Apple today is what Nikes were in the '90's, or perhaps the Walkman in the '80's.
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Why Windows has been so popular?
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Apple today is what Nikes were in the '90's, or perhaps the Walkman in the '80's.
I'm guessing you're implying they're a fading trend. If it is, it's going to be a while before we see a dip.
No company can stay on top, and while we can enjoy Apple's time as a market leader they will at some point stop being the darling of the media and consumers.
You won't hear me complaining. I love the Apple gadgets I have. And, Sony is still a profitable company, and Nike likewise.
On the other hand: Apple has been growing at an explosive rate. To keep that growth going they need to expand into other markets. One could sell about a billion iPods, iPhones, iPads and AppleTV's, but then it stops. The other 6 billion people on this planet cannot afford one's products.
Apple could explore other markets, but continuous growth at the current rate is unlikely.
Can you do simple mathematics? By 2060 Apple's stock will get close to 5 million dollars per share at the current rate of growth, and the market-capitalization of the company will exceed 4.5 quadrillion dollars. That is in the order of ten times the total GDP of the whole planet at that time, or more than 300 times the current global GDP (assuming 6% global growth between now and 2060).
Continued exponential growth is impossible.
Continued growth well into the latter part of this decade is totally conceivable. Apple has the game figured out for the next 5 years, easily. At this point, at the very least, they really have no competition on their level going into a 12-month outlook. Your 2060 example, however, is stretching the seams of credibility a little too much.
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Unix does not mean Zero maintenance. Unix systems are as maintenance hungry as Windows, requiring patching, configuration, babysitting, tuning and other various support and evolution strategies that are also required on Windows.
Your examples ? Windows Server also comes package with all that crap, in a Microsoft sauce. IIS, Active Directory, Windows DNS/DHCP, .NET framework, Powershell, the WSH. Heck, it comes with Terminal Services for remote access and multi-user application use.
Unix is a trademark and a bunch of old copyright code. The trademark is owned by The Open Group, the copyrighted code originally owned by AT&T is now in Novell's hands (Attachmate corporation). OS X, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, they all use very little of that code nowadays. They are all Unix for having passed the certification suite that the Open Group requires for certification for use of the trademark, but they are all quite different.
To say "OS X is flexible because it is Unix!" is blatant ignorance of what Unix is, and of what the Open Group allows as far as the trademark use goes. You can't say "OS X is Unix", that is not allowed. You can say "OS X is a Unix system".
I always find it funny when people think "Unix" just runs by itself. Unix systems are quite the PITA to maintain in working order. It's fun work (I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it), but it is a lot of work.
I agree, but I also think that Apple has the capability to stay on top for a long time. If they can keep up the media image, it will surely help. But they have become the establishment now and time will tell if that will have an effect in the future.
However, the wars I get from the developers won't run under .net. My example was about hosting a specific application, normally hosted on linux, on OS-X. And the point I tried to make was that it's a lot easier than doing the same on Windows. Yes, apache, mysql, java/jboss etc will run on Windows but getting it all set up, faultfree and reasonably tuned, will take weeks.
And, as a reminder, the claim was that any collection of software on OS-X is a lot harder to setup than under Windows and as hard to maintain. The stuff that pays my bills is quite easy to setup and maintain on OS-X.
Where exactly did I give the impression that I don't have 20 years of hands-on experience with UNIX-like operating systems? (and do I need to point at puppet, cfengine and yum, apt, freebsd-update, port etc..? If you think maintaining your systems is hard you need to look at automating stuff. Wether you use Windows, linux, OS-X or UNICOS/mk.)
No, it's not easier than doing the same on Windows. The WARs I get from developers won't run under JBoss (which is never properly setup in distribution packages) or Windows .NET frameworks (which is a given, being that WARs are Java web archives meant to run on Java application servers, which the .NET framework isn't...
). But then, that's because our developers write code for IBM WebSphere.Setting up Apache, MySQL, Java/jboss under Linux also takes a while. Heck, we just got done tuning a Apache instance at work where it was ballouning and using up to 8 GB of RAM for about 300 users. The problem was a 3rd party plug-in that gobbles up RAM like no tomorrow, the solution was tuning the server parameters to make sure the plugin didn't have time to balloun up, but that the clients weren't getting queued.
Thank god for load testing software that permitted us to do multiple runs with different setups.
So what ? It's "easy" on Windows as well. Or on HP-UX, or on Linux. Of course, "easy" is quite relative in the world of IT. If you know your stuff, anything is easy. The problem is new stuff is always coming out that you have to learn all over again. Experience makes the learning curve easier to get through, but maintaining systems in proper working order and properly secured is never easy.
