As you point out, sales in relation to cost is one factor. MS bragged that Vista cost something like $6 billion to develop. It's certainly a flop by that standard.
The OP was comparing MS' license sales to Apple's Mac sales, which is a false comparison. MS makes all its money from license fees. Apple produces software in order to add value to its hardware sales. Apple brings in half MS' revenue from sales to 5% of the PC market. Certainly, comparing unit sales of their respective OS licenses is not useful.
Apple doesn't want to sell OS licensees to PC users, it wants to sell them Macs. It's doing far better selling Macs than it would if it were to trade its hardware business for 5% of Microsoft's software business and ineffectually scratch against the monopoly as NeXT, OS/2, BeOS, and Linux have.
Wrong: Apple didn't develop the Pippin, it was a product created by Japan's Bandai, a Mac OS licensee.
It was a packaged as a high end (well, higher priced) game console to compete against other failed attempts to provide something more than a game console and less than a computer, largely aimed at accessing the Internet.
The failure of the Pippin was no more Apple's fault than the failure of the WinCE-based Gametrac was Microsoft's fault.
In addition, the other circumstances of 1995 and 2008 are a bit different too. For example, we now have fairly common WiFi rather than only dialup, so you can download games rapidly. Apple has also changed from a weak PC ghost to a consumer electronics powerhouse with its own retail outlets.
Interestingly, Apple's iPod Touch/iPhone compare pretty well against the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP as a gaming platform:
Well if you're going to translate your anecdote into data point, you'd need to supply some control information: is this somebody who lives in a safe neighborhood where there is little real threat? How many neighbors are getting broken into?
How much difference does the security company provide in the case of a real break-in (ie, what's the crime prevention rate, what's the catch the thief rate, what's the get your shit back rate? ) and how does that compare with just having a sign that says you have a security system?
With no numbers at my fingers, I'd say that if you're in a fairly safe location, having a sign or a fake camera would provide you with something like 80% of the benefits of a real security system, at about 1% of the cost. Now, if you have a real crime problem, or if the criminals know that everyone has a fake security sign posted, having that sign isn't going to be very useful at all.
In other words, there's no way to say as a general rule of thumb how effective a security system (or pretending you have one) is. That makes this entire threat fairly silly, because everyone seems to be assuming that the Guardian's fairly loose wording and statistics isn't just bullshit.
It's easy to present statistics that back up your bias, and clearly the Guardian wants to say that these cameras are doing nothing. What would be more interesting is to see a real study of how cameras affect crime rates. From those I've read, it appears that they are effective at moving crime elsewhere. If you set up enough, and police them to the point where they are more than a fake deterrent, than it would seem like they could be used to help move crime out of an entire downtown area, and perhaps catch or solve the crime that continues. Even a small help would be valuable.
If the worry is big brother surveillance, it's important to realize that cameras aren't needed for that, so fighting cameras instead of the real problem isn't the solution.
what magical "legal team" can proactively defuse petty lawsuits? If such a thing existed, one would think that corporations would buy them all up to avoid being hit by patent trolls, etc.
I don't like the idea of gettting red light tickets ( and I have before - i managed to hit the intersection just moments before it turned on a street where all the lights are timed to turn in sequence), but I REALLY don't like the idea of red light runners hitting me because the cops lack the resources to police them.
I also don't like the idea of a camera police state, but I REALLY don't like the idea of getting mugged, carjacked, or burgled and having no surveillance tapes that might possibly help in finding the perps, or perhaps helping to prevent crime in the first place.
One can quibble about the cost effectiveness of installing cheap cameras, but what metrics are there on the effectiveness of having a pair of cops walking around the neighborhood? Or six cops having doughnuts together?
It's easy to complain, but sometimes the flawed solution significantly beats inaction of any kind. That doesn't mean there's no room for dissent and questioning policy, but simply being able to craft a complaint does not mean that nothing should be done.
"I'd like to see those cameras made available to the public to scrutinize at their leisure. They would be effective if they were."
Are you nuts or just being funny? Do you think the community makes a good police force? Ever heard of a mob?
