I don't know where you get the idea from that I am either pro MS, anti Apple, or in favour of piracy, or stealing or any of these things. I am not. I am also generally strongly opposed to whining. I also do not think Apple has any obligation, legal or moral, to make its software generally available on non-Apple machines.
I am only saying, and this will be my last word, that if they do not want to do this, as the law stands, their only recourse is to make it technically impossible. They cannot, as the law stands, prevent it by conditions of sale. Like it or lump it, those are the facts.
Margaret Fuller: I have decided to accept the universe.
Look, this is a much simpler question than people seem to think. Please consider carefully. There are three issues. The first is, whether a company can, in law, stop you using a product as you choose after you have bought it, solely by means of conditions of sale. The answer is no, it cannot. No EC court will uphold such conditions and I greatly doubt if US ones will either. It doesn't matter if it is applications, OS, graphics cards or garden tools. This is just how it is. The reason is competition law.
The second question is whether companies OUGHT to be able to stop you using products in certain ways after you have bought them by conditions on sale. Should we change the law? The answer is no. Competition is generally good, and we don't allow anti competitive behaviour for that reason. You do not want to live in a society in which MS can prohibit you from running Office on Wine, or GM tell you what tires to use, or Wolf tell you what handles to use for their hoe attachments. These kinds of things are what you let in if you allow conditions of sale to limit product use. They are bad.
The third question is whether, if Apple's business model depends on your buying Apple hardware, you are being immoral in running X on non-Apple hardware, even if you totally comply with the law, including the law of copyright. The answer is no. It is up to Apple to adopt viable business strategies, taking account of the law and how people want to use their products. Buyers have no moral obligations to make sure any particular strategy works in the marketplace. The customer will buy and then use the product how he wants, and he is always right.
Now, faced with these circumstances, Apple may choose to use DRM or other technical means to stop X working on non-Apple hardware. They have a perfect right to do that. Whether this is wise from a business point of view or technically feasible is immaterial. They do have the legal power. But this is the only way they are going to stop it. Conditions on sale will not and should not stop it.
i think you have to see it in a slightly different context. People who argue this are pro-Apple, and so they feel that Apple's strategy is legitimate and should be respected. The problem is that a legal system which approves post sales restraints gives rise to problems from companies you may not approve of. For example, how would you feel about being forbidden to run MS Office under Wine? How would you feel about being forbidden to play Sony CDs on Panasonic players? You would not like it, and the society that allowed these sorts of restraints - by condition of purchase only - would ossify very rapidly, because aftermarket competition would vanish. It would be too easy to extend a dominant position in one area into an adjacent area.
But to answer the fundamental point: should we respect and encourage Apple's strategy - closed source hardware and an OS tied to it. Not particularly. It makes life easy for Cupertino, but it raises prices and it diminishes competition. This may seem mistaken. But think: if you are the CIO of a big company, you will not give your desktops to a single source company with repeated supply problems and a history of overpricing. So, closed source hardware is a way of driving the customer to Microsoft. We, the economy in general, don't benefit from this. So we should not particularly respect Apple's strategy.
The two things add up to one conclusion. We don't want a society in which post sales restraints on use are lawful. And we don't particularly want to make it easy for Cupertino. So, there is neither a moral nor a legal reason why we should accept Apple telling us what to run X on.
Now, if they make it technically impossible, that's their right. But if they don't, take the same approach you would to Office under Wine, and do what you feel like doing.
No, you are just wrong about this. The issue is a very simple one, its the issue of a company's power to restrain by condition only how you use what you have bought. Its not about their ability to restrain use technically by product features. Nor is it about piracy or copyright. In the same way that Apple cannot restrain by condition what kind of machine you install on, so MS cannot stop you running Office on Wine. Neither can Ford stop you installing a GM branded tape deck, or carpets, or whatever, in a Ford car. Ford can of course make connectors so that the other tape decks won't fit. That's completely different. You cannot restrain post sale use of products solely by conditions of purchase, and the world is a better place because you cannot.
