I'm puzzled why people think Google's ultimate aim was or should have been to make money on Android.
And in return, I'm puzzled why you think that Google doesn't view Android as another platform to push its advertising to. If you think Google doesn't view Android as a means to make money, and that they just released it out of the goodness of their hearts, I suggest you review their business model and ask yourself why Google suddenly seems to have a keen interest in "mobile advertising."
Yeah, look at Linux. Once geeks everywhere started adopting it, Windows totally lost its cachet.
(Hint: "Geek cachet", while not necessarily orthogonal to "Popular cachet", rarely shares much overlap in terms of technology. The features an average consumer would use to evaluate a purchase are rarely the same reasons a geek would cite for choosing (or avoiding) a piece of tech.)
It's not made entirely clear exactly how Android contributed that amount of money, although it seems to be mainly derived from display advertising on its mobile search products.
Google is growing the number of places where they can display ads, and I suspect they will continue to make money off Android in this manner.
Is it any wonder that Google would pursue a strategy that allows them to display more ads on more handsets (thus directly increasing their income), while Apple is pursuing a strategy that allows them to sell each unit of hardware running an exclusive piece of software that differentiates them from the competition at a tidy profit? Two different strategies for two different business models. Google is in advertising, Apple is in hardware.
I like the iPhone, don't get me wrong - but you're off the mark here.
Arguing that you can't compare iPhones to Android by market share is simply a semantic quibble. Better stated, the study compares "All phones that run iOS" versus "All phones that run Android." It just so happens that "all phones that run iOS" are "iPhones," and so it's more convenient for the authors to say they're comparing "iPhones" to "Android".
The comparison stands: in the smartphone market, Android has taken a small, but very real lead over iOS. This is not necessarily a bad thing: competition makes both platforms better. I don't see a future where "every phone is Android," and I think it's entirely possible that Apple would be content with 20-25% share of a very profitable market while Android expands down into the less-expensive end (where margins are very thin, a space where Apple has historically avoided competing), and ends up with a much larger slice of the phone market than Apple's iOS devices.
That's how marketing works - you issue the press releases with graphs that show your product in the most flattering light.
By individual handset, no Android phone compares to the iPhone in terms of unit sales. By individual unit, no Android tablet compares to the iPad in terms of unit sales. But taken as a whole, Android, the platform, is outselling iOS, the platform, in the smartphone market - there are some important qualifiers there. If the Droid had sold more units than the iPhone, you'd see Motorola and Verizon trumpeting that from the rooftops.
It's entirely possible for both of these statements to be factually correct: 1) "Android now has the largest market share by platform in the smartphone market." (Notice we're looking only at the Smartphone market, where a flood of new & inexpensive Android devices is bound to eat away at Apple's market share.) 2) "iOS is still the number one-selling mobile platform for small touch-screen devices in the United States." (Notice we're looking at the broader 'touchscreen device' market, where no serious competitor to the iPad still exists; the Galaxy Tab is nice, and certainly not a bad attempt, but it still hasn't gained traction. I suspect we'll see that change in the next 2 years.)
It almost certainly won't be, at least this year. My bet is a GSM/CDMA "iPhone 5" model (using the Qualcomm dual-transmitter chip) that runs on any US network this year, with a 4G "iPhone 6" next year, or perhaps with "iPhone 7" in 2013 (which, coincidentally, is when Verizon predicts their LTE coverage will "match current 3G area.")
The LTE chips are still very power-hungry, which means you either carry around a big battery pack, or you get sub-par battery life when 4G is active. It's also available in only a couple dozen cities around the US so far, with plans for "aggressive growth" this year and next. Early adopters may want the 4G, but that feature is pretty pointless outside of a fairly small number of urban areas. My guess is Apple doesn't want to limit itself to 10% of Verizon's customers, and will push for an initial release that will appeal to lots of people - a 3G-capable phone. I suspect we'll see one GSM & CDMA version, rather than two separate "Verizon" and "AT&T" versions, because Apple tends to favor simplicity in its product lineup, with a few key differentiators that are easily grasped: 16/32GB; Black/White. I don't see them willingly entering into a "Black/White, 16/32, GSM/CDMA, 3G/4G" type of model lineup - gets too confusing too quickly for customers.
Of course, this is just pure speculation, but I think it's the most likely course, given Apple's recent history and current product lineup.
You've got it all wrong: It's not confirmation bias, it's the simple fact that the dolphins are so damnably cute!
