I did not mean to imply that it is okay to lie. It is not. The fact is that lying is a fact of life, especially in corporate America. That is the point I was making. Any company doing an acquisition should go into the process with a healthy dose of skepticism and should triple check everything that they are shown, especially the finances.
First, remove the support number from your website and anywhere else that it can be found by either browsing the website or via a Google (Bing / Yahoo / etc) search.
Second, setup a support@yourcompany.com email address and make that the only prominent email address on your website. On that account, setup an auto-responder that say something to the effect of...
"Thank you for contacting us for support. As an Open Source Software (OSS) company, we rely on our support revenue to fund our company. The funds allow us to continue improving the software for you, and everyone else who uses it.
We have plenty of free support options. Those are available to you here, here and here... (forums, etc)
If those options do not provide the resolution that you need, feel free to contact us at (support registration webpage). A member of our staff will get in contact with you shortly."
You take control of the dialogue. They contact you, you provide them with options and you control the call back. Of course you want to be responsive and not let support requests sit in the queue for hours or days(!). Make sure to lay out exactly what the costs are on the registration webpage. That way they are pre-screened and expecting it when your team contacts them. Make sure to include payment terms.
Due diligence is a blank cheque for companies to lie. The due diligence, if done... diligently... is supposed to catch these things. There is a whole discipline in the business world that focuses on these transactions.
Here is just one example of how common due diligence is...
If the executives were doing their job, they would be assuming that whomever they are trying to acquire is going to lie to them and is going to do everything that they can to inflate the value of their company. The more I deal with lawyers, the more I realize that the laws are there because everyone is trying to screw everyone else. If someone is a CEO and has not realized that yet, they need to be fired. The corporate world is an evil, predatory place where con artists are paid big money to deceive, lie, cheat and steal to get ahead.
Every single major consulting firm (Deloitte, KPMG, etc) all have extensive M&A practices. Presumably whomever HP engaged to handle the M&A work dropped the ball in a major way.
This is the kind of thing that is likely going to result in a shareholder lawsuit. This is just the first inning. HP is doing what they can to get out ahead of the problem. I would not be surprised if they end up going after their auditors, or whoever they hired to do the M&A. If their own internal legal team handled it, they are screwed.
It never ceases to amaze me how often this happens. I have seen it first hand during an acquisition I was aware of, and here it is at HP. In the case I was aware of, my co-workers and others were doing everything we could to illuminate the problems before the acquisition went through, but the concerns fell upon deaf ears. It took years to clean up that mess. Of course the senior management who were responsible for the acquisition came through it unscathed, while the rest of us worked our asses off to "make it work". It looks like the same thing happened at HP.
As an executive, these people are paid to take care of these things. They are supposed to be able to handle M&A work. That is what all of those fancy degrees and business school is for. In the tech world, if you say that you can build an environment and then fail, it is obvious and you get fired. Yet some how in the C-suite world, if you say you can build a company and fail... nothing happens. I am totally in the wrong profession.
This has been the tale for as long as multiple operating systems have been around. I have seen it numerous times in my career. I have seen it in "creative" departments where some people want Macs and others want PCs. In that context, even the same versions of Photoshop had challenges displaying the exact same file on the respective platforms. It shows up here in the "office" workspace with word processors and spreadsheets. Does anyone remember ConvertIt Plus? That was a big one back in the 1990s that was supposed to solve the same problem that we are still talking about, nearly two decades later.
If Office were a static target, the rest of the industry might catch up. Microsoft continually introduces more functionality, and continues to refine what they already have. SharePoint integration is a big one in the enterprise. Documents are becoming work flow items. Issues like regulatory compliance are demanding solutions for controllable, repeatable processes. Centralized version control is another big one. In many regards, Google Docs is closer to replacing Office than any of the FOSS solutions. Google seems to "get" the enterprise, or at least the need to collaborate. But then it comes back to compliance and regulation, which all too many industries are subjected to. Can you do a full blown forensic collection on all of the docs that Custodians A, B & C are responsible for? What happens when a company gets investigated by the SEC and they can't produce evidence in a timely manner to satisfy the regulators?
