This 24/7 Wall Street article displays three common media ailments: hyperbole, a love for top ten lists, and an obsession with December predictions for the coming year (which off course OSAlert is obviously also falling victim to), and there are some predictable losers on this list (Blockbuster Video, anyone?). I thought it would be an interesting topic for OSAlert because three of the companies/brands are quite familiar to us: Palm, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems.I think that avid followers of tech business could have predicted the continued declining fortunes, if not outright extinction, of all of these companies for several years now. Palm and Mororola are both notorious for having squandered this entire decade and seen their product go from exciting and relevant to unremarkable or even nonexistent, displaying epic failures in product vision and operational management.
Sun is a different case. Though its fortunes turned drastically for the worse about ten years ago when all the dot coms stopped spending all their funny money on datacenters, and recent technological trends such as the rise of Linux and cloud computing have conspired to make Sun’s job harder, it’s been a fundamentally sound business with good products. But now with the impending Oracle buyout, it’s likely to be radically changed, if not completely absorbed, and if the buyout is blocked by regulators, it may be mortally wounded by the disruption the failed buyout causes. In any case, even if the buyout offer never happened, the reason that Sun was on the market in the first place has a lot to do with the prospects of expensive proprietary servers and commercial UNIX moving forward. And even though Sun was doing interesting things with MySQL and OpenSolaris and Linux, these weren’t big moneymakers, and it’s always easier for an upstart to unseat the reigning champ in the tech world than it is for the champ to disrupt a profitable business in order to remain relevant in a hypothetical future.
Despite the fact that I’ve been down on Palm and Motorola for years now, I was surprised to confront them on this list because of the surprising success of their two latest products, the Pre and the Droid. But in both cases, the success of an upstart, niche product may not be enough to counteract the kind of downward momentum both companies have accumulated, and particularly in the case of Motorola, just can’t make a dent in the declining fortunes from the rest of their operating divisions. So perhaps the Pre and the Droid will live on and flourish, but will do so under the umbrella of a drastically diminished parent, or perhaps more likely, in the hands of an acquiring firm.
I won’t shed any tears for Blockbuser Video, though. I’ve been a Netflix user since 2000, and never looked back. I’ve been into a Blockbuster exactly once since then, and it was a traumatic experience. I briefly tried their Netflix-like service on a free trial and was stunned at how poorly executed the user experience was. Blockbuster was on top of the world and utterly failed to take advantage of technological innovations or anticipate changes in the marketplace. I never even liked them in their good days, since they rose to power by putting smaller, cheaper video stores out of business, and I’m sure I’m not the only person that’s been glad to see them get their long-delayed comeuppance.
Kodak is a sadder story. I think they recognized the world’s move to digital, and have consistently tried to straddle the two worlds and make quality products for both. It would never have made sense for them to abandon the film and chemical world too early, but they never had any advantage other than brand recognition to give them a leg up in the digital world. In many ways, their dominance of the film market probably worked against them in digital, since they were not perceived as relevant, and while it was easy for Nikon and Canon to translate their dominance and make the jump, Kodak’s strength wasn’t lenses and machinery, which largely remained, but chemistry, which was yesterday’s news.
OSAlert has always been a place where fans of technologies from the scrapheap have always been welcome. We still pine for the Amiga, the BeBox, the NeXT, the Newton, and reminisce fondly about products from Commodore, Atari, Digital, Sinclair, Compaq, SGI, and other firms that have faded out, been swallowed up, or imploded spectacularly. It’s also been a place where readers have expressed sincere hope that today’s winners will be tomorrow’s has-beens, and hopes are oft aired that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Facebook, or whoever happens to be at the top at the time will soon be knocked from their perch.
So who in the OSAlert orbit will see decline in 2010? Novell? Microsoft? AOL? Yahoo? Will the Amiga fans finally give up for good? Will any commercial UNIX see any gains in relevance? Will the increasingly intense competition in the smartphone space continue to happen at Nokia’s expense? Will IE keep losing marketshare? Which formerly-popular Linux distros will fade? And is one year just too short of a period to track these kinds of declines, which usually play out over a decade or more? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
As far as distos go, I think we’ll see Debian start to take a back-seat. We may see it become the basis of many other distros, but I don’t think we’ll see it progress much.
