Reasons Market Share Declines
Michael Swanwick explains how a monopoly can destroy itself:
Nowadays, times are much easier but a lot scammier. Last week I had to buy a new palmbook/laptop. Which, I discovered on my first and only day of possession, was preloaded with Windows 7 Starter, a not-fully-functional OS. When I tried to change the image on my desktop, I learned that doing so required that I go online and buy Windows 7 Home Premier. After getting my refund, I talked to salesfolk at various stores and learned that all the new palmtops have the cut-down version because they don’t have memory enough to run W7HP.
Well, each new version of Windows is written far too memory-hoggish for the current hardware. So it only makes sense that the new OS would have fewer features. Still, it was pretty cheeky of them to have it automatically try to sell me an OS that my device couldn’t run.
Apple doesn’t play that kind of game, so if I’d been willing to wait for the iPad to come available, I probably would’ve spent the extra money for it. But I have work to do, so I scrounged around until I found one of the dwindling number of netbooks still running on XP.
As I’ve noted before, they did this on laptops with Vista as well. There is no better way to destroy your reputation that to put out something that doesn’t work.
rdan,
Time for an open thread. Please move this to it!
Did you all see the VP Joe Biden on Iraq? Let me quote:
Here’s how Biden put it to Larry King:
“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.
I spent — I’ve been there 17 times now. I go about every two months — three months. I know every one of the major players in all the segments of that society. It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”
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Wow, did I not predict, right here on AB, that Obama would secure the US victory in Iraq and Bush’s legacy of freeing Iraq of one of the worst tyrranies on the planet?!? And now they are taking credit for it!!!!
Bwhahahaha!
Not only an implicit acknowledgement of the success of the surge, but also backs Bush’s idea that freedom can actually come to Islamic dictatorships.
Anyone willing to argue with my prediction that we have between 30-50K US troops in Iraq on election day 2012? Anyone?
Islam will change
Apple doesn’t play that game? In what world?
Apple’s model on this is akin to serfdom. The I-Pad has zero input plugs, not even a single USB port. This means that Apple gets to dictate who you can do business with and what software you can run, and all so they can retain central control of all of the revenue streams. I’d rather own a laptop than encourage-by-participating in the intentionally limited data freedom that is part and parcel of the IPad business model.
Give all the credit to Robert Gates if you like.
Rumsfeld resisted the surge to the end, and Bush was forced into a withdrawal time-line by Maliki.
The original Cheney led plan was to establish Iraq as a permanent platform for the projection of American force throughout the region. This was clearly shown by the choice to establish the country’s largest embassy complex there and in the permanence of the existing air and ground bases. And Bush apologists here were point to the decades long presence of US troops in Germany and Japan as justification for this policy.
In the run up to the war Cheney was asked what they would do if the end result of the invasion was an Iranian friendly fundamentalist influenced Shi’ite government. He confidently replies “That is not going to happen”. This attempt to revise history is simply pathetic, none of the current outcome was in the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld plan. Regime change in Iraq was only the start of the plan, the cabal was openly planning actions against Syria and Iran (remember a commenter here blithely suggesting orbiting bombers over both capitals (though not knowing much about plane types)).
The United States is neither bombing Iran or facilitating an Israeli bombing campaign. All of which adds up to Epic Fail compared to the plans presented in quite public ways by surrogates back in 2002.
I personally don’t share Biden’s optimism here, but even if he is right it would just be a result of preventing the further damage to the world planned by the Bush Regime.
And surge success is certainly relative. Just about every other day we gets reports of suicide bombings in Baghdad and even the former Green Zone and there is a good chance that Maliki’s bold attempt to eliminate most Sunnis from the candidate lists is going to backfire in a bad way.
In any event your triumphalism is sadly out of place, no one would have entered this war knowing its ultimate cost in lives and dollars for so meager a result. After all the end result of Vietnam is that we replaced a fairly brutal dictator with a stable peaceful regime. Of course that dictator was supplied by us and it was the adversaries that established the regime. Which is not too different here, we ended up with a regime that may be stable and peaceful ultimately but which will be likely a patron of a member of the Axis of Evil, i.e. Iran, that is the outcome that Cheney insisted was impossible.
Well no. The connector which connects the iPad to a host computer is a USB port and is already designed to only accept input from that host syncing computer but already has adaptors that will allow it to be connected to digital cameras via a standard mini-USB port or to take an SD Card. The device also comes standard with BlueTooth which allows other possibilities for in put and of course is based on WiFi that would allow it to in principle use wireless networked devices like printers.
And while does have final approval over Apps that will run on the iPad, there are already 100,000 or so that will run on it already at the App Store, with thousands free, and many more at $1.99 each. Additionally Apple has already announced release of its iWork Productivity Suite with each component (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentation etc) priced at $9.95. Compare that to any version of the Office Suite for that laptop.