It's a game of planning, execution and testing.
I'd like to see you "automating" an update-ux procedure.
You're talking to a guy who's been automating systems for 10 years now. Perl and crontab have no secrets for me, nor does bigger ceduler packages like Computer Associates provides.
However, maintaining a functioning Unix system is still work. It requires constantly watching for updates from vendors, analyzing patch changelogs and testing.
It's really no less work than Windows Server.
I get the feeling your 20 years of experience is mostly small workshops or self-employed stuff. I'd like to see you in Fortune 500 level IT and then say it's "easy" and can be deployed in 2 weeks or something. Heck, in 2 weeks, the paperwork isn't even done for the architecture designs, much less the hardware ordered, the software installed and configured, and even less properly integrated with the rest of the system architecture we have in place.
Nothing is easy in IT. But it's a lot of fun.
I can only talk about my personal experience. But as a kid we had an Amiga for the longest time. We did video titles on it, word processing, drawing, games, everything a PC or Mac did but at a fraction of the price.
Wasn't until the later half of the 90's that we even used a PC. Why? Cheaper, more apps and games. Plus in that early computer era it was much better to get upgradeable systems. I remember one computer (1997-99) went through 4 different modems as we upgraded to the best one at the time, a couple of graphics cards. I guess that was the thing to do during those boom years, computers that could be upgraded as frequently as tech became standardised.
Now I'm older I look for simplicity and power in a computer, so I buy Apple products. If their computer range goes too close to iOS I will drop them in a heartbeat, however.
Wasn't until the later half of the 90's that we even used a PC. Why? Cheaper, more apps and games. Plus in that early computer era it was much better to get upgradeable systems. I remember one computer (1997-99) went through 4 different modems as we upgraded to the best one at the time, a couple of graphics cards. I guess that was the thing to do during those boom years, computers that could be upgraded as frequently as tech became standardised.
Now I'm older I look for simplicity and power in a computer, so I buy Apple products. If their computer range goes too close to iOS I will drop them in a heartbeat, however.
I'd like to see you "automating" an update-ux procedure.
You're talking to a guy who's been automating systems for 10 years now. Perl and crontab have no secrets for me, nor does bigger ceduler packages like Computer Associates provides.
However, maintaining a functioning Unix system is still work. It requires constantly watching for updates from vendors, analyzing patch changelogs and testing.
It's really no less work than Windows Server.
I get the feeling your 20 years of experience is mostly small workshops or self-employed stuff. I'd like to see you in Fortune 500 level IT and then say it's "easy" and can be deployed in 2 weeks or something. Heck, in 2 weeks, the paperwork isn't even done for the architecture designs, much less the hardware ordered, the software installed and configured, and even less properly integrated with the rest of the system architecture we have in place.
Nothing is easy in IT. But it's a lot of fun.
Small IT has its own Challenges. With Bigger firms you have resources and company infrastructure, not so much with smaller firms. I've never been personally responsible for more than about 100 user systems. But thats mostly because I choose to work with Developers and Law Firms. A lot of improv and lateral application of software solutions is needed as cash is limited, hardware is limited, and there's no managerial processes to hide behind when something goes wrong.
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I did small IT close to a decade ago. The challenge mostly stems from lack of budget and wild expectations and demands.
It's another kind of world completely.
Don't forget the single server with a failing fan that no ones touched in years suddenly dying.
I do prefer small IT though, as it lets me work with a comfortable income while at Uni and not interfere with studies.
a comfortable income while at Uni
Then you must know one of the systems I manage, eduroam. (However, what I do is limited to ELTR, APTLR is a separate system..) Not our biggest client, but one of the most interesting.
Heard of it, dont know what it is.
In a nutshell: a student in a participating educational institution gets an account. With this account he can access the usual student-stuff, like email, shared calendars, grades and assignments. When on campus he gets access to wifi.
So far nothing special.
However, when he travels abroad, he gets the same access to his own data on the campus of all other participating institutions. And some businesses. For instance: on Dutch educational institutions, but also on railroad-stations and on the Dutch international airport there is (experimental) eduroam-access as well. That is the roaming part.
Now the federation. Students on eduroam can create shared workspaces (when approved by staff). In these workspaces they can share files, calendars and more (code, structured data etc..), all relating to a shared research project. Any student with an eduroam-account, wether he's in Tartu (Estonia), Hokkaido (Japan), Auckland (New Zealand) or Knoxville (USA), can share his stuff with other students on any participating university within his group of participating students.
Ever wondered how people from 80 countries can work together at CERN? Eduroam.
(time to get back on topic?)
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