And not just a competitor in selling similar products (search, email, etc), but also a competitive threat.
Yahoo owns Zimbra, the FOSS threat to Exchange. This is a cheap way for Microsoft to destroy a wide swath of open source products and projects Yahoo contributes toward.
The market has given Yahoo a low valuation based on its earnings and future outlook both as a company and in the current recession. It's the perfect time for Microsoft to exploit that to expand its monopoly power and kill off competition.
Even for shareholders who only care about money, the issue should be: since MS is going to be paying this "premium" with stock (it doesn't have enough cash), is the shell game price really a premium at all?
Because, somewhat obviously, Yahoo thinks it is worth more than its current market valuation.
Next year, the market's hypersensitivity in the outlook for tech could be replaced with optimism that brings Yahoo back up. The board may have some insight as to future profit potential as well, although it looks like there are no magic rabbits to pull out.
Today's value isn't the only thing they're looking at. If you were a homeowner sitting on a property greatly devalued by the current lending crisis, it wouldn't be a great deal to sell your house at a "market premium" if that price was only a premium due to the market being in a trough.
If you thought you could sell for substantially more by waiting for the market to bounce back, today's "market premium" wouldn't be attractive at all.
Actually, Google just ripped off Overture's technology and implemented it better. Yahoo bought Overture, and ended up giving Google a license to it in exchange for cash. It's not obvious that Yahoo ever did anything well, it just happened to be positioned well at a fortunate time in the development of the web.
That Yahoo is still around, and that Microsoft wants to buy it, really says something miraculous about the sustainability of bullshit and the absolute desperation/incompetence of Microsoft, which has been around trying to figure out the web longer than Google or Yahoo.
Try to fathom the reality that Microsoft's attempts to monopolize web search have failed despite its efforts to tie things to its OS/web browser. There is little reason for thinking that Microsoft+Yahoo would be even equal to the sum of its parts, but MS has little else available to buy and demonstrably can't build its own web strategy from scratch.
It's the stock buybacks that are eating up MS' cash reserve. Buying back your own stock is an admission you have nothing better to do with your money that give it back to your shareholders
Remember the words of Michael Dell wrt Apple? Apple isn't buying back its stock, it's buying new campuses, data centers, retail outlets, investing in building products to serve new markets, all of which are selling off the charts.
Microsoft is failing in every consumer electronics arena it enters. It's brightest star is the xbox, which has only made a few million in the last quarter after billions of losses. Sales have now plateaued, forcing the company back to release a new xbox generation and start spending again.
Vista might be shipping on some new PCs, but remember that nobody ever questioned Windows' ability to sell. It's a monopoly! Everyone expected MS to sell Vista without any hiccups. It was the consumer business and Windows Media/PlaysForSure, Zune, WinCE/Windows Mobile, Windows Embedded that were all on fire and sustaining deep losses. Microsoft can't sustain mild sales on Vista after spending billions to develop it over the last 6 years and having nothing really to show for all that.
Windows 7 won't show up for another three years, so Vista has to generate cash across that whole time period, not just ship on some new PCs. What's happening though, is that cheap PCs like the EEE and OLPC are running Linux, premium PC sales are getting eaten into by sales of Macs that are outpacing PC sales by 4x, and major vendors are begging to ship XP.
Microsoft's flat stock has been placid for a decade during record earnings boosted by automatic OEM PC sales in a period where the PC-box was the only game in town and there was no effective competition. MS is now being hit by competition at the low end and the high end, while also finding the PC market itself coasting along statically. Sales volumes are shifting toward mobile devices.
MS hasn't successfully delivered mobile devices anyone wants. UMPC was a huge failure, Windows Mobile is a joke. Now its facing the iPhone/iPod Touch and an array of smartphones from other vendors, without any viable game plan.
At some point, you can't say MS will survive on its good looks and personality alone, because its business is facing several points of failures. Yahoo knows that. It also knows that a MS takeover would gut the company and destroy shareholder value.
If I were starting a dry cleaning business, I couldn't rip off some internationally known corporate icon for a company that does some unrelated business and be okay just because I'm in a different industry and nobody would confuse our enterprises together. The point is, people might confuse the logos together, watering out the brand strength of the original.
Apple's logo doesn't have to be carbon copied in order to result in an infringing look alike. People are breathlessly panting "there's no bite missing!!" WTF? It's Apple's stylized icon with a swirl. Real apples don't look like that. And nothing about a green Apple logo with a swirl says "Big Apple."
That's the real point. You don't have to agree with Apple's lawyers (and I can't say that they are clearly right OR are even taking action that might be enough of a PR problem to offset any need to take IP action) to understand that.
Every Apple hater just crawled out of the woodwork to revile the company for a routine logo infringement complaint, just like they did when Safari popped up as an install option for Windows users who installed Apple's Software Update. Neither are issues, they're just lightning rods for hysterical haters.
