-Much of the focus of discussions like this one is on what Linux is like compared to Windows, the user experience, how easy it is, etc... But people seem to forget that by trying to put Linux on the desktops of average users they are going up against the 800lb gorilla in the room on its home turf. Look, in average people's minds "Microsoft = Operating System". No reasonable business-type person would agree to go head-on against a company that has most of the market share on *their* turf. Read any business book, you will be told that the path to ruin is to go directly head-on against a well established mega-player.
The only way to go against MS directly is with disruptive technology (the transistor was disruptive technology, Linux is NOT), or a disruptive business model. Linux has a chance with the latter since it is open source etc... But disruptive doesn't mean "good". There needs to be a way to show irrefutably to the average user that open source is way better for them, in an immediate way.
This, by the way, brings up another problem: marketing. Most people don't even know that Linux exists. How do you get in people's heads? It would take huge funds to create a marketing campaign that stands a chance of being noticed. Or maybe leveraging the current user base for some guerilla marketing to the masses, like letters to the editor of local papers commenting on the MS EULA. But is there a project that is trying to do this in a coordinated and effective way?
-Also while geeks are good at troubleshooting, they tend NOT to make the best customer support service agents. I once joined the firefox forum to inquire about the amount of memory the browser was using. I think another user with the same problem on the thread mentioned it might be a memory leak. We were all then lectured on what a memory leak was and was not. We were never able to get a good answer on our actual problem. We were all told "if it's a bug, submit a bug report", which happens to involve reinstalling a fresh copy of FF with some special something or another and then spend time trying to find the "bug" so that it can be replicated. WTF? do I look like a test engineer here? How is that "support"? This episode almost turned me off from FF completely.
Those trying to figure out the relations between Google and Apple, apart from the obvious ones, may be interested in reading this post from Guy Kawasaki, and check out the "Apple and Google" report he shows as an example.
I'm an emusic member too. I actually enjoy the discovery process. I'll poke around and listen to samples, sooner or later something good will come up. For 25c a song you can't really go wrong by downloading the whole album. The community forum is really helpful there too if you're stuck not knowing what to explore next.
Anyways, being an emu member makes me wonder why anybody pays $1 for a broken mp3. My iPod is full of eMu downloads.
Disclaimer: I don't work for them, but I do have affiliate links on my site. Frankly I just think they're a good service, especially compared to iTuna
Apparently the driver lies on his back. The vehicle is version 4.0, so to speak. They built on past experiences and consistently improved their designs, year after year. That's key to winning IMO.
Won't help you if your family picture takers use SLRs. No destruction, and not even blocking!
FTA:
"There are some caveats, according to Summet. Current camera-neutralizing technology may never work against single-lens-reflex cameras, which use a folding-mirror viewing system that effectively masks its CCD except when a photo is actually being taken."
Seems to make the technology a little useless. SLRs are cheap nowadays (um, relatively speaking) and many amateur photographers use them. I guess it only protects against small hidden digital cams.
...because it's not a valid test. In "real life" you never are in a situation where you have to choose between one site or another, knowing that one is infected and one is not. In real life if I have the slightest doubt I'll try to research the company by Googling "companyname + spyware" and if I still have doubts I just don't download.
I scored a 6/8. I lost a point because I said that all P2P software packages contained spyware. Why? because that's what I heard, and I don't use P2P so how should I know which packages are clean and which aren't? I steer clear of all of them, like I steer clear of any suspicious website and that's how my machine stays clean. But because I am playing it safe the stupid test docked me one point for wrongly accusing eMule of containing spyware, and called me a "Tightrope Walker" to boot.
This test doesn't test anything, but it's a great marketing ploy. How many people will freak out and download McAfee right then and there?
While Baby-Boomers are now part of this market it is still dominated by younger people who apparently don't care so much about quality. It seems the way people listen to music is changing parallel to the way the music is being distributed. People can now carry so much music in their pocket that they listen to music while doing anything and everything. Music is in essence background music for their lives. For that reason "quantity" is king for these people and "quality" is very secondary. Gone are the days where "listening to music" meant putting an album on in your living room and sitting through the whole thing while doing little other than enjoying the music.
So for that reason I think your point of view is unfortunately a minority, and a shrinking one.