We’ll probably be stuck with OpenSuSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu for the near future.
That would’ve been a prophetic predictions to make in 2004.
I call BS.
1. Debian has still the biggest developer base.
2. Ubuntu will have to push a certain amount of their stuff upstream(Debian) otherwise they have essentially forked Debian and have to do all of the work on their own.
3. Debian will have a release in 2010.
4. Debian is mostly moving in the right direction (with a little help from Ubuntu and others)
5. A lot of governments use Debian as their semi-official distro (Germany for example)
6. A lot of Ubuntu users in search of stability might switch to Debian (or Ubuntu devs will become DDs or DMs)
+ a few things I can’t think of right now.
Pardon my ignorance, but Debian is a semi official of Germany? Where is Debian based from? I would have thought Suse would be the official or semi official one.
kragil postulated…
This is already clearly the pattern Ubuntu intends to pursue. Unfortunately it is also the worst possible choice they could make at this point of time. Their last few releases have been terrible on the netbook segment, one of the fastest growing segments in a nearly flat marketplace. Their response to bugs has been to push the fixes upstream (Debian) and release half-baked crud the Canonical developers know will not work well if at all.
Ubuntu was a great distro in its time, but the developers have been consistently fumbling the ball lately and the resulting perception is Vista-like. Unless they manage to get a Win7-like release out with their upcoming LTS they’re going to lose users like rats from a sinking ship. Two guesses to where they’ll go…
kragil postulated…
This is already happening. Just look at Eeebuntu, which will be basing their next release on Debian and not Ubuntu. Not quite sure what the rename will be since they intend to support more netbooks than just the eeepc, but they’ve already made it clear the next release will be based on Debian. Mepis long ago moved back to Debian after a ill-fated shift to Ubuntu– perhaps they were the start of a trend?
–bornagainpenguin
PS: I will miss Palm when they’re gone, but in all sincerity the Life Drive was their last hurrah, the failure of their Copla–err–Cobalt and the demise of Tapwave’s Zodiac (with its terrible battery life) all but assured its eventual trend towards obscurity. Too bad, because other than my Sharp Wizard 770 the Palm Zire 72s has been my favorite organizer\eBook reader\mp3 player. If only they’d gone for quantity and not multimedia\smartphone they might still be around for the long haul.
Wasn’t that the original posters point? Lots of people will be using things based on Debian, but non of those things will be called Debian.
dagw inquired…
Yes it was, what I was doing there was agreeing with the parent post and citing an example or two of where this was already happening. Personally though I can see it going the other way too–once one of these new distros make it easy enough to do I expect there will be many people making the switch over to plain vanila Debian as they learn enough to be able to do so. We’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out.
–bornagainpenguin
Unlikely, with LTS coming out on 2010. Ubuntu know they can drop the ball with interim releases, but they take the LTS thing seriously.
Talk about dropping the bell… yet again X “disappeared” on my karmic, taking my apps with it.
WinKarmic Millenium Edition: http://www.fewt.com/2009/11/winkarmic-me.html
Ubuntu keeps copy the wrong things…
–bornagainpenguin
It reminds me of what HAL was merged into Fedora many years ago – and all hell broke loose. The follow up was the HAL maintainer that it had nothing to do with HAL and everything to do with a mirade of other facts. Amazing how once HAL is replaced with udev, all the crap that I experienced has magically disappeared. The moral of the story I find is that programmers in the open source world are more than happy to toot their trumpet but when it comes to the fall out when used in real world situations they blame all and sundry for failures.
