How do you know when Paul Thurrott is lying?

His lips are moving.

Seriously, if Microsoft was the Republican Party, Paul Thurrott would be Fox News Channel.

Some people are constitutionally incapable of shutting the fuck up no matter how many times and how thoroughly they’re proven wrong, some people incessantly insist that they were taken out of context when they’re called out, and some people are just pathological liars that deliberately construct every sentence to be as misleading as possible. Paul Thurrott, in my opinion, is three for three.

On top of that, he has this odd mix of gung ho patsy and outright stupid that sometimes makes it difficult to tell when he’s lying and when he really has no idea what he’s saying.

This guy has bothered me for years with his total and utter disregard for journalistic quality, instead often opting to resort to hearsay, weasel words, the statistics that most favor his opinion, and anything that makes Apple and Linux look tiny or irrelevant.

Just a few of the lies and contradictions he’s been unable to escape (in order of how they amuse me):

(Windows Me in Thurrottland) “It is, quite possibly, the most under-hyped version of Windows ever created…It’s easy to ridicule Microsoft for milking the Windows 9x cash cow yet again. But the reality is that this release is exceptional.”

(2007 in Thurrottland) Tries bashing Firefox 2 and gets called out by Asa Dotzler

(2008 in reality) Gives up and writes a positive review of Firefox 3 but insists his abortive attack from the year before was “misconstrued”, goes on to list a few trivial gimmicky features IE 8 has that Firefox doesn’t. (Thurrott, you don’t want to go into feature comparisons between IE and Firefox, it can’t end well for IE)

(2004 in Thurrotland) Like zOMG!!!!1111 MSN Music is gonna be HUGE!

(2006 in reality) MSN Music is shutting down and your licensed files are toast if anything happens to Windows. (Such as upgrading XP to Vista or a slightly less devastating catastrophe like a hard disk crash.)

(2002 in Thurrottland) Like zOMG!!!!1111 Windows Media Audio is the second coming!

(2007 in reality) Finally forced to eat crow and admit that WMA is dead, and everybody uses MP3.

BONUS:

“AAC doesn’t play nice with products made by Microsoft and its partners. AAC isn’t compatible with Windows Media Player or Media Center” -Thurrott, October 2007

“Put simply, I am a fan of the Zune…The online marketplace is good, but not as good as iTunes Store, though that matters less with music because MP3/AAC is universally compatible.” -Thurrott, July 2009 (Note that Zune supported AAC in 2007 when he made the first post)

And just for an added face palm:

“..there are audiophiles and technology trolls out there who might recommend [lossless formats]…Don’t be confused by the term “lossless,” however: These formats are still compressed…This is a foolhardy idea, unless you will never use a portable media device or enjoy the thought of storing and managing two copies of your music collection, one in lossless and one in another format that’s been transcoded from the lossless masters.” – Thurrott, October 2007

I don’t suppose he bothered to mention that you can decompress lossless files back into WAV or onto another CD and the CRC checksums will even match the original disc! Or perhaps that both Windows Media Player and iTunes can transcode from your lossless library on the fly and put the resulting lossy files on your device? This isn’t new folks, they’ve both been able to do this since at least 2003-2004.

(2009) Admits the Zune is going nowhere but tries to play it off by comparing it to a Macintosh computer’s supposedly miniscule market share.

In a survey conducted last fall, IDC’s Kevorkian said only 4.8% of those with a portable media player reported having a Zune, while 61% had some sort of iPod.

So, in late 2008, the Zune actually had 50 percent more usage share in the MP3 player market than the Mac did in the worldwide PC market. (Hey, math can be fun.)

Of course it is, especially when it’s wrong/fake/conjured up with the rest of his delusions.

While we’re comparing apples and bowling balls, Mac rounded out the fourth quarter of 2008 with 8.87% of the desktop computer market (nearly double the market share of the Zune in the MP3 player market), and the Mac has gone on to 9.81% as of May of 2009. *source*

Mac and Linux have driven Windows down to an 87.75% market share, which is still a commanding lead, but in 2004 they had 96.34% *source*. While Windows isn’t dying off as fast as Microsoft’s other products (Read: Dropping like a brick), it *is* shrinking, and it should worry any investor when a company cannot at least break even year-over-year.

