Exactly, they did need the patents. I'm not so sure about your claim about stifling competition though. The DoJ went over that deal with a fine toothed comb and even issued a second request for information. Polycomm threw their hat into the ring against the deal. In the end the analysis showed that the deal was a good one for everyone involved, including consumers.
The article mentioned that VIDEO is one of the key areas that they are focusing on. Tandberg fits there, and the Tandberg acquisition is a key part of Cisco's portfolio. They had to go to bat against the DoJ on that one. Tandberg has the best video conferencing solution on the market.
. I was a few years out of college and just settling in to a lead developer role.
How would you feel if your boss pulled you out of the lead role and put the old man in front of you? Try to be honest, not looking back with 20/20 hindsight on how good of an experience it turned out to be.
First world people do not have the jobs, and now do not have the credit to buy the products. New markets are being developed overseas where the locals have not yet sold themselves up to their eyeballs into credit/debt slavery. Unless there is a serious change to the global economic order, on the scale of "one world government" type change, that dynamic will not change.
America fell with NAFTA and the loss of the manufacturing base. There is nothing short of armed revolution that will bring that back. And even if that happens, America does not have the resources to feed into the manfacturing process to make it work. Our economy and country was built on exploiting the resources of the rest of the world for the last three generations. The only way to try to maintain our "quality of life" at this point is to have everyone else build things for us, and then pay for those goods with dollars.
Once the dollar crashes, as it is trying very hard to do right now with Europe getting ready to default in a big way, America is going to have some real problems. On the bright side of things, most of the rest of the world depends on us to IMPORT from them. We still EXPORT large amounts of food. Sure, our quality of life will take a big hit, but at least we will be able to feed ourselves.
I have only worked at one organization that went through any significant downsizing, but it played out differently than you laid out. First they cut from the bottom and did away with as many redundancies as possible. They also aimed at parts of various departments that were not critical to the operation of the company. On the second round of layoffs they took out most of the middle management. That is what sucked the most for me. I lost my boss (no big loss, he didn't do much anyway) but then had to pick up his work, plus my work, and didn't receive a bump in salary. Even my suggestion that they split the difference and bump me up to half way between what I made and he made was rejected.
I have since moved on. The people who rarely get cut are the senior management. You know, the people who are so out of touch with what is really going on that they fail to actually lead.
The horse has already been beat to death, but I have to jump in anyway. I have been waiting for a new Syndicate game forever. I actually liked Syndicate Wars because it introduced some new dynamics to the game. Being able to rob banks was pretty cool, especially with the enhanced police response that came along with it. It was a nice change to the "persuade the whole city" for money route of raising cash. They also adjusted the squad dynamics. In Syndicate, you could arm everyone with miniguns and be good to go. Toward some of the later missions in Syndicate Wars, you had to mix up the weapons. Miniguns were practically worthless against vehicles so you needed one or two guys with lasers. But lasers were pretty worthless against enemy agents, so you had to have a minigun and probably a sniper rifle to balance things out.
I played the first one so many times that it got to the point where I could pass almost every mission with a single guy armed only with a pistol and a persuadatron.
The new one will fail. It will fail for many reasons. However, it will be so full of fail primarily for one reason. They have taken away the suicide operative dynamic. Sure, it wasn't really good strategy and it was pretty expensive. But who didn't love cranking a guy up to full speed and rushing him head-long into the target only to blow him up with a Ctrl+D?
The FPS dynamic takes out the uber cool, from the blimp POV of your agent taking out a good portion of a city block, complete with who knows how many civilians running away like flaming torches.
How can you say that Syndicate Wars was a flop? You could rob banks. They had flying cars. They did away with the stupid ammunition counters so you didn't spent the second half of the mission searching for guns. The sniper rifle was bad ass. I wouldn't say that it was better than the original, but it was pretty damn good.
Where do these vendors source their hardware from? Do they go straight to Taiwan with specs in hand and have a production run of boards done? What happens when they need spares? Do they just buy a whole slew of spares and then when those run out, move onto the next design?
What happens with industry wide problems, like with what Intel experienced with the SandyBridge CPUs? I ran into some weird issues where a couple of my Dell blades were not seeing all of the RAM. They had a firmware fix available for it. What happens in similar situations with these custom built solutions where companies like Google are designing their own boards, and presumably do not have as much leverage with the BIOS developers.
Of course the summary leaves out the part of the conversation where bandwidth is also a measure of well, bandwidth. Just because one single individual device can only get ~500MB does not mean that GbE is worthless. What if there are two laptops sharing that connection? It will be tapped out. Put another one on there and all of a sudden a one gig pipe is not big enough.