Why don't YOU try telling those cute little eyes and those stubby little flippers that they can't be a person. I can't do it, it'd break my heart. But I guess you're a MONSTER, who doesn't have any of the finer sensitivities the PETA members do.
When the question is "how big can it grow," the answer to that question is the largest it could get, which means every person on earth. Pedantically obvious perhaps, but informative for discussing the growth potential of a business. It *could* be that big. That's as big as it *could* get.
Continue reading BobMcD's & my back and forth, and you'll see more realistic numbers that could be achieved in the more reasonable investment timeframe of the next 5-10 years.
When I suggested the incentives, the notion I had in mind was "hazardous duty pay." It's an acknowledgement that, even for a good teacher, working with kids who have basic physical and emotional needs that aren't being satisfied is going to be a much larger challenge - think inner city kids from poor backgrounds who've had 2 meals in the last 3 days. Think their mind is on learning? I don't.
That sort of a situation is draining on teachers, and the teachers who volunteer for it, and/or are *good* at it should be rewarded for it.
The "better salaries" thing is pretty much what I meant by "good merit pay" in item 2: Base salaries should be competitive with industry, and you shouldn't have to negotiate your pay rate based on "what the union says teachers with X years of experience get in this district." Of course there's an average salary, but if you have extraordinary qualifications for the position, and a sterling track record of effective teaching, why shouldn't you be able to ask for 20% more than the average teacher gets?
Agreed - my 4 bullets should not be construed as suggesting that they're a panacea for all the problems in education, and as with any system where money and measurement are tied together, merit pay could lend itself to gaming and abuse just as easily as "everybody gets the same pay, so why try harder".
And let's not also forget that somebody who is not good at teaching the "best and brightest" students may be naturally quite wonderful at working with and teaching disadvantaged (handicapped, ESL, poor / inner city backgrounds) kids, and the teacher who does great with third graders may be a poor fit in front of high school seniors. They're different skill sets, and we need to acknowledge that, and try to develop ways to match teachers with the types of students who will best benefit from their particular strengths.
And none of what I've said should be construed as a knock against teachers. As I said, both my parents were teachers (now retired), and I have a great deal of respect for the work that they do. But I have also seen my share of absolutely awful teachers who are not qualified to hold their positions, yet they are kept on because the school system needs staff, or the teachers' union would make it too difficult to fire them.
I think one of the greatest problems is the homogenization we've built into the system - we've ended up viewing teachers and students as interchangeable "resources" in an assembly line, and I think the first step is to acknowledge that not all teachers are created equal, and not all students are destined to win the nobel prize in physics. This doesn't mean that you give up on them, or relegate kids to "you're in the McDonald's Skills classes from grade 2 on, kid!", nor should it mean that you can never fire a teacher for being incompetent, or reward a really good teacher with extra pay, or a bonus.
Yep, from the wikipedia entry, the lake is ~250 km long, and ~50 km wide at its widest point - it's of a size with Lake Ontario, so it's definitely a pretty big body of water.
I think it's unlikely that most of the O2 will come out of solution. They're creating a relatively small-diameter bore into the container of the liquid, and then pulling the drill back out, allowing the pressure inside the container to push water back up into the bore. The water will freeze, resealing the bore, then they'll take a sample of the ice that re-froze in the bore hole to analyze, so nothing 'alien' will be introduced *into* the lake's container.
For an analogy, think of this as drawing blood by jabbing you with a needle, letting the resulting drop of blood scab over, and then scraping off a piece of the resulting scab to analyze. The chances are as good that this will cause some sort of catastrophic explosion of oxygen out of the lake as the chances that jabbing you with a small hypodermic would cause all the blood in your body to spontaneously erupt out of every orifice.
1) The money from the extra taxes will go towards recruiting & retaining effective teachers for our school systems;
2) The money will not be spent on a bunch of bullshit earmarks tacked on to the funding bill, and will be spent *fairly* and *appropriately* on teachers who perform better than the people they're replacing (rather than "some politician's niece is a teacher and needs a job...");
Start with those 2 promises, and hold to them, and you can raise my taxes by 10%, no loopholes. If you think you need more, we can discuss it. I don't consider a *functional* educational system a wasteful expenditure - if the money is actually being used to measurably improve the quality of educational outcomes, then I am more than happy to make that investment.
I'm not even sure I'd go that far. Before being granted tenure, most junior professors have to show a history of good research, publications, and so on. Junior researchers basically need to spend their non-tenured time making sure they don't piss off the powers-that-be with heterodox opinions and research, and only after they're given tenure can they "safely" report these findings and explore the questions.
