Apple doesn't have the comfort of being able to sell software at the kinds of margin that Microsoft does.
And no, I don't mean Windows. Price out licenses for SQL Server, Exchange, Windows Server (especially the higher-end editions), Terminal Server (that one always pissed me off) or anything in the Dynamics suite. Oh, and then there's software assurance and the guaranteed-purchase volume Select agreements.
Believe you me, Microsoft has plenty of avenues for high-margin sales.
Conservatives are for the status quo. Liberals are for things changing. Anything else, truly, is just label-mongering.
People mix up their terms all the time. What we really have are Regressives, Conservatives and Progressives in terms of implementing policy, and Anarchists (sorta) and Statists in terms of the forcefulness of said implementation. In this instance, keeping domestic spying in place would be considered conservative because it's not a change of existing policy. Advancing or removing it could be considered progressive or regressive, depending on your point of view. Either way, it's existence is a statist policy.
I brokered a purchase of about sixty Acer Aspire Ones for freinds, colleagues and such and, without fail, everyone complained about one or more of the following:
Not being able to use boxed software (Reader Rabbit, QuickTax, whatever)
Not being able to print to their bargain-bin inkjet printer
Not being able to get MSN Messenger to work (or to get it to work like it does on Windows, if they did find a client),
How to get their Word/PowerPoint documents to look like they did on a normal PC (font issues, OpenOffice's pagination).
General, functionally-fixated behaviours:
Two memorable users complained about not having antivirus software
One person couldn't find Adobe Acrobat (yes, it does come with a PDF creader, but they were locked like a laser beam on Acrobat)
One person freaked because it didn't have Internet Explorer.
The only people who didn't have significant issues were those buying them as their first computer because they lacked baggage. Anyone with Windows experience (which is, frankly, almost everyone) had real trouble. I drove me nuts because, frankly, I found the machine brilliant and easy to use, but it was really hard to overcome people's functional fixation with Windows' behaviour.
Netbooks-as-appliances works as a marketing thrust, and I think a generation's worth of Android-based ARM units sold as fat cellphones (touchscreens would be real nice, here) stands a chance because they don't tread on Windows' experience. But for normal people, Linux netbooks-as-general-purpose-computers don't work for the same reason Linux desktops have flunked.
Yes, and the Red Book has very specific definitions about what you can label with the Compact Disc Digital Audio. It didn't stop any number of vendors from making non-compliant discs, nor did it force many consumers to give a damn.
Consumers, by and large, just expect it to work. They aren't going to scour the box for compliance branding. Corporate customers might, if they're the type to place faith in "YES/It works with Netware" or "Cisco-Compatible" labels. But anal-retentive corporate IT policymakers probably aren't Palm's target market for the Pre.
You're wrong about licensing: a Windows OS install does not count as an Exchange, SQL or Terminal Server CAL. TS CALs have a number of options depending on client OS, server OS, purchase date and licensing model, none of which make much sense. SQL CALs are per processor or per user. Exchange is per mailbox. Windows Server itself? I have no idea. I think it's concurrent client accesses, but I have no idea what constitutes an access (authenticating against AD? Access a file share?). That their various systems don't do a good job of telling you when you're reaching your compliance limits doesn't help.
Licensing is an awful clusterfuck. Most people just overbuy and cross their fingers.
That said, a well-designed AD, complemented with SMS and MOM, is really easy to admin. You're right, there.
The worst thing you can do for someone is give them a new computer. I've worked in very large shops (~2500-3000 desktop deployments per year), and fielded questions from small ones as well as from individual users. People get used to the methods their computer presents them (their files are *here*, their Word program is *there*, they get on the internet *this way*). Give them a new computer, any computer, even if it's the same OS, and they're hosed.
Where are their shortcuts? How do they get to the "H:" drive? What about the TPR form (that was sitting in a message, in Outlook, that they kept opening whenever they needed a new copy). I don't think IT people can really appreciate how the secretaries, order takers and commerce students of the world function. It's not necessarily a Linux thing (though Linux raises the barrier height more than a little). After working with some of these people for a while, I have no idea how they cope when they rent a car that's different from their own, get a new toaster, or buy a new light switch: the least little difference completely flummoxes them. Stupid might be a harsh, if not an entirely inaccurate term
This woman is probably in this category: given a difference---any difference---and she promptly "shuts down" and goes into silent panic mode. The opportune question is why it took so long for her to admit to the problem. I've taken calls from managers screaming because some order-desk flunkie hasn't been able to work since her PC was replaced three weeks ago, and now she can't find her RMA form shortcut and everything's "all different" (for the record: XP to XP, Office 2003 to Office 2003, no changes save the hardware and a new profile upon login, all documents saved to Sharepoint and/or fileservers, mailbox in Exchange). Why she didn't call three weeks ago was the point I raised, and the one I never got an answer for.
