IBM Unseats Microsoft As Second Most Valued Tech Company 296
First time accepted submitter FlatEric521 writes "The BBC is reporting that for the first time since 1996 IBM's market value has exceeded Microsoft's. The values cap a sustained period in which IBM's share price has moved steadily upward as Microsoft's has generally been in decline. Of course, Apple is still the #1 company by far."
And apple's market cap is going to collapse (Score:2, Insightful)
So IBM will be number 1 soon.
Really though. This isn't news for nerds.
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Apple sells upscale products at a premium to a market that is being eviscerated by a massive economic downturn. I would expect them to take a serious hit.
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Don't ask my why, but certain people I see have no money yet insist on obtaining the latest iTrinkets no matter what.
Apple will be fine.
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Actually, the luxury market is fairly resistant to downturns. Most crises affect mainly the poor, then the middle class. The rich are and will be OK.
Also, as seen with tablets, Apple has so much scale now that they can even compete on price. They've been very quiet on the desktop front, it wouldn't take much to give a nice fillip to their share there.
A massive economic downturn is perfect for Apple (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, downturn markets are great for companies like Apple, as their success in the last couple years should demonstrate. You see, in times like this, people cannot afford or feel they cannot afford real luxury items: vacations, expensive cars, bigger houses, pools, early retirement, so on. But people still like to treat themselves to a luxury. Apple is right in the sweetspot for this: pretty much everybody with a job can afford an Apple product or two, and they will sacrifice other things to get one
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So who sales a device that the equivalent of the iPod Touch (802.11n, 960x480 display, etc) cheaper than the Touch? Who sales a 160GB equivalent of the Classic?
Who is selling a 10" tablet that is equivalent to the iPad 2 and cheaper?
All of the high-end Android devices are around $200 - $300 price of the iPhone.
But all that being said, in capitalist society, nothing is "too expens
Re:And apple's market cap is going to collapse (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple's strategy for the last decade has been to ride the cusp of the wave of commoditisation. They identify a market that is about to be overrun by commodity products, enter it at the point when they can get commodity prices from their suppliers but still charge premium prices to their customers, and then move on to a new market while keeping a small share at the expensive end of the newly commoditised market. Home computers, laptops, portable media player, smartphones and tablets have all followed this trend. The problem that Apple now has - and the reason that they're resorting to lawsuits to slow down other tablet makers - is that they don't have the next market identified and they don't have a product ready for it.
This strategy is very profitable, but only as long as they keep moving forward. Apple's market cap is based on the fact that their net income has increased by a huge amount year on year. As soon as it stops increasing, or the rate of increase slows, it will collapse.
It remains to be seen whether post-Jobs Apple can keep this going. Steve Jobs was always good at identifying this kind of market (look at PDO and WebObjects, for example), but it wasn't until he returned to Apple that he was really good at exploiting them, and I suspect that this was largely due to other people on the management team. I'm not sure that Apple still has the expertise to both identify and exploit a new market.
Apple's current parts strategy (Score:3)
is getting away from pure commodity parts. They've been using some of their enormous pile of cash to fund manufacturing processes they like (unibody aluminum) and to fund fab lines in return for first dibs on their output (flash RAM - Apple has a significant fraction of world capacity contracted).
Other manufacturers have had trouble competing on price with Apple lately (which is a switch) because Apple has the best price on parts and processes.
Apple will have its hands full exploiting its current markets f
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Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.
You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.
If you want to talk about bloated OSes that force hardware upgrades, you'd better talk Microsoft. [zdnet.com]
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Using their usual dirty tricks [Apple keeps] releasing new updates to their OS making them run slower on earlier hardware.
You are so full of shit your eyes are brown. Every version of OS X I have used has felt perceptibly faster than its predecessor on the same hardware, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Hell, the upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard was specifically about trimming the fat from the OS.
I think the GP was intending to talk about forced obsolescence, but somehow doesn't know how Apple actually goes about forced obsolescence... They don't put in bloat code to slow things down on older hardware, they declare that older hardware is no longer supported and simply refuse to install the new version on it, regardless of whether it would actually run properly or not. There is no technical reason that you can't run Snow Leopard on a first generation Intel iMac, yet it won't install because the hardw
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So IBM will be number 1 soon.
