They failed to innovate, protected their existing business over entering new fields. Only a few companies have been able to outgrow their initial success, even fewer by directly competing against their established product.
IBM is the number one example of a company that has morphed into something new several times over it's long history. Apple seems to be trying, not sure if they'll succeed. Nokia has done it in the past.
I started with 32MB and 64MB CF cards in about 2000, and even then the writing was already on the wall. I know my aunt, who's a professional photographer, was already experimenting with digital when my nieces were toddlers, they are in college now.
Every small business I know that has survived a BSA audit has switched to OSS. I made a hefty salary doing that over the past 10 years helping small business do just that.
Where I feel the BSA wins, is in scaring a lot of the others, especially with those letters they send around that sound like you might be next on their list.
I think a lot of engineers do this when they leave an employer. Not to reuse it somewhere else or to sell it to an external party, but just because if you work on things long enough they become a bit of yourself and you want to keep them around.
Well, and the managers get more prestige if they manage a larger organisation.
I totally agree with your points though, if things are decentralized and each department has it's own servers, then they can even be each other's fall back option.
I have a story of a mail system at a university running on a SAN, which ran out of file descriptors and took the mail system down for a week as well. I think it was some form of ZFS, although I've seen similar things on GPFS and other things as well.
Just rebuilding a system like that after a crash can take days to weeks. (please note I'm talking Petabytes here).
You mean the port that means you always need a special cable? The port that proves that Apple's profit is way more important than user friendliness? Practically all other phones nowadays come with a MicroUSB connector. So MicroUSB charger are plugged in at strategic places at home, and anyone (visitors too) can just plug their phones in, for charging. Only Apple lusers need to remember to carry an adapter plug, how is that for user friendliness?
What I care about is that I can plug it in my car stereo and control playback from my steering wheel, make hands free calls and use the TomTom app to navigate. What I care about is that I can plug it in my alarm clock and it will play things from my WakeUp play list.
Can your microUSB do that for me with an Android phone?
Especially my car setup is great. I had to replace the factory car stereo with a Pioneer one, but the iPhone uses the mic and speakers of the stereo when connected, it can use the factory radio controls on the steering wheel to select playlists, songs, etc. and the TomTom can play music in the background, and mute it every time it wants to tell me something. Oh and there is this cool Knight Rider app for those of us who grew up in the eighties.
I'm a nerd and I know how to set up backups with rsync and a cron job. Quite often I just don't get around to doing that. With my Mac I just turned on TimeMachine and since then my backup is never more than an hour old.
The last I can also successfully get my mom to do over the phone, the first one I can't.
Watch those, and tell me with a straight face that this is advertising for nerds, by nerds, and by people who have no concept what the words "user experience" means.
Incidentally, every phone shown in those 3 ads is an Android phone.
It's better than the one in the article. But it still tells me very little about what I can actually do.
I have used many devices from many manufacturers (worked in telecom), and a few of the other devices are nice when they're new, but Apple devices (not just phones, also laptops) are still nice when a couple or more years old. Apple keeps supporting their stuff really well, especially if you get the cheap OS upgrades.
Apple is in the game to keep their customers. That's how they create such a loyal following.
To do this they make high quality devices, and those have a certain alure to some people like Mercedes, BMW have for cars. But just like the German car builds, they're just out there to build the best thing they can think of and keep their customers happy and returning. That it means some pimps also drive a beamer to show off is just a side effect.
After reading most of the comments. I had a random thought:
How do the rewards of the top performers compare, say between Law, Medicine, Science, Finance, Business. He might be a bit of a nerd, but someone like Bill Gates is definitely a business man.
So compare him (or Buffet, Elison, Koch, Soros) with the top in Science, say a Nobel Prize winner. Then at least the potential in monetary reward seems to be very different. As a CEO you might end up a billionaire, as a scientist a millionaire. Money isn't everything, but the difference is very big and it's not just the top.
We have a higher education system where students do not incur the huge amounts of debt that happen in the US. Thank past socialist governments.
