So you'd rather be using an inferior OS that has no competition and costs $400? Either that or you have a lot of MSFT stock.
The market will take care of itself. Windows is severely overpriced, and at least the low end PC market will most likely be taken over by Linux in the near future. An average OEM Windows license costs $40 I believe. That $40 (or less) may be the entire profit margin in a $200 PC. Microsoft's free ride on OEMs is finally coming to an end.
For the record I use all of the Big Three: Windows, Linux (Ubuntu), and Mac. My personal opinion is that Mac OS X beats the other two hands down as a consumer desktop OS.
Weak dollar is a good thing if you're in the US and making a product or service that people abroad would buy. It's cheaper for them, hence they'll be more likely to buy and will buy more of it. On the other hand if you're in Europe, Australia, or even Canada and you plan to rely a lot on US sales then you may want to pick something different. Other than that I don't see anything significant to worry about.
This is only an issue for women. Risk of problems with pregnancy (and birth defects) goes up significantly for women as they get older (best time to have kids for women is in their 20's). The male reproductive system is much, much simpler though and I don't think age is a factor for men at all. Of course as you age you'd have to find someone increasingly younger than you to carry a child. That would be the only problem.
On the other hand some men would not consider that to be a problem at all (assuming you can find a mate). And if you're a 40 yearold millionaire you shouldn't have a problem finding a 20-something to have a kid with. :-)
I'm really on the fence about this because both arguments have truth to them. If you look at many successful companies, they were often founded by two people. However you'll also find that usually one of the founders leaves eventually (usually after a short while compared to overall lifetime of the company), and the other stays to run the company.
I can give a whole bunch of examples. Apple: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Microsoft: Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Valve: Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Id Software: John Carmack and John Romero. People split for various reasons, sometimes due to disagreements. Sometimes personal reasons or change of interests. In the end most companies seem to end up being run by one person whether or not they were founded by more than one.
There are also successful companies that were founded by one person, like Dell and Amazon. So to me it seems that statistically speaking eventually you'll split up and one of you will have to leave the company.
Ultimately it seems that the co-founder issue is mostly an issue of initial mutual support. It's tough to go through the early stages on your own, and having someone to share the workload with and get moral support from increases your chances of success. But it can only truly work in the long term if you decide at the beginning that one of you will be the president and have the final word in major decisions. Otherwise it's a recipe for trouble down the road.
Car makers have a very low profit margin. Toyota has about 7% (and that's very high for cars -- GM has like 1%). Google has about 30% profit margin. There's definitely a lot more money in cars in general (in terms of revenue), but Google's net income for 2006 was $1 billion more than GM, despite GM having about $197 billion more in revenue. Having high revenues doesn't mean you're making a lot in profit, which is what counts.
"The laptops were designed specifically to run Linux programs. If the machines run only Linux, Microsoft will lose an opportunity to expose tens of millions of children worldwide to its Windows system."
Sounds like a great opportunity for desktop Linux. Let's hope they stick with it.
"More than 80 percent of Vista sales were through sales of new PCs, which shows how powerful that franchise continues to be."
Huh? Powerful franchise? People buying new computers without any choice of not getting Windows shows that Vista is very popular? The only reason people are using Vista at all is because it ships with new computers.
Not only could Woz not start Apple without Jobs, he would NOT have started it at all if his friends didn't convince him to join Jobs as a co-founder. He didn't want to leave his job at HP (although he may have left partly because HP refused to develop his ideas), or being anything more than an engineer at Apple even though he co-founded it.
Don't get me wrong -- Woz was certainly an engineering genius, but he didn't have any of the vision that Jobs had for building something great. To Woz it was just something interesting to do. Jobs saw the potential of what Woz was able to create. Those two as a pair were the perfect storm that ushered in a personal computing revolution.
I don't know the details about the hacked iPhone bricking, but it's not so far fetched that whatever Apple does to update the (hacked) firmware simply happens to brick the device. I don't see why they wouldn't simply revert the device back to the pre-hacked state if they could do it.
And by the way, you CAN upgrade the RAM and even the hard drive in a MacBook without voiding your warranty. I upgraded both in mine. They can be accessed by taking out the battery.
Old habits may die hard but they will also be detrimental to you. When cars were invented, there must've been people who said "I think I'll stick to horses until they work out the kinks in those car things". Those people probably didn't go on to found IBM or RCA. :-)
I generally strive to embrace new things and new ways of doing things. As long as I believe they're practical. For instance, full OS upgrade over the internet -- brilliant. Ubuntu is the first to offer this to my knowledge. On the other hand, web apps.. I don't see that as being very practical any time soon.
There will certainly be bugs and there's a certain amount of risk in doing an internet upgrade, but this is not major risk. Yet embracing the way of the future early will get you a head start, and I think it's an important mindset to have.
The market will take care of itself. Windows is severely overpriced, and at least the low end PC market will most likely be taken over by Linux in the near future. An average OEM Windows license costs $40 I believe. That $40 (or less) may be the entire profit margin in a $200 PC. Microsoft's free ride on OEMs is finally coming to an end.
For the record I use all of the Big Three: Windows, Linux (Ubuntu), and Mac. My personal opinion is that Mac OS X beats the other two hands down as a consumer desktop OS.