bulldogs

About

Banned
Username
bulldogs
Joined
Visits
18
Last Active
Roles
member
Points
-37
Badges
0
Posts
37
  • Court overturns Apple's $120M patent win against Samsung

    realistic said:
    Why bother trying to innovate when the courts won't allow you to protect the patents with judgements.
    I am sure that the many companies whose IP that Apple has infringed upon feel the same way. You had Apple versus the University of Wisconsin over architecture design. Then Apple versus Ericsson over 2G/4G tech (which Apple settled a couple of months ago out of court). Now you have Apple being sued by Immersion over force touch. The common thread in all 3 cases: these companies entered into licensing agreements with other companies who use their tech - including Samsung by the way - but Apple refused to do so until they were sued (in the case of Ericsson) or when they were forced to by court order as a result of the lawsuit (i.e. the University of Wisconsin). Apple's real strategy wasn't to enforce IP. It was to intimidate OEMs from making and selling Android devices. If going after alleged infringement was their goal, they would have sued Google for inventing and marketing Android in the first place. They never did and never will. Instead, Apple was saber-rattling; trying to use their lawsuit against Samsung as a way to force Android OEMs into licensing agreements that would eliminate their profit margin. At one point they were demanding that Android device makers pay them $35 per device! Microsoft - back when Ballmer was running things - piled on too, figuring that if they could get OEMs to abandon Android, those OEMs would have no choice but to make Windows Mobile phones and tablets if they wanted to stay in the mobile devices business. Curious: Apple went from being a hated, sworn enemy of Microsoft in the 1990s and 2000s to being very willing to benefit Microsoft by joining in the efforts to crush Google. Even though the result would have been Microsoft being #1 in desktop/PC market share, #1 in enterprise, #1 in mobile market share, #2 in console gaming, and with a growing Internet/search/cloud services platform ... even bigger and more powerful than they were during their Wintel heyday. And it seems like Apple would have been perfectly fine with that, despite how terrible it would have been for the economy, innovation, tech in general. Again, curious indeed.
    wdowellcnocbui
  • Sharp reportedly accepts $6.25B takeover bid from Foxconn

    brakken said:
    Oh well. That's the end of Japanese commercial tech hardware.
    I wish they'd been able to keep Sharp Japanese.
    Good luck, Foxy!
    So ... Sony is going to stop making TVs, radios, gaming consoles and smartphones/tablets? When did that happen? And Sony is much bigger than Sharp. Where the entire Sharp company was bought for $6.5 billion, that would be the quarterly profit (or loss) for a single Sony division. Oh yeah, there is also Canon, Hitachi, JVC, NEC, Seiko, Pioneer, Panasonic, Yamaha ... all of whom are as big as Sharp ever was even in their heyday when they were a moderately successful seller of TVs, radios and VHS/DVD players. Now they are getting hit hard by competition from competition by South Korea, China and Taiwan, sure, but seeing one of their smaller units being bought by a foreign company is hardly the harbinger of "the end of Japanese commercial tech hardware." What is far more likely to happen is further consolidation where some of the smaller, struggling players will continue to get absorbed by the bigger ones. The downside to that is less innovation, of course, but that is more of a reflection of internal issues in Japan (with their aging population and whatnot, plus Japan is still recovering from the double hits of the global recession and the massive earthquake/tsunami/nuclear power plant breach that was just 5 years ago ... the financial equivalent of our experiencing 9/11, the Three Mile Island disaster and the great recession WITHIN FIVE YEARS OF EACH OTHER). But the main reason why a Japanese buyer could not be found for Sharp is because they don't offer anything that the other players in the industry have anyway. Sharp makes screens and cameras? So does Sony, Toshiba, Fuji and even (to a lesser extent) Panasonic. So while Sharp was a major supplier for Apple, few Android (for example) OEMs really relied on them to a significant degree, as they went to Sony for premium products and other Japanese companies for the cheaper ones. This will result in Apple being able to streamline their supply chain by allowing them to deal with Foxconn for manufacturing as well as camera and screen components, but that is pretty much the only story here, other than Sharp being able to compete with domestic competition and there being one less good R&D company (Sharp was doing great work with solar panel R&D for example, but weren't able to profit much from it because Chinese companies were "appropriating" their innovations and using a "manufacture cheaply and dump" strategy to eliminate the competition) out there. It would have been neat for Apple to pick up their solar R&D instead, but since that doesn't appear to be a point of interest for Foxconn, it looks like their great work in that area is going to come to a standstill.
    badmonk
  • iPhone controlled 40% of US smartphone market in 2015, data shows