The Office juggernaut is here to stay because cost alone is not enough to compel enough of the marketplace to change. If FOSS is going to succeed, it is going to do so in developing economies like the BRIC, where their entire enterprise culture is not beholden to Microsoft. They have the luxury of starting fresh. With American corporations, operating on razor thin margins and always focused on next quarter's performance, which CIO is going to be stupid enough to stand up and roll out an applications suite that is going to cause a wide spread productivity hit? Look at how hard it is to change accounting systems, email systems, ERP, etc. It happens, but they are massive, multi-year undertakings supported by massive organizations (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc) 9 times out of 10, those deployments are massive boondoggles and require contract extensions that take them way over time and budget. And that is from huge organizations with long histories of doing those implementations. Where is the SAP equivalent for LibreOffice? Is Accenture going to come in and roll it out?
Can you provide evidence of Facebook entering into contracts with anyone where they guaranteed 100% message delivery? If you can, by all means do. If not, STFU with your contempt of court and legal system ramblings. I will admit that they might have entered into some contracts when people setup Fan pages. I doubt it, their lawyers are pretty damn smart. Those guys at Kirkland & Ellis know what they are doing. So if such a contract exists, go ahead and put it up on Pastebin or something so that we can have an informed discussion about it.
We have been all over/. for years at this point discussing how Facebook users are the product, and Facebook is not really free. Now Facebook is beginning to monetize their product. Maybe Zuckerberg can start complaining about how Mark Cuban expects people to pay for tickets to see the Mavericks play. I mean really, that seems unreasonable. They can watch the game for "free" on television in any sports bar. How dare Cuban limit access to his team by extracting concessions from a market that has grown used to being able to watch basketball for free?!?!?!
Let's do a reasonableness check here.
Is it reasonable to expect someone to provide something to you for free forever? Is that reasonable? I think this one is pretty obvious, and anyone who thinks that it is, is very naive and has no grasp on business. Therefore they can be ignored. They might as well whine about a lack of pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Am I wrong? Are you going to honestly say that you will be honest and reasonable with yourself in calculating the cost of running Facebook, and from that reasoned thought process determine that it is reasonable to continue providing it for free, forever?
The second reasonableness check is the cost that Facebook is charging. This one is up for debate and the market will sort it out. My experience with marketing costs is that Facebook seems to be pretty well priced. I compare them to things like direct mail, automated phone calls, traditional promotions (promoters passing out flyers) and sites like Constant Contact. I am basing this on a single data point of one million guaranteed views for $3000.
Show me one other place where ANYBODY can BE GUARANTEED to reach one million people FOR FREE and will concede to you that Facebook is being unreasonable. Until then, I will start adding up the seconds that this post goes unanswered. I bet I will get to one million seconds before you find an example that satisfies the above criteria.
As for poisoning the well, give me a break. If anything, you're guilty of it. "I don't want to address what dave562 brought up, so he's poisoning the well by implying that people should use reason when considering the cost of Facebook advertising."
You're right. Their algorithms are pretty poor. For example, my fiance does not see a lot of my posts. You would think FB would place some emphasis on making sure that someone's significant other stays up to date. Maybe they figure we live together, so why waste the bandwidth?
So in other words, Cuban should get behind Disporia. He can have his cake and eat it too. All he has to do is convince a million of his fans to leave Facebook and setup their own pod.
Technically speaking, you are right, they just provide RSS feeds. A billion or so of them, filtered and correlated and available 24x7. With unlimited photo storage, the ability to update the feeds from a smartphone in an app so easy to use that everyone from a 2 year old kid to an 80+ year old grand parent can use.
Facebook is just the outsourced IT model. Do the Dallas Mavericks want to to be in the IT business, or the basketball business? Facebook is providing a SaaS service with practically 5 9s SLA. Now they need to monetize their offering.
Anyone with an ounce of business accumen would have seen this coming a long time ago. Facebook owns the market segment called Facebook. If people do not want access to that market segment, they are free to circumvent it. I think Facebook is gambling that when people take a long and hard look at what it will cost to achieve the same functionality (ie millions of interested subscribers just one click away), they will cough up the dough to reach those subscribers.