You'd have petty bitches using it to harass people, identity thieves and stalkers using it to spy on people, and spammers would find a way to inject ads into the feeds (cardboard signs?). You know, just like the Intarweb.
Making available clips of a crime might possibly help find assailants or witnesses (doubtful), but police work belongs to cops who are paid to do their job and assigned accountability (supposedly) for the work they do.
In any event, the primary goal of cameras isn't to solve crimes, but to prevent them, or at least move them to other areas. That's the same reason people put security cameras on their house. If it wasn't effective, it wouldn't be a big industry.
"When your at the top you just cant afford to innovate" is a total cop out. While it might take more balls to challenge the status quo once you own the game, it clearly is possible to be better than Microsoft has been.
Look at Apple's iPod: virtually unchallenged over the last 7-8 years. Yes there's competition, but none of it matters. Apple could have sat back and grown comfortable, releasing gold plated iPods or ones with graphics printed on the case or some other non-features, but that would have allowed others to catch up.
Instead, Apple chose to jump ahead several times when it was already on top. The iPod Mini was a super popular top seller when Apple dropped it and replaced it with the Nano. That took balls, and was widely criticized.
However, had Apple kept milking the Mini for another two years, the small players that came out in 2006-7 would have looked far more competitive than they did. Instead, Apple bumped the iPod ahead of everything and maintained its dominant share of the market. It's still growing in unit and dollar numbers in a rough economy where competitors are failing.
So could Microsoft have taken stronger stabs with Windows and its related APIs? It's a different market, but judging from the weak performance of its status quo maintenance strategy, it certainly should have done something more ballsy.
Unlike Apple's iPod, which resisted competition from larger and more entrenched rivals like Sony and MS, Microsoft's Windows is being eaten into by Mac sales and by community efforts with Linux. Microsoft is becoming the old Apple.
Windows Enthusiasts keep saying that, but what's the advantage to waiting three years for Microsoft to introduce another way to run Windows XP in Parallels/VMWare?
No there was lots of software to break. Photoshop and Office were key among them. All classic Mac OS apps prior to OS X needed significant rewriting to run well on Mac OS X.
What Apple did differently is to draw a line in the sand and offer compelling new frameworks that offered significant advantages to developers willing to target the entirely new Cocoa, while also bending backwards enough to meet developers in the middle in offering support for Carbon, which was largely the old Mac OS API.
The result was something Microsoft could have done if it cleaned up Win32 to the point of being usable while offering.Net as a clean and modern future platform. Instead, Win32 is full of bugs intentionally as an effort to run the SimCity from 1995, while.Net hasn't really offered the clean break it was supposed to. The result: Vistapocalypse!
Vista, Seven and Singularity bear a striking resemblance to mistakes in Apple's past: Copland, Gerswin and Taligent:
Maybe we should patent REALLY BAD IDEAS to prevent them from spreading. Of course, it's hard to imagine in advance that ISPs and a company like VeriSign would make a business from poisoning and subverting DNS.
UMPC is Microsoft's new name for its old tablet idea. It does not encompass mini Linux laptops like the EEE PC, ultra cheap Linux systems like the XO, WiFi handheld mobiles like the iPhone, very thin but expensive laptops like the MacBook Air, or any other products that might be ultra mobile but not from Microsoft.
Last year, UMPC units didn't sell a million units. That's why nobody is in any hurry to call their product a "UMPC." That, and its a stupid name that almost appears to be designed to prevent sales.
What exactly do you want to "run in Java," mobile phone games?
And as for Flash, the removal of nuisance ads from the web pretty much makes up for the loss of being able to see the handful of visualization elements done in SWF.
I would like to have a BT profile to use a slim keyboard with the iPhone for writing while traveling. That would make a great combination that's much lighter than a typical laptop and more practical than the joke UMPC/tiny laptops that try to do everything by doing it all poorly.
TFA seemed to be an ad for Intel's Atom, which I'm not convinced will uproot the existing mobile dominance of ARM processors, particularly since the only real need for x86 compatible chips in mobile devices is to support Microsoft's inability to get Windows to run on other hardware.
Given that the most interesting and successful small devices are running Linux or Apple's OS X, the need for x86 processors in that space is not at all obvious. Why wait for Intel to catch up when literally hundreds of ARM licensees are now shipping 3 billion parts a year?
