Posts by danny_0x98 156 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2009
Here's the deal. There will be a fair amount of people who will be looking for a $200 Christmas gift to give. No one cares if the receivers have put the gift on a high shelf in a back closet in late January.
Meanwhile, Amazon isn't really interested about volume, they are interested in how the device facilitates after-sale revenue increases.
Sometime next spring we'll see how this worked out.
Well, not so much enter the ring as the arena on the way to the dressing room and accompanied by a manager speaking of all the punches and strategies they've been working on at camp.
It is very premature to say one wins and the other loses.
I think the primary reason for Windows maintenance of its success in desktops is the high cost of replacing applications necessary with an os change.
Sun went after this with java, and failed in the goal. Today, we have web apps and app stores where the unit cost is a magnitude lower and the licensing terms more liberal. We have Google giving away oses. (And Microsoft following behind saying to its erstwhile partners "Tut, tut, no margin improvements for you, pay us this way or that.)
Sure Touchpads at 99 sell, but where would HP get 100 per user, net, in order to break even?
Microsoft have smart guys, but it's going to take more than a nice looking UI to be more than a reliable collector of cash from user inertia with desktop oses and Office.
Thing is, that might have always been enough.
Insulting MySql does not make your choice of or the software Postgresql better. The two are independent projects with different emphases.
Any way Apple did what they did and a competent administrator may adjust if MySql on OS X SL Server really was mission critical. It's basically the same thing us Postgresql users did before when it was MySql found in the cat box.
Noted and moving on.
If the police show probable cause that some of the contents of the may be material to the investigation of the crime and convince a judge who signs a warrant, that safe is going to be opened. Self-incrimination is about using a confession. It's in the US Constitution because kings were quite fond of torturing for admissions. Yes, I get the Guantanamo irony.
Apple does shut down parties with prejudice. One major change over the past ten years is PowerPC to Intel.
Thing is, if you asked Microsoft, they would express their envy that Apple can do this.
But, Microsoft is in a different business and moving the herd off of the obsolete is a problem. It means the efforts they make in improving user experience and apis are ignored by developers who have customers running the os from 2001. Plus, modern browsers are widely available and there has been a lot of work put towards improving the speed and power of web apps.
So, Apple has to do with this report, how?
If Microsoft is not looking at the ARM opportunity as a moment to somewhat break with the burdens of backwards compatibility, then that's it, the moment of negative mojo.
My guess, when Windows 8 on ARM rolls around, we'll find that Intel was more correct than incorrect, but it won't be a problem to adapt old applications to the new processor, beyond the work to address different underlying assumptions about speed, RAM, and responsiveness.
If you remove the copyrightable parts, what remains is not copyrightable. It's a tautology, so I'll explain. You take a song and remove from it the melody and lyric, the copyrightable portions (under US law), leaving a title or a chord progression, and the copyright holder has no ownership in what remains.
In code, some things are not copyrightable because, in my lay summary, it is what's necessary to do the job, for instance, a for loop, an if-then-else, or, variable assignment. However all those non-copyrightable elements in the aggregate from an implementation of functionality, and the more complex a function, the less one may say this was the one way to do this in defense of programming by copy and paste.
Comments are not necessary, so the copyright holder does own those.
The script, the music, the fixing of the performances in a tangible media, all those are copyrightable and the holder retains copyright after you strip off the credits. (Are credits copyrightable? A lot of movies start and stop the same way.) Well, back to the drawing board, won't get rich today.
I would say the POV of most end users, and more importantly, potential customers, is that it is faster, thinner, a little lighter, has cameras, and for $500, they may get all the power, but less storage and no 3G. It's us techies who sniff and parse each element with derision and condescension in order to prove our crabbed view of the world.
Looking at the bright side of this burgeoning versioning debate, at least Mr. Myslewski didn't dub it iPad 1.0.1, i.e., he recognizes that some non-trivial evolution took place.
Different outside shell and and advancement in the hardware. FWIW, I think Dell bumps up the major number, or gives a product a new name, when that happens.
I had heard about the iPhone dropping in sales rankings. I was curious and appreciate some explanation. Here's one reason: another manufacturer is discounting their phones.
Kids, you can always buy market share, but you better get the volume. Otherwise you are #1 in share and #6 in profit.