UAVs are something we're going to have to get used to. Up next: pilotless passenger planes. Most modern aircraft are already equipped with auto-takeoff, auto-pilot (cruise), and auto-land. What more do you need? The ability to control them from the ground? That's being worked on for security reasons.
"For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive."
Duh! promotion _is_ expensive when you buy a Porsche for a DJ so he'll play your crap!
Users would pay a few euros a month to download as much music or film material as they wanted, with proceeds going to the artists.
So the money goes to the artists. But how is the pot of gold divided up?? Are the numbers of downloads for each artist monitored and the money is returned to the artists proportionately to that? Or are there blanket statements made along the lines of: "well so and so was top-40 last year so he's getting a lot" and "never heard of Wolf Parade so they must be terrible so we won't give them much". Are the indie bands going to get a penny? Who decides this... and if it's some French committee somewhere, are they going to be pressured to give more money to "Variete Francaise" artists even if it has fewer listeners?
You mean to say that setting the price of a song at 99 cents, regardless of duration, regardless of who the artist is, regardless of how popular it might be as long as it comes from a major label is considered price fixing??
I agree the hype will die and the people who think they are going to get paid to write nothing interesting will go away.
But people are always going to talk about themselves and if you give them an avenue (nay, a superhighway) to push their thoughts through then they will do so. And so what... let 'em babble we don't have to listen.
As far as monetizing with ads goes, give me a break. It's a little bit like recycling beer bottles. Have you ever taken cases and cases and cases of bottles to the recycling place only to get enough spare change for a soda? Same thing with visitors: you may have thousands of them, but you'll be celebrating the day you break the $20 dollar mark on your Adsense account and Google writes you a check.
However if you do have a good blog/content website there *are* ways to use that to make decent money I believe. Whatever you do don't charge for content... and don't try cramming so many ads that it's headache inducing... but you could come up with a product or service related to your content that your thousands of visitors would be interested in. No advertising needed. Your potential buyers are already streaming to your selling point. So for example if you are writing about antique cars, try selling glossy prints of the nicest cars. You won't become a milionaire, but you'll be better off than if you relied on adverts/affiliates alone.
Just my $0.02. No wait, that's Adsense. What I just gave you was $2.00.
Agreed. I am no fan of microsoft in general but in most locations I checked their bird's eye view thing beat Google Earth in resolution, and usefulness, and cool factor too.
I agree with everybody who says that the selection is lousy. I'm a true indie-music geek (and proudly so) but none of my favorite unknown/lesser-known bands were in there. NONE!! I searched for more than a dozen bands ranging from tiny Los Angeles groups to National headliners (like Pinback and Belle and Sebastian). Not a single one came up! So obviously this is of no interest except that...
..except that it is an interesting business model for the online music industry:
-It's the first time I see a service offering lossless downloads. This is valuable for those of us with real stereo equipment in their living rooms (I find mp3s sound a little "empty")
-pay-per-minute of music downloaded pricing. That's interesting because it annoys me when I have to pay the same price for a 30 second song as a 10 minute song when I am trying to get a full album. FYI:
0.99 per 10 minutes of lossy compression (Ogg Vorbis format)
(each 10 minutes in length is another $0.99)
$1.24 per 10 minutes of lossless compression (FLAC format)
$6.99 per album for lossy compression (Ogg Vorbis format)
$8.99 per album for lossless compression (FLAC format)
So note that this is NOT a 99c/track type service as has been mentioned above.
I'm not convinced either. I just started a small music website and publishing some sort of audio content is probably in my future. But I've already ruled out streaming radio. It seems to me streaming stations push the same songs to the same users at least once a day (good songs are repeated, but not cached) so it is a poor use of bandwidth, in addition to al the other flaws described above. I'm much more likely to go with Podcasts.
Olivier
Slashdot Mirror
A few things I'd like to add to the above:
-Much of the focus of discussions like this one is on what Linux is like compared to Windows, the user experience, how easy it is, etc... But people seem to forget that by trying to put Linux on the desktops of average users they are going up against the 800lb gorilla in the room on its home turf. Look, in average people's minds "Microsoft = Operating System". No reasonable business-type person would agree to go head-on against a company that has most of the market share on *their* turf. Read any business book, you will be told that the path to ruin is to go directly head-on against a well established mega-player.
