"but the problem is that the middle class has all but vanished in America and what's left are the upwardly mobile upper-middle class and the working poor. When the top 20% have 85% of the wealth in America, the other 80% are left to fight over the crumbs."
Can you link to some evidence showing a slowdown in mobility? Also, I would assume a key metric to showing whether income inequality increase is a problem is to see whether the speed of improvement of standard of living is slowing or not. I'd like to see figures on this as well.
I'm not following your point. Are you saying having a curated store is what causes you to buy more apps? So what specifically drives the increased purchases? Ability to easily discover more apps? Lack of free alternatives? Low pricepoints?
The reason my purchases on the Mac/PC side are fairly low is the amount of free programs that fit my needs (and do it well). Whenever the best app was not free I bought it (Disco, Transmit, come to mind).
Apologies - I should have been more explicit. The point is that I am the type of individual who has the means, and desire, to purchase applications and show my appreciation to the developers that create them; I have done this on the IOS platforms (iPhone/iPad) - but I have NOT done this on the OS X platform - despite using that platform as much, or more, than my iPad/iPhone, and despite there usually being somewhere, a PayPal funding button for those more popular Apps.
Some other thoughts:
o Once there is a curated environment that offers
low friction, and reasonable prices for applications,
I will buy them for OS X.
o Even though there will be $10 VNC apps on the MacStore
I will still pay $119 for Microsoft Office.
o Finally, (and not stated) - I am looking forward to
paying through the MacStore for tools like VLC,
Colloquy, etc...
As to _why_ - I'm not really sure. It might be the desire to believe that I'm not the only chump clicking on the Paypal button (Though, rationally, if my desire is to reward developers, that shouldn't play any role). It might be the convenience of having the curated store track, and filter out the nefarious malware (Though, once again, google, plus only choosing the popular software out there, is a good substitute for that). It might be the belief that I have some control over what is installed on my laptop (though, ps -ef, launchtl list, netstat -an, and find / -cmin -3 after an install usually gives me a pretty good hint)
All I know is that this time, next year, I expect to have purchased about $600 worth of OS X software from the Mac Store, which is about $500 more, on average, than I have in the last 10 years for OS X.
I may be a couple standard deviations away from the mean, but I don't think I'm three.
Net-Net - I believe the MacStore is going to be great for Mac Developers, and will result in significantly more income flooding into that software channel, without wiping out the higher end products. I disagree with the posted article's hypothesis.
Let's check back in a year and see who ends up being correct.
This is just a pet peeve of mine but the actual Franklin quote:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Is not the same as the often quoted paraphrase:
"He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither."
There will always be cases where security is more important than freedom. We can argue when such cases exist, but Franklin said "essential liberties" and "a little temporary security" for a reason.
I'm not actually making a call that shutting up Wikileaks is justified here, but I do find it annoying when people use that incorrect paraphrase.
I was at O'Hare this summer and noticed the exact same thing. All the dudes ended up going through the metal detector, and most of the girls went through the full body scanner.
Then I got really upset when I saw them selecting a young teenage girl to go through the scanner as well - perverts.
The only other browser to do visual tabs on the left that I know of is OmniWeb for Mac, which is/was an awesome browser that doesn't see much support.
I still use Opera on my PC laptop because like you, I'm used to the interface and the built in features. However, on Mac I've never felt like it was as stable/fast.
One feature that used to be in Opera that now isn't (but is in chrome) is switching between your first 10 tabs using Ctrl+# shortcut. I've grown very used to that and was sad to see that go.
Here's the thing - if all publishers cared about was their bottom line, then DRM must absolutely translate to more sales, in this context and in big triple A title games.
Or is it that publishing execs aren't willing to take a risk on trying a DRM free model, even though their revenues would hold/increase?
The funny thing is that nobody will benefit from that. The site is down, so honest people who were willing to spend a few bucks on their favorite games will now have to look for them on The Pirate Bay.
Isn't the point of the site that most of these games are difficult to get any other way (ie, even from Amazon & eBay)?
When a game is that old, and difficult to get hold of, I think eventually it is no longer 'piracy', and instead becomes 'preserving our history/culture'.
Also developers are now including 1 time activiation codes where you say end up reselling it the new user will have to reactivate it for some all of all of the features, for a fee.
Palm/HP is in a tough spot, but it's possible for them to go up with a bit of luck.
They need mindshare, solid hardware, and apps. The 3 are codependent. Good hardware and apps help mindshare, and having market interest and a good phone attracts app makers. If they mix their timing just right they could come in at third place behind apple and google.
They are doing good things right now on the app front. More and more good iPhone games are coming to WebOS. HP is having a lot of their software engineers spend a bit of time writing for WebOS as a sort of 20% project.
If they can get an exciting headset (not just good, exciting), and a marketing campaign that puts it in enough impulse buying hands, then win those users over with webOs + good app selection, they have a chance.
However, if they release a half hearted handset with little marketing, their base wont' expand and it will slowly but surely fall into obscurity.
Yeah, I love my Pre, but the hardware already feels dated. It's crazy how much progress is being made in mobile devices every year now, reminds me of desktops in the mid 90s. You buy one and feel like it's out of date a month later.
What really killed them was launching exclusively on Sprint. With hardware evolving as fast as it does, by the time it made it to Verizon and AT&T it was just no longer compelling. While I actually love Sprint, there are a lot more people on Verizon and AT&T.
I really think market share will take care of any lack of apps. More advanced hardware, a more attractive design, and a better marketing campaign would take care of that. I think HP has a real shot, though maybe my love of WebOS has me biased.
yeah.. never used satellite view except for "shit, i can se e my house on google maps!" type of amusement.
Also before Google and Google Earth, online maps for many countries were not very good. Those with the data was not very interested in creating online maps.
Speed and ease of use is what made maps a killer product for me
Can you link to some evidence showing a slowdown in mobility? Also, I would assume a key metric to showing whether income inequality increase is a problem is to see whether the speed of improvement of standard of living is slowing or not. I'd like to see figures on this as well.