This isn't about gaining marketshare, this is about putting the screws to major developers who are dragging their feet (like Quark).
Apple's done this before with success. Remember USB? It came to the PC world first, but nobody moved on it because the PC manufacturers weren't getting rid of legacy ports, so peripheral manufacturers stayed on the "Most Compatible" route of PS/2 and Serial. It took Apple introducing USB-only iMacs to jump-start the USB peripheral market.
I mean, good grief, how long did it take the PC industry to drop 5 1/4" floppy drives? The 3.5" came out with the first Mac in 1984, and 10 years later PC's still had both drives. And the 3.5" drive is definitely a technology that has overstayed its welcome; but the fact that it continues to hang on means that suitable replacements took much longer to come to market.
It's good that Apple is driving their market, not just trying to make everything backwards-compatible until we have this overbloated OS running on overbloated hardware. Apple's got the balls to do what most of the PC world won't do. Believe it or not, the market will adapt; Apple has proven this.
Wanna run legacy DOS games? Drop a new hard drive in that old Pentium 233 you have laying around. Or buy VirtualPC for Windows. You've got options. But don't suggest that an entire sector of the tech market should slow progress because you want to play a "golden oldie".
You have mistakenly assumed that high marketshare == total needs fulfillment. At one time the horse and buggy had a virtual lock on the transportation market, too.
If the alternatives aren't worth considering, then why is MS busting a nut trying to force Linux out of the market?
A threat is one thing; doing it is something else entirely.
You don't think that Microsoft suddenly cancelling all sales to its largest client won't look a tad suspicious to the DOJ? Particularly when HP starts making noise about MS ordering them to stop their open source initiatives or else?
Stop selling Windows to HP? Let's not get crazy here! MS still has to turn a profit, they aren't going to just cut off their largest partner cold turkey.
Raise their prices? Yeah, maybe a little bit. But, keep in mind that one of the strengths of the HP/Compaq alliance is all of the corporate accounts that they have. MS knows that they need to own corporate computing; if they push HP too hard, they force HP to find a solution to the problem by pushing more open source solutions out the door.
And I wouldn't be so quick to discount MS's fear of judicial backlash if they act in an overtly anticompetitive manner. MS is still trying to cut deals with the DOJ, so they have some concern about the issue.
Voting is a technicality, the result of having thousands and thousands of shareholders. If there were only one shareholder in the company, he wouldn't have to vote on the issue.
No, that's not what you said. You said that the money didn't belong to the shareholders. I said the shareholders are the owners of the company, so the money belongs to them, not the managers.
The managers are charged with spending the money in the best interests of the shareholders, much as the employee with a credit card example. That doesn't mean they have a blank check to spend retained earnings frivilously.
Yeah, I didn't mean that all charitable giving was bad, just that B&J are excessive about it, and it hurts their stock price and ultimately their company.
So when B&J decides that they need more capital and have a new issue of stock that they want to sell... guess what. They have deflated their own stock price.
The shareholders ARE the owners of the company, and the executives are working directly for the shareholders. The shareholders can call a meeting at any time and replace the entire management staff if they so choose, or vote to close the company and liquidate the assets.
The situation is not much different than your supervisor giving you a credit card for company purchases and you decide to make a donation to United Way on it.
My gf is taking a finance class this semester. She was disturbed by the fact that the first chapter talked about how awful it was that Ben and Jerry's like to give away a ton of money to charity, etc.
The reason it's awful that Ben and Jerry's gave a ton of money to charity is that that money belongs to the shareholders, it needs to be paid out to them and let them donate it to charity if they wish.
The post-cool pop star that seemed to be past his prime launched into a high-profile temper tantrum that brought a lot of media attention to himself and sold a lot more records and made them a lot more money.
My take on the whole thing has been that he never intended to go to space. He used his star power and the promise of $20 million to get himself free access to NASA and do what most boys only dream of, i.e., pretend you're in the space program, sit in on NASA press conferences, play with all the high-tech space equipment.
Oh sure, maybe at first he was serious about the $20 million. But I think he sobered up pretty quick and decided that there was no way he was paying that, but he was going to milk the experience for everything he could before they kicked him out.
In the meantime, he also got himself a TON of free publicity. How many members of NSync can you name? Well, there's some guy named Justin who used to date Britney Spears, and a bunch of other guys. Oh, and LANCE BASS.
Geez, he got $20 million worth of publicity without spending a dime.
Apple is just keeping their options open, they don't have a serious desire to switch. If their relationship with Motorola totally falls apart, and IBM isn't an option, then Apple has a fallback position. They don't have to scramble and spend a year or two trying to port OS X to Intel.
