Posts by airmanchairman 17 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2010
LoL at the "10 steaming turds"!
But basically, you nailed the main gripe most musicians have against the iTunes-inspired singles downloading capability, namely the decline of the album format.
The age-old strategy has been to dilute our best offerings with "album-fodder", while releasing singles as a loss-leader to sell same album, which was the real revenue earner per musician. So, while the innovation has sustained the industry with more downloads, the average musician ( including successful ones) has seen earnings drop owing to the increased selection and choice for the buyer.
Tough tacos, I say: Vox Populi, Vox Dei...
Incompetence is the last charge you levy against a CEO who for the entire duration of his leadership kept the 800lb gorillas of IBM (DB2) and Microsoft (SQL Server) at bay, clearly behind his product (even if not by much), as the bespoke data warehousing solution of choice for the Enterprise...
Oh, and one quotation that was missed out here, by far his best and most hilarious given the jitters it sent down Microsoft's spine at the height of the anti-competitive scrutiny of the US Government:
"It's Humanity versus Microsoft..."
Sayonara, Samurai-Sama.
Question: What do you call the Oracle management after the departure of their long-serving supremo?
Answer: Ronin...
The truth may be that the UK Mercantile Class is much greedier than it is Stateside, and can get away with price gouging much more easily
And, for my money, the people here are more accepting of such anomalies, instead preferring to "curse the darkness rather than light a candle".
All my playlists, contacts, photos and history are intact, restored within minutes on login to the new MySpace...
But then again, I have not been, like most people, a fair weather friend; I've checked in every now and then, posted, connected, uploaded, created playlists, read and responded to messages.
It wouldn't surprise me that those complaining virtually abandoned their blogs and stuff in the wake of the rise and rise of FaceBook.
The sad and irritating truth is that the knowledgeable and fiercely-biased if not downright dishonest 5% hijack the opinions of the mostly-silent 95% majority time and again, skewing their clever arguments to fit rationality to their thinly-disguised hatreds and bias.
It becomes very difficult to discern whether they truly desire to educate us when they let slip all manner of unkind digs to attack the objects of their umbrage, and use the "damnation with faint praise" tactics that we associate with that other unsavoury breed, politicians.
In the main, they come across as paid shills when the reality of enterprise use cases of tablets (see the airline, hotel, medical and music creation industries for examples) multiply on a daily basis. Shame.
While 2% of something is something.
"Bread-head" musicians make this argument all the time, and in a nutshell this is what Apple must have been hammering out to the record labels all this time.
It offers a chance to recoup "lost" revenue in a royalty-like system which is based on the "little drops of water, little grains of sand, make a mighty ocean and a desert land" hymn..
I've said before, and will say it again: Nokia's motive in suing Apple is not money - otherwise both teams of negotiators would have happily agreed by now on what constitutes a FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) patent fee for technologies infringing.
The intention all along has been to get some form of legal constraint and worldwide sales ban (similar to what NTP obtained in its complaint against RIM in 2006) to hold up the global Apple juggernaut - and even then Nokia may still hold out for unreasonable terms.
What Nokia is looking for is time to play catch up, but instead of moving faster, they are attempting to slow down the opposition. What about Android? WP7? How long can this strategy hold off the inevitability of losing overall primacy in the cellular handset market to the faster and more innovative game-changers in the market?
Infantile analysis of a very tense and volatile situation, brought about by a very unwise "boardroom coup".
Things were dicey enough for HP's server business when Oracle acquired a vertically integrated software + hardware giant like Sun Microsystems, what with Oracle database software running mainly on a variety of HP "big iron".
But with the sacking of long-time Ellison pal Hurd who was a key player in the reversal of HP's sagging fortunes, Oracle's prompt hiring of the same man and now this temperature-raising lawsuit, I am starting to appreciate Ellison's comparison of Hurd's sacking with that of another long-term pal Steve Jobs from Apple in the mid-80s.
Equally ill-timed and unwise? I think so: Hurd is just the kind of guy Oracle needs to turn around the hardware division of its recent acquisition. Nice move, HP.
Worse still, the manner of Hurd's sacking is certain to fire the man up to succeed at the task of turning around Oracle-Sun's "big Iron" at the expense of HP. I'm sorry, Ellison's flowery language or no, this is not looking good for HP. More heads will roll, that's for sure, when the dust of this spat clears...
those HP board members that followed this trivial sacking through after the initial charges of sexual harrassment were found to be untenable knew that they had "tipped their hand" and revealed to Hurd the identity of his enemies within HP.
As such, they knew that if he survived the coup and retained power they were "dead men / women walking". Hence the trivial-seeming nature of the expenses "rap" that he was nailed with.
Payout or no, this war is going to continue, and I don't see any fairy-tale "Steve Jobs rejoins a resurgent Apple" ending to this sorry saga. And by the way, my money's on more heads rolling at HP when the dust clears...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