Really though. This isn't news for nerds.
No, but it is stuff that matters, which I believe is the second half of slashdot's former slogan.
Apple is #1? (Score:2)
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Because for some reason everyone else thinks that they way to be successful is to make their laptops as cheap as possible in a race to the bottom. There are some other nice laptops out there, but almost no (none?) other all-metal case laptops - it's seen as too expensive.
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They're out there. The laptop I'm typing this reply on has a magnesium case, that's both light, and inexpensive. And it's in a laptop that cost me $400 at regular price... you can get inexpensive laptops with metal cases, you just need to know where to get them from.
Incidentally, an Aluminum case would not be too expensive... with the price of petroleum these days, it's probably cheaper than a plastic case, actually. Al is one of the most abundant minerals found on this planet (behind only Oxygen and Silico
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That's a very good question, and it should lead you to consider that maybe "aluminum case and a 50% markup" isn't all there is to Apple's success. But it probably won't.
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I thought about getting a Mac last time I needed a new laptop. Their cheapest model was nearly 3x as expensive as an inexpensive Thinkpad and the one I ended up with was fully upgraded for much less than the Mac. I ended up spending a bit over $600 for the Thinkpad and I would have had to pay $999 for the MacBook air and I would have had only 2GB of RAM rather than the 4GB I ended up with.
They do include some nice touches, but I couldn't personally justify spending an additional $400 for what was basically
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I don't like OSX nor Macs myself (takes too much effort to use if I want to keep 30+ windows open[1]), but I know lots of people do and OSX+Macs work well for their workflow. Different strokes for different folks etc.
At work I've got a Macbook with OSX in front of me. I use it mostly v
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To some people, OS X is important. I'd pay several hundred dollars if i could run OS X on my home PC. The fact that I needed to upgrade, so just bought a macbook pro and got nice aesthetically pleasing hardware is a bonus.
I have blu-ray (burner) in my desktop PC at home. I've used it about 3 times in the past 2 years. No blu-ray is no great loss.
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No blu-ray is no great loss.
Unless you've got a 100+ bluray discs and your scratching your head as to why a thousands dollar+ laptop has no option to play them.
I've got a Macbook pro, and the lack of blu ray is pretty annoying.
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It doesn't have the ability to play Blu-Ray because Apple said "no way" to all the DRM nonsense they'd have to build in to make a "trusted video path".
I thought slashdot was all about trying to eliminate these anti-consumer practices?
They still have DRM on the iTunes store for movies and TV, but it's not as bad as blu-ray for what it requires of the underlying hardware and software being "trusted".
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Actually, for casual browsing, try a Dell Vostro v130. I have the linux version of that laptop, and yes, it weighs about 100g more than the 13" Mac Air, it's still very light, very portable, and very usable for about everything (non-gaming) that I've thrown at it. It also handles the few games I have bothered to play (nothing taxing, just stuff like TuxKart and Frozen Bubble) with ease.
Though I suppose it wouldn't really fit the question posed, as it wasn't $100 less than a Macbook Air, it was $800 less tha
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What does this even mean?
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I use a computer that has a unix command line, comes pre-installed with Apache/PHP, runs office and photoshop natively.... And just works.
Really..... I dont mind paying over the odds for a computer that does this.
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Marketing explains initial buy-in, but not repeat customers. If Apple's success were only marketing, they would have to attract ridiculous amounts of new customers to replace the ones fleeing the platform. That's not the case. Last I read, the iPhone has something like an 80% retention rate. The iPhone 5 is the most-anticipated phone out there, and Apple has said nothing about it. Clearly, people must buy their products for more reasons than Apple's heavy marketing push.
For myself, I tend to buy Apple
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Marketing explains initial buy-in, but not repeat customers.
Care to back up this with some facts?
If Apple's success were only marketing, they would have to attract ridiculous amounts of new customers to replace the ones fleeing the platform. That's not the case.
