How much is "enough"? For the scale of destruction for which the zombie thing is a metaphor, help isn't going to arrive in for months, if at all. You'd need a big box full of NiMH batteries and a big PVA, a solar thermal water heater and a solar still, since the "zombies" would continue to threaten and you'd prefer to sit tight on your roof rather than go foraging. The solar still is because you will have to recycle your own urine. You still won't have enough food, so eventually you will have to go foraging. You'll need a party of armed men. Has to be men, women argue and have microscopic bladders, and after a while they cause division among men just by being female, which might not be intentional but it still happens. And the men will argue too unless they are fast friends and have trained together with firearms. A group of hunters would probably work. Soldiers would be better. In an armoured vehicle. Two armoured vehicles. With flamethrowers. This is starting to sound like fun.
The Hubble telescope is not an array telescope. It is a Ritchey-Chretiene double hyperbolic reflector telescope which is an American design. Well, partly. Chretiene was French. But Ritchey was American!
The rocketry underpinning the space program was developed during WW2 -- mostly by Germans.
Fission reactors are a Hungarian idea. Some credit to America for building the first working fission pile, but Russia was first to use fission to generate electricity for public use.
You'd think America would be all over the combustion engine. First commercial use was by Samuel Brown of England. The Germans invented practically everything else with a sprinkling of firsts across Europe, such as the gas turbine from Norway. The first notable contribution of America to any type of combustion engine whatsoever was the National Bureau of Standard's published opinion that jet engines weren't a good idea. Happily the rest of the world ignored them and jet engines became viable during WW2 -- thanks to the efforts of Germany. Later on America did share the development of the scramjet with Britain.
Guns? Actually yes, lots of contributions here. But the cheapest, most reliable assault weapon in history is Russian: the AK47. The infamous Claymore mine is based on a Canadian weapon.
The silicon substrate transistor is a British idea: Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen.
Array telescopes (the basis of the Hubble) were invented by Australia.
Over-the-horizon ground based radar is cheaper than satellites and neatly defeats aircraft radar cloaking by using the ionosphere to look from above. Also Australian.
The CD was commercialised by the Dutch based on a Japanese invention (the Laserdisc) based on a French invention (the laser) based on some German physics theory (relativity wasn't Einstein's only work).
TV was invented by a Scotsman (Baird) and first used on a large scale in Germany.
So has America invented anything?
Having been shown by Britain how to make a transistor, America did at least pick up the idea and run with it. Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit in 1954 for Texas Instruments.
Blank silicon wafers are still only made in commercial quantity by the United States.
This started out as a lighthearted troll, but I'm starting to wonder if it isn't acually true. Surely someone can think of some genuinely American innovation?
Notwithstanding the issues surrounding what might be described as Cliquipedia (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) I have to object to some of the fundamental philosophy underpinning "acceptable" content.
They don't accept original work, and they don't accept speculation. Now, I agree that original work should be called out as such. It ought to reference or contain methodology and details of any supporting lab work from which the assertions were derived. But a properly documented and checked primary source is worth a thousand unchecked but published and thoroughly referenced learned opinions.
As for speculation, all of science is speculation. The only certainty in science is that the body of "knowledge" is more of a body of current best guesses that's as internally consistent as we can make it and makes predictions that check out when checking is possible. If you really want to omit speculation then the article on cosmology would have to be limited to "There are lights in the sky. Spectral analysis yielded (table of values). Parallax effects suggest great distance."
Wikipedia is not, we are told, the place to publish your work. But why not? Is there any good reason not to use it like this?
All money is virtual. Coins and notes are storage media, not the thing stored. If you rip a ten dollar bill you don't get dollar coins falling out. At one time a Pound Sterling was redeemable at Her Majesty's treasury for one pound of sterling silver, sterling being a grade of silver. But with the rise of fiat currency, money is a pure abstraction, and the value of it depends entirely on whether you can get others to believe in its worth... a kind of consensual hallucination.
I never forgive spelling errors, not even when they're mine. It's dilemma. A lemma is trivial axiom, a self-evident fact (Gr lemma something taken for granted) and a dilemma is a situation in which you have two lemmata, the juxtaposition of which is inconvenient.
