The only model I can imagine working is the tact Google Video has taken... use the free user uploaded videos to attract people to the site, then try to drive customers towards premium ad-driven (or purchasable) content - come for the clip of "The Daily Show", stay to buy the whole episode.
On the long term my money is on Google's offering, as it seems much more attractive to those with premium content than YouTube does.
Although now that I think about it, the *best* positioned company to dominate this space is Microsoft, even though they don't even have an offering yet. The XBox 360 means that they're the only company which can easily put this video content onto people's televisions sets, something not even Apple makes easy to do yet.
I can imagine the whole company going under pretty quickly with one good lawsuit. Especially once they start to monetize it and ads wind up next to copyrighted content. Plus if reports are true, they're burning $1 million a month in bandwith; their VC money won't last long at the rate they're going. Wouldn't shock me if they went into bankruptcy quite suddenly and wound up being bought for cheap by Google or Yahoo.
In any case though, I think the grandparent is right. Ebay benefits a lot from network effects; you sell and buy on Ebay because that's where buyers and sellers are, and makes possible something that really wasn't possible before. Viral videos, on the other hand, have always managed to make their way around the net without anything like a YouTube, and it's just as easy to share a link from, say Revver or Google Video as it is to share one from YouTube.
Moreover, every single one of you who's going to go home tonight and tell your friends about the big, bad, RIAA, is doing exactly what they hope you'll do.
They're hoping I'm going to go home, tell people what assholes they are, and implore people not to buy un-DRMed indy music instead of doing business with them?
I have no idea how many people have gone from P2P to legally buying RIAA music because of these lawsuits (I've yet to meet someone who has), but I can name a dozen people who've discovered indy music as a direct result of the RIAA's actions.
Especially when you consider that the ones that make the national news are "RIAA sues 12 yo girl/Grandmother/single mom/etc", it's clear these things just aren't accomplishing their intended goal and generating a whole lot of bad PR. These lawsuits are sheer idiocy from a business standpoint.
Well, speaking as someone who came up with the same solution as you, I have to disagree on one point: I *hate* the tiny remote. Six buttons is fine, but sheesh, can't they offer something that's not so small it gets lost every freaking time I put the thing down?
Ginormous TV remotes don't get lost in couch cushions. The Mac Mini remote seems to get lost in every crack that's big enough for it to fall into.
I use a Mac Mini (a PVR has no appeal to me, part of my goal was to eliminate the need for a cable subscription. You can get a lot of iTunes shows for the $700 a year I was paying Comcast).
It's actually the only Mac I own; I just got it because the functionality was there and the price point was right (and face it; a Mac in the living room looks pretty whereas most PC's don't).
Mostly I just use it for FrontRow - it plays DVD's, iTunes shows, and downloaded videos for the most part (it's nice that it can play anything I throw at it). But I do like having the power of a full fledged computer beyond just being a media player, in case I ever want to add functionality, and I have used it to surf the web or watch some stuff on Google Video on occasion.
And honestly, I've used tivo's and such before... I don't think they're any easier to use for the level of functionality they offer. Some of those PVR interfaces are every bit as complex as a full PC.
I think what the article meant though, is that people aren't ever going to use their television screens to check their email or computer screens to watch the latest episode of Lost with their girlfriends. There will always be two physically different devices for that, even if it winds up that they can both run the same software.
You say this like you expect Snaked on a Plane to be bad. There's something to be said for a quality B-movie that doesn't try to be anything but. It's one of the very few movies I'm gonna haul myself out to the theater to see this year.
In any case, what you say isn't exactly true. Superman *cost* $200 million to make, and who knows how much more in marketing. It went on to essentially flop. And while it probably won't lose money by the time they're done with DVD sales and all that, it's still a pretty lousy ROI on $200 million.
Compare that to a niche movie that can be made for under a million and can gross $20 million at the box office based almost entirely on word-of-mouth marketing. Something like Snakes on a Plane or Clerks II.
I think George Lucas was right a couple of months ago when he predicted the end of the blockbuster.
