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[isthisthingon]

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/052710-ballmer-im-not-going-to.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_daily_am_2010-05-28

I just had a thought.  The most unlikely of former enemies could fall madly in love someday.  These two companies are so similar in their approach to business and enjoyed years of an "us versus them" football game we were all supposed to choose a team from and cheer passionately for, tits out.

I'm pretty confident this wasn't in their grand plan by any means.  But Apple, much like Microsoft, makes money the old fashioned way.  No, they don't "earn" it.  They leach it out of you pretty much up front while the rest of the competition is realizing and taking extremely effective advantage of Free.  There's still far more money earned that falls within the non-Free category and perhaps always will be.  But realizing that Google makes more money annually than America's entire airline and auto industries combined?  Granted those industries are not what they used to be but still, one company that continues to expand its fortune based on Free compared to every company within these two non-Free industries?   


The challenge that lies ahead for non-Free companies especially in the information industry, is that as information becomes more available and Free everyday.  Companies have generally two options: embrace it and focus on what is scarce or impose legal restrictions to stave off the inevitable for as long as humanly possible. 

Ladies and gentlemen, Apple and Microsoft will be huddled in a corner someday slinging their wares as loving partners just as Metallica found true happiness in the loving arms of the RIAA.

[kurdt]

Yeah, I'll bet people will fondly remember Google after some private instance hacks into their mainframe (again) and steals all your data. Now if you ever become someone who matters all your stuff you might be embarrassed about can be used against you. Yes, free is great until you realize it was never free, you just paid with your data and nobody asked you if you authorize the transaction.

Oh and for this not to happen Google has to be the first company in the world to invent unhackable and unbreakable security system. Yeah, we all know how likely that it.

[isthisthingon]

Forget Google and consider Craigslist.  If I recall correctly kurdt you read Free and basically scoffed at it.  I'm just finishing it now and it's quite an informative read that's very well written.  Since Google is featured so heavily in the book and they're your nemesis, well I guess it makes sense why you would hate the book as well.

But what happened when Craigslist sucked some 30 billion out of the paper-based ad industry?  Craigslist certainly didn't get rich off of this Free approach but the 30 billion was literally redistributed from the few, powerful publishing houses to the many.  Instead of paying through the nose to list your home, car, etc. etc. in some archaic classified section, a week later FFS, it's listed now; found by a maximized audience and benefits who the most?  The seller of the home, not the Wall Street Journal.

In Google's case it looks different since Free has managed to provide riches for a single entity.  Yet more often than Google, Free provides a means for everybody to compete based on the value of what's given away not simply because someone has the keys to the gate.  This is at the core of the transformation so disruptive it causes people to break out in hives.  If you've spent your time and worked hard perfecting your skills at building fences and keeping people out who can't or won't remit satisfactory payments, then you hate Free with a passion.  It's not only eroding the profits of keymaster conglomerates, but it reduces the value of what you've spent so much time perfecting.

I love that part where someone was charging $20 for games they wrote and had added copy protection on.  Nobody bought the games but they were virally hacked to the ridiculous.  The game author wanted to understand why this was so he asked the community directly from his blog.  The replies were many and not many less than enthusiastic 100 words.  The most common response was that the games were overpriced for what they were.  Additionally, anytime copy protection is found it acts as a license to hack, almost like the very existence of the copy protection was justification enough to hack through it.

He reduced the price to $10.00 and removed all copy protection.  He then offered a Freemium style upgrade that included new things he continued to add moving forward that were not previously released, like a constant stream of value.  The results?  Games are selling like hotcakes and his Freemium play was a huge hit.  To paraphrase the end of the chapter he said:

"I looked into the mind of the pirate and found a paying customer looking for a reason to come out." 

[kurdt]

Yes but what you are so willingly forgetting is that Free is not free in many cases. It's free of monetary currency. My beef is with EVERY company that pretends to give away things for free without telling clearly what you are giving as return. Of course you can argue that TOS is for that but really, it's like legalized fraud because everybody knows nobody reads TOS.

In my books scraping & analyzing identifiable personal information without permission is worse than running closed app environment where everybody knows the name of the game.