Also note that Intel lost something like $5 billion pouring money into the StrongARM business it got from DEC (and rebranded as XScale) before handing it to Marvell for a mere $600 M. If it couldn't beat TI in ARM processors, how can it expect to beat ARM with an inferior and more complicated processor design?
Anytime a trademark gets an indefinite article, it's in risk of being a common term.
Nobody is likely to ask a friend for "Kleenex," hoping to get a specific brand of tissue, but it is common to ask for "a kleenex," just as somebody might ask for "a bandaid."
People in various places also refer to "a frigidaire" or "a coke," and plenty of terms that started out as trademarks have been lost to common words: aspirin, cellophane, dumpster, escalator, nylon, linoleum, thermos, velcro, zipper.
And don't forget the Interstate road system, which was a huge socialist program that snuck through congress as a "defense" project because it could be used to truck around missiles.
Not many Capitalists would want to drive around a country where the means of transportation were maintained and tolled by private enterprise at market costs rather than shared as a socialized national expense.
Now if only California's High Speed Rail could figure out how to link itself up with war hysteria or terrorism ("trains are hard to shoot out of the sky or drive into a building!"), maybe it will get built in our lifetime too.
The "jPhone" was just an OpenMoko device with a poorly drawn iPhone interface clone photoshopped over the top.
Schwartz' Lighthouse design made some nice looking NeXTSTEP apps, but that has more to do with NeXT than anything Sun acquired. Have you seen Sun software? There isn't anything that doesn't look like ass, even if some of it is great underneath.
However, in the mobile arena, there isn't much great underneath AND it looks like ass. Look at the jPhone pics:
Most news and multimedia sites have switched from Apple, Microsoft and Real streaming formats to Flash during the past two years. And now Google is making available its FLA/AVI videos in YouTube as H.264, directly in response to Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch/Apple TV. And iTunes is seeding all paid video downloads as H.264. The BBC is also vending H.264 specifically for Apple's products to use its iPlayer content.
WMA and Real are and have been principally streaming formats, which is not what FLA video does. Flash is just a playback controller that presents On2-codec compressed video. And of course, Flash is now moving to H.264. As everything gains the native ability to play H.264, why will they need to now download another new version of Flash just to orchestrate things?
Presenting video the only useful thing Flash does (the other non-useful things are banner ads and HTML replacement on the web with a slow-to-load vector slideshow), and now that's growing obsolete.
The iPhone could "easily" support Flash if it either:
- used an old version that didn't properly render modern Flash content (like the Flash used in the PlayStation 3)
- used a Lite version of Flash that didn't render anything but a minor subset of Flash, and which will only work with basic FLA video players in its latest version (not officially out yet IIRC)
- used a completely reengineered, yet somehow backwards compatible version of Flash that perfectly ran PC targeted Flash content that currently plays like crap on the Mac with memory leaks and other bugs, but rewritten for the iPhone's ARM architecture with major integration into Apple's Cocoa Touch software.
So yeah, that'd be a piece of cake if Apple gave two shits about spending a year constructing a crutch to hold up Adobe's shitty platform that should go away and make way for a real reach Internet application platform such as HTML 5.
I don't think Apple is going to do that, and if Adobe could, they might have already fixed their Mac version.
It appears that you think is some sort of conspiracy, or that Apple has a moral obligation to devote its resources to supporting a shitty architecture that destroys the web, but only because there are a handful of useful things that could far more easily be redesigned to use standards that are already open.
Apple clearly had a choice. Between 1987 and 1993 it did very little to push the state of the art because it was selling Mac hardware hand over fist. During the same time Steve Jobs assembled at team at NeXT that did what Apple should have: delivered the next great thing. Apple only tried to copy NeXT with IBM and HP in the Taligent project, just as Microsoft is struggling to copy Mac OS X today with its Windows efforts. Microsoft even says as much.
Apple's OS wasn't a mess due to fate, and neither is Microsoft's today. Fate has nothing to do with it. Both simply dropped the ball and got passed up.