However, remeber OpenStep? Jobs was never terribly successful with NeXT, and determined to ride it out to the very end. He ditched the hardware and ported OpenStep to x86. Unfortunately, NeXT continued to decline; selling a shrink-wrapped OS for x86 was not the solution.
I guess it might be a viable alternative for Apple, though, in about 5 years, when most of the new apps are written in Cocoa and can be easily transferred. It would also require that Apple have a string of successful software titles that generate the bulk of their revenue, much as Microsoft has, because Apple wouldn't be able to rely on generous hardware margins anymore.
John Sculley. It's no secret that a) Steve Jobs has a tremendous vindictive streak, and b) most of the changes SJ made at Apple immeditaely upon his return were to cut or scale back JS's initiatives.
Yes, Newton was ahead of its time. It was too big. It was too expensive. It was poorly marketing. It was too __________ (fill in the blank). And, the Newton division was always in the red. That is, it was in the red until right before SJ axed it. Yes, friends, Newton was making a profit for the first time when SJ lowered the boom (two consecutive quarters, I believe); that more than anything tells me that killing it was an act of vindictiveness.
Of course, it didn't take SJ long to realize the error of his ways. About a year later, it came out that Jobs was offering to buy out Palm, but considering that Palm was mostly comprised of ex-Newtonites who were forced out by Steve (successful ones at that), there was no way it was gonna happen.
What was really crazy was that Palm was wildly successful at the time, but they were only nailing the low-end of the emerging PDA market. Newton was perfectly positioned at the time to nail the mid- to high-end of the market, particularly in vertical applications. I remember a MacWeek article at the time about how the Newton was causing a stir in several vertical markets. Apple had the first mover advantage, and they virtually owned the higher-margin high-end of the market. Killing the Newton was an act of sheer stupidity and short-sightedness.
Now that Microsoft has entered the market, I would say that the odds of Apple owning a big chunk of the PDA market are virtually nil. Palm has saturated the low and mid-range of the market; Microsoft and their partners are going after the mid to high-end. Once again, Apple set the table and Microsoft is eating the meal.
Apple might have an opportunity to add PDA features to the iPod; however, that still only gives them a small slice of the low-end consumer market.
If Jobs had been wise, he would have spun out the Newton division, much as he did the Filemaker Pro division, to create its own brand identity apart from Apple and keep the focus on cross-platform compatibility. Perhaps he might have more shrewdly licensed out the Newton OS and allowed PC manufacturers to build the hardware and sell the systems, thus getting a significant jump on Microsoft.
Keep in mind that Japan's population is more concentrated, so the "last mile" costs are going to be much cheaper on average, having many more people per square mile to subsidize those costs.
Betamax is widely used in video production. When I worked at a 3D animation school, the students would save all of their work to a master Beta tape.
Betamax is still huge for people who do video editing.
Betamax still made Sony lots of money
on
Why VHS Was Better
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· Score: 2
Sure, they lost the battle for Joe Consumer, but they won the corporate market big time. And while JVC is spitting out VHS systems for >$100 a pop, Sony is selling their Betamax systems for $10 or 20 grand. Of course, nobody outside of Sony corporate knows just how much they've made versus how much JVC made, but I bet the gulf isn't as wide as most people think.
Statement that 33% of revenue from song sales goes to the artist, 33% to the writer, and 33% to the distributor (and no cheesy "we're charging the artist $0.50 per song for recording/distribution costs).
Personally, I don't care who gets the money. I'm fairly certain that the majority of music purchasers don't care, either.
When I pop in my Star Wars video, I don't care that it made George Lucas a gazillionaire and Mark Hamill still has to take odd jobs.
I do agree, though, that subscription services largely suck, and if I'm going to pay for anything, I need to get the music without any more restrictions than music on CD's currently have. Otherwise, I'll just buy the CD's and rip my own music.
I took a quick look at Notes R5, and the R6 beta, and I thought it was still clunky. To check for new mail, you have to hunt around for a non-obvious Get Mail button; you press it, it downloads messages, and then it seems nothing happens. OHH, you have to click a button to REFRESH THE WINDOW to see what new messages titles appear!
Oh.
My.
Goodness.
Sorry, but that's just not acceptable. I don't like throwing more money than I have to at Microsoft, but I'm not about to reward poor interface design, either. My first loyalty is to myself; How do I make my job easier?
