Actually, it's very likely Mehdi Ali and Bill Sydnes WERE trying to kill the Amiga during the start of their tenure. They couldn't exactly say this, but they were totally PC focused... at least until they got schooled in the actual PC market, and found they couldn't make any money selling PCs. But at least the first six months, they had more or less shut down everything they could. That meant no new chips or PCBs being made, designs, sure, software, sure. They also cancelled most of the hardware projects that were on-going, just in case any of those got finished. They didn't want to make the previous administration look good.
Simply put -- you don't do that at the best and healthiest of high-tech companies. I don't think Commodore was lost in early 1991, but it needed to move quickly on the new stuff we had, and the stuff after that... there was lots going on. Instead, they did the opposite, and put on the brakes. I was certain, by fall of 1991, that they were going to kill the company. I stuck around for the next 2.5 years trying to prevent that, but as much as I would have liked it, there was no technical solution.
Actually, the chips were full custom, not gate arrays.
The big problem wasn't the presence of the custom chips, or even the need to update them every time or not. The real problem was that, given the complexity of the design in the late 80s, this was really one chip that needed to built out at three. Some of these were larger than the 68000 CPU used in the beginning. You might expect that today (nVidia AND AMD GPUs are often more complex than the CPUs in a system), but it was an issue for any smaller company.
And it was also the thing that made the Amiga interesting... no one else was really trying before it came along. They didn't try that much afterwards... both the PC and the Mac delivered 8-bit graphics, but they were slow. What they did right, though, was integrate them in a modular fashion... you could chuck out the old graphics chip, drop in a new one, and nothing else broke. That wasn't possible in the Amiga, as it was.
We were moving to this... it was the obvious direction to go, but unfortunately, C= wasn't spending the kind of money needed to make things happen that fast. It was also pretty obvious that even if Commodore did achieve a more modular architecture (there was a design, called Hombre, which did this in 1993, though it wasn't being built due to cash problems), we needed to be able to use graphics chips in a modular way. I had been working in 1993-1994 with Tseng Labs (at the time, a big name in PC graphics, they had the first VGA chips fast enough for what we wanted to do) to build a graphics add-in as a transitional option, but the company didn't last long enough. Oh well. You can only do so much.... Commodore had been run by complete idiots since early 1991, and slowly strangled by R&D cash even before then.
The AAA chipset was started in 1998. We were grossly underfunded... AAA systems should have been out at least by 1992, if not sooner. No one doing a competitive graphics chip back then had cycles half that long. Commodore had the fund then, they just spent them making rich managers richer, with not a thought to the future of the company.
Ok, the Amiga 3000 didn't have built-in graphics that matched the number of colors of the VGA or Macs of the day. On the other hand, none of the PCs or Macs had hard drive performance capable of real video... the Amiga 3000 did. So it's not exactly the situation as described. Most folks using Amiga 3000s were doing video, with Toasters or other video hardware, and the Amiga's lack of color wasn't a killer.
Yes, of course we wanted more. The original project for a next-generation chipset was started in 1988, but underfunded, so only prototypes existed by 1993. The other upgrade, originally called Pandora, then AA, then AGA, was started a few years later. It was supposed to ship in machine in early 1992, but by then, Commodore had not just a management disease, but a fatal one.
That's also where the A600 came from. The A600 was the A300 (eg, to be cheaper than the A500) with a PCMCIA slot put in and GRR's super-cheap genlock taken out (yeah, the A300 was supposed to ship with a built-in genlock, at least if George got it working by then).
The C65 was a stupid idea, and I believe it happened mainly because no one else wanted to work with the engineer involved, so they just left him alone. It was strange times at Commodore near the end.
It's also sad what got cancelled when the management disease really kicked in. The A3000 has every area of the system we could improve improved, without the new custom chips. Some of that got expensive, which is why it didn't immediately trickle down to cheaper systems. That was Spring of 1990. In 1992, we were planning to have the A3000+, which would have had a 68040 CPU and the AT&T DSP3210 for audio and modem processing (I actually built prototypes, more like the A3000 than we had planned). But we also had a 25MHz 68030 machine, dubbed the A1000+, planned for the same time frame, with the "AA" chipset, the usual expansions, but closer to the A500/A1200 price than the A3000. Both of these were cancelled when the management changed in 1991. The mid-range machine was killed entirely, and the A4000 that came out late in 1992 was missing everything but the "AA" chips... they even forced us to take out the DMA-driven SCSI bus, so our disk I/O got as crappy as that of a Mac or a PC.
In short, these things don't happen overnight. And despite what you see when the hardware comes out, it's not always really an engineering problem.
It wasn't viable other than as a fun think to hack around it (which, honestly, is what many folks did on AmigaOS in the late 80s/early 90s), by the time Commodore was done.
I actually explored this, a few years later, while at Metabox AG. We had originally decided to make PowerPC desktop computers (the company was called PIOS Computer then), but got shut down by both Be, Inc. and later, Apple (we did launch the very first 300MHz or faster Mac compatible).
So we went to multimedia set top boxes instead -- basically, a whole home computer on your TV, doing video, internet, etc. You just don't call it a home computer. We wanted to use Linux, but couldn't find any programmers to help us get around the fairly substantial problems it had back then, even simple things like playing video and audio without stuttering or special hardware. It was impossible to find programmers who wanted to get paid to do that, back in the mid 90s.
I have followed and, as mentioned, used Linux for these kinds of things more recently. It's just as capable as Windows in this, and perhaps moreso, since you have more control over how it's tuned. But back then, as an alternative to AmigaOS, it didn't really fly for most of the reasons one would have been using AmigaOS.
With that said, most of the other choices sucked, too.
Part of that is the same factor I mentioned here in an earlier post. In the early days, when the computer WAS your hobby, the OS was a fascinating thing to learn, take apart, and teach to do your bidding. If you approach your computer that same way today, you may find the same level of enjoyment in Linux. Or AROS, or The Hurd, or HaikuOS, or any variety of operating systems out there now.
But as computers moved from the whole focus to largely being part of how you got a job done, the OS has largely (at least for many) become just a footnote. Sure, if you're paid to program, the pros and cons may be more or less of an issue. About a year ago, I was being paid to integrate a video server and provide a bunch of fairly weird bits of video aggregation (analog and digital video comes in from multiple sources, out comes an MPEG-2 transport stream full of H.264 formatted for DVB-H insertion). This was actually easier to build under Linux today than probably any other OS, simply because of all the open source tools. You had H.264 codecs and TS muxers and demuxers, fast media-ready file systems (XFS... ext4 is good too, but it wasn't ready last year), all kinds of good stuff.
But if I actually wanted to edit a video, Linux would not be my choice. If I wanted to set up a system for other people to edit video, definitely not my choice.
At some point, for most people, the computer, including the OS, became just another tool. And sure, I like some tools quite a bit... I have this fibreglass handled hammer I've had since college, which is a great hammer. But I never loved it like I loved my Amigas in those days. And I've never had a PC I was as attached to as that hammer. Or a PC-OS, at least not once BeOS bit the big one.
Certainly, many "regular" things you want to do are just plain standard in any OS: you can even run the same web browser, office suite, email client, and some other basics, all open source, in many different OSs... which also makes the OS matter all the less. So you pick the OS for what it does better, or what you can't do elsewhere (there are no serious EE CAD tools that I know of for either MacOS or Linux, meanwhile, you have your choice of many for Windows).
On the other hand, it's not even a big question... Linux runs just dandy, under VirtualBox, under Windows. I do it all the time... some versions (CentOS 5, for example) actually worked better on my laptop under VirtualBox than they did native. Any particular need for a different OS is pretty easy these days. But in general, I get most of what I want done under Windows, and the OS itself is just a footnote, not a big issue. I'd switch to Linux just to annoy Windows people if it did as well, but it doesn't. For me, on the desktop, doing CAD, music, and video.
I largely agree... Linux is not a good match to AmigaOS. Sure, there were bound to be a handful of folks who just used Amigas to write code, and given that most serious Amiga users had most of the GNU shell tools (though more than likely still using WShell, not bash or csh or any UNIX shell, which we did not like and did not let you have at the better coolness that was Amiga shell use), and you had these in GNU/Linux too, ok, maybe some were happy there.
But through most of the 90s, Linux was still the Wild West. You just couldn't do much of the multimedia stuff you enjoyed from the Amiga. Couldn't on Windows or the Mac, either, but at least they were closer.
After I left Commodore, I had come into a free PC, and put Windows on it after getting frustrated with the fact you just couldn't do MIDI under OS/2... not to mention no serious MIDI apps on OS/2.... I was a "Bars and Pipes" users on Amiga (I did everything on Amiga, but moving music to the PC seemed to make sense), and needed a decent MIDI program, or forget about it.
