Nextel is a great example of marketing a technically inferior product as superior. And they seem to be successful at it.
The Push To Talk function takes a perfectly good full-duplex cell phone and turns it into a half-duplex walkie-talkie. They even give you a thicker and heavier phone to keep up the illusion!
Nextel fans like to point out that PTT is built into the IDEN network, and other carriers can never offer such a feature. TMobile, however, offers unlimited mobile to mobile calling for $10. You get full duplex all the way with TMobile.
I find it even more interesting that in Star Wars, the rebels are trying to blow up the Death Star (ATT), while in the Matrix they cannot stop using the phone system.
Microsoft is the new IBM, IBM is the new plush toy, and Steve Jobs now gets paid in pimpin' aircraft.
Successful OSS projects must be well documented in order to survive. Naming variables in an intuitive manner and providing insightful comments isn't about improving your annual review scores, it is about ensureing that others can and will read your code.
Companies like Microsoft need to introduce policies to create the same effect. Code reviews and extreme programming are good examples. They often degenerate into either a rubber stamp or a grudge match between different interpretations of Hungarian Notation.
Suppose that S.Korea retaliates against the sanction. All the US needs to do is say "BOO!" in the general direction of N.Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and the economic climate suddenly turns very dark for the South. And there is no way to directly blame the US, as N.Korea has already been labeled a member of the Axis of Evil.
1) obtain copyright for something 2) secretly encourage distribution of the stuff you hold copyright to 3) threaten burnination upon infringers 4) rake in the dough!
At the end of the Dark Ages when IBM released the PC, hackers discovered that almost all of the parts could be obtained from 3rd party vendors. Floppy drives, video controllers, even CPUs came from multiple sources.
Two chips were closed and proprietary, however. The BASIC ROM from Microsoft and the BIOS ROM from IBM.
There was a little tiny company that decided it wanted to build PCs too but, unlike SCO, feared the wrath of the great IBM. The little tiny company hired another little tiny company and they put their heads together and developed a plan to defat IBM's legions of lawyers.
The little companies bought a few IBM PCs and lots of lawyers. They put these together in one room. Then they got some hackers and put them in another room. The hackers were told to develop a new BIOS that operated exactly like the IBM unit. In order to ensure that they didn't disassemble the IBM unit, only lawyers were allowed to touch the IBM hardware.
The first little company became Compaq, the other one was one of the early PC BIOS manufacturers.
For years and years the technology industry has been shipping shoddy half-baked products and generating enormous profits.
The consumer electronics industry, on the other hand, has bee shipping simple reliable products like the walkman and CD players just as long.
I think what has happened here is that some bright young MBA studied the two industries and discovered that the only tangible differentiating factor between them is that high tech products are often broken out of the box, or shortly thereafter.
The next step was to investigate consumer electronics products that could be taught to "break" just like high tech. DVD and CD media were obviously selected as initial products, and the DRM schemes we see today are the result.
Soon, our bright young MBA friend will discover that crappy products don't lead to increased revenue. He will then learn the latest tech-industry skill: how to collect unemployment!
My orange handspring visor was a great conversation starter, as it combined stile with technology and geekiness. While you are shoing her how your pilot works, make sure to demo the addressbook with her contact information. Never miss a phone number again!
Now that I have a girlfriend, I've moved up to a Sony Clie. The Clie doesn't seem to have the same magenetic powers as the visor, but then it is not orange.
Seattle is a geek town, so things like palm pilots are critical for demonstrating your geek cred.
IBM got its start providing IT services to the US Census beureau over 100 years ago. Today it is tightly integrated into the business and government fabric of nations around the world. IBM hires the best and brightest MBA and Law school grads every year into their corporate ranks. With that combination of inteligence and connectivity, IBM is not a force you want to fight directly.
This is all the motivation IBM needs to finish migrating its non-x86 platforms all the way over to Linux and completely dumping that antiquated "Unix" stuff.
I see a lot of job opportunities for Linux hackers opening up at IBM shortly. Especially for people with both Linux and IBM mainframe or PPC experience.
Open Source, and particularly GPL code poses significant risk for two reasons. First, it is readily available. Second, it is very well documented.
In order to steal code from Stac Technologies, the developer needs to have substantial connections within Stac in order to get the code. It is very likely that they have good connections inside of Microsoft as well, and may be able to advice Legal appropriately. The average CS graduate is likely to be familiar with and comfortable using GPL code and may have little understanding of the legal implications of using such code when they go off to work at Microsoft.