    chas_m said:
    cnocbui said:
    Samsung must have gained ground because of all those Android users jumping ship to iPhone 6s.
    That's probably true, actually, though you probably meant it as a smart-arse remark. Android switchers are mostly likely to come from lesser Android "smartphones" that barely qualify for the term, and Apple's gains came mostly from them (though the larger wave of Android switchers is outside the US as you are apparently unaware). Samsung's gains probably came from people UPGRADING their Android phone from lesser brands to Samsung (or switching from BB and Windows Phone), as well as those who've chosen Samsung for various reasons (like the Note, which is a pretty nice AIO phablet).
    "lesser Android "smartphones" that barely qualify for the term" 2011 called and wants its talking points back. While this may have been true in the past, advances in the OS, hardware and manufacturing means that the "barely qualify for the term" thing is no longer true, and hasn't been for awhile. $200 will now get you a smartphone with 2 GB of RAM, 1080p screen, and a 2 GHz quad core 64 bit processor made by Intel or Qualcomm. As a consequence, it can run the same productivity apps (not to mention gaming, social networking, streaming, multimedia) as the iPhone 6 (apps exclusive to iOS notwithstanding). As a matter of fact, the Nexus 5X now sells $299! Also, even the truly cheap phones from ZTE, Kyocera, Blu and other "off-brands" that can be had for less than $100 by the savvy shopper will run most smartphone apps and perform reasonably well doing so, with the caveat that one should not expect much in the way ofmulti-tasking, and there will be other such tradeoffs as occasional glitches, a bunch of unwanted apps that you cannot uninstall, small batteries and cheap 720p IPS LCD screens. So, the only reason to "trade up" from a Moto G to a Galaxy S6 or LG G4 (for example) is wanting a faster CPU, more RAM, a better screen plus extra hardware features (i.e stylus support, IR blaster, NFC, fingerprint scanner). Similarly, the only reason to go from a Moto G to an iPhone 6 is faster performance plus the many benefits that the iOS/Mac OS X ecosystem provides. Also, the "Android users switching to iPhone" was merely so much hype by Tim Cook. Even when the switching was at its peak during 2nd quarter 2014 and 1st quarter 2015, Cook never provided hard numbers on the switching, let alone statistical or other analysis. Also, after 1Q 2015, evidence strongly suggests that while Apple did continue to pick up a lot of former Android customers, more people may have actually left iOS for Android in turn.
    dasanman69
  • Apple Music update lets Android users save songs to SD cards

    redefiler said:
    msantti said:
    Wow.

    A feature Apple denies us.
    No thanks, I'll keep paying Apple to not use SD cards and totally f*%$ing ghetto mobile device features.  It's 2016, and the pro tip is shuffling a couple gigs of internal storage with Apple Music or a cloud storage service is much cheaper, faster and convienent than offloading music files onto stupid storage wafers.
    As someone who owns Apple, Android, Windows and Linux devices you have no idea what you are talking about - particularly with the "cheaper, faster, convenient" thing. Especially since Android phones - gasp! - ALSO OFFER CLOUD STORAGE OPTIONS making them equivalent with Apple products in this regard. SD cards are merely another option for people who want and need them. It is CHOICE. Because your preferred product doesn't offer choice and flexibility in this area, you denounce products that do have them. Whether arrogance, absurdity or (more likely) insecurity, it is not a helpful attitude. 
    koop[Deleted User]
  • Yahoo prepares for split, will lay off 15% of workforce in restructuring

    williamh said:
    ireland said:
    What would you do to save Yahoo!

