carey_jim

Blodget Blasts Ballmer: 'Face Reality'

I don't have time, right now, to sketch out the history of how the Microsoft monopoly was formed but it wasn't formed because there were no alternatives available.

Apple was a competitor with Microsoft from the start and has always had a superior product. Commodore was an established player before Microsoft was formed, and the Commodore 64 was superior to DOS. Even IBM had a superior PC in the early days. The Amiga was the best computer available at that time (In 1983 it had a windows operating system and a color monitor) but its business model was dismal.

The story of Microsoft's rise to its present monopoly status is not pretty and sometimes I think the reason Bill Gates retired and is working hard to give his money away, is to do penance for some pretty ugly business practices. www.businessweek.com/m...


On May 29 02:05 PM SiliconValleyJoe wrote:

> Blodget is right. Microsoft tries to get is fingers on everything
> but does nothing especially well; may be the game :-). Its DOS/Windows
> pseudo-monopoly was formed long ago when the market had no other
> affordable and easy choices, not because it was superior.
>
> It has a mountain of profit, an army of engineers, a giant installed
> base and yet the company seems content to sit back and copy and play
> second fiddle. Sad.
>
> Of course, I dislike Windows and I dislike MSFT's business practice
> especially when they deal with small companies so I am rooting for
> Apple, Google and Palm and even Sony and other game players to continue
> to erode MSFT's market share. Time to cut it down to size and put
> it in its place :-).

Blodget Blasts Ballmer: 'Face Reality'

There are two problems with computer interface businesses (such as operating systems and search engines) that most other businesses don't have.

The first problem is that computer interfaces, being inherently complex, because they are so powerful, are difficult for users to master.

Therefore, whether you are talking about word processors (WORD, Word Perfect, Open Office) or operating systems (Linux, Windows, MAC OS X) it is not easy for users to change brands. A Mercedes drives about the same as a Ford but Windows is completely different from Ubuntu (a Linux based operating system.)

In the early days of automobiles, the government was asked to provide standards for the sizes of parts to make them interchangeable in all cars because, for example, it was not practical for every car to have special tires that wouldn't fit on any other car.

The interfaces used by all computer programs (such as cut, paste, delete, etc.) are similar to the nuts and bolts in cars and if the computer industry is to flourish as a competitive, capitalist model, the way the automobile industry did in the past, then these interface parts should be standardized and made available to all computer businesses, just as car parts are available to independent, car mechanics.

The real problem between Microsoft and Google is that two monopolies are fighting for complete control of a market based on their own privately created interface standards.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

Read the biographies of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others ....
There is no formula.


On May 05 11:32 AM MICHAEL WILEY wrote:

> Please Post and Please send copy to President Obama.
> I'm an entrepreneur from Michigan and a 4-Time Gold Medal Winner
> on Inventions, and I received The First Place Gold Medal for The
> United States Of America at The World Genius Convention in Tokyo
> Japan. I Have some Patents issued on some of these Ideas, and I'm
> working on patents for the rest of them.
>
> #1. A new Invention that will Save Police Officers Lives, We loose
> a Police Officer every 47 hrs. here in the US.
>
> #2 A device that will help Prevent Multiple Vehicle Accidents, <br/>100
> car-200 car, 500 car pileups. This unit will save Lives.
>
> #3. An device that can help Prevent High Speed Police Chases.
> This will Save Lives Every Year.
>
> #4. An Invention that will Help Contain and Control Wild Fires,<br/>Like
> in California, So many people loose their Loved Ones, Homes and
> Property. This will also help save the lives of the Public and The
> Lives of Fire Fighters, This will save Billions of Dollars each year
> from these Tragic Wild Fires. ( This idea should also be addressed
> to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger)
>
> #5. A new Semi Trailer that will Revolutionize the Trucking Industry.
> This Trailer will save Hundreds of Millions of Dollars
> with the transport company's.
>
> #6. A unit that will Protect Internet users from Internet Fraud and
> Identity Fraud. This will save approximately 10 Billion a year.<br/>
>
> #7. An Invention that will Prevent 95% of all Bank Robberies , <br/>The
> US had over 9000 Bank Robberies last year, that’s over 25 a day.
> We can Help Save Lives , Property, Cash, Reduce Hostage Situations,
> and Police Officers Lives. We can Have this Up &amp; Running with-in
> 6-9 Months
> Several more to list.
>
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> Royalties and income from this Facility.
>
> A market survey last year estimated that they were going to build
> and import approximately 24.5 Million vehicles this year. When we
> met with Officials In Washington DC, They advised us to meet with
> the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, because all cars
> should have #2. and #3 Safety Devises Listed Above installed on every
> car Build or Sold in the US.
>
> The cost of the Product to be Installed is about $ 52.00.
> We are looking for $100.00 per unit in Royalties.
> Simple Math 24.5 Million Vehicles X $100.00 = 2.45 Billion a Year
> in Royalties. We want to Manufacture as many ideas as Possible here
> in the U.S.A. We know we have to adjust the number of vehicles now
> because of the Economy.
>
> My Question is-
> HOW DO I PROCEED AND MAKE THIS HAPPEND?.
> More Information on globalinventionsolutio...
> Click on Company Overview
> Michael Wiley
> [e-mail]

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

I thought someone might object to my point that government based (university) research is better at making scientific discoveries than free enterprise. (I was taunting the anti 'socialist' crowd for a response.)