Apple Macs still will be a closed system. OSX needn't be. The problem though is the demands of the hardware and the software pieces push in different directions. If you have a hardware division it will want to compete with other hardware suppliers, which means get the costs out and sell with whatever OS people want to buy. If you have an OS division, it will want to sell as many as possible, so it will want all features equally good for all platforms and won't favour the in house manufacturer. Its the same kind of thing that sunk people offering bundles of content and network access. The different bits pulling in different directions. But the alternative is retreat to the high price niche, which is what they seem to be doing, and the jury is still out on whether that's sustainable long term.
The usual confusion between what you can do with it technically - restrictions of a technical nature are perfectly in order. What you can do in the way of patent law - you may not use patented inventions without paying. What copyright law permits - you may not make copies except for some kinds of personal use and backup. And finally, restrictions on use post sale, which are almost always unenforceable. Almost always - I don't actually know of one that has been enforced. Maybe someone else does.
So, they may have a patent on the template. Fine. They may make it technically impossible to use the template to make others. Fine. They may have copyright on the template. Fine. Or, they may have none of the above, and just have a condition which you assent to by buying that says you won't use it to do various things which it is perfectly capable of doing. Bring them on, you say. Here I am living in the EC, pick a court of your choice, and watch the fun. It will never fly.
"It is purely tied to Apple hardware by the Mac OS X EULA [apple.com], which, by tying Mac OS X to Apple-branded hardware only, effectively quashes any commercial entity from developing and promoting any other platform that might support Mac OS X."
No, no, no. People keep on saying this, but it is not true. Name one EC case in which post-sale restrictions on use have been upheld by the EC courts. Name one EC case in which the provisions of a EULA forbidding installation on a particular type of machine, or restricting how one copy is installed out of the box, have been upheld. You will not find it possible as a seller to penalise a buyer for using the product in a different way from the way you would like or with other products you do not like. There is no legally enforceable way to stop anyone from making and promoting hardware to run X. In the same way, there is no legally enforceable way to stop them running MS Office on Linux under Wine. And Sony could not enforce a CD/DVD EULA which forbad people to play its music or films on players made by anyone else. And Wolf could not enforce post sale contractual provisions which forbid you to use its garden tool attachments with other people's handles - though it might be able to patent the attachment method, and stop others making compatible tools or handles. People need to think straight about this. This is the same.
There are only two reasons why there may not be non-Apple hardware. One might be it will be technically feasible, but not make business sense, perhaps because the niche is too small and the hardware too specialised. Not very plausible. The second might be it is technically impossible or inconvenient to run X on non-Apple machines. Much more likely. EULA provisions forbidding it are, and are well known to be, unenforceable. At least in Europe.
It just isn't so, is it, as a matter of law, at least in Europe? You buy a copy, and may then do what you want with it, subject to copyright law. The EULA is never going to be construed by any court as a rental contract because it so plainly is not one. Neither will post sales restraints of this kind ever be enforceable, because they are an invitation to extend a dominant position in one area to a dominant position in another.
This is the legal position. But it is probably also right. You will not actually want this sort of thing to be lawful, if you think about it. Do you really want a world in which post sales restraints could close down hardware manufacturers by forbidding the use of Windows on their products, though it runs perfectly? Or in which post sales restraints prohibit the use of any browser other than Explorer? Or in which you can only use Gillette razors with Gillette razor blades? Or Kodak cameras with Kodak film? Or some printers with the manufacturer's own ink? This is why competition law prohibits them. And this is why the only recourse is what Apple seems to be intending: making it technically impossible.
I do not think that is the way European competition law works. Don't know about anywhere else. The reason is, that linked sales are always anti-competitive, and this is why post sale restrictions are not enforceable. You cannot, for instance, sell a CD and forbid people to play it on any other player than one made by a given company. You cannot forbid people to use your drill bits on other drills. You can of course have any sort of market segment oriented pricing you choose to have, and you can sometimes make it technically impossible to use your product with other people's - but that has nothing to do with your ability to restrain post sale use by law or contract. This is why this aspect of EULAs has never been tested in the courts. It will be struck down as soon as it is. The contract will be unenforceable because it will be anticompetitive behaviour on the part of the supplier.
This is just wrong, at least in Europe. It is not the way the law is. Post sale restrictions on use are unlawful under competition law. You can see why: once you allow them, you will be allowing linked sales and all kinds of other undesirables. There is no way any EULA which forbids you to run bought software on the machine of your choice will hold up in court. Which is why it has never been tested. Calling it a license doesn't make any difference.
