They did, however, manage to tie the stuff down and limited them in ways unprecedented. In that way, Apple definitely did something new, but that's not something people actually WANT.

IllDefinedTermException.
Stack trace: Your input statement raised a parsing exception at "people". You != people at large.

People (at large) did in fact want stuff "tied down and limited", because without that, they had to figure out how to wander through 100000 ways of doing one simple thing they wanted to do. How I get out of this app? How do I get to my email? If you don't know anything about OSes or apps or even really up from down, you can figure out how to press the center button on the iPhone enough times to get back to an icon you recognize.

Second, by reducing complexity, Apple made it manageable to have the OS drive the phone experience, rather than the hardware driving the experience, which had been the case up to that point (though BlackBerries might strain my theory a bit). This plus sandboxing the hell out of everything in turn made it possible to put software on the phone and have a reasonable expectation that it will work, and voile you can now sell software downloads. I bought an iPhone after having a WinCE device, and despite having been a Linux admin, a quasi-DBA, etc, I couldn't get apps to install on that damn WinCE crap. I could on the iPhone. So that's what the iPhone delivered. Do other OSes do that now, absolutely yes. Are there drawbacks to Apple's design choices in iOS? Also yes, and these are particularly glaring with the iPad (the level of sandboxing really reduces utility of the iPad, IMHO).

But like it or not, Apple the first to figure out how to make a OS/user experience-centric phone for the average Joe or Jane. I suspect that it will be very hard to dislodge them from their perch, just as ostensibly better OSes couldn't get rid of Windows on the desktop.

Interesting, from the CFO's LinkedIn profile

MOZILLA - 2005 - present
--CFO
--Called in to create the financial structure for Mozilla Corporation (

Business Week's profile of them:

Mozilla Corporation provides Internet solutions. It offers Firefox, a Web browser; Thunderbird 2, an email application; Raindrop, a prototype messaging tool, which enables users to manage a stream of messages coming from sources, such as Twitter and Facebook into their email; and Rainbow, a developer prototype that brings video and audio recording to Firefox 4. The company also provides Bugzilla, a bug tracking system that helps users to manage software development; Camino, a Web browser; and SeaMonkey, an application containing a Web browser, HTML editor, and Web development tools, as well as solutions for mobile phones. In addition, it operates an online store that provides apparel. The company is based in Mountain View, California. Mozilla Corporation operates as a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation.

Dunno, I guess they're keeping those 500 people busy, but like a lot of things in this space, I just don't quite get it. Maybe I just don't do the things they're trying to address...

I'm sure they've staffed up. But 1000 people (x100K = 100M/yr)???? Or to be conservative a scant 500 + marketing and bandwidth/hosting costs... What the hell are 500 people doing????

Does anyone know where the money they get from Google goes? Aren't they a non-profit that's freely distributing a community-developed piece of software? If so, why does this cost anything more than a couple million a year? That's what their financial statements from 2009 (latest available from their website) talk about: 10 people and ~ $1.5M in budget. That seems pretty reasonable to me to run a product with as broad a user base as Firefox.

But $100M??? Assuming an average salary of $100K, that's 1000 people. Are there really 1000 people working at Mozilla? If so, what are they doing?

Or are they really spending as much as Nike and Coke on marketing? Do they have a big pile of cash in bank? Can someone help me understand, cause right now I don't see how the math adds up...

Right on, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. The legal ramifications of putting a pen to paper, signing, and then faxing the signed copy are very well understood, especially with a paper copy to follow. I'm at a medical company, and we send out legally signed documents to our clients (lab reports). In researching electronic signature of these documents we learned that there's actually quite a bit of sophistication in putting a pen to paper - you are attesting to your identity, your presence with the piece of paper, and accepting the contents you sign all at once. That's actually rather hard to replicate in a digital signature setup, and it's why so many people misunderstand compliance with 21CFR11: you have to make a process that provides the required attestations, not just buy some technology.

