The Empire Strikes Back
Microsoft has decided to strike back at Apple. One cannot forget the Apple ads that derided the PC so effectively over the past year or two - Windows Vista presented such an inviting target. But now with Windows 7 improvements and Mac prices going ever higher relative to the equivalent PC, Redmond has launched its own counter ads – just as the back-to-school and off to college computer buying season gets started. And clearly the ad above shows the demographics Microsoft is shooting for.
Apple Stings Microsoft Vista
As expected, Microsoft hammers the 3 biggest selling points in favor of Windows :
1)more programs are not just available for the PC but likely to be found and needed on the new school scene[yikes, turning the tables on Apples constant bragging about its app advantage on the iPhone/iPad front];
2) lack of cross platform compatibility of the existing Mac programs and file formats puts users in jeopardy of falling behind at school [the pot calling the kettle black ass];
3)there is a notably large learning curve getting up to speed in the Mac for users familiar with a PC [how soon Redmond forgets the learning curve for Vista and Windows 7 moving from Windows XP].
Yes, it is the old fear and dread campaign only a Republican could love. But the ad has positive inducements including more Windows fun and games, greater TV and media features["how dare they- media friendly was practically invented on Macs!"], better security features ["what, encryption is mandatory only if you have a PC, not so a Mac"] and full touch screen operations["why the blighters, Apple created multi-touch operations and brought it to full fruition on the iPhone and iPad"]. Takethe5th was surprised that Redmond has not mentioned in the ads two other large PC advantages:
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Summer IT Soap Season: AAPL vs GOOG vs MSFT
Summer Theater is well …. soapy, meller-dramatik, and often tainted with fits of outrighteous comedy and unexpected self-satire. And this season’s IT Summer Stock is packed to the gilt edge with certified Box office bonanzas. First there is a new Summer Stock Valuation leader – AAPL, displacing vaunted enemy number one, MSFT from the top of the IT Market Capitalization Heap. Next there are those brash Mountain View college boys goog-ing and getting into every nook and cranny of the Cloud they have searched 10 to the 100th times. In the process, GOOG is thereby increasingly displacing MSFT and AAPL into 2nd place position in many a market. And MSFT has developed a persistent shank shot when teeing off into new markets with Courier, Kin, Mobile 6.5, Zune all doing the Vista Poo.
What makes the Summer Season even more eventful is the players. Take AAPL’s Steve Jobs, the new Emperor of Innovation, is taking swings at ADBE and its Flash when the real problem appears to be that AAPL has under-engineered the graphics drivers [or allowed contractors to do the deed]on its hardware. So all this time AAPL has been selling at double if not triple prices graphics inferiority to its carefully cultivated design & graphics acolytes. Now that is real meller drammer material! But not to be outdone MSFT’s CEO, Dancin Steve Ballmer [ why he hasn't done Dancing with the Stars is a mystery to all us fans] is swatting back at the new Emperor and vowing to swat down the iPad and iPhone with a horde of new tablets and Windows Phone 7 smartphones by Christmas[which Christmas is not stated].
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SCOTUS
Normally one would avoid using SCOTUS, as it suggests genitalia or a social disease of the malbreeding ilk – rather than the Supreme Court of the United States. But the Supreme Court under the “enlightenment” of Chief Justice Roberts is routinely providing such bad decisions that maybe the implied epithets fit his Court. The most recent and notable being under the guise of individual freedom of speech, the Court is now allowing unlimited funding by corporations, unions, and other special interest groups for campaign contributions and/or lobbying. The Chief Justice wrote in favor of the collective or group being able “to speak with unlimited voice=money” without any reference to the approval by members of the group[or the degree of its unanimity] nor to any need for disclosure of the actions of the special interest group. Given a Washington and other state capitals overrun with lobbyists and special interests, this seems especially vacuous after the Financial Meltdown. In sum, this ruling is worse than a thoughtless prank by Robert’s Court on the American public. So the idea of the Court being the source of an implied social disease now seems befitting – and one awaits a few SCOTUS lines in a Bill Maher or Jay Leno monologue.
Saints Preserve US – US Senate Rescues Wall Street Gambling Dens!