We used to have a system where you had 5 years to get your master*, but at some point it was changed to 4 years. This gave by far the biggest problem in the STEM type fields as students basically stopped enrolling. Then the colleges and universities that specialized in those fields started offering to pay for a 5th year themselves. Very quickly after that the government changed so STEM fields would take 5 years to get a master, while other fields would have 4 year courses. It funded both students and institutes accordingly.
*) This might seem less than in the US, but that's mainly due to a difference in how high schools work here in the Netherlands.
I would not grade a lot of those as techies. They're managers who might have started out from a tech position, quite a few of the most successful ones seem to be drop-outs, not the ones who finished their education.
To get to the really top, like the Forbes list you mention, the most important thing you need are people skills in some form. Sure Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were nerds in a certain way, but they got to the top because of their people and management skills, not their technological prowess.
But it's not people like that that determine what field a student chooses, but it's much more people in their direct surroundings.
And yes, I know there are some people who will respond "Bullshit. I'm a programmer/scientist/whatever and I get over $100k." Congratulations. You're not among the average. The real average is considerably different.
For every CS Master that makes over $100k, there is an MBA who makes over $1M. The average and standard deviation seem to be very different. How much you pay has a lot to do with how well you can sell yourself. People in business related fields seem to be better at that.
We value a management position and social skills much more than engineering skills. Until that changes people's choices aren't going to change.
Yeah, I find this obsession the US has with sports very weird. Over here education has nothing to with sports beyond offering basic facilities to students so they can stay healthy. Sport teams are linked to villages, towns and cities not educational institutions.
Next to that I agree that you don't teach your promising students enough at the high school level. I don't think extra classes and summer are a good solution though. Kids need to play. You should just learn your promising students more during school hours.
What you describe is bad. I know things like that often happen on high schools (at least in my country, I don't live in the USA), but at the university level the real science should start right away. It should not be easy, and some should fail (20-30%), but people should be weeded out based on their grasp of the science, not stupid memorizing.
A good test is one here there are nearly only A and F results, people understood or they didn't and no amount of mindless memorizing could save them.
I believe the effects of homework are very well studied, and especially in math heavy classes are highly effective. I've got a masters degree in physics and I think homework is what got 90%+ though.
I don't seem to be able to find the parent you seem to be replying to.
I do think that separating students out past of somewhere between 10-14 does work. What level you go should not be based on just one test (usually it's performance over at least a year), and the first year after the separation it should be possible to shift up, and it should always be easy to switch down to encourage people to try the higher level.
This is how it works in my country (The Netherlands) and I think it works well. If your peers are close to your level intellectually, it stimulates and the educators can pose suitable challenges.
Public high school STEM classes are nowhere near sufficient as far as preparing students for a university-level STEM courseload is concerned.
Maybe if we made public education more about actually teaching and challenging students, rather than a game to see how you can bend the rules to pass the most students, then the first year of college wouldn't be such a difficult experience.
I'm not terribly familiar with the US educational system, beyond what I can glean of the internet and TV, but I feel that this is a contributing factor. When I applied to study in the US for a year after high school, and I was advised to enrol in the second or probably even the third year of university. I ended up not going to the US, so I have no experience. Friends of mine who went on to do PhDs in the US after University also complained how little the freshmen knew compared to their peers here in the Netherlands. I also have American colleagues who did a master or PhD and their level of knowledge seems on par with a master or PhD over here so in the end things do level out.
But next to this there is another very important reason why not more people choose STEM or Education: Other lines of work pay better. Financial, Business Administation, Law have a big lure because you can end up in very well paid jobs. I don't think that making things easier is the right way to go. I'm in favour setting the bar high enough that 20-30% fail. I don't think it should have a high penalty, like a big debt. But I really think that if we want more people in the STEM fields we should make it easier for an engineer to earn more than their manager.
I actually like the definition proposed there. The basic premise is that if a work is for sale, it's illegal to copy it, but if you can't buy it, then there is no copyright infringement.