On the point about DVR's... if you haven't noticed, that's been causing a lot of consternation by TV execs, and advertisers are getting increasingly antsy about people skipping commercials. It may have had some effect on the viability of long term plot arcs, but shows have done that since long before DVR's. I think what happened was more a change in thinking - a show does better when it can engage viewers and make them want to tune in week after week.
And TV in general, far from going way up, has been hemoraging viewers. They just had their lowest rated week in history this last July 4th and they're in panic mode about losing their key 18-24 demographic that advertisers want to reach.
What's missing is the willingness to take a chance on new ideas. Hollywood, over the course of the last 20 years or so, has become increasingly risk-averse. They want a guarenteed hit and ROI, so they increasingly fall back on their formulaic plots, sequels, remakes, established franchises, and ever-more-pervasive marketting campaigns. There's a chance that something which is new and different could turn out to be the next Star Wars franchise... but more likely than not, it'll be a flop. And when there's less money to be had (ticket sales are down by another 3-6% or so this summer), investors don't want to take the risk.
It's not surprising given how the media landscape has been transforming, making the competition for your attention and media dollar all that more fierce. Cable TV, video games, and the internet all makes people that much less likely to go out to the movies.
Also, to a large extent, blame the audience... they're the ones that keep justifying this behavior by coming out en masse for the crapola and letting anything with a hint of originality die a slow box office death.
The great-grandparent made a specious claim that consuming violent media leads to violent behavior, and suggesting censoring violent media was acceptable on that basis. The grandparent suggesting censoring religion and books, the only difference was he didn't claim they lead to violent behavior.
The parent is comparing apples and oranges. Violence and assault are illegal. Violent media is free speech.
By the logic in the great-grandparent, if I could tie religion to violent behaviors (and I probably could without too much effort), then we should censor that too.
And yet... Gmail/Calendar, Writely, and Basecamp are all part of my day-to-day workflow.
Can you say: Cross platform, accessible anywhere, don't have to worry about synchronization, backups, installation or upgrades, lightweight, doesn't crash, and easy-as-pie to collaborate?
(That point D. of yours was a joke, right? Try to get a half dozen people to open and edit the same network copy of an excel spreadsheet at the same time and have the changes show up on everyone's screen simultaneously. Let me know how it goes. In the meantime, I'll use Google's offering for such collaborative projects.)
Then of course there's wiki's, blogs, social networking apps - applications that are only made possible by the web. I suppose you could write desktop clients to power all that stuff, install them on each client PC, and go nuts every time there's an upgrade... but seriously, why would you want to?
But probably not as fast as going to the local Blockbuster - especially for a 2 Gb file. Besides, I can't think of a single time where I so impulsively wanted to rent a particular movie that that kind of speed mattered. I can get any given title from Netflix inside of 48 hours (cept Sundays). That's more than fast enough for me.
2) There is no need to "queue" because there is no effective limit on warehouse copies
True enough, but on the other hand A) I don't see a point in having much more than three titles on hand at any given time... if I did, I'd be buying and building a library, not renting and B) availability from Netflix's warehouse has yet to be an issue for me for any title I've wanted.
3) A per download price can be much cheaper than a NetFlix subscription
Depends. I pay $18 a month and watch about 6 movies in that time, on average. Apple is going to have a tough time beatin $3 a movie.
4) A download can be portable (without risk of damage to the media)
Unless your hard drive fails or system gets corrupted.
5) There is no return 6) There is no subscription
True enough on point 5, although a trip to the mailbox is hardly out of my way. And in this instance, I prefer the subscription, as I get more flexibility between when I get it and when I watch it.
Now, lets look at the flip side:
1) DVD players are ubiquitous which makes a Netflix DVD quite versatile. I can't see myself bringing my computer to someone's house or hooking up my iPod to their TV.
2) Apple simply isn't going to match Netflix's catalog of 60,000 titles, at least not for a good long while.
Their attitude seems to be 'release whatever we can squeeze by the studios, and then if something becomes a major problem, we'll change it.' Hence the original versions of iTunes had some neat remote-music-sharing features, but then when they became major sources of piracy and the studios started to complain (assumedly -- I can only imagine the irate phone calls from Sony/Warner/BMG), they got removed.
