The company was headed down the tubes, so in order to pump up the stock price enough to allow for some breathing room. The problem for McBride is that SCO still hasn't found a way to make money the old-fashioned way. So what was initially a tactic to hold their ground has morphed into their strategy for long-term survival.
But they've overreached. In fact, they've managed to do what even Microsoft has been unable to do so far; they are directly threatening almost everyone in the *NIX world, which will only bring the disparate camps together. There's big money behind Linux, and there are a lot of companies interested in keeping BSD alive as well.
The mouse that roared is going to get stepped on eventually. Whether they can make enough money in the mean time in order to carry on after their legal shenanegans are put to a stop is the real question. If they can't, I expect SCO to die quite rapidly as soon as they lose in court.
Talk about heartbreak! I saw that ubiquitous footage of the US Navy jetpack test when I was a kid, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. There have been many inventions that have changed my life since I saw that footage, but that's "The One That Got Away" for me.
It's funny how when you think about the past, you seldom think about your expectations at the time for the future. This article really made me think about how no invention becomes reality simply by virtue of some sort of inevitability. Money, the market, luck, and the tides of history all play a part in determining what will make it and what won't.
Somehow I don't think I'll ever get to use a Transporter either. Dammit!
It might have actually worked for McDonald's. They're not exactly conquering the world these days, and they definitely need a means of bringing people into the stores.
WiFi alone? Eh.
WiFi and free iTunes? Now there's something.
Of course, who wants to bring their computer into a greasy McDonald's and get Secret Sauce all over it while surfing the 'Net. Ew... forget I went there!
Starbucks. Those guys would do well with an iTunes promo. They've already rolled out the WiFi part of the equation.
I came up with when I last lived in a major city. The fire department could raise money through an unconventional source, action-hungry paintball players could have a lot of fun, and dangerous drivers would receive the attention they richly deserve.
It goes like this:
1) Fire department installs special racks atop their fire engines. Fire department allows qualified paintball players who pay a fee (say, $100/mo. for unlimited rides) to ride along in these racks.
2) As the engines go zooming through the city, a bottleneck appears. It seems some assmunch of a driver is refusing to get out of the way for fear of losing his precious spot in the mad dash to get to the freeway.
3) Traffic Decency Guardians (aka TDGs) unleash a hail of accurate paintball fire at the offending motorist. The paintballs are colored bright purple, or perhaps a mixture of purple and orange. They are not water-soluble. They do mark said motorist as a complete assmunch, so other motorists are sure to treat the offender accordingly.
4) Violations of right-of-way rules plummet. Paintballers everywhere compete for selection as TDGs. The fire department finally has enough money to get that extra ladder they've always needed. Everyone wins.
Except the guy with purple paint all over his car.;-)
Going after spam just doesn't work unless you do it on the client. Hassling with intermediaries who themselves are vulnerable to attacks from spammers doesn't cut it. Waiting for the government doesn't cut it.
When I'm on OS X, I use Mail.app, which has a very effective filter with low false positives. It works with ISP filters like BrightMail, but I've found that I don't even need that.
On Windows, I use Ella for Spam Control. This little plugin is awesome. Just like Mail.app, it doesn't get in my way or require attention all the time. Flag some spam initially, and it learns your preferences from there. It looks like they just released a signatureware version, too.
Collaborative spam filtering mechanisms are great in theory, but I'm through trying one flawed approach after another. Give me effective client-side filtering instead.
If you look at the value of SCO's stock since they started these shenanegans, it's obvious that the strategy is to raise as much money as possible through stock, then pump that money into acquisitions and other activities designed to save the company.
SCO was going down the tubes, and McBride and company saw that they had one arrow left in their quiver, which was their supposed intellectual property. Being ethically-challenged individuals, they took the path most likely to generate money.
Of course the whole scheme is incredibly shortsighted and has generated so much ill will and turmoil that SCO can't be long for this world (at least in its current incarnation).
Threatening your customers and your supposed allies only works when you run a monopoly. When you're just a little pissant like SCO, it just makes everyone want to get rid of you.
QuickBooks for Mac is popular, but it is hardly running in every office in town, although in many respects OS X is a superior OS for small business users.
Unfortunately the Lemming Factor is extraordiarily strong. It's the dark side of the infamous network effect. Everyone jumps off the same Windows cliff, even when a nice foot path with hand rails is available.
QuickBooks for Linux would be great. But it alone would hardly convert the masses in droves.
Whoa there! Who let you in here? Designers are not supposed to be able to think like hackers, and hackers aren't supposed to be able to think like designers!
