The only thing "wrong" with a luxury goods strategy for Apple is that it isn't in line with their current valuation. They've achieved the status of most valuable company in history by sitting in a sweet spot for several years, defined by very high margins and high market share. If they become a regular luxury goods company with 5-10% market share (as they are in computers) then the company is at least 3x overvalued.

So where are the successful foreign internet companies in China? Can you name one? Gadgets, clothes, and cars are successful there because they do not threaten the political leaders. This is all very obvious.

No, Google made a purely rational decision to leave China. Most importantly it has become clear the Chinese government wants local companies to dominate the internet there. As a result not a single non-Chinese internet company has succeeded in China. When a powerful government wants you to lose, there is no point in playing the game. Consequently we've seen Google, Yahoo, EBay, Bing, Facebook, Twitter all essentially cede the market.

You ask "why is rule of law important?" The answer is predictability. Businesses and individuals can make smarter decisions about their futures (where to invest, how to grow, what partnerships to engage in) if they have some measure of predictability about the future. If rules are arbitrary, or change every year, you lose predictability. And then decision-making is less than optimal.

Note that predictability is a potential outcome of the rule of law, but is not guaranteed. For example the US system today of arbitrarily-granted and unpredictably-upheld technology patents. "Predictable" is the last word you'd use to characterize it; it's become a dangerous minefield especially for small companies.

One of the best indicators of a bad regulatory environment is uncertainty of outcomes. When companies are uncertain about outcomes of things like patent litigation or corporate tax rules or future tax incentives, they cannot make intelligent business decisions. Bad decisions across an entire industry becomes a huge drain on business efficiency.

It's a Prisoner's Dilemma game: Everyone would be better off if nobody engaged in the bad behaviors (patent trolling, patenting trivial "innovations"), but unfortunately it's to everyone's unilateral advantage to engage in those behaviors.

Apple would love to get these injunctions, but really they have never behaved as though market share is their primary motivation. From the earliest days of the company they have opted for high-profit sales to a smaller niche audience. For iOS Apple could have easily (a) gone to multiple carriers much earlier than they did, and (b) produced cheaper models for the global market. But they didn't. Historically the high-margin strategy has worked for them.

What I think worries Apple now is that the high-margin strategy only works so long as there is a perceived quality premium. This time the competitor isn't MS-DOS. The best Android phones and tablets with Jellybean are genuinely good products, and in certain areas (LTE adoption, screen size, customizability) Apple is looking like a follower rather than leader. I think what they get from these injunctions isn't so much a market share boost, as it is a boost to their reputation as innovators.

I've worked with Marissa before and admire her product focus and attention to detail. She's very sharp. The challenge for her will be working in an environment without the depth of engineering talent that Google has; she has never experienced this in her working life.

Glad to see FTA made the list. Like Ultima III before it and Skyrim today, it was one of those games that just blew you away with scope and detail. Dramatically richer experience than anything that came before.

Lining up all the games it's also interesting to see how RPGs have evolved from being mostly about combat (Wizardry) to focus much more on exploration and problem-solving. Somewhere down the road somebody will make a fun RPG that doesn't involve killing anything at all.

Stallman's idea of computing is to cater to the programmer. That will always gain the most sympathy on /.

Jobs's idea of computing was to cater to the end user. That will always gain the most sympathy with the 99% of the world that isn't on /.

At my company we have many thousands of employees using MacBook Pros/Airs as primary work machines. Overall it works pretty well, but there are a couple of annoying areas:

1. lack of full-disk encryption out of the box. FileVault is a half-hearted attempt, but it's not secure enough for corporate use. You basically have to find a third party to provide this, which enormously complicates the process of provisioning a new laptop and creates a lot of interaction and support issues.
2. lack of a port extender solution. We're always taking our laptops from our desk to meetings, which involves plugging/unplugging a crazy number of things: power, ethernet, and external monitor cable at a minimum (+USB if you have a keyboard or mouse). I can see why Apple doesn't want the size and ugliness of a dock connector in the bottom of their machines, but this is a big usability issue in a work environment. Thunderbolt seems like a good platform to provide port extension with little impact to the hardware.

I think Apple could look more at the corporate use case. There are a number of things that would improve their machines for the corporate environment, without sacrificing (or changing) anything about the consumer experience.

Spreadsheets are good, but for simple problems they can be unwieldy compared to a calculator. For example calculating the square root of 8 is three keypresses on an RPN calculator. On Excel it's one mouse-click into a cell, followed by nine keypresses ('=sqrt(8)' + return).

Here's my hierarchy of tools for solving numerical problems (putting symbolic math aside):

• simple: RPN calculator
• moderate: spreadsheet
• complex: my own code, usually in C because a lot of standard libraries like LAPACK are available

I've worked directly with a lot of CEOs and other senior leaders at companies. My observation is that there is always a baseline of high personal drive and ambition, and usually a good amount of charisma and intelligence as well. The people who get to the top get there for a reason, and it isn't usually prep school or family connections. Many CEOs come from typical middle-class backgrounds.

That said, at the senior-most level it's hard in practice to determine just who is "pretty damn good at what they do". At a large company it can take five or more years to figure out whether a given strategy was brilliant or misguided. Contrast that with a line factory worker, whose contribution is easy to measure. Because it's so hard to measure the performance of a C-level leader, there gets to be this self-perpetuating aspect to the people in those roles: Once you attain that role (somehow), then wherever you go in the future will also be a C-level role. And if you're a corporate board looking to hire at that level, you go with someone that has prior experience because you don't really know how to measure them anyway, and you're pretty risk averse. In effect the pool of candidates is artificially restricted because of a lack of good information. Ironically C-level people end up making more money precisely because it is so difficult to measure how well they perform.

In net, I'd guess at least one person out of 100,000 has what takes to be a credible CEO of Goldman Sachs, if they were given the chance. Of course we'll never know.

This is interesting, given that Apple buys a lot of its flash and other important components from Samsung, by one estimate over $7B annually. Neither can afford to not do business with the other. Maybe this is the opening move in a components negotiation?

As a lawsuit this seems ineffective as a way of preventing competition. By the time this plods its way through the court, Samsung will be four product generations down the road. Maybe this is all just PR, a way for Apple to accuse Samsung of being "non-innovative" and spread general FUD about Android. But I don't think history has shown that to be a viable strategy. Moreover I have to say that as owner of both the iPhone and Galaxy S, the similarities between them are pretty superficial.

Yeah, the 5+ second load times we still have on complex pages is totally acceptable. And on mobile devices, it's very relaxing to be able to pour a cup of coffee in the time it takes to load a page. I completely don't understand why every browser maker out there is working so hard to improve performance. I mean, what's the rush?

But if you are running a locked-down corp environment you are not allowing auto-updating software like Chrome or Firefox in the first place, right? You're probably running IE, which gives you tight control over versions and upgrades. And so this entire discussion is irrelevant to you. Am I missing something?