MarketWatch has just reported that the Senate has made it safe to bet big and naked on Wall Street. An amendment to the Finance Reform Bill that would have outlawed Naked CDS – Credit Default Swaps that are pure bets on what will happen on default positions taken by others; this prudish amendment has thankfully been rejected. Now naked CDS are a big, multi- trillion-$ Casino operation on Wall Street and other global markets. It is the source of huge growth and profits, so the Banksters are loath to see their money making operations closed down. So there is major pushback from the financial plutocrats against any Washington efforts or from other government capitals where financial reforms are being considered. But naked or synthetic CDS are not very defensible because they are blatant gambling serving no insurance or other economic purpose.
So the Banksters SpinDoctors are arguing that gambling $Trillions is vital to providing information on terms and conditions in the broader derivative markets. Supposedly these naked bets are valuable for setting the rates in the Credit Default markets and defining the value of the underlying CDOs. Of course, no one bothers to mention the fact that many of these markets are so opaque, complex and closed that little or no information gets transmitted, disclosed or otherwise disseminated to the public. The simple fact is that these are largely and deliberately private gambling havens where buyers and sellers and terms are only known to a small set of market makers and participants. This was the underlying problem in September 2008 when Lehman went tits up – nobody knew who owed what and to whom because of the complexity and opaqueness of many of the transactions. And so financial markets – and broad categories of lending and loaning just stopped working.
But hey one of the major causes – opaque and naked big bets in the multi-trillion dollar derivative markets are a Banksters growth industry. So the US Senate has seen fit to let that gambling haven continue on. Here is how MarketWatch describes the situation:
However, naked credit default swaps are derivative investments set up by two investor groups that have no insurable interest but are betting on whether another bond will default or not. The measure, which was introduced by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., would have been attached to a bank reform bill under consideration in the Senate. A measure banning naked credit default swaps was approved by the House as part of a bank reform bill it approved in December.“There is not one social or economic benefit to these investments,” Dorgan said.
How could one let a Senator from North Dakota[?!] rule the roost? So let us not fault the US Senate when one of their kind goes astray! Here is a vital American industry, subject to great job losses and financial distress [in the latter case falling from 41% of all US business profits in 2007 to estimates of only 40% in 2009]. So Saints Preserve US, the US Senate had to and did preserve these vital “financial operations” so at least Wall Street should and shall live long and prosper!
How Steve Jobs Has Scr#wed Himself
Apple’s Steve Jobs appears to have a)granted Adobe’s Lee Brimelow’s wish and scr#wed himself and b)has Amazon, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm and a bevy of other mobile players wishing for many more happy returns by the Cupertino Czar to such faux pas plays in an unforgivably fast evolving Mobile Lite Device market.
Lets handle the SCR#W-THYSELF evidence with care.
With Apple’s Mobile Lite Lineup of device including iPod Touch, iPad, and iPhone so far, Steve Jobs is determined to achieve the dominant if not monopoly position that Apple II and then Lisa/Mac had but he could not hold onto in the Personal Computing marketplace. To achieve this goal, Apple has created a brand new Apple iPhone OS with some familiar but not identical tools available in the senior MacOS environ of MacBooks and Mac Pros. Then Steve has opened up the iPhone OS API to 3rd party developers for a nominal $fee but some pretty tough “quality control” conditions [and Steve is not the only one doing this]:
1)Exclusive Apple distribution of Apps - All Apps to be given away or sold for use on the iPhone OS devices [iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone] must be distributed only through the iApps pages of the iTunes Store or through Apple approved distributors;
2)Pricing of Apps to be determined by Apple – and percentage of all Apps sales goes directly to Apple;
3)Apple has final approval of all Apps to be sold – Apple reserves the right to disqualify Apps for a number of reasons including substantial functional duplication and use of automated code generation systems[this newly minted provision is what disqualifies Adobe's Flash for a second time because the new CS5 Flash Bridge Flash converts Flash Player code to Apple Phone OS compatible Objective C routines].
Now Apple advances logical arguments why it must impose these conditions:
1)The Approval Process would eliminate cheap and poor quality Apps from swamping the store;
2)The No Functional Duplication provision should eliminate me-too duplicate apps;
3)The NO Code Generation Provision prevents poor quality Apps which rely on routines not finely tuned to the Phone OS environ. As well it reduces those apps that are targeted for non-Apple devices which fail to take advantage of the unique Apple hardware and software resources but deferring to lowest common denominator across all platforms.
However, these rules appear to do 3 things. First they provide the reason for the exclusion of all Flash and all Java apps on Phone OS devices. Second they also eliminate all the many code generations systems like UnityD, the previously noted CS5 Flash Bridge, Lazlo, Lua, and at least a dozen more code generation tools. Third, they allow Apple to determine who gets to play in “their” market regardless if the software vendors do the fine-tuning to take advantage of unique Apple iPhone OS capabilities.