Maybe that's how it started... but these days Apple loves their DRM. With every track you buy you become more beholden to iTunes and the iPod if ever you want to play it again. And all those iPod owners... if they want legal music, there's only one download source for it. Thanks to DRM, Apple has the kind of consumer lock-in that Microsoft only has wet dreams about.
It's only more expensive if you need to make something with a fully orchestrated soundtrack, state of the art graphics and plan on hosting a million MMORPG users.
But the reality is that it takes a few hours, moderate programming skill and marginal artistic abilities to throw together a flash game. In that sense, costs have been dropping like a rock.
Same for music - without trying, you could spend a fortune mastering an album using the very best equipment. The thing is, do you need to?
The analogy even carries over to movies. The costs are going up for whizz bang special effects and A-list actors. But you can put together an independent film with little more than a camcorder and a decent PC. (The example that comes to mind is Clerks - the original one was done for around $100k as I recall... today you could probably make the same movie for less than half with digital technology).
Ultimately, I think the economics will work itself out. The market for special effects laden fluff products is shrinking. In the end, it just means we'll see less of them, and more of the cheap stuff that isn't necessarily blockbuster material (but might turn out to be).
Gah - I wish I could have that kind of luck... so far I haven't gotten much of anyone to switch to Google Talk, even amongst those with Gmail accounts. Most still message me over AIM, perhaps out of habit more than anything else.
I've considered simply quitting AIM myself and forcing them to contact me over Jabber/GTalk... but I have a feeling I'd wind up losing friends rather than converting them to a new network.
Here's to hoping that the Google/AOL relationship means they'll be doing their own link up sometime soon, then I can viably just use one jabber account. (The number of people I know who exclusively use Yahoo or MSN is pretty marginal).
I guess the best case scenario would be for Google to simply jabber gateways on their own network... but I suppose such a move would be insta-lawsuit for them, whether such a suit has merits or not.
Plus, there's Google to consider, which is pushing Firefox hard, and will presumably continue to push it hard. I don't think that IE7 will be the default on every Vista computer, thanks to whatever deals they cut with Dell and other manufacturers. Considering that Firefox doesn't come by default anywhere now - I can only see it's share going up once it is the default on a fraction of new computers.
Well, he's not alone there. I'll generally block out two hours or so in the evenings just to rest and vegitate, during which I'll usually watch a movie. Mind you, I don't get to do that every day (life, work, junk like that) and especially lately (the last year or two) I've been just as likely to indulge in some TV show on DVD (I never watch TV shows on TV anymore) - but I'll still watch a good 10-20 movies a month. And no, there's not all new. I have a bunch of favorites I'll watch multiple times, others I'll watch a couple of times, and older ones discovered through Netflix that are new-to-me. Plus the new ones, as they're released.
Selsun Blue may or may not be the "gold standard" for treating dandruff, but I'll be damned if that's not there to convince people to buy it. The line has since been removed, but I tend to think there are certain products & companies that would stand to benefit greatly from tidbits not unlike the above. Wikipedia may not be "authoritative" among scholars, but it certainly is seen that way by consumers, and if Wikipedia says that Product X solves problem Y... that's influence marketters won't ignore for long.
I think like that too. Impress me with what you got, not what you're wearing. Anyone who has a preoccupation with clothes is simply superficial... which means they're either stupid, or trying to con you.
It's not disrespect when someone doesn't wear a suit, it's common sense. The bloody things have got to be the most ridiculously impractical peices of clothing on the face of the Earth. The jacket is like a sweater; hot as hell in the summer yet not warm enough to replace a winter coat. The pants stain, wrinkle, and are too thin. And I can only imagine that ties are worn so you have the option of hanging yourself to escape a long meeting. Not to mention the fact that the whole thing originated from a self-important upper class saying "Look at me! I can wear this ridiculous thing because I don't have to do manual labor all day!"
I'm not a huge fan of iTunes either, mostly because it's not extensible enough (won't play FLAC, their video library management sucks).
But what's Microsoft's alternative? Windows Media Player. Which from a UI perspective, is far worse in just about every way (though at least it's sort of extensible).