Mr. Thurrott, since IDG has Kevorkian on hand, can they possibly put the Zune under? It can be so quick and painless… No reason to punish the people that unwittingly put Microsoft in their 401(k) for another 2 years.

This of course brings me to today’s Paul Thurrott crap.

Thurrott slanders anything that competes with Microsoft, but seems to go out of his way to bash Apple. Now Opera is on his vendetta list since they won freedom of choice for European consumers to decide what browser they want with Windows 7.

The fact that he is bashing the browser with the most strict adherence to World Wide Web Consortium markup standards should not be overlooked, because Thurrott has a history of bashing industry standards like AAC while promoting Microsoft’s dead end (WMA).

His tirade is, essentially   “Well, uhhhm, Internet Explorer has 66% of the browser market, so it should call all the shots”. (It had 92% at the end of 2004 *source* )

Now, Mr. Thurrott has been gay for Internet Explorer for a long long time, and has stood faithfully by it despite several hundred security flaws, the fact that its rendering engine is prehistoric and buggy, and that you can’t extend it with anything but toolbars (oh do we know about IE toolbars…). (Although I have my doubts about whether or not even Thurrott could stomach any version of IE for longer than it takes to glaze over some Microsoft PR notes and grab a few screen shots)

To be dramatic, Paul Thurrott kind of reminds me of that episode of South Park “AhhhH!!! My baby is killing again! Don’t worry, mommy will protect you! I have such a good boy, such a nice boy…”, but there’s only so many bodies you can hide in the backyard and IE is a fuck up that people witness first hand from day one, so there’s really no point in even trying to defend it.

Apparently Thurrott has his panties in a twist this time because he can’t stand that the European Union, unlike the United States, actually has and enforces consumer protection laws. (And it will be interesting to see how the eradication of IE bundling in the Euro Zone affects the spread of spyware over there…)

Thurrott argues, plainly, that users should not be presented with a choice of what browser to use, that IE should remain welded onto Windows, inseparable and popping up even when you thought you hid the fucking thing, and that naive users should continue using what’s there and getting their system deluged with porn dialers, trojans, search page hijackings, and every kind of web annoyance and active content abuse that Adblock Plus for Firefox (or an ad blocking file loaded into Opera’s content blocker) can silence once and for all.

Paul Thurrott remains as pro-Microsoft and anti-user as ever. One could only assume that his yellow journalism is the kind that only Microsoft Monopoly Money could afford.

My reaction to Google’s operating system announcement.

OS X and Windows. R.I.P. 2010?

If you hadn’t heard the good news, Google is getting into the operating system business with “Chrome OS” to challenge the de facto standards, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Their rationale is simple, concise, and correct. The commercial desktop operating system offerings by Microsoft and Apple are humongous and overgrown, needlessly complicated and insecure by nature, buggy and unreliable, and ultimately very expensive.

Google’s new system is not entirely from the ground up it seems, from what I can gather it will be Linux based and highly centralized around the Google Chrome web browser (in fact, Chrome is even the name of the OS).

The idea of an operating system that is just a means to an end, which happens to be a web browser, is not an idea that is entirely without precedent. In fact, it was this concept of the underlying OS becoming irrelevant and Netscape Corporation anticipating an OS of their own converging around Netscape Navigator which scared Microsoft into developing the Internet Explorer monstrosity (and even partnering with Apple to deploy IE on Macs), which through lack of development and intentional subversion and sabotage of inter-operable web standards has become something of a black hole, with the rest of the Internet swirling around it, trapped like an accretion disk. The time dilation could of course account for the five years of IE 6. /sarcasm

Firefox and other standards compliant web browsers have in the past few years been waging war against Internet Explorer in an attempt to “take back the web” and turn it into something that does not favor a particular browser or operating system, something that works well equally on all devices, and Chrome OS may just be the realization of that goal.

Other Linux distributions have come and gone, squabbling over varying ideologies about “freedom”, disagreements over what constitutes technical superiorities, and with specialized set ups geared towards particular users. None of them have been enormously successful against the Windows/Mac establishment because they have been fighting largely with other Linux distributions in order to try to take a larger sliver of the 1% market share of the Linux pie, rather than trying to expand the slice of Linux pie in total.

Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, and Suse have introduced a number of good ideas in their own right, but the overwhelming struggle against each other has unfortunately been to the detriment of Linux. There is also the fact that Ubuntu is still not turning any profit and exists solely as a loss leader which I believe to be spiraling out of control, Fedora puts the interests of Red Hat’s enterprise ambitions first, and OpenSuse is sponsored by Novell who are business partners with Microsoft, giving them no interest in truly competing for anything except how much money they can siphon from Red Hat.

Because of different package managers, different administrative tools, differences in how to even gain administrator privileges, different security concepts, different desktop environments, different terminals, different file systems, and all the quirks, retraining, and gaps in feature parity that go along with them, Linux has gained an arguable reputation as difficult and inconsistent to use, learn, and deploy.

The other problem is who is backing the development of these systems. More often than not a desktop distribution is made needlessly top heavy by the addition of enterprise features that either get in the way of or confuse new users, and the fact that most meaningful new hardware support consists largely of Big Iron hardware that has no meaning to desktop users, often at the expense of common desktop PC hardware such as gamepads, webcams, TV tuner cards, and the like.

While Ubuntu has had some success in making desktop Linux easier to use on the surface, they don’t have the resources to make meaningful contributions to desktop hardware support. I believe in many of the areas Ubuntu has failed, Google could very well succeed. Google’s services will require common PC peripherals to work, and so developing Linux drivers is very much in Google’s interest.

The exciting prospect of a Google sponsored desktop Linux is that they have the finances, the manpower, and the marketing muscle to build a Linux distro entirely organized around the concept that you are a home user and that you should not be plagued with inconsistent hardware support, administration complexity, and nowhere to turn for proper end-user support. Google could bring a desktop Linux that nearly anyone could install and use without hitting any of the all-too-common snags that can make Linux a pain for newcomers.

Common wisdom does, after all, dictate that software which works well becomes an afterthought. Users of Windows Vista are all too painfully aware of the OS because it has so many problems that make transparency an impossibility, likewise for Internet Explorer. Google’s Chrome web browser does what it’s supposed to do so well that I’m convinced if anyone knows they’re using it, it’s because they want to know what to use on their home computer to remove the needless complications offered by other browsers. If Chrome OS can do this well, I don’t suppose that uptake will be a problem, and it could even set the demand for low-powered environmentally friendly netbooks even higher.

It is of course inevitable that kooks, weirdos, “freedom or death” fanatics will viciously attack Chrome OS simply because it is sponsored by Google, but I welcome Chrome OS and the idea that it will make Linux a legitimate desktop choice that new users can adapt to with little or no second thoughts.

A remaining question is “How much will Chrome OS cost?”. It will be free. Google applications will take the front stage replacing dinosaurs like gigabyte-plus office suites, calenders, and email clients which handle like tanks and take tons of local storage and memory. These of course have adwords embedded in them (which I think is a fair enough trade off to be rid of bulky monolithic software suites). Of course the underlying system will still be Linux, so if you prefer the old school stuff, you’ll be able to install that too.

The other question I have is where your guess is as good as mine. Proprietary media encoders and decoders (codecs), required to make and playback things like MP3, AAC, and H.264/DivX videos have always been of questionable legality on Linux, and of limited use even when you can find them for legal purchase. (Fluendo only allows playback, but not encoding.) I am sure that there will be unofficial repositories where people package these and make them available, but unless a legal version is available, it could hurt the uptake of this OS as bundled by OEMs. (Though Google does claim an impressive number of OEM partners for the launch of their OS.)

I’m sure that once again, kooks, weirdos, and “freedom or death” fanatics will want to roast me for wanting to use my MP3 player. Personally I don’t give a crap about whether my codecs are licensed or not, or patented or not, but the commercial viability of an OS may hinge on whether it *can* do these things. Patents expire, and unencumbered formats exist, but in my opinion the MP3 patent argument has got to be the biggest straw man the free software people have ever propped up.

Finally, for those reluctant to leave Windows behind, I’m sure that Google’s OS will have some degree of binary compatibility through the Wine project. Someone will no doubt package it.

Time will tell, the devil is always in the details, but I for one can’t wait to get my hands on this.

Microsoft to release free antivirus beta tomorrow, do you trust it?