I'm not sure I can think of a "better" way to do it, honestly, but tenure doesn't seem to accomplish much aside from saying, "kiss some asses for a while, in the hope that you won't have to keep kissing asses for the rest of your career."
Okay, so as a business, let's realistically think about how much more Facebook can grow in the next few years.
1) Roughly 2 billion people around the world have access to an internet connection. 2) Roughly 200 million people have internet access in the US. 3) Facebook has 500 million users around the world. 4) Roughly 125 million people in the US have a Facebook profile. (Source for 1, 2) (Source for 3, 4)
Conclusions: 1) Facebook has signed up ~63% of the internet-connected population of the US. (125 million / 200 million * 100)
2) Assuming they can achieve a similar level of market share around the world, their potential market is 1.26 billion people (2 billion * 63%)
3) This puts them, currently, at about 40% of their "maximum size".
That's still a LOT of room to grow. And as I've already noted, and I'm sure you can agree, internet access keeps getting more and more ubiquitous and less and less costly. The number of internet-connected people around the world is only going to grow from its present 2 billion.
There's an uncomfortable element of truth to this too, and I say this as a devoted son of two career teachers: If you are top in your Computer Science class, Google or Apple or Microsoft comes along to hire you, offers you a good starting salary with benefits, and a brand-name employer that you can show off to your friends. There's less demand for "the guy who graduated last," which means that the lower-paying jobs - i.e., teaching - will fall to those who... 'can't' get the job at Google.
There simply isn't a great deal of incentive for the "top of the class" to go into education: fight your way through a mystifyingly complex government bureaucracy for a full day of discipline problems and budget cuts, all for the same pay as the meathead who barely graduated college? Gee, where do I sign up?
A couple changes that I think would go a long way towards addressing some of this: 1) Abolish tenure. If you're good, your job is safe. If you're not good, you should be turfed. 2) Merit pay for teachers. GOOD merit pay - competitive with industry, and awarded in equal measure to your effectiveness & talents as a teacher. 3) Incentives for effective teachers to work with disadvantaged students. 4) Expand grants, scholarships, etc. - think the Americorps concept. "We give you a scholarship, and in return, you teach for several years after graduation."
Goals are where you want to go. Plans are how you get there. The logical endpoint of a "one person, one profile" networking site is: everybody alive has a profile. That is how big they *can* grow, and that is the underlying premise of every other intermediary goal and plan they put in place - that they will be around long enough, and be successful enough, to build a network that everybody on earth who can access their servers and who wants a profile has one.
Not everybody *needs* to own a computer to access Facebook. Community centers, schools, libraries, friends, mobile phones which are getting cheaper and cheaper... all of these are ways people could get access to Facebook. The barriers to getting online keep getting cheaper & lower, and make no mistake, Facebook wants every single one of those people signing up.
Consider that 30 years ago, exactly zero people had mobile phone subscriptions. At the end of 2009, there were approximately 4.6 billion active mobile phone subscriptions around the world. Consider further that Android is flourishing as a mobile platform, and has a quite capable Facebook client app.
The question was "how much bigger can it grow". The answer, for a service that wants to connect people, is "we can grow so big that everybody alive has a profile."
If you don't think that's Facebook's ultimate goal, you're kidding yourself. They're not sitting there saying, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we got like, 20 more users than we have today by next year?"
They're sitting there saying, "We want 1.5 billion by 2015, and the whole world by 2025."
WIll they get it? Probably not. There's always going to be people who don't want it, or can't access it. But how many computers were in use on the entire planet 5 years ago? 10 years ago? The trend is up, which means more and more people will be connected. As more people connect, you can bet that Facebook wants to sign them up, and is planning to do just that.
Point is, 500 million users, while a lot, is still less than 10% of the people out there in the world. That's a huge market to grow into, and right now, Facebook really doesn't have much serious competition for the types of services they provide.
Maybe the apps aren't your thing, but a hand-waving "they're all crap" simply shows that you didn't spend even a second looking at what's available.