"No one would bother to buy a Mac if they could just grab a copy of Tiger and slap it on their PC at home..."
So, what we have to do is make them buy hardware they don't want, so they can run an OS they do. That way we will make friends and influence people and...increase our market share to previously unknown levels, and keep our shareholders happy indefinitely?
Well no, it doesn't ignore it, but it does make a judgment about it. It says that the inevitable result of this, in the market as it actually is, is to make yourself a niche player. People keep repeating that Apple is a hardware company, as if this was a fact rather than a strategy. The question is not whether they are following this strategy, the question is whether it is the right one and where it will lead. What it has done, and the clones episode showed that, is to permit them to avoid dealing with their uncompetitively high cost position as a hardware manufacturer. But there has been a high price: loss of market share. Now, do we really think - do they really think - there is a long term ecological niche for a high cost hardware manufacturer in the PC business? I remain sceptical. It seems even more doubtful if you consider that from here on in, their boxes will contain absolutely standard components, and be subject to Photoshop speed tests about which there can be absolutely no argument.
On the other hand, I think the Lord has miraculously given them a second chance in the OS market due to security issues and the temporary advantage of X. However, like other stiff necked people in history, they seem determined to spurn it. But if they do, I don't suppose he'll give them a third chance!
Yes, this is characteristic, but its surely not the real and most important difference in terms of outcomes? The real difference is the business model. Apple's model was and is to only let you run the OS on their hardware. This ensured that when the market raced away, they could only supply a tiny fraction of it. MS's model was to sell to anyone to run it on anything. Lots of hardware suppliers then entered the market. The result was that there were no supply constraints at all. Put it another way: the practical result of the Apple business model was to force most of its potential customers to buy from someone else. They just could not keep up with demand. This ensured they would become a niche platform, with all the consequences of that. Alas, they seem to be about to repeat history....
The moral at the level of strategy is this. When creating a booming market with a great product, ask yourself how all the demand will be met. You have to find a way to meet it yourself. Otherwise, someone else will. Apple didn't realise this. They thought their problem was stopping people running the OS on other hardware. Once you have seen the wrong problem, its very hard to recover.
Question: if going from 15% market share to 2% in a straight line over 15 years is success, what would failure look like? This is what happens when you can't bear to become cost competitive, and you accept share loss as the penalty. But at some point, it stops. Its like the housing ATM for a homeowner who won't cut expenses.
By the way, on clones, what we are about to see in the market is going to be very similar in its effects to clones, but worse. The customer is going to see two identically specified machines. His next question is going to be, what software is bundled, and whats the price? If you didn't like clones, you're going to hate this! The underlying problem is, if you have an uncompetitive cost position, long term, there is no alternative to fixing it. But, having been there, I do understand how difficult people find this.
Its characteristic of failing management teams and their supporters that the terms of the argument change as the market changes, in order to defend the status quo. The strategy stays the same, the results continue to show it failing, but the justification changes. I once worked for a company which refused to move to 16 bit processors, and heard the arguments move from '8 bits is the latest thing' through 'you can do everything you need to with 8 bits' to 'all people are running on our hardware is WP, and that only needs 8 bits'.
Shortly after that last argument was generally accepted (internally) they went broke.
Most of the arguments about freeing X are in this category. The most striking example is people who claim that Apple is not competing with Dell or Microsoft, because it is offering tightly coupled hardware and software in a controlled experience for the user.
What is wrong with this argument is that it confuses a strategy with a market segment. Consider the argument on e-world. e-world was in a different market segment from the ISPs, because it offered a tightly controlled environment of bundled content and commications. Wrong. That was the strategy it was pursuing. Similarly, Apple is pursuing a strategy of competing with MS, Dell and the other hardware vendors by offering its tightly controlled whatever. But it is in the same market. Its just that its offerings and this strategy appeal to a very small proportion of the market, which explains why share has falled from 10% or so 10 years ago to 2% last year.
The problem it has is not justifying the strategy that produced this decline, but changing that strategy to one that will allow them to compete better. If something fails for 10 years in a row, it is probably not going to turn around with more of the same.
Now, there will be those who will say that market share doesn't matter, our strategy is to be a niche player. Yes, this is another argument which failing management teams commonly use. It is the tactic of claiming that the undesired outcome of a strategy is the new purpose of it.