Because seriously, what is the alternative? Convince the market that RSS readers are cool? Maintain IT infrastructure? Fork the user base? That's it.... the league can have an NBABook, where all of the NBA teams can pool their money and convince fans to ThumbsUp their favorite team page. The thing is, such a think already exists. www.nba.com Obviously that site did not have the market penetration that the Mavericks needed. If it did, they would have been better off convincing people to visit www.nba.com/mavericks, instead of Liking a FB page.
The Twitter dynamic works on Facebook too. If people really care about what the Dallas Mavericks are up to, they can go directly to their page. Or more than likely, they can visit www.nba.com/mavericks. If the Mavericks have something so damn important going on that they cannot wait for people to discover it on their own, they can cough up 3 cents for a page view, times however many views they want.
What is he going to tweet? A link to a web server somewhere that he also has to pay for? How long do you think Twitter can keep on allowing people to blast a million plus followers for free?
These services have been free because they are in their infancy. Sooner or later they have to start making money. Data centers are not free. Bandwidth is not free. IT staff is not free. There are costs involved. Either the costs will be recouped, or the services will fold. Nobody can continue giving something away for free forever.
If Facebook removed your ability to post, that might be bait and switch. People can still post to their fans. It just will not reach ALL of them with 100% certainty. If they want 100% certainty, they have to pay for it.
I don't think that FB offered to guarantee delivery of every message posted on their network.
If people want 100% guaranteed delivery to all of their friends, they should setup their own SMTP server and pay for the infrastructure required to facilitate that.
Nobody is making people with Fan pages stay on Facebook. They can give FB the middle finger and go do their own thing. Everyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that the cost is pretty reasonable. How much do you think it would cost for guaranteed delivery of an email message to one million people? How about direct mail? Robocall?
Just stop. You have no idea what you are talking about. Facebook users can post and their posts will get to everyone who has not muted them. I can still send things to my mom, my cat and my college roommate. My cat thinks I am annoying though, so odds are that twat will not see what I have to post.
What has changed is people who have "Fan" pages. Those people who are using Facebook to promote themselves now have to pay to reach ALL of their fans. I do not have a fan page, but my understanding is that the messages still go through to some random subset of the list. To reach everyone, a person has to pay.
In a way, this is an improvement. I do not need to see a dozen posts from a local band on the day of the show that remind me that they have a show that day. By having to pay to post, they think twice before doing it. Yet when they do pay, they can be absolutely certain that the post will show up on every single one of their fan's page.
It seems like a decent deal to me. They do not have to run their own mailing list. They do not have to deal with dead address bounces. Do not have to deal with getting past spam filters. I can pretty much guarantee that the cost of promoting posts is going to fluctuate as Facebook figures out what the market is willing to pay for it.
As you point out, these costs are relatively inexpensive compared to traditional media. A Facebook friend of mine is a party promoter and he raised the same issue. It used to be free, but now he has to pay for it. I asked him how much he used to have to spend on flyers, promoters to pass them out, voicemail boxes for people to dial into, etc. It turns out that it costs less to advertise on Facebook than it does to do it the way he used to do it. That reality did not stop him from whining about it though.
Nobody likes to pay for what was once free. In reality though, they are coming out ahead. Look at a service like Constant Contact for comparison. Advertising is not free. Facebook is offering value by bringing everyone together. The promoters do not need to collect email addresses, update contact lists, etc. All of that is already done for them.
My suggestion for business people who do not want to pay Facebook is to go back to the old way of doing it. Have fun maintaining a mail server, mailing list software, getting past spam filters, etc etc
The heart of the issue is that the judge told Apple to "clarify" any misconceptions that Samsung had violated the specific patent in question. The judge was concerned that consumers would be confused about whether or not buying a non-Apple device would lead to problems down the road.
What Apple did is glossed over the apology, and then went on to mention all of their other litigation against Samsung in other country and touted the positive (for Apple) verdicts in those countries. It was basically a marketing piece that said in short, "The judge is wrong, Samsung really is stealing our ideas, look at all of these other countries who think so."