Now I suppose you'll want a logo for designers who are also hackers. And maybe another one for hackers who are also designers.
The thing is, the bad publicity will hit the Mac-loving crowd, the anti-Microsoft crowd, and probably nobody else will hear about it or give a damn.
Most of the mainstream press doesn't even understand why Microsoft is considered distasteful by many people. I doubt that many news outlets will even consider this news.
The Blog Nation may spread it around for a few nanoseconds, but most of them are already open-minded enough to realize that there are viable alternatives to Microsoft products.
Gator did not win in court. They brought suit against PC Pitstop, and PC Pitstop reached a settlement with Gator.
Gator is using classic bullying tactics: Keep bullying so people think you can win a fight, and they'll avoid standing up to you.
If the definition of "spyware" is defined by the courts through analysis of popular usage, then it seems that all of the sites out there calling Gator "spyware" would be extending definition of the term to include Gator, even though Gator is not according to their own definition, "spyware".
If Enron calls itself an honest company, and thousands of news articles and blogs declare it a dishonest company, who is right? Is Enron an honest company merely because it says it is?
Is Gator an honest Internet citizen because it declares itself to be, as it stands in plain view red-handed?
I'm sure it's just annoying the hell out of some folks that Apple is showing so much early success with iTunes for Windows and the new iTMS. So in the spirit of service, I've rounded up some assaults on Apple that should mollify the critics.
1) Apple blew it. They came out with iTunes for Windows too late. Ha ha hah! Buymusic.com is already there first. The vaporous Dell and Microsoft services are much better on paper than than this pathetic Apple offering.
2) AAC? Beh. Give me the open standard. Give me WMP! Support standards, Apple!
3) Black turtlenecks? Who wears black turtlenecks?
4) 99 cents a song? What, do you think I'm RICH?! Give me songs for free. Artists don't get much money when they go through the iTMS anyway, so why should I give the artists anything at all? Answer me that, man.
5) They're just trying to sell iPods. So that means that even if I get the iTunes app for free and use it, Apple is screwing me over. Yeah, they're screwing me over. That's it.
It's interesting to see how many people in here are getting themselves in a lather refusing to believe that it might cost less to run a supercomputer on Macs than on Dell boxes.
If this were an OS to OS comparison between Windows and OS X, perhaps we wouldn't be getting so frothed up. But this is hardware, and dammit, PC hardware is supposed to *always* be cheaper than Mac hardware!
To summarize what others have said:
1) Dell gave UT a sweetheart deal
2) Apple gave VT a sweetheart deal
3) Nobody has dredged up any information to indicate that the $38M UT spent includes the cost of a building. As csoto pointed out:"A "Center" at UT is a special term for a particular type of organized unit, often a research unit. It does not necessarily mean this place gets its own building. In fact, at UT, space is such a premium that most "Centers" don't have their own (yeah the place is huge, but has lots of people). In fact, I'd venture to guess that NO center has its own building."
4) Hardware is only a portion of the total cost, obviously. UT and VT have set up their supercomputing projects differently. This again is obvious.
5) The really important point of all this is that VT manage to put together a very powerful supercomputing cluster using Macs at a cost that in no way can be considered more expensive than if they'd used PC hardware.
You can argue that costs would have been cheaper had they built their own, or used PCs from some source cheaper than Dell. But they still would have had to deal with labor costs in assembling the PCs, or higher maintenance costs associated with keeping all of those commodity PCs running properly.
UCLA is already using OS X to run Beowulf-style clusters. Tokyo University is replacing over 1,100 Linux PCs with OS X boxes.
Even the total cost of installing, operating, and maintaining large numbers of Macs running OS X is cheaper than either PCs running Windows or PCs running Linux, people often seem incapable of absorbing that information.
You can talk all you want about the Reality Distortion Field, but the truth is that Apple is always working against an incredibly strong bias that says Apple is always more expensive.
Of course Safari kicks ass all over IE. It's my favorite browser. But I still have to use IE all the time to check pages against it. The sad truth is that Safari's marketshare is miniscule in comparison to IE's, which gave rise to my post in the first place. Qualitative superiority and a lot of marketing muscle still don't get you squat when you're up against monopoly power of this magnitude.
without requiring them to retrain users to cope with a different operating system
Uhh... like WindowsXP?