Vis a vis developers, let's say there's a population of 100,000 with devices. But 30,000 bought theirs at full price using one platform, 20,000 bought theirs using another platform, and 50,000 got theirs using the latter os because it was discounted.
If the marketing guy says "OS B has 70,000 users and thus should be our target for app development," you should:
a) Give him a bonus because he noticed that 50,000 users who saved on their phone have more money in their pocket to buy apps.
b) Say, good point, and then circulate his name among the head hunters and hope the competition hire him, because he doesn't get that people who pay for their phones are more likely to pay for the added value of a good app.
Is 30% too much? I don't know. I'm not in the business. But if I did get into the business and didn't have an earlier, disappearing business model with which to compare current endeavors, I might find that I can do all right. Or not. Real stores do things such as charge for optimal shelf space. If the benefit exceeds the cost, the product makers pay.
This will all work out and find its balance. If it turns out that Apple goofed here, we may rest assured that students working towards MBAs next decade will have a subject for their theses written on Android 14 inch tablets via Google docs.
Subscription, renewed as in-app purchase.
Just a quick thought as a Mobile-me subscriber. I know I could take care of synchronization, remote desktop access and email/web storage by assembling the best of the many fine and free alternatives out there. (For awhile, Find my iPhone was made available only to MobileMe subscribers, and that was a useful feature. Happily, it is now available, at no charge, to owners of other Apple devices.)
I thought under $9 a month was a reasonable price to pay to have it all integrated and managed through the System Preferences.
I have two questions. Am I wrong in thinking "The world is leaving us behind, so we must hitch up with the leader." would be a description of Intel's anxieties as they negotiated the MeeGo deal. Also, doesn't the vague outlines of the Nokia-Microsoft deal look similar to the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal? Which, from my seat way back in the peanut gallery, hasn't apparently generated any synergistic sparks, or whatever the kids call it nowadays.
I actually do prefer OpenOffice/LibreOffice to Office, but I recognize that Office holds unassailable practical advantages. Microsoft solved what was The Big Problem, and no alternative application has a chance, unless it provides Word/Excel file format compatibility.
I'm independent contracting to small businesses and the problem I see is that remote communications are becoming more vital and out there they don't have the resources or inclination to open up a spreadsheet or document.
Here come the long-articulated architectures of thin client and client/server, which we now call mobile and cloud, to answer the new Big Problem.
So, back at the back office, does IT hold with the desktop apps and adapt them to consume the remote information being gathered and organized by the servers or does IT deploy mobile apps to the desktop and its input devices? Are the office suites, then, solely useful for legacy compatibility purposes and the occasional "Happy Birthday" banner in Comic Sans?
I don't know.
I'm certain that the beancounters will notice that mobile apps are a lot cheaper, the good ones have a smaller gap between function available and function utilized, and the servers have already been bought.
Good point. About time someone put their finger on the point of that quadruple-edged sword of licensing and typographic loosey-gooseiness that is our modern day first medium of choice.
Indeed, if Steve the Cynic cannot see Comic Sans, well, fie and fail Mozilla. Fie and fail FreeBSD. Fie and fail Internets and its tubes.
Oops. Silly me. The Forte Finger of Fail was pointed at my beloved Ms Stob. I really should read past the first sentence.
Fie and fail on me.
In an essay on Comic Sans and those who know the one thing, its terribleness as a font (usually expressed in furtive, oblivious Arial), that used Comic Sans for example, erudition, and humor, you saw no Comic Sans. I feel your pain.
While many of the elements of 1981 are present, quite a few manufacturers trying to enter into a growth field, I think it differs in some very clear ways.
When IBM entered into the personal computer market it gave an endorsement to the idea of the personal computer at business. The IT departments were quite relieved that here, finally, was a company with grown-ups that was going to last. PCs in the 1980s were expensive and when the clone manufacturers came along a few years later, the people with the money, businesses, were running PC-DOS and would not have tossed over the (also expensive) software they had bought in order to buy a desktop PC with an allegedly better operating system. When the clones arrived, and manufacturers were fighting on price, that was the day MS-DOS became essential and went from doing well to winning big.
So today, we have a similar constellation: consumers and manufacturers. But we have new stars. Google, giving away an operating system because its bread and butter is maximizing network traffic and harvesting the relations and visits in order to provide an accurate demographic to advertisers. They still get what they need when I use my iPhone with Google apps installed.
