Well, as has already been said, Microsoft's largest competitor in this area is still itself. It could patch XP indefinitely, but that wouldn't sell more copies of Windows 7. In all honesty, for an OS that's been around for the best part of a decade, I think the longevity of the support has been impressive (and even now they're not saying they won't support it, just that SP3 is now a requirement) - okay they screw up all over the place elsewhere, but you have to give it to them for at least trying here.
Is this even the case anymore? I know there were a lot of issues initially (which I think mostly transpired to be around the aggressive firewall rules), but most of those I thought were patched in the software or fixed in the OS. I know the last machine I upgraded from SP2 to SP3 (an old machine that previously didn't have net access but suddenly had to go online) didn't have any noticable issues, maybe I was lucky but I thought this was genuinely much less of an issue today.
Certainly 7 seems to be a major enhancement, although I honestly think they should have just written vista off completely and given out free upgrades to 7 so that people don't have to put up with that bloated monstrosity. It would be expensive, but not as expensive as the PR damage in the long run.
Well I'm sure there are still plenty of SP2 machines out there on illegitimate copies, probably the armies of botnets in the middle east that never got updated because the owners never saw the point (or they bought the machine in that condition and lacked the knowledge to update to a later cracked version), but there were also plenty of concerns about updating to WGA on legitimate XP installs. I don't know how much of an issue it is now, but at the time SP3 first released there were all kinds of horror stories about WGA screw ups, and a lot of enterprise customers were reluctant to update on that basis alone.
Even so, it's not like this date just jumped out on them, I remember talking about this something like four years ago. I wouldn't expect them to replace anything until the last minute, because that costs money and it's almost always smarter to wait in big business infrastructure, but if they got to two months away and didn't even have a migration plan, that's just incredibly shoddy.
You can't seriously expect a piece of software costing in the hundred dollar range to get the same level of support as a car that maybe had an initial cost in the tens of thousands. The "moving parts" are the technology the OS is running on, by the way. The software might not change, but try buying a PC today with the same spec as your PC in 1995, supporting all of the hardware iterations between then and now would give us an even more horribly bloated OS (if anything, MS probably does too much to support backwards compatability already).
If you don't have the money to spare then cheaper IS easier. The alternative is you have to go work for however long it takes to earn the money to buy the license (and potentially the Mac to do the development on, since you specifically mention iPhone/iPad), which for students and kids, the people they specifically tested this with, is certainly a barrier to "easy development".
Exactly, hell I've built a whole career from the simple beginnings of reading a few people's (back then) basic text websites on web development - the key here is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. If 99.9% of the stuff is crap, don't throw away the 0.1% that's gold, instead give people better tools to separate the two. If anyone can do that with apps, surely it's Google.
I think that's GP's point - it doesn't matter that the app, website, whatever, isn't the holy grail to everyone. It doesn't matter if it's the holy grail to a significant minority. In some cases, if only a handful of people find it useful, then that's enough. If it was a professionally developed app or site, it would be seen as a failure, but the very fact that it cost someone nothing but their spare time and has helped a bunch of other people is a net gain. It's never going to set the world alight, but by its own limited parameters it might still be a success.
You might think that's the best way to determine what apps should be created, but in practice what people say they want is hardly ever exactly what they do want. If you follow that route you quickly end up with "The Homer" - the everyman car that looks like a monstrosity and costs a fortune because it tries to be everything to everyone. If this tool makes it easy for regular people to prototype ideas quickly and test them in the wild, that's probably not a bad thing. Even if 99% of it is garbage. The 1% can always be polished by developers later if it takes off.
I wouldn't mind so much if Google gave me some tools and expected me to do a little work to get the apps I want. What I'd like to see are advanced search filters (date, downloads, rating, file size, maybe the stats for percentage of people who uninstalled the app - I'm sure they have those available) with the ability to save searchs and, perhaps just as importantly, the ability to block certain users or keyword matches (it seems 90% of the spam crap in the market place originate from a relatively small set of developers, if I could block those I'd instantly see improved results). These should be trivial for Google to implement.