Back when Windows Defender was in the works…

Kooks like the Free Software Foundation were salivating over the possibility of stirring up the shit over nothing, “It will send your files to Microsoft” (It doesn’t), “Microsoft can remove legitimate stuff  from your computer if they don’t want you to have it” (I’ve never seen it happen), and “It will spy on you and send your personal info to Microsoft” (Who knows? Have they got any proof that it has stepped out of line?).

With Windows Defender, you had to explicitly opt-in to “Microsoft Spynet” before it would send back any info to Microsoft, and it was placed in the “Options” menu that most people never look at, unchecked by default, and well explained what it would be doing.

Without user-interference, Windows Defender only uses pattern files of known malware, there doesn’t appear to be any problem with this other than that a significant amount of new malware often comes out before Microsoft’s weekly update rendering it less effective than your normal antivirus most of the time.

Therefore I, and most Vista users as far as I know, that know anything about how useless Windows Defender is, immediately disable it to get rid of a nuisance and resource drain and just run  AVG or Avast or Avira or whatever is the freeware of choice.

But now Microsoft has a free antivirus on the table that goes to Public Beta tomorrow

By design, it operates something like the “Panda Cloud Antivirus” in that it not only uses signatures, it communicates with Microsoft servers to check files, to do this there’s at minimum, three things Microsoft knows about you the first time you go to use it.

Your IP address.

The name of every file on your hard drive.

A checksum hash of every file.

So maybe I’m being paranoid, but you tell me if you want them to know all of this.

Microsoft is butt buddies with the RIAA/MPAA and other such cartels, and so what happens when it scans “C:\Users\<your username>\Music” and suddenly they find out that you have bootlegged Metallica tracks?

Does the RIAA become informed? Does Lars Oldbitch look up from being a no-talent assclown and sue you?

Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but I’m not really comfortable with a MafiAA partner scanning my hard disk and reporting on files that it finds that they think shouldn’t be there.

Besides, even if the freeware works as “well” as Windows Live Onecare, then 87% of virus makers beware, Microsoft is on the scene! (Avast, AVG, and Avira’s freeware typically have detection rates of 98-99.9%)

So no matter what the privacy implications, and I would not be surprised if there are a lot, I just don’t really trust a freeware product from Microsoft based on an ineffective $50/ year predecessor  to protect my machine.

If you feel comfortable with whatever “Videos”, “Music”, “Pictures”, and “Downloads” you have being sent back to Microsoft, more power to you, but to be brutally honest I just feel that it’s none of their god damned business.

Windows gives you lots of choices, apparently one such decision is whether you trust Russian organized crime or American organized crime (Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA) with your personal information.

Surprise, the fastest browser on Windows is in fact….

Safari 4!?

Yep, I ran every browser I could find through Peacemaker (the same people that make Futuremark/3dMark apparently), and got this.

"It's lonely at the bottom, it's dark and I can hear spyware makers laughing."

Yes, even the unoptimized port of Konqueror had its wicked way with Microsoft’s latest browser. :)

You have to go back to Firefox 2.0 to find a browser that performs worse than IE 8.

But even that doesn’t give you the full picture. IE 8 in 2009 does not support complex graphics through the <canvas> element, whereas Firefox 1.5 released in 2005 supports it quite well, so IE 8 actually skipped that entire part of the test because it’s too crippled to run it. (If you run the test in IE, it will skip that cool spaceship animation because IE is incapable of running it)

It’s obvious why Microsoft continues to blatantly defy web standards that are several years old, in order to push their proprietary Silver Blight crap.

So really Firefox 1.5 is more advanced than IE 8, even though IE 8 is marginally faster, 4 years later.

Now I can almost here you say “So what? Silver Blight runs on Mac and there’s a Silver Blight compatible for Linux”.

Where do you think those are going to go if Silver Blight is ever successful?

You’re better off running anything that is not IE. Internet Explorer 8 has improved nothing and is beaten quite easily by browsers that are 2, 3, or 4 years old.

My message to the IE team is that you should all go commit seppuku for this abomination.

Don't say I never gave you anything.

Anyhow….