Among the top 30 purchased apps so far, there are plenty of games; there's also all kinds of "useless crapware" like: #3 - iPhoto #5 - Aperture #8 - iMovie #9 - Pixelmator #10 - Pages #12 - iHomework (students' tool for tracking homework, assignments, etc.) #13 - Sketchbook Pro #15 - Garage Band #16 - Compartments (a home inventory application) #20 - Courier (a utility for uploading photos, video, etc. to various online services & FTP sites) #21 - Keynote #22 - YummySoup (recipe sharing/organization) #26 - Numbers #30 - Rapidweaver (web site creation)
Maybe to you, a fun night at home is spent inspecting Apache logs and rewriting binutils in Haskell, who knows. But these apps are solid, professional-quality applications which certainly don't fit the description of "crapware". Will a lot of useless crap be available on the store? Sure. A lot of useless crap is available all over the internet, I see no reason why the Mac App Store should be particularly exempt. But dismissing a 2-day old service as nothing but crap based on your "briefest glance" shows that you probably didn't even take a "brief glance."
penetration is so high already, how much bigger can it grow?
THey have 500 million users. Estimates put the number of humans on earth at ~7 billion.
By my count, they could grow by another 6.5 billion people. This also ignores the potential for business & social organization sites, clubs, one-shot events, and a host of other entities which *could * use Facebook as a platform for keeping connected. Plus, the 7 billion people alive today will *not* be the same 7 billion people alive tomorrow. New births = new profiles, and death is *not necessarily* the end of a person's content on Facebook, either - think memorials and the like, as odd and creepy as that might sound.
They've got a lot of room to grow still, and with the population in constant turnover, they'll always have new people to sign up, even if old data from dead people cycles out of the system eventually.
We're talking about an "upgrade treadmill," and it's been asserted that Apple is somehow "worse" about forcing hardware upgrades than any other manufacturer due to the "proprietary" nature of their software.
Responding to that point isn't a straw man. But feel free to continue trying to rebut using ad hominem commentary from behind your AC shield.
For many 10.4 and 10.5 users the need to make that choice is now approaching, it's just as simple as that
If you run 10.4 or 10.5, you can keep on running 10.4 and 10.5 until judgement day for all Apple cares. The App store is not the only way in which PPC-Mac owners can get new software. In fact, every way they've gotten software previously will continue to work, and they're also free to write their own to support new needs they discover.
You seem to be suggesting that the "release of the 10.6-only App Store" means that somehow Mac OS has suddenly stopped working on PPC, or that people suddenly can't install software any way but that. The PPC systems that worked yesterday, still work today. And they'll still work tomorrow just as well as they do today unless the hardware shorts out.
Leopard (10.5) supports the PPC architecture, and supports G4 and G5 PPC chips of 867MhZ or higher, which means that it supports hardware back to about late 2003/early 2004. Tiger (10.4) supports G3 thru G5 chips running 500 MhZ or higher, which means that you can run 10.4 on systems that are as old as early 2001, perhaps a bit earlier.
The last 10.4 security update was in 2009; 10.5 is still actively supported. If we assume a similar window of support, 10.5 will probably continue supporting PPC through this year, and into (perhaps through) 2012.
So this means your computer that just about any mac in the last 7 years is well supported with, at worst, a $29 upgrade charge. Further than that, it gets dicier, but let's be honest - would you expect Windows 7 to run well on a 10 year old piece of hardware? The latest Ubuntu version? You can continue running old versions until the hardware breaks, just as with anything. But there is no operating system, in it's graphical "desktop" configuration today, that would run *well* on a system that is 10 years old.
1) It's $29 per seat retail. Less in bulk purchases, unless you have horrible, horrible legal & purchasing teams. And yes, if you opt not to pay that upgrade fee, *you* have *decided* not to upgrade.
2) Do you really think that Microsoft is issuing free bulk licenses for Windows 7 to enterprises? I can assure you that my company (of about ~50,000 people) is paying a whole lot of money to Microsoft every year for enterprise licensing & support.
3) Enterprises didn't adopt Vista in great numbers because it was an unusable mess of an operating system. Windows 7 has corrected many of the shortcomings of Vista, and so enterprises are looking to upgrade their software now.
4) No piece of Mac hardware released in the last 5 years (since the initial intel conversion) is being "left behind" by anything more than a refusal to upgrade to Snow Leopard.
5) The Mac App store would never have a substantial penetration in "the enterprise" anyway. This is simply not an "enterprise" feature - your IT staff doesn't want you downloading and installing a bunch of random stuff onto your corporate-owned PC.
6) Most corporations I've dealt with depreciate hardware and have it on a hardware refresh cycle of 3-5 years. If you're not doing that, I'd suggest you're working at a "small business" that doesn't really fit the term "enterprise".
When your criticism takes the form of ill-informed trolling, don't be surprised when it's considered a troll.