I believe the current thinking [bagheera.com] is that mammoths were hunted to extinction by men. Mammoths and sabretooth tigers became extinct about 12,000 years ago in North America, which coincides nicely with the arrival of humans on the continent. Hence, by your argument, we should bring them back.
That's just a theory of why mammoths are extinct, nobody knows for sure. If I recall, the DNA they are using are from mammoths that were frozen in northern Russia. The evidence is that they were frozen in a cataclysmic event, because some of them still had food in their mouths.
Also, nobody knows the environmental impact of bringing back creatures that have been dead for so long. Has nature adapted and moved on after a dozen millenia? Would the resurrection of a long-extinct species do more harm than good?
Yes, VoIP has been around for a few years now... however, it's only just now getting to the point where it's not a toy. I remember a couple of years ago playing around with DialPad. I was seriously considering dropping my long distance carrier for the free DialPad as a means of offsetting the cost of a cable modem connection -- that is, until I actually used it. DialPad was so wretchedly awful that it killed my optimism for the service (and I *really* wanted to make it work). There was an echo on the line and a 2 second delay, in addition to the obvious drawback of having to always use a headset plugged into your computer to make phone calls. (Now there are IP phones that don't need to be plugged into a computer -- nice!)
Anyway, it's very difficult to justify the savings on long distance when the quality is so bad, and traditional long distance in the US can be had for as low as 2.9 a minute if you shop around.
Also, keep in mind that you won't be eliminating one bill, but merely shifting your money from one vendor to another. As the need for broadband becomes more prevalent, I believe you'll see broadband providers tax usage more and more to pay for their infrastructure. There's already been/. stories about this happening...
So, no, VoIP is not yet a clearly better choice for the American consumer. give it another 10 years, I say. And by that time, maybe the POTS providers will be the ones leading the charge.
I'm working on my MBA, and algebra is most definitely a big part of doing business math. In fact, the people in the program who don't have strong math skills are really struggling.
Funny, when I was in high school, I thought algebra was a waste of my time (silly me). I couldn't imagine at the time how I would use it in the real world, now I use it almost daily.
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Microsoft already did this. They forced Win9x codebase users to upgrade to the NT-based WinXP.
And it wasn't the end of the world. At least, not that I recall...
This isn't about gaining marketshare, this is about putting the screws to major developers who are dragging their feet (like Quark).
Apple's done this before with success. Remember USB? It came to the PC world first, but nobody moved on it because the PC manufacturers weren't getting rid of legacy ports, so peripheral manufacturers stayed on the "Most Compatible" route of PS/2 and Serial. It took Apple introducing USB-only iMacs to jump-start the USB peripheral market.
I mean, good grief, how long did it take the PC industry to drop 5 1/4" floppy drives? The 3.5" came out with the first Mac in 1984, and 10 years later PC's still had both drives. And the 3.5" drive is definitely a technology that has overstayed its welcome; but the fact that it continues to hang on means that suitable replacements took much longer to come to market.
It's good that Apple is driving their market, not just trying to make everything backwards-compatible until we have this overbloated OS running on overbloated hardware. Apple's got the balls to do what most of the PC world won't do. Believe it or not, the market will adapt; Apple has proven this.
Wanna run legacy DOS games? Drop a new hard drive in that old Pentium 233 you have laying around. Or buy VirtualPC for Windows. You've got options. But don't suggest that an entire sector of the tech market should slow progress because you want to play a "golden oldie".
You have mistakenly assumed that high marketshare == total needs fulfillment. At one time the horse and buggy had a virtual lock on the transportation market, too.
If the alternatives aren't worth considering, then why is MS busting a nut trying to force Linux out of the market?
A threat is one thing; doing it is something else entirely.
You don't think that Microsoft suddenly cancelling all sales to its largest client won't look a tad suspicious to the DOJ? Particularly when HP starts making noise about MS ordering them to stop their open source initiatives or else?
Stop selling Windows to HP? Let's not get crazy here! MS still has to turn a profit, they aren't going to just cut off their largest partner cold turkey.
Raise their prices? Yeah, maybe a little bit. But, keep in mind that one of the strengths of the HP/Compaq alliance is all of the corporate accounts that they have. MS knows that they need to own corporate computing; if they push HP too hard, they force HP to find a solution to the problem by pushing more open source solutions out the door.
And I wouldn't be so quick to discount MS's fear of judicial backlash if they act in an overtly anticompetitive manner. MS is still trying to cut deals with the DOJ, so they have some concern about the issue.
If HP is now the largest vendor of preinstalled MS OS's, then clearly MS needs HP more than HP needs MS.