Finally, when Stac gets their code stolen and incorporated into DOS 5, there is a well defined entity, Stac, that Microsoft can fight with and/or appease. Open Source software rarely has a well defined organization behind, but many will come to its aid if they perceive a value opportunity.
Open Source is a can of legal worms, commercial software is a bullet. Microsoft is well versed with kevlar vests and dodging bullets, but these worms are entirely new.
The only perk that really keeps people at Microsoft is the employee stock option program. Now that MSFT is either declining or trading, options are at best fictitious motivation, especially when the company has in excess of $40 B cash lying around.
Check the annual report. You will find that Microsoft makes nearly half of its money from external investments. The other half comes from Windows and Office sales. I don't recall the exact size of those teams, but I'm sure they are under 10k people. Since there are around 40k full time employees, this means that the company is 25% revenue drivers and 75% dead weight.
From a shareholders perspective, holding MSFT stock is similar to splitting your investment between a technology fund and a money market fund.
At Microsoft, Windows NT (XP) source code is only available to general employees through a web based search engine. It would be very interesting if segments of open source code were found inside Windows itself.
At the policy level, Microsoft is extremely paranoid of Open Source. At the individual developer level, the quality and depth of code reviews varries substantially from group to group. As a result, Microsoft is highly unlikely to be aware, as a company, if Open Source has penetrated its products. This presents a significant risk to shareholders.
Apple, on the other hand, has done an excellent job of integrating Open Source into their commercial product(s). They are certainly aware at the marketing level that there is a combination of Open Source and Apple code in OS X, so I assume they have a very good handle on the situation at an engineering level.
Now SCO is in the worst position. Not only do they have the same tech-industry turnover rate as companies like Apple and Microsoft to deal with, but they've changed hands repeatedly in the last decade, further randomizing the org structure. While the SCO legal team may be able to construct threatening arguments aimed at IBM, Linux and friends, they are really exposing their vulnerability to counter suit. Again, significant shareholder risk exists in SCO.
It took three months to assemble, and lets assume 10 hours a week. This guy is a carpenter with some IT skills, so we can assume a wage of around $15 / hour. Ten hours per week is forty hours per month. Three months of forty hours is 120 hours of work. 120 hours at $15 / hour is $1800.
Assume $500 for the flat panel display and we are up to $2300. At this point, we are better off buying a 15" combo drive powerbook.
Assume $300 for a fast Athlon and motherboard, bringing the totoal to $2600. We are not price equivelant to a superdrive 15" powerbook.
Drop in a 120 GB HD for $150 and a fast video card (Radeon or GeForce, you pick) for another $150. Adding $300 brings our total to $2900.
Drop in a Wi-Fi card and 512MB of memory, adding $100 bringing our total to $3000.
Now we are $300 shy of a 17" powerbook. We have taken three months of our time to build our machine, while Apple's shipping delays have decreased to the point where you can pick up your new PowerBook at an Apple Store right now. The PowerBook also includes a warranty, battery power, and will kind of fit on your lap.
For a more "apples" to "apples" comparison, consider the EMac which can be purchased for $799 to $1698, less than the cost of labor to assemble the iMike!
<soapbox> The great thing about OpenSource efforts is that once you create a piece of OpenSource code, you can share it with everyone at almost no cost. The code then goes through a global QA process and that effort is again shared with everyone.
The iMike device demonstrates excellent effort, design and execution, but its existence does not benefit anyone else. If you want one, you have to either build it yourself or convince Mike to spend another three months building one for you. Mass producing this device requires a huge re-engineering effort. In that case, the new manufacturered device will have little in common with the iMike due to the differences between human and machine assembly.
Fuel cells produce CO2 and H2O. This is fine for cars which already leak out all kinds of nasty chemicals. But I don't think cell phones will sell well if they start peeing the user.
Slashdot Mirror
Nextel is a great example of marketing a technically inferior product as superior. And they seem to be successful at it.
The Push To Talk function takes a perfectly good full-duplex cell phone and turns it into a half-duplex walkie-talkie. They even give you a thicker and heavier phone to keep up the illusion!
Nextel fans like to point out that PTT is built into the IDEN network, and other carriers can never offer such a feature. TMobile, however, offers unlimited mobile to mobile calling for $10. You get full duplex all the way with TMobile.
I guess that settles the Condo vs. Yacht question!
I find it even more interesting that in Star Wars, the rebels are trying to blow up the Death Star (ATT), while in the Matrix they cannot stop using the phone system.