I bet few big CEOs would probably be lynched publically for real if somebody could make concise video out of what they do with your private information and to illustrate it in a way that shows how much harm can be done to anybody when you have that kind of data. People know it's been stored but they have no idea what can be done with it. General public's data illiteracy is the base of today's big web companies like Google and Facebook. As long as people don't realize the worth of their own data these companies will florish by offering seemingly Free services and telling everybody how great they are for doing so.

It seems more and more every day that people don't realize what kind of times we are living. In a nutshell everybody is tracked without their permission and people have no way to say no except stop using services so much of today's world rely on. People embrace all this technology because they don't understand what can be done with it. They blindly trust companies with big colorful logos and do no evil slogans. It will be like all the classical tales where victim realizes what's happening but it's too late already, damage is done. Sad part is that most people working in these companies don't understand what they are contributing at.

In today's world where everything from your identity to your friendships are stored digitally, the one who controls the data controls everything. You honestly believe that Free somehow changed the way people who worship stockprice like God think about how great it would be to dominate the world and have unlimited amounts of money?

[isthisthingon]

Again forget Google, and since you brought them up forget Facebook too.  Although the Internet is by far the largest Free influencing factor the world has ever seen, Free has been extremely effective and predates the Internet by about a hundred years.

Here, have a free Jell-o recipe book.  Oh wow look at that.  This product that took two failed decades of "get that crap out of my face" to realize its potential has only one catalyst to thank: Free.  Nope, nobody was stealing and utilizing your personal information like today on the net.  But the radio itself was made possible as a Free service thanks to the ads played between programs.

In Brittan they tax everyone for Free broadcasting like the BBC so you don't need to sit through commercials.  That's completely "Free" as well, though most with outdated mindsets about this can't pry the tax from the Free, making them completely blocked and unable to see the Free 

Free is not necessarily free by any means.  But there's a world of "too cheap to meter" business opportunities (ie - essentially "Free") that remain invisible to those with "there IS no free lunch" goggles.

[nop_90]

To understand "free" one must understand value first.
There are 2 types of value, perceived value and actual value.

Actual value can sometimes be greater then perceived value.
But generally speaking profit is made from the difference between perceived value and actual value.

There are many ways to get a greater perceived value.
1) By assembling various components of lesser value, then create a "special object" like apple does with iphone etc.
2) By creating an artificial shortage using laws, copyrights etc.

Apple for example uses a combination of the 2.
According the the BS put out by the likes of perks who saids that artists must be compensated, or there will be no creativity. I guess there must have been no creativity before 1860 when USA started the patent system.

It is because of #2 that capitalism is failing to work, and as a result USA and the world is in a recession.
The capitalism described by Adam Smith assumed that the market was "free" as in if Apple made iphones, I could crank out an identical product at the same time.
Contrary to popular belief, Adam Smith did say that certain segments of the economy should be controlled by the economy, the parts where a "market" could not exist, such as a utility company etc.

As ITO said, free is not free per say.
Free is not necessarily free by any means.  But there's a world of "too cheap to meter" business opportunities (ie - essentially "Free") that remain invisible to those with "there IS no free lunch" goggles
With the event of mass production this is becoming very important to understand. The amount of labor going into the product is "decreasing".
So under Marx definition where labor is value, the cost is going down.
The comes a point where the cost of charging for said item becomes greater then the cost of the item itself.

That been said, M$ started out as an apple model. But they are switching to a google model.
A prime example is http://www.codeplex.com/, their search engine, mail service etc.
So in the M$ case, I buy the OS at $150 a copy, then for "free" i get all this extra stuff.
In the past they had the apple mentality. M$ at least has the brains to see if u can not beat them join them.
Apple has the rip off the consumer with all sorts of crap, white wash over faults, and then the longer you use their devices, the more you see what a POS they truly are.
IBM same story, most of their income now days comes from "service".

[isthisthingon]

>M$ at least has the brains to see if u can not beat them join them.

Yes.  Apple has something even bigger than Steve Balmer's relentless quest for cash and power: Job's galaxy crushing ego.  Yet as long as his ego finds a way to justify a business move as being the root choice of Apple and not anyone else (see AT&T), then he's on his knees sucking the capitalist chode of Our Lord just like all the other Pirates.  Butt Pirates that is 

[kurdt]

I should have said it in the previous post but I do understand exactly what you mean by Free. I just wanted to illustrate that Google & Facebook are not Free by any means and in my opinion it's really misleading to say they are Free. There's a clear cost there what they are charging. In the other hand, Twitter is truly Free service and Twitter's CEO has said that all tweets are yours and not theirs.

