Isn't this a disincentive to make Mac-native software? Why develop for a tiny fraction of the market when you can develop for the other 95% and wait for the remaining holdouts to install Windows on their Macs?
Maybe. But I think the vast majority of Mac developers at this point are people who just love doing it. Only a few major toolmakers support the Mac anyway, and some resent having to do it (Adobe for sure, probably Microsoft if they weren't worried about legal issues).
I actually think the opposite is going to happen -- Windows devs take up developing for the Mac. I'm a.NET lover and Windows user, but now I want to get a Mac because of this announcement. I really don't want to build PCs myself anymore, and I think Dells suck. Apple makes pretty good quality hardware, so I'm thinking I'll go that way. Surely I'll start fooling around with XCode after I get this Mac, and who knows, maybe I'll become a full time Mac lover/developer.
Tivo is just such a compelling product that it seems like someone will have to buy their IP out of bankruptcy. That's the worst case scenario -- hopefully someone will buy them before they get to that point. The ripoff products have just never come close to the user interface that Tivo provides. I'd like it if Comcast would buy them instead of deploying this craptacular Motorola DVR that they've got now.
People just love Tivo, hey, their brand name has become a verb ("I'm Tivoing '24' right now")! Buying their brand name alone would help any similar product get a better image.
Twice in this thread, including the OP, posters have written "it's" when they meant to write "its". "It's" is a contraction for "it is". "Its" is a possessive.
Here's the dictionary article that outlines how to use the two.
otherwise no U.S. cable service or cellular phone provider would still be in business.
I just got cable for the first time in years recently and expected a lot of headaches with CS. Of course, I did have problems with my service, however the customer service has been incredible. Comcast picks up my calls in 15-20 seconds no matter when I call. They've been very knowledgable and helpful as well. And their CSRs have been empowered to give me discounts because I was having trouble.
This argument also underestimates the capability of countries to very rapidly switch their focus of production in the event of a war, which has been seen several times in history.
Yes, this is true. GM was able to convert their auto plants into tank factories relatively closely. However, never in history has a country had basic materials outsourced to the point that we do today.
Anyway, I don't really think of myself as a "classic" protectionist. Though everyone likes to label everyone else in extreme camps, I actually think that globalism could lead to more peace than we've ever had in history (think Jensen's speech in the movie Network -- ok that's extreme). But the bottom line is that there's no guarantee that other countries are going to play by the rules we set up. Globalism means counting on everyone else to be slave to the financial implications of doing bad things... sometimes that just isn't true.
Ya know, you say that like it's a bad thing, but maybe we need to be a little more xenophobic.
Our steel industry is completely decimated now. We barely make any heavy machinery in the United States. God forbid we actually ever get into a real war against the countries we've outsourced these things to.
Besides that, xenophobia is good for business. Look at the Japanese.... no one can sell electronics to them except Japanese. It's a guaranteed lock that the new Nintendo and Playstation boxes will do well in Japan even if the Xbox 360 is #1 everywhere else in the world. Yet we talk about xenophobia like it's a bad thing? Maybe the US would do better if we actually stopped buying everything at Wal-Mart, your discount Chinese offshored manufacturing headquarters.
You need to work on some performance enhancements. That front page of indi loads unbelievably slow. Rails is really easy. I'm worried about the first time my sites get/.ed though. Ruby needs that JIT interpreter bad.
I don't think 10,000 outfits such as GoDaddy are going to have a pull anywhere near Google collectively.
What pull? Financial pull? Does Google using Linux somehow make it more viable, considering they develop all of their own software on top of it?
Microsoft develops software and OSes that are released to the public. Billions of dollars flow to them daily and 99% of the desktops run their OS. That's called pull.
BTW, what has Google ever given back to the OSS community it depends on to supply Linux, MySQL, Python, etc.?
Are you sure? I added Google, Dell, Apple, and GE to my portfolio, and now the main Finance page has a whole section called "Related News" that just happens to be filled with stories about Google, Dell, Apple, and GE.