Hearing aids are a "medical device" and for most patients are paid for, or at least partially paid for, by insurance. As long as a person only has to pay a "$20 co-pay" or similar price that does not reflect the actual market cost of the device, the price will remain inflated.
The "crippling small business" argument is already stale. It would be simple enough to imagine a system where the state publishes a state sales tax for internet retailers. I've already outlined the framework in another post so I won't rehash it here.
Maybe you can look to the future and offer some constructive input about how to account for declining local tax bases. Maybe figure out some way to be constructive and contribute to the conversation. I'll welcome you back at that point.
I'm saying the old process is broken and a new process needs to be developed to deal with the new realities of commerce on the internet. We cannot continue to starve our local and state governments of tax revenue and expect to maintain the same quality of life and services that we have come to expect.
So either we need to figure out a way to adjust the tax structure to prevent the flight of taxes from local government and into the black hole that is executive compensation and the DJIA, or we need to get used to pot holes and ever lower achievements from the students going to our under funded schools.
The questions you bring up is why the Feds need to step in. The Feds would basically tell the individual state governments, "If you want an internet retailer to collect taxes for your state, you need to publish a state wide tax rate. You are allowed to update it once a year." The Feds would then pass a law that obliges internet retailers to refer to that published tax table and collect taxes accordingly.
The states can then hash it out with the cities and counties on a local level. The retailers would publish an obfuscated report that just contains the zipcode+4 of the delivery plus the amount of tax collected. The cities and counties can query that list and submit a bill to the state. Every party involved would need to allow 10% or whatever for administrative overhead. By that I mean 10% of the tax collected, not a 10% tax. And the 10% is a random number, it might be lower given there are already departments setup for tax collection.
The brick and mortar stores are already subject to it. Everyone who walks through the door and buys something has to pay sales tax.
They could do the same thing that they do with the War on Drugs. They might either liaison with other intelligence agencies in the target country, or they will just work out of the embassy like the DEA does in Colombia.
I'd like to see a hybrid economy emerge. The big box stores are there because people like having everything in one place. The down side is that the sales associates do not know much about any individual product. Furthermore, the selection tends to be limited based on whatever purchasing agreements and relationships the parent company has with their suppliers.
It would be great to have smaller, community focused businesses of experts. The experts could leverage the vastness of the internet supply chains to find the best products for their customers. They could provide personalized, expert service for their specific niche. Rather than ordering from Dell and waiting a few days, someone could buy from the local shop and wait a few days while that person builds the best computer available that fits the price point the customer is looking to pay.
All of the increasingly more vacant strip malls could come back, each one focused on general niches... electronics, kitchen/cooking, whatever.
The biggest challenge would stem from finding enough competent experts to band together to fill a strip mall. Beyond that, such synergies are hard to duplicate in a reliable manner.
I'm of the school of thought that any company should be responsible for collecting taxes and remitting those taxes to the locality where the goods are delivered to. See some of my other posts. In my mind the bigger question is, how are we as a society going to deal with the loss of tax revenue as internet retailers displace traditional brick and mortar stores. The consumers are still buying goods, but the states are not realizing any tax revenue.
In my mind, tax revenue is important. It funds things like roads, power, clean water, etc. Sure, there are some big wastes of tax money and California is the perfect example of stupid social policies so it is hard to take California's side in this one. I'm not interested in "California versus Amazon". I'm interested in the bigger picture that I just described. Lets face it. Amazon is not going to come out and say, "Residents of California, thank you for spending hundreds of millions of dollars with us last year. Here, let us fill some potholes for you."
The article might be interesting, but what concerns me on a higher level is what are we going to do as a society to deal with brick and mortar businesses disappearing and taking their tax revenue with them. Amazon is doing business in place of traditional businesses that did business in the state. The consumers are still there and they are still buying products, but now the state is losing out on the tax revenue. It seems like we have two choices.
Either we force Amazon into a lot of businesses they do not want to be in (road construction, power distribution, trash collection, etc), or we find a way to continue funding those essential functions through the state, via taxes.
As much as I hate to bring up the "but it's on the internet" line of logic, it applies in this case. Amazon benefits from the internet to conduct their business. The packets travel from their servers, through internet lines physically located in California, to reach computers physically located in California. They ship physical goods to customers who physically reside in California.
The whole discussion of subsidiaries and "physical presence" is simply legal wrangling and exploiting laws that have not been modified to deal with the way the internet has changed business dynamics.
Slashdot Mirror
What does your pessimism have to do with the reality of the specifics involved with Cisco acquiring Tandberg?
Exactly, they did need the patents. I'm not so sure about your claim about stifling competition though. The DoJ went over that deal with a fine toothed comb and even issued a second request for information. Polycomm threw their hat into the ring against the deal. In the end the analysis showed that the deal was a good one for everyone involved, including consumers.
