One of the biggest problems in almost every industry is the lack of collaboration in favor of the notion that if you want to contribute something you have to build it yourself. If you're wondering why innovation is stagnating around this is a big reason why.
Bear in mind for a lot of groundbreaking companies there is a partnership between the idea people (Jobs, Edison) and the technical people (Woz, Allen, etc).
I think that's very telling of the game-theory influenced idiocy that governs where everything is considered a Zero-Sum game and the only way you can is for everyone else to lose.
Different people have different skillsets, so expecting that ideas should somehow take a backseat in some kind of Darwinian power struggle is only the adding fuel to PHBs of the world. Oddly, people used to be able to work in teams without the politics and yuppie bullshit that's so prevalent nowadays as everyone climbs over the backs of everyone else (everyone but the top most managers included) for every scrap they can get all to often at the expense of good ideas that could have made them successful.
I can't draw wroth crap, so it would be stupid to expect to me to write AND illustrate a comic book series. You think Stan Lee would have been nearly as successful without Jack Kirby and other artists? No. Being able to draw is not a requirement.
Does it help? Sure. But in today's lackluster franchise/derivative driven entertainment industry that creating additional barriers to entry is useful to either businesses or the marketplace in general. Creativity is a requirement that's sadly lacking nowadays. The rest is mostly optional.
While I can't remember most of my high school biology from the notes I took in class I can remember playing FFVII on my laptop during lectures quite clearly!
What's so different about setting up a Windows PC that requires "hours" more time? Individually plugging in the monitor and speakers isn't exactly a time sink. You have to spend a few minutes going through the Windows setup process, but I assume there was something similar on an iMac. Or was it just a single-user-account computer?
No, installing Windows without a slipstream disk generally takes at least a couple of hours. Remember, it's not just the painfully slow install process, it's also the fact that you have to attach your unpatched, insecure computer to the internet to download the latest security patches.:P
1) Oracle OWNS Solaris and the SPARC architecture - they were never free to begin with, they have always been owned,
Um, actually no they don't. I used to work in the offices of the non-profit that owns to the rights to SPARC hardware. It's an organization called SPARC International, Inc. and they make money off of licensing the trademark. If you pay up enough, your company can have a seat on the executive board of the organization, along with Oracle, Fujitsu amongst several others.
I run Windows 7 right now. I see absolutely zero compelling reasons to upgrade to Windows 8, and plenty of compelling reasons not to. I don't have to switch to Linux for Microsoft to lose out on my money. I just have to not buy any more of their products.
Same here, except I saw absolutely zero compelling reason to upgrade from XP. Granted I was in charge of our companies compatibility with the Vista developer beta so I also had many, many disincentives to upgrade.:P
Game changers earn a short-term first-mover advantage, and given the revenues generated from Apple's iPhone division I don't think they've had any shortage of THAT.
Disagree, a game changer idea is just an idea. The product/theory serves as a vehicle for the diffusion of the concept. Products drive innovative ideas, not the other way around. How quickly and how far the idea spreads is dependent upon the quality of the product and the elegance of it's design.
Ultimately, nobody outside of the industry cares about the industry so a badly implemented idea is irrelevant to them.
Longer term, people will copy innovators and incrementally improve on their new technology, and everybody benefits as a result, in the form of accelerated innovation and lower prices.
Evidently somebody forget to tell that to Microsoft, because they've been ripping people off for years and making a shit ton of money doing so.;)
Businesses exist to make money, but in the absence of strong government regulation (and more importantly strong punitive action to back those regulations) businesses tend to take shortcuts by plagiarizing design to maximize profits and when this practice becomes widespread enough, there's no clear economic incentive for innovation amongst the industry.
As the law stands right now, competition is severely hindered in order to extract even more exorbitant revenue than what the Free Market(R) naturally has to offer. You can't have a competitive marketplace when you have to ask the incumbent's permission to compete with them.
I agree with you about how fucked up the US Patent system is, but I think in this case, Apple was more pissed about the infringements to it's design. Good visual design is not factually quantifiable, but the Patents have to be written so there are at least some guidelines for what companies can and can't do from a design standpoint to prevent what you're describing.
Dictatorial control wrapped up in a shiny package, and the masses love it. It is the antithesis of the equalising power of technology that made the field so attractive to me in the first place.
Herein lies the problem: you are not everybody. I can't speak for the masses, but personally I'm only for open up to the point prior to having to run an anti-virus on my fucking phone. Openness is a good thing in the context of programming, but any halfway competent engineer will tell you that it makes for crap OS design.