I think that's exactly what this really is. Google's working out the technology in San Francisco and Mountain View; they're buying up all that dark fiber - not because they plan to build an ISP, but so they can threaten to.
If ISP's really do start breaking net neutrality (really bad for Google, who's service depends on getting users to any site on the internet quickly) - Google has the leverage to play hardball, and realistically threaten to offer free Wi-Fi in the nation's biggest markets (cities).
They might delete the email in that account, but I don't think they ever delete the account itself; you can log in again at any time and reactivate it, at least with hotmail. (I just did it with an account I haven't used for years).
Suffice to say everyone is going to inflate their numbers; I don't see any reason Yahoo and MS wouldn't include lapsed accounts when they announce "we have X million users". Suffice to say I'd be much more interested in knowing how many of those accounts regularly send/receive email and are logged into at least once a week.
Another issue here is spambots; which I know plagues Yahoo. How many of those accounts are spam or set up by a bot?
They add features and improve stuff at a pretty good clip; I think your complaint here is that they're just not prioritizing the features you might want. Gmail was already addressed, but as for their other products:
Most of the improvements are back end things that improve speed and accuracy that won't necessarily be visible to the end user. Speed and filtering enhancements, that sort of thing.
Google Maps has seen numerous data updates and improved their road data considerably (especially for Europe), and integration with local search, and an all-important API, which allowed applications ("features") to be built on top of it Google could never have dreamed of and most of which will never be seen in Yahoo Maps.
Google News added page customization, personalized reccomendations, more sources, more languages and RSS feeds since its launch.
Froogle I don't use, but I know that shopping carts are a relatively new feature of it.
For other products: Desktop Search is on version 4, Google Earth is on version 4 (second since Google released it last year), Reader has gotten some much needed feature enhancements... etc. Groups has gotten some minor enhancements - ratings and profiles.
I'm pretty sure they add features based at least on part on feedback - that's part of the reason they do these early betas. Sometimes the process is a little baffling (like two years to get a delete button for gmail) but I don't think they've abandoned any of their projects. I see much more project abandonment and product decay over at Yahoo and Microsoft (look at their webmail and maps before Google came along and disrupted those areas).
Slashdot Mirror
The only model I can imagine working is the tact Google Video has taken... use the free user uploaded videos to attract people to the site, then try to drive customers towards premium ad-driven (or purchasable) content - come for the clip of "The Daily Show", stay to buy the whole episode.
On the long term my money is on Google's offering, as it seems much more attractive to those with premium content than YouTube does.
Although now that I think about it, the *best* positioned company to dominate this space is Microsoft, even though they don't even have an offering yet. The XBox 360 means that they're the only company which can easily put this video content onto people's televisions sets, something not even Apple makes easy to do yet.
I can imagine the whole company going under pretty quickly with one good lawsuit. Especially once they start to monetize it and ads wind up next to copyrighted content. Plus if reports are true, they're burning $1 million a month in bandwith; their VC money won't last long at the rate they're going. Wouldn't shock me if they went into bankruptcy quite suddenly and wound up being bought for cheap by Google or Yahoo.
In any case though, I think the grandparent is right. Ebay benefits a lot from network effects; you sell and buy on Ebay because that's where buyers and sellers are, and makes possible something that really wasn't possible before. Viral videos, on the other hand, have always managed to make their way around the net without anything like a YouTube, and it's just as easy to share a link from, say Revver or Google Video as it is to share one from YouTube.
They're hoping I'm going to go home, tell people what assholes they are, and implore people not to buy un-DRMed indy music instead of doing business with them?
I have no idea how many people have gone from P2P to legally buying RIAA music because of these lawsuits (I've yet to meet someone who has), but I can name a dozen people who've discovered indy music as a direct result of the RIAA's actions.
Especially when you consider that the ones that make the national news are "RIAA sues 12 yo girl/Grandmother/single mom/etc", it's clear these things just aren't accomplishing their intended goal and generating a whole lot of bad PR. These lawsuits are sheer idiocy from a business standpoint.