I have been in a Qantas flight, departing Australia for some stop-over en route to Europe, and as usual they played a recorded message about Australian smoking laws, and how there wasn't a smoking section because smoking was not permitted anywhere in the plane at any time during the journey. The moment they got out of Australian airspace they turned the non-smoking sign off and announced you could smoke in the smoking section at the rear of the plane. I daresay that Japan being a sovereign power can declare and enforce that the inside of a plane is subject to Japanese law while it's in Japanese territory, and anyone who doesn't like that had best not land in Japan.
In respect of getting things onto your small plane without government interference, the trick is to load your luggage at a domestic airport and fly to an international airport for a customs stopover. They generally don't search outbound traffic unless you're suspected of something. You might get the dogs but they're just after drugs, which presumably you don't have.
A key point here is the difference between rights and privileges. Privileges can be arbitrarily revoked, rights cannot. If your government (or any other party) can take it away, it isn't a right, it is a privilege. Freedom in the USA became a right because ten thousand soldiers can dominate the daily doings of a million individuals, but not when
Provision of food, shelter etc is largely decentralised
They are spread across a huge continent
Many of them are well armed
Idiotic bright red uniforms render minions of the intending oppressor easily identified at a distance, in an newly dawned era of inexpensive range weapons
While personally unfamiliar with that portion of Anglo-american history, I would be very surprised if there weren't quite a few British soldiers thinking, "Were one to take the target off off one's back and walk for two days, one need no longer risk shooting or shouting, or (in the unlikely event of unscathed retirement) smog and freezing rain." Possibly the mindset of people who insist their soldiers wear bright red, and march in columns, did not extend to intelligence gathering by infiltration. Or perhaps they were aware that the difference between infiltration and exfiltration is a vanishing chuckle.
SInce Android and the iPhone use ActiveSync, that would be a problem for Microsoft, not Apple
I was blissfully unaware of that. Now that I know, I agree with you. It's amazing how one extra fact can change everything. But I still think Microsoft will do well on this one simply because they are commoditising the cellphone and turning it into an extension of the network, home and office in a way that a non-Windows phone never can.
Zune was in this sense an attempt to commoditise the iPod market. Why should WP7 succeed as a commodity given the failure of Zune? Because the PDA/phone/GPS is a tool, not a toy. Location/communication/diary/mobile integration with larger systems has much higher utility value than music. And it does music.
Perhaps that is the core of the Apple phenomenon: tools that are fun.
To me the Newton is the grandaddy of them all because it's obvious that it's a PDA. You might disagree and pick the first PDA phone, whatever that was, but the Newton remains the first serious attempt at a PDA. I think even the name PDA was coined for the Newton by Apple marketroids.
Personally I've never actually used a Blackberry. I can tell you this though: the businesspeople here universally loathe them. I asked why they all bought them and the answer, through a hail of buzzwords, was "Exchange compatibility".
I gather from one of my iPhone wielding friends that iPhones are very Exchange friendly, but the business types here remain blissfully ignorant of this, and as I want them to buy WP7S for me to play, with I don't intend to tell them:)
On this basis I think WP7S will inherit the Blackberry market segment. But more than this, the PDA has become a standard issue business accessory. Businesses are starting to treat them as mobile IT equipment and on that basis are beginning to set internal equipment requirements to contain the spiralling cost of support. In this context, Microsoft is an old hand with profound presence, in a position to use their standard embrace and extend attack pattern.
I predict collaboration enhancements to Exchange designed to be slightly incompatible with the iPhone client, with a fallback mode that conspicuously informs users that due to their use of an obsolete client they can access only a subset of services. This would give Microsoft frequent opportunities to make the competing product look second-rate while never actually saying anything negative or untrue.
There is no such crowd and the secret behind the iPhone is it's never been about style over substance.
Yes there is. The first three people I knew who had iPhones were of a certain persasion and to a man they were die-hard style captains. I had a lovely time ribbing them about how they were entrenching stereotyped perceptions.
I rather think that without Hollywood hogging the limelight, indy film producers would be a lot more successful and would recover their costs quite a bit faster.
Besides, Hollywood already produced the ultimate blockbuster - Avatar. It has aliens, army guys, giant robots, machine guns, spaceships, explosions, boobs, noble savages, evil corporations, Romeo and Juliet (a doomed romance), dinosaurs, a dramatic race against time to save the world, elves (tall slim forest people with pointy ears) and dragonriders. In 3D.
Wow. You've just provided a rational explanation of religion in general and cults in particular. It's a pity you didn't also have a look at the reaction of the rest of the group when someone dares to contradict dogma.