There's a certain willfull stupidity in the general populace. They don't know computers, they can't know them, it's an evil black box and they'll find anything possible to complain about. They can be young, old, male, female, of any race, creed to culture: they're bound together by their raw, unadulterated pigheadedness.
At some point, the paradigm is going to have to change. I don't know how it will change: Terminal Server-like remote desktops with a Time Machine like backup strategy available through an always-on internet connection? Web desktops? Special-purpose devices in lieu of general-purpose PCs?
This car is, essentially, vapourware; this vaunted retail store doesn't actually have anything to sell.
Hasn't Tesla only shipped four cars, two of which went to company executives? And as I understand it, they're using a temporary transmission because the production run doesn't work. And they've just gone through a management shakeout. At this point, what I've heard implies that they have no direction, no plan and no product. They're talking about their new sedan, but haven't been able to birth the roadster yet.
They give the impression of a company that's going to file for C11 in six months, then reemerge as a patent troll.
Her issue isn't people writing fanfic for their or other's enhoyment. That's cool. Her issue is with someone making _money_ of copyrighted and trademarked characters she developed. If this were an online, freely-accessible, no-dollars-required service, then there would be no issue. That's not the case: they're printing and selling the book. Now, in this case it's a small group of fans, but what if it was, say, Rowling's own publisher doing this?
You can write anything you like and post it on fanfiction.net. You could print it and give copies away. You could make a derivative movie and post it on Youtube. You could write or film a Harry Potter-themed porno, provided you didn't try to _charge for it_.
What you cannot do is make money off someone else's work. You _cannot_ make a book set explicitly in that world and _charge_ for it. You cannot make a movie set in that world and _charge for it_. You cannot sell toys, audiobooks, or any other merchandise without the author (and perhaps the publisher's) permission.
Now, I could understand your (and other poster's, and Card's) point if their take on intellectual property were so extremely liberal that they believed content creators had no rights whatsoever to their work. If that's the case, then you would also be ok with HarperCollins ghostwriting follow-ups to Harry Potter, selling thousands of copies and not paying Rowling a dime. If this sort of thing were allowed, there'd be exactly zero chance of someone like Rowling (or Card) ever getting published, and the shelves would be littered with ghostwritten Harlequin-style crap developed by focus groups and accountants. Thanks, but no.
I think Card would be pissed off if someone made an Ender's Game movie, or a ghostwritten sequel, and didn't ask him first, let alone write him a cheque.
I carry a Toshiba Qosmio G30, a "media centre" laptop ("notebook" is the wrong word). Eleven pounds with 17" display, two HDs, one HDDVD and barely two hours of battery time. Oh, and the power adapter adds an extra pound to that. I bike to work with this thing strapped to my back. I'm not saying it's convenient, but I like the speed it didn't cost me much money (I bought it after HDDVD cratered) and it's really not that bad.
I've handed it to a sales executive who needed something for a presentation (his machine was busted) and, listening to him cry when I passed it over, you'd think it broke his arm.
Of course they have souls. They're sitting in a climate-controlled vault in Hell, right next to the room that contains the souls of anyone in the Insurance industry.
What you could do is, instead of spanking one or the other, whip out a big stick and whale on both of them. Lay a beating on Telus while you're at it, and a light paddling to Aliant, MTS, Sasktel, Shaw and Cogeco. Oh, and Videotron should be bludgeoned to death.
The bludgeon, in the case of most of these, would be maintaining the wired-line lease requirement and adding a requirement to lease wireless airtime, tower and spectrum access.
You're correct. The problem with the System Access fee is that the providers and their resellers have implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) said that it's government mandated. The CRTC has expressed some interest in forcing them to clarify it, which, of course, they're fighting.
I've personally had a "discussion" with a Rogers Enterprise Wireless rep (and his sales engineer) on this point when negotiating our contract. He and several of his colleagues were under the impression that it was CRTC-mandated.
Here's the issue: Bell and the other Stentor consortium members were essentially granted a monopoly--and were given government support--to build the telecommunications network in Canada.