I think Free is a lovely illusion. Like you said, Free is made possible of the fact that something can be offered for so cheap that it becomes essentially Free. Unfortunately it doesn't hold water when you need to scale. Or how exactly are you planning to finance the server power to offer that service for let's say 100 million people? Or have you invented the world's first internet service that runs without a server or bandwidth costs? Twitter wouldn't have never been possible if there hadn't been dumb enough investors to put their money in a company that offers essentially a service that sends strings from list A to list B.

When you challenge Free people always take out Freemium. Awesome new concept where you offer the base service for free and then charge for better features. What people fail to understand is that with Freenium your service is not Free anymore even if you so much want it to be and tell everybody it is. It's paid by those paying members. There's a very clear costs attached to your service and it's not so cheap anymore that essentially it becomes Free. Now what happens when you have big architecture to pay for and your paying customers flee somewhere else? The problem with Free is that it's not sustainable after certain point.

[nop_90]

is that it's not sustainable after certain point.

The only thing sustainable after a certain point is death

[kurdt]

is that it's not sustainable after certain point.

The only thing sustainable after a certain point is death

How's death sustainable? It's basically non-existing state Well, you could argue that once you die, price of your existence is so small it's non-existing

[isthisthingon]

Death is Free. 


One fascinating thing about Free is the emotion it provokes when our logic forbids us from ignoring the real underlying costs of everything.  Once one has a good sense for what everything costs it seems almost childish or flat out ignorant for someone to assert that something is free.  IN the case of Facebook and Google, the way they leverage Free - and they most certainly do - is in a way that has personal hot triggers for you.  You really don't like the way in which they leverage Free but that doesn't mean they aren't doing it.

Jell-o is basically a shit sandwich for your body.  So by handing out free Jell-o cookbooks door-to-door, which is truly what happened, these monsters were encouraging us to eat unhealthy and perhaps started the obesity epidemic we face today.  Or not.  But They leveraged Free just as surely as Facebook and you know how I feel about Facebook lately.

Should the sweet sugar pushers handing out Jell-O cookbooks say: ""oh by the way, we're hoping you eat this shit and eventually it will make you fat and nasty."  Should Google say: "oh yeah by the way, we'll be using your information to target products directly to your browser and for pretty much anything we decide will benefit us"

Well Google does say that, granted it's part of long boring user agreements.  But it's becoming a globally understood thing and some people actually like to have targeted products in their browser.  People care far less about privacy that you would think and for them this is the best Free on the planet.

[kurdt]

Death is Free.

Not for your family.

Should the sweet sugar pushers handing out Jell-O cookbooks say: ""oh by the way, we're hoping you eat this shit and eventually it will make you fat and nasty."  Should Google say: "oh yeah by the way, we'll be using your information to target products directly to your browser and for pretty much anything we decide will benefit us"

Yes and yes.

But it's becoming a globally understood thing and some people actually like to have targeted products in their browser.  People care far less about privacy that you would think and for them this is the best Free on the planet.

Yes, just like it was globally understood that consuming stuff was great and loaning money that didn't exist was a good strategy. Now look at how deep shit your country is in as well as many european country. People do not think things thru. And what truly worries me is that now the system itself has shown that it's fundamentally broken and can't be fixed, people are still willing to participate and do not demand a better system. And even Google has shown it knows no boundaries on what they will do like spying on open people's traffic, people still trust them because they just don't understand the implications. I predict that in 200 years this era will be remembered as the era where human race truly showed how stupid and ignorant they can get. As long as they are occupied with safe entertainment, made-up hope and some sort of God like money that they can focus on chasing every day, they will endure pretty much anything. If you threat to take their God away they will yield out. You can scream Yes We Can all day long but when it comes to fixing a system that can't be fixed, I'm sorry but you just can't.

But if you smell the air, you can feel the resistance building up and with networked world, mark my words, something will start happening soon.

[nop_90]

Things are always changing.
Unless u are dead lol

[isthisthingon]

>Not for your family.