But thanks for the non sequitur / wishful thinking summation of your fantasy worldview. Makes for a brilliant conclusion to your thesis.
Apple could likely make just as much money with a slower rate of new products coming out. However, that would make it far easier for competitors to catch up.
Microsoft's second generation Zune, had it arrived a year earlier, would have been competitive hardware wise with the then current iPods. As it was, Apple's rapid upgrading left it looking like nothing special.
The old Apple of the late 80s basically stopped the frantic pace of upgrades, and that's exactly what allowed Microsoft to catch up over a ten year period from 1985-1995. The bumper sticker that said "Windows 95 = Mac 89" was funny, but the sad part was that Mac 89 wasn't so far behind Mac 95.
Now the tables are turned, and Microsoft is the one coasting along on past performance, allowing Apple to catch up and surpass it.
The points I was "trying to make" were pretty clearly outlined. Microsoft's best effort at delivering a cross platform architecture were a failure nobody could use.
You can complain that Mac OS X benefits from being newer, but the fact that NeXT delivered a fat binary, cross platform architecture YEARS before the joke of NT with less money, less clout, and less arrogance really just blows your house of cards down.
MS tried and failed. It's still failing. If WinCE were a victim of being from the late 90s, why was it so much shittier than mobile OSs from the early 90s, such as GO or Newton? And why hasn't it become usable after ten years of work?
Seriously, what makes you defend a worthless sheister company that has never done anything but hold back technology?
TPM was on the commodity Intel logic boards Apple used. Apple didn't use the TPM chips, and not all Macs have them, making them worthless for policing and/or locking down Mac OS X.
If you look at the approach MS took to support Itanium (IA64) and PC x86 (IA32), it really highlights why the company's cross platform efforts are so terrible.
IA64 uses EFI, but MS won't adopt EFI for IA32 until PCs are all EFI, probably Windows 7 in 2010 (if it's on time, hehe). That's another three years of core compatibility failure between the two platforms.
Also, 64bit x86 and 32bit x86 are similarly binary incompatible because of MS' engineering decisions.
Mac OS X is not only 64bit and EFI savvy, but there's no problem running the same software on 32/64 bit hardware, and there's even a smooth ramp between the PPC/Intel platforms. Apple even has their OS running on ARM, rather than a seperate "mobile version" that uses an entirely different kernel design, as MS did with WinCE.
So despite MS' mid 90s efforts to make NT cross platform, it was never really accomplished in a workable way (no equivalent to the late 80s NeXTSTEP running on all those platforms, nor the modern Universal Binary Apple is using), and that's why MS couldn't sustain it.
Saying there was "no real demand" for cross platform support is a bit silly. You could also say Bob was excellent, and just lacked "enough demand." There was "no real demand" for NT's cross platform features because IT WASN'T VERY GOOD.
Pippin was built and marketed by Bandai, not Apple. Bandai was acting as a (classic) Mac OS licensee, along with Pioneer (which never shipped anything IIRC) and Power Computing.
Blaming Pippin's failure on Apple is like blaming Gametrac's failure on Microsoft.
Also, Pippin was developed in 1995. Not only was that a very different market, but Apple was also a very different company headed toward ruin rather than being a top consumer electronics vendor with a significant retail store presence.
You might as well say the company would never build Apple TV because of the failure of the Quadra based iTV prototype of the same period.
Having said all that, it is somewhat unlikely that Apple would create another living room console to compete against the Wii/Xbox/PS3. Where's the opportunity to make any money?
What Apple is doing is shipping a handheld console: the iPhone and iPod Touch. They compare very favorably with the DS and PSP, which I profiled in an article on the subject:
Slashdot Mirror
As you point out, sales in relation to cost is one factor. MS bragged that Vista cost something like $6 billion to develop. It's certainly a flop by that standard.
The OP was comparing MS' license sales to Apple's Mac sales, which is a false comparison. MS makes all its money from license fees. Apple produces software in order to add value to its hardware sales. Apple brings in half MS' revenue from sales to 5% of the PC market. Certainly, comparing unit sales of their respective OS licenses is not useful.