Ranking at the moment seems to be skewed anyway, on the one hand by all the people spamming their websites (who just automatically give 5 stars to every single app, presumably because if the app ranks well there's more chance you'll see their spam in the comments) and on the other hand people who fail to read the disclaimers such as "this app doesn't work on handset X for hardware reasons Y and Z" but they still give it one star because they have handset X (like buying a Windows PC and complaining it won't run OSX software). Maybe these balance each other out but really it seems like the ranking scores are just too unreliable to be any use - downloads are a slightly better indicator, but even then pretty worthless for niche apps.
This seemed to be the most lacking area of the Android to me - given Google's search pedigree I was expecting all kinds of clever filters to help me find the right apps. In the end I decided it was easier to just use app review websites and forums to find the best apps, and to be honest it's not a major issue, just a little confusing it doesn't do this amazingly well right out of the box.
It's much easier to find apps using one of the app review websites than it is to use either Google's market or Apple's app store. Android makes this nice and simple with Google Goggles integration, so you find the app you want, snap a shot of its barcode with the phone camera and it will do the donkey work of finding the app. Alternatively you can use something like App Brain, where (I believe this is how it works, not used it myself) you have a login and you select the apps on your pc and your phone will just sync these later.
Both markets have their fair share of dross, but I have to say that so far I've been impressed particularly with the quality of what I've found for free on Android - I've not run into any situation yet where I couldn't find an app that did exactly what I wanted and was gratis.
Agreed, and it's all about perceptions as well. I knew plenty of guys at school who weren't into computers at all, but if you tell someone "this development kit makes it so easy, a teenage boy could use it" that's not a great endorsement, because the perception of most non-techies is that all teenage boys are "computer wizzkids". If you can say "look at what this group of teenage girls created", that takes the scary techie edge off (and I'm not suggesting that girls are any less competent here than boys, just that this is society's perception).
Re:Trying to put the cat back in the bag
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 1
The only way you can compete with free is by offering better. That's where I think Murdoch will fail. I don't think people would mind paying a sensible price (and given the distribution costs and the fact that it'll still be ad supported, "sensible" for online news should be next to free anyway - after all the cost of the traditional newspaper just pays for the paper and the distribution, it doesn't pay for the reporting) for good quality reporting, but you can't sell us the same crap back that we wouldn't read when it was free and hope that the cost association will somehow lend it an air of value.
Re:It is the beginning. Not the end.
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
Furthermore, this unfiltered content directly from the source is the best kind of content for most. Goodbye big media.
The cynic in me can't help thinking you might be misunderestimating the need of a lot of people to have their news pre-processed, to remove any sharp edges, and then distributed through a channel that they know will give them warm fuzzy views aligned with their own. That will be big media's niche. It's the only way I can begin to explain Faux News.
Re:how can you compare the web to the smartphone?
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
Given what we're being promised with HTML5, it seems like apps might be a nice interim measure until sufficient desktop browsers support the new features. At that point, as you say, it will make much more sense to write an app that is browser based and can run on any device, be it a Mac with Safari, a Windows PC with Chrome, a phone browser or whatever.
You realise you can also use that single device on your all encompassing home network? Assuming you could find the device minus a data package (sim only, no contract maybe) there's nothing stopping you using the phone just for calls/text messages and only using the internet when you have wireless available. Alternatively, try taking your PC into town and connecting using your home broadband and you'll instantly see what the limitations are. Of course, in an ideal world I'd love if both my broadband and mobile data packages were somehow tied so I paid once and could use anywhere and with anything, but two fees, one for any device at home and one for any device while roaming (setting my phone as a WiFi access point or tethering) is a reasonable compromise for me.