The main reason to choose the PC: I could get 8-port devices, and at least some sophistication in MIDI apps (I wound up using Cakewalk... no B&P, but at least you could internally script it if you wanted to).
Here's the thing... there was a day in which just about everyone using a personal computer would say their hobby was "computers". This was the 8-bit days... Commodore PET and 64, Apple ][, TRaSh-80, later Atari 400 and 800. Any user could learn every single thing there was to know about these machines: registers, peek and poke locations, etc. If you were hardcore, you knew the 6502 or Z-80 op-codes from memory.
Next came the 16/32-bit machines, like the PC, the Mac, and the Amiga. These found a place in business (the PC, because the 8087 FPU did spreadsheets 100x faster than an Apple ][ or a PET, then the Mac for wordprocessing, then the Amiga for video), but the personal computer heritage was individuals, and still most of its growth came from that. But the next generation wasn't just looking to "do computers", they wanted to do SOMETHING WITH computers. So over that ten years, roughly 1984-1994, you went from "computer as a hobby" to "hobby with computer". Not everyone, just as not everyone stopped doing HAM radio when computers came along. But the reason computers existed were for these things, not the "computer as my hobby" crowd.
So after Amiga, most Amiga users were doing something with their computer. Linux almost certainly did not do that thing in the 1990s, and if it did, not well. So, yeah, some of those Amiga users, the guys still doing "computer as a hobby" might have found Linux interesting... after all, the focus had definitely already shifted from "this hardware is so cool" to "this software is so cool"... you could spend forever digging into the mess, er, complexity that is GNU/Linux.
But for everyone else, applications had grown up in those ten years, roughly speaking. You didn't just need some basic MIDI tracker, you needed something like Bars and Pipes. You weren't going to be happy with a text editor or even a markup like TeX or Roff/Nroff/whatever, you wanted PageStream. If you did video, you probably at least wanted the power of a Video Toaster, you probably used DeluxePaint or any of the many other pro-level video and graphics apps for the Amiga. You couldn't get any of that, back then, on Linux... even now, it's fairly thin (yeah, I know about Cinerela... it'll do the job, but it's no Vegas, which is how I edit my video on the PC these days. You also have Sonar, Acid, Sound Forge, etc.).
Actually, after Commodore, quite a few ex-Amiga developers jumped on another later-to-be-found-sinking ship, OS/2. Sure, there were some stupid bits in OS/2 (no kernel threads, 16-bit model drivers, a religious conviction that realtime guarantees at the user level were wrong, etc). But hey, it ran REXX, and it wasn't Windows.
And actually, BeOS was up and running before Linux had really become all that viable for the kinds of things Amiga people had been doing. A number of Amiga developers wound up doing BeOS projects, some even worked on the BeOS team. And that was actually the right place to go, technically speaking... BeOS is the only OS to come long that did multimedia in fundamental ways better than the AmigaOS did in its day.
And sure, over time, better tools and components did show up in other OSs... you could do stuff in easily Linux today with things like GStreamer that were somewhere between impossible and a boatload of work in AmigaOS. But there are only so many ways its fair to compare an OS that stopped developing in 1993 with one that's still going strong seventeen years later.
Windows 95 had nothing at all to do with the Amiga's death, commercially. It wasn't even out on the market during the commercial life of the Amiga.
There were two big factors in the Amiga's death. The smaller of the two, but still very substantial, was piracy. While Amigas had a number of very cool niches, the big engine of Amiga sales was home computers, largely driven by gaming. Most of that was in Europe, and at the peak of the Amiga years, piracy was so bad some releases that sold tens of thousands in the USA and Canada (smaller markets, and also not immune to piracy) might have sold 50 copies in Germany or the UK, the two largest markets for Amiga games.
The second was Commodore, on many levels. For one, while they were spending literally tens of millions on bloated salaries and perks for the top management ( the top few guys at C= were making more than the top few guys at IBM or Apple in the early 90s), but we had the lowest R&D budget in the industry. We could deal with some of that simply by hiring the very best engineers one could hire, and working crazy hours. But given how dependent Amiga evolution was on custom chip work -- which is not cheap -- there was just no way to keep up without more investments. So many leading edge designs were done, but they came in later than they should have (our 64-bit graphics project started in 1988, for example, also supporting true color, planar and chunky graphics, MPEG-like compression modes in hardware, and 8-channel 16-bit sound, but by 1993, it was still prototype chips, and engineering didn't have the budget to complete things).
These pretty much worked together in a vicious circle. Curiously, sales of high end systems remained at least flat, well into the end days. Folks who needed to run Video Toasters or Supergens or whatever still needed new Amigas. Commodore had never done much to promote these uses.
There was only a brief hope post-Commodore, despite all the Amiga fans wanting more. The first resurrection, at ESCOM, formed a separate Amiga Technologies division, put existing Amigas back into production, and started working on a new hardware and software platform that could have been reasonable for the middle-late 1990s. Unfortunately, ESCOM themselves blew it in the PC market... and that killed it all.
Nothing after that, far as I know, involved anyone who had actually made personal computers -- there were a bunch of wannabes, that's about it. And the ideas just got progressively worse with each change of hands. And THEY all knew it better than we ex-C= did. A few of us were consulting for ESCOM/Amiga Technologies, they had their own ideas, but they were smart enough to listen.
But they were confused enough for the short time Gateway2000 owned the Amiga assets (you could make a decent enough multimedia computer today using Linux, at least if you set Windows up as the metric, but that was not true when Gateway was involved). And pretty much everything the "new" Amiga, Inc. did was wrong, but you couldn't tell them anything. Not that they were going to do anything new in hardware, anyway, but backing PowerPC in those days was the stupidest move possible -- no good for desktops, no good for portables, not even much of a presence in set top boxes. I guess, if they were building a GUI for a network switch, maybe:-)
I think the average consumer is ill informed about this. It's not as if there has been any Apple competitor taking on the iTunes store (and by extensions, Apple's policies) directly. The only one really butting heads at all with Apple has been Verizon (they mention in passing that the DROID is open, but unless you already understood that, the ads did nothing), and most of their ad campaign has been against AT&T's lack of 3G coverage (every Verizon cell is a 3G cell, so they can boast more coverage, so AT&T's fight backs are very carefully phrased, after they lost a court case to get Verizon to pull those ads).
In general, consumers support behavior that seems good, and oppose behavior that seems bad. But if you're the only spin doctor in the room, your stuff generally smells like roses.
Certainly not NeXT... they were closed source. Sure, they used some freeware underpinnings, like CMU's Mach Kernel and BSD... but BSD isn't open source, it's public domain. So they didn't have to give anything back. Display Postscript was commercial, licensed from Adobe. NeXT didn't give out their source code. The whole point of open source versus public domain was to prevent just this behavior.
Years later, there was OpenStep, which was a collaboration between Sun and NeXT. This wasn't actually open, in the open source sense, but open in that it didn't depend on any specifics of the Mach kernel. So it ran on Solaris, and there was even a port to Windows NT.
It wasn't until the independently implemented GNUStep that there was an open source version of NextStep.
So, maybe it was Pixar? Well, no, not them either. They may well have used lots of open source software within the company, but the loophole in the whole GNU license is that you only have to release source code when you release object code. So folks who take in open source code but only use it internally don't have to release the changes. Pixar sold the closed source Renderman for thousands, and they released films. I do not know of any open source software from them... maybe I missed it. There was (is?) an open source clone of Renderman, called Pixie, but it doesn't seem to exist anymore... or it's moved somewhere obscure.
As with NeXT, Apple built today's MacOS from public domain and closed sources... in fact, today's MacOS started with a redesigned version of OpenStep, as I hear it. They put a bit of the low-level stuff, the kernel (what they made of the Mach kernel... CMU stopped that project back in the mid 80s, though there was a Mach 4 project somewhere in Utah, and it's also part of the GNU Herd) and the BSD stuff out in open source as the DarwinOS, but that's not making Apple any money. Perhaps a bit of good will from developers... they can't study how the middleware works, but they can at least look at the OS at the source level.
Apple has absolutely no problem with harming the functionality of the device if they believe that serves their needs.
Same reason the iPhone will always be a second class citizen on the net... they are never going to support Java, they are never going to support Flash, etc. The reasons are the same... those are alternate means of adding "applications", even if they're just web apps, to the phone... without Apple's permission.
In fact, it's kind of surprising they've gone so far as to offer fast JavaScript... after all, most Palm WebOS apps are written in JavaScript (along with HTML and CSS, of course). Pretty dangerous stuff.
This is also the same reason they did not allow the Commodore 64 emulator on the iPhone. After all, 8-bit applications from the early 80s, and your ability to program in Commodore BASIC 2.0 is a clear affront to Apple's ability to sell applications though the iTunes store.
So, don't place any bets on "Apple won't do this, it will hurt the iPhone"... they will, if they believe it serves their interests, and you won't have much you can do about it, if you're an iPhone user.