The capacity for self deception among people in charge of a failing business is enormous, and their inertia is probably the greatest threat. What you have to do is not accept and justify what the market does to your strategy, but plan, act and change it. Otherwise, what are you paid for? Administration?
Few people are arguing that it was wrong to move to Intel, I'm certainly not. The argument is that it will make no material difference to the market share numbers, as long as the hardware is kept proprietary. Dual booting will not make a material difference either. The reason is that the cause of the decline is closed source, expensive and limited hardware. The model of closed source hardware and a proprietary OS is dying. This is what the last 10 or 15 years market share numbers show. The fact that Apple cannot meet demand is also a sign of this - it is definitely not a mark of success. What it shows is that the business model will not let them capitalise on their potential. The sign of a failing management team is that, confronted with such issues in a key product line, they are unable to tackle the underlying problem, and continue with business as usual in the hope something turns up. This is what the latest moves suggest to me. Its a very clear prediction: either they open the hardware, in which case they bet the company, and the jury is out, or they keep it closed, in which case Apple may do fine, but the computer product line will continue the decline of the last 10 years.
Its a question. I think the law will turn out to be, if anyone ever tests it in court, that what counts is the working of the thing and not its labelling. The law really has been that you cannot restrain post sale use. So, for instance, if you buy a garden tool that is meant to be used as an attachment to a proprietary handle, the maker cannot stop its use on other handles, nor can he restrain the distribution of the other handle except by patents. If it is lawful to make and sell the handles, it is also lawful to sell and promote them to take the tool attachment.
I think the issue with upgrades will depend on the working. If something marked 'upgrade' installs as an independent OS, then I doubt it will be possible to restrain what it runs on. Of course, this doesn't mean it will be lawful to run two copies while getting your upgrade for nothing, or for a discount. The problem there will be simply that what you have bought is one copy and not two.
So, if Intel X is sold in the store, and will install on generic hardware, it is probably not going to be possible to restrain people from doing that. You notice that EULAs post purchase restraints have not been tested in the courts in Europe, and I doubt they ever will be. The suppliers know they will lose. Of course, it doesn't stop people writing all kinds of conditions in the EULA, but it does stop them enforcing them legally.
The problem, as far as competition law is concerned, is that it is a variant of using linked sales as a restraint on competition. This, at least in Europe, is not on.
Thought long and hard about why this is so great. Or why it matters at all. It looks like a solution without a problem. There are lots of issues with the current generation of Macs, but none of them are the fact that they cannot run Windows. The problem Apple has is exactly the reverse: standard Intels cannot run X. So what is this really about? Surely no-one thinks that if this still holds true of the production models, it will increase the sales of Macs? It will not. No large numbers of people are going to buy the hardware to run XP on it. It will not solve the fundamental underlying problem: too little market share for the OS, because it will only run on proprietary hardware that people are not buying in great enough numbers, mainly because it is too expensive. Also because it is too closed. Well, it will still be too expensive, and it will still be closed. It is a failed business model. The model that is working is open hardware. All the rest is distractions. The worrying thing is that the DRM stuff suggests that maybe Cupertino is still distracted. What we seem to be seeing is a management team consistently failing to confront their stratetic problem in a main line of business. And their community failing to confront it too....
It is very doubtful, at least in Europe, that an EULA forbidding one to run a purchased operating system on the hardware of one's choice will be legally enforceable. In general, the European competition legislation has prevented almost all post sale restrictions on use. The general position is, you buy it, you use it as you like. This doesn't mean you can run more than one copy at once. But it does mean Apple will not be able to tell you what to run that one copy on. The same applies by the way to running Office under Wine.
And it will not matter if you call the sale a license....
I probably wasn't clear. I was proposing to do away with Windows totally. There is almost no money, so buying any more Windows or any other sort of software is out of the question. Even $50 of networking stuff is a stretch. This is a real poor local museum! Then install Skole Linux, which is Debian educational, in Server mode on the one decent machine. The others then boot from it. If you read the material about this configuration in educational environments, the claim is that the performance is acceptable if you are using typical office type apps, and that it has saved schools a lot of money. It would be interesting to know if anyone has any reason to think this is a bad idea before I get started. It would be embarrassing to be halfway through in full sight of everyone and discover it is just too slow! I don't know anyone who has had practical experience with it.