And as for software, well discounting Apple, there are lots of free apps available (I've not found any task for my Android yet where I have been forced to buy a paid as opposed to a free app), and on the desktop it seems like a pretty golden age for FOSS, even on Windows systems there's a hell of a lot of free open source software available, whereas ten years ago there was far less choice. Really, it seems like the author has looked at one particular distribution model (the walled, paid garden) and assumed all roads lead to that model, whereas I look around and see more free stuff than ever, and even in the most locked down sectors - movies and music - prices have arguably dropped and there are plenty "all you can eat" services for a nominal fee for anyone who consumes a lot of content.
Meanwhile in the UK the only real option at the time was pay per minute dial up and I regularly had bills averaging a couple hundred pound per month, I don't think free unlimited dial up took off here until 99/00, so to me my £30 per month unlimited data tariff (and a one-off payment of £99 for a phone that's probably much more powerful now than my £1,500 PC was back then) seems entirely reasonable.
Well that's about the state of the Android market right now, but hopefully it will mean people with great ideas but limited technical knowledge will be able to contribute. I've pretty much accepted that if I want to find decent apps, the best bet is not to go via the market place but to use app review sites (and at least they mostly make this very painless by allowing me to snap a photo of the barcode and instantly locate the app).
The key here is not that people routinely break laws, it's that here is a proposal that means in these very specific cases, and contrary to how other nations are interpreting it, you don't have to break the law. Imagine a country with sometimes ridiculously restrictive speed limits (I admit it, I'm from the UK) where the majority of drivers routinely break the speed limit. Now imagine one road is designated as being free of any limit (let's ignore the safety implications of this for the sake of simplicity). People could still enjoy the benefits of driving fast on that one road, safe in the knowledge that we weren't about to be prosecuted, even if it didn't change their habits of routinely driving too fast on other roads in breech of the law.
Of course, the fact that new works likely won't enter public domain until at least a century after they're created, and conceivably up to a century and a half, it's still not a great win for the public. If they combined this with, for instance, a fixed 10 year copyright period it would be a triumph (and an interesting experiment in whether this would stimulate creativity or stifle it).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as has already been said, Microsoft's largest competitor in this area is still itself. It could patch XP indefinitely, but that wouldn't sell more copies of Windows 7. In all honesty, for an OS that's been around for the best part of a decade, I think the longevity of the support has been impressive (and even now they're not saying they won't support it, just that SP3 is now a requirement) - okay they screw up all over the place elsewhere, but you have to give it to them for at least trying here.
Is this even the case anymore? I know there were a lot of issues initially (which I think mostly transpired to be around the aggressive firewall rules), but most of those I thought were patched in the software or fixed in the OS. I know the last machine I upgraded from SP2 to SP3 (an old machine that previously didn't have net access but suddenly had to go online) didn't have any noticable issues, maybe I was lucky but I thought this was genuinely much less of an issue today.
Certainly 7 seems to be a major enhancement, although I honestly think they should have just written vista off completely and given out free upgrades to 7 so that people don't have to put up with that bloated monstrosity. It would be expensive, but not as expensive as the PR damage in the long run.
Well I'm sure there are still plenty of SP2 machines out there on illegitimate copies, probably the armies of botnets in the middle east that never got updated because the owners never saw the point (or they bought the machine in that condition and lacked the knowledge to update to a later cracked version), but there were also plenty of concerns about updating to WGA on legitimate XP installs. I don't know how much of an issue it is now, but at the time SP3 first released there were all kinds of horror stories about WGA screw ups, and a lot of enterprise customers were reluctant to update on that basis alone.
Even so, it's not like this date just jumped out on them, I remember talking about this something like four years ago. I wouldn't expect them to replace anything until the last minute, because that costs money and it's almost always smarter to wait in big business infrastructure, but if they got to two months away and didn't even have a migration plan, that's just incredibly shoddy.