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And in return, I'm puzzled why you think that Google doesn't view Android as another platform to push its advertising to. If you think Google doesn't view Android as a means to make money, and that they just released it out of the goodness of their hearts, I suggest you review their business model and ask yourself why Google suddenly seems to have a keen interest in "mobile advertising."
Yeah, look at Linux. Once geeks everywhere started adopting it, Windows totally lost its cachet.
(Hint: "Geek cachet", while not necessarily orthogonal to "Popular cachet", rarely shares much overlap in terms of technology. The features an average consumer would use to evaluate a purchase are rarely the same reasons a geek would cite for choosing (or avoiding) a piece of tech.)
From your link:
Google is growing the number of places where they can display ads, and I suspect they will continue to make money off Android in this manner.
Is it any wonder that Google would pursue a strategy that allows them to display more ads on more handsets (thus directly increasing their income), while Apple is pursuing a strategy that allows them to sell each unit of hardware running an exclusive piece of software that differentiates them from the competition at a tidy profit? Two different strategies for two different business models. Google is in advertising, Apple is in hardware.
I like the iPhone, don't get me wrong - but you're off the mark here.
Arguing that you can't compare iPhones to Android by market share is simply a semantic quibble. Better stated, the study compares "All phones that run iOS" versus "All phones that run Android." It just so happens that "all phones that run iOS" are "iPhones," and so it's more convenient for the authors to say they're comparing "iPhones" to "Android".
The comparison stands: in the smartphone market, Android has taken a small, but very real lead over iOS. This is not necessarily a bad thing: competition makes both platforms better. I don't see a future where "every phone is Android," and I think it's entirely possible that Apple would be content with 20-25% share of a very profitable market while Android expands down into the less-expensive end (where margins are very thin, a space where Apple has historically avoided competing), and ends up with a much larger slice of the phone market than Apple's iOS devices.
Good thing my iPhone can run non-Apple apps and use non-Apple electricity and access non-Apple sites on the non-Apple internet.
Yeah, if iOS were as closed as you suggest, then you might have a point.
That's how marketing works - you issue the press releases with graphs that show your product in the most flattering light.
By individual handset, no Android phone compares to the iPhone in terms of unit sales. By individual unit, no Android tablet compares to the iPad in terms of unit sales. But taken as a whole, Android, the platform, is outselling iOS, the platform, in the smartphone market - there are some important qualifiers there. If the Droid had sold more units than the iPhone, you'd see Motorola and Verizon trumpeting that from the rooftops.
It's entirely possible for both of these statements to be factually correct:
1) "Android now has the largest market share by platform in the smartphone market." (Notice we're looking only at the Smartphone market, where a flood of new & inexpensive Android devices is bound to eat away at Apple's market share.)
2) "iOS is still the number one-selling mobile platform for small touch-screen devices in the United States." (Notice we're looking at the broader 'touchscreen device' market, where no serious competitor to the iPad still exists; the Galaxy Tab is nice, and certainly not a bad attempt, but it still hasn't gained traction. I suspect we'll see that change in the next 2 years.)
It almost certainly won't be, at least this year. My bet is a GSM/CDMA "iPhone 5" model (using the Qualcomm dual-transmitter chip) that runs on any US network this year, with a 4G "iPhone 6" next year, or perhaps with "iPhone 7" in 2013 (which, coincidentally, is when Verizon predicts their LTE coverage will "match current 3G area.")
The LTE chips are still very power-hungry, which means you either carry around a big battery pack, or you get sub-par battery life when 4G is active. It's also available in only a couple dozen cities around the US so far, with plans for "aggressive growth" this year and next. Early adopters may want the 4G, but that feature is pretty pointless outside of a fairly small number of urban areas. My guess is Apple doesn't want to limit itself to 10% of Verizon's customers, and will push for an initial release that will appeal to lots of people - a 3G-capable phone. I suspect we'll see one GSM & CDMA version, rather than two separate "Verizon" and "AT&T" versions, because Apple tends to favor simplicity in its product lineup, with a few key differentiators that are easily grasped: 16/32GB; Black/White. I don't see them willingly entering into a "Black/White, 16/32, GSM/CDMA, 3G/4G" type of model lineup - gets too confusing too quickly for customers.
Of course, this is just pure speculation, but I think it's the most likely course, given Apple's recent history and current product lineup.
You've got it all wrong: It's not confirmation bias, it's the simple fact that the dolphins are so damnably cute!