And none of this is to even touch the ability of the iPad to serve as the input device for all kinds of Cloud Computing applications and has the ability to access any amount of online storage. My Google Account comes with 7 GB of free storage and that is not the only such free storage account I have.
What input capability would you really need here that the combination of WiFi, the actual USB Port, Bluetooth, and access to the Cloud would not allow you?
Frankly I would rather submit to the tyranny of the Apple App Store than the true hell of wrestling with Windows Registry. Sometimes freedom to run whatever combination of software you want is a one way ticket to wanting to light that laptop on fire, an impulse I have never had with any Apple product, and I bought my first Mac in 1985.
Thats one bizzaro world you’ve invented for yourself. Your imagination is impressive even if I don’t think I have the tolerance for the amount of meth and LSD it would take to come up with some of that all on my own.
surge = paying people not to shoot us.. for now with a generous helping of genocide
Iraq under Saddam wasn’t muslim…
victory??
You know what here:
http://www.juancole.com/
Read about 2 years worth so you’ll at least have some idea of the reality the rest of us deal with. There’s not time to explain it to you. Its a little more detailed that what you’ll get from FOX, but theres value in being well informed even if its depressing.
The trouble with your theory about the universally hated Microsoft model is that it has profited enormously for a generation or so. It’s the “industry standard” (patooie!) which has managed to be not quite bad enough or unreliable enough to trigger a mass exodus, and entrenched enough to make the cost of transition just high enough to also prevent said exodus. It’s like the bad kid who’s never quite bad enough to get that spanking. It’s like Qwerty vs Dvorak.
With negligible exceptions, my entire computer life has been in a Microsoft environment. I wish it were not so. I have avoided IE and Outlook, but may have to bow to Outlook to get my cell phone to work properly. (True!)
Of course, all the MS users are looking for an alternative. They’re like the gazillion people who left Hotmail for Gmail the instant it came on line. But so far MS is well over the safe side of the tipping point. Sigh.
Noni
Well. There’s always Unix. It’s free and a lot of stuff works. But a lot doesn’t.
Unix is what I use, but I really can’t recommend it to anyone looking for something that “just works”.
Frankly, the consumer computer industry is an embarassment to the human race with more standards than anyone can keep track of and only spotty compliance with any of them.
WIndows is a mediocre desktop operating system … on good days. But most things you buy will work with it after a fashion.
Apple is probably better, but costs more and has less compatibility with purchased devices.
Unix is a lot more flexible, but it has even more than compatibility problems than Apple and owning a Linux computer is a lot like owning an mid 20th Century English sports car. Fun to drive, but take your tools and be prepared to walk home … and, if possible get home before dark. http://www.hermit.cc/mania/tmc/articles/lucas.htm
Well I would point out that Apple OS X is built atop UNIX, I believe under BSD, if you dive that deep you will find built in Utilities to allow you to be as geekish as you like.
Second I have not experienced nor really heard of actual device incompatibilities with Apple, most devices seem to be truly Plug and Play with little to nothing of that search for device drivers you have in Windows Land.
And while Apple has always cost more then the median DOS/Windows version at the time, it has been pretty comparable with actual configurations that match it’s out of the box performance, for PCs to equal or exceed graphics performance on a Mac has meant an upgraded graphics accelerator.
Plus overall prices on both platforms have dropped so far and so fast that complaining over differences in price that are mostly in tens of dollars seem pretty meaningless to those of us buying a Mac 128 compared to a PC Junior were talking hundreds of dollars difference.
The basic outlineof the PC/Mac debate has not changed in 25 years, Macs cost more, run a smaller range of programs, and include useless frills, even as the costs drop, that smaller range allows all the same productivity, and useless frills like mice, GUIs and the like ultimately get adopted by the competing platforms.
Don’t remember Mac Killer IBM PC Junior? Wonder why Zoom is not a common word in quite the way iPod is? Welltjere are reasons why resricted market share Apple has maintained that market share while all it’s competitors 20 years ago no longer make PCs (see. An Atari or Compaq or even an IBM recently)
***Don’t remember Mac Killer IBM PC Junior?***
The PC Junior (Mar 1984) was an atrocious computer. But the Apple it was competing with was not the Mac. It was the Apple IIe which was even worse. (I am entirely too familiar with the Apple IIe which was pretty much worthless for office/educational usage)
The Mac cost three times the price of the PC Junior/Apple IIe and competed not especially successfully with the IBM PC XT.
***Second I have not experienced nor really heard of actual device incompatibilities with Apple, most devices seem to be truly Plug and Play with little to nothing of that search for device drivers you have in Windows Land. ***
Well, let’s take the Creative Zen Mozaic MP3 player I just bought because it is said to be both cheap and one of the few MP3 players that have both Bookmark and Resume capabilities. Both are said to be highly desirable for playing audio books. And my experiments with audio books on players that didn’t have those capabilities convinced my wife and I that something was missing mssing for sure.
