Posted on 07/06/2010 12:30:05 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Irish knockoff.
Very true. OTOH, the question as to whether MSFT stole MS-DOS from Gary Kildall is a bit more open
Lift your hands from the keyboard and put your fingertips on your screen.
Now hold them there for the next eight hours.
Doesn't take too long to come to the conclusion that touch-screen desktop computers are overrated.
Similarly, try speaking aloud everything that you type. Aside from privacy concerns (I really don't want the guy in the next cubicle knowing what I"m ordering from Amazon), voice is basically a command-line interface. And speaking with the clear enunciation and stilted, unnatural style that computer voice recognition requires puts a lot of strain on the old pipes.
And rumor has it they want to have a webcam ID login upon windows boot.
I can't wait to see all the tickets the IT department gets from people who can't log in because they're having a bad hair day.
The desktop computer came into being without local networks, let alone the Internet. What we're coming to now is a computing world where it doesn't matter much what platform you're using; networks are TCP/IP, files are increasingly in formats based on open standards, and applications can and often do run on servers with a platform-agnostic browser as the user interface.
The question is whether this sort of open exchange would have come about sooner if DOS/Windows had not become a de facto standard -- if we had IBM PCs, Macs, Amigas, and maybe even OS/2 boxes. Probably not.
Cheap commodity hardware running Windows was the Model T of the Internet. It's easy to write flowery, nostalgic odes to the Model T which was, let's face it, it was a pretty crappy car. But it opened the road to millions of people who would go on to get something more reliable, more powerful and infinitely more comfortable.
You could make the argument that if DOS hadn't become the standard, something else would have. That's likely true, but without the might of IBM behind it, it would have taken a lot longer for computers to become inexpensive and attractive enough to get into people's homes. In a world without IBM PC clones, we might be talking about the Mac as an alternative to the Amiga; Commodore had the biggest installed base in homes when DOS and the Mac entered that market.
Ideas cannot be copyrighted. Specific design elements and implementations can be patented (though "look and feel" patents are controversial), and those elements were introduced on the Mac, duplicated in Windows, and absent on the Alto/Star.
Non-player to a strong third place in three years. Not bad at all, especially considering that Apple only sells phones with AT&T in the US.
And in the bigger scheme of things - the entire cell phone market - Apple is WAY down the list
Apple doesn't care about the entire cell phone market, just like Apple doesn't care about the budget computer market. There's more profit margin in the high-end.
Media infatuation and market share do not necessarily go hand in hand.
Market share and profits do not necessarily go hand in hand. See Dell, big market share, poor profits. Apple is going for the profits, which is what companies are supposed to do. What use is a big market share if it doesn't make you much money?
If I understand the legal outcomes correctly, the "ideas cannot be copyrighted" concept was in fact a landmark of Apple vs Microsoft.
I played with one of the HP iMac competitors at Best Buy. It had a touch screen. Talk about the most useless feature ever on a desktop.
At any rate, for all the moaning about how much better the Apple closed hardware model is for the individual end user, no one will argue it would have been better for the industry if Microsoft had adopted it.
Even the open source hobbyist software development benefitted from the explosion of hardware inventors, innovators and manufacturers that suddenly had a wide open market for their ideas and products. You could pick up a used commodity PC at a yard sale that originally shipped with Windows, wipe it, install your preferred flavor of Linux and be off an running.
Android has gone from non-player to a strong 4th place in just 2 years...;)
The iPhone is a good device, but it's only moderately successful when you look at the Smartphone market. Too many confuse the current media hype over the iPhone as market dominance (I believe that was a word used earlier) when the reality is that it still has a way to go to have any shot at all at the top dog (Nokia, with ~3 times the market share).
Just to put this in perspective: Apple has sold about 50 million iPhones since the introduction, back in January 2007. That's a lot of iPhones!
However, 50 million phones would be a good MONTH for Nokia.
So it's 3.5 years of sales, or ~5 weeks of sales. There's a HUGE difference there.
Market share and profits do not necessarily go hand in hand. See Dell, big market share, poor profits.
See Microsoft - big market share, huge profits. Hewlett Packard - monster market share ($114 billion in sales - more than Apple and Microsoft combined) and also big profits (more than Apple, less than Microsoft).
Big market share may not guarantee big profits, but it makes it a LOT easier to do so!
Ever notice how atheists attack Christian, same fervor. Strange but true.
Ever notice how atheists attack Christian, same fervor. Strange but true.
Your own chart shows Android in 6th place. Interesting how you describe Android's 7M behind Apple's 25M as "strong" while you describe Apple's 25M behind RIM's 34M as "distant."
The iPhone is a good device, but it's only moderately successful when you look at the Smartphone market.
Non-player to over a quarter of the market in three years cannot be honestly called only moderately successful. Android had the advantage of leveraging existing hardware OEMs (with brand names well-known in phones), sales channels, contracts, and business relationships. Apple started from scratch.
However, 50 million phones would be a good MONTH for Nokia.
You keep flipping back and forth between the smart phone and general phone markets.
Well, no, but we have an idea of Microsoft thinking in the design department with the ugly XBox series.
Apple doesn’t have anywhere near 45% of any market, save the music player market in the US
. . . they just target the top end, most profitable niche in a market, and dominate that. Making commodities just isn't Steve Jobs' bag.Apple will make a gaming console when, as, and if they can pitch it as "insanely great" and back it up. They don't want to compete in a category, they want to transcend the categories in our collective minds.They want to surprise us. "Oh, and one more thing . . ."
So no, I don't expect Apple to enter the gaming console market as currently defined.
IMHO
Granted. Apple will probably be high on the list for people who walk into a computer store, and when asked what their system requirements are will say "Well, it has to be pretty."
Are you really under the impression that people walk into a computer store, rattle off a list of system requirements, then buy a computer sight unseen?
I'm under the impression that when people walk into a computer store looking for a system, cosmetics isn't usually high on the requirements list. I will consider any evidence to the contrary, and could change my mind depending on what that evidence is.
I believe your memory is a tad faulty, dayglored. The original Macintosh as released on January 22, 1984, came with a keyboard and a mouse. What it lacked and people complained about were cursor keys for keyboard navigation. Apple's response was that the mouse was sufficient for moving around text windows.
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