Patents are another "star" in the firmament. Microsoft extracts revenue from manufacturers using Android via patent enforcement. So two major players get money when you use the competitor's os.
We also have carriers who may interpose between the user and the apps.
Phones are cheap: this isn't a battle over businesses that spills into the consumer market because people have started to take work home and have to run the same software which generally means the same os and processor as the workplace. (The thinning separation between work time and not-work time being an emergent consequence of the PC.)
Unlike 1981, everyone has phones and computers, we are talking about selling enhanced phones. We have services delivered in os-agnostic ways. It is difficult to imagine how another phenomenon of the 1980s that was killed by Windows in the 1990s, the SGI workstation, would manifest in the smartphone world.
I think it was the application install base that anointed MS-DOS as the 1990s dawned. Apple did well because of the desktop publishing advances of 1987 or so. Microsoft, of course, went into overdrive when it finally delivered a graphical interface that was usable with Windows 95, and the application writers bought in. Hardware was making rapid advances and the consumer was quite happy to chuck WP5.1 in order to run Word95 on a system that was massively faster.
In 2010, though, smartphone apps are priced like candy bars. When the two year contract is up, do the apps, and experience familiarity and loyalty, keep the consumer on their platform or do they move from platform to platform without worrying about re-buying key apps?
We are also overlooking that the tech consumer is now all over the world and not just in the US and Europe. Being a typical parochial American, I am ill-equipped to speculate. Being atypical, I shall not, but it's another level of complexity not found 30 years back.
So, I don't know. I appreciate that the patterns have clear similarities. I guess I'm not ready to say that, of course, it's Rocky IV, only this time Balboa is running around Russia and not Philadelphia.
I thought it was likely that someone would step in, the real question was how well they would approximate the windowing idioms of OS X.
While I fully agree with your assessment that there being no incentive for Apple to maintain its own jvm was the primary motivation behind their announcement, the question is raised, well, who does have an incentive to apply resources and keep java up to date for Apple's users, scratch that, Mac-using java developers? (I'm one and I don't think java desktop apps are really widely used.)
So Oracle has decided that keeping the public version of java on OS X matters to them and Apple has worked out a deal where the new guardians may partake of the secret sauce. Works for me*.
* until it doesn't.
In defense of the wandering mind, a lot of my best solutions have come to mind while on a walk or in the shower. Doing something rote and physical when the mind may wander (which is perhaps happening all the time, but at a level below consciousness) is the ideal situation for the good idea to trickle up into recognition.
I've also spent significant chunks of my life as a bureaucrat and an ersatz rock star. Yes, absolutely, when buried deep in reconciling someone's credit card expense report, those thoughts about playing guitar have been an indicator that at that moment I wanted to be doing something else.
When the work's done, I go and do something else fun.
As I think about it, there's been a time or two when I've been playing music and thought about something at the day job. I guess the point is that disengagement from the moment happens and it only means that all our concentration is not needed.
Now the occasional moment of disengagement is a first step to being totally disengaged, which is known as alienation and unhappiness, as the occasional adult beverage is necessary to alcoholism. Well, yes, but there's a fairly large gap between those states that most people will not traverse.
So.
Oh Yeah.
I use an iPhone.
And I think.......
I'm thinking about playing Angry Birds.
Honest to gosh, three paragraphs in, I wondered who wrote this and moved upwards expecting to see a Cade Metz byline. I was surprised to find it was the work of one of my favorite writers for insightful perspectives.
Many questions were begged above: that Apple suggested it wants to restrict access to web apps on its mobile device. Android's openness at the base is not diluted by the carriers and manufacturers who deploy it. Web apps and native apps are interchangeable as to user experience. That TweetDeck's rejoinder to Jobs is universal endorsement on app-writing for Android, when I think the endorsement extends only to messaging protocol based applications. (Maybe the variation matters and maybe it doesn't, but TweetDeck was talking about its experience and it does not have variety of apps crossing problem spaces.)
I'm for HTML5. I think Flash has a role, but it doesn't need to be used for everything. Despite my welcome for our new extended markup overlords, the downside to being a standard is that it is the work of a committee, and where the committee does not agree, there will be vendor differentiation.