Like multitasking... the presence of perfectly functional multitasking smart phones has put the kebash on Apple's claim that they only allow one external app to run at a time (of course, any number of Apple apps can run at the same time) out of security or power concerns. They just don't want application providers to have the same level of control over the phone as they do, plain and simple.
Apple didn't even take over the market, they just evolved it. And yeah, in a generally good way.
Part of that was the big hole left by everyone else. WinCE/PocketPC/WinMo whatever you want to call it was never sold as a consumer OS, at least in a proper way. They had the "build it and they will come" mentality of the PC. But you need some better way of selling applications to the end user, and MS never even had a clue about that until they got it from Apple. Also, you can't expect tiny apps to cost as much as desktop PC apps, another problem. They have little compelling to offer consumers, and in general, don't function as well for business as RIM and the Blackberry. It's no wonder most of the folks making WinMo handsets are jumping with both feet into Android, even if they haven't quite shut the door on WinMo just yet (HTC and Motorola are two prime examples here... HTC is still making WinMo phones, but has already said half of their phones will run Android... Moto has something like 300 people working on Things Android).
Palm had a few things right a couple of decades before Apple entered the phone business. They didn't really get the store done themselves, but there were some "one stop" Palm app stores, and the prices were much more in line with what you got. They just never when the final way and lost the tether to the PC, which was of course a leftover from the PDA-without-a-network days. And they stopped really doing much of anything new for five years, which is a lifetime in this business. Apple took much of what Palm did right, and pushed to the next level.
RIM had some very good tools for a business that wants to centrally enforce policies and push email to employees in a very reliable way. They have yet to offer anything real that a consumer would want in a smart phone. They have done a little consumerism of some of their phones, sure, but it's not really competitive.
Android so far is, IMHO, doing everything right... which explains the DROID phone sitting on the desk next to me. You can kind of tell how wrong everyone else has been doing things by the fact that there are now like 30 different Android phones on the market, a year after the G1 first shipped, and the Android Marketplace is second only to iTunes in the number of apps available... and growing faster than anyone. It's also telling that practically everyone in the phone business is doing something with Android... and it's expanding beyond just the phone business. Also, the web-centrism of Android (and probably Palm's WebOS, too) makes perfect sense for many things. Since you're always networked anyway, there's little point in docking to a PC, other than perhaps for reasons of speed. If I edit something on my calendar or contacts, it should just sync, period. Which it does, on my DROID. The only time I dock it for MP3/MP4 high speed transfers.
Nokia has been the 500lbs gorilla of smart phones.. but they never figured out how to sell here in the USA. And right now, they're a bit confused, with both Linux/Maemo and Symbian phones on the market. And they're doing something with Android on a tablet. And who knows, they were also rumored to be working on a WinMo product, though maybe that was just hopeful thinking among the WinMo fans.
Apple shot straight to the consumer, which hadn't really been done. And there were plenty of gripes a year or so ago about all the stuff the iPhone didn't do for business or even techie users (not from me... I would not buy an Apple product, but I have been surrounded by iPhone users). But they did manage to leverage the iPod stuff, which was really the key here... the iPod's hand-holding of the PMP worked as well for the phone, which gave Apple a leg up on the smart phones that evolved from other areas, particularly given the usual consumer tech expertise, their tapping a well understood consumer habit, and an already strong market. There was no magic here, it was mostly just "duh"... obvious stuff.
Even the "all screen" iPod had been widely rumored for years, not because most pe
The people who don't hate Apple are the ones who haven't been paying close attention.
Sure, Apple doesn't effect as many folks as Microsoft, it being trivial to stay out of the way of any Apple product (while, with Microsoft, you often have no choice but to at least run their OS, given that the apps you need are unavailable anywhere else). So it's easy to get angry at Microsoft. And yeah, back in the early days of the PC, they did some pretty evil things, later declared illegal, which won them their position. And, of course, it also helped when so many others were doing The Big Stupid, whether in tech or in marketing that tech, which helped Microsoft just as much.
But in terms of the very evil, Apple has been worse than Microsoft for at least a few decades. Imagine the hellstorm there would have been if MS had, after years of fostering the PC market, decided that they were no longer going to openly sell MS-DOS or Windows? That's just what Apple did with MacOS licensing. They've also torpedoed, at various times, developers and users, by leading them on to spend time and money on features that just arbitrarily vanish. They've sent their 800lbs. gorilla lawyers to shut rumors posted on seriously Apple-butt-niffing fanboy sites. They were, for awhile, intentionally not allowing other OSs to run on their Mac hardware. And of course, all of their DRM and other proprietary things, which should send any computer-savvy person to run on ANY other platform.
But yeah, people still like them. That's the power of the combination of good marketing and big legal teams to shut down the bad news fast. And there may be some truth in that whole "reality distortion field" story, too...
Based on the dates, Google certainly had something in testing long before Apple's patent application. And it doesn't seem there's any conflict, anyway... the rejection is clearly based on Apple wanting to offer a service in the future that might overlap with something Google is offering today.
There's another thing about patents.... there is a very fine art to filing them. Patent lawyers are very clever about revealing prior art only though very well documented sources... largely, the patent office. So, it's quite likely that Google, perhaps knowing all of the prior art that came out of the Dodgeball project, had no real hope of filing a patent (you are legally required to report all of the prior art you know, though in many of the patents I have read, this was clearly not done). Apple, having no hard core first hand knowledge of this that could be proven in a court of law, and having found no patent exactly like it, filed their patent.
Now comes the examination process. Your patent is purposely written in as vague terms as possible, but when examined, should seem to be pretty restrictive. Once granted, you immediately find that it covers just about everything.
The field of software patents is especially bad, and it's often very difficult to know what prior art is embedded deep within other programs you have not written. Patent lawyers use this very effectively. Some years back, a company I was working for was hit with a bunch of patents from IBM. One of them was a patent, from 1984, that claimed to cover cut and paste between text buffers in a word processor. I claim, it was impossible, in 1984, to be a software engineer and not have run across this before. I first used it in Emacs (CMU's version of TECO Emacs, decended from the MIT version some years before) in 1979. And in fact, we were being called on this patent since our computer came with a version of MicroEmacs, which did cut and paste between text buffers, using exactly the same set of keystrokes that worked in 1979. Argh!
Except, "applications for the iPhone" does constitute a whole market. There are other smart phones that compete with the iPhone, and other applications that run on those smart phones. You cannot be said to have a monopoly over just a piece of an otherwise competitive market, even if you control that one piece completely.
This is also why you can't win an anti-trust suit against Apple for having a monopoly on hardware that runs iPodOS or MacOS. That's not even remotely what's meant by a monopoly... it is completely legal to have a protected market. It's up to the larger market to decide if they want open or closed application markets.
Sometimes, that pressure makes those with closed markets change their tune. For example, there was enough pressure against DRMed music for Apple to have given up DRMed music sales on the iTunes store, which was actually a competitive advantage for them (if you bought a DRMed music library for your iPod, you were prevented from jumping to another MP3/AAC player only due to that DRM). Of course, Apple hasn't done likewise with video, yet.
And sometimes the market speaks. Most pundits are expecting the Android market to surpass the iPhone market,. first in hardware sales, then in application sales. Probably not in 2010, though it's not impossible. But it's seen by many as inevitable. It's very difficult to hold onto a proprietary market in the fact of an open market that's equally (or better) supported with the critical components (in this case, hardware and software choices).
You don't have to have complete control of a market to have a monopoly. You do need substantial control of that market. Thus, Microsoft was judged to have a monopoly in the computer OS market (primarily the desktop PC market), despite the existence of Apple and various FOSS solutions.
Apple does not have anything close to a monopoly in either the "cell phone" or "smart phone" markets. Nor do they have anything that might amount to monopoly powers. Others may copy the iPhone... that's not a monopoly power. If Apple had the power to force Verizon or Motorola or some other big player to do something they profoundly did not want to do, whatever that is, that's a monopoly power. But simply doing well enough to cause others to seek better positions of competition, that's not a monopoly power.
Look at phones... Apple sells about 20 million iPhones a year, as of 2009, and yeah, that number has been growing every year. So who knows, this might be 40 million in 2010 (look at their numbers carefully, since Apple groups both iPhones and iPods Touch together, it can seem they sell more iPhones than they do). But world-wide, there are over a billion cell phones sold every year (1.21 billion in 2009). There were about 130 million smart phones sold in 2008, an estimated 170 million sold in 2009.
Based on cash rather than unit volume, smart phones were actually just over 50% of the global market. And, while Apple was recently called out as the most profitable cell phone maker (at least in the USA), that's fairly obvious when you see that smart phones account for nearly 2/3 of the global profits in cell phones. But still, Apple had a healthy but small share of that 170million unit market in 2009. They did not have any sort of monopoly.