It's a crazy company that lets a vendor dictate their policies rather than respond to client needs/wants.
Voting is a technicality, the result of having thousands and thousands of shareholders. If there were only one shareholder in the company, he wouldn't have to vote on the issue.
No, that's not what you said. You said that the money didn't belong to the shareholders. I said the shareholders are the owners of the company, so the money belongs to them, not the managers.
The managers are charged with spending the money in the best interests of the shareholders, much as the employee with a credit card example. That doesn't mean they have a blank check to spend retained earnings frivilously.
Yeah, I didn't mean that all charitable giving was bad, just that B&J are excessive about it, and it hurts their stock price and ultimately their company.
So when B&J decides that they need more capital and have a new issue of stock that they want to sell... guess what. They have deflated their own stock price.
The shareholders ARE the owners of the company, and the executives are working directly for the shareholders. The shareholders can call a meeting at any time and replace the entire management staff if they so choose, or vote to close the company and liquidate the assets.
The situation is not much different than your supervisor giving you a credit card for company purchases and you decide to make a donation to United Way on it.
My gf is taking a finance class this semester. She was disturbed by the fact that the first chapter talked about how awful it was that Ben and Jerry's like to give away a ton of money to charity, etc.
The reason it's awful that Ben and Jerry's gave a ton of money to charity is that that money belongs to the shareholders, it needs to be paid out to them and let them donate it to charity if they wish.
Prince is pre-script kiddie. Writing in phonetics is sooooo eighties.
Maybe it was cool "way back when". Now it's just gay.
Yeah, he really screwed them!
:-P
The post-cool pop star that seemed to be past his prime launched into a high-profile temper tantrum that brought a lot of media attention to himself and sold a lot more records and made them a lot more money.
I guess he showed them!
My take on the whole thing has been that he never intended to go to space. He used his star power and the promise of $20 million to get himself free access to NASA and do what most boys only dream of, i.e., pretend you're in the space program, sit in on NASA press conferences, play with all the high-tech space equipment.
Oh sure, maybe at first he was serious about the $20 million. But I think he sobered up pretty quick and decided that there was no way he was paying that, but he was going to milk the experience for everything he could before they kicked him out.
In the meantime, he also got himself a TON of free publicity. How many members of NSync can you name? Well, there's some guy named Justin who used to date Britney Spears, and a bunch of other guys. Oh, and LANCE BASS.
Geez, he got $20 million worth of publicity without spending a dime.
Apple is just keeping their options open, they don't have a serious desire to switch. If their relationship with Motorola totally falls apart, and IBM isn't an option, then Apple has a fallback position. They don't have to scramble and spend a year or two trying to port OS X to Intel.
However, remeber OpenStep? Jobs was never terribly successful with NeXT, and determined to ride it out to the very end. He ditched the hardware and ported OpenStep to x86. Unfortunately, NeXT continued to decline; selling a shrink-wrapped OS for x86 was not the solution.
I guess it might be a viable alternative for Apple, though, in about 5 years, when most of the new apps are written in Cocoa and can be easily transferred. It would also require that Apple have a string of successful software titles that generate the bulk of their revenue, much as Microsoft has, because Apple wouldn't be able to rely on generous hardware margins anymore.
John Sculley. It's no secret that a) Steve Jobs has a tremendous vindictive streak, and b) most of the changes SJ made at Apple immeditaely upon his return were to cut or scale back JS's initiatives.
Yes, Newton was ahead of its time. It was too big. It was too expensive. It was poorly marketing. It was too __________ (fill in the blank). And, the Newton division was always in the red. That is, it was in the red until right before SJ axed it. Yes, friends, Newton was making a profit for the first time when SJ lowered the boom (two consecutive quarters, I believe); that more than anything tells me that killing it was an act of vindictiveness.
Of course, it didn't take SJ long to realize the error of his ways. About a year later, it came out that Jobs was offering to buy out Palm, but considering that Palm was mostly comprised of ex-Newtonites who were forced out by Steve (successful ones at that), there was no way it was gonna happen.
What was really crazy was that Palm was wildly successful at the time, but they were only nailing the low-end of the emerging PDA market. Newton was perfectly positioned at the time to nail the mid- to high-end of the market, particularly in vertical applications. I remember a MacWeek article at the time about how the Newton was causing a stir in several vertical markets. Apple had the first mover advantage, and they virtually owned the higher-margin high-end of the market. Killing the Newton was an act of sheer stupidity and short-sightedness.