As I’ve said, what is required is an eccentric billionaire with $5billion of loose change and fund 100 programmers to work night and day on a particular open source operating system to bring it up to par with Windows. The problem is that investers want a return within a year, a project like I mentioned would take 3-5 years before the product would even reach the door – given the short term nature of many investers, there is a reason why almost every Linux venture turns out crap when it hits the market; netbooks loaded with out of date or obscure distributions, vendors doing a half baked job getting it to the same qualityu level as Windows. The problems will simply keep getting bigger as ‘Linux companies’ expect more of the weight to be carried by some ‘other people’ than themselves taking on the responsibility of enhancing their product.
Isn’t that a pretty fair description of Ubuntu? A rich guy (Shuttleworth) throwing money at building a better Linux?
Yes, if you cut 3 zeros from the budget ;-).
Funny, that has never happened on my Vista install.
Mine neither, back when I had one. It usually just dark-blue-screened on me, corrupting the file system on its way out.
On Linux I could at least log in immediately.
Yay, login and use cli to write a buncha bash scripts. Whee.
No, I meant I could login from gdm to full X session.
How can any of those distros continue to move forward if Debian doesn’t? Debian is the lifeblood of Ubuntu et al., and it continues to move forward, with the same stability and attention detail that they have always had.
Ubuntu and their ilk need Debian. They need it strong and healthy.
MySpace, AOL, Twitter and AMD are ones with writing on the wall. MySpace and AOL are owned by larger corps but their demise is eminent. Twitter is starting to lose its cool factor. I heard a story the other day about Twitter. They were talking with a teen who said, “Twitter is for old people.” AMD is sad. I hoped they would do well for so long and now they are destined to be forever an also ran in the chip business even with the recent win against Intel. I would not be surprised to see Intel step in and prop them up a’la MS and Apple in the 90’s to avoid monopoly issues.
AMD right now has a very strong graphics division, it’s kicking Nvidia’s ass all over the place. Their processor roadmap looks good, and they have been setting the pace for most of this decade, I don’t think AMD is going anywhere.
Have you seen their financial’s? They have had great products for years but that has not translated into profits or market share. Intel has both, and not just in CPU market share. As much as I hate them, Intel graphics dominate the market.
Fusion might just change all that.
Intel already has the silicon ready for their CPU-GPU on a single package product. AMD is nowhere near releasing a product based on fusion yet.
Intel can’t get larrabee to work, I don’t have a lot of faith in their CPU-GPU product. It’ll end up being almost as crappy as their current products, while AMD knows how to make a good GPU.
I wasn’t talking about Larrabee, and BTW intel already made it public that Larabee I and II were test vehicles, Larabee III is the product.
Intel already has their GPU-CPU single package solution, AMD doesn’t.
With their GMA (and associated drivers, in the GMA500 case)? Unless they get serious about GPGPU and video offloading (the GMA4500HD uses way too much CPU for the task, FI), I won’t hold my breath. Getting one out first is fine for hype, but I don’t trust Intel to actually make it good, as well, unlike the CPU it will sit next to.
Edited 2009-12-05 22:29 UTC
Something that may be “good” and only exists in paper (Fusion) has nothing to do against something which is “not great” but already on silicon.
Last I checked I perform most of my computations using semiconductor based devices, I have yet to achieve the same level of functionality from vapor and paper.
Likewise, I do mine with products already proven to work well, like AMD’s GPUs. The fully integrated CPU/GPU silicon may be vapor to us right now, but the rest is just a matter of AMD’s beta software making it to some official release status.
Edited 2009-12-08 23:01 UTC
Their financials look bad right now only because of the split-off of their chip-making part they had recently. Now that those charges and hits are over, and the settlement of the lawsuit spat with Intel (where Intel is giving *AMD* a huge chunk of cash) has happened, and the economy starts to rebound, they’ll do better, just as they’ve always done.
Its been this way for the last 2 *decades*, and for all that time people have been predicting AMD’s demise, and for all that time, AMD has been disappointing everyone. There’s a reason for this: all the other players want at least one alternative to Intel to be available (see below).