It hadn't occurred to me to use BSD and Windowmaker in standalone mode, but that is an interesting alternative and I can have a go.
The thread is very critical of thin clients, but its not very clear why. Here is the case I am looking at: a museum with no money, and 3 old windows machines, plus one reasonably fast recent one. They would like to give the public access to their catalogue, run some kind of shared calendar for the various volunteers who staff the place. At the moment one of the old machines is in storage, the fast machine is in the office but used only a couple of days a week when their secretary comes in and does mail and accounts, one runs their catalogue, but since it is Win98 and has no security they cannot let the public use it...
What I am thinking is, use Skole Linux, buy cheap network cards, and run three thin clients off the fast recent machine. Is this not a case where without spending hardly any more money the institution gets a lot more functionality out of what it already has? And may there not be lots of public sector/charity cases where this sort of thing applies? Or is there something about thin clients or Skole Linux that I don't know?
I've only looked closely at the WP and Database components. People are underestimating the WP component, perhaps because it is so different from OO. It is frame oriented. I don't know about stability, but if it is stable, it will be quite a lot easier both to publish with, and to use as a long document outliner, manage sections and styles and so on. It isn't a Word replacement, this is a different animal. Its a combined outliner and desktop publisher. Lyx is the other alternative in this kind of thing, but its a very steep learning curve.
On the Database, the problem is documentation. There basically doesn't seem to be any. The end user, for whom it seems to be designed, is going to need some. It looks the part in terms of design, but when you read it is meant to compete with Filemaker, you expect real point and click configuration. I know Filemaker is usually despised by real coders, but the fact is, a non-programmer can construct a simple database application that looks pretty and works and will accomodate quite big files. I am not sure that Kexi will meet this need. For example - compare stating how many characters a field will accomodate, with the way you make field scrolling in FM. From an end user point of view, there is a world of difference.
Another example - how does one use scripts? FM has what everyone will feel is that really childish point and click script writer. But it works!
Conclusion: higher marks for Writer, but probably lower for Kexi, than most people rate.
This is simply not my experience. I am 'supporting' several people who are using desktop Linux. They are using it both professionally and personally. For internet access, mail, web and so on, for archiving photographs, and for writing. One of them is routinely writing quite long books on it. Maybe the word 'support' is an exaggeration, the support needed is actually minimal, and is not really Linux support - I spend more time explaining how to use spreadsheets or word processing to do what they want than on how to use the system, which seems to be rather intuitive for them. This is now Suse 9.2, both Gnone and KDE. I can't see there is much difference explaining to them how to do reformatting in OpenOffice versus MS Word, or how to do attachments in KMail versus Outlook. At their level of use, the differences in the interface between OO and Word or Excel are minimal.
I also sometimes have to help a friend who is on OS X, and contrary to the usual story, he finds changing his system, getting wireless and ADSL running, no easier than the people on Linux, and I'm struck by how much of what is supposed to be user friendly actually puzzles and confuses him.
Where I have noticed a loss of usability is that when one of my people was on the old Mac Classic, I hardly ever got any calls. Linux generates more. But this is probably because he's doing more complicated things with the applications, rather than because of the OS, and I think either Windows or OS X would generate just as many. More if you count the security issues. Linux, at least Suse 9.2, and Mandrake 9.2 before that, just works.
It is true that these are middleaged people, and they are not at all sophisticated in their demands, they are not kids trying to play games, and they don't have electronic organisers which have to be synchronised. But at least from this experience, the stories about the difficulties of ordinary people using Linux on the desktop are simply myths.
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I am only saying, and this will be my last word, that if they do not want to do this, as the law stands, their only recourse is to make it technically impossible. They cannot, as the law stands, prevent it by conditions of sale. Like it or lump it, those are the facts.
Margaret Fuller: I have decided to accept the universe.
Thomas Carlyle: Madam, you'd better!
The second question is whether companies OUGHT to be able to stop you using products in certain ways after you have bought them by conditions on sale. Should we change the law? The answer is no. Competition is generally good, and we don't allow anti competitive behaviour for that reason. You do not want to live in a society in which MS can prohibit you from running Office on Wine, or GM tell you what tires to use, or Wolf tell you what handles to use for their hoe attachments. These kinds of things are what you let in if you allow conditions of sale to limit product use. They are bad.