When high-speed internet came to the forefront, Bell utterly failed to deliver a competitive product and was basically going to fall back a the "gentleman's agreement" with the cable- and phone companies that would have allowed a maximum amount of profit for the providers with a minimum amount of service on lines that we, the consumer, subsidized.
The CRTC, deciding that the existing Bell/Stentor cartel had done little except gouge customers and that forcing leased lines had done wonders for the long-distance market, hit Bell with the same thing. The result is that Canada has one of the best broadband adoption rates in the world, despite a fairly unfriendly geography.
Yes, they own the last mile, yes, and pay for it, but it's not like they didn't get a free ride from the CRTC and the Canadian public for years. Revoking this will result in a broadband market that looks like the Canadian wireless market: something like the "gentleman's agreement" mentioned above that keeps prices uncompetitively high.
On that note, I personally think the CRTC hasn't gone far enough: they need to force the incumbent providers to open their wireless networks ("System Access fee" my ass) as well. The wireless market in this country is abysmal (as in "worse than the US, by a large margin") and the reason is that the incumbents maintain a cartel and buy or destroy competition.
Heck, Canadian content rules have actually kept foriegn competition out of the market, which means that all Bell et al have had to compete with are small fish and bottom-feeders, which is what Bell wants to squash. I don't like T-Mobile or Verizon much, but I'd like to see them slap some respect into Bell, Telus and Rogers
Put it this way: Apple makes appliances. I don't want to be able to recompile the kernel that runs my microwave, I just want it to nuke stuff and not piss me off by offering me a hundred different settings in sixteen menus for every permutation of food and weight, but no easy way to say "nuke on high for one minute".
Do you understand now?
Surface should be something similar: a zero-effort experience for the end user. Sacrificing usability so some geek can change themes (or worse, so a carrier can bitchslap you with ads every ten seconds) is a bad thing in this market.
Yes, but their products, by and large, just work right out of the box. That's not customer-hostile when what your customers are demanding is a solid user experience as possible with minimum of distractions.
Apple's customers want easy to use and stylish. They don't want bling, bells and whistles.
To use the oft-abused car analogy: if Apple designed an in-car electronics system, it'd have one knob, four buttons, wouldn't allow you to swap it out, wouldn't support many models of car and wouldn't have half the features that it's competitors do. It would, however, be operable without taking your eyes off the road at 80mph. Effortlessly. By someone like my father.
I admin a fleet of Windows Mobile devices. I've done the same for BlackBerry. I wouldn't even suggest deploying a SFA or CRM app with the iPhone and I doubt I could find or buy a package even if I wanted to. BB and especially WM have a far more developer/hacker friendly environment and are better choices in this space for that reason.
But you know what? My sales reps hate Windows Mobile. In past jobs, I've found that they tolerate BlackBerry, but only just. Why? Because the devices do all sorts of stupid things (crash, throw up strange dialogue boxes, have a zillion settings and options) that just get in their way. The few who've seen the iPhone love it and they don't care that it's locked down, or that it doesn't have an open SDK, or that they can't install craplets on it. It just works.
How you define "Customer Hostile" depends on your perspective and needs as a customer. As someone who uses, supports and develops for WM every day, I'd definitely say it's more customer-hostile than the much more restricted iPhone, but that's just me.
This is why Apple's tight control of their whole ecosystem is a good thing: you don't generally see them putting their "partner's" need to shove content at customers above the user experience.
You can tell Apple's _customers_ are it's actual customers.** Microsoft's partners and developers are it's customers, and it shows.
Look at Windows Mobile: you get a reasonable platform that's perverted by hardware "partners" and their singular inability to write crash-resistant software, and then further mangled by the carriers, who seem addicted to penny-pinching revenue-ware.
Yes, it's "open" to developers, but as a manager of a fleet, the first thing I'd like to do is strip the device down to Microsoft's core platform, without the craplets the vendors see fit to add to it.
With Apple, you get a locked-down device. AT&T can't rebrand it (if they had their way, it'd be the "AT&T A7530", and it'd have six different ways for AT&T to sell me overpriced ringtones or web forms), nor can the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer load it with battery management software that misspells the word "Battery".
** you see this with free software as well, but the customer base isn't quite the same demographic as Apple's.
I reported to a CFO once. He gave me a useful bit of info he learned in his first days as an auditor, one that has served me well when people throw up paper firewalls like this. It reads as follows:
Policy is not a control.
