I'm not saying everything's OK (and unlike what one of the ACs thinks, I'm not a Republican either - I'm actually a Democrat and even an elected office holder - though a minor one). But the nature of manufacturing has changed drastically in the last few decades. Manufacturing used to be a place of great added value. Building things like homes, cars, industrial equipment, aircraft, and even many consumer electronics items was a place for skilled labor and the value of a domestic workforce was high.

Nowadays, those jobs building iPhones, PCs, and flat screen TVs are highly automated and the only real labor intensive part of the job is fitting things in place and tightening screws. Even though they're retail jobs (and not great), there's several thousand people working at the stores - and those are far better jobs than the Foxconn workers have. And overall Apple has about 50,000 employees.

It's not so much that it would add a tremendous extra price to iPhones to make them here - it's that the supply chain and people aren't available here to do it, even if they wanted to. You try and find a factory complex in the US that can draw a quarter-million employees with thousands of engineers to supervise them. We just don't have enough people for that.

We can still build things that provide good jobs and employ plenty of people. We just can't do that sort of manufacturing here. But it's not a huge loss - we can do better.

Apple makes gobs of money by owning the high-value part of the product - the design, engineering, and final sales. There's virtually no profit in actually manufacturing the product. So as a result, companies have emerged like Foxconn (the biggest) that specialize in the manufacturing process. And they make money by doing a _lot_ of manufacturing, for a lot of different vendors. They set up shop in mainland China for easy access to workers - and for most of those workers the crappy pay they get is better than they could earn elsewhere.

And because of that, a whole supply chain rose around those companies to keep them freshly supplied with components. There's an entire infrastructure in and around China specialized in low-cost electronics manufacturing. That's not the only place Foxconn makes stuff (they have factories in Eastern Europe, Brazil, and India - all places where they can get relatively cheap access to an educated workforce). And also, Foxconn doesn't just make products for Apple - nor are they Apple's only manufacturing vendor.

Also worth noting again is that the manufacturing is a low-margin business. Based on their 2010 numbers, they had about $59 billion in sales. Sounds like a lot, but less than 2/3 of Apple's numbers alone. Again, in profit they did $2.2 billion - but that's a low percentage of sales, and that's after supporting nearly a million employees.

The only other thing I'd mention here is that there are companies manufacturing products in higher-wage places, and there are products better-suited to manufacturing here in the US. Precision electronics, low-volume, high-price items, and goods where the manufacturing cost is lower than the shipping costs from overseas would be - these are all good candidates for onshore manufacturing. iPhones, PCs, gaming consoles - those are gone, and they're not coming back. But the jobs they create are crappy ones anyways. And they'll always be chasing the lowest cost somewhere in the world.

I think Winer's story extends out to a myriad of professions (mainly technical ones, but plenty of others). If an observer doesn't understand the work you do, they think it can't be too hard. Most folks overestimate their own abilities. I run a small IT company - we've got a few employees of varying skill sets but all pretty good at solving network issues. But I still regularly see clients complain about how long a task takes, or how a five-minute fix couldn't have been that hard. Car repairmen still get bitched at by people about a $200 bill to replace a tiny part.

There are good programmers, there are great programmers, and there are assuredly mediocre programmers. But that's what they do - and they are guaranteed to know more about it than virtually any layperson. Just because your car runs does not mean you know how to build a car. If your lawyer gets you off the hook for a crime you didn't commit, does that mean you could be a lawyer?

It takes very little skill to stock shelves in a grocery store. But a person who is doing that for a living definitely is better at that task than we are. More people need to understand this basic fact.

Of course, then people would be convinced that they were better at understanding facts.

I think as a practical matter, any spying done on devices outside of RIM would have to be at the cellular carrier level - and that wouldn't require the handset makers to cooperate at all. Blackberries all get routed through RIM's servers, but pretty much every other smartphone is just an Internet node.

In the same vein, I'd think that if it's on wifi there wouldn't be anything special that a backdoor would get. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.

The old "digital delivery service" WAM!NET used to stick a rubber chicken in their non-sealed (but still not supposed to be opened normally) box. In the box was a small 19" rack with the router, communications gear (an SGI box), and a rubber chicken.

They didn't mind you seeing it, it was a little joke on their part. Sometimes their techs would tell me to go in the box.

They sold turnkey communications services to ad agencies, print shops, and media companies for file transfer. Back in the days when a T-1 was a couple of thousand per month. They installed their box and all the gear, stuck it on your network, created user accounts, and hooked it up to the T-1 they'd order. And then you'd be billed by the transfer.

They also gave out hundreds of pairs of purple Chuck Taylors at the Seybold conference in Boston where they debuted. Still have mine.