Care to explain why you assume that a ridiculous amount of old customers would flee from a mediocre product with good marketing? Or you simply think this is how it works?
Last I read, the iPhone has something like an 80% retention rate.
So, by the same reasoning, Internet Explorer 6 was a great product (mind that there were already plenty of good, free, alternatives). Some times initial marketing (which may include borderline monopolistic tactics) gets the bulk of the people. After, people don't leave for more simple reasons. Resistanc
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Amusing, especially this:
You're simply ignoring that brand loyalty is made up of a lot of things and, in many cases, quality and consumer advantages are down at the bottom of the list. In general, people are like sheep, they don't think a lot and are are generally under-educated. It just takes repeating messages, showing shiny bells and whistels and "group thinking" (or should I say un-thinking?). This is well-known since decades. Go, figure, try to find some dusty books, err sorry an App, with Noam Chomsky writings.
So, I'll reply to that with your own quote:
But we are lucky because we can read you profund and enlighted thoughts and explanations, strictly facts-based. Not.
We are going in circles!
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Apple is the industry highest in customer satisfaction for the 8th year in a row. This isn't due to 'marketing' although I know /. loves to write off Apple as such. Apple makes solid products with good design and durability. For day to day wear and tear, the OS is excellent, and doesn't require 3 hours to update, the ports don't break after 12 months, and the power cord doesn't crack the motherboard. The hinges don't fall off, the screen doesn't crack, the bottom doesn't turn brown from excessive heat, it d
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Why doesn't anyone else take their laptops and add an aluminum case and 50% markup?
Uh, pretty much every single major laptop manufacturer has either announced or already shipped a model that's exactly that in the last few months.
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Why doesn't anyone else take their laptops and add an aluminum case and 50% markup?
Because it's not one thing, it's lots of small things. For me, the big benefits are a full Unix environment, really good suspend support (really important for a notebook) and convenient backup software. Oh, and I haven't broken the case yet, unlike with the PCs I had before of the same age. :-) YMMV.
Re:Apple is #1? (Score:4)
Lots of people add an aluminium case. They just don't add the rest. For example, my last 3 Mac laptops have all had a backlit keyboard - if I use it in low light, I can still see the keys. The last two came with MagSafe power connectors. I managed to kick the power cable on my ThinkPad and drop it from the top of a chest of drawers (to its credit, it survived). I kick the power cable of my MacBook Pro regularly, and it doesn't have a problem. The screen on this machine is the best I've seen on any laptop. It's bright enough to use in direct sunlight and isn't one of the horrible glossy screens that seem so popular elsewhere. FireWire 800 means that I can daisy-chain a couple of external hard drives and still get good performance from them - when I was doing video editing I had one for the source material and one for scratch renders, and even my G4 PowerBook was pretty fast in that configuration. ThunderBolt means that I don't have to worry so much about expandability - I can plug in PCIe devices externally, and I can even drive two external displays if I'm going to be in the same place for a while. The trackpad can simultaneously track 4 fingers, so multitouch gestures work nicely.
My last MacBook Pro had four years of daily use before being retired to less strenuous uses and I expect the new one to last as long. My ageing PowerBook still works, although it doesn't get much use anymore.
As to the 50% markup, let's see what a similar spec machine costs from Lenovo. The ThinkPad W520 seems to be about the same spec as the one I bought. I need to bump the CPU up to 2.2GHz from the stock 2GHz to make that the same. The display is only 1600x900, while mine is 1680x1050, but it has an option of 1920x1080 for £144 more. We'll go with the cheaper one since it has an nVidia GPU with 2GB of RAM while the Mac has an ATI GPU with 1GB of RAM. I'll leave it with the stock 4GB of RAM, since I upgraded mine to 8GB with third-party RAM (buying RAM from laptop makers seems expensive from anyone, but Apple is probably the worst in this regard). The ThinkPad doesn't have the option of a 256GB SSD, so I'll go with the 128GB SSD for now. The price is now £100 more than I paid for my MacBook Pro, yet:
If Apple is adding a 50% markup, then Lenovo must be adding at least 75%. On the plus side for the ThinkPad, it does have ExpressCard (my last MBP did as well - I never used it) and eSATA (less useful to me than FW800, because I can't daisy chain external disks with it, I can only plug one in at a time). It also has USB3, which may become useful at some point in the future, .