In classes I teach, users coming from Win98 to XP are often very confused. But since Microsoft dictates it, IT managers everywhere are forced to upgrade. Imagine upgrading when you wanted to, as opposed to when Microsoft wanted you to.
we all depend on IE too much to have crooks, social deviants, malcontents and crackers from messing with our lifestyles and our livelihoods.
Any time one piece of software from one company can be responsible for such negative impact on our lives because of how poorly it was designed, while still remaining far and away the dominant product in its category in spite of superior software being readily available, that's a sign that the ill effects of monopoly power are at play.
So your big argument is that you can play games better on a Windows machine?
Sure you can, provided you have the latest and greatest hardware and take pains to keep it all up to date. But that begs the question: Is Internet Week's core reader base gamers? Somehow I doubt it. IW's tagline is: "Technology that Connects the Internet."
We're talking about doing work with your computer. So your comments about games are automagically irrelevant.
You mention video formats, but then use MP3 audio as an example. Curious. Anyway, if you've used QuickTime content creation tools, you know that QuickTime is more than just a playback mechanism. It's an extremely powerful, extremely flexible multimedia platform. Although not that many business users I know are interested in downloading bad P2P copies of movies, there are methods for watching xvid on a Mac.
So your arguments against Apple (your use of the term "Apple" rather than "Mac" in a conversation about operating systems is a dead giveaway that you're not really a Mac user) are invalid.
Let's talk about Linux and Windows, since you conveniently ignore how easy Macs are to set up. It takes you an hour to configure a new Windows system, but it takes you weeks or months to get a Linux system working. That's mighty strange, friend. Maybe you haven't set up a Linux system in a while. But you're missing the point anyway. We're talking about enterprise use here.
While I agree that Linux on the desktop might not be ready for prime-time in many respects, it's also a perfectly valid replacement for Windows in many enterprise situations. It runs servers and networks quite well. A well-configured Linux distro is perfect for many business users because it eliminates all kinds of increased support costs due to Outlook/Office security problems. Eliminating this one set of problems alone can save a large Windows-using organization big money.
To summarize:
1) You can play a lot of games on Windows if you are sure to keep your system up to date.
2) #1 is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand.
3) If you are really wasting time at work and want to play xvid on your Mac, you can.
4) Modern Linux distros are extremely easy to set up and can provide major cost savings for enterprise organizations that are tired of fighting with money-draining Outlook/Office security problems.
When I signed up for what was Cellular One but is now AT&T, all of the reviews I could find said that for my particular area (the always-difficult area around the Santa Cruz Mountains near Silicon Valley), Cellular One was the best bet.
Of course, my service was crappy, and of course Verizon started making great strides in my area. Now literally everyone I know who has had a cell phone for more than three years in this area is using Verizon. Friends have tried Sprint and T-Mobile, but they all wound up sticking with Verizon. They like it for local service and a couple of them who travel say it has the best coverage nationally as well.
My primary work phone is my cell phone, and I'm not interested in changing my business cards and going through the hassle of changing numbers. Forwarding arrangements are fine and dandy, but I want to draw the line in the sand right here and simply keep the number I established two years ago.
Being able to hold onto one number would be nice, especially in this age of constant number changes, passwords, account logins, and so on.
The cell networks are used to getting business based on crafty marketing and the fact that it's really difficult for customers to truly verify how well a network will work for them until they purchase a plan. The companies that know they're weak are putting up a tremendous fight because they depend on this lack of transparency.
Slashdot Mirror
We're in the PC hardware business. What is this "quality" you speak of?
"... they started using their purchased IP as a whip."
I trust this meets with your approval, AC. ;-)
But they've overreached. In fact, they've managed to do what even Microsoft has been unable to do so far; they are directly threatening almost everyone in the *NIX world, which will only bring the disparate camps together. There's big money behind Linux, and there are a lot of companies interested in keeping BSD alive as well.
The mouse that roared is going to get stepped on eventually. Whether they can make enough money in the mean time in order to carry on after their legal shenanegans are put to a stop is the real question. If they can't, I expect SCO to die quite rapidly as soon as they lose in court.
It's funny how when you think about the past, you seldom think about your expectations at the time for the future. This article really made me think about how no invention becomes reality simply by virtue of some sort of inevitability. Money, the market, luck, and the tides of history all play a part in determining what will make it and what won't.
Somehow I don't think I'll ever get to use a Transporter either. Dammit!
Uh... is that 21st Century Math? Crap. My kids are going to come home from school and I won't be able to help them with their homework.
WiFi alone? Eh.
WiFi and free iTunes? Now there's something.
Of course, who wants to bring their computer into a greasy McDonald's and get Secret Sauce all over it while surfing the 'Net. Ew... forget I went there!
