A company must turn a profit to succeed. A government just needs to accomplish a decent rate of return on their investment for the entire aggregated economy it governs. If Blah Corp takes on the risk of creating a new design it fails if Goo Corp copies it and gets to market first. If the U.S. government takes on the "risk" of, say, putting in more internet capacity, the "downside" is limited to overestimating demand. That's what everybody was saying Korea did in the nineties. Now that those fat pipes have helped Korea become a powerhouse in a dozen fields, nobody is saying that anymore.
The only real risk that government faces is if the level of corruption is so vast that nothing gets built. This is a real risk, as anybody who has watched the fiasco of the "digitizing" of the patent system call tell you about. But it is addressable and is a risk for corporations, too.
Look at what happened to the OLPC project. Their own devices have been meh at best. But it's pretty damn obvious that they inspired the netbook market, which has been a vast win for everybody, including their intended recipients. No OLPC, no Intel Classmate, no EEE PC, and so forth. And, from the looks of it, we'll be seeing the Pixel Qi tech coming out in another year or two, which will be yet another vast win for their intended result. Have they "turned a profit"? No. Have they achieved an excellent return on investment? Hell fucking yes.
In short, most of what makes a project "risky" to a profit-making entity is a null-value statement in a case like this.

I agree that putting people to work is good but if we're going to do so, why the f*ck not have them do that work building manufacturing capacity instead of just assembling and installing yet more parts we're depend on others to support and upgrade?

It really wasn't that many years ago that most of what was inside a computer was made in America, not just the design for the box. If we're so all fired up to undo the damage that shortsighted corporations have done to this country, then we should get our act together and subsidize and assist the creation of new manufacturing capacity. Not commodity stuff like RAM chips but more high end components and maybe even a few strategic assets like LEDs.

We're finally getting more factories running that make photovoltaics in this country. Why the hell are we still allowing ourselves to be held by the shorthairs in what is supposed to be one of the few fields where Americans still excel?

Oh, no doubt, my primary concern in that post was refuting the common statement that netbooks are just about cost. But as for the market for small tablets and "netbooks" being not worth it I've written about this market twice before, though I focused more on keyboarded devices and, in short, having actually done quite a bit of research on this, some of it as an IT director for big enough departments to get honest answers out of the manufacturers, I'm pretty damn sure that the markets are more than big enough to justify the cost. They didn't get withdrawn from lack of users. They got withdrawn because of Microsoft sabotage and corporate groupthink. To go broad, the fucking MARINE CORPS was looking into the Newton when it got canceled. Doctors loved it and were starting to get it specced for hospital use. Insurance companies were handing them out to their agents. Plenty of users there to pay for a product line that's already up and running and has no real competitors. This wasn't rational behavior. Seriously.

It's dangerous to assume that because companies did something, they should have done that thing. Companies do stupid shit all the time. That's a large part of why U.S. automakers are in such trouble right now. They do what is best for the executives making the decisions. Or what their friends think is cool. Or simply what's easiest to understand. I've done corporate workflow consulting and I can tell you that there's a reason that the Nobel prize in Economics went a few times back to a guy (Thaler) who specialized in articulating repeated patterns of irrational decisionmaking. One of the hottest management books right now is something called The Innovators Dilemma . Personally, I think that it wusses out on some key factors, but it shows that even in "c-level" offices they're starting to figure out that the current management paradigm frequently leaves them with their head up their asses. And, even worse, telling each other how sweet the smell is up there.
 
Go ahead, prognosticate. It can be fun. But don't succumb to the assumption that just because a product went south, that kind of product isn't viable.

The only way I can see them not getting blasted all to hell in the market if Steve is really dying is to bring back the Woz...

And doesn't that make it interesting that Woz will be presenting at MacWorld next week? Not for Apple but still becoming more visible.

Oh, and by the way, the product that he's promoting? Means to turn a Mac laptop into a tablet.

Aren't coincidences fun?

Exactly. "Software and usage was clunky, and the weight was just too much". You were using a previous gen device, probably clunkily ruggedized, almost certainly hobbled by bullshit specs required by Microsoft when they stepped in and sabotaged the whole market, in part to undermine the growing competition from Palm OS devices. Good old "embrace, extend, extinguish."