Apple v. Sanho (Score:2)
The last two came with MagSafe power connectors.
Which are a female dog and a half to find replacements for should they break, or to find external batteries for. For a very long time, Apple flat-out refused to license its patented MagSafe connector to a maker of external batteries. In fact, one company bought authentic Apple power supplies just for the authentic MagSafe connectors and soldered them onto its external batteries, and Apple still sued [arstechnica.com].
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MagSafe is patented and other manufacturers can't license either the connector or the technology. So much for stupid manufacturers, eh?
The exact implementation of MagSafe is patented, but any other manufacturer could come up with a magnetic power supply connector - they just don't.
You're also comparing the MacBook Pro 15" with the optional 1680x1050 screen; default is 1440x900
I'm also comparing prices. Even with the optional screen, the Mac worked out cheaper.
Thunderbolt? Intel's been working with Apple to get it in their machine.
And Intel is shipping the controller chips to anyone who wants them. Apple is the only company to be shipping them now, although other manufacturers have said that they will.
Firewire? Meh, it has USB3 and eSATA, which are far more common standards;
Really? I've not yet seen a single USB3 peripheral, and the only eSATA drives I've seen also have other
Stock market fluctuations (Score:5, Informative)
shhh goldman is listening (Score:2)
there are 'people in washington' who might not approve of your 'tone'.
Re:Stock market fluctuations (Score:5, Insightful)
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While I agree with you in general, there are some type of stocks I would never invest in, like, say, airlines. They always seem to be going out of business, and yet the brand lives on and on (most of the time).
Stock prices reflect future, not today (Score:2)
Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.
Stock prices are not meaningless, they are simply misunderstood and misused. They are not a measurement of how a company is currently doing, they are an estimate of how a company will be doing in the future. The current state is just one of several variables that goes into that estimate. Regrettably when an estimate reflects a relatively large change in either direction, good or bad, speculators pile on and inflate or deflate that price. Apple is far more vulnerable to such speculation than IBM. As suggeste
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Bullshit. Then that would mean Joe Blow could open a company on Monday and have it be worth $300B by Friday's IPO.
Sorry, things don't work th
One simple way to show this (Score:3)
Calculate the effect of the iPhone 5 being banned from europe vs the next Galaxy phone from Samsung. This battle is raging right now. For Apple, this is a major part of their business, it brings in a lion share of their profit.
For Samsung? They got plenty of other ventures, a block will hurt their bottom line but not in any significant way. Samsung is larger then Apple in many ways BUT not that much larger, it is just far more diversified.
It isn't fair to say Apple if a bubble stock because Apple isn't to b
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Yeap, because there is a great anti-Apple conspiracy out there.
Or maybe Slashdot is a pretty diverse place, and it always has a group of people who thinks that particular metric is meaningless and another group who thinks that metric is valuable. (Plus plenty of people who don't care either way.)
And maybe you just think that the attitude has changed because you feel violated at any perceived attack upon Apple.
Or maybe not. Maybe there is a vast anti-Apple conspiracy and I just don't know about it because I
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It's not a conspiracy as such, but but there are an awful lot of people on here and other sites - including some who register specifically on Mac-centric sites - in order to base their self worth on telling Mac users what "sheep" they are and how we're all "fanbois" and that our intelligence and sexuality is defined by our choice of operating system.
Back in the early days, as I said, before Apple was the behemoth it is today, it was often called "dying" due to its share price and stock performance.
Now that
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Stop saying that the overpriced limited functionality iPad is a laptop replacement and I'll stop calling you fanboys a bunch of idiots.
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I don't recall people using that metric previously. MS was the largest company as much by market cap as by install base. The latter being of great concern to most folks that cared about it at all. Market cap is just how much you can convince people you're company is worth and unless you're buying or selling your own shares it's a meaningless metric.
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You're being disingenuous if you are claiming that the long term history of a company's share price and its overall market cap are "meaningless" in determining how it performs.