Read that again. Print it out and paste it somewhere. Tattoo it to your forehead and put a mirror up above your monitor. Unless you put up technical blocks, things will happen. Users will inadvertently or maliciously, screw things up. Yes, even people who should (and do) know better.
There's a reason why accounting departments make people jump through hoops. It may seem stupid, or time-wasting, or needlessly bureaucratic, but it's done because sometime, somewhere someone caused the company to lose money. IT is a much younger discipline and doesn't have nearly the controls that F&A does, and IT suffers for it.
From my experience, developers are some of the worst people in the world when it comes to systems management. Developers develop; they're not network, security or desktop support people.
I started in end-user support. Developers might be able to write their own mail client, but they're just as helpless when Outlook cheeses itself. The only difference between a developer and an accounts payable clerk in that situation is that the developer (in some of my experiences) can be insufferably arrogant.
I don't think "young" or "tech-savvy" are necessarily the virtues you think they are: I've supported a group of "young", "tech-savvy" developers and network people who insisted on purchasing and adminning their own machines. What did it get us? More SQL Slammer/Blaster/Worm-of-the-day infections per capita then the rest of the company.
We ended up putting them on their own network and cutting them off the WAN fairly often because they couldn't patch, protect or resuist opening every random attachment they came across. Yes, they ran Windows by and large (one guy had a four-processor box with eleven VMware images, all infected with something), but these were supposedly "young" and "tech-savvy" people who didn't need to be controlled and could be trusted to patch their own machines.
At least they didn't place many support calls.
In a big shop, someone needs to either rule with an iron fist, or self-adminned machines need to be sequestered into the own network and allowed exactly zero access to company data. Heck, even in a small shop there has to be one person designated to kicking ass and taking names. People have day jobs--even IT people--that would get in the way of proper maintenance and someone needs to ensure that:
Stuff gets backed up
Stuff is secure
Stuff doesn't screw up other stuff
Yes, even "Web 2.0 aware hipsters" need to do this, and it's not their job any more than bookkeeping or balancing cash would be.
LCDs always look sharper than CRTs--that's their greatest virtue (well, next to power and packaging), and it's pretty much inherent in how an LCD works. The pixels are individally addressed, fixed (there's no gun to focus) and not subject to refresh-based flicker.
What LCDs don't offer is the colour fidelity or response time. They're sharp, but not as brilliant nor as suited to quick-moving images.
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Think about how many people buy Shake versus how many people buy Exchange Server.
Apple doesn't have the comfort of being able to sell software at the kinds of margin that Microsoft does.
And no, I don't mean Windows. Price out licenses for SQL Server, Exchange, Windows Server (especially the higher-end editions), Terminal Server (that one always pissed me off) or anything in the Dynamics suite. Oh, and then there's software assurance and the guaranteed-purchase volume Select agreements.
Believe you me, Microsoft has plenty of avenues for high-margin sales.
Conservatives are for the status quo. Liberals are for things changing. Anything else, truly, is just label-mongering.
People mix up their terms all the time. What we really have are Regressives, Conservatives and Progressives in terms of implementing policy, and Anarchists (sorta) and Statists in terms of the forcefulness of said implementation. In this instance, keeping domestic spying in place would be considered conservative because it's not a change of existing policy. Advancing or removing it could be considered progressive or regressive, depending on your point of view. Either way, it's existence is a statist policy.
I brokered a purchase of about sixty Acer Aspire Ones for freinds, colleagues and such and, without fail, everyone complained about one or more of the following:
The only people who didn't have significant issues were those buying them as their first computer because they lacked baggage. Anyone with Windows experience (which is, frankly, almost everyone) had real trouble. I drove me nuts because, frankly, I found the machine brilliant and easy to use, but it was really hard to overcome people's functional fixation with Windows' behaviour.
Netbooks-as-appliances works as a marketing thrust, and I think a generation's worth of Android-based ARM units sold as fat cellphones (touchscreens would be real nice, here) stands a chance because they don't tread on Windows' experience. But for normal people, Linux netbooks-as-general-purpose-computers don't work for the same reason Linux desktops have flunked.
Yes, and the Red Book has very specific definitions about what you can label with the Compact Disc Digital Audio. It didn't stop any number of vendors from making non-compliant discs, nor did it force many consumers to give a damn.
