actors and techies can ignore this, tech nerds might like it.
I'm going to start posting tech related things in this journal, even though hardly anyone on my friendslist is going to care or fully understand everything I'm talking about. I'm glad I have you guys to keep me normal, or at least abnormal in several interesting ways, instead of becoming abnornal in just this way, i.e. the computer geek way, but I want to write my thoughts on this somewhere, and LJ is a good place to do it. I think I'm going to join so LJ user group for nerds and link them hear so someone reads it, but if you don't give a flying fuck about computers or technology or the business of getting them made, you cna just scroll right past it. I'll keep putting up personal updates too. In fact I'm going to do one in about 5 min.
On why Windows isn't going anywhere just yet.
I recently got my mom to buy an iMac. I gave her crap about her Dell, and the it broke every 5 seconds for years. A couple months ago adaware found something like 70 new infections and McAffee found 4 viruses and instead of spending hours cleaning it up again, she asked me to pick her up an iMac on my way home. Of course, and I'm giddy as a school boy about buying the brand spanking new iMac with the core duo processor and DDR2 RAM and ati video card with 128mbs of VRAM and it's all PCI express and its got gigabit ethernet and 802.11 a/b/g wireless and and and... So she gets this awesome little piece of computer history. Probably one of the first 10,000 intel apples, a partnership that flies in the face of (all) 30 years of computer history, and what does she do with it? Nothing. It sits in the office upstairs while she checks her mail on Dave's dell laptop. Why? AOL's mac support is pretty awful. Since switching myself I've found compatability issues to be surprising unobtrusive. The one exception is AOL anything, because AOL is not the real internet or real email or real home networking. It has all its own versions of stuff that they've engineered to work with itself on windows. There's no getting at any of it from the outside and their mac cleint sucks. I don't really care because I hate AOL and everything about it. But in my mom's case it turned out to be all she cares about. I couldn't get the AOL application to work on the iMac at all, maybe because of the new intel chip, and the web interface works better with Inernet Explorer on windows than on either Safari or Firefox on mac so she turns on the Dell, checks her mail, and turns it off so it doesn't get any viruses. My sisters aren't allowed to use it so it stays mostly functional.
So basically I convinced her to waste $1200 on a peice of white plastic that just sits upstairs and teases me, because it's way faster than my powerbook, and I want it. And that is what finally made me understand why Apple just can't win huge marketshare. They make computers for people who care about using computers to their full potential, and most poeple could not care less. Graphic designers, film edittors, researchers who want to build super computers*, general-purpose geeks all have a reason to want to get as much out of their machine as possible. Most people want it to do as little as possible.
Until Apple changes or people change the market isn't going to change. Apple could start selling to people who don't care about anything but AOL mail, but they won't. Steve Jobs has too much pride, and I'm thankful for that. People could also realize how much stuff computers can do other than check AOL, such as use a real email system, edit photos, make web sites, but I doubt that will happen either.
One place where this conflict between Apple and the majority of people doens't cause problems is iPods. In fact, it's why they are beating everyone in the market senseless. They make iPods for poeple who care about music, and that's just about everybody. The other guys are making music players for people who care about technology as much as their engineers do. So they sell to people who want every possible feature, take the time to figure them all out, and don't care that they are using the ugliest thing known to man. I am one of those people who wants all the features and would take the time to learn them, and I've considered buying something other than an iPod for my next music player purchase, but at this point there aren't many features that the iPod doesn't have. FM tuner might be nice if there was a damn thing worth listening to on the radio other than NPR. If Apple sold a radio tuner for $50 and a radio receiver that didn't tune, it's just set to 89.9, for $49 I'd save the buck and forget about all the other stations. MMM well maybe not, I like KROQ sometimes. OK, a radio that has two settings, KCRW and KROQ and I'm set.
But the iPod dominance does scare me sometimes, just because I don't like monopolies. Am I going to make an exception to my no monopolies rule just because it's Apple? I dunno. Am I going to buy an inferior product just to keep apple from getting their monopoly? Certainly not. I was reading this other blog about how the iPod is kicking so much ass and all the people who were saying "Just wait, this will be the mac all over again. I predict the death of the iPod within 2 years" are shutting the fuck up because it's been 4 years since it was introduced, 2 1/2 since I bought my first one, and about the same amount of time since it exploded like a h bomb and they are still selling so many iPods is ridiculous. So you look at the market now and see what other companies are offering, and it's pretty much nothing. Creative failed, Rio failed, Sony failed, Dell failed, Samsung failed but they don't care because they sell the flash memory to Apple so they're still making money. So as the red hot mp3 player market cools off, not because sales are down, but because someone will need to introduce something bold and new to even have a chance at defeating the iPod, and doing so costs money, of which the others have already lost plenty, will Apple revel in its monolopy like MS does? Ignoring it and allowing innovation to die until someone comes along to threaten them again? I hope not.
One place where the monopoly really scares me is content. I don't want there to be only one DRM laden formatt protected music store, even it is is Apple. I'd even go out of my way to buy from an inferior store just to prevent them from getting 90% marketshare, but I don't have to because some godly person invented emusic.com which isn't DRM laden and while it's MP3 which is not my favorite codec it's better than them going WMA, because that creates a de jure restriction on the music, only microsoft lisenced players, or AA, because that creates a de facto restriction. Anyone can get the rights to AAC, Apple can't stop them, and the fees are pretty small, but in fact the only players that support AAC are the iPod, the PSP and maybe a couple others but that might actually be it. So go buy from emusic. Stick it to the man! In fact, stick in to several men. labels, apple, microsoft, pop artists, germans. I don't see how it sticks it to the germans, in fact mp3 was invented by germans so they're probably fine with it, disregard that last one.