The article mentioned that VIDEO is one of the key areas that they are focusing on. Tandberg fits there, and the Tandberg acquisition is a key part of Cisco's portfolio. They had to go to bat against the DoJ on that one. Tandberg has the best video conferencing solution on the market.
My edge routers for the data center infrastructure? Juniper.
And what's at the Core?
. I was a few years out of college and just settling in to a lead developer role.
How would you feel if your boss pulled you out of the lead role and put the old man in front of you? Try to be honest, not looking back with 20/20 hindsight on how good of an experience it turned out to be.
First world people do not have the jobs, and now do not have the credit to buy the products. New markets are being developed overseas where the locals have not yet sold themselves up to their eyeballs into credit/debt slavery. Unless there is a serious change to the global economic order, on the scale of "one world government" type change, that dynamic will not change.
America fell with NAFTA and the loss of the manufacturing base. There is nothing short of armed revolution that will bring that back. And even if that happens, America does not have the resources to feed into the manfacturing process to make it work. Our economy and country was built on exploiting the resources of the rest of the world for the last three generations. The only way to try to maintain our "quality of life" at this point is to have everyone else build things for us, and then pay for those goods with dollars.
Once the dollar crashes, as it is trying very hard to do right now with Europe getting ready to default in a big way, America is going to have some real problems. On the bright side of things, most of the rest of the world depends on us to IMPORT from them. We still EXPORT large amounts of food. Sure, our quality of life will take a big hit, but at least we will be able to feed ourselves.
I have only worked at one organization that went through any significant downsizing, but it played out differently than you laid out. First they cut from the bottom and did away with as many redundancies as possible. They also aimed at parts of various departments that were not critical to the operation of the company. On the second round of layoffs they took out most of the middle management. That is what sucked the most for me. I lost my boss (no big loss, he didn't do much anyway) but then had to pick up his work, plus my work, and didn't receive a bump in salary. Even my suggestion that they split the difference and bump me up to half way between what I made and he made was rejected.
I have since moved on. The people who rarely get cut are the senior management. You know, the people who are so out of touch with what is really going on that they fail to actually lead.
They realized it a few years, but it looks like they are now thinking about making it mandatory.
See "Windows Server Core"
The horse has already been beat to death, but I have to jump in anyway. I have been waiting for a new Syndicate game forever. I actually liked Syndicate Wars because it introduced some new dynamics to the game. Being able to rob banks was pretty cool, especially with the enhanced police response that came along with it. It was a nice change to the "persuade the whole city" for money route of raising cash. They also adjusted the squad dynamics. In Syndicate, you could arm everyone with miniguns and be good to go. Toward some of the later missions in Syndicate Wars, you had to mix up the weapons. Miniguns were practically worthless against vehicles so you needed one or two guys with lasers. But lasers were pretty worthless against enemy agents, so you had to have a minigun and probably a sniper rifle to balance things out.
I played the first one so many times that it got to the point where I could pass almost every mission with a single guy armed only with a pistol and a persuadatron.
The new one will fail. It will fail for many reasons. However, it will be so full of fail primarily for one reason. They have taken away the suicide operative dynamic. Sure, it wasn't really good strategy and it was pretty expensive. But who didn't love cranking a guy up to full speed and rushing him head-long into the target only to blow him up with a Ctrl+D?
The FPS dynamic takes out the uber cool, from the blimp POV of your agent taking out a good portion of a city block, complete with who knows how many civilians running away like flaming torches.
How can you say that Syndicate Wars was a flop? You could rob banks. They had flying cars. They did away with the stupid ammunition counters so you didn't spent the second half of the mission searching for guns. The sniper rifle was bad ass. I wouldn't say that it was better than the original, but it was pretty damn good.
Where do these vendors source their hardware from? Do they go straight to Taiwan with specs in hand and have a production run of boards done? What happens when they need spares? Do they just buy a whole slew of spares and then when those run out, move onto the next design?
What happens with industry wide problems, like with what Intel experienced with the SandyBridge CPUs? I ran into some weird issues where a couple of my Dell blades were not seeing all of the RAM. They had a firmware fix available for it. What happens in similar situations with these custom built solutions where companies like Google are designing their own boards, and presumably do not have as much leverage with the BIOS developers.
Of course the summary leaves out the part of the conversation where bandwidth is also a measure of well, bandwidth. Just because one single individual device can only get ~500MB does not mean that GbE is worthless. What if there are two laptops sharing that connection? It will be tapped out. Put another one on there and all of a sudden a one gig pipe is not big enough.
How stupid are people, really?