The worst part is those who have to make up "this is the only way the world can be" declarations of corporate morality and compare Apple to a criminal outfit such as Microsoft. Too much.
Apple's logo challenge isn't about confusing businesses together, it's about complaining that logo looks similar to its own to prevent the loss or erosion of its trademarks.
Your comment that the conflict between Apple Computer and "Apple Music" was based on Apple "trying to assert that they were the only Apple in the world" betrays a gross ignorance of that situation. It was Apple Corps that repeatedly sued Apple and extorted millions of dollars over the use of the word apple in an unrelated business.
Similarly, this has nothing to do with the Big Apple slogan, as Apple has never challenged NYC over the use of that.
Similarly, your signature that liberals vote for feel good candidates while conservatives solve problems fails to account for why the Republicans like to hide behind idiot actors like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the vacuous dim bulb of business failures like President Bush, while failing to do anything to solve real problems, and instead creating new ones for Democrats to fix.
Reagan supplied the chemical WMDs to Sadam he used to kill Iraqi minorities. Bush II then attacked Iraq for being the dictator the right installed him to be against Iran, at tremendous expense to the country, and without planning any sort of exit strategy. Conservatives have been spending wildly with no accounting, terrorizing citizens, ripping up the Constitution, and converting the US from leader of the world into a fundamentalist group of nuts promoting an international inquisition and Holy Land crusade.
Clearly, you are chuck full of nuts, and can't manage to say anything that isn't bullshit.
Had you not said "the office where I work still has several OS9 computers running [...] they run slower on a brand new quadcore than they due on an old g4," I wouldn't have jumped to the conclusion you were talking out of your ass, particularly given the context of replying to a poster saying Classic sucked.
Had you said your workflow was slower, it would have made more sense. The details you supplied in your defense are more interesting than your original comment, so I don't feel too bad for coaxing them out of you, even if I was in error to jump all over your comment (and sorry for that).
Apple is sued daily by patent trolls, lawyers complaining that it advertises a diagonal display size that damages customers, and lots of other frivolous suits. However, we allow BS suits because we're all afraid we'll someday want to sue over something righteous and or profitable and won't be able to.
Until there is some miracle that removes legal bullshit from being a fact of life, you'll have to sort out your anger about reading that Apple has lawyers. Keep in mind that when Apple farts, it's newsworthy. You don't ever hear about 90% of the absurd legal cases that relate to other companies
In any case, Apple suing over a logo isn't really as evil as Microsoft being sued for being cheap and using known to be defective parts by lowest bidders in China that have resulted in Xbox units catching on fire, burning down houses, killing a baby, and burning a teen girl. And you probably didn't hear that Microsoft argued that the case was frivolous because the people should have known MS' cheap Chinese made shit might burn their house down.
What you probably did hear about was the iPod user who was hit by lightning, or the kid who got a burn from a defective battery. Don't make all your opinions based on what you're spoon fed by the ignorant media.
Apple's rainbow logo was thought up in 1976, when colors suggested technical capabilities (like the NBC peacock).
The gay rainbow flag first started in 1978, using colors that weren't in the real rainbow (ie, the rainbow from God). It wasn't a well known gay icon until much later, probably the mid 90s outside the gay community. Hawaii had no idea the rainbow had any gay connotation when it made its license plates, and many people even recently have associated it with "diversity" in general rather than man on man action.
The monochrome logo change was probably prompted in part by the gay association to rainbow colors, but also by then the rainbow icon looked a little dated anyway and Apple needed a fresh look to disassociate itself from mid 90s corporate failure, not homos.
It is somewhat funny that San Francisco bought a warehouse full of gay flags to put on Market Street, but because the 1978 colors were too difficult to print at the time, the gay flag was toned down to use a different set of easier to print colors.
Just recently, the Castro (gay neighborhood at the end of Market Street) put up a replacement version of its huge landmark flag using the original 1978 colors, so it no longer matches the rest of the flags on Market Street. Which shoots down the whole stereotype that gays are all well put together and can match colors.
I agree that there isn't a confusion between the two entities; however, the issue isn't Apple suing to stop NYC from using the idea of an apple. It's a simple one of Apple legal filing to contest a logo that has more than a little similarity to its own. It's not close to being exactly the same, but if Apple hadn't taken any action, it would not have much to stand on when a third party in the PC/MP3/smartphone/software business began using something just as similar.
Apple Corps sued Apple over its name in 1978, and the case was settled in 1981 with Apple paying $80,000 and agreeing to stay out of the music business.
In 1989, Apple Corps sued again over the Mac's ability to play back MIDI and the Apple IIGS, which incorporated an Ensoniq sound chip. Apple Corps had an electronics business that failed in 1968. Apple settled again, paying $26.5 million.
When Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes, Apple Corps sued again, but the group lost its case against Apple. The two came to an agreement that gave Apple the rights to the name, the freedom to run its business, and gave Apple Corps the freedom to use the Apple name as well through a licensing agreement from Apple. The amount Apple Corps got was not published.
All these frothing Apple critics that say the company persecuted the Beetles are uninformed.
Give him a break coward, he was probably on acid at the time.
In any event, the Lisa computer was named after a different Apple engineer's daughter anyway.
And seriously, Jobs would name a PC after his abandoned daughter and then seek to kill the PC? What a raving lunatic you are. Keep connecting the dots, genius.
The concept is that politically powerful people who live in NYC could be induced to start taking action on the issue of IP because of this tempest in a teapot.
NYC's own politicians are probably too busy with shit to care about another minor issue from some legal challenge.
You try so hard to malign Apple that it hurts. Good thing you're not very effective. Why not just jerk off furiously in your basement instead? Nobody gives a shit either way.
Apple and the Apple Corps were arguing over whether Apple could sell any PCs that had music capabilities, which was hardly an infringement of the music label's business, since it didn't sell any computer hardware or music gear.
Apple is acting here to stop a logo of an abstract apple outline logo that does look fleetingly similar. It's protecting a trademark logo. If it did not, it could eventually lose its rights to stop others from using the Apple name and logo in clearly infringing icons and brand names.
Your righteous indignation here is not a reaction to the event, but an opportunity you're taking to link up a company working to protect its trademarks with a company that has exercised its 20 year monopoly to cheat customers, delay the state of the art in technology, destroy competitors and prevent competing products from reaching the market, and flout the court's consent decrees it agreed to obey. There is no relation of any kind. Microsoft is criminal, Apple's lawyers are mildly irritating.
Wrong. The Beetles' Apple Corps wasn't any more related to Apple Computer's business than the Apple One temp agency or thousands of other businesses using the word apple.
Apple Corps went after Apple once it began making computers with music playback, hardly any infringement upon that label's business. That went back and forth for years, long before Apple began selling music in iTunes.
And Apple isn't going after NYC's slogan here, they're going after a new ad campaign with a new apple logo in the same 2D perspective. It's not an intentional rip off, but how many iconic 2D apple logo outlines can there be?
The Apple Corps used a photographic apple logo with proportions very different than Apple's iconic 2D apple outline logo. The NYC campaign looks like Apple's logo with a swoosh instead of a bite. Not exactly entirely frivolous, even if it is a worrisome sign of a world gone litigation nuts.
I think the bite in the Apple logo has been pointed out to be a play on a computer byte. I can't imagine Apple would do a tribute to Turing's death by linking the company's logo to the cause of death. That would be creepy.
That said, linking the idea of Apple products to thousands of banners around NYC advertising green efforts to recycle would be a marketing coup.
Apple isn't arguing that NYC can't use the term Big Apple. The suit is about a new ad campaign that uses an apple logo with a swirl. It does not look much like Apple's logo, but if Apple didn't work to defend its logos and trademarks vigorously, it could lose them, perhaps not Apple, but others.
If it never said anything about the NYC apple, then what about a about a company that recycled computers with a similar iconic apple logo? What about a company making Applee iPodds?
I agree with an early poster: Apple winning the seemingly frivolous action might generate enough attention to reform the rather insane IP laws in general.
Microsoft hasn't ever even described its concept for Windows 7, let alone began any serious work on it.
Vista was Microsoft's Copland, and 7 is its Gershwin. Apple shipped a developer release of Copland after four years of diddling, then pulled it back and recycled its feature set into Mac OS 8 and 9, and incorporated others into Mac OS X. Gershwin was never actually worked on, just floated as an upcoming release as a placeholder.
Similarly, "Windows 7" exists to take some of the heat off of Vista and suggest that a stopgap solution will be coming Real Soon Now. Unlike the old Apple, Microsoft released betas of Vista after four years of diddling, then kept working on it, scaled back features, and shipped something nobody wanted. There was far more excitement among Mac users for Mac OS 8 and 9 than there was among PC users for Vista.
The big difference is that Apple had an actual backup plan in place after buying NeXT in late 1996, and while it took a half decade to put together and ship Mac OS X, Apple had salable products to fill time in between (Mac OS 8, 8.5, 9). Microsoft not only lacks a serious product right now (driving PC users back to 2001's XP or into examining Linux), but it also clearly lacks any concrete plans for the future. Windows 7 is as vaporously devoid of specifics as it can be.
All Microsoft can talk about is Windows 7, which supposedly actually does what Vista promised but will only take 12 months to deliver instead of ~70, and Singularity, which floats some interesting concepts that are not even remotely close to being ready for any practical use. Talk about both only serves to distract from the disappointing reality of Vista.
