comma, which has been sold to local authorities, and bought by local history societies, to generate local history archives, which stores its stuff in non-standard formats with no export capability. Another is Catalist, a collection management package, the younger brother of Modes, which has been sold to a lot of smaller UK museums and educational institutions, and which has no export capability in either of the two mandated database formats.
Both of these now seem to be non-compliant. However, one can be sure that suppliers of this sort of package will simply go back to the institutions they have sold to, with the message that now BECTA says you have to upgrade!
Probably the most reasoned and accurate comment ever published on a public forum about Apple's marketing strategy and performance. Your point about the apparent failure of the controlled hardware environment to deliver the superior quality, the 'just works' performance used to justify it in computers, is very true.
Your central point about iTunes is also true: making people use Apple products to buy music on iTunes is classic anti competitive behaviour, and should be condemned.
There remains the baffling puzzle. Why is it that people think this stuff is perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, from Apple, but wrong and dreadful from everyone else? Extraordinary moral blindness.
The issue is not really whether Eulas are enforceable. Some are, some are not, depending on what they say. The issue is whether a court in your jurisdiction will enforce a clause, whether in a Eula or anywhere else, which is incompatible with the law in that jurisdiction.
For example, the wonderful example where The Breeder Standard (is this real, and not a joke?) says that you agree to pay them $8k if you try to chargeback. I'm pretty sure this is incompatible with the UK Sale of Goods Act, which gives you various rights, and with other UK sale of goods regulations which limit what contracts may be imposed in the mass market. For example, from a UK Government site:
"The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 (SI 1999 No 2083) provide that a term which has not been individually negotiated in a consumer contract is unfair (and hence non-binding on the consumer) if, contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the rights and obligations of the parties to the detriment of the consumer." There are similar regulations in effect in the whole of the EC.
There was a discussion some time ago here on whether Apple could, by Eula alone, prevent buyers of OS X from installing it on non-Apple hardware. The issue is the same as the question of whether MS can, by Eula alone, prevent buyers of Office from installing it under Wine.
The answer in both cases is no: not because of any difficulty with Eulas. But because such linked sales conditions are unlawful under EC competition law.
In the same way, a Eula condition which placed the buyer in involuntary servitude would not be lawful in the US, not because Eulas are problematic, but because involuntary servitude is unlawful under the constitution. Whatever boxes you check on a Eula, no court is going to place you in involuntary servitude.
So really, the most helpful way to look a this is not by focussing on Eulas. The thing to focus on is whether the company behaviour and conditions which they are trying to enforce in this way are lawful, regardless how they are enforced. The involuntary servitude example: suppose they had a guy standing at the exit to the store who had you sign a contract in the presence of three witnesses, and under oath. That would not be a Eula, and it would not be enforceable either...
Interesting. The other interesting UK development on the anonymity front, maybe not as directly relevant to this thread, has been (paper) postal balloting. What happens is, you request to do a postal ballot. You do not have to identify yourself securely when doing it or when voting, which has led to large scale fraud. This is also not done on an individual basis but a family basis. The result is that the ballot, which was never anonymous in relation to the authorities, now has ceased to be anonymous within the family. The result has been the disenfranchisement of women in many communities. Effectively the UK has given the (male) head of household the right to vote for the family - and in many cases, given the elders of the clan the right to dictate the votes of the whole extended family.
There are as many enemies of electoral anonymity as there are of individual liberty, and they are not always the obvious or traditional ones.
I've only read about two thirds of the comments, not having been able to stomach any more, but the tone of these is typified by one writer who talks about Dvorak having "gone over to the other side". This is the language of religious or political warfare applied to buying preferences. Its nuts. No, he is not a good writer on technology, but he and the recent Slate article are making a valid point.
That point is, that no other company with Apple's record on financial performance, or product innovation, would get the kind of applause it gets.
Now, this may strike you as unkind, but before reaching for the keyboard, have a look at
Whatever we might feel, this is not the record of a great growth company. Its the record of a company managing to avoid disaster by the skin of its teeth. You don't agree? Take a look at the identical reports for Dell or Cisco. Like it or not, their performance sets the standards for excellence, and Apple's just doesn't match it. Not even close.
Then, if you look at innovation, you also have to look at product quality, and you have to look over time. What we are looking for in this league is a track record. Consistent performance. Well, remember the Performas? The 4400? 8.0? 10.0? Read Ars Technica on the various hardware issues. Read the forums on what screens you can and cannot use with the Mini.