Why don't YOU try telling those cute little eyes and those stubby little flippers that they can't be a person. I can't do it, it'd break my heart. But I guess you're a MONSTER, who doesn't have any of the finer sensitivities the PETA members do.
When the question is "how big can it grow," the answer to that question is the largest it could get, which means every person on earth. Pedantically obvious perhaps, but informative for discussing the growth potential of a business. It *could* be that big. That's as big as it *could* get.
Continue reading BobMcD's & my back and forth, and you'll see more realistic numbers that could be achieved in the more reasonable investment timeframe of the next 5-10 years.
When I suggested the incentives, the notion I had in mind was "hazardous duty pay." It's an acknowledgement that, even for a good teacher, working with kids who have basic physical and emotional needs that aren't being satisfied is going to be a much larger challenge - think inner city kids from poor backgrounds who've had 2 meals in the last 3 days. Think their mind is on learning? I don't.
That sort of a situation is draining on teachers, and the teachers who volunteer for it, and/or are *good* at it should be rewarded for it.
The "better salaries" thing is pretty much what I meant by "good merit pay" in item 2: Base salaries should be competitive with industry, and you shouldn't have to negotiate your pay rate based on "what the union says teachers with X years of experience get in this district." Of course there's an average salary, but if you have extraordinary qualifications for the position, and a sterling track record of effective teaching, why shouldn't you be able to ask for 20% more than the average teacher gets?
Agreed - my 4 bullets should not be construed as suggesting that they're a panacea for all the problems in education, and as with any system where money and measurement are tied together, merit pay could lend itself to gaming and abuse just as easily as "everybody gets the same pay, so why try harder".
And let's not also forget that somebody who is not good at teaching the "best and brightest" students may be naturally quite wonderful at working with and teaching disadvantaged (handicapped, ESL, poor / inner city backgrounds) kids, and the teacher who does great with third graders may be a poor fit in front of high school seniors. They're different skill sets, and we need to acknowledge that, and try to develop ways to match teachers with the types of students who will best benefit from their particular strengths.
And none of what I've said should be construed as a knock against teachers. As I said, both my parents were teachers (now retired), and I have a great deal of respect for the work that they do. But I have also seen my share of absolutely awful teachers who are not qualified to hold their positions, yet they are kept on because the school system needs staff, or the teachers' union would make it too difficult to fire them.
I think one of the greatest problems is the homogenization we've built into the system - we've ended up viewing teachers and students as interchangeable "resources" in an assembly line, and I think the first step is to acknowledge that not all teachers are created equal, and not all students are destined to win the nobel prize in physics. This doesn't mean that you give up on them, or relegate kids to "you're in the McDonald's Skills classes from grade 2 on, kid!", nor should it mean that you can never fire a teacher for being incompetent, or reward a really good teacher with extra pay, or a bonus.
Yep, from the wikipedia entry, the lake is ~250 km long, and ~50 km wide at its widest point - it's of a size with Lake Ontario, so it's definitely a pretty big body of water.
I think it's unlikely that most of the O2 will come out of solution. They're creating a relatively small-diameter bore into the container of the liquid, and then pulling the drill back out, allowing the pressure inside the container to push water back up into the bore. The water will freeze, resealing the bore, then they'll take a sample of the ice that re-froze in the bore hole to analyze, so nothing 'alien' will be introduced *into* the lake's container.
For an analogy, think of this as drawing blood by jabbing you with a needle, letting the resulting drop of blood scab over, and then scraping off a piece of the resulting scab to analyze. The chances are as good that this will cause some sort of catastrophic explosion of oxygen out of the lake as the chances that jabbing you with a small hypodermic would cause all the blood in your body to spontaneously erupt out of every orifice.
Guarantee me the following:
1) The money from the extra taxes will go towards recruiting & retaining effective teachers for our school systems;
2) The money will not be spent on a bunch of bullshit earmarks tacked on to the funding bill, and will be spent *fairly* and *appropriately* on teachers who perform better than the people they're replacing (rather than "some politician's niece is a teacher and needs a job...");
Start with those 2 promises, and hold to them, and you can raise my taxes by 10%, no loopholes. If you think you need more, we can discuss it. I don't consider a *functional* educational system a wasteful expenditure - if the money is actually being used to measurably improve the quality of educational outcomes, then I am more than happy to make that investment.
I'm not even sure I'd go that far. Before being granted tenure, most junior professors have to show a history of good research, publications, and so on. Junior researchers basically need to spend their non-tenured time making sure they don't piss off the powers-that-be with heterodox opinions and research, and only after they're given tenure can they "safely" report these findings and explore the questions.
