AMD chips were found in 52.5 percent of desktop PCs sold in U.S. retail stores during that period."
Of course, Dell doesn't sell many of its computers in retail stores, it is the largest manufacturer in the US, and it doesn't use AMD chips (yet). So the quoted statistic is misleading at best. Still, more competition is always a good thing.
It's by far the most on-topic response thus far, and sure to be a lot more interesting to the three other baseball fans that read slashdot than "I Am Copyrighting Planck's Constant!"
I didn't re-read the article before posting, so I was relying on my memory of something I read while waiting for the dentist in early October. If the article portrayed the Cornice/Apple talks differently than I did, I apologize for my fuzzy recollection.
That said, I think all your comments are spot-on. I appreciate the info.
I read an article about Cornice a while back (upon further googling, here it is). They were approached by Apple to be the exclusive supplier of HDs for the iPod Mini. They ended up turning Apple down in order to focus on the phone hard drive market. Time will tell how smart of a decision that was, but if there's one thing you can say about their CEO it's that he's got some brass ones. I think it was a pretty stupid move, but then Apple would be done with this tech by now (only flash in the Nano, bigger HDs in the 5G iPod) so maybe they will sell a lot of phones with hard drives and become rich.
One of my readers makes his living selling goods over the Internet, and his sole means of obtaining customers is through Google AdWords. His business is robust for a one-man operation and he makes a good living. Knowing the actual numbers, I would say he makes a VERY good living, which shows the effectiveness of Google and AdWords as an advertising medium. ... "It's like Vegas," said my friend. "They want you to lose. Try to game the system and they cut off one of your legs."
If they "want him to lose", why has he decided to "bet his life" so to speak on making a living from Google? There are other ways to make a buck in the world...
"RIAA sucks! Apple rules! iPods rule!" et cetera. It's getting old.
To fill a 60 gig iPod with songs from itunes costs roughly $15 grand. And yet they still sell very well... hmmm. I suppose a lot of folks with 1250 disc CD collections (the stack of CD cases would only be about 30 feet high) will come out of the woodwork to talk about how much they love having each bootleg Phish show they own on their iPod, but the fact is that most people who have 60 gigs of music stole a lot of it. (Other anticipated responses: I use my ipod to store 8 million digital pictures of my girlfriend; I keep 60 gigs of [not copywritten] porn on it; I back up every Linux distribution ever created; etc. You're a hero, and this post isn't about you, so go have a Jolt to reward yourself!)
If quarter-over-quarter iPod sales are way up (discounted for seasonality - lots of those iPods will be Xmas gifts, after all) but quarter-over-quarter music sales aren't, record executives are right to be skeptical about iPods driving their sales. They've pretty much figured out that Apple screwed them over - the iTMS is basically an advertisement for iPods. The fact that it generates some revenue is an ancillary benefit, nothing more.
Now, I'm all for music labels as they are generally constituted now shrivelling up and dying. I couldn't care less. But for the longest time, people b**ched and moaned about how they wouldn't steal if there was a better alternative; if only some genius company would sell tracks for $1 each, so you wouldn't have to buy the whole crummy album for the 3 songs you wanted! I think I read that same post about 6 million times in 1999. Now that it's here, people are discovering that actually, free is still a lot better than $1, and so file-sharing and allofmp3 downloads keep setting all-time records.
This is bad, because the mean record industry is going to call up their cronies in congress and pass more stupid laws that will piss off everyone here. They are going to do something, because the availability of cheap, legal music isn't enough to stop the flood of illegal music being shared. So stop whining and go buy some indie records off itunes:)
In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.'"
There have been a lot of economic-related comments already; I have my own, but want to break new ground. I also disagree with the "popular->expensive, not popular->cheap" strategy, but for different reasons than I've seen listed.
Generally, much of "low volume" music can be thought of as filling a particular niche. There might not be a lot of people who like The Decemberists (well, there used to not...), but those who like them tend to really like them. If I'm a Decemberists fan, I'm going to buy their new album when it comes out; there won't be a lot of folks like me, but there are some. Us Decemberist fans are relatively insensitive to price (in economic terms, we have low price elasticity of demand). Therefore, it makes sense to charge more for music like this - few listeners, inelastic demand.