Twenty years? Five years, for movies. Seriously, five years later a movie only gets played on TV if
It's cheap because it's rubbish
It's awesome and can support ten minute ad breaks all through it
If a movie is so awesome it can support ten minute ad breaks all through it, then arguably it is a cultural icon and should move to the public domain.
Music is a little different. The chances of repeat play are much much higher.
I could go off on a long rant but the long and the short of it is that the value of music companies to society was the services of distribution and promotion. Google and youtube have reduced the sell price of these services to zero, so the commercial value of music company services is close to zero. In a free market economy they would have gone broke five years ago and rightly so.
The idea was not at all ahead of its time, it was a natural evolution of the Palm PDA. I always maintained Palm could have given us basically an iPhone about three years before Apple. and thus we could have had an iPad three years sooner too. Perhaps it would have lacked a GPS chip or something along those lines, but those are totally extraneous to the core functionality and it all could have been running Palm apps with a natural migration.
It was a natural evolution of the Newton, if it comes to that. Which was an Apple innovation. But I have to reassert that it was ahead of its time because even the iPhone itself is nothing without the network, and cheap data on the cell net is recent. Perhaps things were different in the USA or wherever you are, but in Australia and Europe circa 2001, a device like the iPhone would have been prohibitively expensive to operate.
I think MS has quite a good plan and the resources to execute, you disagree. Time will tell. These things are notoriously difficult to pick. The Zune is a beautiful piece of kit with an extremely well designed UI, and is competitively priced. It should have monstered the iPhone, and didn't. The reason I expect better this time is that the WP7S platform, unlike its precursors, shares both dev model and dev tools with desktop Windows, and shares XNA with Xbox360. That gives it not one but two dev cultures to draw upon. This time, Igor! This time!
People waffle about how many iPhone apps there are, but quantity is not quality. The iPhone apps I've seen are rubbish. I really don't need an app to make my phone sound like a lightsabre or a bullwhip. Everywhere I go there are workstations with internet connections. I tried playing some of the games but they failed to engage.
So what does the iPhone have going for it? A very complete hardware platform. Half a dozen UI innovations and endorsement from the SOS (style over substance) crowd. The UI innovations have all been copied and improved upon. That particular hardware configuration is no longer unique and will soon be ubiquitous. And there are now so many iPhones they aren't cool any more. The flip side of which is entrenchment and user-base, but the business crowd will say it's not compatible with my office software, and the phone junkies will buy a different phone because that's what they do.
A counterargument has just come to me. A plausible reason for failure of the Zune was the simple fact that it was branded Microsoft. The Microsoft-bashing crowd includes most of the arty types who provide the glitz and chic synthétique so vital to triggering herd behaviour. This could well interfere with uptake of WP7S. But I will continue to specify them because they are an excellent platform for my purposes. Our customers will have them essentially because I said so. Their employees will have one because a free WP7S is better than an iPhone you have to pay for. [cue thunder and diabolical laughter]
Yes, it's exactly this tortoise/hare kind of arrogant assumption that only Microsoft could lead new markets that has led Microsoft into the conundrum they are in - being essentially non-existant in any platform with a future.
This statement does you no credit. They make no such assumption. Microsoft is acutely aware that it is a huge lumbering entity incapable of innovation, and compensates by supporting startups and then buying them if they actually come up with something good. Why do you think slashdot uses the Borg-Bill imagery?
Just because Apple also failed to do anything with this market earlier does not excuse Microsoft from their own failures. What's amusing though is Jobs shares your own disdain for the Newton
It's not a question of excuses. The idea was simply ahead of its time. The hardware wasn't there. Now it is, the idea's time has come, and every man and his dog is making one. Apple's own success suggests that what people will pay for is opportunity for social discrimination that places no intellectual demand on them. They aren't buying a PDA/phone, they're buying a sign that says "I'm cooler/richer/more desirable than you are." That Apple's toys are expensive only makes them better for the purposes of peacock tail sexual display; it slows down the riffraff.
Happily, there are so many iPhones out there now that they no longer serve this purpose. With any luck sanity will return and the market will be driven by a competition to commoditise. Microsoft has a talent for this, so I disagree with the negative outlook you give them.
Phone manufacturers will fiercely resist commoditisation since it would force them to compete on price and build quality. I predict that Microsoft will run out of patience with the squirming evasions of individual phone makers, and instead collaborate directly with either Intel or Motorola. Probably Intel, since Intel has significant interest in perpetuating the Wintel Hegemony.