Those seem to be based on your recent stock searches, not the stocks in your portfolio.
links to more technical charting, links to options listings... It's a brand new beta. Give it time for more advanced portfolio (i hope!) additions.
I'm not sure what software business you're in, but in the one I work for, "beta" means feature complete. If I wanted a link to another site with options listings, I might as well just go to Yahoo where they have options listings. I want better options listings. Google hasn't improved on anything here except using their patented Google CSS to display some stock information... and you guys are all going ga-ga over it.
No usless real time stock ticker (are you a speculator or investor?)
I'm both a speculator and an investor. A 15 or 20 minute delay makes a stock price useless -- especially if you were trading Google's stock. Like I said, I wouldn't use Google Finance for information on Google's stock. Without options or real time quotes, it's a good way to lose money.
Like another poster mentioned, I don't want to be logged into my broker's site all day, they'll kick me off after 20 minutes or so. Bottom line is, Google Finance is another throw away tool that Google's put out there and will soon stop developing. The 3 people who put it together will move onto something else soon, kind of like Google Ride Finder, Google Reader, Google Web Accelerator, even Google News, which is in 4 years of Beta.
No stock news based on stocks in your portfolio... no real time quotes... no technical charting.. no options listings.
Besides a somewhat nifty chart -- which most pro sites have already gone far beyond -- this is not very noteworthy except that all things Google are news, right? I'd use Yahoo Finance to get information on Google's stock before I used Google Finance.
A spec like the PS3 for $500? Where can I get one of those?
With a PC you're paying for the right to not have to subsidize the hardware vendor by buying the software. Remember that with every PS3 title, Sony's going to get some licensing fee for every game sold. If the PS3 hardware wasn't subsidized like that, do you think it would be $500? Similarly, if you could develop anything you want for it (the post I was replying to), the subsidizing model doesn't work.
Like I said. People say things differently everywhere you go, that doesn't mean one person is wrong and another is "correct". Even in the US, we have "pop" and we have "soda". We've got "grinders", "subs", "wedges", "po'boys", "heroes", etc.. All of these words refer to the same thing (a sandwich), but no one goes around correcting each other about it. It's just tiresome, and I absolutely hate it when one of you guys take time out of a normal conversation to tell us we're wrong to call it football.
More generally, I'm just tired of everyone who comes to the US and tells us how wrong we are about everything. Our cars are too big, our houses are too big, we eat too much, blah blah blah. Somehow, somewhere, a country that controls 20% of the global product with 5% of the world population must be doing something right.
Anyway, all I'm asking is to give it a rest, it's annoying. BTW, what makes more money, the NFL or the English Premier League? (I don't know, that's a serious question).
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
Either continue doing what they're doing or offer content we'd pay for. I vote for the former. Obviously plenty of suckers don't know about ad blockers, or somehow end up clicking on ads, if crappy dating sites are earning $10K a day on ads alone.
Oh, and do you use a Tivo? Why do you rip off the television broadcasters? How on earth will they stay in business with you doing that?
Ya know, when I go to England I don't tell them how to spell "gray" or "color".
300m people in this country agree that, in English, "football" is an oblong ball. Why do the Europeans always have to argue about this point like we're using our language improperly? Get over it.
Long term, there's no value in any single investment in an open market. Returns diminish, and profits approach zero. The only way you stay ahead of the curve is to keep investing in newer stuff. Google appears to have a solid group behind them capable of doing exactly that, and doing it well enough, repeatedly. How valuable is a computer from five years ago? Or a car from ten years ago? Or a printing press from 100 years ago? How valuable is an ad campaign from 15 years ago?
Let's not confuse the products themselves with the creation of that product. A computer from 5 years ago is almost as expensive to get into building as it is today. How much does a fab cost Intel? $1b? On the other hand, when investment in a website is so cheap, how can you invest in the long term? Let's say it costs $25m for someone else to deploy a Gmail clone. That's peanuts. Compare that to the cost of building a fab line, a car company, or a fast food chain.