Apple doesn't want to sell OS licensees to PC users, it wants to sell them Macs. It's doing far better selling Macs than it would if it were to trade its hardware business for 5% of Microsoft's software business and ineffectually scratch against the monopoly as NeXT, OS/2, BeOS, and Linux have.
Wrong: Apple didn't develop the Pippin, it was a product created by Japan's Bandai, a Mac OS licensee.
It was a packaged as a high end (well, higher priced) game console to compete against other failed attempts to provide something more than a game console and less than a computer, largely aimed at accessing the Internet.
The failure of the Pippin was no more Apple's fault than the failure of the WinCE-based Gametrac was Microsoft's fault.
In addition, the other circumstances of 1995 and 2008 are a bit different too. For example, we now have fairly common WiFi rather than only dialup, so you can download games rapidly. Apple has also changed from a weak PC ghost to a consumer electronics powerhouse with its own retail outlets.
Interestingly, Apple's iPod Touch/iPhone compare pretty well against the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP as a gaming platform:
iPhone 2.0 SDK: Video Games to Rival Nintendo DS, Sony PSP
Well if you're going to translate your anecdote into data point, you'd need to supply some control information: is this somebody who lives in a safe neighborhood where there is little real threat? How many neighbors are getting broken into?
How much difference does the security company provide in the case of a real break-in (ie, what's the crime prevention rate, what's the catch the thief rate, what's the get your shit back rate? ) and how does that compare with just having a sign that says you have a security system?
With no numbers at my fingers, I'd say that if you're in a fairly safe location, having a sign or a fake camera would provide you with something like 80% of the benefits of a real security system, at about 1% of the cost. Now, if you have a real crime problem, or if the criminals know that everyone has a fake security sign posted, having that sign isn't going to be very useful at all.
In other words, there's no way to say as a general rule of thumb how effective a security system (or pretending you have one) is. That makes this entire threat fairly silly, because everyone seems to be assuming that the Guardian's fairly loose wording and statistics isn't just bullshit.
It's easy to present statistics that back up your bias, and clearly the Guardian wants to say that these cameras are doing nothing. What would be more interesting is to see a real study of how cameras affect crime rates. From those I've read, it appears that they are effective at moving crime elsewhere. If you set up enough, and police them to the point where they are more than a fake deterrent, than it would seem like they could be used to help move crime out of an entire downtown area, and perhaps catch or solve the crime that continues. Even a small help would be valuable.
If the worry is big brother surveillance, it's important to realize that cameras aren't needed for that, so fighting cameras instead of the real problem isn't the solution.
what magical "legal team" can proactively defuse petty lawsuits? If such a thing existed, one would think that corporations would buy them all up to avoid being hit by patent trolls, etc.
I don't like the idea of gettting red light tickets ( and I have before - i managed to hit the intersection just moments before it turned on a street where all the lights are timed to turn in sequence), but I REALLY don't like the idea of red light runners hitting me because the cops lack the resources to police them.
I also don't like the idea of a camera police state, but I REALLY don't like the idea of getting mugged, carjacked, or burgled and having no surveillance tapes that might possibly help in finding the perps, or perhaps helping to prevent crime in the first place.
One can quibble about the cost effectiveness of installing cheap cameras, but what metrics are there on the effectiveness of having a pair of cops walking around the neighborhood? Or six cops having doughnuts together?
It's easy to complain, but sometimes the flawed solution significantly beats inaction of any kind. That doesn't mean there's no room for dissent and questioning policy, but simply being able to craft a complaint does not mean that nothing should be done.
"I'd like to see those cameras made available to the public to scrutinize at their leisure. They would be effective if they were."
Are you nuts or just being funny? Do you think the community makes a good police force? Ever heard of a mob?
You'd have petty bitches using it to harass people, identity thieves and stalkers using it to spy on people, and spammers would find a way to inject ads into the feeds (cardboard signs?). You know, just like the Intarweb.
Making available clips of a crime might possibly help find assailants or witnesses (doubtful), but police work belongs to cops who are paid to do their job and assigned accountability (supposedly) for the work they do.
In any event, the primary goal of cameras isn't to solve crimes, but to prevent them, or at least move them to other areas. That's the same reason people put security cameras on their house. If it wasn't effective, it wouldn't be a big industry.