I'm not sure I can think of a "better" way to do it, honestly, but tenure doesn't seem to accomplish much aside from saying, "kiss some asses for a while, in the hope that you won't have to keep kissing asses for the rest of your career."
Okay, so as a business, let's realistically think about how much more Facebook can grow in the next few years.
1) Roughly 2 billion people around the world have access to an internet connection.
2) Roughly 200 million people have internet access in the US.
3) Facebook has 500 million users around the world.
4) Roughly 125 million people in the US have a Facebook profile.
(Source for 1, 2)
(Source for 3, 4)
Conclusions:
1) Facebook has signed up ~63% of the internet-connected population of the US.
(125 million / 200 million * 100)
2) Assuming they can achieve a similar level of market share around the world, their potential market is 1.26 billion people (2 billion * 63%)
3) This puts them, currently, at about 40% of their "maximum size".
That's still a LOT of room to grow. And as I've already noted, and I'm sure you can agree, internet access keeps getting more and more ubiquitous and less and less costly. The number of internet-connected people around the world is only going to grow from its present 2 billion.
Woosh.
Manor =/= Manner.
Manor = building, generally a mansion-style home in the country.
Manner = style, method.
There's an uncomfortable element of truth to this too, and I say this as a devoted son of two career teachers: If you are top in your Computer Science class, Google or Apple or Microsoft comes along to hire you, offers you a good starting salary with benefits, and a brand-name employer that you can show off to your friends. There's less demand for "the guy who graduated last," which means that the lower-paying jobs - i.e., teaching - will fall to those who... 'can't' get the job at Google.
There simply isn't a great deal of incentive for the "top of the class" to go into education: fight your way through a mystifyingly complex government bureaucracy for a full day of discipline problems and budget cuts, all for the same pay as the meathead who barely graduated college? Gee, where do I sign up?
A couple changes that I think would go a long way towards addressing some of this:
1) Abolish tenure. If you're good, your job is safe. If you're not good, you should be turfed.
2) Merit pay for teachers. GOOD merit pay - competitive with industry, and awarded in equal measure to your effectiveness & talents as a teacher.
3) Incentives for effective teachers to work with disadvantaged students.
4) Expand grants, scholarships, etc. - think the Americorps concept. "We give you a scholarship, and in return, you teach for several years after graduation."
Goals are where you want to go. Plans are how you get there. The logical endpoint of a "one person, one profile" networking site is: everybody alive has a profile. That is how big they *can* grow, and that is the underlying premise of every other intermediary goal and plan they put in place - that they will be around long enough, and be successful enough, to build a network that everybody on earth who can access their servers and who wants a profile has one.
Not everybody *needs* to own a computer to access Facebook. Community centers, schools, libraries, friends, mobile phones which are getting cheaper and cheaper... all of these are ways people could get access to Facebook. The barriers to getting online keep getting cheaper & lower, and make no mistake, Facebook wants every single one of those people signing up.
Consider that 30 years ago, exactly zero people had mobile phone subscriptions. At the end of 2009, there were approximately 4.6 billion active mobile phone subscriptions around the world. Consider further that Android is flourishing as a mobile platform, and has a quite capable Facebook client app.
The question was "how much bigger can it grow". The answer, for a service that wants to connect people, is "we can grow so big that everybody alive has a profile."
If you don't think that's Facebook's ultimate goal, you're kidding yourself. They're not sitting there saying, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if we got like, 20 more users than we have today by next year?"
They're sitting there saying, "We want 1.5 billion by 2015, and the whole world by 2025."
WIll they get it? Probably not. There's always going to be people who don't want it, or can't access it. But how many computers were in use on the entire planet 5 years ago? 10 years ago? The trend is up, which means more and more people will be connected. As more people connect, you can bet that Facebook wants to sign them up, and is planning to do just that.
Point is, 500 million users, while a lot, is still less than 10% of the people out there in the world. That's a huge market to grow into, and right now, Facebook really doesn't have much serious competition for the types of services they provide.
Maybe the apps aren't your thing, but a hand-waving "they're all crap" simply shows that you didn't spend even a second looking at what's available.
Among the top 30 purchased apps so far, there are plenty of games; there's also all kinds of "useless crapware" like:
#3 - iPhoto
#5 - Aperture
#8 - iMovie
#9 - Pixelmator
#10 - Pages
#12 - iHomework (students' tool for tracking homework, assignments, etc.)