Safari 4 is 421% faster than IE 8

Google Chrome 2.0.180 is 376% faster than IE 8

Chrome 1.0 is r 326% faster than IE 8

Safari 3.23 is 273% faster than IE 8

Opera 10’s May 13 weekly build is 247% faster than IE 8

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is 224% faster than IE 8

Opera 9.64 is 79% faster than IE 8

Firefox 3.0.10 is 49% faster than IE 8

Konqueror 4.2.3’s Windows port is even 17% faster than IE 8 (And that’s written with Unix-like operating systems in mind, not Windows)

On a technical level, IE is competing with Firefox 2 for speed and Firefox 1.0 for standards support.

Microsoft’s anti-ipod ad shows how out of touch their Zune division is

This video is essentially a lie by omission:

The premise is why buy music from Apple when you can get DRM time bombed subscription music from Microsoft.

$15 a month * 12 months = $180

So assuming you bought $180 of music from Apple, you’d have 16-18 albums worth that you could keep, whereas if you bought the subscription from Microsoft and stop paying, you have a lot of worthless WMA files that won’t play.

Notice the ad doesn’t mention that the “unlimited downloads” will commit suicide if you quit paying rent?

Microsoft also doesn’t point out that you cannot burn subscription music to a CD, or that the RIAA found loopholes in singer and songwriter contracts that let them fuck the artist over because it doesn’t count as a “sale” if you downloaded a subscription file.

Would you rather have 180 real songs to keep or a lot of dead bits when you stop paying Microsoft?

Now I’ve had my ipod for about 2 years now, so in that time I could have had 360 songs from the Apple store or more just for what I would have otherwise bought nothing from Microsoft for the same amount of money.

Though I still buy the CDs and rip them myself most of the time, the ipod is clearly superior to the Zune.

And if you thought you were going to be cute and record your SPDIF output, Vista will disable that if the file is DRM’d.

Have fun lighting your money on fire with Zune + Vista!

Attack of the Clones, can Apple repel Psystar?

Have a sip, it's only $1,000 a cup!

I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a few days:

If Sir Alec Guinness were here, he might put it “The force, of advertising, can have a stong influence on the weak of mind”.

At the beginning of the summer, when Psystar started shipping their “Open Computer”, I actually did consider buying one, because they do have better hardware than Apple offers, at a much lower markup price.

But the more I looked into it, the less I liked the deal, not because I have any moral reservations about what they do, they were mainly the facts that you still can’t get *some* updates from Apple themselves and because the fan controls were not working when booted into OS X, and the noise levels in one review easily drowned out a passing fire engine.

So what is going on now?

Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar (I wanted to link to the original article, but it is mysteriously not responding), they allege the usual load of Bologna that big companies with one cash cow do when they’re under the gun, copyright infringement and violation of their EULA.

Psystar’s position, and the one I agree with, is that Apple is an abusive monopoly which is betraying their customer’s trust in locking OS X to an incredibly overpriced piece of hardware.

By the way, if you even begin reading this line, you owe me $300. ;)

Of course this all comes down to who can last longer in court, naturally you would think it to be Apple, yet Psystar is openly defying them by continuing to sell the Open Computer, and has hired a team of prominent anti-trust lawyers. (Has someone slipped Psystar some money?)

By the way, if you wish to side with Apple, please stop using your PC immediately, you and the company that sold it are in violation of IBM’s intellectual property.

The PC itself is a clone of IBM’s PC, and IBM eventually sold off their PC division to Lenovo because it was no longer profitable enough to them since you can walk into the gas station and get a halfway decent Gateway and a bag of chips and still not go over $500.

Apple’s bread and butter is bundling OS X with expensive hardware that only they can produce.

But if you still doubt me, let’s look at what you get with Psystar vs. a real Mac:

In the left corner, the $599 Mac Mini:

1.83 Ghz Core 2 Duo

1 GB DDR2 667 RAM

80 gig 5200 RPM hard disk

a DVD ROM/CD RW drive (no DVD burning for you!)

Oh look, an Intel GMA 950 that can’t even play games, and you can’t upgrade it!

Extreme Tech reviewed the GMA 950 in 2005 and found that at 640 x 480, with all quality settings on ultra low, it managed 16 frames a second in DOOM 3.

A $600 PC in 2004 could run DOOM 3 at twice the speed of a $600 Mac in 2008!

(I have a GMA 3100 on my board, but I have never used it, a $50 card would beat the crap out of it, and a $100 or $200 card would murder it)

So here we’ve already determined that Apple is selling you a system that was low end, 3 years ago, but also managing to sell it for $600.