   Nice.

As for the rest I think you're points are valid yet almost entirely outside of the economic realities that drive various approaches to generating profits in capitalism in general.  We may be in for a gigantic collapse and we may see untold years ahead of relative stability or even "growth."  But if things turn terribly bad there's nothing you can possibly blame businesses for other than the only thing they are here on this planet to do: make money.  You are blaming capitalism or at least you should be.  I'd agree 100%.  But expecting a publicly traded money mission to do anything other than hunt money - especially something with the greater macroeconomic consequences in mind, is a foolish hope imo.

Externalities like the destruction of forests and mass starvation and enslavement of populations don't even make the Apple's of the world pause to consider the ethics of their path to power.  Using the legal system to strong-arm the world into propping you up financially is far worse than using Free in a free market to maximize revenue 

And for a reality check, man you used to go on and on about how licensed software and Apple in particular is totally fine the way they do business since ignorance is no excuse of the law.  So how is this different in terms of privacy?  I personally think it sucks out loud to have even any ambiguity, and when the defaults coincidentally expose everything.  But you support patents or rather you seem to suggest it's the better way to go, as with h.264.  The way I see it patents are far more insidious than the misuse of certain online information.  But I think I react to patent infringement and IP hooks in general like you react to Free.     Interesting.

[kurdt]

And for a reality check, man you used to go on and on about how licensed software and Apple in particular is totally fine the way they do business since ignorance is no excuse of the law.  So how is this different in terms of privacy?  I personally think it sucks out loud to have even any ambiguity, and when the defaults coincidentally expose everything.  But you support patents or rather you seem to suggest it's the better way to go, as with h.264.  The way I see it patents are far more insidious than the misuse of certain online information.  But I think I react to patent infringement and IP hooks in general like you react to Free.     Interesting.

Yes, I still feel Apple's way of doing business is totally legit. But now you have to understand that what I do support is freedom to make legit business where you offer a product and somebody values it higher than the sum of currency it's sold for. What the product is irrelevant - the deal is clear, you take it or you don't. What I do not support is this slimey & sneaky Google & Facebook way of doing business where they do all kind of nice tricks to make you believe their service is totally Free when it's nothing like that. If you don't understand underlying business model or your knowledge is inadequate to know what can be grabbed and how it can be identified, you are very susceptible for their trap. I wonder how many people would use Google if there would be a link to a complete example profile what they can analyze out of you. Because that's what you are paying with when you use those services.

Actually I don't support patents. I think they are totally unnecessary way of empowering people and companies who have no intentions to materialize their ideas. After patent system has been driven to the ground by misuse, it will be remember as one of the mistakes made in trying to create artificial financial growth to the system.

If you dig out what I wrote, I was originally against h264 as video codec in the web. But more and more I read about it, the clearer it is that it's the most open and transparent deal at the moment. I know it sounds totally opposite what you think about h264 but what I mean with open is that they openly tell you the fees and what it's going to cost and are transparent about the fact that it's free until 2015 and they will rise the prices but have promissed to cap it to max 10% in 5 years after 2015. Google is withholding their patent research of WebM/VP8 at the moment and that makes it way too risky and shady deal to accept. But the reality is that at the moment, you have to support two video codecs if you want to use HTML5's <video>. Frankly, I just rather go with <video> h264 for devices with h264 support or without Flash and only Flash for the rest. This way you don't have to encode your videos in many different formats and you have until 2015 to see how WebM/VP8 plays out without putting yourself at risk.

All in all, I think we are after same things: honesty, openness and transparency.

Funny that Google & Facebook can't be described with any of those terms - both have recently demonstrated quite the opposite on all fronts. I know you might disagree but in my opinion those apply to Apple which is probably why I bother to defend them on public forum like this Apple is honest, open and transparent about the fact that they have product that does this and this. As a developer you will not be able to do this, this and this but you can do this, this and this. That's the deal - take it or leave it. It's really irrelevant to the offer if you wish it would include this, this and this. If you can't accept the deal, then just don't take it. I think one area where Apple needs to improve with openness & transparency is their app approval process. It's too much like Google's advertiser programs where complete retards make decisions based on random feelings they just happen to feel at that given moment without giving shit because rules are so vague they can get away with it.