"When your at the top you just cant afford to innovate" is a total cop out. While it might take more balls to challenge the status quo once you own the game, it clearly is possible to be better than Microsoft has been.
Look at Apple's iPod: virtually unchallenged over the last 7-8 years. Yes there's competition, but none of it matters. Apple could have sat back and grown comfortable, releasing gold plated iPods or ones with graphics printed on the case or some other non-features, but that would have allowed others to catch up.
Instead, Apple chose to jump ahead several times when it was already on top. The iPod Mini was a super popular top seller when Apple dropped it and replaced it with the Nano. That took balls, and was widely criticized.
However, had Apple kept milking the Mini for another two years, the small players that came out in 2006-7 would have looked far more competitive than they did. Instead, Apple bumped the iPod ahead of everything and maintained its dominant share of the market. It's still growing in unit and dollar numbers in a rough economy where competitors are failing.
So could Microsoft have taken stronger stabs with Windows and its related APIs? It's a different market, but judging from the weak performance of its status quo maintenance strategy, it certainly should have done something more ballsy.
Unlike Apple's iPod, which resisted competition from larger and more entrenched rivals like Sony and MS, Microsoft's Windows is being eaten into by Mac sales and by community efforts with Linux. Microsoft is becoming the old Apple.
How Microsoft has become the Beleaguered Apple â96
Windows Enthusiasts keep saying that, but what's the advantage to waiting three years for Microsoft to introduce another way to run Windows XP in Parallels/VMWare?
Windows Vista, 7, and Singularity: The New Copland, Gershwin, Taligent
No there was lots of software to break. Photoshop and Office were key among them. All classic Mac OS apps prior to OS X needed significant rewriting to run well on Mac OS X.
.Net as a clean and modern future platform. Instead, Win32 is full of bugs intentionally as an effort to run the SimCity from 1995, while .Net hasn't really offered the clean break it was supposed to. The result: Vistapocalypse!
What Apple did differently is to draw a line in the sand and offer compelling new frameworks that offered significant advantages to developers willing to target the entirely new Cocoa, while also bending backwards enough to meet developers in the middle in offering support for Carbon, which was largely the old Mac OS API.
The result was something Microsoft could have done if it cleaned up Win32 to the point of being usable while offering
Vista, Seven and Singularity bear a striking resemblance to mistakes in Apple's past: Copland, Gerswin and Taligent:
Well either way it was apparently informative, thanks.
Maybe we should patent REALLY BAD IDEAS to prevent them from spreading. Of course, it's hard to imagine in advance that ISPs and a company like VeriSign would make a business from poisoning and subverting DNS.
Flash Wars: Adobe in the History and Future of Flash
UMPC is Microsoft's new name for its old tablet idea. It does not encompass mini Linux laptops like the EEE PC, ultra cheap Linux systems like the XO, WiFi handheld mobiles like the iPhone, very thin but expensive laptops like the MacBook Air, or any other products that might be ultra mobile but not from Microsoft.
Last year, UMPC units didn't sell a million units. That's why nobody is in any hurry to call their product a "UMPC." That, and its a stupid name that almost appears to be designed to prevent sales.
CES: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
What exactly do you want to "run in Java," mobile phone games?
And as for Flash, the removal of nuisance ads from the web pretty much makes up for the loss of being able to see the handful of visualization elements done in SWF.
I would like to have a BT profile to use a slim keyboard with the iPhone for writing while traveling. That would make a great combination that's much lighter than a typical laptop and more practical than the joke UMPC/tiny laptops that try to do everything by doing it all poorly.
TFA seemed to be an ad for Intel's Atom, which I'm not convinced will uproot the existing mobile dominance of ARM processors, particularly since the only real need for x86 compatible chips in mobile devices is to support Microsoft's inability to get Windows to run on other hardware.
Given that the most interesting and successful small devices are running Linux or Apple's OS X, the need for x86 processors in that space is not at all obvious. Why wait for Intel to catch up when literally hundreds of ARM licensees are now shipping 3 billion parts a year?