On the other hand, popular music is very fad-driven. The "new" song is only new for a little while. Some folks who have to have every new song they here on the radio will pay four bucks for the new 50 Cent single, but I imagine that most people would be turned off at that price. The "hits" are more price sensitive.
I imagine that price elasticity of demand in the music business is hard to measure, because each "firm" is a monopoly - only 50 Cent sells 50 Cent records, e.g. As a monopolist of "iTunes Downloads" with essentially zero marginal production costs, Apple should charge prices such that price * quantity is maximized for every song. How to find those prices? Demographic listener data, maybe? Try messing with the price charged and see how quantity demanded changes as a result?
I paid some kid 50 bucks to install an extra 80 gig HD i had laying around in my Xbox and install a new front end (including media center, a dongle-free DVD player, etc) for me. The Xbox itself was 200 bucks. Plus, I don't have a mac, so setting up a mac mini to play the same role my xbox plays would have been nontrivial in terms of time and effort.
Plus, the Xbox has this other neat feature: it plays Xbox games.
I hope the ACLU's British equivalent has been notified of this gross encroachment onto our civil liberties. It's appalling! Next thing you know, they'll be allowed to take DNA samples from prisoners to attempt to "link" them to crime scenes.
Carl Bialik sends in a free Wall Street Journal article every few days and they seem to be always accepted. Does Slashdot get a percentage of ad revenue/new subscriptions they generate for the WSJ? If so, shouldn't you make this more obvious? If not, why should Slashdot be a de facto WSJ advertisement?
I noticed that in the review, Ars said the battery was soldered directly onto the mainboard instead of using the a clip. I wonder why this was done? IIRC previous iPods have used clips, making it fairly easy to replace the battery (albeit voiding the warranty in the process) without using apple and their $99 charge.
I know it's cool to get submissions from the Wall Street Journal, but you don't have to put all of them on the front page. They are obviously using you guys as a traffic magnet to drive up interests and subscriptions.
People who use peer-to-peer software are likely bigger music fans than people who don't. Therefore, it is quite natural that they would consume more music (both paid-for and not) than there non-thieving counterparts. Of course, what music companies and the RIAA allege is that these people would have paid 8.5 times more than the other group but for the existence of P2P.
I'm not saying that record companies and/or the RIAA aren't evil. I'm not saying that free music can be a fantastic promotional tool which can lead to more paid music consumption. So calm down:)
For stories that subscribers can see from "The Mysterious Future", but a button that can be clicked on the story title if the poster thinks the story is a dupe. I realize that each Slashdot author doesn't read every story that is posted, but enough other people would notice that dupes could get caught before they make the main page.
EU's Antitrust reasoning, and why it sucked
on
Windows XP N a Bust
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The reason that XP-N isn't selling is obvious - it costs the same as regular XP, and is worse. What a stupid "remedy."
Bundling is considered bad by most pre- and post-Chicago school economists is that it uses monopoly power in the tying product (in this case, the operating system) to attempt to gain monopoly power in the tied product (the media player). Microsoft's strategy, so the EU and Justice Department allege, is to force me to take their crappy Media Player along with their operating system, locking me into it and creating a second monopoly from which they could then profit further - by jacking up prices for song downloads, e.g.
There are a number of reasonable critiques of this analysis which I won't get into here. However, the EU decision obviously provides no remedy to Apple or Real or whoever if Microsoft is allowed to continue selling the goods as a bundle, especially since doing so imposes no additional cost to them other than packaging costs (the marginal cost of the Media Player code on an XP CD is zero). If they were out for anything other than Gotcha!ing a big American company, they would force MS to sell the two pieces of software separately, or at least make MP available as a free download.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't want people to pay just for the parts of Windows they actually use - it's 200 bucks for the whole kit and kaboodle. For that reason, they don't offer XP-N at a discount, even though they might make more money by doing so.
You're absolutely right - the Beatles catalog, or Steamboat Willie, or the Happy Birthday song, or whatever all have lots of residual value today, which is of course why their copyright holders want to extend copyright forever. However, as I'm sure you know, copyright law is intended to incent an innovator by allowing him to profit from his creation. Extending copyright ex post facto does not create much additional incentive; as you say, 3% higher NPV for the proposed UK legislation, and less than that for the Sonny Bono Act (because US copyrights were already longer than 50 years). Based on your cynical comment, I suspect you agree with me that laws should not be based on profit-maximizing for media companies, but I guess I'm an idiot for being so idealistic.