Consumers, by and large, just expect it to work. They aren't going to scour the box for compliance branding. Corporate customers might, if they're the type to place faith in "YES/It works with Netware" or "Cisco-Compatible" labels. But anal-retentive corporate IT policymakers probably aren't Palm's target market for the Pre.
As one of the priests, I sincerely wished that the congregation wouldn't return.
You're wrong about licensing: a Windows OS install does not count as an Exchange, SQL or Terminal Server CAL. TS CALs have a number of options depending on client OS, server OS, purchase date and licensing model, none of which make much sense. SQL CALs are per processor or per user. Exchange is per mailbox. Windows Server itself? I have no idea. I think it's concurrent client accesses, but I have no idea what constitutes an access (authenticating against AD? Access a file share?). That their various systems don't do a good job of telling you when you're reaching your compliance limits doesn't help.
Licensing is an awful clusterfuck. Most people just overbuy and cross their fingers.
That said, a well-designed AD, complemented with SMS and MOM, is really easy to admin. You're right, there.
Fair comment, actually.
The worst thing you can do for someone is give them a new computer. I've worked in very large shops (~2500-3000 desktop deployments per year), and fielded questions from small ones as well as from individual users. People get used to the methods their computer presents them (their files are *here*, their Word program is *there*, they get on the internet *this way*). Give them a new computer, any computer, even if it's the same OS, and they're hosed.
Where are their shortcuts? How do they get to the "H:" drive? What about the TPR form (that was sitting in a message, in Outlook, that they kept opening whenever they needed a new copy). I don't think IT people can really appreciate how the secretaries, order takers and commerce students of the world function. It's not necessarily a Linux thing (though Linux raises the barrier height more than a little). After working with some of these people for a while, I have no idea how they cope when they rent a car that's different from their own, get a new toaster, or buy a new light switch: the least little difference completely flummoxes them. Stupid might be a harsh, if not an entirely inaccurate term
This woman is probably in this category: given a difference---any difference---and she promptly "shuts down" and goes into silent panic mode. The opportune question is why it took so long for her to admit to the problem. I've taken calls from managers screaming because some order-desk flunkie hasn't been able to work since her PC was replaced three weeks ago, and now she can't find her RMA form shortcut and everything's "all different" (for the record: XP to XP, Office 2003 to Office 2003, no changes save the hardware and a new profile upon login, all documents saved to Sharepoint and/or fileservers, mailbox in Exchange). Why she didn't call three weeks ago was the point I raised, and the one I never got an answer for.
There's a certain willfull stupidity in the general populace. They don't know computers, they can't know them, it's an evil black box and they'll find anything possible to complain about. They can be young, old, male, female, of any race, creed to culture: they're bound together by their raw, unadulterated pigheadedness.
At some point, the paradigm is going to have to change. I don't know how it will change: Terminal Server-like remote desktops with a Time Machine like backup strategy available through an always-on internet connection? Web desktops? Special-purpose devices in lieu of general-purpose PCs?
I don't think they exist...
(followed by screaming)
They don't refuse, they defer defending the 2nd to the NRA. It makes sense to let specialists do their work for them.
This car is, essentially, vapourware; this vaunted retail store doesn't actually have anything to sell.
Hasn't Tesla only shipped four cars, two of which went to company executives? And as I understand it, they're using a temporary transmission because the production run doesn't work. And they've just gone through a management shakeout. At this point, what I've heard implies that they have no direction, no plan and no product. They're talking about their new sedan, but haven't been able to birth the roadster yet.
They give the impression of a company that's going to file for C11 in six months, then reemerge as a patent troll.
Her issue isn't people writing fanfic for their or other's enhoyment. That's cool. Her issue is with someone making _money_ of copyrighted and trademarked characters she developed. If this were an online, freely-accessible, no-dollars-required service, then there would be no issue. That's not the case: they're printing and selling the book. Now, in this case it's a small group of fans, but what if it was, say, Rowling's own publisher doing this?
You can write anything you like and post it on fanfiction.net. You could print it and give copies away. You could make a derivative movie and post it on Youtube. You could write or film a Harry Potter-themed porno, provided you didn't try to _charge for it_.
What you cannot do is make money off someone else's work. You _cannot_ make a book set explicitly in that world and _charge_ for it. You cannot make a movie set in that world and _charge for it_. You cannot sell toys, audiobooks, or any other merchandise without the author (and perhaps the publisher's) permission.