Apple doesn't (and hasn't) ever removed the focus on its currently shipping version of Mac OS X to talk about something that's still two years off. Leopard didn't begin its marketing intro until Apple had its release set for 6 months out. Even despite pushing Leopard's release another ~8 months to ship the iPhone, that left the Leopard marketing little more than a year long effort, a full two years after the release of Tiger.
Microsoft begins talking about the next OS shortly before releasing its current version (XP hype began months before the release of 2000). Microsoft is always fixating attention two years out, not because it takes two years to deliver a release, but because it diverts attention from the shameful, non-competitive crap it's currently foisting upon the market.
Remember that MS took two years to get from Win95 to Win98, and then had to push out 98SE to make it actually work. Another two years brought WinME, which was dreadful. Win2000 was a good product, but was the result of a four YEAR effort to improve upon NT 4. Then a year later, Win2000 was merged with ME junk to deliver XP, a major and significant release but a relatively minor jump in technology, as indicated by the internal version number incrementing from 5.0 to 5.1. Then no new real updates for PC users until the disappointing Vista, which despite 6 years of work (and external hardware progress in the PC industry that should have made it faster), is still slow and suffers from backward compatibility problems.
If Vista can't run existing software flawlessly and support a wide range of PC hardware, how is some radical new version of Windows that has even less intrinsic backwards support (that is, relies on some sort of VM ghetto rather than providing native legacy support) in Windows 7 going to offer users any advantages?
And how is it that a company that has never introduced compelling operating system technology on anything close to an aggressive schedule is going to pull this off in some magically short time frame, when everything else the company has touched recently has turned into failure (Windows Mobile/WinCE, Windows Media, PlaysForSure, Vista, WHS, Surface, Zune, etc)?
Gates says Vista will have a replacement in a year, and everyone assumes that a significant new version of Windows will ship?
Remember that last year, Gates promised Surface by the end of the year. It couldn't ship that big ass table on time, and when it did, it turned out to be just what I said it would be: a hobbyist kit with dev tools forcing buyers to write the software end themselves. In other words, MS couldn't ship the software end as promised.
Sound familiar? It spent over year just getting Vista SP1 out, and that's largely a package of the security updates already released, not a major feature upgrade. Yet observers are warning people to wait for MS to fix SP1, because there's still lots of problems.
Remember Windows Home Server? Was supposed to arrive in 2006, but ended up getting reintroduced at CES 2007, still not ready. WHS is a simplified version of Windows Server with a web interface, not a substantial product.
Do we even need to point out that Longhorn Vista spent 6 years in gestation before being released to snores? New tech, but still swimming in old legacy and limited by decisions MS though would be a good idea until it actually got knee deep and realized it had optimized for the wrong problems. Many features, such as the fabled database file system, couldn't get figured out at all.
Microsoft has never delivered by Bill Gates' promises and timelines. Remember Cairo in 1991? Remember what NT was supposed to deliver? Why will Microsoft suddenly be able to fulfill Gates' announcements after never having been able to previously, even over the last couple years?
Remember that MS has recently failed to stay competitive with Windows Mobile, with Windows Media, with PlaysForSure, with the Zune, with WHS, etc. ad nauseam. Now suddenly after the failure of the Vista launch, why would anyone rush to believe the idea that Microsoft can successfully ship a buzzword-heavy, detail-light operating system update that offers significant reasons to upgrade, is delivered at a reasonable price, runs well on existing hardware, and does not introduce major new problems for existing users with existing software? That's insane.
Microsoft is trying to do damage control after having targeted Windows 7 for arrival sometime in 2011, using the "two years out" promises that the company has always given, but never keeps. Facing real competition for the first time ever, Microsoft is now forced to cut its lie in half and promise something so fantastically egregious that pundits have no choice but to repeat it.
The problem with your claim is that neither Classic nor OS 9 runs on "quadcore" or any other Intel Macs, so trying to say they run "slower than a G4" is pretty silly.
You'd need Quark 5 to run on Mac OS X at all (and an Intel Mac).
Classic apps ran in a ghetto, but didn't run any slower in Mac OS X than on Mac OS 9, and actually had better access to VM.
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And not just a competitor in selling similar products (search, email, etc), but also a competitive threat.
Yahoo owns Zimbra, the FOSS threat to Exchange. This is a cheap way for Microsoft to destroy a wide swath of open source products and projects Yahoo contributes toward.
The market has given Yahoo a low valuation based on its earnings and future outlook both as a company and in the current recession. It's the perfect time for Microsoft to exploit that to expand its monopoly power and kill off competition.
Even for shareholders who only care about money, the issue should be: since MS is going to be paying this "premium" with stock (it doesn't have enough cash), is the shell game price really a premium at all?
Because, somewhat obviously, Yahoo thinks it is worth more than its current market valuation.
Next year, the market's hypersensitivity in the outlook for tech could be replaced with optimism that brings Yahoo back up. The board may have some insight as to future profit potential as well, although it looks like there are no magic rabbits to pull out.
