This article is an answer to "Competition Is Not Good" by Kroc and reading it wouldn't be comfortable without switching to and from the original article. I wrote it just because I do strongly disagree with Kroc and I believe I can prove that he is not as close to truth as it may seem from the first glance.
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Member since:2005-07-24
Member since:2006-12-05
Member since:2006-10-16
Obviously someone is going to come in first. It's just a truth of the world. A law of God if you will. It's just logical.
If someone invents something really new, it's just gonna take a few years till everybody "gets" it (and realizes there's money in it, nobody, not even ibm, saw good money in computers ("I think there's a world market for maybe 5 computers" comment from IBM's CEO comes to mind), until several years after the intel chips hit the market.
And yes computers only became somewhat useful right after microsoft got involved. Whatever else microsoft is, they were at the birth of the personal computer, and they competed, and won, and got a lot out of it. They made all the innovations. MS-DOS : a simple version of unix to run on "normal" hardware. Visual basic : ever notice how just about all experiments in electronics STILL use either visual basic or matlab ? There must be some good in it (and yes, a lot of bad, but please let God strike down anyone trying to regulat programming languages). Graphical windows, working, with a useful application (word processor and DTP, which was a pain in the ass before windows came along, either expensive as hell, or scissors and paper, take your pick)).
They courted the small developer, as an innovative practice, and it worked (they created, or at least enabled shareware). It worked VERY well. Everybody's trying to repeat this brilliant tactic ever since.
I'm not saying they're perfect. They're not. At all. But they deserve some success for a few very good ideas.
"Microsoft has sensationally abandoned its controversial plans to restrict the sharing of XBox One games, and has also removed daily online authentication requirements for its forthcoming console", reports The Guardian. They had no choice. Still a good move."A snippet of code in the Steam digital distribution platform has revealed that Valve may be planning to let users easily share their games with friends in the future. The Verge has verified the code's authenticity, which was originally spotted by a member of the NeoGAF gaming forum; the code references a 'shared game library' and a notification that would alert a user when their games are currently in use by a borrower." This would change the, uh, game.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane."MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."
Member since:
2006-12-28
I'm afraid that the PC processor market is a prime example of what happens when there is competition involved. If it where not for AMD, Intel would have no reason to push they're x86 design forward.
Take the Itanic (Itanium) mess. It's a prime example of a company which thought that the world would follow it's lead no matter what it did. AMD brought out the x86-64bit extensions which proved so popular that Intel had to follow suit.
If Intel where the sold manufacturer of x86 processors, all 64 bit PCs today would be running Itanium.
There is no monopoly in the x86 processor market and there hasn't been in a while.