Turning patent troll might help Motorola for the next few quarters, but after they've sued their market away, and pissed off consumers world-wide, what will they be left with?? The people who wouldn't care that Motorola did something so stupid are already buying Apple devices, so they won't switch, and everyone else will avoid them just so they're not supporting STUPIDITY, corporate greed and entitlement.
Maybe instead of thinking that your product failed because something else was better, look a little harder at the market and figure out if it's really that big to begin with. I saw my first windows tablet when I was in college, around 2003, and never saw another one until a couple of years ago at my job, when we started selling software to run on a windows tablet. We haven't sold very many. I don't know anyone that has an Android tablet, though I know a few people considering the smaller ones (comparable to the iPod Touch) to replace their old Palm Pilots and such.
I do know a few people with iPads though, and they're the type of people who buy toys just to look cool, who spend money to feel important, and only bought iPad's because they were the next big release from Apple, and that means they needed it in order to be as cool as they felt they were.
Long story short, I don't think tablets are that great, and I think Apple has only been successful with them because their target audience is rich and doesn't have a lot of sense. No one I know has logically evaluated the tablet option and actually decided it was a good move. Most people have a tablet as their phone, or they have a laptop which does more than the tablet could, or they have a netbook for portability.
I think a smarter move than turning patent troll would be to think about something innovative, and move forward with that. Or, because I understand creative thinking is difficult for old companies like Motorola, they could at least put some of their weight behind making Android a better competitor to iOS... but even there, I think the ROI would be lacking....
"the Gadhafi family (mainly via Muamar's son Saadi) has invested about $100 million in big Hollywood movies, including the Adrian Brody/Forrest Whittaker film, The Experiment."
I wish I'd heard that a week ago... I just watched that movie on Netflix last weekend. It wasn't terrible, but I'd have loved having a good reason to have not wasted my time on it...
I can understand this point of view. Basically, when the "uneducated mob" gets involved, things can get ugly... To keep things flowing positively, they need to maintain a level of rationality around these discussions, and as we all know, there are many people out there who have no idea what the word rational means, or at least are good at pretending they don't.
I think though, that if we're talking about errors and how to correct them, the logic above doesn't apply. I would accept that for research and new treatments, you don't want to have people talking themselves into a false sense of security, especially when they don't know everything they should. Errors are things that have happened already, and solutions can come from anywhere. Personally, I think the stuff is so boring that most of the public won't care to get involved. If that's the case, it'll only draw interested and invested people into the discussion, and I believe that would be very good for progress. Mention a cure for cancer though, and all the crazies would come out of hiding...
From the linked article:
"Hulu's management, on the other hand, contends that the current strategy of reaching the widest possible audience on the free site will ultimately generate higher advertising revenue. They say revenue is expected to top $500 million this year, proof that its current emphasis is paying off.
In a short time, Hulu has exploded into one of the top Internet video destinations, defying skeptics who predicted that a service backed by such an unwieldy joint venture would never work. It now attracts some 27 million users every month, according to ComScore Video Metrix."
Hulu offers a subscription for their streaming service, which I happily pay to have their content available on my TV. On their site, they ask me if certain ads are relevant to me, so that they can tune the ads to only be things I'm interested in, ads I'd actually want to watch, and for the most part, it works pretty well. I canceled my cable subscription, not _because_ of hulu, but it made it a lot easier. I canceled cable because it was becoming _priced_ higher than I _valued_ it. If hulu wasn't there, I'd either pirate it or ignore it. My subscription is assurance to advertisers that they know where they can reach me, and when they hear that I only watch ads that might really interest me, and they also hear that I don't have a cable subscription anymore, than the value to them starts to shift from "old school" to "new school." They start paying cable less for ads, because I'm not watching cable, and cable can't pay as much to the content providers. All the while advertisers start to pay more to hulu, for the assurance of attentive eyes, and with the 70% deal, hulu's owners start getting paid a lot more, and oh yeah, aren't they the content providers??
To make this happen, Hulu needs to continue to get better, not get worse. Destroying Hulu won't save the "old school" cable services. People don't take leaps forward like Hulu and then revert back to what they realized they weren't happy with. They find other ways to keep moving forward. I do not pay for cable TV now, and I never will again. For the money I'm saving, I'll happily wait for it to come to netflix, should hulu suffer, and if it doesn't make it there, then I'll probably never know about it, because they don't show me commercials at all :-).
I'll second the hell out of this. Hulu gets my $8 a month because I like new episodes of stuff popping into my queue every week, without having to hunt and download, and they don't make me feel like I'm wasting that money on 800 channels when I only watch 8 of them.
I absolutely LOVE my Roku box, because they have done what cable companies should have done long ago. Offer many channels for free, but charge on a per channel basis for the premium ones. (I'm not an employee or anything, just a very pleased customer. Though if anyone wants to pay me for this opinion I'd be happy to accept.)
This is great. Unfortunately I have no faith that Chris Dodd will read this, or if he does actually read it, I have even less faith that he would understand and accept it. It's clear that he believes what he's paid to believe, forget facts...