The judge called them out on their BS and told them to comply with the court order to "clarify" the misconceptions. Apple spouted some BS about how it was going to take 14 days to change the message. The judge told them that was a load of crap. Apple then changed the message, but made it much less prominent than the first one they posted. Again, the judge called them out on it.
In short, Apple's legal team is the same as legal teams all over the place. They are a bunch of assholes who think they are smarter than everyone else and will do whatever they think they can get away with.
I dislike lawyers intensely. I really do. I never realized how bad they are until I worked with them. We provide services to them. We are on their side. They still treat us like crap, like we are the adversary. They are constantly trying to trip us up over the slightest things. It's like their brains are hard wired to press any perceived advantage and exploit even the slightest gap. They want systems with five nines up time, yet they are the cheapest, tightest, penny pinching bastards on the planet. I really think they demand the insane SLA so that they have something to dispute with the intention of extracting concessions on the monthly fees. It is to the point where I will not get on the call with a client unless a member of our legal team is on the call. When I do get on the call, I give short, brief and extremely limited answers. I do not explain in detail. I do not think outside the box. I take everything literally. It sucks because I have to become a different person when I deal with them. I cannot even offer constructive solutions because then it turns into a game of, "Why are you only thinking about this now? Why did you not predict this need of ours a year ago? That sounds negligent to me."
Sounds like the legal team failed to properly setup a subsidiary.
The company I work for deals with complex legal matters. We have data center presence in Canada, APAC and Europe specifically to address the concerns of clients in those jurisdictions who do not want to be subjected to the uncertainties of the PATRIOT Act. It is possible to do it. The cloud providers are spouting FUD.
It's one thing to complain about how the guy is worthless and not getting anything to done. It's another thing when he is finally shown the door and the reality that he was worthless and not getting anything done sinks in. Those projects that he was responsible for are still there, and now 6-12 months behind schedule. True story.
Everyone seems to focus on the worker, but more of us are consumers than workers, and well-run companies are good for consumers. They're also good for investors, and the majority of Americans are investors now, to some degree, with 401K and pension plans.
The majority of workers are not investors. The majority of workers are the people who consumers do not really think about when they are consuming. Everyone working in retail, or the service industry, a good portion of the population, does not have a 401K or a pension plan. Most of the people taking your money do not have a retirement plan and are lucky if they have health insurance.
There is a growing divide in this country. The number of "good paying jobs" are dwindling while the population is growing. A large number of those jobs have gone overseas and are not coming back. They are also not going to be replaced by any up and coming industries. The most rapidly growing sector in the economy is health care, and that is growing because all of the Baby Boomers who had pensions and retirement plans are now aging and have to deal with health issues. Without their savings, that sector of the economy would be dying as well.
If you have a job making more than $100,000 a year with health care and a retirement plan, you are a member of a very small portion of the economy.
Or he could do what my parents did and sign the kid up for some classes at the local community college. If the kid is really interested in all of those other subjects, there are plenty of opportunities. The dad apparently does not care about chemistry. If his kid brings home a D in the class because he was spending time after school on other "more important" studies, well then who cares? Or ROP. My first networking class was at ROP. It was me, the 14 year old kid and a bunch of older guys in their 20s all trying to pick up some real world skills.
I see RAID drives fail all the time. The hot spare kicks in and an alert goes to the help desk. The failed drive is replaced and life goes back to normal. In the good SANs, it will even go across disk array enclosures to get hot spares if necessary. We tend to provision 1 spare for every 24 disk enclosure. That has never presented a problem.
I found it less useful for influencing people and more useful for understanding how the mind functions. Language is a very powerful tool once you understand how to leverage it for your benefit. Of course once you know how the mind functions, you can begin to tailor your communications for maximum impact.
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I did not mean to imply that it is okay to lie. It is not. The fact is that lying is a fact of life, especially in corporate America. That is the point I was making. Any company doing an acquisition should go into the process with a healthy dose of skepticism and should triple check everything that they are shown, especially the finances.
First, remove the support number from your website and anywhere else that it can be found by either browsing the website or via a Google (Bing / Yahoo / etc) search.