When I was young, I found it depressing because of the ending. Now that I'm older I find it depressing because I've seen it begin to grow in the world around me...:P
So it was always their strategy to have crappy phones that didn't perform well when compared to iphones and androids, but would be better loved by the carriers, maybe?
Pretty much. Product design at RIM has really taken a back seat to creating and maintaining Carrier partnerships for quite a while now which pretty much killed their ability to compete as evidenced by the Carrier specific marketplaces.
Several features of the Storm (most notably on board wi-fi) actually got squashed because Verizon objected and that was really the last straw for the few remaining good product engineering guys who were still around, so RIM ended up having to redo a lot of the work that went into it at the last minute and the end result was a buggy mess in a piece of really badly designed hardware which to me signaled the beginning of the end for RIM.
Hey, he rightfully stole them from the Prada phone who rightfully stole them from Palm who stole them from Xerox! I mean, stealing something at a fourth degree really is original!
I read the Hobbit to my son around first grade, and we read Lord of the Rings when he was about 7. This was ten years before the movies came out, and he was able to use his own imagination instead of seeing Peter Jackson's imagination at work. Highly recommended - he still has fond memories of our reading those books, and even said so this weekend.
Same here regarding the Hobbit and LotR, my father read many of what are still my favorite science fiction and fantasy stories to me when I was 6.
Just a few of the many sci-fi/fantasy book series he introduced to me and my brother by reading them aloud to us were David Edding's Belgariad series, Gordon R. Dickson's Dragon Knight Series, Keith Laumer's Retief books, The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison, The 14 core Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series.
He also read us several mystery and non-fiction books as well, including the Sherlock Holmes books, Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody series, selections from Stephen Ambrose's Pegasus Bridge, as well as various books dealing with the 'Beam Wars' of WWII, chief among them the collected written works of R. V. Jones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._V._Jones
It may seem odd to some people to read these books to a 6-8 year old child (no one here, of course;), but I honestly think that's really why I've been such a voracious reader even now all these years later.
For while he no longer reads aloud to me like he did when I was a child, my father and I can now trade reading recommendations as equals; in fact just recently he got me hooked on David Drake's RCN stories and I got him hooked on Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series.
Apple's MDM is pretty good, but it is based on Apple's model, and not any enterprise.
Therein illustrating the reason why it's so good.;)
Having worked I.T. infrastructure consulting at a variety of major companies, I can tell you that the flaw in enterprise models is that the companies that specialize in them usually end up banking on the fact that most corporate buying decisions are primarily based on perceived notions regarding business costs and marketing/sales people providing kickbacks to the people who make the decisions.
The only remotely technical consideration is whether or not the system meets various standards checklists, usability considerations are pretty much non-existent prior to purchasing, after purchasing when it becomes a factor management defers blame regarding the ensuing usability issues to the SysAdmins for not being able to support the devices people want to use as they're forced to spend the majority of their time wrestling with the implementation of the crap systems they're stuck with as a result of the whole sordid mess of a process.
That, and the whole BYOD in the enterprise is really starting to take off. Why pay for smartphones when your employees will buy something else anyways (and not want what you bought)?
Agreed, although I'll be curious to see Apple, Google, RIM, etc. try to cope with the rising popular business sentiment for a focus on providing better heterogeneous device management solution as time goes on, because for the most part the emphasis is still focused on either AD or device vendor specific proprietary solutions (which, to be fair, worked really well for RIM when they focused more on design and less on kissing carrier ass) rather than focusing on the BYOD direction in which the market is currently heading.
Apple products get met with one word from my department, unsupported.
Yes, some SysAdmins do take that route, fortunately most Apple users in Enterprise environments can generally work around that by setting up community self-support with minimal issues and call in consultants such as myself if something goes really wrong.
Worse yet are the users, when a virus makes it onto the network, most of the time it came from a Mac user forwarding Adobe_CS3_Crack.exe to someone.
So you're blaming Mac users for your company's failure to implement basic e-mail attachment security policies on your e-mail servers?;)
Any IT senior I've known who uses Apple doesn't stay in that position very long. Nor do they use their personal devices to set company policy. Yes I know the Dilbert myths, but in reality that doesn't happen.
Disagree. I've done I.T. sub-contracting at pretty much every Fortune 500 company in the SFBay area and I can't count the number of times I've ended up having to aid members of in house I.T. departments in their efforts of integrating serial modems for laptops from the early 90s into their networks because some ancient corporate officer has been using it since time immemorial and can't be bothered to be required to upgrade.
And let's not even get into the amount of hours I've spent wrestling with serial printer integration!:P
All I have to do is point out the cost of operating Apple products and whatever complaints the boss has disappears quickly.