This is pretty clear given that the USA is by far Apple's strongest market, and yet, they're only available AT&T, and even with their help, AT&T is not the largest cell network provider. This is the other big piece of the cell phone business, the network, and there's far more money there than in the actual hardware. This is another reason why Apple's power is limited in the cell phone market.
And again, as I'm sure others have pointed out, you can't have monopoly powers over a partial market, only a whole market. So sure, Apple makes all iPhones... but the iPhone is not a whole market, it's just one of many smart phone markets on the planet. They call compete with one another. The big news in this past year wasn't even Apple and iPhone, but Android... that being, finally, an open, multi-vendor OS that's actually getting big support from both hardware and application vendors. Windows Mobile and Symbian both largely failed at this, while RIM and Apple have always been proprietary and closed, with Palm technically open but effectively proprietary (eg, you need real vendor support other than from one or two companies) and open, software-wise.
Apple's big contribution was demonstrating the right way to sell smart phone applications... make then cheap and easy to buy. Who would have guessed?
Same here... I did not care to let Apple dictate which apps I could run or could not run. After years of being on Verizon, where they did a similar thing even on their "dumb" phones (like cutting down the Motorola OS on the RAZR until it was pretty much just another "freebie" phone, in terms of features), I curiously found the phone I was looking for, in the DROID... on Motorola and Verizon. Who woulda thunk it?
But these are both clear reasons Android will relegate Apple to something more or less akin to their place in the PC world: small share of the market, but still with enough users to sell their gear way above the accepted profit margins. They're probably comfortable with that, but they have no alternative. The reality of open applications on Android and the fact that every major cell phone maker other than Apple, RIM, and Palm are working on something with Android (not to mention the places it's showing up beyond the phone, like on Archos internet tablets and eBooks like the B&N nook), pretty much guarantee it's ascendancy over Apple. And everyone else. It's gravy for some of us that, as well, the OS is open source. That's also a key to why every phone vendor is using it, of course.
This will happen faster with education. Many regular users don't know just how much Apple is censoring applications. They should be educated about this, in the mainstream, not just in the corners of the internet inhabited by geeks.
Type it? What is this, the 1800s? You put your Kindle on a scanner, and OCR it, page by page. Not pretty, but doable. In fact, if you hook the "next page" button up to the scanning PC, it could be nicely automated.
I never had much objection to the Kindle hardware, other than it not having the ability to deal well with datasheets (eg, text with drawings), primarily due to limited, unexpandable storage.
The big problem I have with it is that Amazon is using it to change the definiton of "book". You're not getting electronic books, you're getting a different thing that now called an eBook. But it doesn't follow past, well documented book behavior. I can't lend or sell it. I can't mark it up (and have those marks follow the book itself), or tear out pages, etc. And can't buy books from any bookseller to play on a Kindel... only from Amazon (and, I guess, a couple of freeware book formats).
I suppose a reliable way to remove the DRM is at least a step forward, even if it's technically illegal (due to the DCMA). The problem, and hopefully Amazon takes this to heart, is that this doesn't give you a book, either, it gives you a superbook. Now I can lend it AND read it at the same time.
I really never asked for that from an eBook reader... that's unreasonable. I just don't want to give up the rights I normally have with a pBook when buying the same thing as an eBook.
CDMA does soft handoffs for all protocols. So you can actually be on three cells at once, though only one is doing the uphaul. One would imagine this allowa for graceful failover if your uplink gets hosed, but who knows for sure. UMTS is supposedly doing some form of soft handoff, too. Don't know the details.
Major League sports figures are not the only professionals... there are plenty of minor league players who play full seasons, as their primary source of income, but earn only modest salaries.
Pro sports figures are paid like crazy because they are television stars. Pretty much all major TV stars are paid crazy money, and the better they do in their areas, the better it gets. Many sporting events get the same kind of ratings as any major network primetime sitcom or drama. So you may have some ballplayer pulling down $25 million over three years. That's crazy compared to the guy doing the same job at his AAA team for $100K or less, but think back to Seinfield making $1 million per half hour comedy show, or what major network talking heads get for a few hours of "news" reading on TV, and it's no different. Same with rock stars... they're making good music, sometimes, or they're just in the right place at the right time, sometimes, but they become stars based on media exposure, and that's what drives the money machines.
And yeah, you could replace most of these guys in a heatbeat. That doesn't mean they're not among the best, but once they're in, there are mechanisms that keep them in. For your athletes, they have nothing to worry about working out, too much money, and the occasional injury. They have the best sports medicine available, free, and can look forward to a comfortable life, aside from possible chronic injuries. Once you're successful in film or music, you have a much easier time being successful again. If you're Bob Dylan, you can release a nutty Christmas album and still sell a ton of CDs.
And that same machinery makes it easy to anoint replacements. If they put you on the Eagles or the Steelers or, hell, even the Mets, you have a pretty good chance of getting instantly famous. As long as you can do the job, you're "in". Do it exceptionally, and you eventually get to write your own ticket. Same idea with TV: ABC or CBS puts you in a show, you're instantly seen by millions. You have some work to do, but it's an instant jump. Same idea with a musician getting a recording contract (ok, record companies are the worst of thieves, and you may take awhile to make money, but fame, you have a good shot at that, instantly). Spielberg or Bruckheimer or Cameron put you in a film, you're an instant star, if not yet a household name. Oprah Winfrey mentions your book on her show, it's an instant bestseller, and you're now a Famous Author. It's all based on the vast cash surrounding the media.
So clearly, the thing we nerds need is some TV time. It might have been close, awhile back, with the battling robot craze, but that one seems to have wound itself down. And there IS that whole video game thing... more cash there than in films, today.
You don't just look at the NFL, NBA, or MLB for professionals... anyone working at a sport as their major means of income IS in fact a professional. So while there are plenty of Yankees and Phillies and Steelers and Jersey Devils, and hell, even Mets making a nice bit a coin, you have to average in all those guys trying to make it, working in AAA Baseball or AHL Hockey or any other minor league. They're not major league but they are professional -- they work at this as their only or primary means of income. And some of these guys can make a decent living, $100K a year for the top guys, something in that range. Sure, there's are not as many paid positions in any sport at you'll find in IT or engineering or any related area. Simply put, there's just much less demand for people who play a game for a living.
For me, two years of Judo and five years of Aikido practice. But the software guys don't mess with me, either... there are wrist locks that send regular folks into new and painful places. Imagine if you have carpal tunnel syndrome! And I know how to fall, after bashing my head too hard.
I don't think, in this age of unprecedented teenage sloth, it's wise or necessary to cut down the value of sports just to raise up the value of the sciences, computer or otherwise. What we need to really address is "fat kid on a couch, playing X-Box and eating chips, for hours after school" as a standard and acceptable behavior.
There's a commonality between these, too. When you get good at a sport, you get pushed to new physical plateaus... places you never imagined going. But you go there primarily with your mind, or you fail... most people give up mentally long before their bodies just stop working (which they absolutely will, if you can keep pushing hard enough, long enough... but that's good too, as long as its not a destructive failure).
It really is two sides of the same coin, physical and mental development. This occurred to me again last Sunday, during a 6 hour, non-stop, snow shoveling session, clearing my 1/5th mile driveway from a 24" blizzard. You need to go to the same place on those three-or-four-days-without-sleep marathon hacking sessions as well (in the old days at Commodore, this was otherwise termed "between Christmas and New Years"... that annual week of sleeplessness, getting ready for the CES show). But I digress.
From what I've read, the Milestone only does 900MHz/2100MHz 3G, which is the European AWS band, specifically reallocated for GSM's bandwidth-hungry 3G protocols (you need 10MHz for regular UMTS/HSPA, and 20MHz for the higher speed stuff, the version AT&T sells at 7.2Mb/s down and 2Mb/s up). It's almost as if Motorola didn't want this phone imported to the USA:-)
AT&T jumped in early here, with more bandwidth already owned, and did it on their own with non-standard 850MHz and 1900MHz, including some compromises (they have a single-duplex 5MHz version), and some places they just aren't going to do 3G.
T-Mobile waited for the US AWS auction, and got 1700/2100MHz slots, but they came later, and they're less well funded... and worst of all, not compatible with either AT&T or Europe. So they get little hardware support.
Now, the reason they say "900/2100" or "1700/2100" is particularly evil... these are not alternatives, the phone is using both: 900MHz or 1700MHz for transmit, 2100MHz in both cases for receive. So if you look in detail at the specs, you may not even see mention of the 2100MHz frequency (FCC filings, for example), because that's receive-only, and doesn't have to be documented unless used for transmit. This was particularly confusing given that CDMA, 2G/EDGE, and AT&T can all work within a single band, which is what everyone's used to (eg, 850/1900 for voice, EDGE, or EvDO is a choice, not a coupling).