Not to mention that there is STILL no universal trust architecture on the internet. That means that getting anything resembling a real digital signature between company A and B means that the two companies' IT departments have to haggle out some form of relationship that allows them to accept company A, person 1234's digital signature and company B person 9876's signature in the same document and signature format (we're starting to converge towards PDF, but by no means converged). By contrast, when you send a fax, all those assurances are just there for you with no work at all.

Finally, a fax has a conceptual simplicity to it that is still pretty compelling. You make a piece of paper appear in a particular physical place with content on it. Lots of people still like to read documents on paper more than on screen (which is why there are still printers). That means if you know Mary has a fax near her desk and someone who organizes her papers for her, you can make a piece of paper get onto Mary's desk and perhaps get read. If you send her an email you had to know that you got the right account, got through her spam and other filters, and then compete for attention with the jillion other emails she's getting.

I myself don't care to fax much, because I a) read most things on a computer b) am terrible at managing paper, and c) manage to read most the emails I get (not a hug number). I have learned however, that those things are not representative of a large portion of the population.

I would third the suggestion of "being a bigger part of the company". The only way to make this ask and not have it backfire is to appeal to their sense of teamwork. If you have been part of the team, and you are showing that you are willing to be more closely bound to the company and its fortunes, they may consider it worthwhile to offer you a little equity in order to retain your goodwill (and similarly that of others). After all, a good employee is a bird in the hand, so most good managers will attempt to accommodate those types of requests.

Bear in mind of course that unless the company is already planning to issue additional equity, any new equity that's offered dilutes existing shareholders, so you will face a pretty steep uphill climb if there is not a pool set aside for employee equity.

I would also second or third or 700th the suggestions that you make absolutely no mention of being indispensable, since you are not. If someone is in fact indispensable it's a good time for an institution to start looking for their replacement - just to mitigate the business risk. If they are not, then dropping the I-word gives an impression ranging from tacky to arrogant to hostage-taker, and you may well be shown the door.

Long story short, if you really like the company and want to be part of it, I think I'd ask for a promotion - probably accompanied by converting to a salaried employee - and see if you can slide in a request for a little equity there. Otherwise you're probably taking your chances.

This is well thought out and raises some good points about the economics of maximizing hardware and features over time. Nonetheless, I deeply disagree, since I think you're missing a couple key variables in your analysis.

Replacing a computer is a pretty big hassle every time you do it - dig out backups, migrate stuff, get email, bookmarks, working directories set up, go fetch data off the old machine when you realize you forgot it, etc. And if you had a crash, you have to add the replacement time. So a good analogy is to AC - you want it on and working when you turn it on. Interruptions won't kill you, but they can be pretty aggravating on certain days. As such your analysis is leaving out the value of minimizing downtime. Someone's sensitivity to downtime does depend on how much they rely on a computer (i.e., do they have a desktop they can use as a backup), but it's still pretty rare to have a highly portable environment on any computer. So a reliable machine and warranty and/or retail option that turns your computer around quickly are more important to a lot of folks than maximizing hardware and features over time.

My wife happens to also not like her Mac, and I'm going to take a guess that my wife and the OPs wife have relatively similar desires - do the things they knew how to do in Windows quickly, and not worry about anything else about the computer. What she mainly wants it to do is always work. So I think what she needs is a reliable, not too feature-focused machine with a setup and a warranty that minimize downtime. Whether the easiest way to get to that is to install Windows on the existing Mac box or buy a Windows machine depends on lots of real-life details only the OP knows. I will probably take a stab at installing Windows on my wife's machine and see how that goes over.

Of my 2 favorite things about using a Mac, one is going to the retail store* and leaving a little while later with my machine ready to go (although you do have to spend a couple hours ignoring the condescending hipness of the "geniuses"). That only applies to problems that can be fixed by configuration or swapping out hardware, but that's a pretty good fraction of all problems - HD, PS, RAM, battery failures have to be O(50%) or more of hardware problems.