As Stephen Breyer pointed out during oral argument for the challenge brought to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act a few years ago, then-current (i.e. pre-Bono Act) copyright terms already convey 99.7% of the present value of the future earnings stream from a work to the copyright holder, assuming a historical average discount rate. No economist seriously believes that the current round of term extensions are anything but government kowtowing to media companies. It's a shame that the SCOTUS didn't overturn the Sonny Bono Act.
Many of us hang out at baseballthinkfactory.org. However, most people who post there have played a lot of ball; I would say the average proficiency is high school, but I don't know for sure. Certainly, we're not very good (compared with the players we follow, at least), but it's probably unfair to say we've never picked up a bat or ball our entire lives. Certainly a much more athletic crowd than the one here, judging by the reaction that this and any other athletic-related thread gets.
The parent post is very insightful and perfectly demonstrates the problem with modern antitrust law. My buddy works for the FTC's antitrust division. Most of the cases he works on are brought by competitors of the firm in trouble. Sun v MS and Caldera v MS are other examples of this same thing. Antitrust law is a very useful tool in my liberal heart, but it should not be used as a competitive weapon! I don't care at all if Tower Records cannabalizes some of Best Buy's cd sales because it uses RIAA dough for advertising money, and you shouldn't either.
I'm not sure what precisely makes a "walkman phone," but Samsung came out with the MP3-playing Uproar 3 or 4 years ago, as I pointed out on a thread similar to this one a few months back. Does this have a sony brand or something? And they think people actually care about it?
The RIAA doesn't want any one company, be it Apple or anyone else, to get too much of the market. That would give them too much bargaining power! With a bunch of weak market shares, the RIAA can dictate its wholesale price. Now, Apple can tell them it won't pay a higher price and have the muscle to back up its threat.
Of course they don't want American Google putting Italian Gucci/Prada/Armani ads next to searches for French LVMH products. It's nationalism! I'd be surprised if LVMH suppliers weren't buying ads for "gucci" searches. Oh well, no biggie.
Slashdot Mirror
AMD chips were found in 52.5 percent of desktop PCs sold in U.S. retail stores during that period."
Of course, Dell doesn't sell many of its computers in retail stores, it is the largest manufacturer in the US, and it doesn't use AMD chips (yet). So the quoted statistic is misleading at best. Still, more competition is always a good thing.
It's by far the most on-topic response thus far, and sure to be a lot more interesting to the three other baseball fans that read slashdot than "I Am Copyrighting Planck's Constant!"
I heard Duke Nukem Forever is going to be the Phantom's first title. People will be lining up for miles to buy this thing!
I didn't re-read the article before posting, so I was relying on my memory of something I read while waiting for the dentist in early October. If the article portrayed the Cornice/Apple talks differently than I did, I apologize for my fuzzy recollection.
That said, I think all your comments are spot-on. I appreciate the info.
I read an article about Cornice a while back (upon further googling, here it is). They were approached by Apple to be the exclusive supplier of HDs for the iPod Mini. They ended up turning Apple down in order to focus on the phone hard drive market. Time will tell how smart of a decision that was, but if there's one thing you can say about their CEO it's that he's got some brass ones. I think it was a pretty stupid move, but then Apple would be done with this tech by now (only flash in the Nano, bigger HDs in the 5G iPod) so maybe they will sell a lot of phones with hard drives and become rich.
One of my readers makes his living selling goods over the Internet, and his sole means of obtaining customers is through Google AdWords. His business is robust for a one-man operation and he makes a good living. Knowing the actual numbers, I would say he makes a VERY good living, which shows the effectiveness of Google and AdWords as an advertising medium.
...
"It's like Vegas," said my friend. "They want you to lose. Try to game the system and they cut off one of your legs."
If they "want him to lose", why has he decided to "bet his life" so to speak on making a living from Google? There are other ways to make a buck in the world...
"RIAA sucks! Apple rules! iPods rule!" et cetera. It's getting old.