Amazon isn't really letting it's users "download music more than once from the locker". From what I understand, it's letting you stream it over a media player from your on-line storage account, which is basically like having an on-line iPod, or an external hard drive that you store your music on and hook up to your entertainment center to listen to (only portable).
I think there's an even bigger loss here. If Amazon were to put up a fight, they have the resources to bleed the RIAA a bit in court, no? Not likely enough to kill them, but I'd like to think maybe enough to make it harder for them to get their "right to listen to your own music if it's stored on a different computer."
To be honest, I believe that the RIAA needs Amazon much more than Amazon needs them. I go to Amazon for a lot of stuff, none of which is music. I know a few people that do go there for music though, and if Amazon stopped offering it for them, they wouldn't go somewhere else to pay for it if you know what I mean.
Is the fact that I pretty much had stopped caring about the Foo Fighters, but will be checking out this new album when I get home from work, if for nothing more than to show them my support for treating fans like fans and not criminals.
Because the fight won't be on again every weekend for the next 6 months, whereas if you wait a little bit longer for the movie, it will be.
Also, my friend would order PPV fights, and then have a viewing party where if people wanted to help him pay for the fight, they could. If people want to overpay for a movie, they go to the theater to see it, not over to someone else's house.
Signing up and agreeing to those Terms and Conditions is like saying "Hey, I'm stupid, take my money!"
A company that would try to make you liable for their security getting breached, probably wouldn't be above 'hacking' your account themselves, just to get that $25k
I totally agree. And if they delay it long enough, it may actually get delayed right out of my memory and NOT into my Netflix queue... I'm sure that's their end goal though, that you'll either watch it in the theater or not at all...
It's in common usage, but it's not perfectly valid. That's like saying UNGION is a valid mispronunciation of the word ONION, or that AKS is another valid way of saying ASK, and SUPPOSABLY for SUPPOSEDLY. It's accepted by some, because they understand the intent and aren't pedantic enough to make a correction. They may fear being called "Smarty pants" or "Librul Eeleet". Either way, "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" truly mean two different things, and if you don't care about something at all, then the correct phrase is "I couldn't care less" because in fact, there is nothing less than none at all, which is the level of caring you are trying to claim you have.
If you could care less, then you really do care some already.
"Your reading comprehension seems to get worse week by week."
I think it's actually that you write better pieces, and by that I mean you are more verbose and try to hedge off these types of ridiculous arguments in your postings week by week. That leaves these trolls no choice but to get crazier and crazier in how they attack you...
Yeah, I got that part. I wasn't saying a Microsoft boycott would prevent you from getting sued if these laws were passed in your state. But if enough people stop giving Microsoft their money, then Microsoft wouldn't have enough money to spend on government officials to get garbage like this passed. It's not an overnight solution, none of the good ones are.
Innovation is about going into uncharted territory. There's no way of knowing whether or not you're going to subject yourself to risk by going there, until you actually go there.
Essentially, what you are saying is that the only acceptable innovation is into fields where there are no existing players. No one should try to compete with a company who is already doing something, because you may infringe on their rights, and that is a no no.
On the post: Not Relying On Copyright Doesn't Mean You Don't Make Money
Re: Birthing Pains
On the post: Analyst: Motorola's Best Play Is To Become A Patent Troll & Destroy Android Ecosystem With Patent Lawsuits
Quarterly profit over longevity
Maybe instead of thinking that your product failed because something else was better, look a little harder at the market and figure out if it's really that big to begin with. I saw my first windows tablet when I was in college, around 2003, and never saw another one until a couple of years ago at my job, when we started selling software to run on a windows tablet. We haven't sold very many. I don't know anyone that has an Android tablet, though I know a few people considering the smaller ones (comparable to the iPod Touch) to replace their old Palm Pilots and such.
I do know a few people with iPads though, and they're the type of people who buy toys just to look cool, who spend money to feel important, and only bought iPad's because they were the next big release from Apple, and that means they needed it in order to be as cool as they felt they were.
Long story short, I don't think tablets are that great, and I think Apple has only been successful with them because their target audience is rich and doesn't have a lot of sense. No one I know has logically evaluated the tablet option and actually decided it was a good move. Most people have a tablet as their phone, or they have a laptop which does more than the tablet could, or they have a netbook for portability.
I think a smarter move than turning patent troll would be to think about something innovative, and move forward with that. Or, because I understand creative thinking is difficult for old companies like Motorola, they could at least put some of their weight behind making Android a better competitor to iOS... but even there, I think the ROI would be lacking....
On the post: Who's Funding More Terrorism: Downloaders Or Hollywood?
A week late...
I wish I'd heard that a week ago... I just watched that movie on Netflix last weekend. It wasn't terrible, but I'd have loved having a good reason to have not wasted my time on it...
On the post: Hospitals Argue That More Transparency On Medical Errors Will Decrease Dialogue On Fixing Them
Re:
I think though, that if we're talking about errors and how to correct them, the logic above doesn't apply. I would accept that for research and new treatments, you don't want to have people talking themselves into a false sense of security, especially when they don't know everything they should. Errors are things that have happened already, and solutions can come from anywhere. Personally, I think the stuff is so boring that most of the public won't care to get involved. If that's the case, it'll only draw interested and invested people into the discussion, and I believe that would be very good for progress. Mention a cure for cancer though, and all the crazies would come out of hiding...