Now that Microsoft has entered the market, I would say that the odds of Apple owning a big chunk of the PDA market are virtually nil. Palm has saturated the low and mid-range of the market; Microsoft and their partners are going after the mid to high-end. Once again, Apple set the table and Microsoft is eating the meal.
Apple might have an opportunity to add PDA features to the iPod; however, that still only gives them a small slice of the low-end consumer market.
If Jobs had been wise, he would have spun out the Newton division, much as he did the Filemaker Pro division, to create its own brand identity apart from Apple and keep the focus on cross-platform compatibility. Perhaps he might have more shrewdly licensed out the Newton OS and allowed PC manufacturers to build the hardware and sell the systems, thus getting a significant jump on Microsoft.
Ah well.
Keep in mind that Japan's population is more concentrated, so the "last mile" costs are going to be much cheaper on average, having many more people per square mile to subsidize those costs.
ok, that'll teach me to proof...
should be less than $100, not great than.
duh.
Betamax is widely used in video production. When I worked at a 3D animation school, the students would save all of their work to a master Beta tape.
Betamax is still huge for people who do video editing.
Sure, they lost the battle for Joe Consumer, but they won the corporate market big time. And while JVC is spitting out VHS systems for >$100 a pop, Sony is selling their Betamax systems for $10 or 20 grand. Of course, nobody outside of Sony corporate knows just how much they've made versus how much JVC made, but I bet the gulf isn't as wide as most people think.
Statement that 33% of revenue from song sales goes to the artist, 33% to the writer, and 33% to the distributor (and no cheesy "we're charging the artist $0.50 per song for recording/distribution costs).
Personally, I don't care who gets the money. I'm fairly certain that the majority of music purchasers don't care, either.
When I pop in my Star Wars video, I don't care that it made George Lucas a gazillionaire and Mark Hamill still has to take odd jobs.
I do agree, though, that subscription services largely suck, and if I'm going to pay for anything, I need to get the music without any more restrictions than music on CD's currently have. Otherwise, I'll just buy the CD's and rip my own music.
I took a quick look at Notes R5, and the R6 beta, and I thought it was still clunky. To check for new mail, you have to hunt around for a non-obvious Get Mail button; you press it, it downloads messages, and then it seems nothing happens. OHH, you have to click a button to REFRESH THE WINDOW to see what new messages titles appear!
Oh.
My.
Goodness.
Sorry, but that's just not acceptable. I don't like throwing more money than I have to at Microsoft, but I'm not about to reward poor interface design, either. My first loyalty is to myself; How do I make my job easier?
I believe the current thinking [bagheera.com] is that mammoths were hunted to extinction by men. Mammoths and sabretooth tigers became extinct about 12,000 years ago in North America, which coincides nicely with the arrival of humans on the continent. Hence, by your argument, we should bring them back.
That's just a theory of why mammoths are extinct, nobody knows for sure. If I recall, the DNA they are using are from mammoths that were frozen in northern Russia. The evidence is that they were frozen in a cataclysmic event, because some of them still had food in their mouths.
Also, nobody knows the environmental impact of bringing back creatures that have been dead for so long. Has nature adapted and moved on after a dozen millenia? Would the resurrection of a long-extinct species do more harm than good?
Just some thoughts...
Yes, VoIP has been around for a few years now... however, it's only just now getting to the point where it's not a toy. I remember a couple of years ago playing around with DialPad. I was seriously considering dropping my long distance carrier for the free DialPad as a means of offsetting the cost of a cable modem connection -- that is, until I actually used it. DialPad was so wretchedly awful that it killed my optimism for the service (and I *really* wanted to make it work). There was an echo on the line and a 2 second delay, in addition to the obvious drawback of having to always use a headset plugged into your computer to make phone calls. (Now there are IP phones that don't need to be plugged into a computer -- nice!)
/. stories about this happening...
Anyway, it's very difficult to justify the savings on long distance when the quality is so bad, and traditional long distance in the US can be had for as low as 2.9 a minute if you shop around.
Also, keep in mind that you won't be eliminating one bill, but merely shifting your money from one vendor to another. As the need for broadband becomes more prevalent, I believe you'll see broadband providers tax usage more and more to pay for their infrastructure. There's already been
So, no, VoIP is not yet a clearly better choice for the American consumer. give it another 10 years, I say. And by that time, maybe the POTS providers will be the ones leading the charge.
I'm working on my MBA, and algebra is most definitely a big part of doing business math. In fact, the people in the program who don't have strong math skills are really struggling.
Funny, when I was in high school, I thought algebra was a waste of my time (silly me). I couldn't imagine at the time how I would use it in the real world, now I use it almost daily.