Today's value isn't the only thing they're looking at. If you were a homeowner sitting on a property greatly devalued by the current lending crisis, it wouldn't be a great deal to sell your house at a "market premium" if that price was only a premium due to the market being in a trough.
If you thought you could sell for substantially more by waiting for the market to bounce back, today's "market premium" wouldn't be attractive at all.
Actually, Google just ripped off Overture's technology and implemented it better. Yahoo bought Overture, and ended up giving Google a license to it in exchange for cash. It's not obvious that Yahoo ever did anything well, it just happened to be positioned well at a fortunate time in the development of the web.
That Yahoo is still around, and that Microsoft wants to buy it, really says something miraculous about the sustainability of bullshit and the absolute desperation/incompetence of Microsoft, which has been around trying to figure out the web longer than Google or Yahoo.
Try to fathom the reality that Microsoft's attempts to monopolize web search have failed despite its efforts to tie things to its OS/web browser. There is little reason for thinking that Microsoft+Yahoo would be even equal to the sum of its parts, but MS has little else available to buy and demonstrably can't build its own web strategy from scratch.
Why Does Microsoft Really Want Yahoo?
It's the stock buybacks that are eating up MS' cash reserve. Buying back your own stock is an admission you have nothing better to do with your money that give it back to your shareholders
Remember the words of Michael Dell wrt Apple? Apple isn't buying back its stock, it's buying new campuses, data centers, retail outlets, investing in building products to serve new markets, all of which are selling off the charts.
Microsoft is failing in every consumer electronics arena it enters. It's brightest star is the xbox, which has only made a few million in the last quarter after billions of losses. Sales have now plateaued, forcing the company back to release a new xbox generation and start spending again.
Video Game Consoles 2007: Wii, PS3 and the Death of Microsoftâ(TM)s Xbox 360
Vista might be shipping on some new PCs, but remember that nobody ever questioned Windows' ability to sell. It's a monopoly! Everyone expected MS to sell Vista without any hiccups. It was the consumer business and Windows Media/PlaysForSure, Zune, WinCE/Windows Mobile, Windows Embedded that were all on fire and sustaining deep losses. Microsoft can't sustain mild sales on Vista after spending billions to develop it over the last 6 years and having nothing really to show for all that.
Windows 7 won't show up for another three years, so Vista has to generate cash across that whole time period, not just ship on some new PCs. What's happening though, is that cheap PCs like the EEE and OLPC are running Linux, premium PC sales are getting eaten into by sales of Macs that are outpacing PC sales by 4x, and major vendors are begging to ship XP.
Microsoft's flat stock has been placid for a decade during record earnings boosted by automatic OEM PC sales in a period where the PC-box was the only game in town and there was no effective competition. MS is now being hit by competition at the low end and the high end, while also finding the PC market itself coasting along statically. Sales volumes are shifting toward mobile devices.
MS hasn't successfully delivered mobile devices anyone wants. UMPC was a huge failure, Windows Mobile is a joke. Now its facing the iPhone/iPod Touch and an array of smartphones from other vendors, without any viable game plan.
At some point, you can't say MS will survive on its good looks and personality alone, because its business is facing several points of failures. Yahoo knows that. It also knows that a MS takeover would gut the company and destroy shareholder value.
Why Does Microsoft Really Want Yahoo?
Yes, such is the danger of writing ambiguously.
No that's not "all there is to it."
If I were starting a dry cleaning business, I couldn't rip off some internationally known corporate icon for a company that does some unrelated business and be okay just because I'm in a different industry and nobody would confuse our enterprises together. The point is, people might confuse the logos together, watering out the brand strength of the original.
Apple's logo doesn't have to be carbon copied in order to result in an infringing look alike. People are breathlessly panting "there's no bite missing!!" WTF? It's Apple's stylized icon with a swirl. Real apples don't look like that. And nothing about a green Apple logo with a swirl says "Big Apple."
That's the real point. You don't have to agree with Apple's lawyers (and I can't say that they are clearly right OR are even taking action that might be enough of a PR problem to offset any need to take IP action) to understand that.
Every Apple hater just crawled out of the woodwork to revile the company for a routine logo infringement complaint, just like they did when Safari popped up as an install option for Windows users who installed Apple's Software Update. Neither are issues, they're just lightning rods for hysterical haters.
The worst part is those who have to make up "this is the only way the world can be" declarations of corporate morality and compare Apple to a criminal outfit such as Microsoft. Too much.
Apple's logo challenge isn't about confusing businesses together, it's about complaining that logo looks similar to its own to prevent the loss or erosion of its trademarks.
Your comment that the conflict between Apple Computer and "Apple Music" was based on Apple "trying to assert that they were the only Apple in the world" betrays a gross ignorance of that situation. It was Apple Corps that repeatedly sued Apple and extorted millions of dollars over the use of the word apple in an unrelated business.