The third question is whether, if Apple's business model depends on your buying Apple hardware, you are being immoral in running X on non-Apple hardware, even if you totally comply with the law, including the law of copyright. The answer is no. It is up to Apple to adopt viable business strategies, taking account of the law and how people want to use their products. Buyers have no moral obligations to make sure any particular strategy works in the marketplace. The customer will buy and then use the product how he wants, and he is always right.
Now, faced with these circumstances, Apple may choose to use DRM or other technical means to stop X working on non-Apple hardware. They have a perfect right to do that. Whether this is wise from a business point of view or technically feasible is immaterial. They do have the legal power. But this is the only way they are going to stop it. Conditions on sale will not and should not stop it.
But to answer the fundamental point: should we respect and encourage Apple's strategy - closed source hardware and an OS tied to it. Not particularly. It makes life easy for Cupertino, but it raises prices and it diminishes competition. This may seem mistaken. But think: if you are the CIO of a big company, you will not give your desktops to a single source company with repeated supply problems and a history of overpricing. So, closed source hardware is a way of driving the customer to Microsoft. We, the economy in general, don't benefit from this. So we should not particularly respect Apple's strategy.
The two things add up to one conclusion. We don't want a society in which post sales restraints on use are lawful. And we don't particularly want to make it easy for Cupertino. So, there is neither a moral nor a legal reason why we should accept Apple telling us what to run X on.
Now, if they make it technically impossible, that's their right. But if they don't, take the same approach you would to Office under Wine, and do what you feel like doing.
No, you are just wrong about this. The issue is a very simple one, its the issue of a company's power to restrain by condition only how you use what you have bought. Its not about their ability to restrain use technically by product features. Nor is it about piracy or copyright. In the same way that Apple cannot restrain by condition what kind of machine you install on, so MS cannot stop you running Office on Wine. Neither can Ford stop you installing a GM branded tape deck, or carpets, or whatever, in a Ford car. Ford can of course make connectors so that the other tape decks won't fit. That's completely different. You cannot restrain post sale use of products solely by conditions of purchase, and the world is a better place because you cannot.
Apple Macs still will be a closed system. OSX needn't be. The problem though is the demands of the hardware and the software pieces push in different directions. If you have a hardware division it will want to compete with other hardware suppliers, which means get the costs out and sell with whatever OS people want to buy. If you have an OS division, it will want to sell as many as possible, so it will want all features equally good for all platforms and won't favour the in house manufacturer. Its the same kind of thing that sunk people offering bundles of content and network access. The different bits pulling in different directions. But the alternative is retreat to the high price niche, which is what they seem to be doing, and the jury is still out on whether that's sustainable long term.
So, they may have a patent on the template. Fine. They may make it technically impossible to use the template to make others. Fine. They may have copyright on the template. Fine. Or, they may have none of the above, and just have a condition which you assent to by buying that says you won't use it to do various things which it is perfectly capable of doing. Bring them on, you say. Here I am living in the EC, pick a court of your choice, and watch the fun. It will never fly.
No, no, no. People keep on saying this, but it is not true. Name one EC case in which post-sale restrictions on use have been upheld by the EC courts. Name one EC case in which the provisions of a EULA forbidding installation on a particular type of machine, or restricting how one copy is installed out of the box, have been upheld. You will not find it possible as a seller to penalise a buyer for using the product in a different way from the way you would like or with other products you do not like. There is no legally enforceable way to stop anyone from making and promoting hardware to run X. In the same way, there is no legally enforceable way to stop them running MS Office on Linux under Wine. And Sony could not enforce a CD/DVD EULA which forbad people to play its music or films on players made by anyone else. And Wolf could not enforce post sale contractual provisions which forbid you to use its garden tool attachments with other people's handles - though it might be able to patent the attachment method, and stop others making compatible tools or handles. People need to think straight about this. This is the same.
There are only two reasons why there may not be non-Apple hardware. One might be it will be technically feasible, but not make business sense, perhaps because the niche is too small and the hardware too specialised. Not very plausible. The second might be it is technically impossible or inconvenient to run X on non-Apple machines. Much more likely. EULA provisions forbidding it are, and are well known to be, unenforceable. At least in Europe.