You’re joking right? Or are you just talking about the graphically ‘weaker’ laptop/netbook market? AMD has ATI’s graphics technology now, which blow Intel’s stuff out of the water in terms of performance. AMD’s IGP parts are now getting *much* better (see their 780G/790G parts – Intel has nothing like them). Even in the laptop market, now that they have the old ATI tech, AMD is far from dead. As the other poster mentioned, AMD’s ‘Fusion’ (ATI’s graphics tech + AMD’s CPU tech on the same silicon) will likely guarantee their survival in the laptop & low-end desktop markets of the future. Meanwhile their current IGP parts & graphics cards are beating everyone else in the higher-up markets.
Thats obvious, *especially* to the other market players. That’s the one thing everyone keeps ignoring: AMD is the only competition Intel has, the only reason they were able to do x86 parts so long ago was because Intel had to form an agreement with someone else because the players of that time, namely IBM, didn’t want to depend on a single source (and have one company control that source). Those fears haven’t changed one bit, there are way too many people (companies & governments) who have a vested interest in Intel having at least a ‘token’ competitor (and an alternate source for x86 parts). AMD won’t disappear for that reason alone.
I’d bet that even the last thing Intel wants is for AMD to go under, as that would put them back in the bullseye of the antitrust hawks in both the US and Europe. Intel doesn’t want to see AMD go away, they want them to just ‘stick around’ they way they have been doing for the last 20 odd years.
That *is* the most important market, don’t you think? Some people buy expensive hardware with high-performance graphics. A lot more buy what’s cheap, and for them, sufficient. Sure, Intel’s graphics are crap in terms of performance, but they’re good enough for many…
Right, except AMD is now redefining what is ‘sufficient’ for the medium and low ends of the market. I happen to be using an AMD IGP in my desktop (the 790GX that I mentioned earlier), and this thing is so good, I may never buy a higher-end graphics card (I’m not a hard-core gamer). It can even do accelerated OpenGL 3D well enough play a lot of simpler/older games, and amazingly, it can do all this while being passively cooled (and quiet!).
Like I said, Intel has nothing like it, and AMD is now in process of pushing this tech down into the low-end laptop/netbook segment. AMD’s Fusion is likely going to cause Intel much grief.
Its ok, they have + cash flows and they have good balance sheet so they will probably stand around.
AMD still sucks in the mobile market. For years people have been waiting for them to come up with a competitor to Intel that has similar low-power requirements, but it hasn’t happened–AMD’s chips are still more power-hungry than Intel’s. Admittedly this has to do with the fact that Intel is always one step ahead in shrinking its manufacturing process–but it also has to do with architecture, and either way you cut it, it doesn’t look good for AMD since laptops have been eating away at desktop market share for years now.
Pre-Athlon: not enough people cared, and even the decent PIII-M wasn’t done ‘right’ until the Tualitin(sp), as the P4 was ramping up.
Athlon v. P4: both sucked.
Athlon XP v. P4: yay, AMD.
Turon v. Pentium-M: draw, both good.
Tyrion v. Core: Core a bit better, AMD much cheaper.
Core 2 to i7: Intel > * (except ARM).
It has really only been recently that Intel has bested them in efficiency. Since Intel can make chips small, cheaper, and faster, AMD can’t beat them that way, and for now, is sort of stuck.
We could see them being competitive in mobile performance again, if Bobcat doesn’t get delayed past 2011. Bobcat (and Bulldozer) is in many ways a departure from the path they’ve been taking from the K7. The thing is, I think the Atom pretty well blindsided everybody. Making Phenom II chips run efficiently enough to truly compete w/ the Core 2 and i-series mobile is probably wasted time and money, compared to coming out with an Atom competitor.
Intel is in a nice spot right now, but the future is not bleak for AMD (actually, the present isn’t, either, except for small mobile stuff).
P.S. I hate the funky brand names, like Turion. I managed to mispell it twice, differently, and still not catch it until now! Well, better than Semporn
.
Edited 2009-12-06 06:32 UTC
I sure hope you’re right about AMD. People forget how much computers used to cost when Intel had an effective monopoly on processors. AMD pushed Intel hard to continue to improve their product. If AMD goes under, R&D at Intel will be cut back and processor (and computer) prices will rise rapidly.