A tablet of the sort being discussed wouldn't be an "iPod class device", just one that we are speculating would run some variation on what Apple quite insistently refers to as the "iPhone/iTouch platform".

Go back and watch the video on Apple's site that they put up when they brought the SDK public. Interesting in quite a few ways. All the way through it is the theme that this platform has broader potential, and that Apple has broader plans for it than just current devices doing current types of apps. The featuring of the dedicated Kleiner Perkins venture capital pool was a pretty blatant tell for those of us who were paying attention.

There are plenty of reasons for a netbook other than cost, as Liliputing has argued quite articulately again and again.
- Being able to throw it in a bag and not have to sacrifice as many other things to make the weight manageable.
- Being able to work more efficiently in small spaces like airline or commuter rail seats.
- Better for women and children who have smaller hands and don't gain from larger systems.
- Low enough weight to be used while standing, as is desired by, say people working inventory in a factory or looking over drug interaction data in a hospital corridor.

For about half of these, a tablet would be just as good or considerably better than a keyboard oriented device, especially with the new Swype-style onscreen keyboards.

As for apps, well, how many of those are one buck quickies? How many from vendors who used them to promote desktop apps? And how many simply not the same kinds of things one would choose for a tablet?
I'm sorry but I'm seeing plenty of opportunity, plenty of possible demand, and no real third party barriers. But then, hell, I've been waiting for a chance to buy such a device for about fifteen years now.

Personally, I can't help but wonder if this "leak" was actually Apple orchestrated to stir demand but fuzz specifics before next week's MacWorld Expo. As I've said a hundred times before, let's see what's out by January 10th and then talk about longer term trends.

Yep. I had a whole slew of issues about parties today that came down to time zone factors. I decided that I wasn't willing to call "next year" until I reached the party I was heading to.

And fwiw, my last partying was done at a collection of food carts talking to a very cute fellow geek (I used a Sharpie to write down my email and number for her and we both laughed about it) who was in full steampunk regalia, where the biggest food cart is run by a couple of pro-open source, highly experimental guys who are about as geeky as it gets.

Geek party with DJ, great food, LED lighting, and serious society hacking ftw!

If only I could mod you up for that.

Or rather, if only mod you up for that I could.

We need our silly little traditions to counterpoint, y'know, our real lives. I've been some sort of geek for about thirty years now (was socially engineering my way into the offices of PG&E in 1979) and I can't think of any time that the way that I spent my days or the technologies/processes I focused on ever stayed fundamentally the same for more than a couple of years.
Among the old farts here I would guess that I'm pretty typical in that I went:
78-81: model building, both spaceships and actual ones that flew
81-84: volunteering in a bio lab, taking programming classes, and working on a vast prosthetics project
84-89: working on my own inventions, mostly in fiber optics
89-92: random tech monkey
92-95: consulting/freelancing
95-00: consulting/freelancing/fill in IT director at various places
00-04: consulting but now in a completely non-technical field
04-now: my own company in yet another field.

Or to put it in terms of most used platform
timeshare Fortran ->
Apple II ->
original Mac ->
Wang and 286 ->
VMS and Unix ->
Mac ->
DOS ->
dedicated devices and Win 3.1 ->
mixed platforms (i.e. corporate computing) ->
Win 95 and Novell ->
Macs again ->
mixed platforms, largely something called QPS that has less than 1K sites ->
and out of the business.

Let us have our little constancies. After, oh, the eighth OS and the fifteenth job description, you tend to take what you can get.

I agree wholeheartedly with your idea but wonder about where the best use of your time is. Would you be willing to use that time to convince a couple of other coders and or users to take the time to personally schedule appointments with the staff (real staff, not "constituent relations" drones) of local legislators and explain this all to them? It's easy to get a feel that government should do this. It's much harder to actually get the relevant government and school officials to agree. Getting journalists, local, non-tech section journalists to understand the relevance of this to, say, school funding is pretty damn important, too.