Well, speaking as someone who came up with the same solution as you, I have to disagree on one point: I *hate* the tiny remote. Six buttons is fine, but sheesh, can't they offer something that's not so small it gets lost every freaking time I put the thing down? Ginormous TV remotes don't get lost in couch cushions. The Mac Mini remote seems to get lost in every crack that's big enough for it to fall into.
I use a Mac Mini (a PVR has no appeal to me, part of my goal was to eliminate the need for a cable subscription. You can get a lot of iTunes shows for the $700 a year I was paying Comcast).
It's actually the only Mac I own; I just got it because the functionality was there and the price point was right (and face it; a Mac in the living room looks pretty whereas most PC's don't).
Mostly I just use it for FrontRow - it plays DVD's, iTunes shows, and downloaded videos for the most part (it's nice that it can play anything I throw at it). But I do like having the power of a full fledged computer beyond just being a media player, in case I ever want to add functionality, and I have used it to surf the web or watch some stuff on Google Video on occasion.
And honestly, I've used tivo's and such before... I don't think they're any easier to use for the level of functionality they offer. Some of those PVR interfaces are every bit as complex as a full PC.
I think what the article meant though, is that people aren't ever going to use their television screens to check their email or computer screens to watch the latest episode of Lost with their girlfriends. There will always be two physically different devices for that, even if it winds up that they can both run the same software.
Amazingly and sadly, this was modded funny.
Isn't it remarkable how it flips back and forth between a "license" and "a disc with media on it" depending on which one sticks it to consumers more?
You say this like you expect Snaked on a Plane to be bad. There's something to be said for a quality B-movie that doesn't try to be anything but. It's one of the very few movies I'm gonna haul myself out to the theater to see this year.
In any case, what you say isn't exactly true. Superman *cost* $200 million to make, and who knows how much more in marketing. It went on to essentially flop. And while it probably won't lose money by the time they're done with DVD sales and all that, it's still a pretty lousy ROI on $200 million.
Compare that to a niche movie that can be made for under a million and can gross $20 million at the box office based almost entirely on word-of-mouth marketing. Something like Snakes on a Plane or Clerks II.
I think George Lucas was right a couple of months ago when he predicted the end of the blockbuster.
On the point about DVR's... if you haven't noticed, that's been causing a lot of consternation by TV execs, and advertisers are getting increasingly antsy about people skipping commercials. It may have had some effect on the viability of long term plot arcs, but shows have done that since long before DVR's. I think what happened was more a change in thinking - a show does better when it can engage viewers and make them want to tune in week after week. And TV in general, far from going way up, has been hemoraging viewers. They just had their lowest rated week in history this last July 4th and they're in panic mode about losing their key 18-24 demographic that advertisers want to reach.
There's no shortage of ideas.
What's missing is the willingness to take a chance on new ideas. Hollywood, over the course of the last 20 years or so, has become increasingly risk-averse. They want a guarenteed hit and ROI, so they increasingly fall back on their formulaic plots, sequels, remakes, established franchises, and ever-more-pervasive marketting campaigns. There's a chance that something which is new and different could turn out to be the next Star Wars franchise... but more likely than not, it'll be a flop. And when there's less money to be had (ticket sales are down by another 3-6% or so this summer), investors don't want to take the risk.
It's not surprising given how the media landscape has been transforming, making the competition for your attention and media dollar all that more fierce. Cable TV, video games, and the internet all makes people that much less likely to go out to the movies.
Also, to a large extent, blame the audience... they're the ones that keep justifying this behavior by coming out en masse for the crapola and letting anything with a hint of originality die a slow box office death.
The great-grandparent made a specious claim that consuming violent media leads to violent behavior, and suggesting censoring violent media was acceptable on that basis. The grandparent suggesting censoring religion and books, the only difference was he didn't claim they lead to violent behavior.
The parent is comparing apples and oranges. Violence and assault are illegal. Violent media is free speech.
By the logic in the great-grandparent, if I could tie religion to violent behaviors (and I probably could without too much effort), then we should censor that too.
And yet... Gmail/Calendar, Writely, and Basecamp are all part of my day-to-day workflow.
Can you say: Cross platform, accessible anywhere, don't have to worry about synchronization, backups, installation or upgrades, lightweight, doesn't crash, and easy-as-pie to collaborate?