I hope that so-called cloud computing and Google will disappear in 2010.
Hey, man got to have high hopes!
Cloud computing will probably dissapear, but not Google.
For this author, the solution for these firms is to “seek a buyer”. If every company currently not number 1 in sales sells out to the company that is currently number 1 in sales… eventually there will only be one (or very few) players.
The author describes a recipe for monopoly. Correct me if I am wrong but, isn’t monopoly bad?
Depends on what you mean by “bad”. Natural monopolies occur in industries where it makes sense not to have competition: for example, having more than one set of telephone wires in a neighborhood doesn’t really make sense, nor does having more than one network of roads in a neighborhood. So (in the US at least) the telephone wires are operated by local monopolies, and the roads are (usually) owned by (state or local) government, i.e. monopolies.
Monopolies in contexts that don’t make sense, like who supplies the long-distance telephone service, or who can drive on the road, are generally bad for everyone (except the owners of the monopoly).
nope. Just good business. You’re not a monopoly unless deemed on by the US government, and then you can buy off certain members of congress to keep your company out of litigation.
The only reason why AT&T was broken up in the 80’s was because somebody didn’t get their vig.
Maybe not in 2010, maybe not for a few years, but, if things don’t work out well between Microsoft and Yahoo! I think there will be far more layoffs at Yahoo! as Google eats their lunch.
Even if the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal works out in terms of the legal hurdles, the whole deal removes a lot of what made Yahoo! the company they were: search. While they have lots of great content, is that enough by itself to remain truly profitable long-term, keeping in mind that they’re ad-driven for revenue? Is Yahoo! turning into a pure content company? At this time, things are still up in the air: it’s not clear what Yahoo!’s focus is, and that’s the biggest problem for survival. The problem with Yahoo! and their product is that customers aren’t locked in by needing to run their product to run other products: Microsoft may not be doing as well as they’d think they should, but it’s really hard to fight the inertia of having 90% OS market share for consumer-level computers, when you consider the very large application market for apps that require Windows, that aren’t that easily moved over to other platforms, because that’s a costly proposition, especially when you compare potential market for other OSes. Cost of moving from Microsoft Windows to another OS: relearn various applications and their equivalents (if they exist) on the other platforms, as well as acquiring them: while some are free, there are likely far more proprietary applications that aren’t on the open general market that are used and valued, and then there’s the inertia of learning anything new. While for switching from one search engine/site to another, it all comes down to clicking different links, or typing them in the address bar: unless you’re a social networking fool and connected via specific services to lots of your friends, it doesn’t have an awful lot of stickiness to it!
There’s an important lesson here: regardless of how good technology a company puts out, regardless of how great the company is, if people choose something else because they’ve got it on their mind, it’s still failure for all practical intents and purposes. History has shown that it’s not always the superior solution that sells: it’s just what people adopt, good, bad or ugly, and where things are easily switched from, sooner or later, they are, en masse by the public, on a whim. Ask yourself: if a particular web-based company disappeared off the web, how much would it disrupt your life in work and home use? Even Microsoft, for all their money they can throw at problems, can’t make you use their web-based stuff and be profitable at it, regardless of their claims (provable or not) of having superior web search/analytics technology: quite simply, Google has out-marketed Yahoo! and Microsoft, and by leveraging network effects for economies of scale and value of data, they’ve got the lion’s share of network traffic for search, which only gets more valuable at a non-linear rate based on number of users. However, Google may collapse under their own weight of data: how many times have you tried to find something, only to get so many results from Google that you’d need to be immortal to get through them to separate the wheat from the chaff? Perhaps there’s a natural maximum size for them they can grow to before they reach a point of diminishing/stable returns, but Microsoft, Yahoo! and any others need to have that happen soon to remain profitable (Yahoo! in general over the years has been profitable online, just not as wildly profitable as Google: Microsoft has, in general, only lost money online) or even relevant. The other big factor that may stop Google from becoming the Web Borg indefinitely: people’s distrust of any single entity having too much power over their data and privacy. This may be the salt to the sugar fuel to the bread dough-like growth of Google, that causes things to stop growing at a certain point…
[disclaimer: i’m a yahoo user, so there may be bias]
I don’t think so.. Yahoo! was rather something else; it was a web portal and Yahoo’s the last surviving one of them. Considering how statistics suggest Bing and Google have eaten up Yahoo’s share in search market; I’m not surprised they’re being eaten up.