#13 - Sketchbook Pro
#15 - Garage Band
#16 - Compartments (a home inventory application)
#20 - Courier (a utility for uploading photos, video, etc. to various online services & FTP sites)
#21 - Keynote
#22 - YummySoup (recipe sharing/organization)
#26 - Numbers
#30 - Rapidweaver (web site creation)
Maybe to you, a fun night at home is spent inspecting Apache logs and rewriting binutils in Haskell, who knows. But these apps are solid, professional-quality applications which certainly don't fit the description of "crapware". Will a lot of useless crap be available on the store? Sure. A lot of useless crap is available all over the internet, I see no reason why the Mac App Store should be particularly exempt. But dismissing a 2-day old service as nothing but crap based on your "briefest glance" shows that you probably didn't even take a "brief glance."
THey have 500 million users. Estimates put the number of humans on earth at ~7 billion.
By my count, they could grow by another 6.5 billion people. This also ignores the potential for business & social organization sites, clubs, one-shot events, and a host of other entities which *could * use Facebook as a platform for keeping connected. Plus, the 7 billion people alive today will *not* be the same 7 billion people alive tomorrow. New births = new profiles, and death is *not necessarily* the end of a person's content on Facebook, either - think memorials and the like, as odd and creepy as that might sound.
They've got a lot of room to grow still, and with the population in constant turnover, they'll always have new people to sign up, even if old data from dead people cycles out of the system eventually.
We're talking about an "upgrade treadmill," and it's been asserted that Apple is somehow "worse" about forcing hardware upgrades than any other manufacturer due to the "proprietary" nature of their software.
Responding to that point isn't a straw man. But feel free to continue trying to rebut using ad hominem commentary from behind your AC shield.
If you run 10.4 or 10.5, you can keep on running 10.4 and 10.5 until judgement day for all Apple cares. The App store is not the only way in which PPC-Mac owners can get new software. In fact, every way they've gotten software previously will continue to work, and they're also free to write their own to support new needs they discover.
You seem to be suggesting that the "release of the 10.6-only App Store" means that somehow Mac OS has suddenly stopped working on PPC, or that people suddenly can't install software any way but that. The PPC systems that worked yesterday, still work today. And they'll still work tomorrow just as well as they do today unless the hardware shorts out.
Leopard (10.5) supports the PPC architecture, and supports G4 and G5 PPC chips of 867MhZ or higher, which means that it supports hardware back to about late 2003/early 2004. Tiger (10.4) supports G3 thru G5 chips running 500 MhZ or higher, which means that you can run 10.4 on systems that are as old as early 2001, perhaps a bit earlier.
The last 10.4 security update was in 2009; 10.5 is still actively supported. If we assume a similar window of support, 10.5 will probably continue supporting PPC through this year, and into (perhaps through) 2012.
So this means your computer that just about any mac in the last 7 years is well supported with, at worst, a $29 upgrade charge. Further than that, it gets dicier, but let's be honest - would you expect Windows 7 to run well on a 10 year old piece of hardware? The latest Ubuntu version? You can continue running old versions until the hardware breaks, just as with anything. But there is no operating system, in it's graphical "desktop" configuration today, that would run *well* on a system that is 10 years old.
1) It's $29 per seat retail. Less in bulk purchases, unless you have horrible, horrible legal & purchasing teams. And yes, if you opt not to pay that upgrade fee, *you* have *decided* not to upgrade.
2) Do you really think that Microsoft is issuing free bulk licenses for Windows 7 to enterprises? I can assure you that my company (of about ~50,000 people) is paying a whole lot of money to Microsoft every year for enterprise licensing & support.
3) Enterprises didn't adopt Vista in great numbers because it was an unusable mess of an operating system. Windows 7 has corrected many of the shortcomings of Vista, and so enterprises are looking to upgrade their software now.
4) No piece of Mac hardware released in the last 5 years (since the initial intel conversion) is being "left behind" by anything more than a refusal to upgrade to Snow Leopard.
5) The Mac App store would never have a substantial penetration in "the enterprise" anyway. This is simply not an "enterprise" feature - your IT staff doesn't want you downloading and installing a bunch of random stuff onto your corporate-owned PC.
6) Most corporations I've dealt with depreciate hardware and have it on a hardware refresh cycle of 3-5 years. If you're not doing that, I'd suggest you're working at a "small business" that doesn't really fit the term "enterprise".
When your criticism takes the form of ill-informed trolling, don't be surprised when it's considered a troll.