Its Tough Economic Times in Silicon Valley
Despite reaching new levels of sales and profitability for major companies like Apple, Google, HP, Oracle and others, Silicon Valley has an 11% unemployment rate. The whole state of California has a 12% rate of unemployment. The whole US has an unemployment rate of 9.5 %. And the underemployment plus the quit-looking-for-work rate is close to 20%. Now what Steve Jobs is saying to a good portion of developers of Flash, Java, and code generation skills – “you cannot participate in My Mobile Lite Devices ticket to success because I want to create a monopoly like Google and Microsoft. And your coding schemes and methods threaten my control of my markets so go away.” To device manufacturers, Steve Jobs is saying “no consorting with other developers like Google or Nokia or I will sue you as in the case of HTC. Oh, and you better adhere to my software development standards”. And to the telecom carriers, Apple is married exclusively to T and ” you better adhere to my software standards too”.
So having snubbed a sizable chunk of developers and their users[close to 100% of web developers know and use one of Java, Flash, or code generation technologies] what can Steve Jobs expect? Yes, developers will likely switch to more open platforms like Android, Chrome, Meego, even Windows Mobile 7 and develop there. And it has already happened. Android saw 9000 new apps in March. Steve is driving the developer and user communities to the competition.
Finally, Steve has an upcoming test. In his very public and ugly diatribes against Flash, Steve has told developers to use the upcoming HTML5. But HTML5 is upcoming but slowly. Despite the nearly complete standards, there is almost no support for many of the new and innovative features in HTML5 by most web tool vendors [nothing yet in Dreamweaver, Komodo, Aptana, Eclipse, Netbeans, etc, etc]. So Steve is saying to developers and users switch to something that has no strong technology support yet.
But one developer anticipated this and has done so – Google. Now Google’s Voice app has already been rejected as iPhone OS app by Apple despite being fully coded in Objective C. So the Google gals and guys rewrote Google Voice in the Steve Jobs blessed HTML5 for both the iPhone and iPad. Google Voice has been available for iPhone since the end of January and has been tweaked for the iPad recently. Will Steve let Google Voice HTML5 edition continue to be used or will there be another banishment? Since Apple approved the Opera Mini browser – there is hope that the HTML5 version of Google Voice will be allowed.The question is of import because Google Voice + Skype brings free telephone service to the iPad as long as Skype to Skype transactions are involved. Skype to mobile or landline phone costs the Skype partner in the call extra.
So the test becomes -> will Steve allow Google+Skype to get a large phone enabling presence on iPad before Apple bring telephone service to the iPad or will Steve rule that Google Voice HTML5 version are also out of bounds? And what happens to Skype on iPad? Stay tuned to see if Steve passes Monopoly 101 or not. Regardless of which way he chooses, it appears Steve has already scr#wed himself.
Scrabble Gets Bonked
Will the Creative Disruption that will be taking place in Scrabble this late Spring be gaga-allowed or Lady Gaga – now allowed too. This all comes about as as Mattel, “Makers of Scrabble” [Hasbro is so far saying "no thank you" for its North American edition of the game], changes the rules of the game to allow Proper Nouns into the game. I mean Samoa and Brontosaurus are now to be admitted to the Scrabble board. This is simply Mind Boggling! What happens with proper nouns like “Isthmus of Panama” or “Dark Matter”? Will blanks be allowed? And whats this about stealing other’s letters. Oh Joe, say it aint so!
How will legitimate proper nouns be decided – if you can Wikipedia or Google or Yahoo it – its a proper noun ? And what this about drawing a card to decide whether one can use proper nouns, spell a word backwards or steal an opponents tile. Me-thinks this Trickster Disruptive Innovation, this Expedient Expanding of the Franchise, this Mattelish Scrabbling of the Rules will become the British Edsel of the Game.
Consumer Financial Protection Agency as Humor
The idea of a independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency is gaining traction again as seen in this Huffington Post . Could the following LOL comic skit be contributing to the momentum?
The problem for the GOP opposition is that they do not want to be on the opposite side of popular and Tea Party sentiment on this issue. The problem for the Democrats is a)almost all regulatory agencies are under a cloud for being less than effective, b)the costs of setting up the agency will play into the “no more debt” hands and c)even if enacted, the Agency will not be able to start-up and deliver effective help until well after the November elections. Gee “tag your it” seems to be right on.