That said, Yahoo’s noticeably shifting its focus and I can see their ads all over the place*. Maybe Yahoo has new incentive. Personally; I’m content with YahooI stick to Yahoo because of Mail, Messenger, Delicious and Flickr.
On the other hand, it’ll definitely be interesting to see how Google will go. Who knows, maybe it’ll become the IBM; dominant for years until a change will take place in the market that Goo would fail to notice. I just hope it doesn’t become Intel – a *persistent* monopoly..
EDIT: * when I say ads, I don’t mean web ads. I mean billboard ads in my country, India
Edited 2009-12-04 20:29 UTC
Yes, I agree that although search is how Yahoo got its start, it hasn’t been its reason for existence in more than a decade.
Yahoo’s main function is and has been for a long time as a portal–a kind of replacement for ex-AOL users who just upgraded to “the raw internet” (which it was long before AOL itself turned into a web-based portal). It has long been one of the most “trusted” brands by average people for webmail, news, stocks, etc. Google on the other hand, started out with just search, and added all of the stuff Yahoo already had (mail, groups, news, etc) in a gradual manner. Which is why there are still plenty of people who go to Yahoo instead of Google, because they still see Google as primarily “just a search” site.
Yahoo also has lots of cool but severely under-marketed technology up its sleeve–it has a really nice AJAX web applications platform with Zimbra, and it’s got an awesome content mashup tool in Yahoo! pipes. Yahoo’s main problem as I see it is an unwillingness to experiment with any kind of branding that is not “Yahoo!” When it bought Konfabulator, it totally messed with its guts and renamed it Yahoo Widgets–a recipe for fail. Ditto for Zimbra–it’s now branded the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Just about the only thing it didn’t try to impose its brand on was Flickr (and thank god it didn’t).
If you compare Yahoo’s approach to AOL’s, AOL (believe it or not) does a much better job of building brand recognition by allowing each of its brands to flourish under its own banner, without being obviously tainted by the AOL name. Engadget, MapQuest, Moviefone, TMZ, ICQ–How many people even realize that these are AOL properties? And yet AOL still gets the advertising bucks. Yahoo could learn something. Or (my favorite pet imaginary deal) Yahoo could just buy AOL outright and acquire a large stable of great content websites at a (most likely) bargain price.
My only big pet peeve of Yahoo is that they’re now the *only* major webmail provider that charges extra for POP access. What year are we living in???
AOL is completely absent from the world. It only survives in the USA.
In your country. In mine they don’t charge for POP. They do for IMAP. And god I hate those giant animated flash ads they pop from everywhere. It sucks! Die Yahoo!… die!
I agree that they’re under-marketting their better products. But Yahoo has a very dominant global presence; AOL (or Aol.) has only recently entered India and many of Indian yuppies already heard enough bad news about Aol. to warn against it.
I feel annoyed about Yahoo! Mail too; although I *do* get POP access in my country..
I don’t even remember Yahoo getting its start from pure search capabilities. I remember that it excelled at its categorizations of the search results. Yahoo has had several search providers in the past, so having microsoft do it is really nothing new. Some past providers:
Altavista (starting in 1996)
Inkotomi
Google ( until 2004m then it created its own search engine)
So switching to Bing? Not that big of a deal.
From what I remember, Yahoo started mainly as a categorized directory of websites. Then, as the number of websites & the size of the directory grew, there was a shift towards search (as opposed to drilling down through the directory categories).
1. Netbooks being eclipsed by book readers and tablets/slates. I see these devices taking off like crazy … especially if the Apple device proves to be true.