So I'll respond to my own post.

It is true that various research departments of large corporations, such as Bell Labs, IBM, Sun and many others have contributed in a major way to theoretical research. Also, many of their employees function as quasi-independent professors of computer science and other sciences.

It is also true that many major universities are beginning to look more like corporations (Harvard, Yale, U.C. Berkeley, etc.)

But I still think I'm right. Bell Labs was, in fact, shut down because it was thought to be, by its parent corporation, too costly even though it produced more innovations than most research universities.

Xerox produced the operating system (based on SmallTalk) that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were accused of stealing to make the first Apple windows system. But the Xerox corporation itself wasn't able to make use of the work of its own research department and so the American judicial system decided against Xerox and for Apple.

What I'm pointing out is that these large research departments are independent of corporate culture and function more as scientific research centers.

When profit motives get in the way we get the situation that we find it the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry and it isn't pretty.

Only the government is capable of getting the profit motive out of scientific research. Even though many corporations can't understand what their research departments are doing and too dumb to take advantage of it anyway, we can't rely on incompetence to insure objectivity.

Let free enterprise develop these ideas but let there be places where people can pursue knowledge for freely too, without bosses telling them where to look and without the need to worry about what the marketing department will say.

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

JerseyMike, as you know Apple's 'next OS revision' is just a few bells and whistles added on top of their objective C based FreeBSD Unix engine.

This combination makes Apple into a real competitor for Microsoft (but marketing will have to do the heavy lifting, as usual) except for the fact the objective C, their proprietary programming language is not a mainstream language.

Objective C is a great object oriented programming language and many think it is better than C++ or C# (Microsoft's proprietary language) but it isn't taught in major universities and is not known by many programmers. (Here is a case where simple 'crowd behavior' trumps the underlying value of a programming language.)

It's a very good thing that Apple has made this marriage with Unix but this new development to handle several processors is just a first step. The only impact will be to possibly prod customers to demand more and better multi-processor and multi-process support.

But it isn't really revolutionary to be able to switch between several processors, each with its own section of dedicated RAM. Especially if each CPU handles only one program.

I don't think Seeking Alpha is the place to go into technical details ((I have a background in both hardware and software design) so just let me say that this is a neglected area of computer research, and major advances could bring a huge increase in computing power using only hardware that is available today.

I also have to say that it seems obvious from past history that this kind of research is the kind of thing that governments and universities do best.

Private industry, for example, had no hand in developing the Internet or the programming languages commonly in use today, such as C++, SQL, etc. just as it has had no hand in developing the basic scientific and mathematical knowledge used by businesses to build the technological world around us.

The role of businesses (Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs ................) is to transform this basic research into practical and useful technology.

But 'socialismcantwork' is sure to step in here and give me negative points for saying it (although he never gives any arguments to prove his point.)


On Apr 08 09:14 PM JerseyMike wrote:

> Apple's next OS revision due out this summer - Snow Leopard - is
> specifically designed to work with multiple processors (they call
> the technology "grand central").
>
> But, as others have pointed out, the real growth in the PC sector
> in last year has been in low powered netbooks and not in high end
> desktops or servers. Thus, I would imagine that the number of Intel
> Atom processors sold probably far exceeds the number of i7 processors
> sold during the same period.

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

The real problem is that the big three operating systems can't take advantage of the power of hardware that has been available for years.

For ten or twenty years it has been possible, for example, to place hundreds of vanilla brand CPU's together in one box with mountains of RAM dedicated to each CPU, but no existing operating systems are able to use this kind of parallel computing arrangement.

Certainly not Apple's Big Cat OS or Microsoft's Fat Couch OS. The versions of Unix known collectively as Linux can't either.

It would be relatively simple to develop an OS that could handle two hundred and fifty CPU's, each CPU capable of running an application with its own dedicated RAM. But putting such capacity on top of Big Cat OS or Fat Couch OS would be virtually impossible.

No one has given much time, to my knowledge, of writing such as operating system because they know it is impossible to lure people away from Apple and Microsoft.

It isn't about hardware. Ultimately, it's about tearing people away from big screen virtual reality and other forms of narcissistic navel gazing, and bringing them back to the hard reality of creating software and new programming languages to more effectively use the hardware that is already there.

After all, the jellyware called the human brain has been shown to be capable of discovering quantum mechanics, relativity theory and the science of heredity. But what do most people use this jellyware for?

The question almost answers itself.

Let us hope there are unknown computer software Einsteins, Heisenbergs and Watson and Cricks using their jellyware to develop the operating systems of the future.

Which is not, of course, to say that Intel has not produced a great new product. It is to say that almost nobody knows what to do with it.

Commoditization and the Demise of Customer Support

An example of the failure of artificial intelligence is the Pleo.

I bought one of these robot dinosaurs and it stopped working a couple of months out of the box.