Microsoft is the new IBM, IBM is the new plush toy, and Steve Jobs now gets paid in pimpin' aircraft.
17,179,869,184 DIMM sockets to max out the 64 bit address space with 1 GB DIMMs!
I *know* I'm going to complain to Apple on this one.
You also need a big wing to keep the rear wheels down in corners for maximum performance.
Successful OSS projects must be well documented in order to survive. Naming variables in an intuitive manner and providing insightful comments isn't about improving your annual review scores, it is about ensureing that others can and will read your code.
Companies like Microsoft need to introduce policies to create the same effect. Code reviews and extreme programming are good examples. They often degenerate into either a rubber stamp or a grudge match between different interpretations of Hungarian Notation.
Suppose that S.Korea retaliates against the sanction. All the US needs to do is say "BOO!" in the general direction of N.Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and the economic climate suddenly turns very dark for the South. And there is no way to directly blame the US, as N.Korea has already been labeled a member of the Axis of Evil.
Now my TiBook has Firewire AND USB 2.0!
Once Microsoft integrates a relational database into the operating system, worm penetration will reach 100%.
Seriously though, I hope they port the registry over to a real database system along the way.
I think it is about time to try a dictionary create on pan european patents!
1) obtain copyright for something
2) secretly encourage distribution of the stuff you hold copyright to
3) threaten burnination upon infringers
4) rake in the dough!
Mod parent -1: Senator Hatch is a Troll.
You may want to look into BitTorrent to spread the server load around.
At the end of the Dark Ages when IBM released the PC, hackers discovered that almost all of the parts could be obtained from 3rd party vendors. Floppy drives, video controllers, even CPUs came from multiple sources.
Two chips were closed and proprietary, however. The BASIC ROM from Microsoft and the BIOS ROM from IBM.
There was a little tiny company that decided it wanted to build PCs too but, unlike SCO, feared the wrath of the great IBM. The little tiny company hired another little tiny company and they put their heads together and developed a plan to defat IBM's legions of lawyers.
The little companies bought a few IBM PCs and lots of lawyers. They put these together in one room. Then they got some hackers and put them in another room. The hackers were told to develop a new BIOS that operated exactly like the IBM unit. In order to ensure that they didn't disassemble the IBM unit, only lawyers were allowed to touch the IBM hardware.
The first little company became Compaq, the other one was one of the early PC BIOS manufacturers.
For years and years the technology industry has been shipping shoddy half-baked products and generating enormous profits.
The consumer electronics industry, on the other hand, has bee shipping simple reliable products like the walkman and CD players just as long.
I think what has happened here is that some bright young MBA studied the two industries and discovered that the only tangible differentiating factor between them is that high tech products are often broken out of the box, or shortly thereafter.
The next step was to investigate consumer electronics products that could be taught to "break" just like high tech. DVD and CD media were obviously selected as initial products, and the DRM schemes we see today are the result.
Soon, our bright young MBA friend will discover that crappy products don't lead to increased revenue. He will then learn the latest tech-industry skill: how to collect unemployment!
My orange handspring visor was a great conversation starter, as it combined stile with technology and geekiness. While you are shoing her how your pilot works, make sure to demo the addressbook with her contact information. Never miss a phone number again!
Now that I have a girlfriend, I've moved up to a Sony Clie. The Clie doesn't seem to have the same magenetic powers as the visor, but then it is not orange.
Seattle is a geek town, so things like palm pilots are critical for demonstrating your geek cred.
1) Aim shotgun at foot
2) Pull trigger
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!
IBM got its start providing IT services to the US Census beureau over 100 years ago. Today it is tightly integrated into the business and government fabric of nations around the world. IBM hires the best and brightest MBA and Law school grads every year into their corporate ranks. With that combination of inteligence and connectivity, IBM is not a force you want to fight directly.
Beginning this year, IBM has appointed a new Chairman. Mr. Palmisano has a history of supporting Linux.
This is all the motivation IBM needs to finish migrating its non-x86 platforms all the way over to Linux and completely dumping that antiquated "Unix" stuff.
I see a lot of job opportunities for Linux hackers opening up at IBM shortly. Especially for people with both Linux and IBM mainframe or PPC experience.
Open Source, and particularly GPL code poses significant risk for two reasons. First, it is readily available. Second, it is very well documented.