You see, unlike Microsoft Apple is also giving away a vast number of development resources, for free. iTunes U with a ton of free development videos, and every session from the recent Apple developers conference to anyone who has joined the $99/year program
Microsoft pioneered the approach of giving away high quality developer resources. They've been doing it since Windows 3.1 was released around 1990. The sessions from TechEd can be downloaded at no charge. It is pleasing to learn that Apple has followed suit.
'If there were no Apple, it would be necessary for Microsoft to create one.' (apologies to Voltaire)
I rather think I did. (Lord Vetinari)
Over the past fifteen years I have known various Microsofties. Whenever the Apple/Microsoft "conflict" was discussed they would laugh and point out that the biggest selling applications on the Macintosh platform were (and still are) Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. If the discussion got techy and they were feeling nasty they might mention NeXT.
I do think the pocket is the next great computing frontier. While Microsoft has been messing about for a good decade without producing anything spectacular, I think this was less due to any shortcomings of Microsoft than to it being an idea for which neither technology nor the buying public was ready. I notice none of the Apple fanbois has mentioned the Newton. Stylish and overpriced like everything else Apple peddles, it fell slightly short of the mark in every way. Don't bother to contradict me, this is the voice of experience. I had one and adored it, but the only thing it was really good for was making a space in people's minds for something that couldn't be built, like Leonardo da Vinci's submarines and helicopters.
Times changed. Now you can buy (commercial qty prices)
A GPS chipset for $30
A 3G module for $40
4G of flash RAM for $30
1G of DRAM for $10
A VGA LCD screen for about $40
A triaxial accelerometer for about $30
Giving you a bill of materials cost for iPhone equivalent hardware of about $180. Since retail price for a typical consumer product is nearly always four times the cost of manufacture, I would expect an iPhone to retail for $800 - which is pretty much what they do cost. (If you think all these prices are wrong then you probably live in another country.)
The Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series has almost exactly the hardware spec I describe above. It's basically an iPhone, except that unlike Apple, Microsoft is all but giving the development tools away. Microsoft is commoditising phones, just as they did to PCs twenty years ago. I don't know about you but I rather like that idea.
"If you build it they will come" is bollocks. If you build it and they don't come, you will go broke and be forgotten. If you build it and by some bizarre chance it really floats their collective boat, then you will be wealthy and in a position to publish self-congratulatory and eminently quotable epithets such as "If you build it they will come."
Darwinism is brutal. Any given frog has hundreds of thousands of offspring over the course of its life. You can tell that statistically only two of them survive to breed from the fact that we are not hip deep in frogs. So it is with business ideas and enterprises. Few of them survive. As with nature red in tooth and claw, survival is slightly dependent on fitness in context and heavily dependent on luck.
People with enhanced immune systems will run around cheerfully breathing pathogens on people who can't survive them. For once there is a strong and direct correlation between intelligence and chance of survival.
Apple products were open. My Apple II had slots for which any number of companies produced cards. I even had a Z80 card made by Microsoft that I used to run TurboPascal on CP/M. Apple closed their products as a business decision when Jobs decided the computer should be an appliance, first manifest in the Lisa and then in the Mac. Intel and OS/X doesn't change that, it merely commoditises the hardware.
You mount it on a Warthog! Or a battlemech, but those are so nineties. Anyway, you guys all ask the wrong question. The real questions are
How much?
Where can I get one?
Can I be the Master Chief, and
Technically this isn't a firearm because it doesn't throw a projectile. Does this mean that, due to the lag of law behind tech, for the time being it's unregulated and therefore legal for me to have one? Once I have one it's a lot harder to tell me I can't have it! Can anyone say "sentry gun"?
First, diplomacy. It isn't smart to point out to an enormous, well-organised, well-funded group that its dearest tenets are patently and hilariously utter bollocks.
Second, contamination: when your own ranks are filled with people infected with these delusions it is not possible to recognise their pathology.
Slashdot Mirror
How much is "enough"? For the scale of destruction for which the zombie thing is a metaphor, help isn't going to arrive in for months, if at all. You'd need a big box full of NiMH batteries and a big PVA, a solar thermal water heater and a solar still, since the "zombies" would continue to threaten and you'd prefer to sit tight on your roof rather than go foraging. The solar still is because you will have to recycle your own urine. You still won't have enough food, so eventually you will have to go foraging. You'll need a party of armed men. Has to be men, women argue and have microscopic bladders, and after a while they cause division among men just by being female, which might not be intentional but it still happens. And the men will argue too unless they are fast friends and have trained together with firearms. A group of hunters would probably work. Soldiers would be better. In an armoured vehicle. Two armoured vehicles. With flamethrowers. This is starting to sound like fun.