Second, setup a support@yourcompany.com email address and make that the only prominent email address on your website. On that account, setup an auto-responder that say something to the effect of...
"Thank you for contacting us for support. As an Open Source Software (OSS) company, we rely on our support revenue to fund our company. The funds allow us to continue improving the software for you, and everyone else who uses it.
We have plenty of free support options. Those are available to you here, here and here... (forums, etc)
If those options do not provide the resolution that you need, feel free to contact us at (support registration webpage). A member of our staff will get in contact with you shortly."
You take control of the dialogue. They contact you, you provide them with options and you control the call back. Of course you want to be responsive and not let support requests sit in the queue for hours or days(!). Make sure to lay out exactly what the costs are on the registration webpage. That way they are pre-screened and expecting it when your team contacts them. Make sure to include payment terms.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but here's more relevant information. It looks like HP farmed it out to Deloitte.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-20/deloitte-humiliated-quick-look-its-other-best-known-client
Due diligence is a blank cheque for companies to lie. The due diligence, if done ... diligently... is supposed to catch these things. There is a whole discipline in the business world that focuses on these transactions.
Here is just one example of how common due diligence is...
http://www.steptoe.com/assets/htmldocuments/Jeffrey%20Weiner%20Chapter%20Business%20Due%20Diligence%20Strategies%202010.pdf
If the executives were doing their job, they would be assuming that whomever they are trying to acquire is going to lie to them and is going to do everything that they can to inflate the value of their company. The more I deal with lawyers, the more I realize that the laws are there because everyone is trying to screw everyone else. If someone is a CEO and has not realized that yet, they need to be fired. The corporate world is an evil, predatory place where con artists are paid big money to deceive, lie, cheat and steal to get ahead.
Every single major consulting firm (Deloitte, KPMG, etc) all have extensive M&A practices. Presumably whomever HP engaged to handle the M&A work dropped the ball in a major way.
This is the kind of thing that is likely going to result in a shareholder lawsuit. This is just the first inning. HP is doing what they can to get out ahead of the problem. I would not be surprised if they end up going after their auditors, or whoever they hired to do the M&A. If their own internal legal team handled it, they are screwed.
It never ceases to amaze me how often this happens. I have seen it first hand during an acquisition I was aware of, and here it is at HP. In the case I was aware of, my co-workers and others were doing everything we could to illuminate the problems before the acquisition went through, but the concerns fell upon deaf ears. It took years to clean up that mess. Of course the senior management who were responsible for the acquisition came through it unscathed, while the rest of us worked our asses off to "make it work". It looks like the same thing happened at HP.
As an executive, these people are paid to take care of these things. They are supposed to be able to handle M&A work. That is what all of those fancy degrees and business school is for. In the tech world, if you say that you can build an environment and then fail, it is obvious and you get fired. Yet some how in the C-suite world, if you say you can build a company and fail... nothing happens. I am totally in the wrong profession.
This has been the tale for as long as multiple operating systems have been around. I have seen it numerous times in my career. I have seen it in "creative" departments where some people want Macs and others want PCs. In that context, even the same versions of Photoshop had challenges displaying the exact same file on the respective platforms. It shows up here in the "office" workspace with word processors and spreadsheets. Does anyone remember ConvertIt Plus? That was a big one back in the 1990s that was supposed to solve the same problem that we are still talking about, nearly two decades later.
If Office were a static target, the rest of the industry might catch up. Microsoft continually introduces more functionality, and continues to refine what they already have. SharePoint integration is a big one in the enterprise. Documents are becoming work flow items. Issues like regulatory compliance are demanding solutions for controllable, repeatable processes. Centralized version control is another big one. In many regards, Google Docs is closer to replacing Office than any of the FOSS solutions. Google seems to "get" the enterprise, or at least the need to collaborate. But then it comes back to compliance and regulation, which all too many industries are subjected to. Can you do a full blown forensic collection on all of the docs that Custodians A, B & C are responsible for? What happens when a company gets investigated by the SEC and they can't produce evidence in a timely manner to satisfy the regulators?