I'd like to find long term investments that are longer than a year. It might be true that all companies' returns go to zero, but the time over which that happens is very different for brick and mortar companies. Google is already tapped out with their valuation, to buy it and plan on holding it for 10 years is a ridiculous strategy. OTOH, if you had bought $10,000 of McDonald's stock in January, 1980, it would be worth $553,225.80 today. Name one internet site that's as reliable as an investment as McDonald's was 25 years ago and I'll invest in it. Even then, it was obvious that McDonald's was a nearly unbeatable success story. I just don't see that in the internet business because it seems like anyone can spend a little money in a year or two and build a better product.
Yes, Google has figured out how to monetize advertising for now. We have yet to see whether that advertising revenue is itself a bubble, caused by the sheer hype of AdWords. Personally, I just find it impossible to believe we can continue to have an entire information economy based on advertising revenue.
That said, short term trading on Google stock is a gold mine.
I like how about half of the comments respond how easy it is for the kid to have created the site, or that there's not much innovation going on there.
I often agree with both of these statements, including for Google, Y!, MSN sites mentioned in Slashdot stories. They're all a bunch of Javascript. Wowee. That's a pain in the butt, but it's not innovative. There's some server technology that's pretty cool behind Gmail and the like, but as time goes on, those bottlenecks will be solved in a more commoditized way.
So my question to you all is, why would you own Google or Yahoo stock for more than five minutes, to ride up the next big push? It seems like there's virtually no long term value in any website's technology. Surely someone else will take the idea and improve on it at some point -- it's already happened several times over in the last 10 years. We're already seeing the fast decline in the quality of Google's results, and here come a new wave of search engine rivals knocking on the door. Impossible? Ask AltaVista.
Or do we just live in a world where brand name is all we're investing in anymore? It's has to be branding we buy because no one actually creates products for the ages. When someone creates a "one click ordering" button, that's what they get patented. Owning the rights to a button on a computer screen like inventors once owned the phonograph, or film emulsion... that's what buying stock is about.
I remember when a Coke used to be a nickel, dammit.
There's plenty of creativity available... the problem is getting that creativity past the money people.
No, this is oftentimes not the reason a game or movie sucks. A lot of times, that creativity just doesn't work out.
I've worked on high profile movies with massive budgets and some of the biggest name directors and writers in Hollywood. Some of these movies -- no, many of these movies -- ended up sucking. Why? It certainly wasn't because of the money people. Sometimes the directors and writers are the money people.
The reason is because whenever you embark on a creative venture, sometimes you get to the end and it just isn't like you had hoped it would be. Maybe if you had unlimited time and patience, you'd go back and try to fix it, but most of us are just ready to go onto the next thing. Then there are deadlines, release dates, etc.. At some point, money people or not, you just have to cut the baby loose and go onto the next project. Also, it's easy to get so close to a project that you can't tell if it's good or not, and when you're a big name Hollywood guy, the Yes Men won't tell you it sucks.
The upside is, it's ridiculously easy to recoup your cost for the movies. If the movie fails at the box office, release it on DVD. If it fails there, release it on HBO. Then sell the rights to USA "Up all Night". Then sell the rights to NBC. Some way or another, they'll make back most of the money -- it's very rare that a movie actually loses money (usually when you hear "this movie cost this much to make", that figure is inflated in the first place).
For games that is not the case. Games are even more finicky than movies when it comes to getting back the investment. They get one chance to sell the game for one platform -- PS2, Gamecube, whatever. After that, the kids view it as an old, lame game. The market for cheaper, not so great games is nowhere near as lucrative as it is for movies. Being out in front of a release with preview marketing is a necessity, not a scam.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this a disincentive to make Mac-native software? Why develop for a tiny fraction of the market when you can develop for the other 95% and wait for the remaining holdouts to install Windows on their Macs?
.NET lover and Windows user, but now I want to get a Mac because of this announcement. I really don't want to build PCs myself anymore, and I think Dells suck. Apple makes pretty good quality hardware, so I'm thinking I'll go that way. Surely I'll start fooling around with XCode after I get this Mac, and who knows, maybe I'll become a full time Mac lover/developer.