It is certainly not the be all and end all, but calling it meaningless is laughable.
For the first time since MAY (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to the last time this happened?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/05/22/0232216/ibm-now-officially-worth-more-than-microsoft [slashdot.org]
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This is the last time it happened. It just took that long to filter through the Firehose.
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Prospering After Its Founder (Score:5, Interesting)
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In my opinion it's actually the opposite problem at Microsoft. Judging by the way the company acts I wouldn't be surprised to see that the desk calendar on the top execs desk is still the one from 1997. Microsoft has yet to seem to come to the realization that it's biggest competition no longer comes from within the company but from outside. The past decade at Microsoft has pretty much been the top execs trying to empire build within the company and completely ignoring outside threats. As such Windows
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So you're saying Windows ME and Vista was on purpose?
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Anyway, my point is that Gates could come back if need be.
This question comes up again and again in the interviews, and every time he plainly says that he has different interests now, and quite enough money for himself to fund them (duh).
Predict "activist shareholder" knee-jerk reaction (Score:2)
Valued is far from the right term (Score:2)
Monied might be more appropriate. I doubt that either MicroSoft or IBM are "valued" by anybody. They are simply players.
Not 'monied' either... (Score:2)
This is market cap based. 'Value' is the closest word for that. It doesn't directly indicate cash on hand or how much debt they hold. It doesn't indicate directly how highly viewed among potential clients they are. It indicates the perceived value of IBM by stock market participants. This translates well to their ability to borrow and *usually* indicates a healthy company with positive cash flow/good standing with their customers.
While IBM is doing well enough at creating and selling goods and services
Apples, Oranges and Grapes (Score:2)
Apple is a media company, first and foremost.
Microsoft is a software company, first and foremost.
IBM is a services company, first and foremost.
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Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM is worth more to the U.S. government then INTEL, Apple, and Microsoft combined.
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It doesn't count because they don't own any of Apple at all.
They did purchase $150 million of non-voting stock as part of a court settlement many, many years ago, but they sold it a long time ago.
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Even if they did, it would count and in no way contradict this.
And so Anonymous Coward learns of the concept of the "convergent series".
right. now they just own everyone else (Score:2)
"say, i couldnt help but notice you are trying to sell a mobile phone. all sorts of people might want to sue you over that, you know, what with patents and all. why dont you pay us, say, 10% of your income, and we can arrange it sos nobody patent sues you?"
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Re:What about Microsoft owning part of Apple? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, yeah. They should have bought into Plays For Now, or Zune and they didn't. What fools they are! They should have grasped that brass ring when it was before them, and now they could be enjoying the rapture of Windows Phone's one percent market share. after having sold their soul to the devil to get there like Nokia is doing.
Um, no. Not just no, but Fuck no. Are you fucking kidding? I saw this movie and it doesn't end well. It's a sole survivor flick where even the survivor is tortured.
But it's different now because Microsoft has grown warm and fuzzy.
Fuck you. We've had that story a thousand times, and it's a faustian bargain every time. The devil treats only when it's his advantage to do so. Make a deal with him, and he gets your soul. That's how it works.
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Yes, everybody is stupid but you. Give me a fucking break, AC, the reason the ipod pretty much created the modern digital music player market because of it's usability, not in spite of it.
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Actually, it's marketing, not usability. The Sandisk Sansa from the same era was much more usable than the iPod, and had features that the Apple didn't, like FM radio and MicroSD expansion ports, in addition to being mountable as USB mass storage. While it's personal opinion, I also found that the menu options on the Sandisk were more easily navigated and made more sense to me... in the end, it wasn't usability/features that caused the iPod to catch on, it was marketing. There were *much* better options ava
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I did quite well buying Apple stock. Didn't do as well with my Dell stock, but that's why you diversify.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
LoB
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I always find this a little absurd. Steve Jobs said it best: "We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." The same basic sentiment goes here. The fact that Apple and IBM are doing better than Microsoft doesn't mean Microsoft is in trouble. They're making more money than ever, despite slashdot predictions of doom and gloom continuing since they made a fraction of what they do now.