The Hubble telescope is not an array telescope. It is a Ritchey-Chretiene double hyperbolic reflector telescope which is an American design. Well, partly. Chretiene was French. But Ritchey was American!
So has America invented anything?
This started out as a lighthearted troll, but I'm starting to wonder if it isn't acually true. Surely someone can think of some genuinely American innovation?
Notwithstanding the issues surrounding what might be described as Cliquipedia (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) I have to object to some of the fundamental philosophy underpinning "acceptable" content.
They don't accept original work, and they don't accept speculation. Now, I agree that original work should be called out as such. It ought to reference or contain methodology and details of any supporting lab work from which the assertions were derived. But a properly documented and checked primary source is worth a thousand unchecked but published and thoroughly referenced learned opinions.
As for speculation, all of science is speculation. The only certainty in science is that the body of "knowledge" is more of a body of current best guesses that's as internally consistent as we can make it and makes predictions that check out when checking is possible. If you really want to omit speculation then the article on cosmology would have to be limited to "There are lights in the sky. Spectral analysis yielded (table of values). Parallax effects suggest great distance."
Wikipedia is not, we are told, the place to publish your work. But why not? Is there any good reason not to use it like this?
All money is virtual. Coins and notes are storage media, not the thing stored. If you rip a ten dollar bill you don't get dollar coins falling out. At one time a Pound Sterling was redeemable at Her Majesty's treasury for one pound of sterling silver, sterling being a grade of silver. But with the rise of fiat currency, money is a pure abstraction, and the value of it depends entirely on whether you can get others to believe in its worth... a kind of consensual hallucination.
I never forgive spelling errors, not even when they're mine. It's dilemma. A lemma is trivial axiom, a self-evident fact (Gr lemma something taken for granted) and a dilemma is a situation in which you have two lemmata, the juxtaposition of which is inconvenient.
I have been in a Qantas flight, departing Australia for some stop-over en route to Europe, and as usual they played a recorded message about Australian smoking laws, and how there wasn't a smoking section because smoking was not permitted anywhere in the plane at any time during the journey. The moment they got out of Australian airspace they turned the non-smoking sign off and announced you could smoke in the smoking section at the rear of the plane. I daresay that Japan being a sovereign power can declare and enforce that the inside of a plane is subject to Japanese law while it's in Japanese territory, and anyone who doesn't like that had best not land in Japan. In respect of getting things onto your small plane without government interference, the trick is to load your luggage at a domestic airport and fly to an international airport for a customs stopover. They generally don't search outbound traffic unless you're suspected of something. You might get the dogs but they're just after drugs, which presumably you don't have.
While personally unfamiliar with that portion of Anglo-american history, I would be very surprised if there weren't quite a few British soldiers thinking, "Were one to take the target off off one's back and walk for two days, one need no longer risk shooting or shouting, or (in the unlikely event of unscathed retirement) smog and freezing rain." Possibly the mindset of people who insist their soldiers wear bright red, and march in columns, did not extend to intelligence gathering by infiltration. Or perhaps they were aware that the difference between infiltration and exfiltration is a vanishing chuckle.
I really hope so. Such an awkward name.
I was blissfully unaware of that. Now that I know, I agree with you. It's amazing how one extra fact can change everything. But I still think Microsoft will do well on this one simply because they are commoditising the cellphone and turning it into an extension of the network, home and office in a way that a non-Windows phone never can.
Zune was in this sense an attempt to commoditise the iPod market. Why should WP7 succeed as a commodity given the failure of Zune? Because the PDA/phone/GPS is a tool, not a toy. Location/communication/diary/mobile integration with larger systems has much higher utility value than music. And it does music.
Perhaps that is the core of the Apple phenomenon: tools that are fun.
To me the Newton is the grandaddy of them all because it's obvious that it's a PDA. You might disagree and pick the first PDA phone, whatever that was, but the Newton remains the first serious attempt at a PDA. I think even the name PDA was coined for the Newton by Apple marketroids.
Personally I've never actually used a Blackberry. I can tell you this though: the businesspeople here universally loathe them. I asked why they all bought them and the answer, through a hail of buzzwords, was "Exchange compatibility".