In the right corner, the $554.99 base model Open Computer:

Pentium Dual Core E2180 @ 2 Ghz (It’s Conroe, so it’s 170 Mhz faster than the Mini’s CPU, and 1 MB of L2 less, should balance out)

2 GB of DDR2 800 (You start off with twice the RAM, it’s faster, and you still have two available slots that the Mini doesn’t, and can actually get the case open without a paint scraper, yes, PAINT SCRAPER)

Nvidia Geforce 7200GS with 256 MB of dedicated GDDR2 (About 7-8 times faster than the GMA 950)

Dual Layer 20x DVD+/-RW (Yay!)

250 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive

Winner: The Open Computer, it’s about fifty bucks cheaper and about 5 times the computer

The Mac Mini boils down to an overpriced toy, it has cheap hardware and Apple uses the rest of the “Mac Tax” to hide where their profit is coming from.

About 2 years ago, I made an offer on a Mac, a used G4 1.5 Ghz with 512 megs of RAM if I remember right, I offered the guy $300 for it and offered to come pick it up the next day, he acted shocked insulted.

Even though I probably offered him at least $100 more than the thing was worth, he told me that if I gave him $700 for it he would end the auction, it turns out that he had it listed on ebay and craigslist at once (both of these are a violation of ebay auction policy).

I ended up reporting him for abuse and his ebay sellers account was revoked, but the part that really shocked me was why anyone would pay that much for a 6 year old computer.

When I go to sell my car, remind me to tell them it’s a vintage Macintosh and that it’s based on UNIX, I’ll be able to retire at the ripe old age of 24.

This is what advertising does people, it convinces us things are worth more than they are, you can still go to ebay and see incredibly ancient Macs selling for more than PC’s that are 5-6 times faster and brand new.

Our cruisers can't repel marketing bullshit of that magnitude!

I’ve never fully understood what the full deal behind the Mac craze was anyway:

It seems more to be a status symbol to me than practical in many cases, I’ve seen very few people that actually needed a Mac, most of the one’s I’ve known in my life (well, all four), two were spoiled children using the thing as a toy, one was my uncle using it for CAD (It does do that well, but decent CAD software is in the $3,000-$4,000 ballpark anyway), and the other one works at a newspaper office and appears to use it mainly for Microsoft Word.

Yeah, it’s UNIX certified, I’ve heard some people rip that straight from Apple’s marketing page.

The funny thing about that is, that most of them can’t tell you what UNIX, POSIX, C, source code, or a compiler are.

“DTrace is a low-level debugging and profiling facility for detailed monitoring of virtually any aspect of an application.”

Will be heard by most users as:

“The inverse tachyon beam has caused a feedback loop in the primary routing systems for the EPS conduits, but with a controlled burst from the deflector aray, we may be able to cause a tetrion cascade of positively charged verdian particles.”

And if you want to rock and roll with the 95% of video games that will never be ported and cost double if they are, which no Mac under $1,000 can handle anyway, you’ll have to buy a copy of Vista.

Or try your hand at Darwine or Cider, (Wine and Cedega for Mac) which leaves you in the same boat as Linux users, who got Linux for free and their choice of fairly priced commodity hardware.

Not that I don’t enjoy playing $19.99 Windows games for $49.95 on the Mac.

(I would sell my soul for Angelina Jolie, however!)

So to wrap it up:

I doubt anyone really wants a Mac, they either want OS X and/or a status symbol.

People are trying to run OS X on the PC because they realize that Apple price gouges, they want OS X, and that in keeping OS X locked up, Apple has made it a forbidden fruit. :P

I don’t hate OS X, Apple, or the Mac, I have some stong opinions against some of the things they are doing, and how people are seemingly programmed to side with Apple.

Apple is clearly being belligerent, anti-competitive, abusive of it’s customers, and is cheating the public coffers and flagrantly abusing the court system to try to secure it’s monopoly.

When Microsoft does this behavior, they get smacked down by the DOJ or the EC, but when Apple engages in predatory behavior that creates a conflict of interest with their customers, we cheer them on?

Not me!

Apple is doing everything you would expect them to do, it’s cheaper to just sue competitors into the ground than to make your product capable of competing on it’s own merits.