The only way to go against MS directly is with disruptive technology (the transistor was disruptive technology, Linux is NOT), or a disruptive business model. Linux has a chance with the latter since it is open source etc... But disruptive doesn't mean "good". There needs to be a way to show irrefutably to the average user that open source is way better for them, in an immediate way.
This, by the way, brings up another problem: marketing. Most people don't even know that Linux exists. How do you get in people's heads? It would take huge funds to create a marketing campaign that stands a chance of being noticed. Or maybe leveraging the current user base for some guerilla marketing to the masses, like letters to the editor of local papers commenting on the MS EULA. But is there a project that is trying to do this in a coordinated and effective way?
-Also while geeks are good at troubleshooting, they tend NOT to make the best customer support service agents. I once joined the firefox forum to inquire about the amount of memory the browser was using. I think another user with the same problem on the thread mentioned it might be a memory leak. We were all then lectured on what a memory leak was and was not. We were never able to get a good answer on our actual problem. We were all told "if it's a bug, submit a bug report", which happens to involve reinstalling a fresh copy of FF with some special something or another and then spend time trying to find the "bug" so that it can be replicated. WTF? do I look like a test engineer here? How is that "support"? This episode almost turned me off from FF completely.
Those trying to figure out the relations between Google and Apple, apart from the obvious ones, may be interested in reading this post from Guy Kawasaki, and check out the "Apple and Google" report he shows as an example.
I'm an emusic member too. I actually enjoy the discovery process. I'll poke around and listen to samples, sooner or later something good will come up. For 25c a song you can't really go wrong by downloading the whole album. The community forum is really helpful there too if you're stuck not knowing what to explore next.
Anyways, being an emu member makes me wonder why anybody pays $1 for a broken mp3. My iPod is full of eMu downloads.
Disclaimer: I don't work for them, but I do have affiliate links on my site. Frankly I just think they're a good service, especially compared to iTuna
Oliver
UBC Supermileage website
Apparently the driver lies on his back. The vehicle is version 4.0, so to speak. They built on past experiences and consistently improved their designs, year after year. That's key to winning IMO.
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.com
Won't help you if your family picture takers use SLRs. No destruction, and not even blocking!
FTA:
"There are some caveats, according to Summet. Current camera-neutralizing technology may never work against single-lens-reflex cameras, which use a folding-mirror viewing system that effectively masks its CCD except when a photo is actually being taken."
Seems to make the technology a little useless. SLRs are cheap nowadays (um, relatively speaking) and many amateur photographers use them. I guess it only protects against small hidden digital cams.
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.com
...because it's not a valid test. In "real life" you never are in a situation where you have to choose between one site or another, knowing that one is infected and one is not. In real life if I have the slightest doubt I'll try to research the company by Googling "companyname + spyware" and if I still have doubts I just don't download.
I scored a 6/8. I lost a point because I said that all P2P software packages contained spyware. Why? because that's what I heard, and I don't use P2P so how should I know which packages are clean and which aren't? I steer clear of all of them, like I steer clear of any suspicious website and that's how my machine stays clean. But because I am playing it safe the stupid test docked me one point for wrongly accusing eMule of containing spyware, and called me a "Tightrope Walker" to boot.
This test doesn't test anything, but it's a great marketing ploy. How many people will freak out and download McAfee right then and there?
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.comI assume "you" are. (the driver, err owner/passenger of the vehicle).
Just like you are responsible for your dog and your under-18 kids, you are responsible for your robotic car.
It's then up to you to turn the psychological trauma of getting your butt kicked by an angry Ferrari owner into a class-action lawsuit against Toyota.
IANAL, though maybe I should be...
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.com
Quality over Quantity...
While Baby-Boomers are now part of this market it is still dominated by younger people who apparently don't care so much about quality. It seems the way people listen to music is changing parallel to the way the music is being distributed. People can now carry so much music in their pocket that they listen to music while doing anything and everything. Music is in essence background music for their lives. For that reason "quantity" is king for these people and "quality" is very secondary. Gone are the days where "listening to music" meant putting an album on in your living room and sitting through the whole thing while doing little other than enjoying the music.
So for that reason I think your point of view is unfortunately a minority, and a shrinking one.