Maybe. But I think the vast majority of Mac developers at this point are people who just love doing it. Only a few major toolmakers support the Mac anyway, and some resent having to do it (Adobe for sure, probably Microsoft if they weren't worried about legal issues).
I actually think the opposite is going to happen -- Windows devs take up developing for the Mac. I'm a
Great move on Apple's part. Bravo.
Tivo is just such a compelling product that it seems like someone will have to buy their IP out of bankruptcy. That's the worst case scenario -- hopefully someone will buy them before they get to that point. The ripoff products have just never come close to the user interface that Tivo provides. I'd like it if Comcast would buy them instead of deploying this craptacular Motorola DVR that they've got now.
People just love Tivo, hey, their brand name has become a verb ("I'm Tivoing '24' right now")! Buying their brand name alone would help any similar product get a better image.
Twice in this thread, including the OP, posters have written "it's" when they meant to write "its". "It's" is a contraction for "it is". "Its" is a possessive.
Here's the dictionary article that outlines how to use the two.
They forgot a few.
//gs? Macintosh TV? eMate? Oh -- the KING of all Apple failures... Apple III?
Remember Dylan?
Remember OpenDoc?
Apple
I think that new sound system they introduced is a dud as well, but maybe the Cult of Mac will buy some.
otherwise no U.S. cable service or cellular phone provider would still be in business.
I just got cable for the first time in years recently and expected a lot of headaches with CS. Of course, I did have problems with my service, however the customer service has been incredible. Comcast picks up my calls in 15-20 seconds no matter when I call. They've been very knowledgable and helpful as well. And their CSRs have been empowered to give me discounts because I was having trouble.
This argument also underestimates the capability of countries to very rapidly switch their focus of production in the event of a war, which has been seen several times in history.
Yes, this is true. GM was able to convert their auto plants into tank factories relatively closely. However, never in history has a country had basic materials outsourced to the point that we do today.
Anyway, I don't really think of myself as a "classic" protectionist. Though everyone likes to label everyone else in extreme camps, I actually think that globalism could lead to more peace than we've ever had in history (think Jensen's speech in the movie Network -- ok that's extreme). But the bottom line is that there's no guarantee that other countries are going to play by the rules we set up. Globalism means counting on everyone else to be slave to the financial implications of doing bad things... sometimes that just isn't true.
15%, son, if you're paying 15%...
If you're not paying 15%, you have no equity worth anything. It's called capital gains.
Ya know, you say that like it's a bad thing, but maybe we need to be a little more xenophobic.
Our steel industry is completely decimated now. We barely make any heavy machinery in the United States. God forbid we actually ever get into a real war against the countries we've outsourced these things to.
Besides that, xenophobia is good for business. Look at the Japanese.... no one can sell electronics to them except Japanese. It's a guaranteed lock that the new Nintendo and Playstation boxes will do well in Japan even if the Xbox 360 is #1 everywhere else in the world. Yet we talk about xenophobia like it's a bad thing? Maybe the US would do better if we actually stopped buying everything at Wal-Mart, your discount Chinese offshored manufacturing headquarters.
You need to work on some performance enhancements. That front page of indi loads unbelievably slow. Rails is really easy. I'm worried about the first time my sites get /.ed though. Ruby needs that JIT interpreter bad.
Is that before or after it ships? Badda-bing!
Billions of dollars flow to them daily
Oops. Make that millions.
I don't think 10,000 outfits such as GoDaddy are going to have a pull anywhere near Google collectively.
What pull? Financial pull? Does Google using Linux somehow make it more viable, considering they develop all of their own software on top of it?
Microsoft develops software and OSes that are released to the public. Billions of dollars flow to them daily and 99% of the desktops run their OS. That's called pull.
BTW, what has Google ever given back to the OSS community it depends on to supply Linux, MySQL, Python, etc.?
So... a flash video of a rendered flash movie? That's new. Try this the original flash movie
Are you sure? I added Google, Dell, Apple, and GE to my portfolio, and now the main Finance page has a whole section called "Related News" that just happens to be filled with stories about Google, Dell, Apple, and GE.