:)
To fill a 60 gig iPod with songs from itunes costs roughly $15 grand. And yet they still sell very well... hmmm. I suppose a lot of folks with 1250 disc CD collections (the stack of CD cases would only be about 30 feet high) will come out of the woodwork to talk about how much they love having each bootleg Phish show they own on their iPod, but the fact is that most people who have 60 gigs of music stole a lot of it. (Other anticipated responses: I use my ipod to store 8 million digital pictures of my girlfriend; I keep 60 gigs of [not copywritten] porn on it; I back up every Linux distribution ever created; etc. You're a hero, and this post isn't about you, so go have a Jolt to reward yourself!)
If quarter-over-quarter iPod sales are way up (discounted for seasonality - lots of those iPods will be Xmas gifts, after all) but quarter-over-quarter music sales aren't, record executives are right to be skeptical about iPods driving their sales. They've pretty much figured out that Apple screwed them over - the iTMS is basically an advertisement for iPods. The fact that it generates some revenue is an ancillary benefit, nothing more.
Now, I'm all for music labels as they are generally constituted now shrivelling up and dying. I couldn't care less. But for the longest time, people b**ched and moaned about how they wouldn't steal if there was a better alternative; if only some genius company would sell tracks for $1 each, so you wouldn't have to buy the whole crummy album for the 3 songs you wanted! I think I read that same post about 6 million times in 1999. Now that it's here, people are discovering that actually, free is still a lot better than $1, and so file-sharing and allofmp3 downloads keep setting all-time records.
This is bad, because the mean record industry is going to call up their cronies in congress and pass more stupid laws that will piss off everyone here. They are going to do something, because the availability of cheap, legal music isn't enough to stop the flood of illegal music being shared. So stop whining and go buy some indie records off itunes
In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.'"
Oh the irony.
There have been a lot of economic-related comments already; I have my own, but want to break new ground. I also disagree with the "popular->expensive, not popular->cheap" strategy, but for different reasons than I've seen listed.
Generally, much of "low volume" music can be thought of as filling a particular niche. There might not be a lot of people who like The Decemberists (well, there used to not...), but those who like them tend to really like them. If I'm a Decemberists fan, I'm going to buy their new album when it comes out; there won't be a lot of folks like me, but there are some. Us Decemberist fans are relatively insensitive to price (in economic terms, we have low price elasticity of demand). Therefore, it makes sense to charge more for music like this - few listeners, inelastic demand.
On the other hand, popular music is very fad-driven. The "new" song is only new for a little while. Some folks who have to have every new song they here on the radio will pay four bucks for the new 50 Cent single, but I imagine that most people would be turned off at that price. The "hits" are more price sensitive.
I imagine that price elasticity of demand in the music business is hard to measure, because each "firm" is a monopoly - only 50 Cent sells 50 Cent records, e.g. As a monopolist of "iTunes Downloads" with essentially zero marginal production costs, Apple should charge prices such that price * quantity is maximized for every song. How to find those prices? Demographic listener data, maybe? Try messing with the price charged and see how quantity demanded changes as a result?
I paid some kid 50 bucks to install an extra 80 gig HD i had laying around in my Xbox and install a new front end (including media center, a dongle-free DVD player, etc) for me. The Xbox itself was 200 bucks. Plus, I don't have a mac, so setting up a mac mini to play the same role my xbox plays would have been nontrivial in terms of time and effort.
Plus, the Xbox has this other neat feature: it plays Xbox games.
From the first page of the paper:
"This Draft: December 30, 2004"
Pretty current, that research is.
I hope the ACLU's British equivalent has been notified of this gross encroachment onto our civil liberties. It's appalling! Next thing you know, they'll be allowed to take DNA samples from prisoners to attempt to "link" them to crime scenes.
The society we live in these days...
Carl Bialik sends in a free Wall Street Journal article every few days and they seem to be always accepted. Does Slashdot get a percentage of ad revenue/new subscriptions they generate for the WSJ? If so, shouldn't you make this more obvious? If not, why should Slashdot be a de facto WSJ advertisement?
I noticed that in the review, Ars said the battery was soldered directly onto the mainboard instead of using the a clip. I wonder why this was done? IIRC previous iPods have used clips, making it fairly easy to replace the battery (albeit voiding the warranty in the process) without using apple and their $99 charge.
I know it's cool to get submissions from the Wall Street Journal, but you don't have to put all of them on the front page. They are obviously using you guys as a traffic magnet to drive up interests and subscriptions.