Also note that Intel lost something like $5 billion pouring money into the StrongARM business it got from DEC (and rebranded as XScale) before handing it to Marvell for a mere $600 M. If it couldn't beat TI in ARM processors, how can it expect to beat ARM with an inferior and more complicated processor design?
ARM, x86 Chip Makers Fight to Ride Mobile Growth
Will Apple Rescue Intel's Silverthorne?
It's in the title of a Prince song, so presumably it's a poetic reference to a vagina.
Anytime a trademark gets an indefinite article, it's in risk of being a common term.
Nobody is likely to ask a friend for "Kleenex," hoping to get a specific brand of tissue, but it is common to ask for "a kleenex," just as somebody might ask for "a bandaid."
People in various places also refer to "a frigidaire" or "a coke," and plenty of terms that started out as trademarks have been lost to common words: aspirin, cellophane, dumpster, escalator, nylon, linoleum, thermos, velcro, zipper.
And don't forget the Interstate road system, which was a huge socialist program that snuck through congress as a "defense" project because it could be used to truck around missiles.
Not many Capitalists would want to drive around a country where the means of transportation were maintained and tolled by private enterprise at market costs rather than shared as a socialized national expense.
Now if only California's High Speed Rail could figure out how to link itself up with war hysteria or terrorism ("trains are hard to shoot out of the sky or drive into a building!"), maybe it will get built in our lifetime too.
The "jPhone" was just an OpenMoko device with a poorly drawn iPhone interface clone photoshopped over the top.
Schwartz' Lighthouse design made some nice looking NeXTSTEP apps, but that has more to do with NeXT than anything Sun acquired. Have you seen Sun software? There isn't anything that doesn't look like ass, even if some of it is great underneath.
However, in the mobile arena, there isn't much great underneath AND it looks like ass. Look at the jPhone pics:
Sun Tries to Jump on iPhone Bandwagon with jPhone
WMA and Real are and have been principally streaming formats, which is not what FLA video does. Flash is just a playback controller that presents On2-codec compressed video. And of course, Flash is now moving to H.264. As everything gains the native ability to play H.264, why will they need to now download another new version of Flash just to orchestrate things?
Presenting video the only useful thing Flash does (the other non-useful things are banner ads and HTML replacement on the web with a slow-to-load vector slideshow), and now that's growing obsolete.
The iPhone could "easily" support Flash if it either:
- used an old version that didn't properly render modern Flash content (like the Flash used in the PlayStation 3)
- used a Lite version of Flash that didn't render anything but a minor subset of Flash, and which will only work with basic FLA video players in its latest version (not officially out yet IIRC)
- used a completely reengineered, yet somehow backwards compatible version of Flash that perfectly ran PC targeted Flash content that currently plays like crap on the Mac with memory leaks and other bugs, but rewritten for the iPhone's ARM architecture with major integration into Apple's Cocoa Touch software.
So yeah, that'd be a piece of cake if Apple gave two shits about spending a year constructing a crutch to hold up Adobe's shitty platform that should go away and make way for a real reach Internet application platform such as HTML 5.
I don't think Apple is going to do that, and if Adobe could, they might have already fixed their Mac version.
It appears that you think is some sort of conspiracy, or that Apple has a moral obligation to devote its resources to supporting a shitty architecture that destroys the web, but only because there are a handful of useful things that could far more easily be redesigned to use standards that are already open.
Gone in a Flash: More on Appleâ(TM)s iPhone Web Plans
Apple clearly had a choice. Between 1987 and 1993 it did very little to push the state of the art because it was selling Mac hardware hand over fist. During the same time Steve Jobs assembled at team at NeXT that did what Apple should have: delivered the next great thing. Apple only tried to copy NeXT with IBM and HP in the Taligent project, just as Microsoft is struggling to copy Mac OS X today with its Windows efforts. Microsoft even says as much.
Apple's OS wasn't a mess due to fate, and neither is Microsoft's today. Fate has nothing to do with it. Both simply dropped the ball and got passed up.
But thanks for the non sequitur / wishful thinking summation of your fantasy worldview. Makes for a brilliant conclusion to your thesis.