Now, I am not saying all this is terrible or a total disaster. Not at all. It is pretty much run of the mill, quite reasonable. It is by no means at the bottom of the class. Its mediocrity with occasional flashes of inspiration, mediocrity punctuated by a few real hits. Could do much worse. But I am saying, with Dvorak and Slate, that this performance would never get the uncritical praise that Apple gets, if it were coming from another company. Surely you cannot argue with this, if you look at the facts.
Now, as to why. That's a really interesting question. Its about feeling. You can see the feelings in this thread. Why they get attached to Apple I do not know. But their nature is clear. There is felt to be something about identifying with this company and its CEO that in some way will make us special, give meaning to our lives, mark us out as being special. We will be Apple people. We will be, in the words of the Time Magazine article, among the "chosen of the earth". We will be associated with a CEO who is really looking out for us, and only takes $1 a year in compensation. Excluding stock options....
How buying one particular product can do that, well, those of us on the outside will not understand, really do not want to, and find these kinds of feelings, and their overwrought public expression, one of the worst aspects of the whole Apple phenomenon.
In the UK, every ballot paper is traceable back to the individual who cast the vote. Not often realised, but if you look, every ballot has a unique number associated with a voter, which the staff at the polling station enter on it before it is used....
How sure are you that it is always anonymous everywhere else?
Obviously, what is needed is a central bank. The central bank should control the amount of currency. It should also control, or try to control, the exchange rate between currencies (in this case dollars and gil). It will do this by issuing bonds, and by purchasing and selling gil on the open market in exchange for the money, probably gil, this raises.
If you are lucky, you will then experience fluctuations and manias like those which characterised Western economic history for the last few hundred years. With any luck, all the gil will get totally devalued and have to be reissued. At the end of the process you will all be sadder and wiser, and realise that any monetary system which allows unlimited credit creation will collapse. This knowlege will stand you all in good stead in the coming years....
They are remarkable stories being told about the role playing world. Does it remind you of anything? Consider: there is a source of money outside the system which just allows gold to be created out of nothing. Is there anything like this today in the USA? Then, it no longer pays to farm to get gold, its too slow. And inflation is going so fast, that as soon as you get your gold, it no longer buys anything. So what should you do? Clearly, move into the gold trading business. Does this remind you of anything? Should you perhaps borrow some gold and buy now, before the price of what you want gets away from you?
But, what will happen if the supply of purchases into the system suddenly, for whatever reason, dries up? Ah, that's called deflation. And very nasty it is too.
A whole generation is getting educated in the nature of, and the causes of, the coming economic disaster. Ironic that it should be happening in parallel to the real one....
Not sure if we should blame ourselves for buying what was best for us...or blame the competition for making sure there was only one place to buy it. There was one OS which had the potential to give Windows problems, and that was Mac. But they insisted on tying it to very expensive own brand hardware. What was everyone to do? You could put in Macs for half the people, or Windows for all of them. And have second source supply. It was a no-brainer.
Isn't that one interesting question? At the start of the saga, it was less usable, less stable, and had lower market share than MacOS. At the end, it had evolved to not much above parity, and crushed it. People always say it was due to anti competitive tactics. Yes, but what placed MS in a position to employ them effectively?
This is EU speak, which will turn out to mean regulate, in accordance with the wishes of some association of large companies and various political interest groups. Forums in EU speak are not places where people just talk, and models of cooperation do not mean just sharing ideas. If it gets started, it will have a life of its own, and it will be amazing where it will go. You doubt this. Research the history of the Recreational Craft Directive.
This is not quite how the EU works. There would be two possibilities. First the Commission could promulgate an administrative directive with immediate effect. A bit unlikely in such a technical matter. Second, it could start the process of EU legislation, which means that it creates an obligation on member states to pass their own legislation which achieves the purpose of the directives, but where the detail is left up to the states. This would take years and not be uniform.
All in all, I don't expect to see any ISP obliged by the EU to use any particular DNS root servers in my lifetime. It is much more likely to be a commercial decision by individuals and their ISPs. In which case, it won't have any effect in Europe, everyone will just carry on as now, no-one will want to connect to the restricted DNS system, but you could certainly see attempts by the control oriented regimes basically to split their citizens off from the global net, and only have access to a local one. Well, they can do this. But they can do it today, and some try, with more or less success. But in the end they end up as islands of restriction, and one of the lessons of the last 30 years or so is, efforts to restrain information in the digital age are not very successful. If you cannot control the PC, in the end you cannot control information.