On why Windows isn't going anywhere just yet.
I recently got my mom to buy an iMac. I gave her crap about her Dell, and the it broke every 5 seconds for years. A couple months ago adaware found something like 70 new infections and McAffee found 4 viruses and instead of spending hours cleaning it up again, she asked me to pick her up an iMac on my way home. Of course, and I'm giddy as a school boy about buying the brand spanking new iMac with the core duo processor and DDR2 RAM and ati video card with 128mbs of VRAM and it's all PCI express and its got gigabit ethernet and 802.11 a/b/g wireless and and and... So she gets this awesome little piece of computer history. Probably one of the first 10,000 intel apples, a partnership that flies in the face of (all) 30 years of computer history, and what does she do with it? Nothing. It sits in the office upstairs while she checks her mail on Dave's dell laptop. Why? AOL's mac support is pretty awful. Since switching myself I've found compatability issues to be surprising unobtrusive. The one exception is AOL anything, because AOL is not the real internet or real email or real home networking. It has all its own versions of stuff that they've engineered to work with itself on windows. There's no getting at any of it from the outside and their mac cleint sucks. I don't really care because I hate AOL and everything about it. But in my mom's case it turned out to be all she cares about. I couldn't get the AOL application to work on the iMac at all, maybe because of the new intel chip, and the web interface works better with Inernet Explorer on windows than on either Safari or Firefox on mac so she turns on the Dell, checks her mail, and turns it off so it doesn't get any viruses. My sisters aren't allowed to use it so it stays mostly functional.
So basically I convinced her to waste $1200 on a peice of white plastic that just sits upstairs and teases me, because it's way faster than my powerbook, and I want it. And that is what finally made me understand why Apple just can't win huge marketshare. They make computers for people who care about using computers to their full potential, and most poeple could not care less. Graphic designers, film edittors, researchers who want to build super computers*, general-purpose geeks all have a reason to want to get as much out of their machine as possible. Most people want it to do as little as possible.
Until Apple changes or people change the market isn't going to change. Apple could start selling to people who don't care about anything but AOL mail, but they won't. Steve Jobs has too much pride, and I'm thankful for that. People could also realize how much stuff computers can do other than check AOL, such as use a real email system, edit photos, make web sites, but I doubt that will happen either.
One place where this conflict between Apple and the majority of people doens't cause problems is iPods. In fact, it's why they are beating everyone in the market senseless. They make iPods for poeple who care about music, and that's just about everybody. The other guys are making music players for people who care about technology as much as their engineers do. So they sell to people who want every possible feature, take the time to figure them all out, and don't care that they are using the ugliest thing known to man. I am one of those people who wants all the features and would take the time to learn them, and I've considered buying something other than an iPod for my next music player purchase, but at this point there aren't many features that the iPod doesn't have. FM tuner might be nice if there was a damn thing worth listening to on the radio other than NPR. If Apple sold a radio tuner for $50 and a radio receiver that didn't tune, it's just set to 89.9, for $49 I'd save the buck and forget about all the other stations. MMM well maybe not, I like KROQ sometimes. OK, a radio that has two settings, KCRW and KROQ and I'm set.
But the iPod dominance does scare me sometimes, just because I don't like monopolies. Am I going to make an exception to my no monopolies rule just because it's Apple? I dunno. Am I going to buy an inferior product just to keep apple from getting their monopoly? Certainly not. I was reading this other blog about how the iPod is kicking so much ass and all the people who were saying "Just wait, this will be the mac all over again. I predict the death of the iPod within 2 years" are shutting the fuck up because it's been 4 years since it was introduced, 2 1/2 since I bought my first one, and about the same amount of time since it exploded like a h bomb and they are still selling so many iPods is ridiculous. So you look at the market now and see what other companies are offering, and it's pretty much nothing. Creative failed, Rio failed, Sony failed, Dell failed, Samsung failed but they don't care because they sell the flash memory to Apple so they're still making money. So as the red hot mp3 player market cools off, not because sales are down, but because someone will need to introduce something bold and new to even have a chance at defeating the iPod, and doing so costs money, of which the others have already lost plenty, will Apple revel in its monolopy like MS does? Ignoring it and allowing innovation to die until someone comes along to threaten them again? I hope not.
One place where the monopoly really scares me is content. I don't want there to be only one DRM laden formatt protected music store, even it is is Apple. I'd even go out of my way to buy from an inferior store just to prevent them from getting 90% marketshare, but I don't have to because some godly person invented emusic.com which isn't DRM laden and while it's MP3 which is not my favorite codec it's better than them going WMA, because that creates a de jure restriction on the music, only microsoft lisenced players, or AA, because that creates a de facto restriction. Anyone can get the rights to AAC, Apple can't stop them, and the fees are pretty small, but in fact the only players that support AAC are the iPod, the PSP and maybe a couple others but that might actually be it. So go buy from emusic. Stick it to the man! In fact, stick in to several men. labels, apple, microsoft, pop artists, germans. I don't see how it sticks it to the germans, in fact mp3 was invented by germans so they're probably fine with it, disregard that last one.