(That point D. of yours was a joke, right? Try to get a half dozen people to open and edit the same network copy of an excel spreadsheet at the same time and have the changes show up on everyone's screen simultaneously. Let me know how it goes. In the meantime, I'll use Google's offering for such collaborative projects.)
Then of course there's wiki's, blogs, social networking apps - applications that are only made possible by the web. I suppose you could write desktop clients to power all that stuff, install them on each client PC, and go nuts every time there's an upgrade... but seriously, why would you want to?
Just to offer the counterpoints...
But probably not as fast as going to the local Blockbuster - especially for a 2 Gb file. Besides, I can't think of a single time where I so impulsively wanted to rent a particular movie that that kind of speed mattered. I can get any given title from Netflix inside of 48 hours (cept Sundays). That's more than fast enough for me.
True enough, but on the other hand A) I don't see a point in having much more than three titles on hand at any given time... if I did, I'd be buying and building a library, not renting and B) availability from Netflix's warehouse has yet to be an issue for me for any title I've wanted.
Depends. I pay $18 a month and watch about 6 movies in that time, on average. Apple is going to have a tough time beatin $3 a movie.
Unless your hard drive fails or system gets corrupted.
True enough on point 5, although a trip to the mailbox is hardly out of my way. And in this instance, I prefer the subscription, as I get more flexibility between when I get it and when I watch it.
Now, lets look at the flip side:
1) DVD players are ubiquitous which makes a Netflix DVD quite versatile. I can't see myself bringing my computer to someone's house or hooking up my iPod to their TV.
2) Apple simply isn't going to match Netflix's catalog of 60,000 titles, at least not for a good long while.
Maybe that's how it started... but these days Apple loves their DRM. With every track you buy you become more beholden to iTunes and the iPod if ever you want to play it again. And all those iPod owners... if they want legal music, there's only one download source for it. Thanks to DRM, Apple has the kind of consumer lock-in that Microsoft only has wet dreams about.
It's only more expensive if you need to make something with a fully orchestrated soundtrack, state of the art graphics and plan on hosting a million MMORPG users.
But the reality is that it takes a few hours, moderate programming skill and marginal artistic abilities to throw together a flash game. In that sense, costs have been dropping like a rock.
Same for music - without trying, you could spend a fortune mastering an album using the very best equipment. The thing is, do you need to?
The analogy even carries over to movies. The costs are going up for whizz bang special effects and A-list actors. But you can put together an independent film with little more than a camcorder and a decent PC. (The example that comes to mind is Clerks - the original one was done for around $100k as I recall... today you could probably make the same movie for less than half with digital technology).
Ultimately, I think the economics will work itself out. The market for special effects laden fluff products is shrinking. In the end, it just means we'll see less of them, and more of the cheap stuff that isn't necessarily blockbuster material (but might turn out to be).
Gah - I wish I could have that kind of luck... so far I haven't gotten much of anyone to switch to Google Talk, even amongst those with Gmail accounts. Most still message me over AIM, perhaps out of habit more than anything else.
I've considered simply quitting AIM myself and forcing them to contact me over Jabber/GTalk... but I have a feeling I'd wind up losing friends rather than converting them to a new network.
Here's to hoping that the Google/AOL relationship means they'll be doing their own link up sometime soon, then I can viably just use one jabber account. (The number of people I know who exclusively use Yahoo or MSN is pretty marginal).
I guess the best case scenario would be for Google to simply jabber gateways on their own network... but I suppose such a move would be insta-lawsuit for them, whether such a suit has merits or not.
Plus, there's Google to consider, which is pushing Firefox hard, and will presumably continue to push it hard. I don't think that IE7 will be the default on every Vista computer, thanks to whatever deals they cut with Dell and other manufacturers. Considering that Firefox doesn't come by default anywhere now - I can only see it's share going up once it is the default on a fraction of new computers.
Well, he's not alone there. I'll generally block out two hours or so in the evenings just to rest and vegitate, during which I'll usually watch a movie. Mind you, I don't get to do that every day (life, work, junk like that) and especially lately (the last year or two) I've been just as likely to indulge in some TV show on DVD (I never watch TV shows on TV anymore) - but I'll still watch a good 10-20 movies a month. And no, there's not all new. I have a bunch of favorites I'll watch multiple times, others I'll watch a couple of times, and older ones discovered through Netflix that are new-to-me. Plus the new ones, as they're released.