One point you touched upon but you haven't quite thought through, in my humble opinion, is that "open" is a developer experience and "integrated" is a user experience. Now a market needs producers, vendors, and customers, so developer and user experience are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, get both experiences tuned and everybody wins.
Apple certainly waves the UE banner, believes that is what butters its bread, and if it steps on developer toes (and tells some customers "yes, we got no bananas, and, yes, we will never have bananas."), it will do so until it stops making buckets of money. As for me, I'm a satisfied Apple customer and there's a very good chance I'll be getting an iPad in the new year. I'm also hobbling around a bit this weekend because Apple's java thing mashed my tootsies. I'm hoping Oracle or IBM step up, provide a jvm that is easily installed by customers, and libraries that provide a look and feel that is Aqua-ish and not Swing-ish on the Mac. (Maybe IBM, with its sponsorship of Eclipse is the more likely party to bring me what I want.)
All right. Thank you for your time. I'm off to install a Xubuntu Meerkat guest os on this MBP.
Regarding sources, all I know is that to update java on my Windows and FreeBSD systems, I get stuff from Oracle. For OS X, it comes from Apple, eventually. For Linux, distro repositories.
Is it really material that Jobs forgot about AIX and HP/UX, server products? I like Gosling but we should also remember Apple and Sun's relation have been complex.
I do expect someone to port the java and jvm to OS X. It does make sense for Oracle to do so. If not, IBM has a window. Yikes, strikes, it's jikes!
Any way, not much I can do about it and there's java on my Mac know, so tomorrow's weather has far more consequence for me right now than the announcement. I'll be watching. I write java applications on my Mac, so it will be an inconvenience, and potential showstopper, if it truly goes away.
Your central point remains, Amazon has more books for less cost.
iBooks are like iTunes, the publisher sets the price and Apple takes 30%. For both stores, the publisher chooses if the store will offer the eBook. (In contrast, a brick and mortar book store may get its books direct from the publisher, from a wholesaler, or used; the publisher only has control over first sale.)
So far so good. If Apple charges more, it's either that the publisher is charging less to Amazon or Amazon is taking a smaller share and/or subsidizing their eBooks.
Amazon may also have said that in order for it to "stock" the dead tree version, it requires a steep discount in its cost for electronic versions. Perhaps this better explains how Amazon may have lower prices, higher title count, and is profitable.
The publisher, though, may be seeing that they have to sell three e-books for every dead-tree book they don't sell, and until volume ramps up, they may see increased unit sales and declining revenue. A store that can't leverage dead-tree sales is perhaps getting a price meant to drive per volume e-book revenues closer to their paper predecessors. Some publishers may think eBooks are a losing proposition for them. Amazon? Well, they need Amazon. Apple? Not so much. The good news for them, as they look at it, no used e-book market.
Meanwhile, in this transitional period, Amazon wants to sell eBooks and brought out the Kindle to improve the user experience for that activity and Apple wants to sell iPads so it sells books and distributes Amazon's Kindle app. It's a good time to be a reader, if one has embraced eBooks.
I'm all for giving credit for interfaces where due. While validation for Yahoo's past work may be deserved (I qualify because I don't know and don't pretend to know who did exactly what), I think Google's timing is more about the backend and it was more important that the implementation minimized the tradeoff between currency and interface dynamism.
Bingo famousringo!
And let me add my underlined emphasis on the back up issue.
Plus, I have enough exposure to civilians to know that the care and feeding of /Volumes/BigHardExternalDrive/AuxITunesLibrary is placed deep in their Venn Diagram circle marked "Life is Too Short For."
And Rik, Rik, Rik, does Apple exert any censorship over MobileMe facilitated storage via iDisk? That said, one would have to question the intelligence of any one who would upload actionable (in certain prudish jurisdictions) files of, oh, let's say, sensitivity.
Which makes me wonder. Would a zealous North Carolina DA be able to subpoena Apple to get a looksee for prosecutable media files?
Apple won't let mobile device users transact directly with other vendors? They ripped out all the support for web applications from iOS last week and they didn't tell me?
The thing about emulators, frameworks, compilers, and interpreters is they present a security risk and a risk where the closing of vulnerabilities is in another party's hands. (Apple is slow enough as it is.) While I understand that we hearty readers of El Reg face the bad guys with a sneer and snarl and are quite competent in captaining our own ships and taking responsibility for the risks of the software we install, Apple's aiming for a different, less-abled customer. That's why we insult the company and its customers, is it not?
