Re: Apple's poor positioning for the age *after* x86

In article <200509191851448930%danieljohnson@vzavenuenet>,
Daniel Johnson <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 2005-09-18 12:54:52 -0400, ZnU <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
>
> > In article <200509181035548930%danieljohnson@vzavenuenet>,
> > Daniel Johnson <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> On 2005-09-17 23:55:56 -0400, ZnU <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> >
> > [snip]
> >>> There are a couple of studies that say the whole concept of copy
> >>> protection is based on a false premise -- namely, that online file
> >>> trading actually reduces sales.
> >>
> >> This is not the premise. The premise is that unpoliced, people will
> >> share their media.
> >
> > But they only care about that if it costs them money. They're quite
> > convinced it does, but the evidence doesn't particularly point that way.
>
> I think you are using "costs them money" a little imprecisely. They
> only care about piracy in that they think it affects their business.
> That you think it does not impresses them not at all.
>
> [snip]
> >> It is just that the problem was not this piracy, but rather the
> >> inability of the music industry to come to terms with technological
> >> change. They have come to see the customer as the enemy, and the
> >> customer's interests as inimical to their own. No amount of copy
> >> protection can fix that.
> >
> > In this respect, Microsoft is actually working *against* the long-term
> > interests of the content providers, by telling them that their old
> > business models can be forced to work in this age of easy digital
> > copies.
>
> Yes. Microsoft executed on their traditional model: supporting
> 'software' developers. What the music industry needed was not
> technological support in this sense, so it did not work.
>
> [snip]
> >>> This is a little sad, honestly. There are ways to beat Google on the
> >>> merits.
> >>
> >> Really. How?
> >
> > Just off the top of my head:
> >
> > 1) Something beyond keyword search; mining unstructured web pages and
> > producing structured data. Google does some of this to produce data for
> > Google Local and Froogle, but much more is possible.
>
> What beyond keyword search?

There's lots of stuff. IBM has a system called "WebFountain" that can
attach semantic meaning to unstructured text. It can look at a web page
and figure out what's a reference to a person, a place, a book, an
event, or whatever. This allows for much more accurate searches than
text string matching.

> > 2) Community features, like site ratings, etc. integrated with browser
> > toolbars and used to help rank results.
>
> They have "PageRank". Isn't this better than easily-spammed manual rankings?

A combination (with the manual rankings designed to hard to hack) would
probably be a better combination. The problem is, of course, that
quantity of inbound links does not necessarily imply anything about
quality.

> > 3) APIs that web sites could implement to allow the engine to index the
> > contents of their databases, not just whatever pages are accessible by
> > following links.
>
> Now this is a good idea. Indeed, I bet Microsoft will wind up doing
> something very like that. They are talking about things sort of like
> that.
>
> But the thing is, the indices produced will be private, not available
> for general consumption like Google, in most cases. So it won't exactly
> be a Google-competitor. At least not directly.

But there's no reason a public search engine shouldn't do this. And a
lot of sites seem to want this. Some of them go out of their way to have
linked pages just listing tons of stuff from their databases, that are
clearly designed as Google bait rather than to be directly read by
humans.

> [snip]
> >> Microsoft is about quality of implementation. They take good ideas that
> >> have been poorly implemented, implement them very well, and profit.
> >> That's what they did to Apple with Windows, and what they are doing to
> >> Java with .NET.
> >
> > This is a honestly a fairly nutty claim. Yes, I see how the argument
> > can be made about .NET and Java, but the larger pattern is exactly the
> > opposite -- Microsoft creates inferior implementations and wins through
> > leveraging its existing market power.
>
> Some people take it as an article of faith that Microsoft's
> implementations are poor. It is, however, rather obviously not true.
> Just as Win16 represented a clear improvement on the Macintosh Toolbox,
> so .NET represents a clear improvement on Java.

What's more interesting is whether Microsoft's implementations are what
they should be given the technology and the knowledge available at the
time they develop them. That fact that Microsoft can in some cases best
systems developed years earlier is unsurprising.

The Mac toolbox was written with fairly ludicrous constraints. A more
interesting comparison might be Win32 vs. NeXT's API. Not much of a
contest there.

> >> Yes. You will probably never admit that Microsoft's Windows products
> >> were superior to OS/2, Mac OS and Novell Netware, but it was, and
> >> that's why it won.
> >
> > I'd love to hear an explanation of how pre-XP consumer versions of
> > Windows or pre-NT corporate versions of Windows were in any way
> > superior to Mac OS.
>
> Oh, that's easy. That was before Mac OS X; Mac OS was junk then. It was
> awful in all sorts of ways. I've held forth on this topic before at
> length in this newgroups. You sure you want me to do it again? My mouth
> sometimes runneth over.
>
> Win95 beat it handily across the board. Even before that, Windows 3
> beat it in many areas.

>From a developer's perspective, Windows was ahead in some respects,
though behind in others. From a user's perspective, well, the GUI was
(and, for that matter, is) an incoherent mess. Somewhat better
underlying technologies didn't do much for reliability, and Microsoft
wrote (and seems to still write) what we could maybe call "spaghetti
operating systems", with zillions of fragile interdependencies.

[snip]

--
"It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get
them out of harm's way."
-- George W. Bush in Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005
.

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