    The fact that we don't use Yahoo isn't exactly a failure of Yahoo's, it's just that their "directory" is an anachronism from the time before search engines.  How many things have to go wrong in the world for us to go back to that?  
    It isn't that they were a "directory"; people could ignore that if they wanted to, and it was actually useful to people who wanted it. And as someone said earlier, it had nothing to do with "the mind police" (as the NSA was involved with Yahoo too) or government lobbying. Instead, what happened is that Google created a much better search algorithm than Yahoo, and also designed a much more visually appealing and useful way of presenting the information. The beginning of the end for Yahoo was like over 15 years ago, when you would do a Yahoo search and then "results powered by Google" popped up on the screen; they started paying Google for search results. Except that Google was only giving them raw search data; Google did not provide the contextual information and other tools to process the data to rank the results. So even though Google was powering the search, searching for the exact same thing on Google performed better results than for Yahoo. And again - Google's search page result construction was far superior, making it easier to read and analyze. Then Yahoo bought the remains of Alta Vista and several other failed search engines, used their tools to come up with a way of powering their own results so they could stop paying - and providing free advertising to - Google, but it was too late. And when Microsoft entered the search engine game, even though Microsoft never actually turned a profit with Bing, the increased competition - especially since Microsoft also created their own directory/portal MSN.com in addition to the search engine - they were unable to compete with the third major player.

    And that is just desktop. Not only did Yahoo fail to join Google and Microsoft in creating their own mobile OS, but they were very late creating a mobile presence. When they finally did deliver mobile apps, they were very terrible and limited. To this day, Yahoo's mobile offerings are far behind that of Microsoft and Google. Yahoo should have been in the perfect position to benefit from mobile. Where Google and Microsoft were competing with each other - and Apple - with their own mobile OS and devices. They should have been in the best position to be able to work out deals to get their apps and services featured on other operating systems because they were the only one without a system of their own to create conflict of interest. They didn't. Also, becoming a cloud company? Trying to offer enterprise products? They didn't even try.

    Yahoo's main problem is that they tried to transition from being a tech company into being a media company. Remember: they bought Time Warner. Their big thing was providing news and entertainment content because that was what most people searched for. Their goal was essentially to replace network and cable television and also replace the newspaper and the magazine. There were problems with that. First, they got into and tried to redefine media right when the value of media began to decline. Buying Time Warner was the equivalent of buying a horse buggy company right before the invention of the automobile. Second, the technology wasn't there yet. This was before actual broadband Internet, and it was even before video sharing/search sites like YouTube. And no, Yahoo didn't do squat to develop the tech that they needed. Third: they were REALLY BAD at being a media company anyway, so even if media were still a valuable growing area and the tech was there, they would have still failed. 

    Contrast Yahoo with the companies that survived: Google and Amazon. Instead of trying to transition from being a tech company to being a media company, Google and Amazon increased their tech expertise. They started offering cloud products, enterprise solutions, operating systems (well Google anyway) ... they even started selling hardware. Google and Amazon survived - and got stronger - by becoming more like Microsoft and Oracle instead of trying to be the Disney of the Internet. 

    As for Marissa Meyer: she made it worse. Sorry, but a lot of people always did say that she was just a photogenic personality to market Facebook, and based on her leadership of Yahoo, they were right. And no, her being a woman does not make saying this sexist. Meyer came on board and just did everything that Yahoo was failing at before, except did it worse. Instead of hiring a bunch of developers to create mobile apps - or even an OS to compete with Android and Chrome OS - she brings in a bunch of journalists and writers to create content. Instead of creating a presence in the cloud for their own products and to sell to consumers and enterprises, she hires Katie Couric to be a "global news anchor" to upload video newscasts. She buys Tumblr because she wanted to get Yahoo into social networking, but there is no real way to turn Tumblr into a major revenue source. She had none of the tech knowledge required to transform Yahoo into a company that could actually compete with Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Her business skills were terrible and she also had no real expertise in the content and media directions that she had Yahoo invest so much in. Paying the NFL to live stream games over the Internet? Verizon was doing that already, and with much better tech. Trying to compete with Netflix and Amazon by running the last season of the very low rated "Community", a show only liked by TV critics? 

    Yahoo could have been saved. It is just that Meyer was the wrong one to save it. Do any of you doubt that Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Hugo Barra etc. - people who actually know something about tech and have management ability - would have been able to save Yahoo? 
    cornchip