You can't seriously expect a piece of software costing in the hundred dollar range to get the same level of support as a car that maybe had an initial cost in the tens of thousands. The "moving parts" are the technology the OS is running on, by the way. The software might not change, but try buying a PC today with the same spec as your PC in 1995, supporting all of the hardware iterations between then and now would give us an even more horribly bloated OS (if anything, MS probably does too much to support backwards compatability already).
If you don't have the money to spare then cheaper IS easier. The alternative is you have to go work for however long it takes to earn the money to buy the license (and potentially the Mac to do the development on, since you specifically mention iPhone/iPad), which for students and kids, the people they specifically tested this with, is certainly a barrier to "easy development".
Exactly, hell I've built a whole career from the simple beginnings of reading a few people's (back then) basic text websites on web development - the key here is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. If 99.9% of the stuff is crap, don't throw away the 0.1% that's gold, instead give people better tools to separate the two. If anyone can do that with apps, surely it's Google.
I think that's GP's point - it doesn't matter that the app, website, whatever, isn't the holy grail to everyone. It doesn't matter if it's the holy grail to a significant minority. In some cases, if only a handful of people find it useful, then that's enough. If it was a professionally developed app or site, it would be seen as a failure, but the very fact that it cost someone nothing but their spare time and has helped a bunch of other people is a net gain. It's never going to set the world alight, but by its own limited parameters it might still be a success.
You might think that's the best way to determine what apps should be created, but in practice what people say they want is hardly ever exactly what they do want. If you follow that route you quickly end up with "The Homer" - the everyman car that looks like a monstrosity and costs a fortune because it tries to be everything to everyone. If this tool makes it easy for regular people to prototype ideas quickly and test them in the wild, that's probably not a bad thing. Even if 99% of it is garbage. The 1% can always be polished by developers later if it takes off.
I wouldn't mind so much if Google gave me some tools and expected me to do a little work to get the apps I want. What I'd like to see are advanced search filters (date, downloads, rating, file size, maybe the stats for percentage of people who uninstalled the app - I'm sure they have those available) with the ability to save searchs and, perhaps just as importantly, the ability to block certain users or keyword matches (it seems 90% of the spam crap in the market place originate from a relatively small set of developers, if I could block those I'd instantly see improved results). These should be trivial for Google to implement.
Ranking at the moment seems to be skewed anyway, on the one hand by all the people spamming their websites (who just automatically give 5 stars to every single app, presumably because if the app ranks well there's more chance you'll see their spam in the comments) and on the other hand people who fail to read the disclaimers such as "this app doesn't work on handset X for hardware reasons Y and Z" but they still give it one star because they have handset X (like buying a Windows PC and complaining it won't run OSX software). Maybe these balance each other out but really it seems like the ranking scores are just too unreliable to be any use - downloads are a slightly better indicator, but even then pretty worthless for niche apps.
This seemed to be the most lacking area of the Android to me - given Google's search pedigree I was expecting all kinds of clever filters to help me find the right apps. In the end I decided it was easier to just use app review websites and forums to find the best apps, and to be honest it's not a major issue, just a little confusing it doesn't do this amazingly well right out of the box.
It's much easier to find apps using one of the app review websites than it is to use either Google's market or Apple's app store. Android makes this nice and simple with Google Goggles integration, so you find the app you want, snap a shot of its barcode with the phone camera and it will do the donkey work of finding the app. Alternatively you can use something like App Brain, where (I believe this is how it works, not used it myself) you have a login and you select the apps on your pc and your phone will just sync these later.
Both markets have their fair share of dross, but I have to say that so far I've been impressed particularly with the quality of what I've found for free on Android - I've not run into any situation yet where I couldn't find an app that did exactly what I wanted and was gratis.
Agreed, and it's all about perceptions as well. I knew plenty of guys at school who weren't into computers at all, but if you tell someone "this development kit makes it so easy, a teenage boy could use it" that's not a great endorsement, because the perception of most non-techies is that all teenage boys are "computer wizzkids". If you can say "look at what this group of teenage girls created", that takes the scary techie edge off (and I'm not suggesting that girls are any less competent here than boys, just that this is society's perception).