Now trade laws and regulations are what they are and I have no quarrel with them or the possibility that Apple may need to adjust its behavior. I would not be appreciative, though, if a side effect or unintended consequence of this affair is that some money that goes into the pockets of Apple and its developers went into the pockets of some other big company and its developer and I, idiot iPhone user I am, am fielding notifications that my AV signatures need updating or my subscription is about to lapse or that I'll be getting SMS messages and web popups offering me all sorts of needless things, including that system scan for malicious programs.
Give or made available? I see the "when" is based on the details of the employee's particular carrier.
As Microsoft will not be making the phone, and I can't imagine Microsoft buying the phones unlocked, it sounds like a reimbursement program.
Again, since Microsoft doesn't make the phone, their cost for the program is the amount of reimbursement, less the licensing amount paid by the phone's manufacturer. Let's say a 200 reimbursement less 15 income for the os license and all 87000 use the program, that's 16.1 million USD net cash out. As a promotional tactic, wouldn't the money be better spent on advertising?
As a thank you gesture, though, it's a nice one. The complications with smartphones are they are expensive and carrier two-year lock-ins and exclusivity deals mean some employees may opt-out for sensible reasons which have nothing to do with the phone os quality, especially if the reimbursement offer is time-limited. Fortunately, the tech press, renowned for its balance and sensitivity, will not report future offer uptake counts along the entertaining lines of how many Microsoft employees don't use WP7, even when it's free. And...
Ruh-roh.
I guess it's a peculiar hell when strangers use your "Let's Go Crazy" on their non-commercial birthday videos without paying a license fee. Mind you, it's expecting money from places where, heretofore, one never expected money, but thinking about that makes my brain hurt and the Writer Occasionally Known As Orlowski probably has a tard-appendage waiting in the wings for me.
A few years back, maybe 2005 or so, I was talking with an agent buddy who had Prince as a client and he was telling me that Prince was adamant about not putting tracks on iTunes. It was reported to me as Prince exacting some sort of vengeance on Steve Jobs. No doubt there was a back story, but details were not forthcoming. I didn't delve because, though I think very highly of the music, I can do with out the madnesses that occasionally accompany talent. I did express to my friend my point of view that Prince was nuts. I think Jobs figures a person/label that passes on iTunes is hurting themselves more than they hurt him.
As to today's comment about advances. I think Prince is talking about the way Wal-Mart or Best Buy will give an artist production money in return for a term of retail exclusivity. So Apple doesn't do that in general or do that in particular for Prince. Okay, he makes his choices and more power to him. But, I will not be begging his pardon as I scratch my head and wonder why Prince thinks he is entitled to an exclusivity deal. As one who pays for his music and who shops only at iTunes (yeah, I'm lazy), I guess none of my money will 70% go to Prince.
You have to admire a guy who takes a stand when it costs him money. So, Prince, Salute! Let me know if you put your catalog on iTunes, I seem to have misplaced one of my discs for "Sign o the Times" and I'd like to replace it.
Quite a lot of noise from the folks who are on the other side of the coin from the insistent blowhard boor described in the diary. The other side being "I'm very, very smart, I don't want any thing by Apple and so any one who wants an iPhone is an idiot."
It's a phone. Nothing extraordinary happens when you get one. Nothing dire happens if you don't.
The idea of purposely starving the supply chain only makes sense if one is confident that the product's desirability is beyond being the first one on your block to have one. It also relies on having confidence that the ones who do get it on day 1 won't say bad, indifferent, or nerd-gush (it's awesome, the RZFs are peta-giggy) things about it.
In figuring out its allocations and stocking, Apple has to make some educated guesses. The factory has an output limit of some number of units per day. Before release date, completed phones have to be stored some where and that costs money. The first day demand will be atypical. It would not make sense to run three factories for a few weeks and then cut back to one just so every one who wants an iPhone on day 1 gets it.
Even though someone who goes away empty-handed may not come back.
We all know the proverb about malice and incompetence. For some things, it's neither. Our diary-writer would have had the best week of the year, if Apple had flooded the sales channel. Apple's not going to do that. The day every store has sufficient stock for day 1 demand of an Apple product will be one of those days they release something of limited interest. Mac-Mini refresh, any one?
