Posts by David Dever6 posts • joined Sunday 29th April 2007 12:45 GMT
As noted above–the tone of your article suggests that it's a mandatory 30% take on everything, when in fact it isn't–Apple charges a portal fee (percentage) for on-platform purchases, but the user retains the option of purchasing (subscribed) content within the app or outside the app.
Therefore, the policy ticks the regulatory checkboxes–it's now up to the app developers to determine how they'll implement this (which, if you REALLY think about it in the context of Android and WebOS devices, makes sense: each platform has its own app portal, plus the app-neutral portal).
On the whole, this policy may end up being better for Google and HP–and possibly lucrative for a few third-party payment portal vendors as well.
As for Rhapsody's 30% whine–talk to the record companies, they'd rather you went away as it is.
...wouldn't have to do with the Computerworld article in which he defends the use of SAP and Siebel CRM in-house at MS, now, would it?!?
If the user interface of the newer iPods changes substantially from the older ones, will this signal the end of the revenue stream to Creative Technologies?
Perhaps this will be the final nail in their coffin–what they have done to their musical instrument brands (E-mu and Ensoniq) is nearly criminal.
"How many big Unix players are there left apart from Sun?"
Apple, for one–OS X 10.5 now meets UNIX 03 certification.
As a Mac OS X 10.x user, I'd have to say that the first two versions were pretty awful–but the subsequent releases have been substantially better, without, in most cases, huge driver re-writes (IEC 61883-6 / FireWire audio layers excepted) or a massive change in user interface.
Some might mistake this for a rip-off, but there is a bit of kaizen here–think of how much Microsoft stuffs into a Service Pack or Second Edition that could have been released out into the wild in a more timely fashion. Apple's point releases happen in a timely fashion and don't upset the apple cart tremendously.
It's probably fair to say that the playing field is pretty level for both Microsoft and Apple from a kernel perspective–after all, hardware is hardware, and the bigger problems come not with driver compatibility with some cheap-$#it audio IC from Singapore (you can always trade off performance for stability), but with overall stability and sustainability issues.
Apple's first version of OS X was not anywhere near ready for prime time (10.2 is probably a minimum for most people) at its launch, and many prominent developers did not come on board until much later, as developer resources started to flesh out.
It's worth keeping in mind, however, that Microsoft, at the top of the heap, has far more to lose if it can't develop new and exciting products, from the OS on up.
FWIW, I just removed Vista from my MacBook Pro laptop and replaced it with XP, as half of the things I need to work, don't.