Whereas all I have to do is point out the financial costs of lost time and productivity from wrestling with configuration hassles and cleaning out malware on Windows, the savings on non per-CPU client site licenses, cost of repeated upgrades, and cost of staff training for updates.
I'm sorry to have to destroy the myth for you, but Apple really has no place in the enterprise despite the attempts of fanboys to delude others otherwise.
I'd hardly describe myself as a fanboi of any technology, but I've definitely seen a slow but steady growth of Apple technologies in I.T. departments over the last decade and as this article shows, I'm clearly not alone in that observation, either: http://goo.gl/vY1lM
Not in regulated environments, they don't. Users who try to do what they want in those environments can find themselves being escorted out of the building by security with their last paycheck and a promise to have their belongings shipped to them in hand.
No, see, I think you're confusing what happens to users with what happens to I.T. staff members who try to refuse Management requests to use and support whatever device they want...
Personal anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. In 10 years at a corporate headquarters of one of the largest corporations in the world... only one instance of fraud was found, and that by a low level manager.
That's funny, I used to know somebody who had a similar anecdote to yours. He worked with a major accounting firm called Anderson...
Let me offer you a personal anecdote of my own which is that one of the things I've noticed is that out of all my friends and people I've met in various industries over the years, the biggest difference between the people I know who came out of situations like this relatively unscathed (be it from Enron or something as recent as Solyndra) and those that didn't, is that the people who didn't take a hit from it were the sort of people who never really trust the people running the companies they worked at.
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One of the biggest problems in almost every industry is the lack of collaboration in favor of the notion that if you want to contribute something you have to build it yourself. If you're wondering why innovation is stagnating around this is a big reason why. Bear in mind for a lot of groundbreaking companies there is a partnership between the idea people (Jobs, Edison) and the technical people (Woz, Allen, etc). I think that's very telling of the game-theory influenced idiocy that governs where everything is considered a Zero-Sum game and the only way you can is for everyone else to lose. Different people have different skillsets, so expecting that ideas should somehow take a backseat in some kind of Darwinian power struggle is only the adding fuel to PHBs of the world. Oddly, people used to be able to work in teams without the politics and yuppie bullshit that's so prevalent nowadays as everyone climbs over the backs of everyone else (everyone but the top most managers included) for every scrap they can get all to often at the expense of good ideas that could have made them successful. I can't draw wroth crap, so it would be stupid to expect to me to write AND illustrate a comic book series. You think Stan Lee would have been nearly as successful without Jack Kirby and other artists? No. Being able to draw is not a requirement. Does it help? Sure. But in today's lackluster franchise/derivative driven entertainment industry that creating additional barriers to entry is useful to either businesses or the marketplace in general. Creativity is a requirement that's sadly lacking nowadays. The rest is mostly optional.
So basically, if you are a quiet, bright, introvert, you are probably brilliant at your job - and almost unemployable.
Bummer, eh?
Gosh, I didn't know there were any other introverts besides me in Canada! ;)
While I can't remember most of my high school biology from the notes I took in class I can remember playing FFVII on my laptop during lectures quite clearly!
Just got my first iPad mini yesterday! Now if only someone would port VO to iPad as well!
What's so different about setting up a Windows PC that requires "hours" more time? Individually plugging in the monitor and speakers isn't exactly a time sink. You have to spend a few minutes going through the Windows setup process, but I assume there was something similar on an iMac. Or was it just a single-user-account computer?
No, installing Windows without a slipstream disk generally takes at least a couple of hours. Remember, it's not just the painfully slow install process, it's also the fact that you have to attach your unpatched, insecure computer to the internet to download the latest security patches. :P
1) Oracle OWNS Solaris and the SPARC architecture - they were never free to begin with, they have always been owned,
Um, actually no they don't. I used to work in the offices of the non-profit that owns to the rights to SPARC hardware. It's an organization called SPARC International, Inc. and they make money off of licensing the trademark. If you pay up enough, your company can have a seat on the executive board of the organization, along with Oracle, Fujitsu amongst several others.
I run Windows 7 right now. I see absolutely zero compelling reasons to upgrade to Windows 8, and plenty of compelling reasons not to. I don't have to switch to Linux for Microsoft to lose out on my money. I just have to not buy any more of their products.
Same here, except I saw absolutely zero compelling reason to upgrade from XP. Granted I was in charge of our companies compatibility with the Vista developer beta so I also had many, many disincentives to upgrade. :P
Clearly, you must be new here!
...I still think anytime a Dominion installation in the Alpha Quadrant closes, it's a good thing! ;)
...being basically! As if a real I.T. genius would ever use basic!
