The Borg keep adding “features” (or bugs depending on your POV) that clearly no one wants or needs solely for revenue. Steve Jobs tells us that Apple is the greatest thing since, well, the last big Apple thing solely for the purpose of being chi chi. . . . . even if their big ideas did come from Bang & Olufsen, and a Brit Jonathan Ive.

30 years on and it’s still a box. A commodity. A utility. And in the Borg’s case, not even a good one at that. And a boring one at that. Especially when the ISPs are capping traffic and you can’t even do things like download movies, much less anything else.

And of course as most customers find, hitching their wagon to corporate strategies in terms of things like OS/2, well then they find out that corporations can also change direction too leaving them out their investment or locking them into something completely out of the mainstream, something IBM has a rep for.

The question gets to be, why would I pay for something I can get for free. Certainly not anything MS. Apple only if it’s worthwhile like their new spreadsheet. Ubuntu of course. Why throw money out on needless stuff.

As the Forbes article notes, being the innovator in any industry is oftentimes a guarantee that you will NOT succeed. But the genie’s out of the bottle:
http://www.forbes.com/infoimaging/feeds/infoimaging/2004/11/23/infoimagingusatoday_2004_11_23_eng-usatoday_money_eng-usatoday_money_021650_3089454182464422039.html
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/tech/article/0,2777,DRMN_23910_4483037,00.html

Things like this may not be as ubiquitous as the iPod, but give it time. If Hollywood wasn’t shaken by the idea of zipping past commercials, you wouldn’t see the absurd levels of product placement in most modern TV programming today.

I realize your whole schtick is driving home the point that Americans are a bunch of clueless, braindead morons who don’t deserve the freedoms and privileges they have, but out of a nation of 300+ million people, there’re a few folks out there that realize we’re meant for more than just to passively consume.

If that were true, Bones, then TiVO wouldn’t exist.

Ah, that’s right. I forgot – now that TiVO is on the market people have stopped buying things.

By the way, how are sales of TiVO and DVRs doing?

This is maybe the silliest thing you’ve ever said. You live in America, where being sold to is every person’s highest aspiration.

The truth is confusing indeed. Because if Windows realized back in 2000 that their OS was stable and the best thing going, why release Vista at all? And don’t overlook the fact that the newly-announced Facebook advertising system is being met with a serious negative backlash: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2007/11/the_facebook_ba.html
http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=1232
http://gigaom.com/2007/11/09/facebooks-cruel-intentions/

Microsoft is a huge, slow-moving company that is always behind the curve on these ideas because it simply doesn’t have the speed and clarity of direction to get ahead of them. Too much middle management, too many partnerships and clients to worry about pissing off, and too little in the way of real genuine innovation.

Ironically, you are quite right in pointing out that they finally caught lightning in a bottle with XP (at least by the time of Service Pack 2), and I have found their mobile software to be a lot more stable and easy to use than Palm’s and other third-party developers. Not everything that comes out of the open-source world is better than the closed models of the larger companies, and many geek developers focus too much on making things cool and with lots of bells and whistles, rather than simply useful and easy to interact with.

But consider this–if there was no demand for OS alternatives in the mainstream, would Dell ever have bothered to package any of their hardware with Linux: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/alliances/en/linux?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

Open-source alternatives such as OpenOffice.org and free software suites like Google Docs and Zoho are still mostly embraced by the geek fringe. That’s as it should be–the geeks are always the first people to adopt something, much like social networking. Eventually the ideas will find the way into the mainstream and the larger companies will have to compete or die. That’s how it goes.

Overall, I think you were actually onto something in your first paragraph, but that libertarian reality distortion field you have going around you warped the narrative into another tirade against open source. You’re right–it IS about selling things. But not everyone wants to be sold to.

I’m already heading to Apple after the debacle a few months back where their routine update killed my USB ports and cost me the better part of a week to get fixed (and even now one of the ports is still dead).