2. I see Microsoft making a blip again in the Mobile space win WM7. I don’t think they will hit a home run but make enough of a splash to remind the market that they still are there.
3. I (want to) see (more like praying) FreeBSD getting a virtualization solution. Not holding out on that one.
4. I see Intel dropping Moblin.
5. (maybe) will see something of that Nvidia Tegra soltuion.
My list of predictions for next December (compared to now):
Losers:
-Cable TV providers
-AT&T (Sprint too but I doubt it will get worse than it already is)
-LG phones (due to lack of focus on smartphones)
-Windows Mobile
-Internet Explorer
Winners:
-Internet TV and music providers
-Verizon (at the expense of AT&T)
-Smartphones in general (at the expense of “feature phones”)
-Nokia (buoyed by new smartphones and new uptake in the US)
-Android
-Chrome (the browser, not the OS)
-Firefox
-Tablet-style devices (imitating Apple’s iTablet, of course)
-Bluray (because it’ll finally be cheap enough for everyone)
Remember, this is all *relative to today*, not saying any of these companies/products will die/take over the world.
Given that cable TV providers are also often broadband providers I don’t see them being too hurt.
I think people overestimate the impact of smartphones (though I could severely underestimate it). I don’t want a phone that does everything. I want one that is a phone (and maybe an mp3 player) and that doesn’t cost me triple digits. I’m banking my doubts on me not being the only one, but again, I could well be wrong on that
But it’s mainly that Cable providers cannot charge as many extras to internet. They become utility providers as opposed to content providers. The loss of their monopoly on watching content will hurt them.
//(Sprint too but I doubt it will get worse than it already is)//
I keep hearing this, but I’ve been a Sprint customer for two years here in the midwestern USA states, and have never had any problems.
Am I missing something? Should I bail in March 2010, when my contract expires with Sprint?
I actually don’t have any authority to pretend to know what I’m talking about, since I haven’t even lived int the U.S. for the past three years.
From what I have read online about Sprint, though, their customer service stinks and their corporate management is a mess. But AT&T customer satisfaction is actually much lower, the lowest of all the carriers (according to a new Consumer Reports… report). So I guess if you’re happy with Sprint there’s no real reason to switch.
… yeah very witty. Did someone already mention it? Couldn’t be bothered reading the thread – the headline didn’t seem to warrant it. Just as valid a guess as the others, I suppose. Hey wait, that’s not true. We do have reason to believe that MS and Suse will make it at least for another year… lol
yeah, easy kiddos, it’s all xmas fun.
….good riddance. Many a Ma and Pop video store fell because of predatory business tactics in the 90’s. Take a huge loss, suck all the customers in; crush the competition, then jack the prices up. Just like how every small hardware store magically seems to shut it’s doors whenever a Home Depot, or Lowes comes to town. Strange how that works. Or maybe when a super-walmart opens up and every town grocery store/market/deli in a 5 mile radius goes dark.
SCO, the company that wouldn’t die, should die in 2010.
The way Dell is going, Michael Dell might have to go back to school, so he can revive his business in a dorm room.
I’ve been wondering if Sun will linger on its own, simply because no one knows what will happen with MySQL.
I’ve got to believe that Palm will be consumed by another company, maybe LG or Kyocera, that needs a little boost.
leaving field open for AMD and Fusion:
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/12/intels-larrabee-gpu-pu…
Their first CPU+GPU is going to be the same GMA (PowerVR?) part with Intel’s drivers, and was going to be, all along. AMD’s Fusion was looking a great deal superior to what Intel was planning, well before they put away Larrabee.
Intel will have better manufacturing, but AMD can have such a superior GPU attached, even before Fusion really comes to fruition, that any performance-minded person[, that is fine w/ IGP, and/or wants a mobile device,] would go AMD over Intel when it happens (best of GPU and best of CPU integrated + good dev tools that can handle march-independent code well). Larrabee (or similar) is still something Intel must have, going to the future, they just can’t do it, yet. Good Flash H264 support alone could make AMD look tons better, however much I hate to use Flash as a feature.