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Actually, it's very likely Mehdi Ali and Bill Sydnes WERE trying to kill the Amiga during the start of their tenure. They couldn't exactly say this, but they were totally PC focused... at least until they got schooled in the actual PC market, and found they couldn't make any money selling PCs. But at least the first six months, they had more or less shut down everything they could. That meant no new chips or PCBs being made, designs, sure, software, sure. They also cancelled most of the hardware projects that were on-going, just in case any of those got finished. They didn't want to make the previous administration look good.
Simply put -- you don't do that at the best and healthiest of high-tech companies. I don't think Commodore was lost in early 1991, but it needed to move quickly on the new stuff we had, and the stuff after that... there was lots going on. Instead, they did the opposite, and put on the brakes. I was certain, by fall of 1991, that they were going to kill the company. I stuck around for the next 2.5 years trying to prevent that, but as much as I would have liked it, there was no technical solution.
Actually, the chips were full custom, not gate arrays.
The big problem wasn't the presence of the custom chips, or even the need to update them every time or not. The real problem was that, given the complexity of the design in the late 80s, this was really one chip that needed to built out at three. Some of these were larger than the 68000 CPU used in the beginning. You might expect that today (nVidia AND AMD GPUs are often more complex than the CPUs in a system), but it was an issue for any smaller company.
And it was also the thing that made the Amiga interesting... no one else was really trying before it came along. They didn't try that much afterwards... both the PC and the Mac delivered 8-bit graphics, but they were slow. What they did right, though, was integrate them in a modular fashion... you could chuck out the old graphics chip, drop in a new one, and nothing else broke. That wasn't possible in the Amiga, as it was.
We were moving to this... it was the obvious direction to go, but unfortunately, C= wasn't spending the kind of money needed to make things happen that fast. It was also pretty obvious that even if Commodore did achieve a more modular architecture (there was a design, called Hombre, which did this in 1993, though it wasn't being built due to cash problems), we needed to be able to use graphics chips in a modular way. I had been working in 1993-1994 with Tseng Labs (at the time, a big name in PC graphics, they had the first VGA chips fast enough for what we wanted to do) to build a graphics add-in as a transitional option, but the company didn't last long enough. Oh well. You can only do so much.... Commodore had been run by complete idiots since early 1991, and slowly strangled by R&D cash even before then.
The AAA chipset was started in 1998. We were grossly underfunded... AAA systems should have been out at least by 1992, if not sooner. No one doing a competitive graphics chip back then had cycles half that long. Commodore had the fund then, they just spent them making rich managers richer, with not a thought to the future of the company.
Ok, the Amiga 3000 didn't have built-in graphics that matched the number of colors of the VGA or Macs of the day. On the other hand, none of the PCs or Macs had hard drive performance capable of real video... the Amiga 3000 did. So it's not exactly the situation as described. Most folks using Amiga 3000s were doing video, with Toasters or other video hardware, and the Amiga's lack of color wasn't a killer.
Yes, of course we wanted more. The original project for a next-generation chipset was started in 1988, but underfunded, so only prototypes existed by 1993. The other upgrade, originally called Pandora, then AA, then AGA, was started a few years later. It was supposed to ship in machine in early 1992, but by then, Commodore had not just a management disease, but a fatal one.
That's also where the A600 came from. The A600 was the A300 (eg, to be cheaper than the A500) with a PCMCIA slot put in and GRR's super-cheap genlock taken out (yeah, the A300 was supposed to ship with a built-in genlock, at least if George got it working by then).
The C65 was a stupid idea, and I believe it happened mainly because no one else wanted to work with the engineer involved, so they just left him alone. It was strange times at Commodore near the end.
It's also sad what got cancelled when the management disease really kicked in. The A3000 has every area of the system we could improve improved, without the new custom chips. Some of that got expensive, which is why it didn't immediately trickle down to cheaper systems. That was Spring of 1990. In 1992, we were planning to have the A3000+, which would have had a 68040 CPU and the AT&T DSP3210 for audio and modem processing (I actually built prototypes, more like the A3000 than we had planned). But we also had a 25MHz 68030 machine, dubbed the A1000+, planned for the same time frame, with the "AA" chipset, the usual expansions, but closer to the A500/A1200 price than the A3000. Both of these were cancelled when the management changed in 1991. The mid-range machine was killed entirely, and the A4000 that came out late in 1992 was missing everything but the "AA" chips... they even forced us to take out the DMA-driven SCSI bus, so our disk I/O got as crappy as that of a Mac or a PC.
In short, these things don't happen overnight. And despite what you see when the hardware comes out, it's not always really an engineering problem.
For more about what went wrong, see my film: http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv
It wasn't viable other than as a fun think to hack around it (which, honestly, is what many folks did on AmigaOS in the late 80s/early 90s), by the time Commodore was done.
I actually explored this, a few years later, while at Metabox AG. We had originally decided to make PowerPC desktop computers (the company was called PIOS Computer then), but got shut down by both Be, Inc. and later, Apple (we did launch the very first 300MHz or faster Mac compatible).
So we went to multimedia set top boxes instead -- basically, a whole home computer on your TV, doing video, internet, etc. You just don't call it a home computer. We wanted to use Linux, but couldn't find any programmers to help us get around the fairly substantial problems it had back then, even simple things like playing video and audio without stuttering or special hardware. It was impossible to find programmers who wanted to get paid to do that, back in the mid 90s.
I have followed and, as mentioned, used Linux for these kinds of things more recently. It's just as capable as Windows in this, and perhaps moreso, since you have more control over how it's tuned. But back then, as an alternative to AmigaOS, it didn't really fly for most of the reasons one would have been using AmigaOS.
With that said, most of the other choices sucked, too.
Part of that is the same factor I mentioned here in an earlier post. In the early days, when the computer WAS your hobby, the OS was a fascinating thing to learn, take apart, and teach to do your bidding. If you approach your computer that same way today, you may find the same level of enjoyment in Linux. Or AROS, or The Hurd, or HaikuOS, or any variety of operating systems out there now.
But as computers moved from the whole focus to largely being part of how you got a job done, the OS has largely (at least for many) become just a footnote. Sure, if you're paid to program, the pros and cons may be more or less of an issue. About a year ago, I was being paid to integrate a video server and provide a bunch of fairly weird bits of video aggregation (analog and digital video comes in from multiple sources, out comes an MPEG-2 transport stream full of H.264 formatted for DVB-H insertion). This was actually easier to build under Linux today than probably any other OS, simply because of all the open source tools. You had H.264 codecs and TS muxers and demuxers, fast media-ready file systems (XFS... ext4 is good too, but it wasn't ready last year), all kinds of good stuff.
But if I actually wanted to edit a video, Linux would not be my choice. If I wanted to set up a system for other people to edit video, definitely not my choice.
At some point, for most people, the computer, including the OS, became just another tool. And sure, I like some tools quite a bit... I have this fibreglass handled hammer I've had since college, which is a great hammer. But I never loved it like I loved my Amigas in those days. And I've never had a PC I was as attached to as that hammer. Or a PC-OS, at least not once BeOS bit the big one.
Certainly, many "regular" things you want to do are just plain standard in any OS: you can even run the same web browser, office suite, email client, and some other basics, all open source, in many different OSs... which also makes the OS matter all the less. So you pick the OS for what it does better, or what you can't do elsewhere (there are no serious EE CAD tools that I know of for either MacOS or Linux, meanwhile, you have your choice of many for Windows).
On the other hand, it's not even a big question... Linux runs just dandy, under VirtualBox, under Windows. I do it all the time... some versions (CentOS 5, for example) actually worked better on my laptop under VirtualBox than they did native. Any particular need for a different OS is pretty easy these days. But in general, I get most of what I want done under Windows, and the OS itself is just a footnote, not a big issue. I'd switch to Linux just to annoy Windows people if it did as well, but it doesn't. For me, on the desktop, doing CAD, music, and video.
I largely agree... Linux is not a good match to AmigaOS. Sure, there were bound to be a handful of folks who just used Amigas to write code, and given that most serious Amiga users had most of the GNU shell tools (though more than likely still using WShell, not bash or csh or any UNIX shell, which we did not like and did not let you have at the better coolness that was Amiga shell use), and you had these in GNU/Linux too, ok, maybe some were happy there.
But through most of the 90s, Linux was still the Wild West. You just couldn't do much of the multimedia stuff you enjoyed from the Amiga. Couldn't on Windows or the Mac, either, but at least they were closer.
After I left Commodore, I had come into a free PC, and put Windows on it after getting frustrated with the fact you just couldn't do MIDI under OS/2... not to mention no serious MIDI apps on OS/2.... I was a "Bars and Pipes" users on Amiga (I did everything on Amiga, but moving music to the PC seemed to make sense), and needed a decent MIDI program, or forget about it.