Are they going to control DVDs too? The Soviets used to control typewriters and copiers, but you still had Samizdat. Its futile, and it just draws attention to the repression.
I can see their problem with the first inspection. They don't know what they are looking at. They see a backpack full of stuff that might or might not be nefarious. I can even see their problem about the contents of the flat. At first sight, the searching officers have no idea what a breakout box is.
The real problem, and its to some extent a technical one, is happening later - they seem to have no quick way of clearing him, getting all that manpower turned to something useful, and moving on. So they have him come down with a solicitor, they spend time considering charging him when he's obviously done nothing, they keep useless records on file clogging up their database and obstructing later searches. This is bad for him, and an infringement of his civil liberties, but it is even worse for us, if its happening a lot. It means they are wasting time, but worse, have a database filled with useless junk, so it will actively obstruct searches. Needles in self created haystacks.
The technical problem is actually Bayesian. The occurrence of a phenomenon is extremely rare. So even quite reliable indicators of it only raise the probability of this being one of them to very low levels.
Well, they had two choices if they wanted to grow.
Choice (1): move out of the niche market for bundled proprietary hardware+OS, and sell unbundled OS, and try to grow the PC product line. Risky. Bet the company stuff.
Choice (2): stay in the niche, keep hardware+OS bundled, and diversify into different product areas for growth.
They chose the second. This meant their PC market share will probably now never rise above 5%, the PC product line whatever its merits will not be a source of much growth. But the new business areas, as long as they can keep inventing them and exploiting them, and as long as they pick high margin areas, may deliver earnings growth. As the correlation of stock price movement and iPod introduction shows.
Not sad, just a business decision. You can see the attractions in the stock price. They'll end up as a consumer electronics company rather than a computer company, if it works.
Two good things about WM. It runs well on slow hardware. I've seen acceptable speed on 64MB/200Mhz MMX. And if you are in a kind of kiosk environment with computer-wary people, its an interface they are fine with. I've showed it to a bunch of retired ladies who started out saying, we don't know about computers. After five minutes, which was basically double click on the icons to start your apps, go between desktops using the arrows on this icon, the reaction I got was something like, of course I can use this. Probably not good for the home user who wants lots of multimedia and stuff, but if you just want access to one or two apps in a simple administrative work environment, its great. Really worth considering if you are settng up a poor charity with some kind of database lookup app and WP/Spreadsheet.
It might be that the imperatives of the different product lines pull them in different directions now, if they have independent P&Ls. Analogous to when you split the network and content pieces at the old online services - network division now wants to give access to all content, content division now wants to be available across all networks. No more bleating about making people take our network to get at our content. If Apple split OS and Hardware, hardware division would want to sell as much as possible with any OS that you wanted, and OS would want to run on any platform. The divisions lose interest in each others' financial performance and will not want to take the hit. Also, it makes it harder to conceal the reasoning. You can now ask the CEO of a division why he is not going after an apparently profitable market.
So, maybe, the pressures for Office and other applications on Linux will start to intensify...?
Re:Apple did what redhat should have, train gone..
on
Ulrich Drepper On The LSB
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There are surely two distinct desktop market segments. One is under 10% of the total desktop market and is for bundled, single source, OS/hardware combination from one supplier. It is a real and currently profitable segment, and Apple dominates it.
The other segment is for desktop OSs that run on generic multi-source hardware. That is over 90% of the market, and that is where the BSDs, Windows and Linux compete.
The hardware part of this market segment is not dominated by anyone, there are low entry barriers and lots of players. The OS part is dominated by MS, but with increasing competition from the BSDs and Linux. Whether this will turn into a real threat, its too early to say. Apple is not a player here, and, right or wrong, evidently doesn't intend to be. In this market segment, OS X, whatever its merits to users, is irrelevant because absent.
Conclusion: it may be too late for desktop Linux or BSD, but not because of OS X.
Here is the significance of ebooks. You are a small school, a small village in a developing country, a kid in a small town in a developed one. Libraries are expensive, buildings, heat, light, staffing. Shelving is expensive. However, in a small library you can have one reasonable server and half a dozen dumb terminals, and you can have, via Gutenberg and a hard drive, THE WORLDS SUPPLY of out of copyright books of all kinds available for your people. It applies today to Gutenberg for personal use: that kid can have a library of 10,000+ out of copyright titles. Books in other languages, books you simply cannot buy, that you may not have heard of, and if you could buy them, you couldn't store them.