I read these threads and there's all this noise about this feature is good because that os is freedom-sucking and I just wonder. If you are smart enough to understand the trade-offs regarding freedom and to deal with the impediments, you're smart enough to use any os as needed. Nothing's perfect.
While Gnome may have been around longer than OS X (which is a union of Mach, BSD and the NeXT gui layer, which all precede OS X by a decade or so), the basic metaphors of the Apple desktop go back to 1982 in one sense, and a few years earlier to Xerox PARC, in another.
And what would it matter who came first? It's a world of riches. Some platforms cost more and may have more polish. Others are free and massively configurable.
What I found a tad non-specific in the Fedora review above were comments about dual versions of python. I've got that set up now (on my Mac, yes, yes, yes) via MacPorts and it's the same mechanism. Installation tends to be a one-time cost, so I'm not sure how Fedora is really delivering something interesting in this particular case.
What sense does it make to buy a company, whose sales price will be partly based on its current book of business, and then stop selling to those customers? The only, the only way that makes sense is if Apple believes it can replace the demand for the customers it shut off. No way.
Plus, they put their own processor, which is to say one that was developed through its acquisition of PA Semi, into the iPad, so there's yet another reason why the thought of an acquisition of ARM makes no sense.
Apple may be evil, but it isn't stupid.
So, us USians finally began viewing - oh wait, this is the 21st century, make that consuming - the Moffat Doctor Who over the weekend. Thus, twice in 48 hours, I have seen reference to a certain Patrick Moore. I have very little idea what he does, but I induce that it's on television and either he or his phenomenon is rather comical to smart people.
But isn't that the wonder of life? Another pop cultural reference to track down! That's better than street-cars in Los Angeles for a variety of reasons.
Long-time fan of Ms Stob and it's always a pleasure to find her work.
Why bother estimating job losses? Take a look at job counts from 1997 and 2009. A little subtraction, type up the result, and break for lunch. Now if one is estimating, I hope one adds back the folks who are shooting and selling the $2 camcorder in cinema DVD. It's a job. Sure, it's underground. It doesn't give the pennies to the creators and the big bucks to the publisher they deserve. It's unsavory and unethical, but it's a living.
There are so many reasons why these studies - many of which are funded specifically to create the case for technology hobbling and absolutist every performance is compensated legislation - have flaws. First, can unlicensed internet downloading truly be isolated? There are significant demographic changes. Other media have arisen.
And, what about the "value" of a hit song? Every year there are more. One can hear them on the radio, in the movies, on music video channels, in the grocery store, in the restaurants, etc. There are so many ways to hear music without direct payment, who can really blame the youngsters who see the internet as one more, even as we adults understand that someone has to make money somewhere for things to happen and continue.
It used to be that a record company was the only entity that would have the capital to correctly record, market, and distribute a recording. Really, only marketing is left. If the record company offers less, can it really expect to not suffer revenue losses? As I look at where the record companies have been putting their best efforts, I see it as maximizing licensing revenues for catalog. That is flat-out not sustainable. The industry needed Elvis Presley because Frank Sinatra's fans were in their 30s. Who's there to replace Led Zeppelin now that those fans are around 60? Guitar Hero?
90 million licenses, even discounted, even if paid for and not used, still mean a whole lot of green.
But, Windows, by virtue of its ubiquity on new computers, always moves a lot of licenses and generates a lot of cash.
Windows 7's mission was to get people to buy another Windows OS (and, implicitly, to stop using XP.) Ninety million in four months (noting that some licenses were sold during the RC period and booked after official release date) doesn't seem like it's that rapid a conversion rate. Later in the year, after SP1, we'll start to see if corporate customers are ready to show it some love. Until that time, it's an open question as to whether Win7 accomplished any thing beyond changing Vista's name.
Well, OpenOffice.org files are completely compatible between Windows and OS X and adds Linux and the BSDs.
I read Office for Mac 2011 will have ribbons. I saw a screenshot which indicated that the ribbons would be per document window while a menu remains up above in the menu bar. One hopes that they don't change the menu choices, but moving stuff around is a Redmond forte. (Maybe it helps their partners by inviting more training book sales.)