That doesn't mean Microsoft isn't in trouble but there's really nothing about "not being
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Microsoft isn't in trouble. And as for hurting sales... Sales haven't ever declined, not a single year -- ever. Go spread your FUD elsewhere, the actual numbers are easy to see if you look.
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Numbers I see from www.cnn.com and others show PC sales lagging. Offices have been cutting back on upgrades and using older versions of software. I have not seen a single article stating that sales are actually increasing from MS in a long time. That was true 10 years ago, but not today.
In 2000 and earlier people upgraded WIndows and Office every 2-3 years. Now the standard life cycle is well over 5-7 years with people hanging on to Windows XP for life. The cost accountants in these organizations have notic
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And the ironic thing is that Microsoft is the chief reason why that happened. They switched to Software Assurance after XP and Office 2003 came out and then, with a steady source of income from people buying in each year, the pressure was off and they took forever to put out Vista and Office 2007. Then of course Vista had horrible performan
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Part of that is that neither IBM nor Apple have been under DoJ supervision for the last decade, which tends to put them at a bit of a competitive advantage when it comes to pushing for growth. MS got slapped for going for other markets beyond Windows and Word. Granted they were going at it in an anti-competitive manner, but MS historically has only known how to grow via those sorts of sleazeball tactics.
That being said, Apple did have the good fortune of having a decade where the DoJ didn't believe in antit
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Part of what has made IBM and Apple so successful (and Nintendo too), is that they don't just "sell tech".
In Apple's case it's the whole experience of using a (usually portable) device to play music, surf online, communicate.....a whole range of activities that people are interested in doing. They don't just make those things possible, they concentrate on making the whole process a) simple; and b) enjoyable. Too many of their competitors have concentrated solely on selling the tech and letting the users try
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"Macs are popular in business"
Graphics, music, and some small forays into movie production (although the real work still happens on Windows and the processing on Linux). Business-business, that being, engineering, finance,
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You're paying easily 30-40% of the price just for it being an iDevice.
You're also paying for it being a little higher in quality than your average cheapest-component-everywhere bargain PC. If you compare the average Mac to a comparable quality brand PC, the difference is much less than your above.
I don't mind paying a premium for something that's worth it, but I hate it how the PC fanboys distort the numbers. Yes, Apple is more expensive. No, the difference isn't 30-40%, that's just ridiculous. You can't compare a product against its cheapest competitor and then claim it's th
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How did you manage to get all those off the shelf parts into the screen and keep it virtually silent and cool running?
I'd imagine the GPU would stick of of the back or something, but I assume you had some sort of plan for that.
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Silicon Valley businesses are hardly typical of day to day businesses though are they. Walk into any corporate/government office and count how many Macs you see.
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I love how you personify companies as people, much like countries do. I ask you to name a single IBM employee that was in the company at the time. I'd actually be somewhat skeptical if there are any active employees that were alive for said event.
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Just out of curiosity, what precisely does that have to do with anything? Are individuals that were involved with the company back then still running it? Is there even a single employee working there that was employed by IBM at the time?
It's about as relevant to IBMs continuing operations as Henry Ford's known support of the Nazis.
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Corporations want to be treated as persons, with all the rights of individuals. Well, with rights come responsibility.
If an individual person had done for the Nazis what IBM did, he would have gotten the death penalty at Nuremberg and hung.
Why is IBM still doing business?
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Yours is the only correct response. Yes, we have to evaluate corporations based on what they do and with whom they do business. They cannot be given a pass just because they are profit-driven.
Who knows what MS and Apple would have done in regard to the Nazis. But it is worth remembering that not all corporations decided or sought to do business with them.
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I guess IBM's slogan should be - as variation of Google's "Don't do evil" - "Automating evil".
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Fame is transient in the high-tech world. Screw up one generation of products, and you're history.
Unless you are IBM. IBM has been a major player in the high tech world since before WWII. There are only a handful of companies worldwide that have been major players in any industry for as long or longer than IBM has been a major player in high tech (there are a couple who have been around much longer than IBM)..