Game changers earn a short-term first-mover advantage, and given the revenues generated from Apple's iPhone division I don't think they've had any shortage of THAT.
Disagree, a game changer idea is just an idea. The product/theory serves as a vehicle for the diffusion of the concept. Products drive innovative ideas, not the other way around. How quickly and how far the idea spreads is dependent upon the quality of the product and the elegance of it's design.
Ultimately, nobody outside of the industry cares about the industry so a badly implemented idea is irrelevant to them.
Longer term, people will copy innovators and incrementally improve on their new technology, and everybody benefits as a result, in the form of accelerated innovation and lower prices.
Evidently somebody forget to tell that to Microsoft, because they've been ripping people off for years and making a shit ton of money doing so. ;)
Businesses exist to make money, but in the absence of strong government regulation (and more importantly strong punitive action to back those regulations) businesses tend to take shortcuts by plagiarizing design to maximize profits and when this practice becomes widespread enough, there's no clear economic incentive for innovation amongst the industry.
As the law stands right now, competition is severely hindered in order to extract even more exorbitant revenue than what the Free Market(R) naturally has to offer. You can't have a competitive marketplace when you have to ask the incumbent's permission to compete with them.
I agree with you about how fucked up the US Patent system is, but I think in this case, Apple was more pissed about the infringements to it's design. Good visual design is not factually quantifiable, but the Patents have to be written so there are at least some guidelines for what companies can and can't do from a design standpoint to prevent what you're describing.
Incidentally I would say that I'm surprised that you're siding with Samsung given what they tried to pull: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/27/1748236/apple-says-samsung-3g-patents-violate-rand-requirements
Dictatorial control wrapped up in a shiny package, and the masses love it. It is the antithesis of the equalising power of technology that made the field so attractive to me in the first place.
Herein lies the problem: you are not everybody. I can't speak for the masses, but personally I'm only for open up to the point prior to having to run an anti-virus on my fucking phone. Openness is a good thing in the context of programming, but any halfway competent engineer will tell you that it makes for crap OS design.
Missing my mod points right now. Well played, sir. Well played.
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here...As long you're here, I'll always be here...;)
Nah, it's still the ending of 1984 that depresses me.
It's one thing for governments to be horrible to the people they're supposed to care for. I've come to terms with that.
It's when people are horrible to the people they care for that continues to surprise me.
The Government is made of people! IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!
When I was young, I found it depressing because of the ending. Now that I'm older I find it depressing because I've seen it begin to grow in the world around me...:P
All they need to know is that their toaster isn't working the way it should and there's a genius down the road who'll fix it for a blowjob.
Yeah, I'm kinda easy that way...
Ahh ok, so apple stole it from the xerox star OS then, I guess it's only 1 degree of stealing then :(
Only if by stole you mean licensed in exchange for a discount on Apple's stock...;)
So it was always their strategy to have crappy phones that didn't perform well when compared to iphones and androids, but would be better loved by the carriers, maybe?
Pretty much. Product design at RIM has really taken a back seat to creating and maintaining Carrier partnerships for quite a while now which pretty much killed their ability to compete as evidenced by the Carrier specific marketplaces.
Several features of the Storm (most notably on board wi-fi) actually got squashed because Verizon objected and that was really the last straw for the few remaining good product engineering guys who were still around, so RIM ended up having to redo a lot of the work that went into it at the last minute and the end result was a buggy mess in a piece of really badly designed hardware which to me signaled the beginning of the end for RIM.
Hey, he rightfully stole them from the Prada phone who rightfully stole them from Palm who stole them from Xerox! I mean, stealing something at a fourth degree really is original!
Actually, Palm stole the concept from Apple, not Xerox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
I read the Hobbit to my son around first grade, and we read Lord of the Rings when he was about 7. This was ten years before the movies came out, and he was able to use his own imagination instead of seeing Peter Jackson's imagination at work. Highly recommended - he still has fond memories of our reading those books, and even said so this weekend.
Same here regarding the Hobbit and LotR, my father read many of what are still my favorite science fiction and fantasy stories to me when I was 6.
Just a few of the many sci-fi/fantasy book series he introduced to me and my brother by reading them aloud to us were David Edding's Belgariad series, Gordon R. Dickson's Dragon Knight Series, Keith Laumer's Retief books, The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison, The 14 core Wizard of Oz books by L. Frank Baum, and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series.