I think they might make something of it if they give their good R&D guys, in one location, under one boss, time to get a good core design. With power concerns everywhere, today, Intel can no longer just push extra transistors and GHz.
That reminds me of the numerous threads on macrumors of people crapping on about how terrible Intel GPU’s are, and how horrible the performance is. One can’t help but look at the Nvidia fiasco with failing GPU’s and chipsets to thank ones lucky starts that feature fetish didn’t get the best of him. People may go on about performance all they like but given the fact that Nvidia can’t get their act together in terms of producing products that aren’t dying in a manner of months, I’m more than happy to have something something slower but more reliable.
Buy AMD and you have faster and more reliable.
I have – my iMac has an ATI GPU in it, however, my MacBook has a X3100 GPU in it. As for my future MacBook, it depends on what is on offer, I might be forced to purchase a MacBook Pro if Nvidia becomes the chipset of choice for future MacBooks.
IE an MS domination down. I hate a software that’s being written only for XP/Vista, and instructions given for IE only, verbatim. People, the so called “Internet” thingie is not the big blue icon on your XP desktop.
Windows Mobile loses market share. Yahoo not being sold to MS.
bing dot com, this misunderstanding, not being used by more than 5000 people – the type of users that MS loves – they don’t see where they click, and they generally don’t care, just want the thing working.
(I’m obviously an MS not-such-a-big-fan )
I think also that :
Android will gain popularity, Apple grows, laptop market increased even more, ISPs seeing even more traffic, due to inet TV being used more often.
Last, but not the least – Google infiltrates more and more technology aspects.
For me at least, the bit about Sun:
>> Maybe having a money-losing model is what the European regulators want.
SPOT ON. Finally someone else sees what I see so far as the EU going after companies.
Or the EU protecting already well established big companies from having to face competition from a underdog. There is a reason why in European countries there are bugger all new starts up – the taxation is so high that if you’re established and large enough the cost is minimal, if you’re a small company where every euro counts, you’re going to be taken to the cleaners by the tax man.
Then again, the US is no better expecting the employer to pay for the healthcare, retirement etc. of the employee – at what point did I take on the role of being nanny state as an employer? Christ, no wonder manufacturing jobs are leaving the US in droves – an ever expanding government to pay for the military industrial complex and bugger all left to pay for whats really important – health, education and other shared responsibilities.
I predict that in 2010 nouveau will displace the nvidia binary driver as the driver of choice for nvidia cards on linux. I predict that in 2010 wine’s game compatability will near 100% for new games being released as the console market has the pc market in its death grip. Until games start coming out with DirectX 11 support wine is going to continue to support most pc games that people will want to play on it. (I just finished Modern Warfare 2 last week in wine!). I predict that IF Valve do bring steam and source engine to linux we will start to see a surge in native ports to the platform. That said I mainly look forward to continued wine compatability and hardware driver improvements.
I want to know what you are smoking, and where I can get some…
OS news should be on the list. It has declined and I predict it will die in 2010.
Why don’t you beat the rush and get out now, QUICK!
Well, I did not say I wanted it to die. I would rather it revived.
Pick any ten, or 100… I didn’t know of one.
http://www.dpi.qld.gov.au/images/Biosecurity_MovingSellingAndIdenti…
ahh blockbuster. several years ago i went to the store and tried to rent something and you told me there was a late fee that i had to pay before i could rent. when i knew i didn’t return anything late, i told them i didn’t have any late fees and that i suspected they forgot to clock the video in on time. They wouldn’t budge on the fee. so i said, “fine i won’t rent anything then” handed the employee the rental video and left and never ever went back. I can be inflexible too, i haven’t been to blockbuster in about 5 years or so. and i suspect they are doing so poorly because of incidents like this. you treat me poorly, i don’t shop there. customer service is everything to a place like this. if you wanna keep customers you have to have awesome customer service.
customer service is one of the reasons i love best buy. i go there, if i have a problem with something they are awesome, they always replace it or give me store credit.