Microsoft Digital Hub

[tgrundke]

Re: Good Article

Bingo.

This is what we call a market that has entered 'commodity status', whereby the major determining factor is *price* (within a certain parameter).

Dell learned this eons ago - that computers were going to become appliances at some point. Ergo, they modeled their business after a low-cost manufacturer of boxes.

Apple definitely must go the Sony/IBM route: get their technology into others' products, share development costs, create tools and appliances that work across platforms, and embrace open standards.

I think we're seeing those pieces come into place very nicely and Apple is positioning itself to leverage many of its technologies, investments, and purchases in the coming 12-24 months.

I genuinely believe that 2003 will be a landmark year for the company, representing a fundamental 'shift' in growth strategies as Apple moves to the Sony/IBM model.

Originally posted by jayscheuerle
Apple faces the same problem as do all computer makers. Pretty much everyone who wants a PC has one and for everyday tasks a 4 or 5 year old computer still does the job. How do you convice someone who uses their computer to surf the web, check their email and do their accounting to buy something they don't need? Computers are becoming appliances, and for most intents and purposes can be used until they die. I'm talking about the average user here, not gamers or pros, whom I am happy to take advantage of and buy their 2 year old discards when they are overcome by the "latest and greatest" urge. Apple hasn't sold any hardware to me personally since my 6100 and like cars, computer's resale values plummet the moment you take them home. Buy used.

Apple has the right idea with the iPod. They need to compete with Sony more than Microsoft. - j

 

[lmalave]

Re: Re: Good Article

Originally posted by tgrundke
Bingo.

This is what we call a market that has entered 'commodity status', whereby the major determining factor is *price* (within a certain parameter).

Dell learned this eons ago - that computers were going to become appliances at some point. Ergo, they modeled their business after a low-cost manufacturer of boxes.

Apple definitely must go the Sony/IBM route: get their technology into others' products, share development costs, create tools and appliances that work across platforms, and embrace open standards.

I think we're seeing those pieces come into place very nicely and Apple is positioning itself to leverage many of its technologies, investments, and purchases in the coming 12-24 months.

I genuinely believe that 2003 will be a landmark year for the company, representing a fundamental 'shift' in growth strategies as Apple moves to the Sony/IBM model.

Yeah, man: Rendezvous, MPEG-4, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth - I feel it all about to come together in an explosion of cool Apple gadgetry!

 

[Geetar]

Tgrundke,

Thanks for the expansion on your earlier point. It's good to get a glimpse of issues in a different industry to the one I'm buried in (music).

 

[Yellow99Stang]

Always with the complaining here

You people here sure complain a lot about MS. Get over it. I have every kind of computer out there and they all work. Some better than others. Corporate America needs Windows. Designers need macs, big servers need to be BSD derivitives, and the US government likes Unix and wants to Adopt Linux. And people here still complain. Microsoft has always sold PLUS since win3.1, and this is Plus Media Center thing is no differnet so they are not "biting" off Apple, and even if they were so what, does it impact you life that much?
People like me like the idea of building our own systems, if APPLE would just sell OSX for MY AMD Processor systems i would be with it in a second, but they won't cause they wanna control the crappy hardware they give you for double the price. The world as I see it with the blinders off as i don't hold to any illusions of any companies greatness or benevoloence.(case in point the .Mac BS! and how it screwed me and countless others, but my hotmail, yahoomail, and netscape mail is all still free)
MS OS's are decent but stability is always an issue with the amount of hardware it supports. Office is great and the best productivity package ever. Thats why all almost all of the corporate world uses it.
Apple makes pretty looking hardware that is less than modern,sticking a tft screen on something is like when you look at a 20 ft classic car. At 20 feet it looks amazing but when you get up close and look under the hood you find its full of blemishes and lackluster parts and equipment. However APPLE puts out an amazing and great OS too bad it won't run on a cutting edge P4 3Gigahertz with HT on a DDR400 motherboard with a WD Special edition 200 Gig HD with an S-ATA150 transfer that costs way less than an Apple system. I mean i can go on and on about how i love my Powerbook G4 Ti because of the ergonomics and the looks and feel of it and how well it works in relation to my thinkpad , etc etc. Bash IBM, Praise linux because of what it symbolizes in the fight against RIAA and the DMCA and go on and on. But my whole point here is, please take your head out of your rectums, take a good look around and see the world and everything that goes along with it for what it is. If your happy with your Mac and its OS plus programs etc, then who the hell gives 2 S#!TS what MS is doing on their side of the fence?! Go on with your lives and be happy and for goodness sake QUIT COMPLAINING!! Its not like Bill Gates and Steve Balmer broke into your house and stole the bread off your table!!