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.com
BABERANK
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.com
...and NASA plans to do it too for terrain mapping purposes (presumably within US borders):
http://esto.nasa.gov/obs_technologies_uavsar.html
UAVs are something we're going to have to get used to. Up next: pilotless passenger planes. Most modern aircraft are already equipped with auto-takeoff, auto-pilot (cruise), and auto-land. What more do you need? The ability to control them from the ground? That's being worked on for security reasons.
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.com
I think the retail-CD is dead in the long run if the price stays where it's at or climbs. But I don't think they have to be that expensive. See:
http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingdata/cost.asp
From the RIAA link above:
Duh! promotion _is_ expensive when you buy a Porsche for a DJ so he'll play your crap!
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
FTA:
So the money goes to the artists. But how is the pot of gold divided up?? Are the numbers of downloads for each artist monitored and the money is returned to the artists proportionately to that? Or are there blanket statements made along the lines of: "well so and so was top-40 last year so he's getting a lot" and "never heard of Wolf Parade so they must be terrible so we won't give them much". Are the indie bands going to get a penny? Who decides this... and if it's some French committee somewhere, are they going to be pressured to give more money to "Variete Francaise" artists even if it has fewer listeners?
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
PS: In the interest of full disclosure: I am part French AND part American (and Canadian, but let's keep this simple).
You mean to say that setting the price of a song at 99 cents, regardless of duration, regardless of who the artist is, regardless of how popular it might be as long as it comes from a major label is considered price fixing??
[shocked] No! Way!
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
I agree the hype will die and the people who think they are going to get paid to write nothing interesting will go away.
But people are always going to talk about themselves and if you give them an avenue (nay, a superhighway) to push their thoughts through then they will do so. And so what... let 'em babble we don't have to listen.
As far as monetizing with ads goes, give me a break. It's a little bit like recycling beer bottles. Have you ever taken cases and cases and cases of bottles to the recycling place only to get enough spare change for a soda? Same thing with visitors: you may have thousands of them, but you'll be celebrating the day you break the $20 dollar mark on your Adsense account and Google writes you a check.
However if you do have a good blog/content website there *are* ways to use that to make decent money I believe. Whatever you do don't charge for content... and don't try cramming so many ads that it's headache inducing... but you could come up with a product or service related to your content that your thousands of visitors would be interested in. No advertising needed. Your potential buyers are already streaming to your selling point. So for example if you are writing about antique cars, try selling glossy prints of the nicest cars. You won't become a milionaire, but you'll be better off than if you relied on adverts/affiliates alone.
Just my $0.02. No wait, that's Adsense. What I just gave you was $2.00.
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
Agreed. I am no fan of microsoft in general but in most locations I checked their bird's eye view thing beat Google Earth in resolution, and usefulness, and cool factor too.
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
I agree with everybody who says that the selection is lousy. I'm a true indie-music geek (and proudly so) but none of my favorite unknown/lesser-known bands were in there. NONE!! I searched for more than a dozen bands ranging from tiny Los Angeles groups to National headliners (like Pinback and Belle and Sebastian). Not a single one came up! So obviously this is of no interest except that...
..except that it is an interesting business model for the online music industry:
-It's the first time I see a service offering lossless downloads. This is valuable for those of us with real stereo equipment in their living rooms (I find mp3s sound a little "empty")
-pay-per-minute of music downloaded pricing. That's interesting because it annoys me when I have to pay the same price for a 30 second song as a 10 minute song when I am trying to get a full album. FYI:
0.99 per 10 minutes of lossy compression (Ogg Vorbis format) (each 10 minutes in length is another $0.99)
$1.24 per 10 minutes of lossless compression (FLAC format)
$6.99 per album for lossy compression (Ogg Vorbis format)
$8.99 per album for lossless compression (FLAC format)
So note that this is NOT a 99c/track type service as has been mentioned above.
Oliver / http://www.treasuretunes.com/
I'm not convinced either. I just started a small music website and publishing some sort of audio content is probably in my future. But I've already ruled out streaming radio. It seems to me streaming stations push the same songs to the same users at least once a day (good songs are repeated, but not cached) so it is a poor use of bandwidth, in addition to al the other flaws described above. I'm much more likely to go with Podcasts. Olivier