The Office juggernaut is here to stay because cost alone is not enough to compel enough of the marketplace to change. If FOSS is going to succeed, it is going to do so in developing economies like the BRIC, where their entire enterprise culture is not beholden to Microsoft. They have the luxury of starting fresh. With American corporations, operating on razor thin margins and always focused on next quarter's performance, which CIO is going to be stupid enough to stand up and roll out an applications suite that is going to cause a wide spread productivity hit? Look at how hard it is to change accounting systems, email systems, ERP, etc. It happens, but they are massive, multi-year undertakings supported by massive organizations (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc) 9 times out of 10, those deployments are massive boondoggles and require contract extensions that take them way over time and budget. And that is from huge organizations with long histories of doing those implementations. Where is the SAP equivalent for LibreOffice? Is Accenture going to come in and roll it out?
Can you provide evidence of Facebook entering into contracts with anyone where they guaranteed 100% message delivery? If you can, by all means do. If not, STFU with your contempt of court and legal system ramblings. I will admit that they might have entered into some contracts when people setup Fan pages. I doubt it, their lawyers are pretty damn smart. Those guys at Kirkland & Ellis know what they are doing. So if such a contract exists, go ahead and put it up on Pastebin or something so that we can have an informed discussion about it.
We have been all over /. for years at this point discussing how Facebook users are the product, and Facebook is not really free. Now Facebook is beginning to monetize their product. Maybe Zuckerberg can start complaining about how Mark Cuban expects people to pay for tickets to see the Mavericks play. I mean really, that seems unreasonable. They can watch the game for "free" on television in any sports bar. How dare Cuban limit access to his team by extracting concessions from a market that has grown used to being able to watch basketball for free?!?!?!
Let's do a reasonableness check here.
Is it reasonable to expect someone to provide something to you for free forever? Is that reasonable? I think this one is pretty obvious, and anyone who thinks that it is, is very naive and has no grasp on business. Therefore they can be ignored. They might as well whine about a lack of pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Am I wrong? Are you going to honestly say that you will be honest and reasonable with yourself in calculating the cost of running Facebook, and from that reasoned thought process determine that it is reasonable to continue providing it for free, forever?
The second reasonableness check is the cost that Facebook is charging. This one is up for debate and the market will sort it out. My experience with marketing costs is that Facebook seems to be pretty well priced. I compare them to things like direct mail, automated phone calls, traditional promotions (promoters passing out flyers) and sites like Constant Contact. I am basing this on a single data point of one million guaranteed views for $3000.
Show me one other place where ANYBODY can BE GUARANTEED to reach one million people FOR FREE and will concede to you that Facebook is being unreasonable. Until then, I will start adding up the seconds that this post goes unanswered. I bet I will get to one million seconds before you find an example that satisfies the above criteria.
As for poisoning the well, give me a break. If anything, you're guilty of it. "I don't want to address what dave562 brought up, so he's poisoning the well by implying that people should use reason when considering the cost of Facebook advertising."
You're right. Their algorithms are pretty poor. For example, my fiance does not see a lot of my posts. You would think FB would place some emphasis on making sure that someone's significant other stays up to date. Maybe they figure we live together, so why waste the bandwidth?
So in other words, Cuban should get behind Disporia. He can have his cake and eat it too. All he has to do is convince a million of his fans to leave Facebook and setup their own pod.
Technically speaking, you are right, they just provide RSS feeds. A billion or so of them, filtered and correlated and available 24x7. With unlimited photo storage, the ability to update the feeds from a smartphone in an app so easy to use that everyone from a 2 year old kid to an 80+ year old grand parent can use.
Facebook is just the outsourced IT model. Do the Dallas Mavericks want to to be in the IT business, or the basketball business? Facebook is providing a SaaS service with practically 5 9s SLA. Now they need to monetize their offering.
Anyone with an ounce of business accumen would have seen this coming a long time ago. Facebook owns the market segment called Facebook. If people do not want access to that market segment, they are free to circumvent it. I think Facebook is gambling that when people take a long and hard look at what it will cost to achieve the same functionality (ie millions of interested subscribers just one click away), they will cough up the dough to reach those subscribers.