I'm struggling to think of one instance where they've been either less stupid or less evil than the music industry.
Actually, this highlights a potentially bigger and rarely mentioned problem with Wikipedia: Spamming.
A couple of months ago I was reading the article on dandruff when I came across this line, completely unreferenced:
(Link to version of the page with the quote.)
Selsun Blue may or may not be the "gold standard" for treating dandruff, but I'll be damned if that's not there to convince people to buy it. The line has since been removed, but I tend to think there are certain products & companies that would stand to benefit greatly from tidbits not unlike the above. Wikipedia may not be "authoritative" among scholars, but it certainly is seen that way by consumers, and if Wikipedia says that Product X solves problem Y... that's influence marketters won't ignore for long.
I think like that too. Impress me with what you got, not what you're wearing. Anyone who has a preoccupation with clothes is simply superficial... which means they're either stupid, or trying to con you.
It's not disrespect when someone doesn't wear a suit, it's common sense. The bloody things have got to be the most ridiculously impractical peices of clothing on the face of the Earth. The jacket is like a sweater; hot as hell in the summer yet not warm enough to replace a winter coat. The pants stain, wrinkle, and are too thin. And I can only imagine that ties are worn so you have the option of hanging yourself to escape a long meeting. Not to mention the fact that the whole thing originated from a self-important upper class saying "Look at me! I can wear this ridiculous thing because I don't have to do manual labor all day!"
I'm not a huge fan of iTunes either, mostly because it's not extensible enough (won't play FLAC, their video library management sucks).
But what's Microsoft's alternative? Windows Media Player. Which from a UI perspective, is far worse in just about every way (though at least it's sort of extensible).
I think that's exactly what this really is. Google's working out the technology in San Francisco and Mountain View; they're buying up all that dark fiber - not because they plan to build an ISP, but so they can threaten to.
If ISP's really do start breaking net neutrality (really bad for Google, who's service depends on getting users to any site on the internet quickly) - Google has the leverage to play hardball, and realistically threaten to offer free Wi-Fi in the nation's biggest markets (cities).
They might delete the email in that account, but I don't think they ever delete the account itself; you can log in again at any time and reactivate it, at least with hotmail. (I just did it with an account I haven't used for years).
Suffice to say everyone is going to inflate their numbers; I don't see any reason Yahoo and MS wouldn't include lapsed accounts when they announce "we have X million users". Suffice to say I'd be much more interested in knowing how many of those accounts regularly send/receive email and are logged into at least once a week.
Another issue here is spambots; which I know plagues Yahoo. How many of those accounts are spam or set up by a bot?
They add features and improve stuff at a pretty good clip; I think your complaint here is that they're just not prioritizing the features you might want. Gmail was already addressed, but as for their other products:
Most of the improvements are back end things that improve speed and accuracy that won't necessarily be visible to the end user. Speed and filtering enhancements, that sort of thing.
Google Maps has seen numerous data updates and improved their road data considerably (especially for Europe), and integration with local search, and an all-important API, which allowed applications ("features") to be built on top of it Google could never have dreamed of and most of which will never be seen in Yahoo Maps.
Google News added page customization, personalized reccomendations, more sources, more languages and RSS feeds since its launch.
Froogle I don't use, but I know that shopping carts are a relatively new feature of it.
For other products: Desktop Search is on version 4, Google Earth is on version 4 (second since Google released it last year), Reader has gotten some much needed feature enhancements... etc. Groups has gotten some minor enhancements - ratings and profiles.
I'm pretty sure they add features based at least on part on feedback - that's part of the reason they do these early betas. Sometimes the process is a little baffling (like two years to get a delete button for gmail) but I don't think they've abandoned any of their projects. I see much more project abandonment and product decay over at Yahoo and Microsoft (look at their webmail and maps before Google came along and disrupted those areas).
And, after almost two years they added a delete button! Can't forget that :)