The main reason to choose the PC: I could get 8-port devices, and at least some sophistication in MIDI apps (I wound up using Cakewalk... no B&P, but at least you could internally script it if you wanted to).
Here's the thing... there was a day in which just about everyone using a personal computer would say their hobby was "computers". This was the 8-bit days... Commodore PET and 64, Apple ][, TRaSh-80, later Atari 400 and 800. Any user could learn every single thing there was to know about these machines: registers, peek and poke locations, etc. If you were hardcore, you knew the 6502 or Z-80 op-codes from memory.
Next came the 16/32-bit machines, like the PC, the Mac, and the Amiga. These found a place in business (the PC, because the 8087 FPU did spreadsheets 100x faster than an Apple ][ or a PET, then the Mac for wordprocessing, then the Amiga for video), but the personal computer heritage was individuals, and still most of its growth came from that. But the next generation wasn't just looking to "do computers", they wanted to do SOMETHING WITH computers. So over that ten years, roughly 1984-1994, you went from "computer as a hobby" to "hobby with computer". Not everyone, just as not everyone stopped doing HAM radio when computers came along. But the reason computers existed were for these things, not the "computer as my hobby" crowd.
So after Amiga, most Amiga users were doing something with their computer. Linux almost certainly did not do that thing in the 1990s, and if it did, not well. So, yeah, some of those Amiga users, the guys still doing "computer as a hobby" might have found Linux interesting... after all, the focus had definitely already shifted from "this hardware is so cool" to "this software is so cool"... you could spend forever digging into the mess, er, complexity that is GNU/Linux.
But for everyone else, applications had grown up in those ten years, roughly speaking. You didn't just need some basic MIDI tracker, you needed something like Bars and Pipes. You weren't going to be happy with a text editor or even a markup like TeX or Roff/Nroff/whatever, you wanted PageStream. If you did video, you probably at least wanted the power of a Video Toaster, you probably used DeluxePaint or any of the many other pro-level video and graphics apps for the Amiga. You couldn't get any of that, back then, on Linux... even now, it's fairly thin (yeah, I know about Cinerela... it'll do the job, but it's no Vegas, which is how I edit my video on the PC these days. You also have Sonar, Acid, Sound Forge, etc.).
Actually, after Commodore, quite a few ex-Amiga developers jumped on another later-to-be-found-sinking ship, OS/2. Sure, there were some stupid bits in OS/2 (no kernel threads, 16-bit model drivers, a religious conviction that realtime guarantees at the user level were wrong, etc). But hey, it ran REXX, and it wasn't Windows.
And actually, BeOS was up and running before Linux had really become all that viable for the kinds of things Amiga people had been doing. A number of Amiga developers wound up doing BeOS projects, some even worked on the BeOS team. And that was actually the right place to go, technically speaking... BeOS is the only OS to come long that did multimedia in fundamental ways better than the AmigaOS did in its day.
And sure, over time, better tools and components did show up in other OSs... you could do stuff in easily Linux today with things like GStreamer that were somewhere between impossible and a boatload of work in AmigaOS. But there are only so many ways its fair to compare an OS that stopped developing in 1993 with one that's still going strong seventeen years later.
Windows 95 had nothing at all to do with the Amiga's death, commercially. It wasn't even out on the market during the commercial life of the Amiga.
There were two big factors in the Amiga's death. The smaller of the two, but still very substantial, was piracy. While Amigas had a number of very cool niches, the big engine of Amiga sales was home computers, largely driven by gaming. Most of that was in Europe, and at the peak of the Amiga years, piracy was so bad some releases that sold tens of thousands in the USA and Canada (smaller markets, and also not immune to piracy) might have sold 50 copies in Germany or the UK, the two largest markets for Amiga games.
The second was Commodore, on many levels. For one, while they were spending literally tens of millions on bloated salaries and perks for the top management ( the top few guys at C= were making more than the top few guys at IBM or Apple in the early 90s), but we had the lowest R&D budget in the industry. We could deal with some of that simply by hiring the very best engineers one could hire, and working crazy hours. But given how dependent Amiga evolution was on custom chip work -- which is not cheap -- there was just no way to keep up without more investments. So many leading edge designs were done, but they came in later than they should have (our 64-bit graphics project started in 1988, for example, also supporting true color, planar and chunky graphics, MPEG-like compression modes in hardware, and 8-channel 16-bit sound, but by 1993, it was still prototype chips, and engineering didn't have the budget to complete things).
These pretty much worked together in a vicious circle. Curiously, sales of high end systems remained at least flat, well into the end days. Folks who needed to run Video Toasters or Supergens or whatever still needed new Amigas. Commodore had never done much to promote these uses.
There was only a brief hope post-Commodore, despite all the Amiga fans wanting more. The first resurrection, at ESCOM, formed a separate Amiga Technologies division, put existing Amigas back into production, and started working on a new hardware and software platform that could have been reasonable for the middle-late 1990s. Unfortunately, ESCOM themselves blew it in the PC market... and that killed it all.
Nothing after that, far as I know, involved anyone who had actually made personal computers -- there were a bunch of wannabes, that's about it. And the ideas just got progressively worse with each change of hands. And THEY all knew it better than we ex-C= did. A few of us were consulting for ESCOM/Amiga Technologies, they had their own ideas, but they were smart enough to listen.
But they were confused enough for the short time Gateway2000 owned the Amiga assets (you could make a decent enough multimedia computer today using Linux, at least if you set Windows up as the metric, but that was not true when Gateway was involved). And pretty much everything the "new" Amiga, Inc. did was wrong, but you couldn't tell them anything. Not that they were going to do anything new in hardware, anyway, but backing PowerPC in those days was the stupidest move possible -- no good for desktops, no good for portables, not even much of a presence in set top boxes. I guess, if they were building a GUI for a network switch, maybe :-)
I think the average consumer is ill informed about this. It's not as if there has been any Apple competitor taking on the iTunes store (and by extensions, Apple's policies) directly. The only one really butting heads at all with Apple has been Verizon (they mention in passing that the DROID is open, but unless you already understood that, the ads did nothing), and most of their ad campaign has been against AT&T's lack of 3G coverage (every Verizon cell is a 3G cell, so they can boast more coverage, so AT&T's fight backs are very carefully phrased, after they lost a court case to get Verizon to pull those ads).
In general, consumers support behavior that seems good, and oppose behavior that seems bad. But if you're the only spin doctor in the room, your stuff generally smells like roses.
Which software company was that?
Certainly not NeXT... they were closed source. Sure, they used some freeware underpinnings, like CMU's Mach Kernel and BSD... but BSD isn't open source, it's public domain. So they didn't have to give anything back. Display Postscript was commercial, licensed from Adobe. NeXT didn't give out their source code. The whole point of open source versus public domain was to prevent just this behavior.
Years later, there was OpenStep, which was a collaboration between Sun and NeXT. This wasn't actually open, in the open source sense, but open in that it didn't depend on any specifics of the Mach kernel. So it ran on Solaris, and there was even a port to Windows NT.
It wasn't until the independently implemented GNUStep that there was an open source version of NextStep.
So, maybe it was Pixar? Well, no, not them either. They may well have used lots of open source software within the company, but the loophole in the whole GNU license is that you only have to release source code when you release object code. So folks who take in open source code but only use it internally don't have to release the changes. Pixar sold the closed source Renderman for thousands, and they released films. I do not know of any open source software from them... maybe I missed it. There was (is?) an open source clone of Renderman, called Pixie, but it doesn't seem to exist anymore... or it's moved somewhere obscure.
As with NeXT, Apple built today's MacOS from public domain and closed sources... in fact, today's MacOS started with a redesigned version of OpenStep, as I hear it. They put a bit of the low-level stuff, the kernel (what they made of the Mach kernel... CMU stopped that project back in the mid 80s, though there was a Mach 4 project somewhere in Utah, and it's also part of the GNU Herd) and the BSD stuff out in open source as the DarwinOS, but that's not making Apple any money. Perhaps a bit of good will from developers... they can't study how the middleware works, but they can at least look at the OS at the source level.
Apple has absolutely no problem with harming the functionality of the device if they believe that serves their needs.
Same reason the iPhone will always be a second class citizen on the net... they are never going to support Java, they are never going to support Flash, etc. The reasons are the same... those are alternate means of adding "applications", even if they're just web apps, to the phone... without Apple's permission.
In fact, it's kind of surprising they've gone so far as to offer fast JavaScript... after all, most Palm WebOS apps are written in JavaScript (along with HTML and CSS, of course). Pretty dangerous stuff.
This is also the same reason they did not allow the Commodore 64 emulator on the iPhone. After all, 8-bit applications from the early 80s, and your ability to program in Commodore BASIC 2.0 is a clear affront to Apple's ability to sell applications though the iTunes store.
So, don't place any bets on "Apple won't do this, it will hurt the iPhone"... they will, if they believe it serves their interests, and you won't have much you can do about it, if you're an iPhone user.