Now, I could understand your (and other poster's, and Card's) point if their take on intellectual property were so extremely liberal that they believed content creators had no rights whatsoever to their work. If that's the case, then you would also be ok with HarperCollins ghostwriting follow-ups to Harry Potter, selling thousands of copies and not paying Rowling a dime. If this sort of thing were allowed, there'd be exactly zero chance of someone like Rowling (or Card) ever getting published, and the shelves would be littered with ghostwritten Harlequin-style crap developed by focus groups and accountants. Thanks, but no.
I think Card would be pissed off if someone made an Ender's Game movie, or a ghostwritten sequel, and didn't ask him first, let alone write him a cheque.
Yes.
I carry a Toshiba Qosmio G30, a "media centre" laptop ("notebook" is the wrong word). Eleven pounds with 17" display, two HDs, one HDDVD and barely two hours of battery time. Oh, and the power adapter adds an extra pound to that. I bike to work with this thing strapped to my back. I'm not saying it's convenient, but I like the speed it didn't cost me much money (I bought it after HDDVD cratered) and it's really not that bad.
I've handed it to a sales executive who needed something for a presentation (his machine was busted) and, listening to him cry when I passed it over, you'd think it broke his arm.
Of course they have souls. They're sitting in a climate-controlled vault in Hell, right next to the room that contains the souls of anyone in the Insurance industry.
What you could do is, instead of spanking one or the other, whip out a big stick and whale on both of them. Lay a beating on Telus while you're at it, and a light paddling to Aliant, MTS, Sasktel, Shaw and Cogeco. Oh, and Videotron should be bludgeoned to death.
The bludgeon, in the case of most of these, would be maintaining the wired-line lease requirement and adding a requirement to lease wireless airtime, tower and spectrum access.
A la carte TV would be nice, too.
You're correct. The problem with the System Access fee is that the providers and their resellers have implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) said that it's government mandated. The CRTC has expressed some interest in forcing them to clarify it, which, of course, they're fighting.
I've personally had a "discussion" with a Rogers Enterprise Wireless rep (and his sales engineer) on this point when negotiating our contract. He and several of his colleagues were under the impression that it was CRTC-mandated.
Here's the issue: Bell and the other Stentor consortium members were essentially granted a monopoly--and were given government support--to build the telecommunications network in Canada.
When high-speed internet came to the forefront, Bell utterly failed to deliver a competitive product and was basically going to fall back a the "gentleman's agreement" with the cable- and phone companies that would have allowed a maximum amount of profit for the providers with a minimum amount of service on lines that we, the consumer, subsidized.
The CRTC, deciding that the existing Bell/Stentor cartel had done little except gouge customers and that forcing leased lines had done wonders for the long-distance market, hit Bell with the same thing. The result is that Canada has one of the best broadband adoption rates in the world, despite a fairly unfriendly geography.
Yes, they own the last mile, yes, and pay for it, but it's not like they didn't get a free ride from the CRTC and the Canadian public for years. Revoking this will result in a broadband market that looks like the Canadian wireless market: something like the "gentleman's agreement" mentioned above that keeps prices uncompetitively high.
On that note, I personally think the CRTC hasn't gone far enough: they need to force the incumbent providers to open their wireless networks ("System Access fee" my ass) as well. The wireless market in this country is abysmal (as in "worse than the US, by a large margin") and the reason is that the incumbents maintain a cartel and buy or destroy competition.
Heck, Canadian content rules have actually kept foriegn competition out of the market, which means that all Bell et al have had to compete with are small fish and bottom-feeders, which is what Bell wants to squash. I don't like T-Mobile or Verizon much, but I'd like to see them slap some respect into Bell, Telus and Rogers
I think he's sarying the Corrino are.
And the Fremen are Muslims, but we already knew that.
Put it this way: Apple makes appliances. I don't want to be able to recompile the kernel that runs my microwave, I just want it to nuke stuff and not piss me off by offering me a hundred different settings in sixteen menus for every permutation of food and weight, but no easy way to say "nuke on high for one minute".
Do you understand now?
Surface should be something similar: a zero-effort experience for the end user. Sacrificing usability so some geek can change themes (or worse, so a carrier can bitchslap you with ads every ten seconds) is a bad thing in this market.
Yes, but their products, by and large, just work right out of the box. That's not customer-hostile when what your customers are demanding is a solid user experience as possible with minimum of distractions.
Apple's customers want easy to use and stylish. They don't want bling, bells and whistles.