Might be difficult to prove in court though. It doesn't sound very practical.
If such a law would come into effect, the entertainment industry would probably put their entire back catalog on sale for say a billion dollars a piece. Then technically it would be for sale, just nobody would be able to pay the price. There are probably some other loopholes in the idea as well.
You know that the "logy" in theology has very little to do with logic. It's derived from the word "logos" than means word, so its "word of god", or "words about gods" or something like that, it's got nothing to do with logic.
they'll struggle to maintain Linux without someone like Redhat backing them up.
I have to call that out. It has not been 1993 in almost 20 years.
Unless you have people who have been doing that since 1993. (Or even earlier, some people in our IT staff have been there since the PDP-11 days). There are some really experienced and skilled Unix admins out there.
But for what it's worth, I've also seen RedHat solutions work really well. For the less experienced who need high uptime, security, and have a complex setup, it can work really nicely.
What I like about the RedHat offerings, is their software update system, I think it's called RedHat Network nowadays. You can define different streams for different types of machines (coders, scientists, PHB, servers, etc.). You can monitor the systems remotely for all kinds of stuff. You can get your own in house proxy and such for efficient distribution of updates.
Things like that make it worthwhile to have RedHat as they save the IT staff a lot of time. It depends on the configuration you need though, the more complex your situation, the more you gain from going RedHat. You can roll your own, but RH does have some nice out of the box solutions that are well worth what they ask for it in time saved.
I've seen the other two reasons as well, but have found it much harder to convince management of the validity of those two reasons. I'm also not sure if the message "With RH you can run operations with less IT staff" is the answer you wanted to hear, but in my opinion it is true, especially for large complex setups (1000+ machines).
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They failed to innovate, protected their existing business over entering new fields. Only a few companies have been able to outgrow their initial success, even fewer by directly competing against their established product.
IBM is the number one example of a company that has morphed into something new several times over it's long history.
Apple seems to be trying, not sure if they'll succeed.
Nokia has done it in the past.
There's probably a few more examples.
I remember having a 512 MB card
I started with 32MB and 64MB CF cards in about 2000, and even then the writing was already on the wall. I know my aunt, who's a professional photographer, was already experimenting with digital when my nieces were toddlers, they are in college now.
Every small business I know that has survived a BSA audit has switched to OSS. I made a hefty salary doing that over the past 10 years helping small business do just that.
Where I feel the BSA wins, is in scaring a lot of the others, especially with those letters they send around that sound like you might be next on their list.
I think a lot of engineers do this when they leave an employer. Not to reuse it somewhere else or to sell it to an external party, but just because if you work on things long enough they become a bit of yourself and you want to keep them around.
Well, and the managers get more prestige if they manage a larger organisation.
I totally agree with your points though, if things are decentralized and each department has it's own servers, then they can even be each other's fall back option.
A single point of failure isn't always cheaper.
I have a story of a mail system at a university running on a SAN, which ran out of file descriptors and took the mail system down for a week as well. I think it was some form of ZFS, although I've seen similar things on GPFS and other things as well.
Just rebuilding a system like that after a crash can take days to weeks. (please note I'm talking Petabytes here).
You mean the port that means you always need a special cable? The port that proves that Apple's profit is way more important than user friendliness? Practically all other phones nowadays come with a MicroUSB connector. So MicroUSB charger are plugged in at strategic places at home, and anyone (visitors too) can just plug their phones in, for charging. Only Apple lusers need to remember to carry an adapter plug, how is that for user friendliness?
What I care about is that I can plug it in my car stereo and control playback from my steering wheel, make hands free calls and use the TomTom app to navigate.
What I care about is that I can plug it in my alarm clock and it will play things from my WakeUp play list.
Can your microUSB do that for me with an Android phone?