On the post: Why Does The Entertainment Industry Seek To Kill Any Innovation That's Helping It Adapt?
Re: What Spotify and Hulu actually do...
"Hulu's management, on the other hand, contends that the current strategy of reaching the widest possible audience on the free site will ultimately generate higher advertising revenue. They say revenue is expected to top $500 million this year, proof that its current emphasis is paying off.
In a short time, Hulu has exploded into one of the top Internet video destinations, defying skeptics who predicted that a service backed by such an unwieldy joint venture would never work. It now attracts some 27 million users every month, according to ComScore Video Metrix."
Hulu offers a subscription for their streaming service, which I happily pay to have their content available on my TV. On their site, they ask me if certain ads are relevant to me, so that they can tune the ads to only be things I'm interested in, ads I'd actually want to watch, and for the most part, it works pretty well. I canceled my cable subscription, not _because_ of hulu, but it made it a lot easier. I canceled cable because it was becoming _priced_ higher than I _valued_ it. If hulu wasn't there, I'd either pirate it or ignore it. My subscription is assurance to advertisers that they know where they can reach me, and when they hear that I only watch ads that might really interest me, and they also hear that I don't have a cable subscription anymore, than the value to them starts to shift from "old school" to "new school." They start paying cable less for ads, because I'm not watching cable, and cable can't pay as much to the content providers. All the while advertisers start to pay more to hulu, for the assurance of attentive eyes, and with the 70% deal, hulu's owners start getting paid a lot more, and oh yeah, aren't they the content providers??
To make this happen, Hulu needs to continue to get better, not get worse. Destroying Hulu won't save the "old school" cable services. People don't take leaps forward like Hulu and then revert back to what they realized they weren't happy with. They find other ways to keep moving forward. I do not pay for cable TV now, and I never will again. For the money I'm saving, I'll happily wait for it to come to netflix, should hulu suffer, and if it doesn't make it there, then I'll probably never know about it, because they don't show me commercials at all :-).
On the post: Why Chris Dodd Is Doing Everything Wrong With The MPAA
Re: New business model
I absolutely LOVE my Roku box, because they have done what cable companies should have done long ago. Offer many channels for free, but charge on a per channel basis for the premium ones. (I'm not an employee or anything, just a very pleased customer. Though if anyone wants to pay me for this opinion I'd be happy to accept.)
On the post: Why Chris Dodd Is Doing Everything Wrong With The MPAA
Re:
On the post: Why Chris Dodd Is Doing Everything Wrong With The MPAA
On the post: Will Amazon Cave In And Get Licenses For Its Streaming Player?
Re: Other problems Amazon must deal with
On the post: Will Amazon Cave In And Get Licenses For Its Streaming Player?
Even bigger...
To be honest, I believe that the RIAA needs Amazon much more than Amazon needs them. I go to Amazon for a lot of stuff, none of which is music. I know a few people that do go there for music though, and if Amazon stopped offering it for them, they wouldn't go somewhere else to pay for it if you know what I mean.
On the post: Foo Fighters Album Leaked; Band Relieved
Even more rad?
On the post: Movie Studios Add Another Window: The $30 Dollar Rental
Re: Re: Re:
Also, my friend would order PPV fights, and then have a viewing party where if people wanted to help him pay for the fight, they could. If people want to overpay for a movie, they go to the theater to see it, not over to someone else's house.
On the post: Porn Company Says You Owe $25k If Content In Your Account Ends Up Pirated... Even If You Prove You Were Hacked [Updated]
Hack proof
A company that would try to make you liable for their security getting breached, probably wouldn't be above 'hacking' your account themselves, just to get that $25k
On the post: Movie Studios Add Another Window: The $30 Dollar Rental
Re: I have said it before
On the post: Another Court Rejects Idea That DMCA Requires Proactive Approach From Service Providers
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Another Court Rejects Idea That DMCA Requires Proactive Approach From Service Providers
Re: Re: Re:
If you could care less, then you really do care some already.
On the post: Another Court Rejects Idea That DMCA Requires Proactive Approach From Service Providers
Re:
On the post: Do We Really Want Judges Determining What Art 'Says'?
Re: Re: Re:
I think it's actually that you write better pieces, and by that I mean you are more verbose and try to hedge off these types of ridiculous arguments in your postings week by week. That leaves these trolls no choice but to get crazier and crazier in how they attack you...
On the post: Microsoft Wants To Make It Illegal To Buy From An Overseas Company That Uses Unauthorized Software
Re: Re: Another reason
On the post: Yet Another Study Says Enforcement Won't Bring Back Consumer Spending On Music; But Will Strangle New Biz Models
Re: Re: Re:
Essentially, what you are saying is that the only acceptable innovation is into fields where there are no existing players. No one should try to compete with a company who is already doing something, because you may infringe on their rights, and that is a no no.
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