Because seriously, what is the alternative? Convince the market that RSS readers are cool? Maintain IT infrastructure? Fork the user base? That's it.... the league can have an NBABook, where all of the NBA teams can pool their money and convince fans to ThumbsUp their favorite team page. The thing is, such a think already exists. www.nba.com Obviously that site did not have the market penetration that the Mavericks needed. If it did, they would have been better off convincing people to visit www.nba.com/mavericks, instead of Liking a FB page.
The Twitter dynamic works on Facebook too. If people really care about what the Dallas Mavericks are up to, they can go directly to their page. Or more than likely, they can visit www.nba.com/mavericks. If the Mavericks have something so damn important going on that they cannot wait for people to discover it on their own, they can cough up 3 cents for a page view, times however many views they want.
What is he going to tweet? A link to a web server somewhere that he also has to pay for? How long do you think Twitter can keep on allowing people to blast a million plus followers for free?
These services have been free because they are in their infancy. Sooner or later they have to start making money. Data centers are not free. Bandwidth is not free. IT staff is not free. There are costs involved. Either the costs will be recouped, or the services will fold. Nobody can continue giving something away for free forever.
If Facebook removed your ability to post, that might be bait and switch. People can still post to their fans. It just will not reach ALL of them with 100% certainty. If they want 100% certainty, they have to pay for it.
I don't think that FB offered to guarantee delivery of every message posted on their network.
If people want 100% guaranteed delivery to all of their friends, they should setup their own SMTP server and pay for the infrastructure required to facilitate that.
Nobody is making people with Fan pages stay on Facebook. They can give FB the middle finger and go do their own thing. Everyone capable of having a reasoned thought process around the subject will come to realize that the cost is pretty reasonable. How much do you think it would cost for guaranteed delivery of an email message to one million people? How about direct mail? Robocall?
You're not on Facebook.
Just stop. You have no idea what you are talking about. Facebook users can post and their posts will get to everyone who has not muted them. I can still send things to my mom, my cat and my college roommate. My cat thinks I am annoying though, so odds are that twat will not see what I have to post.
What has changed is people who have "Fan" pages. Those people who are using Facebook to promote themselves now have to pay to reach ALL of their fans. I do not have a fan page, but my understanding is that the messages still go through to some random subset of the list. To reach everyone, a person has to pay.
In a way, this is an improvement. I do not need to see a dozen posts from a local band on the day of the show that remind me that they have a show that day. By having to pay to post, they think twice before doing it. Yet when they do pay, they can be absolutely certain that the post will show up on every single one of their fan's page.
It seems like a decent deal to me. They do not have to run their own mailing list. They do not have to deal with dead address bounces. Do not have to deal with getting past spam filters. I can pretty much guarantee that the cost of promoting posts is going to fluctuate as Facebook figures out what the market is willing to pay for it.
As you point out, these costs are relatively inexpensive compared to traditional media. A Facebook friend of mine is a party promoter and he raised the same issue. It used to be free, but now he has to pay for it. I asked him how much he used to have to spend on flyers, promoters to pass them out, voicemail boxes for people to dial into, etc. It turns out that it costs less to advertise on Facebook than it does to do it the way he used to do it. That reality did not stop him from whining about it though.
Nobody likes to pay for what was once free. In reality though, they are coming out ahead. Look at a service like Constant Contact for comparison. Advertising is not free. Facebook is offering value by bringing everyone together. The promoters do not need to collect email addresses, update contact lists, etc. All of that is already done for them.
My suggestion for business people who do not want to pay Facebook is to go back to the old way of doing it. Have fun maintaining a mail server, mailing list software, getting past spam filters, etc etc
The heart of the issue is that the judge told Apple to "clarify" any misconceptions that Samsung had violated the specific patent in question. The judge was concerned that consumers would be confused about whether or not buying a non-Apple device would lead to problems down the road.
What Apple did is glossed over the apology, and then went on to mention all of their other litigation against Samsung in other country and touted the positive (for Apple) verdicts in those countries. It was basically a marketing piece that said in short, "The judge is wrong, Samsung really is stealing our ideas, look at all of these other countries who think so."