Customer service was 'premium stonewall.' My emails were ignored and my telephone calls not returned.

The Pleo website gave instructions on how to obtain an RMA number, which it said was necessary for returning a broken Pleo and also provided the mailing address for broken Pleos.

But the company WOULD NOT ACKNOWLEDGE my request of an RMA number, either by email or telephone.

To add insult to injury, they said that any Pleo sent for repair or replacement that did NOT have an RMA number would not be accepted and would be returned to sender.

Naturally, I contacted the better business bureau. They launched a complaint against Pleo (Ugobe Inc.) but gave the company 90 days to respond. By then, my Pleo will be outside of the warranty.

The dinosaur sits in its box (sadly?) waiting for a response from either the Better Business Bureau or Ugobe.

Caleb Chung, the founder of the company, is obviously just another Wizard of Oz/Barnum and Bailey act waiting for suckers like me who want to believe in the reality of artificial intelligence.

But, alas, the Pleo, even when it is working, does not resemble a life form. It resembles a help desk manned by people with foreign accents, reading from algorithm scripts.

Commoditization and the Demise of Customer Support

A deeper problem is that fewer and fewer people actually have the technical and scientific training to help anyone.

While computer science itself is no more difficult than any other branch of knowledge, it is immensely complex.

For example, it is well known that any large computer program is far more complex than a jet aircraft or any other mechanical device.

These programs were developed by teams of programmers and it is very unusual for a single programmer to understand the entire program.

For example, Unix and all its flavors was developed by thousands of programmers, many of whom are anonymous, and no one individual is an expert on more than a few parts of Unix.

Therefore most IT departments have a small army of Unix experts who specialize in different parts of Unix such as networking, shell script writing, etc. It is essential for the proper functioning of any company (and Google, Yahoo and other computer companies are not exceptions) that their Unix experts NOT be talking heads working from scripts, but are problem solvers with a deep knowledge of their specific specialties.

The basic problem is that human beings have become overwhelmed by the explosion in scientific and technological knowledge.

We are also faced with two basic problems.

The first is the failure of artificial intelligence. The dream of artificial intelligence is a variation of the dream that robots will someday be able to vacuum homes, mow lawns and cook dinner. Obviously, this has not happened and using telephone trees and problem solving algorithms has turned out to be more frustrating that helpful.

The second problem is that, at least in America, the average American has not risen to the challenge of mastering the new technological knowledge.

More and more American high school students want to be actors, professional athletes, politicians or businessmen but fewer and fewer want to become scientists and engineers.

The second problem will cause America to continue to outsource to countries such as India and China or to import their scientists and engineers, and the first problem will continue to cause frustration until we realize that artificial intelligence is still only a dream at best and a nightmare at worst.

Apple and Macworld: The End of an Era or Two

Did Steve Jobs write the Tiger operating system all by himself? (Or is it called Linux Bear now? It's so hard keeping up to date on all the names.)



On Dec 17 04:14 PM deasys wrote:

> @carey_jim: "Apple and Linux correspond to Packard and the Cord of
> the 1930s, and like them, are destined to disappear unless Microsoft
> is broken up by the FTC"
>
> And how does that assertion jibe with Microsoft's continuing loss
> of OS market share, browser market share, and mobile market share?
>
>
> It's hard keeping up, isn't it? It's almost 2009, Jim, not 1995...

Apple and Macworld: The End of an Era or Two

The contemporary computer industry is a cross between the automobile industry and the telephone industry of the 1920s and 1930s.

Microsoft corresponds to AT&T but without the Willis-Graham Act of 1921 which exempted AT&T from the Sherman Antitrust Act and allowed it to be a monopoly for 60 years before it was finally broken up in the 1980s.

Microsoft also appears to be a "natural monopoly" but apparently doesn't need a Willis-Graham Act to remind the FTC.

To change the analogy to the automobile industry, Apple and Linux correspond to Packard and the Cord of the 1930s, and like them, are destined to disappear unless Microsoft is broken up by the FTC.

Apple, Linux and Microsoft are, basically, operating systems. Hardware is interchangeable, so Microsoft is Vista.

Paradoxically, Apple, Linux and the other variations of Unix, which are essentially public domain operating systems (just as the Internet is based on public domain software) are still superior to the closed and proprietary operating system Vista even after billions of dollars have been paid to the best computer scientists in the world to improve the Microsoft Windows operating system.

If the FTC would do its job and break up the Microsoft monopoly you wouldn't need to worry about Steve Jobs' health. Allowed to stand, God himself as CEO of Apple wouldn't be able to save Apple or Linux from the fate of the Packard and Cord automobiles and the Dodo bird: extinction.

Even though Apple is now running on a supercharged V8 version of the Unix operating system it is no match for the monopoly power of Microsoft.

AT&T was finally broken up after more than 60 years. Do we have to wait that long for Microsoft to be broken up?

A Giant Pinball Game - Fast Money Recap (9/30/08)

If you could look back and do one thing for the last month, you would have doubled your money, at least:

Buy an ETF index fund at the end of a down day and sell it at the end of next day if it's an up day.

Casino America?