I gather from one of my iPhone wielding friends that iPhones are very Exchange friendly, but the business types here remain blissfully ignorant of this, and as I want them to buy WP7S for me to play, with I don't intend to tell them :)
On this basis I think WP7S will inherit the Blackberry market segment. But more than this, the PDA has become a standard issue business accessory. Businesses are starting to treat them as mobile IT equipment and on that basis are beginning to set internal equipment requirements to contain the spiralling cost of support. In this context, Microsoft is an old hand with profound presence, in a position to use their standard embrace and extend attack pattern.
I predict collaboration enhancements to Exchange designed to be slightly incompatible with the iPhone client, with a fallback mode that conspicuously informs users that due to their use of an obsolete client they can access only a subset of services. This would give Microsoft frequent opportunities to make the competing product look second-rate while never actually saying anything negative or untrue.
Yes there is. The first three people I knew who had iPhones were of a certain persasion and to a man they were die-hard style captains. I had a lovely time ribbing them about how they were entrenching stereotyped perceptions.
I rather think that without Hollywood hogging the limelight, indy film producers would be a lot more successful and would recover their costs quite a bit faster.
Besides, Hollywood already produced the ultimate blockbuster - Avatar. It has aliens, army guys, giant robots, machine guns, spaceships, explosions, boobs, noble savages, evil corporations, Romeo and Juliet (a doomed romance), dinosaurs, a dramatic race against time to save the world, elves (tall slim forest people with pointy ears) and dragonriders. In 3D.
True. But is it also true that indie movies never cost anything like as much to produce.
Wow. You've just provided a rational explanation of religion in general and cults in particular. It's a pity you didn't also have a look at the reaction of the rest of the group when someone dares to contradict dogma.
Twenty years? Five years, for movies. Seriously, five years later a movie only gets played on TV if
If a movie is so awesome it can support ten minute ad breaks all through it, then arguably it is a cultural icon and should move to the public domain.
Music is a little different. The chances of repeat play are much much higher.
I could go off on a long rant but the long and the short of it is that the value of music companies to society was the services of distribution and promotion. Google and youtube have reduced the sell price of these services to zero, so the commercial value of music company services is close to zero. In a free market economy they would have gone broke five years ago and rightly so.
Mmmmmmm, Doughnuts! Oooh look, boobies. Hey, where's my doughnut gone?!
It was a natural evolution of the Newton, if it comes to that. Which was an Apple innovation. But I have to reassert that it was ahead of its time because even the iPhone itself is nothing without the network, and cheap data on the cell net is recent. Perhaps things were different in the USA or wherever you are, but in Australia and Europe circa 2001, a device like the iPhone would have been prohibitively expensive to operate.
I think MS has quite a good plan and the resources to execute, you disagree. Time will tell. These things are notoriously difficult to pick. The Zune is a beautiful piece of kit with an extremely well designed UI, and is competitively priced. It should have monstered the iPhone, and didn't. The reason I expect better this time is that the WP7S platform, unlike its precursors, shares both dev model and dev tools with desktop Windows, and shares XNA with Xbox360. That gives it not one but two dev cultures to draw upon. This time, Igor! This time!
People waffle about how many iPhone apps there are, but quantity is not quality. The iPhone apps I've seen are rubbish. I really don't need an app to make my phone sound like a lightsabre or a bullwhip. Everywhere I go there are workstations with internet connections. I tried playing some of the games but they failed to engage.
So what does the iPhone have going for it? A very complete hardware platform. Half a dozen UI innovations and endorsement from the SOS (style over substance) crowd. The UI innovations have all been copied and improved upon. That particular hardware configuration is no longer unique and will soon be ubiquitous. And there are now so many iPhones they aren't cool any more. The flip side of which is entrenchment and user-base, but the business crowd will say it's not compatible with my office software, and the phone junkies will buy a different phone because that's what they do.
A counterargument has just come to me. A plausible reason for failure of the Zune was the simple fact that it was branded Microsoft. The Microsoft-bashing crowd includes most of the arty types who provide the glitz and chic synthétique so vital to triggering herd behaviour. This could well interfere with uptake of WP7S. But I will continue to specify them because they are an excellent platform for my purposes. Our customers will have them essentially because I said so. Their employees will have one because a free WP7S is better than an iPhone you have to pay for. [cue thunder and diabolical laughter]
This statement does you no credit. They make no such assumption. Microsoft is acutely aware that it is a huge lumbering entity incapable of innovation, and compensates by supporting startups and then buying them if they actually come up with something good. Why do you think slashdot uses the Borg-Bill imagery?