Those seem to be based on your recent stock searches, not the stocks in your portfolio.
search for a ticker symbol. right above the chart, you'll see a line that starts "Real-Time ECN:" that is a real-time quote.
I swear that wasn't there when I posted earlier. Oh well. Good to see it made it. Now how about the other items? Develop faster, webmonkeys!
links to more technical charting, links to options listings... It's a brand new beta. Give it time for more advanced portfolio (i hope!) additions.
I'm not sure what software business you're in, but in the one I work for, "beta" means feature complete. If I wanted a link to another site with options listings, I might as well just go to Yahoo where they have options listings. I want better options listings. Google hasn't improved on anything here except using their patented Google CSS to display some stock information... and you guys are all going ga-ga over it.
No usless real time stock ticker (are you a speculator or investor?)
I'm both a speculator and an investor. A 15 or 20 minute delay makes a stock price useless -- especially if you were trading Google's stock. Like I said, I wouldn't use Google Finance for information on Google's stock. Without options or real time quotes, it's a good way to lose money.
Like another poster mentioned, I don't want to be logged into my broker's site all day, they'll kick me off after 20 minutes or so. Bottom line is, Google Finance is another throw away tool that Google's put out there and will soon stop developing. The 3 people who put it together will move onto something else soon, kind of like Google Ride Finder, Google Reader, Google Web Accelerator, even Google News, which is in 4 years of Beta.
No stock news based on stocks in your portfolio... no real time quotes... no technical charting.. no options listings.
Besides a somewhat nifty chart -- which most pro sites have already gone far beyond -- this is not very noteworthy except that all things Google are news, right? I'd use Yahoo Finance to get information on Google's stock before I used Google Finance.
A spec like the PS3 for $500? Where can I get one of those?
With a PC you're paying for the right to not have to subsidize the hardware vendor by buying the software. Remember that with every PS3 title, Sony's going to get some licensing fee for every game sold. If the PS3 hardware wasn't subsidized like that, do you think it would be $500? Similarly, if you could develop anything you want for it (the post I was replying to), the subsidizing model doesn't work.
Like I said. People say things differently everywhere you go, that doesn't mean one person is wrong and another is "correct". Even in the US, we have "pop" and we have "soda". We've got "grinders", "subs", "wedges", "po'boys", "heroes", etc.. All of these words refer to the same thing (a sandwich), but no one goes around correcting each other about it. It's just tiresome, and I absolutely hate it when one of you guys take time out of a normal conversation to tell us we're wrong to call it football.
More generally, I'm just tired of everyone who comes to the US and tells us how wrong we are about everything. Our cars are too big, our houses are too big, we eat too much, blah blah blah. Somehow, somewhere, a country that controls 20% of the global product with 5% of the world population must be doing something right.
Anyway, all I'm asking is to give it a rest, it's annoying. BTW, what makes more money, the NFL or the English Premier League? (I don't know, that's a serious question).
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
Either continue doing what they're doing or offer content we'd pay for. I vote for the former. Obviously plenty of suckers don't know about ad blockers, or somehow end up clicking on ads, if crappy dating sites are earning $10K a day on ads alone.
Oh, and do you use a Tivo? Why do you rip off the television broadcasters? How on earth will they stay in business with you doing that?
Ya know, when I go to England I don't tell them how to spell "gray" or "color".
300m people in this country agree that, in English, "football" is an oblong ball. Why do the Europeans always have to argue about this point like we're using our language improperly? Get over it.
I'd be willing to pay more for a gaming console if I had control to produce my own content [e.g. programs, games, whatever].
There's one of those out already.
Wait for it... Wait for it...
It's called a PC.
Long term, there's no value in any single investment in an open market. Returns diminish, and profits approach zero. The only way you stay ahead of the curve is to keep investing in newer stuff. Google appears to have a solid group behind them capable of doing exactly that, and doing it well enough, repeatedly. How valuable is a computer from five years ago? Or a car from ten years ago? Or a printing press from 100 years ago? How valuable is an ad campaign from 15 years ago?