Starbucks. Those guys would do well with an iTunes promo. They've already rolled out the WiFi part of the equation.
It goes like this:
1) Fire department installs special racks atop their fire engines. Fire department allows qualified paintball players who pay a fee (say, $100/mo. for unlimited rides) to ride along in these racks.
2) As the engines go zooming through the city, a bottleneck appears. It seems some assmunch of a driver is refusing to get out of the way for fear of losing his precious spot in the mad dash to get to the freeway.
3) Traffic Decency Guardians (aka TDGs) unleash a hail of accurate paintball fire at the offending motorist. The paintballs are colored bright purple, or perhaps a mixture of purple and orange. They are not water-soluble. They do mark said motorist as a complete assmunch, so other motorists are sure to treat the offender accordingly.
4) Violations of right-of-way rules plummet. Paintballers everywhere compete for selection as TDGs. The fire department finally has enough money to get that extra ladder they've always needed. Everyone wins.
Except the guy with purple paint all over his car. ;-)
At Apple, good spelling skills are not required.
On Slashdot, good grammar is not required.
When I'm on OS X, I use Mail.app, which has a very effective filter with low false positives. It works with ISP filters like BrightMail, but I've found that I don't even need that.
On Windows, I use Ella for Spam Control. This little plugin is awesome. Just like Mail.app, it doesn't get in my way or require attention all the time. Flag some spam initially, and it learns your preferences from there. It looks like they just released a signatureware version, too.
Collaborative spam filtering mechanisms are great in theory, but I'm through trying one flawed approach after another. Give me effective client-side filtering instead.
SCO was going down the tubes, and McBride and company saw that they had one arrow left in their quiver, which was their supposed intellectual property. Being ethically-challenged individuals, they took the path most likely to generate money.
Of course the whole scheme is incredibly shortsighted and has generated so much ill will and turmoil that SCO can't be long for this world (at least in its current incarnation).
Threatening your customers and your supposed allies only works when you run a monopoly. When you're just a little pissant like SCO, it just makes everyone want to get rid of you.
Come to think of it, so did the name Gator.
QuickBooks for Mac is popular, but it is hardly running in every office in town, although in many respects OS X is a superior OS for small business users.
Unfortunately the Lemming Factor is extraordiarily strong. It's the dark side of the infamous network effect. Everyone jumps off the same Windows cliff, even when a nice foot path with hand rails is available.
QuickBooks for Linux would be great. But it alone would hardly convert the masses in droves.
Now I suppose you'll want a logo for designers who are also hackers. And maybe another one for hackers who are also designers.
Get back in your tidy category, dammit!
Most of the mainstream press doesn't even understand why Microsoft is considered distasteful by many people. I doubt that many news outlets will even consider this news.
The Blog Nation may spread it around for a few nanoseconds, but most of them are already open-minded enough to realize that there are viable alternatives to Microsoft products.
Gator is using classic bullying tactics: Keep bullying so people think you can win a fight, and they'll avoid standing up to you.
If the definition of "spyware" is defined by the courts through analysis of popular usage, then it seems that all of the sites out there calling Gator "spyware" would be extending definition of the term to include Gator, even though Gator is not according to their own definition, "spyware".
If Enron calls itself an honest company, and thousands of news articles and blogs declare it a dishonest company, who is right? Is Enron an honest company merely because it says it is?
Is Gator an honest Internet citizen because it declares itself to be, as it stands in plain view red-handed?
1) Apple blew it. They came out with iTunes for Windows too late. Ha ha hah! Buymusic.com is already there first. The vaporous Dell and Microsoft services are much better on paper than than this pathetic Apple offering.
2) AAC? Beh. Give me the open standard. Give me WMP! Support standards, Apple!
3) Black turtlenecks? Who wears black turtlenecks?
4) 99 cents a song? What, do you think I'm RICH?! Give me songs for free. Artists don't get much money when they go through the iTMS anyway, so why should I give the artists anything at all? Answer me that, man.
5) They're just trying to sell iPods. So that means that even if I get the iTunes app for free and use it, Apple is screwing me over. Yeah, they're screwing me over. That's it.
If this were an OS to OS comparison between Windows and OS X, perhaps we wouldn't be getting so frothed up. But this is hardware, and dammit, PC hardware is supposed to *always* be cheaper than Mac hardware!