If you look at the accession rate for Gutenberg, what you see is that ebooks have arrived and are thriving. All this stuff about they don't look and smell like real books is irrelevant. The success of ebooks is not about replacing real books, its democratisation of access to knowledge. It is actually very like open source software, which gives you equivalent access to skills and tools.
I was a kid in a small town with a minimal library. What I would have given for a Gutenberg DVD all those years ago! Or for the Debian or Mandrake DVD!
No, its not in your head. Zealotry and bad manners prevent open forum discussion of quite a lot of topics now, and not just here, because rational contributions get drowned out by insults from single issue zealots. More aggressive moderation would have drowned out almost all of this thread - that might be a temporary answer?
Slashdot Mirror
It seems, admittedly from anecdotal evidence, that there are large numbers of people who want to buy OSX and run it on the hardware of their choice. Any normal company and any normal management team would stop bleating about controlling the total user experience (which is anyway nonsense, the Tiger experience has been no stabler, and no more immune from hardware incompatibilities than the XP experience) and just sell its customers what they want.
People keep saying in reply to this sort of thing: but Apple is a hardware company. It may be. If it is, people will carry on buying its hardware. What's the problem? Sell them the OS they seem to want, as well.
People also quote Jobs as referring to people who want to buy the software standalone as parasites. This is one of the maddest things ever to come out of California. We are talking customers . Guys with money who want to give it to you! Just take it!
"No", I said, as I pulled on my fresh black turtleneck for the evening. "No way. I am in the business of offering a controlled experience, every aspect of it is controlled, right down to the grain of the wood in the tables you are sitting at, and you can only drink my wine in my restaurant."
"Well that's jolly good for you", said my customers, "but in that case I will buy my wine elsewhere. And it may not be quite as good now, but it will get better as the other vineyards learn from you. Because you see, I am not going to stop drinking my wine with my own cooking at home. Its really important to me, and you cannot stop me from doing it" .
"The only thing you can do, is stop me drinking YOUR wine with my cooking. Think about it."
And that is how I lost the chance to become one of the leading winemakers of the world. But I am still running quite a good local restaurant, with a vineyard attached.
Imagine the product liability suits from such a sub-woofer....
Not that it will stop me from using BSD, but the design is simply in execrable taste. What on earth were they thinking of? Something cool, bluish and understated would have been the thing. No shortage of examples. Even the new Mandrake is better. Or Mepis
There is however one interesting kind of package which is not compliant. There are a number of UK suppliers of format locked stuff. One is Comma, which has been sold to local authorities, and bought by local history societies, to generate local history archives, which stores its stuff in non-standard formats with no export capability. Another is Catalist, a collection management package, the younger brother of Modes, which has been sold to a lot of smaller UK museums and educational institutions, and which has no export capability in either of the two mandated database formats.
Both of these now seem to be non-compliant. However, one can be sure that suppliers of this sort of package will simply go back to the institutions they have sold to, with the message that now BECTA says you have to upgrade!
Your central point about iTunes is also true: making people use Apple products to buy music on iTunes is classic anti competitive behaviour, and should be condemned.
There remains the baffling puzzle. Why is it that people think this stuff is perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, from Apple, but wrong and dreadful from everyone else? Extraordinary moral blindness.
For example, the wonderful example where The Breeder Standard (is this real, and not a joke?) says that you agree to pay them $8k if you try to chargeback. I'm pretty sure this is incompatible with the UK Sale of Goods Act, which gives you various rights, and with other UK sale of goods regulations which limit what contracts may be imposed in the mass market. For example, from a UK Government site:
"The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 (SI 1999 No 2083) provide that a term which has not been individually negotiated in a consumer contract is unfair (and hence non-binding on the consumer) if, contrary to the requirement of good faith, it causes a significant imbalance in the rights and obligations of the parties to the detriment of the consumer." There are similar regulations in effect in the whole of the EC.
There was a discussion some time ago here on whether Apple could, by Eula alone, prevent buyers of OS X from installing it on non-Apple hardware. The issue is the same as the question of whether MS can, by Eula alone, prevent buyers of Office from installing it under Wine.
The answer in both cases is no: not because of any difficulty with Eulas. But because such linked sales conditions are unlawful under EC competition law.