Hearing aids are a "medical device" and for most patients are paid for, or at least partially paid for, by insurance. As long as a person only has to pay a "$20 co-pay" or similar price that does not reflect the actual market cost of the device, the price will remain inflated.
The "crippling small business" argument is already stale. It would be simple enough to imagine a system where the state publishes a state sales tax for internet retailers. I've already outlined the framework in another post so I won't rehash it here.
Maybe you can look to the future and offer some constructive input about how to account for declining local tax bases. Maybe figure out some way to be constructive and contribute to the conversation. I'll welcome you back at that point.
I'm saying the old process is broken and a new process needs to be developed to deal with the new realities of commerce on the internet. We cannot continue to starve our local and state governments of tax revenue and expect to maintain the same quality of life and services that we have come to expect.
So either we need to figure out a way to adjust the tax structure to prevent the flight of taxes from local government and into the black hole that is executive compensation and the DJIA, or we need to get used to pot holes and ever lower achievements from the students going to our under funded schools.
What are you talking about? It seems like you're trying to confuse the issue. Nobody pays sales tax twice when they purchase anything in a store.
It's impossible. The property lines are split at the state line. You couldn't build a building across state lines.
Maybe you need a car analogy?
The questions you bring up is why the Feds need to step in. The Feds would basically tell the individual state governments, "If you want an internet retailer to collect taxes for your state, you need to publish a state wide tax rate. You are allowed to update it once a year." The Feds would then pass a law that obliges internet retailers to refer to that published tax table and collect taxes accordingly.
The states can then hash it out with the cities and counties on a local level. The retailers would publish an obfuscated report that just contains the zipcode+4 of the delivery plus the amount of tax collected. The cities and counties can query that list and submit a bill to the state. Every party involved would need to allow 10% or whatever for administrative overhead. By that I mean 10% of the tax collected, not a 10% tax. And the 10% is a random number, it might be lower given there are already departments setup for tax collection.
The brick and mortar stores are already subject to it. Everyone who walks through the door and buys something has to pay sales tax.
They could do the same thing that they do with the War on Drugs. They might either liaison with other intelligence agencies in the target country, or they will just work out of the embassy like the DEA does in Colombia.
I'd like to see a hybrid economy emerge. The big box stores are there because people like having everything in one place. The down side is that the sales associates do not know much about any individual product. Furthermore, the selection tends to be limited based on whatever purchasing agreements and relationships the parent company has with their suppliers.
It would be great to have smaller, community focused businesses of experts. The experts could leverage the vastness of the internet supply chains to find the best products for their customers. They could provide personalized, expert service for their specific niche. Rather than ordering from Dell and waiting a few days, someone could buy from the local shop and wait a few days while that person builds the best computer available that fits the price point the customer is looking to pay.
All of the increasingly more vacant strip malls could come back, each one focused on general niches... electronics, kitchen/cooking, whatever.
The biggest challenge would stem from finding enough competent experts to band together to fill a strip mall. Beyond that, such synergies are hard to duplicate in a reliable manner.
I remember mail order. Mail order did not introduce a paradigm shift in the economy the way the internet has.
I'm of the school of thought that any company should be responsible for collecting taxes and remitting those taxes to the locality where the goods are delivered to. See some of my other posts. In my mind the bigger question is, how are we as a society going to deal with the loss of tax revenue as internet retailers displace traditional brick and mortar stores. The consumers are still buying goods, but the states are not realizing any tax revenue.
In my mind, tax revenue is important. It funds things like roads, power, clean water, etc. Sure, there are some big wastes of tax money and California is the perfect example of stupid social policies so it is hard to take California's side in this one. I'm not interested in "California versus Amazon". I'm interested in the bigger picture that I just described. Lets face it. Amazon is not going to come out and say, "Residents of California, thank you for spending hundreds of millions of dollars with us last year. Here, let us fill some potholes for you."
Perhaps you should read the article?
You must be new here. ;)
The article might be interesting, but what concerns me on a higher level is what are we going to do as a society to deal with brick and mortar businesses disappearing and taking their tax revenue with them. Amazon is doing business in place of traditional businesses that did business in the state. The consumers are still there and they are still buying products, but now the state is losing out on the tax revenue. It seems like we have two choices.
Either we force Amazon into a lot of businesses they do not want to be in (road construction, power distribution, trash collection, etc), or we find a way to continue funding those essential functions through the state, via taxes.
As much as I hate to bring up the "but it's on the internet" line of logic, it applies in this case. Amazon benefits from the internet to conduct their business. The packets travel from their servers, through internet lines physically located in California, to reach computers physically located in California. They ship physical goods to customers who physically reside in California.
The whole discussion of subsidiaries and "physical presence" is simply legal wrangling and exploiting laws that have not been modified to deal with the way the internet has changed business dynamics.