This is the legal position. But it is probably also right. You will not actually want this sort of thing to be lawful, if you think about it. Do you really want a world in which post sales restraints could close down hardware manufacturers by forbidding the use of Windows on their products, though it runs perfectly? Or in which post sales restraints prohibit the use of any browser other than Explorer? Or in which you can only use Gillette razors with Gillette razor blades? Or Kodak cameras with Kodak film? Or some printers with the manufacturer's own ink? This is why competition law prohibits them. And this is why the only recourse is what Apple seems to be intending: making it technically impossible.
I do not think that is the way European competition law works. Don't know about anywhere else. The reason is, that linked sales are always anti-competitive, and this is why post sale restrictions are not enforceable. You cannot, for instance, sell a CD and forbid people to play it on any other player than one made by a given company. You cannot forbid people to use your drill bits on other drills. You can of course have any sort of market segment oriented pricing you choose to have, and you can sometimes make it technically impossible to use your product with other people's - but that has nothing to do with your ability to restrain post sale use by law or contract. This is why this aspect of EULAs has never been tested in the courts. It will be struck down as soon as it is. The contract will be unenforceable because it will be anticompetitive behaviour on the part of the supplier.
This is just wrong, at least in Europe. It is not the way the law is. Post sale restrictions on use are unlawful under competition law. You can see why: once you allow them, you will be allowing linked sales and all kinds of other undesirables. There is no way any EULA which forbids you to run bought software on the machine of your choice will hold up in court. Which is why it has never been tested. Calling it a license doesn't make any difference.
So, what we have to do is make them buy hardware they don't want, so they can run an OS they do. That way we will make friends and influence people and...increase our market share to previously unknown levels, and keep our shareholders happy indefinitely?
On the other hand, I think the Lord has miraculously given them a second chance in the OS market due to security issues and the temporary advantage of X. However, like other stiff necked people in history, they seem determined to spurn it. But if they do, I don't suppose he'll give them a third chance!
The moral at the level of strategy is this. When creating a booming market with a great product, ask yourself how all the demand will be met. You have to find a way to meet it yourself. Otherwise, someone else will. Apple didn't realise this. They thought their problem was stopping people running the OS on other hardware. Once you have seen the wrong problem, its very hard to recover.
By the way, on clones, what we are about to see in the market is going to be very similar in its effects to clones, but worse. The customer is going to see two identically specified machines. His next question is going to be, what software is bundled, and whats the price? If you didn't like clones, you're going to hate this! The underlying problem is, if you have an uncompetitive cost position, long term, there is no alternative to fixing it. But, having been there, I do understand how difficult people find this.
(1) how much market share do they think you have to have to be viable long term?
(2) what market share do they think Apple is going to have over the next five years?
I suspect the answers are something like 10-15%, and under 5%.
Thats if they don't free the OS. If they free it, who knows? There's a window of opportunity, and 20% might be possible.
The problem people have, users, in thinking about this, is that its not what I like. Its what will make the market buy, in enough quantity.
Shortly after that last argument was generally accepted (internally) they went broke.
Most of the arguments about freeing X are in this category. The most striking example is people who claim that Apple is not competing with Dell or Microsoft, because it is offering tightly coupled hardware and software in a controlled experience for the user.
What is wrong with this argument is that it confuses a strategy with a market segment. Consider the argument on e-world. e-world was in a different market segment from the ISPs, because it offered a tightly controlled environment of bundled content and commications. Wrong. That was the strategy it was pursuing. Similarly, Apple is pursuing a strategy of competing with MS, Dell and the other hardware vendors by offering its tightly controlled whatever. But it is in the same market. Its just that its offerings and this strategy appeal to a very small proportion of the market, which explains why share has falled from 10% or so 10 years ago to 2% last year.
The problem it has is not justifying the strategy that produced this decline, but changing that strategy to one that will allow them to compete better. If something fails for 10 years in a row, it is probably not going to turn around with more of the same.
Now, there will be those who will say that market share doesn't matter, our strategy is to be a niche player. Yes, this is another argument which failing management teams commonly use. It is the tactic of claiming that the undesired outcome of a strategy is the new purpose of it.