Personally, I would recommend printing out a couple of copies of this whole thread, all the way down to -1 comments, sitting down over beer with some friends, going over it comment by comment, and using it as a series of starting points to explaining all of this. I've been excerpting parts of recent /. threads and forwarding them for a while now.

Yes, we need more code. But it seems to me that there's a much higher multiplier, especially right now with every level of government deciding on stimulus measures for the next few years, to getting better understanding among the folks in government than in being one more coder.

And, yes, I am working with my local government on several projects related to this kind of thing.

Good luck.

Uh, huh. So coders are "logically" available as volunteers but all those other folks are external factors who need to be paid to do as they're told and then go away.

Interesting mindset, methinks. Sound about like what I've seen out there in the programmer world.

So what would it take for the culture of F/OSS to change enough to actually think of those designers, human factors folks, writers, and so on as actual respected partners? I'm truly curious. 'cause I've known a few folks who have tried to help from those angles and they've usually gotten sick of being treated as "too girly" and therefore not really people to be respected or given any decisionmaking authority.

Obviously, I have an opinion here and equally obviously I think that what we're looking at is some combination of insecurity, misogyny, and homophobia by a culture that is still proud to maintain the habits and attitudes of typical insecure teenaged boys. Frankly, as a straight male techie with more credentials and experience than most of you put together, I'm damn sick of it. My other posts in this thread and others on open source have made that pretty clear. From what I've read the number of women going into technical fields is decreasing and has been for years. Wonder why that is?

I'm seriously curious, if this is the case, does the Mongolian government contribute to OO.o? Are there any Mongolian schools that do so? Or NGOs that are meant to address Mongolian concerns? Seems like this a rare case of OO.o having a chance to get help that will be judged by usability metrics, which sure sounds to me like a damned good thing.

That would be great but who is going to take on the low coolness factor job of creating and maintaining that documentation?

I must admit, I'm curious, is there a reason that no school has been approached to help with this? There are people who are actually training to be technical writers and project managers out there and could really gain from time put in on a real, in-use project like OO.o. Seems to me like there should be some way to portion out some of these tasks to designated groups of students under some professor who can be persuaded to have some degree of investment in the project.

You are a perfect example of why I don't take OO.o seriously. Look at your wording. "office slaves", "suits" Blah, blah, blah. Because only "secretaries" actually do trivial stuff like writing or analysis, while you're a (woo-hoo!) ENGINEER with your manly coding skills. As if you are somehow proving how superior you are in your contempt for, y'know, the actual intended users of the product.

I don't eat food by cooks who have contempt for what those eating it will taste. I don't wear clothes by people who have contempt for how their products will fit. I don't read books by writers who have contempt for their reading public. And ya know what? I've dealt with programmers from inside Adobe and DEC and HP and Apple and, yes, Microsoft who bloody well *loved* the tiny, "mundane" little problem they were spending years on. How can we get this line screen algorithm to better deal with heavier paper stock? How can we change this header to be more fault-tolerant for people using degraded documents? And so on. And you can see that love in the quality of their work.

If you hold the users of a feature in contempt then, frankly, I think that you should get the fuck off that part of the project. Because chances are your code will suck and it will look like the feature or bug has been addressed when, in reality, it has just morphed into a new problem.

There are a hell of a lot more of us out there unwilling to use O.O than PHBs. My new laptop (an HP 2133) came with OO and I tried to actually use it. Silly me. The PDF converter crashed. The RTF converter created garbage. The text converter missed most of what was there. And this with files from several apps. This is kid's stuff here. It looks pretty enough but when I went to use it, it only worked to the level of a proof of concept. "Oooh! Look at what a cool programmer I am! I wrote a PDF converter!"

This isn't rocket science here, folks. I could be pretty happy with something that had the features of Wordperfect DOS circa 1988 or even Simpletext circa 1990. NotaBene circa 1995 would make me very happy indeed. But if a feature is there, it needs to actually work. The vibe I get instead is a piece of crap judged not by actually providing a trustworthy tool for users but rather as a series of project bullet points for Sun managers and programming exercises and resume items for coders.

Come back to me when the software actually works.