He also read us several mystery and non-fiction books as well, including the Sherlock Holmes books, Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody series, selections from Stephen Ambrose's Pegasus Bridge, as well as various books dealing with the 'Beam Wars' of WWII, chief among them the collected written works of R. V. Jones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._V._Jones
It may seem odd to some people to read these books to a 6-8 year old child (no one here, of course ;), but I honestly think that's really why I've been such a voracious reader even now all these years later.
For while he no longer reads aloud to me like he did when I was a child, my father and I can now trade reading recommendations as equals; in fact just recently he got me hooked on David Drake's RCN stories and I got him hooked on Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series.
Apple's MDM is pretty good, but it is based on Apple's model, and not any enterprise.
Therein illustrating the reason why it's so good. ;)
Having worked I.T. infrastructure consulting at a variety of major companies, I can tell you that the flaw in enterprise models is that the companies that specialize in them usually end up banking on the fact that most corporate buying decisions are primarily based on perceived notions regarding business costs and marketing/sales people providing kickbacks to the people who make the decisions.
The only remotely technical consideration is whether or not the system meets various standards checklists, usability considerations are pretty much non-existent prior to purchasing, after purchasing when it becomes a factor management defers blame regarding the ensuing usability issues to the SysAdmins for not being able to support the devices people want to use as they're forced to spend the majority of their time wrestling with the implementation of the crap systems they're stuck with as a result of the whole sordid mess of a process.
That, and the whole BYOD in the enterprise is really starting to take off. Why pay for smartphones when your employees will buy something else anyways (and not want what you bought)?
Agreed, although I'll be curious to see Apple, Google, RIM, etc. try to cope with the rising popular business sentiment for a focus on providing better heterogeneous device management solution as time goes on, because for the most part the emphasis is still focused on either AD or device vendor specific proprietary solutions (which, to be fair, worked really well for RIM when they focused more on design and less on kissing carrier ass) rather than focusing on the BYOD direction in which the market is currently heading.
Apple products get met with one word from my department, unsupported.
Yes, some SysAdmins do take that route, fortunately most Apple users in Enterprise environments can generally work around that by setting up community self-support with minimal issues and call in consultants such as myself if something goes really wrong.
Worse yet are the users, when a virus makes it onto the network, most of the time it came from a Mac user forwarding Adobe_CS3_Crack.exe to someone.
So you're blaming Mac users for your company's failure to implement basic e-mail attachment security policies on your e-mail servers? ;)
Any IT senior I've known who uses Apple doesn't stay in that position very long. Nor do they use their personal devices to set company policy. Yes I know the Dilbert myths, but in reality that doesn't happen.
Disagree. I've done I.T. sub-contracting at pretty much every Fortune 500 company in the SFBay area and I can't count the number of times I've ended up having to aid members of in house I.T. departments in their efforts of integrating serial modems for laptops from the early 90s into their networks because some ancient corporate officer has been using it since time immemorial and can't be bothered to be required to upgrade.
And let's not even get into the amount of hours I've spent wrestling with serial printer integration! :P
All I have to do is point out the cost of operating Apple products and whatever complaints the boss has disappears quickly.
Whereas all I have to do is point out the financial costs of lost time and productivity from wrestling with configuration hassles and cleaning out malware on Windows, the savings on non per-CPU client site licenses, cost of repeated upgrades, and cost of staff training for updates.
I'm sorry to have to destroy the myth for you, but Apple really has no place in the enterprise despite the attempts of fanboys to delude others otherwise.
I'd hardly describe myself as a fanboi of any technology, but I've definitely seen a slow but steady growth of Apple technologies in I.T. departments over the last decade and as this article shows, I'm clearly not alone in that observation, either: http://goo.gl/vY1lM
Not in regulated environments, they don't. Users who try to do what they want in those environments can find themselves being escorted out of the building by security with their last paycheck and a promise to have their belongings shipped to them in hand.
No, see, I think you're confusing what happens to users with what happens to I.T. staff members who try to refuse Management requests to use and support whatever device they want...
You obviously don't work in IT. :)
Rule 1. Don't trust the users.
Oh I don't, but unlike management, I don't feel the need to keep them under continuous surveillance. ;)
Personal anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. In 10 years at a corporate headquarters of one of the largest corporations in the world ... only one instance of fraud was found, and that by a low level manager.
That's funny, I used to know somebody who had a similar anecdote to yours. He worked with a major accounting firm called Anderson...
Let me offer you a personal anecdote of my own which is that one of the things I've noticed is that out of all my friends and people I've met in various industries over the years, the biggest difference between the people I know who came out of situations like this relatively unscathed (be it from Enron or something as recent as Solyndra) and those that didn't, is that the people who didn't take a hit from it were the sort of people who never really trust the people running the companies they worked at.