Like multitasking... the presence of perfectly functional multitasking smart phones has put the kebash on Apple's claim that they only allow one external app to run at a time (of course, any number of Apple apps can run at the same time) out of security or power concerns. They just don't want application providers to have the same level of control over the phone as they do, plain and simple.
Fortunately, this is not the case on Android.
Apple didn't even take over the market, they just evolved it. And yeah, in a generally good way.
Part of that was the big hole left by everyone else. WinCE/PocketPC/WinMo whatever you want to call it was never sold as a consumer OS, at least in a proper way. They had the "build it and they will come" mentality of the PC. But you need some better way of selling applications to the end user, and MS never even had a clue about that until they got it from Apple. Also, you can't expect tiny apps to cost as much as desktop PC apps, another problem. They have little compelling to offer consumers, and in general, don't function as well for business as RIM and the Blackberry. It's no wonder most of the folks making WinMo handsets are jumping with both feet into Android, even if they haven't quite shut the door on WinMo just yet (HTC and Motorola are two prime examples here... HTC is still making WinMo phones, but has already said half of their phones will run Android... Moto has something like 300 people working on Things Android).
Palm had a few things right a couple of decades before Apple entered the phone business. They didn't really get the store done themselves, but there were some "one stop" Palm app stores, and the prices were much more in line with what you got. They just never when the final way and lost the tether to the PC, which was of course a leftover from the PDA-without-a-network days. And they stopped really doing much of anything new for five years, which is a lifetime in this business. Apple took much of what Palm did right, and pushed to the next level.
RIM had some very good tools for a business that wants to centrally enforce policies and push email to employees in a very reliable way. They have yet to offer anything real that a consumer would want in a smart phone. They have done a little consumerism of some of their phones, sure, but it's not really competitive.
Android so far is, IMHO, doing everything right... which explains the DROID phone sitting on the desk next to me. You can kind of tell how wrong everyone else has been doing things by the fact that there are now like 30 different Android phones on the market, a year after the G1 first shipped, and the Android Marketplace is second only to iTunes in the number of apps available... and growing faster than anyone. It's also telling that practically everyone in the phone business is doing something with Android... and it's expanding beyond just the phone business. Also, the web-centrism of Android (and probably Palm's WebOS, too) makes perfect sense for many things. Since you're always networked anyway, there's little point in docking to a PC, other than perhaps for reasons of speed. If I edit something on my calendar or contacts, it should just sync, period. Which it does, on my DROID. The only time I dock it for MP3/MP4 high speed transfers.
Nokia has been the 500lbs gorilla of smart phones.. but they never figured out how to sell here in the USA. And right now, they're a bit confused, with both Linux/Maemo and Symbian phones on the market. And they're doing something with Android on a tablet. And who knows, they were also rumored to be working on a WinMo product, though maybe that was just hopeful thinking among the WinMo fans.
Apple shot straight to the consumer, which hadn't really been done. And there were plenty of gripes a year or so ago about all the stuff the iPhone didn't do for business or even techie users (not from me... I would not buy an Apple product, but I have been surrounded by iPhone users). But they did manage to leverage the iPod stuff, which was really the key here... the iPod's hand-holding of the PMP worked as well for the phone, which gave Apple a leg up on the smart phones that evolved from other areas, particularly given the usual consumer tech expertise, their tapping a well understood consumer habit, and an already strong market. There was no magic here, it was mostly just "duh"... obvious stuff.
Even the "all screen" iPod had been widely rumored for years, not because most pe
The people who don't hate Apple are the ones who haven't been paying close attention.
Sure, Apple doesn't effect as many folks as Microsoft, it being trivial to stay out of the way of any Apple product (while, with Microsoft, you often have no choice but to at least run their OS, given that the apps you need are unavailable anywhere else). So it's easy to get angry at Microsoft. And yeah, back in the early days of the PC, they did some pretty evil things, later declared illegal, which won them their position. And, of course, it also helped when so many others were doing The Big Stupid, whether in tech or in marketing that tech, which helped Microsoft just as much.
But in terms of the very evil, Apple has been worse than Microsoft for at least a few decades. Imagine the hellstorm there would have been if MS had, after years of fostering the PC market, decided that they were no longer going to openly sell MS-DOS or Windows? That's just what Apple did with MacOS licensing. They've also torpedoed, at various times, developers and users, by leading them on to spend time and money on features that just arbitrarily vanish. They've sent their 800lbs. gorilla lawyers to shut rumors posted on seriously Apple-butt-niffing fanboy sites. They were, for awhile, intentionally not allowing other OSs to run on their Mac hardware. And of course, all of their DRM and other proprietary things, which should send any computer-savvy person to run on ANY other platform.
But yeah, people still like them. That's the power of the combination of good marketing and big legal teams to shut down the bad news fast. And there may be some truth in that whole "reality distortion field" story, too...
Based on the dates, Google certainly had something in testing long before Apple's patent application. And it doesn't seem there's any conflict, anyway... the rejection is clearly based on Apple wanting to offer a service in the future that might overlap with something Google is offering today.
There's another thing about patents.... there is a very fine art to filing them. Patent lawyers are very clever about revealing prior art only though very well documented sources... largely, the patent office. So, it's quite likely that Google, perhaps knowing all of the prior art that came out of the Dodgeball project, had no real hope of filing a patent (you are legally required to report all of the prior art you know, though in many of the patents I have read, this was clearly not done). Apple, having no hard core first hand knowledge of this that could be proven in a court of law, and having found no patent exactly like it, filed their patent.
Now comes the examination process. Your patent is purposely written in as vague terms as possible, but when examined, should seem to be pretty restrictive. Once granted, you immediately find that it covers just about everything.
The field of software patents is especially bad, and it's often very difficult to know what prior art is embedded deep within other programs you have not written. Patent lawyers use this very effectively. Some years back, a company I was working for was hit with a bunch of patents from IBM. One of them was a patent, from 1984, that claimed to cover cut and paste between text buffers in a word processor. I claim, it was impossible, in 1984, to be a software engineer and not have run across this before. I first used it in Emacs (CMU's version of TECO Emacs, decended from the MIT version some years before) in 1979. And in fact, we were being called on this patent since our computer came with a version of MicroEmacs, which did cut and paste between text buffers, using exactly the same set of keystrokes that worked in 1979. Argh!
Except, "applications for the iPhone" does constitute a whole market. There are other smart phones that compete with the iPhone, and other applications that run on those smart phones. You cannot be said to have a monopoly over just a piece of an otherwise competitive market, even if you control that one piece completely.
This is also why you can't win an anti-trust suit against Apple for having a monopoly on hardware that runs iPodOS or MacOS. That's not even remotely what's meant by a monopoly... it is completely legal to have a protected market. It's up to the larger market to decide if they want open or closed application markets.
Sometimes, that pressure makes those with closed markets change their tune. For example, there was enough pressure against DRMed music for Apple to have given up DRMed music sales on the iTunes store, which was actually a competitive advantage for them (if you bought a DRMed music library for your iPod, you were prevented from jumping to another MP3/AAC player only due to that DRM). Of course, Apple hasn't done likewise with video, yet.
And sometimes the market speaks. Most pundits are expecting the Android market to surpass the iPhone market,. first in hardware sales, then in application sales. Probably not in 2010, though it's not impossible. But it's seen by many as inevitable. It's very difficult to hold onto a proprietary market in the fact of an open market that's equally (or better) supported with the critical components (in this case, hardware and software choices).
You don't have to have complete control of a market to have a monopoly. You do need substantial control of that market. Thus, Microsoft was judged to have a monopoly in the computer OS market (primarily the desktop PC market), despite the existence of Apple and various FOSS solutions.
Apple does not have anything close to a monopoly in either the "cell phone" or "smart phone" markets. Nor do they have anything that might amount to monopoly powers. Others may copy the iPhone... that's not a monopoly power. If Apple had the power to force Verizon or Motorola or some other big player to do something they profoundly did not want to do, whatever that is, that's a monopoly power. But simply doing well enough to cause others to seek better positions of competition, that's not a monopoly power.
Look at phones... Apple sells about 20 million iPhones a year, as of 2009, and yeah, that number has been growing every year. So who knows, this might be 40 million in 2010 (look at their numbers carefully, since Apple groups both iPhones and iPods Touch together, it can seem they sell more iPhones than they do). But world-wide, there are over a billion cell phones sold every year (1.21 billion in 2009). There were about 130 million smart phones sold in 2008, an estimated 170 million sold in 2009.
Based on cash rather than unit volume, smart phones were actually just over 50% of the global market. And, while Apple was recently called out as the most profitable cell phone maker (at least in the USA), that's fairly obvious when you see that smart phones account for nearly 2/3 of the global profits in cell phones. But still, Apple had a healthy but small share of that 170million unit market in 2009. They did not have any sort of monopoly.