Especially my car setup is great. I had to replace the factory car stereo with a Pioneer one, but the iPhone uses the mic and speakers of the stereo when connected, it can use the factory radio controls on the steering wheel to select playlists, songs, etc. and the TomTom can play music in the background, and mute it every time it wants to tell me something. Oh and there is this cool Knight Rider app for those of us who grew up in the eighties.
Apple is very careful to keep a squeeky-clean image.
Apple understands that it's main assets are it's brand and it's users. It's the main reason behind most of what they do.
Exactly.
I'm a nerd and I know how to set up backups with rsync and a cron job. Quite often I just don't get around to doing that.
With my Mac I just turned on TimeMachine and since then my backup is never more than an hour old.
The last I can also successfully get my mom to do over the phone, the first one I can't.
Watch those, and tell me with a straight face that this is advertising for nerds, by nerds, and by people who have no concept what the words "user experience" means.
Incidentally, every phone shown in those 3 ads is an Android phone.
It's better than the one in the article. But it still tells me very little about what I can actually do.
I have used many devices from many manufacturers (worked in telecom), and a few of the other devices are nice when they're new, but Apple devices (not just phones, also laptops) are still nice when a couple or more years old. Apple keeps supporting their stuff really well, especially if you get the cheap OS upgrades.
Apple is in the game to keep their customers. That's how they create such a loyal following.
To do this they make high quality devices, and those have a certain alure to some people like Mercedes, BMW have for cars. But just like the German car builds, they're just out there to build the best thing they can think of and keep their customers happy and returning. That it means some pimps also drive a beamer to show off is just a side effect.
The exclusiveness is a side effect.
After reading most of the comments. I had a random thought:
How do the rewards of the top performers compare, say between Law, Medicine, Science, Finance, Business. He might be a bit of a nerd, but someone like Bill Gates is definitely a business man.
So compare him (or Buffet, Elison, Koch, Soros) with the top in Science, say a Nobel Prize winner. Then at least the potential in monetary reward seems to be very different. As a CEO you might end up a billionaire, as a scientist a millionaire. Money isn't everything, but the difference is very big and it's not just the top.
We have a higher education system where students do not incur the huge amounts of debt that happen in the US. Thank past socialist governments.
We used to have a system where you had 5 years to get your master*, but at some point it was changed to 4 years. This gave by far the biggest problem in the STEM type fields as students basically stopped enrolling. Then the colleges and universities that specialized in those fields started offering to pay for a 5th year themselves. Very quickly after that the government changed so STEM fields would take 5 years to get a master, while other fields would have 4 year courses. It funded both students and institutes accordingly.
*) This might seem less than in the US, but that's mainly due to a difference in how high schools work here in the Netherlands.
I would not grade a lot of those as techies. They're managers who might have started out from a tech position, quite a few of the most successful ones seem to be drop-outs, not the ones who finished their education.
To get to the really top, like the Forbes list you mention, the most important thing you need are people skills in some form. Sure Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were nerds in a certain way, but they got to the top because of their people and management skills, not their technological prowess.
But it's not people like that that determine what field a student chooses, but it's much more people in their direct surroundings.
And yes, I know there are some people who will respond "Bullshit. I'm a programmer/scientist/whatever and I get over $100k." Congratulations. You're not among the average. The real average is considerably different.
For every CS Master that makes over $100k, there is an MBA who makes over $1M. The average and standard deviation seem to be very different. How much you pay has a lot to do with how well you can sell yourself. People in business related fields seem to be better at that.
We value a management position and social skills much more than engineering skills. Until that changes people's choices aren't going to change.
Better to let in as many as possible and let the actual material decide who really has the needed ability and passion.
I agree completely.
But then don't saddle them with debt and give the institutes sufficient funding to do the job right.
Yeah, I find this obsession the US has with sports very weird. Over here education has nothing to with sports beyond offering basic facilities to students so they can stay healthy. Sport teams are linked to villages, towns and cities not educational institutions.
Next to that I agree that you don't teach your promising students enough at the high school level. I don't think extra classes and summer are a good solution though. Kids need to play. You should just learn your promising students more during school hours.
