And a Chromebook of all things. It isn't like this is a real operating system. For all the stuff you're giving up by having a Chromebook you'd think that it would at least be power competitive.
I agree with the sentiment, but I've never used a laptop that had more than 2 hours advertised battery life (so, 1 hour in practice). My most recent purchase is a 2010 System76, so I'm quite out of touch, I know. I dream of having 3 hours+ of battery life on a laptop. That far, far more than I'm used to. Though, when tablets can do 10-20 hours, why is this stuck at 3? I agree, that does seem measly.
Even in 2010, 1 hour is not acceptable, but a reasonable number to expect from a high-end, lightweight 2012 laptop would be around 7 hours (using Linux).
And before someone comes with the "but microsoft doubled its share values during Ballmer". The argument here is that, with microsoft's dominant incumbent position, a monkey would have tripled it.
Carly Fiorina. She did the same thing to HP, very differently. Cut quality. Cut R&D. Cut support. Cut service. Slightly lower prices, while your reputation is still sky-high. Outsource anything that can be done cheaper not in-house. Scale back benefits and anything that costs money. Have layoffs anywhere that doesn't produce short-term revenue.
Profits soar. Share prices soar. A few years later, as reputation catches up with quality and support, as there are no new products in the R&D pipeline, and as you have no core competencies, and as your best employees leave, the company tanks.
You walk of with a ton of cash from early-year bonuses.
The company was in bad time, now the scene look much better. With windows 7 a success and all the enterprise growth, with Xbox and windows 8, they are in a much better position. Although I am not nearly qualified enough to comment on Balmer's performance as a multi-billion dollar company's CEO, but he seems to do fine. Bill Gates set the bar high for Steve, and weather Steve under-performed or not remains a matter of speculation.
The MS share price has underperformed both the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones since he took over and a company that had never posted a loss now has.
The Xbox has lost money over all time (if you include initial costs), the Zune failed, Windows 8 is yet to be released. Despite massive investment last time I checked their on-line services division (give or take 400 million users) still lost money.
And they've gone from being the tech company you couldn't ignore to one that you can.
The only reason it looks fine is that Windows and Office keep bringing home the bacon but with the declining PC market (except Macs) and the rise of the smartphone and tablet markets (in which MS are currently, roughly, nowhere), how long will that be for?
Where did you get the data to say that Xbox had lost money?
Did you include royalties from each title and dev kits? I just would like to remind you that the only company in the game industry who make money with hardware is Nintendo. All other ones lose money on hardware and recover those loses from titles sells.
If you do have the support for saying that Xbox has lost money I will be very interested on reading that :)
The original Xbox launched in 2001 and the business unit lost money consistently until it's first profitable year in FY 2007/8 [1]. This is the business unit remember so includes all income including royalties from games and so on.
The same article also mentions that the year before the unit lost $1.9bn (the red ring of death issues hitting it hard).
You'd have hoped that once it turned profit it would have been upwards from there but while it remained profitable in 2009, the figures dropped 66% to a $169m [2]. In 2010 profits were up to $618m and then in 2011 $1.32bn which is obviously great but even if you add those four profitable years together you're only $500m or so over the loss from 2007.
Against that you've got all the development costs in the run up to the launch of the 360 in 2005 and the entire loss making life of the original Xbox (launched 2001 but would have been running up development costs for a couple of years before that at least).
The success recently and the launch of Kinnect will have likely increased it's profitability since 2011, but while I don't have links (though I have gone through it before, I just don't have the time now) I don't believe it's come close to wiping out those original losses.
I'm wondering if this posting is a practical joke of some sort. The post linked to here is so dense with vocabulary, yet somehow lacks any meaningful content.
I kept reading only to see if there was a punchline at the bottom. Something to the effect of: "See? All that crap written above really cries out for some information architecture, doesn't it?"
Agreed. "When trying to articulate what it is I do, I find that I default to an older arsenal of terminology to qualify what is actually a fairly simple vocation, built on an assortment of superficial qualifications and reliant on a heavy interaction with a cloud of specialized UX disciplines." Huh?
This person clearly has a difficult time explaining basic concepts (not exactly a trait I'd look for in an IA).
I don't really care what I get for my money. I was just glad to have an opportunity to support a prolific developer that is making the Clojure community a better place.
Seriously, do you have any plans of how to make money? The server costs on this could get really high if it actually becomes popular. Then you have a hugely successful app that is actively losing you money.
Yep, we have thought through a number of different monetization strategies including sponsored challenges, private games / events, virtual goods and paid / ad-supported versions. The most important thing right now for us, though, is building a product that people love. With that in mind, we'd love any feedback you might have from that perspective.
I'm not sure I'm your target market as I'm not much for photo sharing type stuff. That being said I think the app looks great and was pretty interesting for the brief time I browsed it.
I'm just a bit annoyed at all the, "We'll get a few million users and then worry about how to make money." When I see a service I like that doesn't have any way of making money I'm scared it will go away. Note this isn't how the masses think, but it is how software devs think.
I agree, I think it's unfortunate when services get shut down post acquisition.
I also agree with you that all startups should have a clear path to monetization. I would assume that institutional investors would require as much before investing, but I think that would probably be assuming too much these days.
However, I don't think that all startups should "turn on" the monetization immediately. For those us trying to build two-sided platforms, we need to get one side of the platform on first. Typically this will be the users as brands and retailers are still very much focused on reach and are very slow to make decisions.
while i agree, in most cases I personally believe the monetization should start at the beginning. If it's going to be ad supported, adding that later will annoy users for example.
Some of the other things you mentioned I don't think would hinder growth at all. i.e. maybe in app purchase for the private section or sponsored challenges etc. It just seems to me too many good services get shut down because people don't think about how it is going to be profitable.
I look forward to kicking the tires, since I've been looking for a solid replacement for Parse ever since Facebook bought them.