The only way you can compete with free is by offering better. That's where I think Murdoch will fail. I don't think people would mind paying a sensible price (and given the distribution costs and the fact that it'll still be ad supported, "sensible" for online news should be next to free anyway - after all the cost of the traditional newspaper just pays for the paper and the distribution, it doesn't pay for the reporting) for good quality reporting, but you can't sell us the same crap back that we wouldn't read when it was free and hope that the cost association will somehow lend it an air of value.
Furthermore, this unfiltered content directly from the source is the best kind of content for most. Goodbye big media.
The cynic in me can't help thinking you might be misunderestimating the need of a lot of people to have their news pre-processed, to remove any sharp edges, and then distributed through a channel that they know will give them warm fuzzy views aligned with their own. That will be big media's niche. It's the only way I can begin to explain Faux News.
Given what we're being promised with HTML5, it seems like apps might be a nice interim measure until sufficient desktop browsers support the new features. At that point, as you say, it will make much more sense to write an app that is browser based and can run on any device, be it a Mac with Safari, a Windows PC with Chrome, a phone browser or whatever.
You realise you can also use that single device on your all encompassing home network? Assuming you could find the device minus a data package (sim only, no contract maybe) there's nothing stopping you using the phone just for calls/text messages and only using the internet when you have wireless available. Alternatively, try taking your PC into town and connecting using your home broadband and you'll instantly see what the limitations are. Of course, in an ideal world I'd love if both my broadband and mobile data packages were somehow tied so I paid once and could use anywhere and with anything, but two fees, one for any device at home and one for any device while roaming (setting my phone as a WiFi access point or tethering) is a reasonable compromise for me.
And as for software, well discounting Apple, there are lots of free apps available (I've not found any task for my Android yet where I have been forced to buy a paid as opposed to a free app), and on the desktop it seems like a pretty golden age for FOSS, even on Windows systems there's a hell of a lot of free open source software available, whereas ten years ago there was far less choice. Really, it seems like the author has looked at one particular distribution model (the walled, paid garden) and assumed all roads lead to that model, whereas I look around and see more free stuff than ever, and even in the most locked down sectors - movies and music - prices have arguably dropped and there are plenty "all you can eat" services for a nominal fee for anyone who consumes a lot of content.
I would suggest, if you intend to download half a gig of data, WiFi might be the better option...
Meanwhile in the UK the only real option at the time was pay per minute dial up and I regularly had bills averaging a couple hundred pound per month, I don't think free unlimited dial up took off here until 99/00, so to me my £30 per month unlimited data tariff (and a one-off payment of £99 for a phone that's probably much more powerful now than my £1,500 PC was back then) seems entirely reasonable.
Well that's about the state of the Android market right now, but hopefully it will mean people with great ideas but limited technical knowledge will be able to contribute. I've pretty much accepted that if I want to find decent apps, the best bet is not to go via the market place but to use app review sites (and at least they mostly make this very painless by allowing me to snap a photo of the barcode and instantly locate the app).
The key here is not that people routinely break laws, it's that here is a proposal that means in these very specific cases, and contrary to how other nations are interpreting it, you don't have to break the law. Imagine a country with sometimes ridiculously restrictive speed limits (I admit it, I'm from the UK) where the majority of drivers routinely break the speed limit. Now imagine one road is designated as being free of any limit (let's ignore the safety implications of this for the sake of simplicity). People could still enjoy the benefits of driving fast on that one road, safe in the knowledge that we weren't about to be prosecuted, even if it didn't change their habits of routinely driving too fast on other roads in breech of the law.
Of course, the fact that new works likely won't enter public domain until at least a century after they're created, and conceivably up to a century and a half, it's still not a great win for the public. If they combined this with, for instance, a fixed 10 year copyright period it would be a triumph (and an interesting experiment in whether this would stimulate creativity or stifle it).