To use the oft-abused car analogy: if Apple designed an in-car electronics system, it'd have one knob, four buttons, wouldn't allow you to swap it out, wouldn't support many models of car and wouldn't have half the features that it's competitors do. It would, however, be operable without taking your eyes off the road at 80mph. Effortlessly. By someone like my father.
I admin a fleet of Windows Mobile devices. I've done the same for BlackBerry. I wouldn't even suggest deploying a SFA or CRM app with the iPhone and I doubt I could find or buy a package even if I wanted to. BB and especially WM have a far more developer/hacker friendly environment and are better choices in this space for that reason.
But you know what? My sales reps hate Windows Mobile. In past jobs, I've found that they tolerate BlackBerry, but only just. Why? Because the devices do all sorts of stupid things (crash, throw up strange dialogue boxes, have a zillion settings and options) that just get in their way. The few who've seen the iPhone love it and they don't care that it's locked down, or that it doesn't have an open SDK, or that they can't install craplets on it. It just works.
How you define "Customer Hostile" depends on your perspective and needs as a customer. As someone who uses, supports and develops for WM every day, I'd definitely say it's more customer-hostile than the much more restricted iPhone, but that's just me.
This is why Apple's tight control of their whole ecosystem is a good thing: you don't generally see them putting their "partner's" need to shove content at customers above the user experience.
You can tell Apple's _customers_ are it's actual customers.** Microsoft's partners and developers are it's customers, and it shows.
Look at Windows Mobile: you get a reasonable platform that's perverted by hardware "partners" and their singular inability to write crash-resistant software, and then further mangled by the carriers, who seem addicted to penny-pinching revenue-ware.
Yes, it's "open" to developers, but as a manager of a fleet, the first thing I'd like to do is strip the device down to Microsoft's core platform, without the craplets the vendors see fit to add to it.
With Apple, you get a locked-down device. AT&T can't rebrand it (if they had their way, it'd be the "AT&T A7530", and it'd have six different ways for AT&T to sell me overpriced ringtones or web forms), nor can the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer load it with battery management software that misspells the word "Battery".
** you see this with free software as well, but the customer base isn't quite the same demographic as Apple's.
I reported to a CFO once. He gave me a useful bit of info he learned in his first days as an auditor, one that has served me well when people throw up paper firewalls like this. It reads as follows:
Policy is not a control.
Read that again. Print it out and paste it somewhere. Tattoo it to your forehead and put a mirror up above your monitor. Unless you put up technical blocks, things will happen. Users will inadvertently or maliciously, screw things up. Yes, even people who should (and do) know better.
There's a reason why accounting departments make people jump through hoops. It may seem stupid, or time-wasting, or needlessly bureaucratic, but it's done because sometime, somewhere someone caused the company to lose money. IT is a much younger discipline and doesn't have nearly the controls that F&A does, and IT suffers for it.
From my experience, developers are some of the worst people in the world when it comes to systems management. Developers develop; they're not network, security or desktop support people.
I started in end-user support. Developers might be able to write their own mail client, but they're just as helpless when Outlook cheeses itself. The only difference between a developer and an accounts payable clerk in that situation is that the developer (in some of my experiences) can be insufferably arrogant.
We ended up putting them on their own network and cutting them off the WAN fairly often because they couldn't patch, protect or resuist opening every random attachment they came across. Yes, they ran Windows by and large (one guy had a four-processor box with eleven VMware images, all infected with something), but these were supposedly "young" and "tech-savvy" people who didn't need to be controlled and could be trusted to patch their own machines.
At least they didn't place many support calls.
In a big shop, someone needs to either rule with an iron fist, or self-adminned machines need to be sequestered into the own network and allowed exactly zero access to company data. Heck, even in a small shop there has to be one person designated to kicking ass and taking names. People have day jobs--even IT people--that would get in the way of proper maintenance and someone needs to ensure that:
- Stuff gets backed up
- Stuff is secure
- Stuff doesn't screw up other stuff
Yes, even "Web 2.0 aware hipsters" need to do this, and it's not their job any more than bookkeeping or balancing cash would be.LCDs always look sharper than CRTs--that's their greatest virtue (well, next to power and packaging), and it's pretty much inherent in how an LCD works. The pixels are individally addressed, fixed (there's no gun to focus) and not subject to refresh-based flicker. What LCDs don't offer is the colour fidelity or response time. They're sharp, but not as brilliant nor as suited to quick-moving images.