In the same way, a Eula condition which placed the buyer in involuntary servitude would not be lawful in the US, not because Eulas are problematic, but because involuntary servitude is unlawful under the constitution. Whatever boxes you check on a Eula, no court is going to place you in involuntary servitude.
So really, the most helpful way to look a this is not by focussing on Eulas. The thing to focus on is whether the company behaviour and conditions which they are trying to enforce in this way are lawful, regardless how they are enforced. The involuntary servitude example: suppose they had a guy standing at the exit to the store who had you sign a contract in the presence of three witnesses, and under oath. That would not be a Eula, and it would not be enforceable either...
There are as many enemies of electoral anonymity as there are of individual liberty, and they are not always the obvious or traditional ones.
That point is, that no other company with Apple's record on financial performance, or product innovation, would get the kind of applause it gets.
Now, this may strike you as unkind, but before reaching for the keyboard, have a look at
http://quicktake.morningstar.com/Stock/Income1 0.asp?Country=USA&Symbol=AAPL&stocktab=finance
Whatever we might feel, this is not the record of a great growth company. Its the record of a company managing to avoid disaster by the skin of its teeth. You don't agree? Take a look at the identical reports for Dell or Cisco. Like it or not, their performance sets the standards for excellence, and Apple's just doesn't match it. Not even close.
Then, if you look at innovation, you also have to look at product quality, and you have to look over time. What we are looking for in this league is a track record. Consistent performance. Well, remember the Performas? The 4400? 8.0? 10.0? Read Ars Technica on the various hardware issues. Read the forums on what screens you can and cannot use with the Mini.
Now, I am not saying all this is terrible or a total disaster. Not at all. It is pretty much run of the mill, quite reasonable. It is by no means at the bottom of the class. Its mediocrity with occasional flashes of inspiration, mediocrity punctuated by a few real hits. Could do much worse. But I am saying, with Dvorak and Slate, that this performance would never get the uncritical praise that Apple gets, if it were coming from another company. Surely you cannot argue with this, if you look at the facts.
Now, as to why. That's a really interesting question. Its about feeling. You can see the feelings in this thread. Why they get attached to Apple I do not know. But their nature is clear. There is felt to be something about identifying with this company and its CEO that in some way will make us special, give meaning to our lives, mark us out as being special. We will be Apple people. We will be, in the words of the Time Magazine article, among the "chosen of the earth". We will be associated with a CEO who is really looking out for us, and only takes $1 a year in compensation. Excluding stock options....
How buying one particular product can do that, well, those of us on the outside will not understand, really do not want to, and find these kinds of feelings, and their overwrought public expression, one of the worst aspects of the whole Apple phenomenon.
In the UK, every ballot paper is traceable back to the individual who cast the vote. Not often realised, but if you look, every ballot has a unique number associated with a voter, which the staff at the polling station enter on it before it is used.... How sure are you that it is always anonymous everywhere else?
If you are lucky, you will then experience fluctuations and manias like those which characterised Western economic history for the last few hundred years. With any luck, all the gil will get totally devalued and have to be reissued. At the end of the process you will all be sadder and wiser, and realise that any monetary system which allows unlimited credit creation will collapse. This knowlege will stand you all in good stead in the coming years....
They are remarkable stories being told about the role playing world. Does it remind you of anything? Consider: there is a source of money outside the system which just allows gold to be created out of nothing. Is there anything like this today in the USA? Then, it no longer pays to farm to get gold, its too slow. And inflation is going so fast, that as soon as you get your gold, it no longer buys anything. So what should you do? Clearly, move into the gold trading business. Does this remind you of anything? Should you perhaps borrow some gold and buy now, before the price of what you want gets away from you? But, what will happen if the supply of purchases into the system suddenly, for whatever reason, dries up? Ah, that's called deflation. And very nasty it is too. A whole generation is getting educated in the nature of, and the causes of, the coming economic disaster. Ironic that it should be happening in parallel to the real one....
Linux at 15.6%? Three times OS X? Can't be random, surely?
Not sure if we should blame ourselves for buying what was best for us...or blame the competition for making sure there was only one place to buy it. There was one OS which had the potential to give Windows problems, and that was Mac. But they insisted on tying it to very expensive own brand hardware. What was everyone to do? You could put in Macs for half the people, or Windows for all of them. And have second source supply. It was a no-brainer.
The power of open source hardware.