People who use peer-to-peer software are likely bigger music fans than people who don't. Therefore, it is quite natural that they would consume more music (both paid-for and not) than there non-thieving counterparts. Of course, what music companies and the RIAA allege is that these people would have paid 8.5 times more than the other group but for the existence of P2P.
:)
I'm not saying that record companies and/or the RIAA aren't evil. I'm not saying that free music can be a fantastic promotional tool which can lead to more paid music consumption. So calm down
For stories that subscribers can see from "The Mysterious Future", but a button that can be clicked on the story title if the poster thinks the story is a dupe. I realize that each Slashdot author doesn't read every story that is posted, but enough other people would notice that dupes could get caught before they make the main page.
The reason that XP-N isn't selling is obvious - it costs the same as regular XP, and is worse. What a stupid "remedy."
Bundling is considered bad by most pre- and post-Chicago school economists is that it uses monopoly power in the tying product (in this case, the operating system) to attempt to gain monopoly power in the tied product (the media player). Microsoft's strategy, so the EU and Justice Department allege, is to force me to take their crappy Media Player along with their operating system, locking me into it and creating a second monopoly from which they could then profit further - by jacking up prices for song downloads, e.g.
There are a number of reasonable critiques of this analysis which I won't get into here. However, the EU decision obviously provides no remedy to Apple or Real or whoever if Microsoft is allowed to continue selling the goods as a bundle, especially since doing so imposes no additional cost to them other than packaging costs (the marginal cost of the Media Player code on an XP CD is zero). If they were out for anything other than Gotcha!ing a big American company, they would force MS to sell the two pieces of software separately, or at least make MP available as a free download.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't want people to pay just for the parts of Windows they actually use - it's 200 bucks for the whole kit and kaboodle. For that reason, they don't offer XP-N at a discount, even though they might make more money by doing so.
You're absolutely right - the Beatles catalog, or Steamboat Willie, or the Happy Birthday song, or whatever all have lots of residual value today, which is of course why their copyright holders want to extend copyright forever. However, as I'm sure you know, copyright law is intended to incent an innovator by allowing him to profit from his creation. Extending copyright ex post facto does not create much additional incentive; as you say, 3% higher NPV for the proposed UK legislation, and less than that for the Sonny Bono Act (because US copyrights were already longer than 50 years). Based on your cynical comment, I suspect you agree with me that laws should not be based on profit-maximizing for media companies, but I guess I'm an idiot for being so idealistic.
As Stephen Breyer pointed out during oral argument for the challenge brought to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act a few years ago, then-current (i.e. pre-Bono Act) copyright terms already convey 99.7% of the present value of the future earnings stream from a work to the copyright holder, assuming a historical average discount rate. No economist seriously believes that the current round of term extensions are anything but government kowtowing to media companies. It's a shame that the SCOTUS didn't overturn the Sonny Bono Act.
Many of us hang out at baseballthinkfactory.org. However, most people who post there have played a lot of ball; I would say the average proficiency is high school, but I don't know for sure. Certainly, we're not very good (compared with the players we follow, at least), but it's probably unfair to say we've never picked up a bat or ball our entire lives. Certainly a much more athletic crowd than the one here, judging by the reaction that this and any other athletic-related thread gets.
The parent post is very insightful and perfectly demonstrates the problem with modern antitrust law. My buddy works for the FTC's antitrust division. Most of the cases he works on are brought by competitors of the firm in trouble. Sun v MS and Caldera v MS are other examples of this same thing. Antitrust law is a very useful tool in my liberal heart, but it should not be used as a competitive weapon! I don't care at all if Tower Records cannabalizes some of Best Buy's cd sales because it uses RIAA dough for advertising money, and you shouldn't either.
I'm not sure what precisely makes a "walkman phone," but Samsung came out with the MP3-playing Uproar 3 or 4 years ago, as I pointed out on a thread similar to this one a few months back. Does this have a sony brand or something? And they think people actually care about it?
The RIAA doesn't want any one company, be it Apple or anyone else, to get too much of the market. That would give them too much bargaining power! With a bunch of weak market shares, the RIAA can dictate its wholesale price. Now, Apple can tell them it won't pay a higher price and have the muscle to back up its threat.
Of course they don't want American Google putting Italian Gucci/Prada/Armani ads next to searches for French LVMH products. It's nationalism! I'd be surprised if LVMH suppliers weren't buying ads for "gucci" searches. Oh well, no biggie.