* My second favorite thing about the Mac is that sleeping and hibernate rarely causes crashes. You open the case and the computer is as it was before going to sleep, with some occasional confusion about network changes. That was just never the case in the Windows machines I had - I attribute it to being able to define the hardware and test the software and hardware together. I like other stuff about the Mac, but they're way behind those two.

Sort of. Currently the best way to reduce overpopulation is to reduce infant mortality. Once parents know that their chances are high of getting several kids who will live to adulthood, they fairly quickly tend to have less kids. I'm not sure how this argument extends out once you're talking about people who are going to live a long time.

Another big factor to consider is how these long-lived people fit into the economy. Do they work until they're 100? Is this anti-aging stuff really going to keep brains and bodies healthy enough for a 95 year-old to be an account, a truck driver, a software engineer, a waiter?

Excellent post. You should read this piece by Atul Gawande about treating people at the end of their lives:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande

Two takeaways. First, hospice is the work of the angels. I have observed this with my mother-in-law's death from cancer, and almost everyone I've talked to seems to agree.
Second, your remark about Vietnamese having incense and pictures of ancestors is incredibly on-point, and that's what brought to mind Gawande's article. People need traditions and structure around dying to guide them through it, and that's largely missing in modern American life. My wife, who has seen a lot of death in her 35 years (mother, father, grandparents, close family friends, etc.) keeps a fair number of her ancestors close. WASP that I am, my family has none of these traditions and little to guide me when it comes to death. The Vietnamese have it right.

Sadly, I think I've come over time to agree with you (the sadness is that it feels more like cynicism than wisdom).

One thing to examine is that regulatory regimes have worked for various industries at various points in history. So while they seem to get captured with great regularity in the US, they do seem to exist and work to some degree in some industries in some countries. Somehow, for example, the requirement for the acoustic dead-man's switch that Norway and Brazil both enforce, and that the US MMS would have required had its employees not been doing coke and sleeping with oil reps, and the companies comply in Brazil and Norway. I happen to know a bit about Brazil, and it has both deadingly bureaucratic state and a great deal of cronyism and corruption, but somehow in this case regulate won out over don't-regulate - i.e., more or less the law asked for the right thing happened (unlike Amazon land use laws or its propped-up steel industry). So how did their regulatory body not get captured?

That seems to be a pretty key question for our time, since a balance between sustainability and prosperity requires an honest and unburdensome regulatory regime.

I know I'm late to this party, but I'd be interested in your reaction to the cap and dividend idea:

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1602354&cid=31700124

I know this thread is old, but it's a pleasure to see thoughtful commenters on Slashdot. Have you heard of the cap and dividend idea? I think Maria Cantwell in particular is or was pushing it. It's more akin to Alaska's oil dividend in that it focuses on the originators of the carbon (mining and fossil fuel extraction companies) and directly redistributes the proceeds of carbon taxation to families. That eliminates some of the gaming associated with figuring out who of the many, many, many (many, many, many, ....) users of fossil fuels who do the actual emission can do what and how that will be monitored.

I admit there's probably a lot of ways the taxation rules can be set up to favor incumbents, but it just seems to me that by focusing on the source of the carbon that is ultimately emitted, there are far fewer entities to try to regulate and monitor. On the political side it seems like a winner because it sets up a battle with a limited number industries rather than anyone who uses energy - though in this case the industries in question are extremely powerful and connected across the political spectrum.

I'm just curious about your viewpoint because you seem to be interested in whether the system that's set up will work, more than the dogma around whether trying to set up such a system is inherently noble or inherently evil...

Absolutely agreed. If you want to promote it, you have to go find people you think MIGHT (not may, not are...) be interested and promote it to them.

I would add something else I noted just from the original post. You submitted anonymously, and didn't mention the name of your project, much less link to it's *Forge page. Very honorable in that you don't appear to be self-promoting. The reality, however, is that shameless self-promotion is both necessary and useful. Just the project name and a link would have netted you probably 10s of leads. Then as the parent said, go follow up and be friends with those people.