This is EU speak, which will turn out to mean regulate, in accordance with the wishes of some association of large companies and various political interest groups. Forums in EU speak are not places where people just talk, and models of cooperation do not mean just sharing ideas. If it gets started, it will have a life of its own, and it will be amazing where it will go. You doubt this. Research the history of the Recreational Craft Directive.
All in all, I don't expect to see any ISP obliged by the EU to use any particular DNS root servers in my lifetime. It is much more likely to be a commercial decision by individuals and their ISPs. In which case, it won't have any effect in Europe, everyone will just carry on as now, no-one will want to connect to the restricted DNS system, but you could certainly see attempts by the control oriented regimes basically to split their citizens off from the global net, and only have access to a local one. Well, they can do this. But they can do it today, and some try, with more or less success. But in the end they end up as islands of restriction, and one of the lessons of the last 30 years or so is, efforts to restrain information in the digital age are not very successful. If you cannot control the PC, in the end you cannot control information.
Are they going to control DVDs too? The Soviets used to control typewriters and copiers, but you still had Samizdat. Its futile, and it just draws attention to the repression.
The real problem, and its to some extent a technical one, is happening later - they seem to have no quick way of clearing him, getting all that manpower turned to something useful, and moving on. So they have him come down with a solicitor, they spend time considering charging him when he's obviously done nothing, they keep useless records on file clogging up their database and obstructing later searches. This is bad for him, and an infringement of his civil liberties, but it is even worse for us, if its happening a lot. It means they are wasting time, but worse, have a database filled with useless junk, so it will actively obstruct searches. Needles in self created haystacks.
The technical problem is actually Bayesian. The occurrence of a phenomenon is extremely rare. So even quite reliable indicators of it only raise the probability of this being one of them to very low levels.
Choice (1): move out of the niche market for bundled proprietary hardware+OS, and sell unbundled OS, and try to grow the PC product line. Risky. Bet the company stuff.
Choice (2): stay in the niche, keep hardware+OS bundled, and diversify into different product areas for growth.
They chose the second. This meant their PC market share will probably now never rise above 5%, the PC product line whatever its merits will not be a source of much growth. But the new business areas, as long as they can keep inventing them and exploiting them, and as long as they pick high margin areas, may deliver earnings growth. As the correlation of stock price movement and iPod introduction shows.
Not sad, just a business decision. You can see the attractions in the stock price. They'll end up as a consumer electronics company rather than a computer company, if it works.
But it doesn't need any more configuring, you all say, its perfect as it is.
Weird, isn't it! Why don't they all see it?
Two good things about WM. It runs well on slow hardware. I've seen acceptable speed on 64MB/200Mhz MMX. And if you are in a kind of kiosk environment with computer-wary people, its an interface they are fine with. I've showed it to a bunch of retired ladies who started out saying, we don't know about computers. After five minutes, which was basically double click on the icons to start your apps, go between desktops using the arrows on this icon, the reaction I got was something like, of course I can use this. Probably not good for the home user who wants lots of multimedia and stuff, but if you just want access to one or two apps in a simple administrative work environment, its great. Really worth considering if you are settng up a poor charity with some kind of database lookup app and WP/Spreadsheet.
So, maybe, the pressures for Office and other applications on Linux will start to intensify...?
The other segment is for desktop OSs that run on generic multi-source hardware. That is over 90% of the market, and that is where the BSDs, Windows and Linux compete.
The hardware part of this market segment is not dominated by anyone, there are low entry barriers and lots of players. The OS part is dominated by MS, but with increasing competition from the BSDs and Linux. Whether this will turn into a real threat, its too early to say. Apple is not a player here, and, right or wrong, evidently doesn't intend to be. In this market segment, OS X, whatever its merits to users, is irrelevant because absent.
Conclusion: it may be too late for desktop Linux or BSD, but not because of OS X.
If you look at the accession rate for Gutenberg, what you see is that ebooks have arrived and are thriving. All this stuff about they don't look and smell like real books is irrelevant. The success of ebooks is not about replacing real books, its democratisation of access to knowledge. It is actually very like open source software, which gives you equivalent access to skills and tools.
I was a kid in a small town with a minimal library. What I would have given for a Gutenberg DVD all those years ago! Or for the Debian or Mandrake DVD!
No, its not in your head. Zealotry and bad manners prevent open forum discussion of quite a lot of topics now, and not just here, because rational contributions get drowned out by insults from single issue zealots. More aggressive moderation would have drowned out almost all of this thread - that might be a temporary answer?