Windows support? Of course.
Apple support? Nope (And my impression is that it may not be wild about Apple style smart playlists, but maybe I did something wrong).
Can it be made to work with OX-X by doing what you’d have to do with Unix? Probably. A lot of stuff can. Some apparently can’t. But If I’m going to have to do the BSD-Linux stuff anyway, what’s the point of paying a lot of money for Apple? And the BSD-Linux stuff varies in complexity from a few minutes to literally weeks in the case of our Samsung CLP-300 laser printer and Epson V-300 flat bed Scanner.
The principle problem I’d anticipate with OS-X and Unix software is that OS-X is based on BSD whereas most devices that have Unix support are designed to use Linux. The two (Linux and BSD) are similar, but not identical and the process of tweaking software configured for one to work on the other is not simple or, indeed, always possible.
Anyway, my point is that normal people shouldn’t have to put up with that crap, and, for the most part, won’t put up with it.
Vt maybe I don’t compete in the Codger category but I certainly remember the Chicklet Keyboard of the Junior.
It was the poster child for what Ken was saying, IBM deliberately crippled the Junior trying to compete with Apple on the cheap while not biting into their market share in the office market. Their marketing always seemed to work on that same model. “well yeah our home version is crappier by far than our office model, but hey you’ll save a few bucks as against an Apple”.
Apple never adopted that Office vs Home model. Though it did adopt a Professional (especially Graphics and Publishing) vs Education and Home. The gap between Office and Education was never wide enough to allow them to fend off IBMs crappy Home Products on people who needed a higher entry point. When I was writing graduate school papers I needed WYSIWYG where IBM was only willing to deliver the ability to let people write a memo in Courier.
Actually, there was a Windows 1.0 back around 1985 and I believe it had a WYSIWYG editor (WRITE). The problem was that Windows 1.0 on the PCs of the day had pretty much the same problem as Apple’s incredibly expensive Lisa. Lots of neat features, but so slow as to be unusable.
I tried both Windows 1.0 and a Lisa … Once each.
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Agreed on the PC Jr which is indeed the poster child for letting marketing screw up a product attempting to position it. I’ve been told that later versions of the PC Jr were actually usable, but the original was certainly a disaster.
I wondered at the time, and still wonder today if IBM shouldn’t have Henry Forded their PC — stamping them out like biscuits and driving the costs down, down, down.
I think even netbooks are able to run Windows 7 Home Premium. I’m running Home Premium on a low end laptop and it runs well and has the eye candy.
It appears to me that the Home Starter edition was intended to keep the original sticker price of netbooks low. Starter edition could just as easily be seen as a result of manufacturers trying to stay within the $250-400 netbook sweet spot, as it is Microsoft attempting to gouge consumers with upselling.
Even though Starter is probably an actual operating system in that it will be able to run programs and such, it doesn’t seem that way. Changing your desktop background is seen by most people as part of what computers do. That’s probably why they chose it, as it’s superfluous, but also important enough to spur users to change. Most of the other features Starter lacks are pretty benign except for the ability to run multiple monitors.
I don’t think Microsoft was being entirely irrational or evil with the idea of Starter edition. I see the logic in their belief that if they’re going to sell a cheap operating system for low end machines that OS shouldn’t do everything that the expensive version does. Personally, I think that Microsoft would have been better off letting the hardware limitations of a netbook cripple the full fledged OS for them. Although I could see the potential for abuse there.
Naive/entry-level users often want Microsoft to be all things in town and forget about the third party software market. I bet there are multiple Windows starter edition background changer on the market. See for example
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/47294-desktop-background-change-windows-7-starter.html
Windows is controlled by registry database which make it quite flexible and friendly for third party software. That’s one of the reasons of Windows sucess despite warts and all.
Also it’s never a good idea to shoot from the heap.
Second the motion about using third-party software to overcome Windows flaws and oversights. I’m running the wallpaper changer linked to in the previous comment. For the daring*, however, it’s possible to run Mac OS X on a netbook and set up has become fairly automated. I’m typing this on a netbook running OS X right now (it also runs Win 7 Starter and Xubuntu, but fortunately, not simultaneously).
Having a few hobbyists with netbooks running OS X instead does little to undermine Microsoft’s monopoly, but I agree that Microsoft will eventually undermine itself. At least I can avoid Windows if I want to.
A somewhat out-of-date OS X – netbook compatibility chart can be found here:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/12/17/osx-netbook-compatib.html
OS X Installation instructions for one model of netbook can be found here:
http://gizmodo.com/5389166/how-to-hackintosh-a-dell-mini-10v-into-the-ultimate-snow-leopard-netbook
*This does violate Apple’s EULA, but I’ve seen no sign of them going after individual users. They have gone after businesses installing OS X on non-Apple hardware (Google “Psystar”, for example).