Similarly, this has nothing to do with the Big Apple slogan, as Apple has never challenged NYC over the use of that.
Similarly, your signature that liberals vote for feel good candidates while conservatives solve problems fails to account for why the Republicans like to hide behind idiot actors like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the vacuous dim bulb of business failures like President Bush, while failing to do anything to solve real problems, and instead creating new ones for Democrats to fix.
Reagan supplied the chemical WMDs to Sadam he used to kill Iraqi minorities. Bush II then attacked Iraq for being the dictator the right installed him to be against Iran, at tremendous expense to the country, and without planning any sort of exit strategy. Conservatives have been spending wildly with no accounting, terrorizing citizens, ripping up the Constitution, and converting the US from leader of the world into a fundamentalist group of nuts promoting an international inquisition and Holy Land crusade.
Clearly, you are chuck full of nuts, and can't manage to say anything that isn't bullshit.
That's a lot of big words.
Using a thesaurus doesn't make you more intelligent, it just makes you a bigger asshole.
I don't need to defend my intelligence against an anonymous troll who serves as a broken record playing a song that isn't even catchy or interesting.
Hey retard,
I slow it down again for you:
People with money and influence live in NYC.
They're not the same people who run the city's business.
Both are involved in some sort of political job.
Sorry you're so easily confused, but if you don't get it yet, I'm not going to spend the time explaining it further.
I'm not being nice; I think you're an asshole.
Had you not said "the office where I work still has several OS9 computers running [...] they run slower on a brand new quadcore than they due on an old g4," I wouldn't have jumped to the conclusion you were talking out of your ass, particularly given the context of replying to a poster saying Classic sucked.
Had you said your workflow was slower, it would have made more sense. The details you supplied in your defense are more interesting than your original comment, so I don't feel too bad for coaxing them out of you, even if I was in error to jump all over your comment (and sorry for that).
The whole world has a problem with litigation.
Apple is sued daily by patent trolls, lawyers complaining that it advertises a diagonal display size that damages customers, and lots of other frivolous suits. However, we allow BS suits because we're all afraid we'll someday want to sue over something righteous and or profitable and won't be able to.
Until there is some miracle that removes legal bullshit from being a fact of life, you'll have to sort out your anger about reading that Apple has lawyers. Keep in mind that when Apple farts, it's newsworthy. You don't ever hear about 90% of the absurd legal cases that relate to other companies
In any case, Apple suing over a logo isn't really as evil as Microsoft being sued for being cheap and using known to be defective parts by lowest bidders in China that have resulted in Xbox units catching on fire, burning down houses, killing a baby, and burning a teen girl. And you probably didn't hear that Microsoft argued that the case was frivolous because the people should have known MS' cheap Chinese made shit might burn their house down.
What you probably did hear about was the iPod user who was hit by lightning, or the kid who got a burn from a defective battery. Don't make all your opinions based on what you're spoon fed by the ignorant media.
Apple's rainbow logo was thought up in 1976, when colors suggested technical capabilities (like the NBC peacock).
The gay rainbow flag first started in 1978, using colors that weren't in the real rainbow (ie, the rainbow from God). It wasn't a well known gay icon until much later, probably the mid 90s outside the gay community. Hawaii had no idea the rainbow had any gay connotation when it made its license plates, and many people even recently have associated it with "diversity" in general rather than man on man action.
The monochrome logo change was probably prompted in part by the gay association to rainbow colors, but also by then the rainbow icon looked a little dated anyway and Apple needed a fresh look to disassociate itself from mid 90s corporate failure, not homos.
It is somewhat funny that San Francisco bought a warehouse full of gay flags to put on Market Street, but because the 1978 colors were too difficult to print at the time, the gay flag was toned down to use a different set of easier to print colors.
Just recently, the Castro (gay neighborhood at the end of Market Street) put up a replacement version of its huge landmark flag using the original 1978 colors, so it no longer matches the rest of the flags on Market Street. Which shoots down the whole stereotype that gays are all well put together and can match colors.
I agree that there isn't a confusion between the two entities; however, the issue isn't Apple suing to stop NYC from using the idea of an apple. It's a simple one of Apple legal filing to contest a logo that has more than a little similarity to its own. It's not close to being exactly the same, but if Apple hadn't taken any action, it would not have much to stand on when a third party in the PC/MP3/smartphone/software business began using something just as similar.
Apple Corps sued Apple over its name in 1978, and the case was settled in 1981 with Apple paying $80,000 and agreeing to stay out of the music business.
In 1989, Apple Corps sued again over the Mac's ability to play back MIDI and the Apple IIGS, which incorporated an Ensoniq sound chip. Apple Corps had an electronics business that failed in 1968. Apple settled again, paying $26.5 million.
When Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes, Apple Corps sued again, but the group lost its case against Apple. The two came to an agreement that gave Apple the rights to the name, the freedom to run its business, and gave Apple Corps the freedom to use the Apple name as well through a licensing agreement from Apple. The amount Apple Corps got was not published.
All these frothing Apple critics that say the company persecuted the Beetles are uninformed.
The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won't Inherit Microsoft's Malware Crown
Give him a break coward, he was probably on acid at the time.
In any event, the Lisa computer was named after a different Apple engineer's daughter anyway.
And seriously, Jobs would name a PC after his abandoned daughter and then seek to kill the PC? What a raving lunatic you are. Keep connecting the dots, genius.
The Apple Corps uses a 3D-ish, photographic logo, not a 2D abstracted apple outline logo.
Apple isn't acting to stop of the use of the word apple, but over a similar looking logo.
NYC being the Big Apple doesn't have any relation to a dispute over the similarity of a logo.
Both are abstracted 2D outlines of very similar proportions.
NYC can't claim any rights to Apple's 30 year old logo design just because both entities share a common noun.
This really has anti-Apple clowns all frothed up though.
WMF: I'll type this slowly for you:
The concept is that politically powerful people who live in NYC could be induced to start taking action on the issue of IP because of this tempest in a teapot.
NYC's own politicians are probably too busy with shit to care about another minor issue from some legal challenge.
You try so hard to malign Apple that it hurts. Good thing you're not very effective. Why not just jerk off furiously in your basement instead? Nobody gives a shit either way.
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Apple and the Apple Corps were arguing over whether Apple could sell any PCs that had music capabilities, which was hardly an infringement of the music label's business, since it didn't sell any computer hardware or music gear.
Apple is acting here to stop a logo of an abstract apple outline logo that does look fleetingly similar. It's protecting a trademark logo. If it did not, it could eventually lose its rights to stop others from using the Apple name and logo in clearly infringing icons and brand names.
Your righteous indignation here is not a reaction to the event, but an opportunity you're taking to link up a company working to protect its trademarks with a company that has exercised its 20 year monopoly to cheat customers, delay the state of the art in technology, destroy competitors and prevent competing products from reaching the market, and flout the court's consent decrees it agreed to obey. There is no relation of any kind. Microsoft is criminal, Apple's lawyers are mildly irritating.
Wrong. The Beetles' Apple Corps wasn't any more related to Apple Computer's business than the Apple One temp agency or thousands of other businesses using the word apple.
Apple Corps went after Apple once it began making computers with music playback, hardly any infringement upon that label's business. That went back and forth for years, long before Apple began selling music in iTunes.
And Apple isn't going after NYC's slogan here, they're going after a new ad campaign with a new apple logo in the same 2D perspective. It's not an intentional rip off, but how many iconic 2D apple logo outlines can there be?
The Apple Corps used a photographic apple logo with proportions very different than Apple's iconic 2D apple outline logo. The NYC campaign looks like Apple's logo with a swoosh instead of a bite. Not exactly entirely frivolous, even if it is a worrisome sign of a world gone litigation nuts.
I think the bite in the Apple logo has been pointed out to be a play on a computer byte. I can't imagine Apple would do a tribute to Turing's death by linking the company's logo to the cause of death. That would be creepy.
That said, linking the idea of Apple products to thousands of banners around NYC advertising green efforts to recycle would be a marketing coup.
Apple isn't arguing that NYC can't use the term Big Apple. The suit is about a new ad campaign that uses an apple logo with a swirl. It does not look much like Apple's logo, but if Apple didn't work to defend its logos and trademarks vigorously, it could lose them, perhaps not Apple, but others.
.Mac
If it never said anything about the NYC apple, then what about a about a company that recycled computers with a similar iconic apple logo? What about a company making Applee iPodds?
I agree with an early poster: Apple winning the seemingly frivolous action might generate enough attention to reform the rather insane IP laws in general.
Filling the Unlocked iPhone Gap with
nice username.
Microsoft hasn't ever even described its concept for Windows 7, let alone began any serious work on it.
Vista was Microsoft's Copland, and 7 is its Gershwin. Apple shipped a developer release of Copland after four years of diddling, then pulled it back and recycled its feature set into Mac OS 8 and 9, and incorporated others into Mac OS X. Gershwin was never actually worked on, just floated as an upcoming release as a placeholder.
Similarly, "Windows 7" exists to take some of the heat off of Vista and suggest that a stopgap solution will be coming Real Soon Now. Unlike the old Apple, Microsoft released betas of Vista after four years of diddling, then kept working on it, scaled back features, and shipped something nobody wanted. There was far more excitement among Mac users for Mac OS 8 and 9 than there was among PC users for Vista.
The big difference is that Apple had an actual backup plan in place after buying NeXT in late 1996, and while it took a half decade to put together and ship Mac OS X, Apple had salable products to fill time in between (Mac OS 8, 8.5, 9). Microsoft not only lacks a serious product right now (driving PC users back to 2001's XP or into examining Linux), but it also clearly lacks any concrete plans for the future. Windows 7 is as vaporously devoid of specifics as it can be.
