My wife was a non-traditional student recently. We bought an iPad because one term of books cost more than the iPad. Nobody told us the e-books were gonna be just as expensive as the physical books, and they expired to boot. Not the iPad's fault, but iPad-as-cost-savings is a pretty short sighted strategy.
She did like not having to carry 25 lbs. of books around in 100+ temps though.
Large companies, unless you're Apple (willing to sacrifice one generation of customers for another),
Exactly this. Microsoft just keeps piling on layers of code to existing legacy code in fear of losing that Microsoft Word 4.0 user, at the expense of everyone else.
Blasphemy! Microsoft has made lots of really cool things, like Songsmith!
I have a simpler analysis of the decision makers at Microsoft. They never consider "just make good stuff that people want to buy" as a plausible business model.
If you don't think iOS is stealing from Microsoft's (and Apple's) OS market, you are delusional.
The goal of a movie is to put asses in seats.
This comment makes me sad for humanity. Also, if this were true, why do they serve 3 gallon servings of soda? That just makes bigger asses, allowing for fewer asses per screening.
And here I was being all pragmatic and equating "flop" with "bad movie". Lest I forget, I live in the land of the stupid where the only thing that matters is making money.
Again, missing the point. People don't "need" outlook. They think they do, they buy an iPad, configure the mail tool to their exchange server, then forget they ever needed outlook in the first place. There's no point in arguing because if people really wanted to do Office stuff on their tablet devices, they wouldn't be buying millions of iPads. But they are, because they don't want to, which is the point Microsoft is missing.
These ads only further the notion that MS doesn't get it. Only geeks care about sd cards and number of USB ports. People don't care about buzzwords like "multitasking". People don't buy iPads to create PowerPoint slides. People DO play chopsticks on their iPad. It really isn't that difficult. Keep your head in the past then wonder why nobody is buying your products...
But Microsoft has a long history of doing this. I think the business tactic of "wait for Apple, then do that" has grown long in the tooth for the MS faithful, and they are really bad at copying otherwise good technologies.
The other problem MS has is they have low standards...they don't get what makes teh shiny desirable. Their version of teh shiny is zune brown and WinXP Fisher Price interfaces. "Close Enough" should be their corporate byline.
The obvious answer to the old "I'm a Mac, he's a PC" advertising slur was "yeah, Mac guy looks pretty, but he's actually useless. Look at what PC guy can do". They always seemed curiously afraid to go there.
Probably because this "obvious answer" hasn't been accurate in probably 5-10 years. It used to be en vogue to mock how useless a Mac was, until people actually started using them. Now the argument, "look what the PC guy can do" is actually kind of a joke for millennials (and even some of us Gen X'ers) who understand productivity is no longer measured by number of spreadsheet rows or PowerPoint slides.
Immediately stop reading anytime somebody stars off with, "Dude, the zune was awesome..."
Well, that escalated quickly. Have you ever taken a class in psychology or cognition or education? Moving information from sensory input to short term memory is very well documented and understood. Moving it to long term storage and recalling that is what is still pretty much not understood. Unless you do this for a living, I suggest YOU don't know shit and you can hang your own worthless response on your fucking wall as a reminder of when to butt the hell out when you don't know what the hell you are talking about. Cunt.
This is why some people make the single-payer argument for health care. No subsidies to give out so the private interests can just raise their prices. Also political suicide (in America, at least).
This is exactly why I make the argument that state run colleges should be state-run colleges, not institutions of private interest that the state throws funding at.
I think housing is completely different. Housing is out of control because people sell their shitty orange county house for $1.2 million then move to Austin and spend their $800k in equity on a house that should only cost about $200k. Yes, House Hunters and Property Brothers are often filmed in Austin and you can see this phenomenon several times a week. Yes, this is really a thing...uppity rich folk moving here and buying dilapidated sub-standard housing in the trendy part of town and dumping upwards of $250-300k in renovations, subsequently raising the prices for all of Austin to the point those of us who qualify as "wealthy" under Obamacare law can't afford to live within 20 miles of downtown.
I have friends graduating with engineering degrees that have 30k in debt from a STATE SCHOOL.
While I think tuition is ridiculous and a problem, a little perspective is often in order. How many engineers with $30k debt from state colleges do I know that go out and buy a $30k car with their first job? All of them.
If anyone thinks $30k in debt is a life crushing issue, I can't wait for them to grow up and come to the real world. With that, though, I've never understood why kids go to schools that cost upwards of $50k a year, when the giant state college across the street will gladly take 1/5th of that money off their hands and provide the equally useless BA/BS in Anything that most of us have, and what most employers look for (in the professional world).
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