This is pretty clear given that the USA is by far Apple's strongest market, and yet, they're only available AT&T, and even with their help, AT&T is not the largest cell network provider. This is the other big piece of the cell phone business, the network, and there's far more money there than in the actual hardware. This is another reason why Apple's power is limited in the cell phone market.
And again, as I'm sure others have pointed out, you can't have monopoly powers over a partial market, only a whole market. So sure, Apple makes all iPhones... but the iPhone is not a whole market, it's just one of many smart phone markets on the planet. They call compete with one another. The big news in this past year wasn't even Apple and iPhone, but Android... that being, finally, an open, multi-vendor OS that's actually getting big support from both hardware and application vendors. Windows Mobile and Symbian both largely failed at this, while RIM and Apple have always been proprietary and closed, with Palm technically open but effectively proprietary (eg, you need real vendor support other than from one or two companies) and open, software-wise.
Apple's big contribution was demonstrating the right way to sell smart phone applications... make then cheap and easy to buy. Who would have guessed?
Same here... I did not care to let Apple dictate which apps I could run or could not run. After years of being on Verizon, where they did a similar thing even on their "dumb" phones (like cutting down the Motorola OS on the RAZR until it was pretty much just another "freebie" phone, in terms of features), I curiously found the phone I was looking for, in the DROID... on Motorola and Verizon. Who woulda thunk it?
But these are both clear reasons Android will relegate Apple to something more or less akin to their place in the PC world: small share of the market, but still with enough users to sell their gear way above the accepted profit margins. They're probably comfortable with that, but they have no alternative. The reality of open applications on Android and the fact that every major cell phone maker other than Apple, RIM, and Palm are working on something with Android (not to mention the places it's showing up beyond the phone, like on Archos internet tablets and eBooks like the B&N nook), pretty much guarantee it's ascendancy over Apple. And everyone else. It's gravy for some of us that, as well, the OS is open source. That's also a key to why every phone vendor is using it, of course.
This will happen faster with education. Many regular users don't know just how much Apple is censoring applications. They should be educated about this, in the mainstream, not just in the corners of the internet inhabited by geeks.
Type it? What is this, the 1800s? You put your Kindle on a scanner, and OCR it, page by page. Not pretty, but doable. In fact, if you hook the "next page" button up to the scanning PC, it could be nicely automated.
I never had much objection to the Kindle hardware, other than it not having the ability to deal well with datasheets (eg, text with drawings), primarily due to limited, unexpandable storage.
The big problem I have with it is that Amazon is using it to change the definiton of "book". You're not getting electronic books, you're getting a different thing that now called an eBook. But it doesn't follow past, well documented book behavior. I can't lend or sell it. I can't mark it up (and have those marks follow the book itself), or tear out pages, etc. And can't buy books from any bookseller to play on a Kindel... only from Amazon (and, I guess, a couple of freeware book formats).
I suppose a reliable way to remove the DRM is at least a step forward, even if it's technically illegal (due to the DCMA). The problem, and hopefully Amazon takes this to heart, is that this doesn't give you a book, either, it gives you a superbook. Now I can lend it AND read it at the same time.
I really never asked for that from an eBook reader... that's unreasonable. I just don't want to give up the rights I normally have with a pBook when buying the same thing as an eBook.
CDMA does soft handoffs for all protocols. So you can actually be on three cells at once, though only one is doing the uphaul. One would imagine this allowa for graceful failover if your uplink gets hosed, but who knows for sure. UMTS is supposedly doing some form of soft handoff, too. Don't know the details.
Major League sports figures are not the only professionals... there are plenty of minor league players who play full seasons, as their primary source of income, but earn only modest salaries.
Pro sports figures are paid like crazy because they are television stars. Pretty much all major TV stars are paid crazy money, and the better they do in their areas, the better it gets. Many sporting events get the same kind of ratings as any major network primetime sitcom or drama. So you may have some ballplayer pulling down $25 million over three years. That's crazy compared to the guy doing the same job at his AAA team for $100K or less, but think back to Seinfield making $1 million per half hour comedy show, or what major network talking heads get for a few hours of "news" reading on TV, and it's no different. Same with rock stars... they're making good music, sometimes, or they're just in the right place at the right time, sometimes, but they become stars based on media exposure, and that's what drives the money machines.
And yeah, you could replace most of these guys in a heatbeat. That doesn't mean they're not among the best, but once they're in, there are mechanisms that keep them in. For your athletes, they have nothing to worry about working out, too much money, and the occasional injury. They have the best sports medicine available, free, and can look forward to a comfortable life, aside from possible chronic injuries. Once you're successful in film or music, you have a much easier time being successful again. If you're Bob Dylan, you can release a nutty Christmas album and still sell a ton of CDs.
And that same machinery makes it easy to anoint replacements. If they put you on the Eagles or the Steelers or, hell, even the Mets, you have a pretty good chance of getting instantly famous. As long as you can do the job, you're "in". Do it exceptionally, and you eventually get to write your own ticket. Same idea with TV: ABC or CBS puts you in a show, you're instantly seen by millions. You have some work to do, but it's an instant jump. Same idea with a musician getting a recording contract (ok, record companies are the worst of thieves, and you may take awhile to make money, but fame, you have a good shot at that, instantly). Spielberg or Bruckheimer or Cameron put you in a film, you're an instant star, if not yet a household name. Oprah Winfrey mentions your book on her show, it's an instant bestseller, and you're now a Famous Author. It's all based on the vast cash surrounding the media.
So clearly, the thing we nerds need is some TV time. It might have been close, awhile back, with the battling robot craze, but that one seems to have wound itself down. And there IS that whole video game thing... more cash there than in films, today.
You don't just look at the NFL, NBA, or MLB for professionals... anyone working at a sport as their major means of income IS in fact a professional. So while there are plenty of Yankees and Phillies and Steelers and Jersey Devils, and hell, even Mets making a nice bit a coin, you have to average in all those guys trying to make it, working in AAA Baseball or AHL Hockey or any other minor league. They're not major league but they are professional -- they work at this as their only or primary means of income. And some of these guys can make a decent living, $100K a year for the top guys, something in that range. Sure, there's are not as many paid positions in any sport at you'll find in IT or engineering or any related area. Simply put, there's just much less demand for people who play a game for a living.
For me, two years of Judo and five years of Aikido practice. But the software guys don't mess with me, either... there are wrist locks that send regular folks into new and painful places. Imagine if you have carpal tunnel syndrome! And I know how to fall, after bashing my head too hard.
I don't think, in this age of unprecedented teenage sloth, it's wise or necessary to cut down the value of sports just to raise up the value of the sciences, computer or otherwise. What we need to really address is "fat kid on a couch, playing X-Box and eating chips, for hours after school" as a standard and acceptable behavior.
There's a commonality between these, too. When you get good at a sport, you get pushed to new physical plateaus... places you never imagined going. But you go there primarily with your mind, or you fail... most people give up mentally long before their bodies just stop working (which they absolutely will, if you can keep pushing hard enough, long enough... but that's good too, as long as its not a destructive failure).
It really is two sides of the same coin, physical and mental development. This occurred to me again last Sunday, during a 6 hour, non-stop, snow shoveling session, clearing my 1/5th mile driveway from a 24" blizzard. You need to go to the same place on those three-or-four-days-without-sleep marathon hacking sessions as well (in the old days at Commodore, this was otherwise termed "between Christmas and New Years"... that annual week of sleeplessness, getting ready for the CES show). But I digress.
From what I've read, the Milestone only does 900MHz/2100MHz 3G, which is the European AWS band, specifically reallocated for GSM's bandwidth-hungry 3G protocols (you need 10MHz for regular UMTS/HSPA, and 20MHz for the higher speed stuff, the version AT&T sells at 7.2Mb/s down and 2Mb/s up). It's almost as if Motorola didn't want this phone imported to the USA :-)
AT&T jumped in early here, with more bandwidth already owned, and did it on their own with non-standard 850MHz and 1900MHz, including some compromises (they have a single-duplex 5MHz version), and some places they just aren't going to do 3G.
T-Mobile waited for the US AWS auction, and got 1700/2100MHz slots, but they came later, and they're less well funded... and worst of all, not compatible with either AT&T or Europe. So they get little hardware support.
Now, the reason they say "900/2100" or "1700/2100" is particularly evil... these are not alternatives, the phone is using both: 900MHz or 1700MHz for transmit, 2100MHz in both cases for receive. So if you look in detail at the specs, you may not even see mention of the 2100MHz frequency (FCC filings, for example), because that's receive-only, and doesn't have to be documented unless used for transmit. This was particularly confusing given that CDMA, 2G/EDGE, and AT&T can all work within a single band, which is what everyone's used to (eg, 850/1900 for voice, EDGE, or EvDO is a choice, not a coupling).