All Microsoft can talk about is Windows 7, which supposedly actually does what Vista promised but will only take 12 months to deliver instead of ~70, and Singularity, which floats some interesting concepts that are not even remotely close to being ready for any practical use. Talk about both only serves to distract from the disappointing reality of Vista.
Apple doesn't (and hasn't) ever removed the focus on its currently shipping version of Mac OS X to talk about something that's still two years off. Leopard didn't begin its marketing intro until Apple had its release set for 6 months out. Even despite pushing Leopard's release another ~8 months to ship the iPhone, that left the Leopard marketing little more than a year long effort, a full two years after the release of Tiger.
Microsoft begins talking about the next OS shortly before releasing its current version (XP hype began months before the release of 2000). Microsoft is always fixating attention two years out, not because it takes two years to deliver a release, but because it diverts attention from the shameful, non-competitive crap it's currently foisting upon the market.
Remember that MS took two years to get from Win95 to Win98, and then had to push out 98SE to make it actually work. Another two years brought WinME, which was dreadful. Win2000 was a good product, but was the result of a four YEAR effort to improve upon NT 4. Then a year later, Win2000 was merged with ME junk to deliver XP, a major and significant release but a relatively minor jump in technology, as indicated by the internal version number incrementing from 5.0 to 5.1. Then no new real updates for PC users until the disappointing Vista, which despite 6 years of work (and external hardware progress in the PC industry that should have made it faster), is still slow and suffers from backward compatibility problems.
If Vista can't run existing software flawlessly and support a wide range of PC hardware, how is some radical new version of Windows that has even less intrinsic backwards support (that is, relies on some sort of VM ghetto rather than providing native legacy support) in Windows 7 going to offer users any advantages?
And how is it that a company that has never introduced compelling operating system technology on anything close to an aggressive schedule is going to pull this off in some magically short time frame, when everything else the company has touched recently has turned into failure (Windows Mobile/WinCE, Windows Media, PlaysForSure, Vista, WHS, Surface, Zune, etc)?
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Gates says Vista will have a replacement in a year, and everyone assumes that a significant new version of Windows will ship?
.Mac
Remember that last year, Gates promised Surface by the end of the year. It couldn't ship that big ass table on time, and when it did, it turned out to be just what I said it would be: a hobbyist kit with dev tools forcing buyers to write the software end themselves. In other words, MS couldn't ship the software end as promised.
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Sound familiar? It spent over year just getting Vista SP1 out, and that's largely a package of the security updates already released, not a major feature upgrade. Yet observers are warning people to wait for MS to fix SP1, because there's still lots of problems.
Remember Windows Home Server? Was supposed to arrive in 2006, but ended up getting reintroduced at CES 2007, still not ready. WHS is a simplified version of Windows Server with a web interface, not a substantial product.
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Microsoft couldn't ship Windows Mobile 6 on time, which was supposed to ship alongside Vista; both were delayed, but Vista even more so.
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Do we even need to point out that Longhorn Vista spent 6 years in gestation before being released to snores? New tech, but still swimming in old legacy and limited by decisions MS though would be a good idea until it actually got knee deep and realized it had optimized for the wrong problems. Many features, such as the fabled database file system, couldn't get figured out at all.
Microsoft has never delivered by Bill Gates' promises and timelines. Remember Cairo in 1991? Remember what NT was supposed to deliver? Why will Microsoft suddenly be able to fulfill Gates' announcements after never having been able to previously, even over the last couple years?
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Remember that MS has recently failed to stay competitive with Windows Mobile, with Windows Media, with PlaysForSure, with the Zune, with WHS, etc. ad nauseam. Now suddenly after the failure of the Vista launch, why would anyone rush to believe the idea that Microsoft can successfully ship a buzzword-heavy, detail-light operating system update that offers significant reasons to upgrade, is delivered at a reasonable price, runs well on existing hardware, and does not introduce major new problems for existing users with existing software? That's insane.
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Microsoft is trying to do damage control after having targeted Windows 7 for arrival sometime in 2011, using the "two years out" promises that the company has always given, but never keeps. Facing real competition for the first time ever, Microsoft is now forced to cut its lie in half and promise something so fantastically egregious that pundits have no choice but to repeat it.
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Filling the Unlocked iPhone Gap with
Apple bought Logic and made it Mac-only.
The problem with your claim is that neither Classic nor OS 9 runs on "quadcore" or any other Intel Macs, so trying to say they run "slower than a G4" is pretty silly.
You'd need Quark 5 to run on Mac OS X at all (and an Intel Mac).
Classic apps ran in a ghetto, but didn't run any slower in Mac OS X than on Mac OS 9, and actually had better access to VM.