The judge called them out on their BS and told them to comply with the court order to "clarify" the misconceptions. Apple spouted some BS about how it was going to take 14 days to change the message. The judge told them that was a load of crap. Apple then changed the message, but made it much less prominent than the first one they posted. Again, the judge called them out on it.
In short, Apple's legal team is the same as legal teams all over the place. They are a bunch of assholes who think they are smarter than everyone else and will do whatever they think they can get away with.
I dislike lawyers intensely. I really do. I never realized how bad they are until I worked with them. We provide services to them. We are on their side. They still treat us like crap, like we are the adversary. They are constantly trying to trip us up over the slightest things. It's like their brains are hard wired to press any perceived advantage and exploit even the slightest gap. They want systems with five nines up time, yet they are the cheapest, tightest, penny pinching bastards on the planet. I really think they demand the insane SLA so that they have something to dispute with the intention of extracting concessions on the monthly fees. It is to the point where I will not get on the call with a client unless a member of our legal team is on the call. When I do get on the call, I give short, brief and extremely limited answers. I do not explain in detail. I do not think outside the box. I take everything literally. It sucks because I have to become a different person when I deal with them. I cannot even offer constructive solutions because then it turns into a game of, "Why are you only thinking about this now? Why did you not predict this need of ours a year ago? That sounds negligent to me."
Sounds like the legal team failed to properly setup a subsidiary.
The company I work for deals with complex legal matters. We have data center presence in Canada, APAC and Europe specifically to address the concerns of clients in those jurisdictions who do not want to be subjected to the uncertainties of the PATRIOT Act. It is possible to do it. The cloud providers are spouting FUD.
It's one thing to complain about how the guy is worthless and not getting anything to done. It's another thing when he is finally shown the door and the reality that he was worthless and not getting anything done sinks in. Those projects that he was responsible for are still there, and now 6-12 months behind schedule. True story.
It certainly is not, "Getting laid"
Hey, I saw that in Miami Vice!
This.
And the fact that you CAN access external media, unlike that other popular, non-android table.... pad thing.
It would not based on the entire cost of the car, it would be based on the cost of the hot spot.
Everyone seems to focus on the worker, but more of us are consumers than workers, and well-run companies are good for consumers. They're also good for investors, and the majority of Americans are investors now, to some degree, with 401K and pension plans.
The majority of workers are not investors. The majority of workers are the people who consumers do not really think about when they are consuming. Everyone working in retail, or the service industry, a good portion of the population, does not have a 401K or a pension plan. Most of the people taking your money do not have a retirement plan and are lucky if they have health insurance.
There is a growing divide in this country. The number of "good paying jobs" are dwindling while the population is growing. A large number of those jobs have gone overseas and are not coming back. They are also not going to be replaced by any up and coming industries. The most rapidly growing sector in the economy is health care, and that is growing because all of the Baby Boomers who had pensions and retirement plans are now aging and have to deal with health issues. Without their savings, that sector of the economy would be dying as well.
If you have a job making more than $100,000 a year with health care and a retirement plan, you are a member of a very small portion of the economy.
Or he could do what my parents did and sign the kid up for some classes at the local community college. If the kid is really interested in all of those other subjects, there are plenty of opportunities. The dad apparently does not care about chemistry. If his kid brings home a D in the class because he was spending time after school on other "more important" studies, well then who cares? Or ROP. My first networking class was at ROP. It was me, the 14 year old kid and a bunch of older guys in their 20s all trying to pick up some real world skills.
The array did not support hot spares?
I see RAID drives fail all the time. The hot spare kicks in and an alert goes to the help desk. The failed drive is replaced and life goes back to normal. In the good SANs, it will even go across disk array enclosures to get hot spares if necessary. We tend to provision 1 spare for every 24 disk enclosure. That has never presented a problem.
http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-NLP-Psychological-Understanding-Influencing/dp/1855383446
I found it less useful for influencing people and more useful for understanding how the mind functions. Language is a very powerful tool once you understand how to leverage it for your benefit. Of course once you know how the mind functions, you can begin to tailor your communications for maximum impact.