Let's not confuse the products themselves with the creation of that product. A computer from 5 years ago is almost as expensive to get into building as it is today. How much does a fab cost Intel? $1b? On the other hand, when investment in a website is so cheap, how can you invest in the long term? Let's say it costs $25m for someone else to deploy a Gmail clone. That's peanuts. Compare that to the cost of building a fab line, a car company, or a fast food chain.
I'd like to find long term investments that are longer than a year. It might be true that all companies' returns go to zero, but the time over which that happens is very different for brick and mortar companies. Google is already tapped out with their valuation, to buy it and plan on holding it for 10 years is a ridiculous strategy. OTOH, if you had bought $10,000 of McDonald's stock in January, 1980, it would be worth $553,225.80 today. Name one internet site that's as reliable as an investment as McDonald's was 25 years ago and I'll invest in it. Even then, it was obvious that McDonald's was a nearly unbeatable success story. I just don't see that in the internet business because it seems like anyone can spend a little money in a year or two and build a better product.
Yes, Google has figured out how to monetize advertising for now. We have yet to see whether that advertising revenue is itself a bubble, caused by the sheer hype of AdWords. Personally, I just find it impossible to believe we can continue to have an entire information economy based on advertising revenue.
That said, short term trading on Google stock is a gold mine.
I like how about half of the comments respond how easy it is for the kid to have created the site, or that there's not much innovation going on there.
I often agree with both of these statements, including for Google, Y!, MSN sites mentioned in Slashdot stories. They're all a bunch of Javascript. Wowee. That's a pain in the butt, but it's not innovative. There's some server technology that's pretty cool behind Gmail and the like, but as time goes on, those bottlenecks will be solved in a more commoditized way.
So my question to you all is, why would you own Google or Yahoo stock for more than five minutes, to ride up the next big push? It seems like there's virtually no long term value in any website's technology. Surely someone else will take the idea and improve on it at some point -- it's already happened several times over in the last 10 years. We're already seeing the fast decline in the quality of Google's results, and here come a new wave of search engine rivals knocking on the door. Impossible? Ask AltaVista.
Or do we just live in a world where brand name is all we're investing in anymore? It's has to be branding we buy because no one actually creates products for the ages. When someone creates a "one click ordering" button, that's what they get patented. Owning the rights to a button on a computer screen like inventors once owned the phonograph, or film emulsion... that's what buying stock is about.
I remember when a Coke used to be a nickel, dammit.
There's plenty of creativity available ... the problem is getting that creativity past the money people.
No, this is oftentimes not the reason a game or movie sucks. A lot of times, that creativity just doesn't work out.
I've worked on high profile movies with massive budgets and some of the biggest name directors and writers in Hollywood. Some of these movies -- no, many of these movies -- ended up sucking. Why? It certainly wasn't because of the money people. Sometimes the directors and writers are the money people.
The reason is because whenever you embark on a creative venture, sometimes you get to the end and it just isn't like you had hoped it would be. Maybe if you had unlimited time and patience, you'd go back and try to fix it, but most of us are just ready to go onto the next thing. Then there are deadlines, release dates, etc.. At some point, money people or not, you just have to cut the baby loose and go onto the next project. Also, it's easy to get so close to a project that you can't tell if it's good or not, and when you're a big name Hollywood guy, the Yes Men won't tell you it sucks.
The upside is, it's ridiculously easy to recoup your cost for the movies. If the movie fails at the box office, release it on DVD. If it fails there, release it on HBO. Then sell the rights to USA "Up all Night". Then sell the rights to NBC. Some way or another, they'll make back most of the money -- it's very rare that a movie actually loses money (usually when you hear "this movie cost this much to make", that figure is inflated in the first place).
For games that is not the case. Games are even more finicky than movies when it comes to getting back the investment. They get one chance to sell the game for one platform -- PS2, Gamecube, whatever. After that, the kids view it as an old, lame game. The market for cheaper, not so great games is nowhere near as lucrative as it is for movies. Being out in front of a release with preview marketing is a necessity, not a scam.