No date, no price. Better go back to thinking about the iPad. (Office for iPad. Ooooooh, that'd be interesting.)
So, this summer, a company calls up Apple and says they'd like to buy 30,000 iPads in order to run Windows via Citrix. Apple will book that sale and send a very nice thank you letter. They may even send a thank you note to Citrix.
It is Steve's intention to sell devices and systems. The software is to add value to the hardware. Third party software adds value to the platform at a nominal cost to Apple.
So as we enjoy a warm chuckle and share the levity of this faux ironic moment from the os wars, Apple have grabbed their coat - it was the one with all those checks in its pockets - and have proceeded, secondary verb unknown, all the way to the bank.
Increased lead time could mean the demand and therefore the number of orders has increased. Given it's relatively high level of problems, that seems unlikely, yet, I've seen the reporting and I still want one, though I am waiting for the problem fixed sign.
An alternative explanation would be supplier delays and this may be tied in with q/c issues.
It has to be one of those two reasons because an increase from two to three weeks means they can't make as many as the market wants.
The curve that was missing was the XP curve, but that would muck up the scale.
So, 2.02% of XP users and 1.49% of Vista users went to Windows 7 in the period. I was led to believe that the Vista to Win7 upgrade was the no-brainer, but some folks I gather are thinking. One could not call it a stampede of XP users at this moment. At this rate, XP users will be vested in Windows 7 in 50 months and Vista users will be converted over in 67 months. With December 2012 only 24 months away, I predict 2013 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
Honestly, this data point doesn't really say very much. Sometime in 2010, XP numbers will fall and Windows 7 numbers will increase rapidly because corporate IT will believe they can trust Win7 and will start replacing old machines with new. (As long as the recession doesn't double dip.)
As to OS X... does anyone really care? If it falls below 4% does this MBP I'm typing on sublimate into vapor? Because, if so, I'd appreciate a warning.
Discount 50-60% and watch those licenses move.
Here are a few theories to bat around: if Windows 7 does well in Q2, then they left money on the table by discounting; Windows 7 is overpriced; Microsoft captured the low-hanging fruit and license sales move back into normal or sub-normal numbers; all the beta/RC installers set up great word of mouth which set up great pre-sales which will set up more word of mouth and there will be rapid turnover from XP/Some Vista to Win7/Some XP at full cost (Ka-ching).
I lean towards overpriced, but I'm biased because I'm sitting on my hands until either I have to upgrade or I can go from Vista Business Pro to Win7 Business for about 60 bucks or so. I expect deals that will get me to spend will appear in February or March, if not sooner.
Compatible with most software? Arguable but who wants to argue?
What most people want (as long as we keep mum about those server room purchasers)? Well indeed, Yet a retailer with an eye on the Wall Street Journal will see that Apple makes a ton of money despite not being what most people want.
Still, it is most and not all isn't it? Perhaps the retailer should be advised "and those folks who want a Linux system are quite used to buying Windows and blowing it away. We make a sell, you make a sell, and the buyer ends up happy and how else could we achieve 100% satisfaction?"
I'm tempted to link to this, though no one ever likes or clicks through.
Still, as my friends have no clue what I'm talking about when I make faux wisdom coinages such as "It takes a lot of semi-colons to write a C program," this is likely to be the best opportunity to share with them a favorite humorist and superb writer.
Microsoft and Apple only compete regarding the operating system when a new system is sold. You have an XP or Vista Dell and OS X is not a choice.
As for established markets not having piracy, the current user of XP or Vista doesn't have to spend for an upgrade unless they see value. In addition, Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't make the XP to Win7 upgrade slam dunk easy. There will be reinstallation of software. Some XP users still have underpowered systems and would have to pay to beef them up. I say you put it all together, apply actions speak louder than words, and Microsoft still would rather you buy a new machine with Win7.
Finally, while Messrs. Ballmer and Turner profess confidence that with Lauren et al they have finally turned the advertising tables, I can imagine a devastating "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad this fall. As poor PC ponders the prices, limiited deals, rules, upgrade paths, feature sets, and who may buy which version of Win7, he offers his sympathy to Mac because he's facing an upgrade. "Oh," Mac points out "one Snow Leopard, one price, and it has all the features and no software reinstallation and product key wrangling." Complex vs. Simple. It's classic.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