How Microsoft has become the Beleaguered Apple â96
Oh sorry, I didn't mean suggest anything positive with the phrase "past performance."
perform |pÉ(TM)rËfÉ"(É(TM))rm|
verb [ trans. ]
1 carry out, accomplish, or fulfill (an action, task, or function)
2 present (a form of entertainment) to an audience
"Did you see the show? It was an awful performance."
Apple could likely make just as much money with a slower rate of new products coming out. However, that would make it far easier for competitors to catch up.
Microsoft's second generation Zune, had it arrived a year earlier, would have been competitive hardware wise with the then current iPods. As it was, Apple's rapid upgrading left it looking like nothing special.
The old Apple of the late 80s basically stopped the frantic pace of upgrades, and that's exactly what allowed Microsoft to catch up over a ten year period from 1985-1995. The bumper sticker that said "Windows 95 = Mac 89" was funny, but the sad part was that Mac 89 wasn't so far behind Mac 95.
Now the tables are turned, and Microsoft is the one coasting along on past performance, allowing Apple to catch up and surpass it.
Windows Vista, 7, and Singularity: The New Copland, Gershwin, Taligent
innuendo and half-truths?
The points I was "trying to make" were pretty clearly outlined. Microsoft's best effort at delivering a cross platform architecture were a failure nobody could use.
You can complain that Mac OS X benefits from being newer, but the fact that NeXT delivered a fat binary, cross platform architecture YEARS before the joke of NT with less money, less clout, and less arrogance really just blows your house of cards down.
MS tried and failed. It's still failing. If WinCE were a victim of being from the late 90s, why was it so much shittier than mobile OSs from the early 90s, such as GO or Newton? And why hasn't it become usable after ten years of work?
Seriously, what makes you defend a worthless sheister company that has never done anything but hold back technology?
Why Did Apple Buy PA Semi?
TPM was on the commodity Intel logic boards Apple used. Apple didn't use the TPM chips, and not all Macs have them, making them worthless for policing and/or locking down Mac OS X.
If you look at the approach MS took to support Itanium (IA64) and PC x86 (IA32), it really highlights why the company's cross platform efforts are so terrible.
IA64 uses EFI, but MS won't adopt EFI for IA32 until PCs are all EFI, probably Windows 7 in 2010 (if it's on time, hehe). That's another three years of core compatibility failure between the two platforms.
Also, 64bit x86 and 32bit x86 are similarly binary incompatible because of MS' engineering decisions.
Mac OS X is not only 64bit and EFI savvy, but there's no problem running the same software on 32/64 bit hardware, and there's even a smooth ramp between the PPC/Intel platforms. Apple even has their OS running on ARM, rather than a seperate "mobile version" that uses an entirely different kernel design, as MS did with WinCE.
So despite MS' mid 90s efforts to make NT cross platform, it was never really accomplished in a workable way (no equivalent to the late 80s NeXTSTEP running on all those platforms, nor the modern Universal Binary Apple is using), and that's why MS couldn't sustain it.
Saying there was "no real demand" for cross platform support is a bit silly. You could also say Bob was excellent, and just lacked "enough demand." There was "no real demand" for NT's cross platform features because IT WASN'T VERY GOOD.
Windows Vista, 7, and Singularity: The New Copland, Gershwin, Taligent
Pippin was built and marketed by Bandai, not Apple. Bandai was acting as a (classic) Mac OS licensee, along with Pioneer (which never shipped anything IIRC) and Power Computing.
Blaming Pippin's failure on Apple is like blaming Gametrac's failure on Microsoft.
Also, Pippin was developed in 1995. Not only was that a very different market, but Apple was also a very different company headed toward ruin rather than being a top consumer electronics vendor with a significant retail store presence.
You might as well say the company would never build Apple TV because of the failure of the Quadra based iTV prototype of the same period.
Having said all that, it is somewhat unlikely that Apple would create another living room console to compete against the Wii/Xbox/PS3. Where's the opportunity to make any money?
What Apple is doing is shipping a handheld console: the iPhone and iPod Touch. They compare very favorably with the DS and PSP, which I profiled in an article on the subject:
iPhone 2.0 SDK: Video Games to Rival Nintendo DS, Sony PSP