Having a reverse DNS is a good practice, and anyone with a mail server should be doing it. That said, a lot of small businesses don't have reverse DNS set up, don't know what you mean when you tell them to do it, or have ISPs that are a pain to deal with. I'd mark up the spam score on a message without reverse DNS on the sending server (and I do on my own server) but I wouldn't block it entirely unless it sets off a lot more flags than just that one.

I use Kerio Connect on my server - I add 2 points for lack of reverse DNS. 3.5 points drops you into the junk folder, 5 blocks you completely. Doing that I get pretty much no false blocks, a false positive every few days, and about 3-5 spams that make it to the junk folder per day. I block a few hundred.

"Hey, I hope you don't mind, I got up a little early, so I took the liberty of milking your cow for you. Yeah, it took a little while to get her warmed up, she sure is a stubborn one, whew."

"We don't have a cow. We have a bull."

"I'm gonna brush my teeth."

You know, I have to give Apple all these props (yes, my life is filled with iThings, but still), but once again they set the standard. Macs have been mounting ISO images and DMG files for the last decade - I was really surprised when Vista dropped without this basic native ability and even more so when it didn't make the cut for Windows 7. Sure, most PCs still ship with optical drives but it's been more convenient for years now to ship image files than .EXE installers or zip files in most cases. You'd think that Windows would have gained this ability before now.

As said earlier in this thread, the App Store model now will begin to take over for most packaged software and for Windows as well. Linux users have downloaded from repositories for the better part of 20 years (ever since the RPM). Mac users have downloaded DMG installers forever, and now have an App Store. Retail software distribution is going down the toilet.

The only wildcard is bandwidth capping - the carriers all want it, none of the users and none of the content providers want it. More and more things are going digital. Something's got to give, and within the next year or so we'll know which it is.
 

The trend in IT since day 1 has been to alternate waves of centralization (Mainframe, client-server, cloud) with waves of decentralization (PC, workstation). Really, it'll probably be like it is now, just more so. Firms with very simple needs will use cloud-based mail and sharing solutions, firms with more need for customization and/or performance will run their own servers. If they are large enough to justify the expense, they'll hire an IT staff, otherwise they will use companies like mine when needed. Computers themselves will still need support, even if all the data is in a server farm somewhere. Not to mention that cloud computing assumes Internet that's always there and always working.

Wireless will become more important, but wired will still be used when viable because it's faster and more reliable (plus every wired computer is one less tapping shared spectrum). Windows will continue to suck less, Macs the same, and Linux will keep being just a couple of years away from desktop usage.

The wildcard is the emergence of the iPad (not tablets in general yet - the market so far has decreed that no tablet other than the iPad matters thus far). iPads alone won't redefine the IT business, but if any other platform takes hold to even close to the degree the iPad has thus far then tablets may finally become a viable part of the IT environment - ant that has the potential to redefine how applications are used and support is provided.

Kerio Connect is based on a lot of open-source technologies, and they do contribute back - but it is in itself a commercial product. For a small number of users, though, it's still a good value for those looking to DIY.

(disclaimer: Though I'm a user of it, I'm also a fairly large reseller by Kerio standards and my business gets a lot of our revenue from it)

The minus of Kerio is that it's commercial software and therefore not roll-your-own in nature. Limited tinkering is available. And to get updates after year 1, there's a subscription charge. The webmail is good but a little dated compared to some of the latest stuff out there.

The pluses, though, are these (in my non-biased opinion):

- Good antispam tech (blacklists, SpamAssassin, Bayes filtering). Not state-of-the-art, but traps most of it.
- Uses built-in Sophos engine and/or your own AV for filtering
- Easy to administer with web GUI, plus it's extensible with an API.
- Mail and config files are stored in plain text and can be accessed and edited by hand if needed.
- Supports native client for pretty much everything (Outlook, Mac apps, Sunbird and Thunderbird, etc.). Supports IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV.
- Integrates with AD or OD if needed
- Supports ActiveSync and if you have a Windows server it can support Blackberries (you have to run BES to do that, and BES is Windows-only)
- Easy to manage SSL, and it'll automatically use SSL for SMTP transfers if the target server supports it as well (so you get encrypted transmission)
- Runs on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Plus it comes as a pre-packaged VM for VMware or Parallels for appliance use. That's kind of handy.
- Scales well. It'll go from 5 to 1000 users pretty well on good-enough hardware. My largest client on it has an Xserve with an SSD boot drive and a RAID 1 mirror to support 1000 users.

They'll give you a 30-day trial if you want for free. And if you try it and like it, feel free to buy it from someone other than me - I don't get referral fees or anything for that but I'm not pimping it on my own behalf here.