 

[OutThere]

Recently I used my friend's Sony Vaio digital studio. In theory this is a massive digital hub that you can connect anything you want to. The more that I used it the more I wanted it. It seemed so powerful, windows XP seemed stable and good, and it ran every game that you could think of for a PC. I thought how wimpy my little iMac seemed compared to this beast with a video capture card, AV ports all around and a TV Tuner. We tried to set it up for video mirroring using an S-Video out, from then on I began to dislike the computer more and more. It was completely unintuitive. While the help system worked, unlike OS X's, it didn't give you any information as to the source of your troubles. Then there was the slew of programs supposed to work together efficiently churn out home movies and DVD's. Unfortunatley they were named such non-descript names as Pico Player, Giga Pocket, Giga Video Recorer. We needed to launch each one to see what it did, which wasn't much. The computer was stable, but it seemed counterprodcutive. When I used my iMac the next morning I couldn't get enough of OS 9. The Sony Digital hub seemed inadequate, it shipped with a geforce 2, and a very low quality sound card, but was sugar coated to cover up it shortcomings. If a mac were to have that many AV ports and one or two simple software programs it could become the ultimate digital hub, which the vaio digital studio did not even come close to.

 

[shadowfax]

Re: Always with the complaining here

Originally posted by Yellow99Stang
You people here sure complain a lot about MS. Get over it. I have every kind of computer out there and they all work. Some better than others. Corporate America needs Windows. Designers need macs, big servers need to be BSD derivitives, and the US government likes Unix and wants to Adopt Linux. And people here still complain. Microsoft has always sold PLUS since win3.1, and this is Plus Media Center thing is no differnet so they are not "biting" off Apple, and even if they were so what, does it impact you life that much?
People like me like the idea of building our own systems, if APPLE would just sell OSX for MY AMD Processor systems i would be with it in a second, but they won't cause they wanna control the crappy hardware they give you for double the price. The world as I see it with the blinders off as i don't hold to any illusions of any companies greatness or benevoloence.(case in point the .Mac BS! and how it screwed me and countless others, but my hotmail, yahoomail, and netscape mail is all still free)
MS OS's are decent but stability is always an issue with the amount of hardware it supports. Office is great and the best productivity package ever. Thats why all almost all of the corporate world uses it.
Apple makes pretty looking hardware that is less than modern,sticking a tft screen on something is like when you look at a 20 ft classic car. At 20 feet it looks amazing but when you get up close and look under the hood you find its full of blemishes and lackluster parts and equipment. However APPLE puts out an amazing and great OS too bad it won't run on a cutting edge P4 3Gigahertz with HT on a DDR400 motherboard with a WD Special edition 200 Gig HD with an S-ATA150 transfer that costs way less than an Apple system. I mean i can go on and on about how i love my Powerbook G4 Ti because of the ergonomics and the looks and feel of it and how well it works in relation to my thinkpad , etc etc. Bash IBM, Praise linux because of what it symbolizes in the fight against RIAA and the DMCA and go on and on. But my whole point here is, please take your head out of your rectums, take a good look around and see the world and everything that goes along with it for what it is. If your happy with your Mac and its OS plus programs etc, then who the hell gives 2 S#!TS what MS is doing on their side of the fence?! Go on with your lives and be happy and for goodness sake QUIT COMPLAINING!! Its not like Bill Gates and Steve Balmer broke into your house and stole the bread off your table!!

you have the worst talent for communicating your ideas i have ever seen. you strike me as an overbearing *******, quite frankly, and i don't appreciate you bringing your mangy, poorly constructed arguments in such a manner. you tell us not to complain about a company we have issues with, and then you go off about apple. i don't care if you have a G4 powerbook, you've obviously missed the boat somewhere. apple doesn't need to port their software to x86. it's a waste of time to support such a market. they're all like you, they think that they "need" windows. anyone who "needs" windows doesn't need an OS X port. OS X is not for people who put up with crap like that, if you ask me.

and our hardware may be expensive, but it's better, in a very tangible way. you can go knowck yourself out on a pentium 4 all you want; that's not quality, that's slamming as much heat as you can into the smallest package possible. your 3 GHz box takes ~100 watts of power! that's stupid and unsafe. apple hardware has a different perspective (don't whine to me about the G4, that's motorola's problem and i hope apple will drop those idiots as soon as possible)--it's made fast, not fastest , but plenty fast, i promise. they have other ideas in mind, and you can call it ergonomics, techno feng shui bull if you want, but with my tibook next to my dad's dell laptop, i am sold.

that's just me though, of course. if you like microsoft you can go for them. i hope they make you a happy little twit.

Oh and about your idiotic "plus" and "3.1" comment, save it. we have you covered there too. 3.1 itself is basically a rip. I mean, if a company did to MS what gates did to apple in the 1980s, he would put a lawsuit up their rears in a new york second. dear god, looking at your whole argument, i feel such deep shame to even remotely agree with anything you say, even if under normal circumstances i would agree.

 

[GrandShenlong]

MS vs. Apple rages on

The main problem that Apple faces is that its raw statistics vs. price ratio is too low. People see

$2500: Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, etc.
and next to it,
$2500: 800Mhz G4, etc.

AMD attempted to solve this with its XP ####+ series. Though I don't know of that strategy was effective, but the average schmoe will at least take another glance at an AMD machine now. Apple needs to narrow the APPARENT (as opposed to the real) gap between its processors and Intel's.