It's not a question of excuses. The idea was simply ahead of its time. The hardware wasn't there. Now it is, the idea's time has come, and every man and his dog is making one. Apple's own success suggests that what people will pay for is opportunity for social discrimination that places no intellectual demand on them. They aren't buying a PDA/phone, they're buying a sign that says "I'm cooler/richer/more desirable than you are." That Apple's toys are expensive only makes them better for the purposes of peacock tail sexual display; it slows down the riffraff.
Happily, there are so many iPhones out there now that they no longer serve this purpose. With any luck sanity will return and the market will be driven by a competition to commoditise. Microsoft has a talent for this, so I disagree with the negative outlook you give them.
Phone manufacturers will fiercely resist commoditisation since it would force them to compete on price and build quality. I predict that Microsoft will run out of patience with the squirming evasions of individual phone makers, and instead collaborate directly with either Intel or Motorola. Probably Intel, since Intel has significant interest in perpetuating the Wintel Hegemony.
Microsoft pioneered the approach of giving away high quality developer resources. They've been doing it since Windows 3.1 was released around 1990. The sessions from TechEd can be downloaded at no charge. It is pleasing to learn that Apple has followed suit.
I rather think I did. (Lord Vetinari)
Over the past fifteen years I have known various Microsofties. Whenever the Apple/Microsoft "conflict" was discussed they would laugh and point out that the biggest selling applications on the Macintosh platform were (and still are) Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. If the discussion got techy and they were feeling nasty they might mention NeXT.
I do think the pocket is the next great computing frontier. While Microsoft has been messing about for a good decade without producing anything spectacular, I think this was less due to any shortcomings of Microsoft than to it being an idea for which neither technology nor the buying public was ready. I notice none of the Apple fanbois has mentioned the Newton. Stylish and overpriced like everything else Apple peddles, it fell slightly short of the mark in every way. Don't bother to contradict me, this is the voice of experience. I had one and adored it, but the only thing it was really good for was making a space in people's minds for something that couldn't be built, like Leonardo da Vinci's submarines and helicopters.
Times changed. Now you can buy (commercial qty prices)
Giving you a bill of materials cost for iPhone equivalent hardware of about $180. Since retail price for a typical consumer product is nearly always four times the cost of manufacture, I would expect an iPhone to retail for $800 - which is pretty much what they do cost. (If you think all these prices are wrong then you probably live in another country.)
The Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series has almost exactly the hardware spec I describe above. It's basically an iPhone, except that unlike Apple, Microsoft is all but giving the development tools away. Microsoft is commoditising phones, just as they did to PCs twenty years ago. I don't know about you but I rather like that idea.
This causes inflation, which erodes your hard earned savings.
This does not.
"If you build it they will come" is bollocks. If you build it and they don't come, you will go broke and be forgotten. If you build it and by some bizarre chance it really floats their collective boat, then you will be wealthy and in a position to publish self-congratulatory and eminently quotable epithets such as "If you build it they will come." Darwinism is brutal. Any given frog has hundreds of thousands of offspring over the course of its life. You can tell that statistically only two of them survive to breed from the fact that we are not hip deep in frogs. So it is with business ideas and enterprises. Few of them survive. As with nature red in tooth and claw, survival is slightly dependent on fitness in context and heavily dependent on luck.
People with enhanced immune systems will run around cheerfully breathing pathogens on people who can't survive them. For once there is a strong and direct correlation between intelligence and chance of survival.
Does that westernise as NecroTic?
Apple products were open. My Apple II had slots for which any number of companies produced cards. I even had a Z80 card made by Microsoft that I used to run TurboPascal on CP/M. Apple closed their products as a business decision when Jobs decided the computer should be an appliance, first manifest in the Lisa and then in the Mac. Intel and OS/X doesn't change that, it merely commoditises the hardware.
You mount it on a Warthog! Or a battlemech, but those are so nineties. Anyway, you guys all ask the wrong question. The real questions are
...for two reasons.
First, diplomacy. It isn't smart to point out to an enormous, well-organised, well-funded group that its dearest tenets are patently and hilariously utter bollocks.
Second, contamination: when your own ranks are filled with people infected with these delusions it is not possible to recognise their pathology.