In order to steal code from Stac Technologies, the developer needs to have substantial connections within Stac in order to get the code. It is very likely that they have good connections inside of Microsoft as well, and may be able to advice Legal appropriately. The average CS graduate is likely to be familiar with and comfortable using GPL code and may have little understanding of the legal implications of using such code when they go off to work at Microsoft.
Finally, when Stac gets their code stolen and incorporated into DOS 5, there is a well defined entity, Stac, that Microsoft can fight with and/or appease. Open Source software rarely has a well defined organization behind, but many will come to its aid if they perceive a value opportunity.
Open Source is a can of legal worms, commercial software is a bullet. Microsoft is well versed with kevlar vests and dodging bullets, but these worms are entirely new.
The only perk that really keeps people at Microsoft is the employee stock option program. Now that MSFT is either declining or trading, options are at best fictitious motivation, especially when the company has in excess of $40 B cash lying around.
Check the annual report. You will find that Microsoft makes nearly half of its money from external investments. The other half comes from Windows and Office sales. I don't recall the exact size of those teams, but I'm sure they are under 10k people. Since there are around 40k full time employees, this means that the company is 25% revenue drivers and 75% dead weight.
From a shareholders perspective, holding MSFT stock is similar to splitting your investment between a technology fund and a money market fund.
At Microsoft, Windows NT (XP) source code is only available to general employees through a web based search engine. It would be very interesting if segments of open source code were found inside Windows itself.
At the policy level, Microsoft is extremely paranoid of Open Source. At the individual developer level, the quality and depth of code reviews varries substantially from group to group. As a result, Microsoft is highly unlikely to be aware, as a company, if Open Source has penetrated its products. This presents a significant risk to shareholders.
Apple, on the other hand, has done an excellent job of integrating Open Source into their commercial product(s). They are certainly aware at the marketing level that there is a combination of Open Source and Apple code in OS X, so I assume they have a very good handle on the situation at an engineering level.
Now SCO is in the worst position. Not only do they have the same tech-industry turnover rate as companies like Apple and Microsoft to deal with, but they've changed hands repeatedly in the last decade, further randomizing the org structure. While the SCO legal team may be able to construct threatening arguments aimed at IBM, Linux and friends, they are really exposing their vulnerability to counter suit. Again, significant shareholder risk exists in SCO.
1) Create Linux Rocket
2) All your base are belong to Linux
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!!
It took three months to assemble, and lets assume 10 hours a week. This guy is a carpenter with some IT skills, so we can assume a wage of around $15 / hour. Ten hours per week is forty hours per month. Three months of forty hours is 120 hours of work. 120 hours at $15 / hour is $1800.
Assume $500 for the flat panel display and we are up to $2300. At this point, we are better off buying a 15" combo drive powerbook.
Assume $300 for a fast Athlon and motherboard, bringing the totoal to $2600. We are not price equivelant to a superdrive 15" powerbook.
Drop in a 120 GB HD for $150 and a fast video card (Radeon or GeForce, you pick) for another $150. Adding $300 brings our total to $2900.
Drop in a Wi-Fi card and 512MB of memory, adding $100 bringing our total to $3000.
Now we are $300 shy of a 17" powerbook. We have taken three months of our time to build our machine, while Apple's shipping delays have decreased to the point where you can pick up your new PowerBook at an Apple Store right now. The PowerBook also includes a warranty, battery power, and will kind of fit on your lap.
For a more "apples" to "apples" comparison, consider the EMac which can be purchased for $799 to $1698, less than the cost of labor to assemble the iMike!
<soapbox>
The great thing about OpenSource efforts is that once you create a piece of OpenSource code, you can share it with everyone at almost no cost. The code then goes through a global QA process and that effort is again shared with everyone.
The iMike device demonstrates excellent effort, design and execution, but its existence does not benefit anyone else. If you want one, you have to either build it yourself or convince Mike to spend another three months building one for you. Mass producing this device requires a huge re-engineering effort. In that case, the new manufacturered device will have little in common with the iMike due to the differences between human and machine assembly.
</soapbox>
Now the 17" powerbook small and compact by comparison.
President Bush on Thursday stopped by a booth by MTI MicroFuel Cells Inc. of Albany in Washington, D.C., and made a cell phone call from a phone powered by MTI's direct methanol micro fuel-cell system, according to the company.
Thursday was Feb 6, 2003.
Fuel cells produce CO2 and H2O. This is fine for cars which already leak out all kinds of nasty chemicals. But I don't think cell phones will sell well if they start peeing the user.
I welcome the day when we no longer have security bugs.