Microsoft has a huge advantage in terms of software, and I DON'T mean capabilities. Since it has 95% market share, most software publishers will tailor their products to Windows machines. Just look at the number of games that are Windows-compatible and the number that are Mac-compatible. THere's no comparison there. Apple has an davantage with the fact that its flagship products are all in-house (iTunes, iDVD, iChat, etc.) BUT, this can also be detrimental to business. Apple has WAY more at stake when it introduces a new iApp than does Microsoft when Easy CD Creator 23 rolls out. Thus, Apple's products MUST be MUCH more streamlined than Microsoft to ENSURE, BEYOND A DOUBT, that they'll make Apple some big bucks. Microsoft has oodles of third-party publishers to spread the risk over. Sure, they don't get the money, but gain the popularity.

Windows, in all of its different iterations, has been harder to use than Mac OS. But, right off the bat, it tailored itself xclusively to the whim of the market. Now, AFTER getting 95% market share, it can afford to be arrogant. Apple, on the other hand, can't do so, because it started out arrogant. Now it has to recapture a percentage of a gigantic market, that is already much-enamored of, and familiar with, Windows.

But then again, such competition is healthy. It keeps Apple's software a step ahead of Microsoft's constantly, fue to the constant threat to Apple of dying out if it doesn't always keep one step of the competition. Also, in my opinion, Apple's hardware needs to be made more utilitarian. Case in point, the one-button mouse. That things has driven me crazy numerous times, havng to wait for a little while before a the secondary function window pops up, or holding down a key on the keyboard, may get quite frustrating for the average newbie.

Even though the Mac OS is more streamlined, I would say that Apple and Microsoft are tied in the race to build the ultimate digital hub. Sure, the new iMac oozes style, and has killer iApps, but look at the HP and Sony offerings: media readers, MASSIVE hard drives, speedy processors, their exterior styling is on the road to slickness, and DVD burners galore. All at a very attractive price for the average customer, who doesn't read expert reviews, and doesn't track benchmarks. For them: 2.6 GHz = high wow factor, and 200GB hard drives just add to the allure. Comparing a high-end HP Media Center side-by-side with a high-end iMac, the iMac will win fashion awards by a landslide, but HP will look nice judging from pure stats, which, aside from price, is the first thing consumers look at.

 

[GrandShenlong]

Looking at the few comments immediately preceding my previous one, I feel I must post again. Sorry.

I'm now typing on a Windows PC that I built myself, it's bloody fast, but at the same time, noisy as anything. I like Windows XP, and MAC OS X too, since my school (U of MI) has massive labs filled with new iMacs. To the one who insists on exuding his arrogance all over this forum, I must say this. Microsoft bashing is useless, but so bashing Microsoft bashers. I mean, if you truly see the merits of both systems, and even if you think that your Windows system (I myself would never switch unless Apple came out with a two-button mouse, and other stuff) is better, why do you feel that you must play God and tell the heathens that their opinions (even if they're unfounded, which apparently is not true) don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

Does YOUR opinion really matter?

Somehow, I doubt that the World of Mac will kowtow at your feet and listen to your thoroughly intelligent, refined, and highly polished rant on how Apple fans should just shut up and open their eyes. If you really think that you yourself can actually make them listen to such a bluntly stated, and rather crude, opinion, maybe you need an eye-opener yourself.

Have a nice day.

 

[skunk]

Re: Re: Always with the complaining here

Originally posted by Shadowfax
OS X is not for people who put up with crap like that, if you ask me.

No, but it's evidently for people who put up with Apple's crap: high prices, dysfunctional printing, SLOW processors, SLOW surfing.... This is not an argument, it's bigotry. Of course we all feel increasingly embarrassed to have invested in a platform which appears to be falling far behind in performance, but Mac users should be complaining to Apple, not slagging off Windows users. And it's not MS' fault that Apple made a lousy business decision in the 80s. That was down to our great Leader bathing in his own RDF....

 

[shadowfax]

Re: Re: Re: Always with the complaining here

Originally posted by skunk


No, but it's evidently for people who put up with Apple's crap: high prices, dysfunctional printing, SLOW processors, SLOW surfing.... This is not an argument, it's bigotry. Of course we all feel increasingly embarrassed to have invested in a platform which appears to be falling far behind in performance, but Mac users should be complaining to Apple, not slagging off Windows users. And it's not MS' fault that Apple made a lousy business decision in the 80s. That was down to our great Leader bathing in his own RDF....

why emphasize slow? i mean, oooh, ok, the 3 GHz P4 tops the dual 1 1/4 GHz G4... that doesn't make it slow. that's stupid. and lemme tell you, chimera is screaming fast browsing. i don't put up with any of the crap you cited at all. so you got me on the prices thing. people pay a lot for a name that they think is good. look at bose, or sennheiser, or mont blanc, or rolls, or jaguar...

and if you hadn't noticed, plenty of us bitch at apple when they do stupid things do. nobody's perfect, but i've lived with MS long enough, and still do to a lesser extent, to know that that's not the crap i want to deal with.