What you describe is bad. I know things like that often happen on high schools (at least in my country, I don't live in the USA), but at the university level the real science should start right away. It should not be easy, and some should fail (20-30%), but people should be weeded out based on their grasp of the science, not stupid memorizing.
A good test is one here there are nearly only A and F results, people understood or they didn't and no amount of mindless memorizing could save them.
I believe the effects of homework are very well studied, and especially in math heavy classes are highly effective. I've got a masters degree in physics and I think homework is what got 90%+ though.
I don't seem to be able to find the parent you seem to be replying to.
I do think that separating students out past of somewhere between 10-14 does work. What level you go should not be based on just one test (usually it's performance over at least a year), and the first year after the separation it should be possible to shift up, and it should always be easy to switch down to encourage people to try the higher level.
This is how it works in my country (The Netherlands) and I think it works well. If your peers are close to your level intellectually, it stimulates and the educators can pose suitable challenges.
Public high school STEM classes are nowhere near sufficient as far as preparing students for a university-level STEM courseload is concerned.
Maybe if we made public education more about actually teaching and challenging students, rather than a game to see how you can bend the rules to pass the most students, then the first year of college wouldn't be such a difficult experience.
I'm not terribly familiar with the US educational system, beyond what I can glean of the internet and TV, but I feel that this is a contributing factor. When I applied to study in the US for a year after high school, and I was advised to enrol in the second or probably even the third year of university. I ended up not going to the US, so I have no experience. Friends of mine who went on to do PhDs in the US after University also complained how little the freshmen knew compared to their peers here in the Netherlands. I also have American colleagues who did a master or PhD and their level of knowledge seems on par with a master or PhD over here so in the end things do level out.
But next to this there is another very important reason why not more people choose STEM or Education: Other lines of work pay better. Financial, Business Administation, Law have a big lure because you can end up in very well paid jobs. I don't think that making things easier is the right way to go. I'm in favour setting the bar high enough that 20-30% fail. I don't think it should have a high penalty, like a big debt. But I really think that if we want more people in the STEM fields we should make it easier for an engineer to earn more than their manager.
I actually like the definition proposed there. The basic premise is that if a work is for sale, it's illegal to copy it, but if you can't buy it, then there is no copyright infringement.
Might be difficult to prove in court though. It doesn't sound very practical.
If such a law would come into effect, the entertainment industry would probably put their entire back catalog on sale for say a billion dollars a piece. Then technically it would be for sale, just nobody would be able to pay the price. There are probably some other loopholes in the idea as well.
You know that the "logy" in theology has very little to do with logic. It's derived from the word "logos" than means word, so its "word of god", or "words about gods" or something like that, it's got nothing to do with logic.
they'll struggle to maintain Linux without someone like Redhat backing them up.
I have to call that out. It has not been 1993 in almost 20 years.
Unless you have people who have been doing that since 1993. (Or even earlier, some people in our IT staff have been there since the PDP-11 days). There are some really experienced and skilled Unix admins out there.
But for what it's worth, I've also seen RedHat solutions work really well. For the less experienced who need high uptime, security, and have a complex setup, it can work really nicely.
What I like about the RedHat offerings, is their software update system, I think it's called RedHat Network nowadays. You can define different streams for different types of machines (coders, scientists, PHB, servers, etc.). You can monitor the systems remotely for all kinds of stuff. You can get your own in house proxy and such for efficient distribution of updates.
Things like that make it worthwhile to have RedHat as they save the IT staff a lot of time. It depends on the configuration you need though, the more complex your situation, the more you gain from going RedHat. You can roll your own, but RH does have some nice out of the box solutions that are well worth what they ask for it in time saved.
I've seen the other two reasons as well, but have found it much harder to convince management of the validity of those two reasons. I'm also not sure if the message "With RH you can run operations with less IT staff" is the answer you wanted to hear, but in my opinion it is true, especially for large complex setups (1000+ machines).