To summarize what others have said:
1) Dell gave UT a sweetheart deal
2) Apple gave VT a sweetheart deal
3) Nobody has dredged up any information to indicate that the $38M UT spent includes the cost of a building. As csoto pointed out:"A "Center" at UT is a special term for a particular type of organized unit, often a research unit. It does not necessarily mean this place gets its own building. In fact, at UT, space is such a premium that most "Centers" don't have their own (yeah the place is huge, but has lots of people). In fact, I'd venture to guess that NO center has its own building."
4) Hardware is only a portion of the total cost, obviously. UT and VT have set up their supercomputing projects differently. This again is obvious.
5) The really important point of all this is that VT manage to put together a very powerful supercomputing cluster using Macs at a cost that in no way can be considered more expensive than if they'd used PC hardware.
You can argue that costs would have been cheaper had they built their own, or used PCs from some source cheaper than Dell. But they still would have had to deal with labor costs in assembling the PCs, or higher maintenance costs associated with keeping all of those commodity PCs running properly.
UCLA is already using OS X to run Beowulf-style clusters. Tokyo University is replacing over 1,100 Linux PCs with OS X boxes.
Even the total cost of installing, operating, and maintaining large numbers of Macs running OS X is cheaper than either PCs running Windows or PCs running Linux, people often seem incapable of absorbing that information.
You can talk all you want about the Reality Distortion Field, but the truth is that Apple is always working against an incredibly strong bias that says Apple is always more expensive.
That's simply no longer true.
Uhh... like WindowsXP?
In classes I teach, users coming from Win98 to XP are often very confused. But since Microsoft dictates it, IT managers everywhere are forced to upgrade. Imagine upgrading when you wanted to, as opposed to when Microsoft wanted you to.
Any time one piece of software from one company can be responsible for such negative impact on our lives because of how poorly it was designed, while still remaining far and away the dominant product in its category in spite of superior software being readily available, that's a sign that the ill effects of monopoly power are at play.
Sure you can, provided you have the latest and greatest hardware and take pains to keep it all up to date. But that begs the question: Is Internet Week's core reader base gamers? Somehow I doubt it. IW's tagline is: "Technology that Connects the Internet."
We're talking about doing work with your computer. So your comments about games are automagically irrelevant.
You mention video formats, but then use MP3 audio as an example. Curious. Anyway, if you've used QuickTime content creation tools, you know that QuickTime is more than just a playback mechanism. It's an extremely powerful, extremely flexible multimedia platform. Although not that many business users I know are interested in downloading bad P2P copies of movies, there are methods for watching xvid on a Mac.
So your arguments against Apple (your use of the term "Apple" rather than "Mac" in a conversation about operating systems is a dead giveaway that you're not really a Mac user) are invalid.
Let's talk about Linux and Windows, since you conveniently ignore how easy Macs are to set up. It takes you an hour to configure a new Windows system, but it takes you weeks or months to get a Linux system working. That's mighty strange, friend. Maybe you haven't set up a Linux system in a while. But you're missing the point anyway. We're talking about enterprise use here.
While I agree that Linux on the desktop might not be ready for prime-time in many respects, it's also a perfectly valid replacement for Windows in many enterprise situations. It runs servers and networks quite well. A well-configured Linux distro is perfect for many business users because it eliminates all kinds of increased support costs due to Outlook/Office security problems. Eliminating this one set of problems alone can save a large Windows-using organization big money.
To summarize:
1) You can play a lot of games on Windows if you are sure to keep your system up to date.
2) #1 is totally irrelevant to the topic at hand.
3) If you are really wasting time at work and want to play xvid on your Mac, you can.
4) Modern Linux distros are extremely easy to set up and can provide major cost savings for enterprise organizations that are tired of fighting with money-draining Outlook/Office security problems.
Of course, my service was crappy, and of course Verizon started making great strides in my area. Now literally everyone I know who has had a cell phone for more than three years in this area is using Verizon. Friends have tried Sprint and T-Mobile, but they all wound up sticking with Verizon. They like it for local service and a couple of them who travel say it has the best coverage nationally as well.
My primary work phone is my cell phone, and I'm not interested in changing my business cards and going through the hassle of changing numbers. Forwarding arrangements are fine and dandy, but I want to draw the line in the sand right here and simply keep the number I established two years ago.
Being able to hold onto one number would be nice, especially in this age of constant number changes, passwords, account logins, and so on.
The cell networks are used to getting business based on crafty marketing and the fact that it's really difficult for customers to truly verify how well a network will work for them until they purchase a plan. The companies that know they're weak are putting up a tremendous fight because they depend on this lack of transparency.