The capacity for self deception among people in charge of a failing business is enormous, and their inertia is probably the greatest threat. What you have to do is not accept and justify what the market does to your strategy, but plan, act and change it. Otherwise, what are you paid for? Administration?
Few people are arguing that it was wrong to move to Intel, I'm certainly not. The argument is that it will make no material difference to the market share numbers, as long as the hardware is kept proprietary. Dual booting will not make a material difference either. The reason is that the cause of the decline is closed source, expensive and limited hardware. The model of closed source hardware and a proprietary OS is dying. This is what the last 10 or 15 years market share numbers show. The fact that Apple cannot meet demand is also a sign of this - it is definitely not a mark of success. What it shows is that the business model will not let them capitalise on their potential. The sign of a failing management team is that, confronted with such issues in a key product line, they are unable to tackle the underlying problem, and continue with business as usual in the hope something turns up. This is what the latest moves suggest to me. Its a very clear prediction: either they open the hardware, in which case they bet the company, and the jury is out, or they keep it closed, in which case Apple may do fine, but the computer product line will continue the decline of the last 10 years.
I think the issue with upgrades will depend on the working. If something marked 'upgrade' installs as an independent OS, then I doubt it will be possible to restrain what it runs on. Of course, this doesn't mean it will be lawful to run two copies while getting your upgrade for nothing, or for a discount. The problem there will be simply that what you have bought is one copy and not two.
So, if Intel X is sold in the store, and will install on generic hardware, it is probably not going to be possible to restrain people from doing that. You notice that EULAs post purchase restraints have not been tested in the courts in Europe, and I doubt they ever will be. The suppliers know they will lose. Of course, it doesn't stop people writing all kinds of conditions in the EULA, but it does stop them enforcing them legally.
The problem, as far as competition law is concerned, is that it is a variant of using linked sales as a restraint on competition. This, at least in Europe, is not on.
Thought long and hard about why this is so great. Or why it matters at all. It looks like a solution without a problem. There are lots of issues with the current generation of Macs, but none of them are the fact that they cannot run Windows. The problem Apple has is exactly the reverse: standard Intels cannot run X. So what is this really about? Surely no-one thinks that if this still holds true of the production models, it will increase the sales of Macs? It will not. No large numbers of people are going to buy the hardware to run XP on it. It will not solve the fundamental underlying problem: too little market share for the OS, because it will only run on proprietary hardware that people are not buying in great enough numbers, mainly because it is too expensive. Also because it is too closed. Well, it will still be too expensive, and it will still be closed. It is a failed business model. The model that is working is open hardware. All the rest is distractions. The worrying thing is that the DRM stuff suggests that maybe Cupertino is still distracted. What we seem to be seeing is a management team consistently failing to confront their stratetic problem in a main line of business. And their community failing to confront it too....
And it will not matter if you call the sale a license....
http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/
It hadn't occurred to me to use BSD and Windowmaker in standalone mode, but that is an interesting alternative and I can have a go.
What I am thinking is, use Skole Linux, buy cheap network cards, and run three thin clients off the fast recent machine. Is this not a case where without spending hardly any more money the institution gets a lot more functionality out of what it already has? And may there not be lots of public sector/charity cases where this sort of thing applies? Or is there something about thin clients or Skole Linux that I don't know?
Another example - how does one use scripts? FM has what everyone will feel is that really childish point and click script writer. But it works!
Conclusion: higher marks for Writer, but probably lower for Kexi, than most people rate.
I also sometimes have to help a friend who is on OS X, and contrary to the usual story, he finds changing his system, getting wireless and ADSL running, no easier than the people on Linux, and I'm struck by how much of what is supposed to be user friendly actually puzzles and confuses him.
Where I have noticed a loss of usability is that when one of my people was on the old Mac Classic, I hardly ever got any calls. Linux generates more. But this is probably because he's doing more complicated things with the applications, rather than because of the OS, and I think either Windows or OS X would generate just as many. More if you count the security issues. Linux, at least Suse 9.2, and Mandrake 9.2 before that, just works.
It is true that these are middleaged people, and they are not at all sophisticated in their demands, they are not kids trying to play games, and they don't have electronic organisers which have to be synchronised. But at least from this experience, the stories about the difficulties of ordinary people using Linux on the desktop are simply myths.