🚀 go-pugleaf

Dan Pop (Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch) wrote:
: Who cares?  Today, there are orders of magnitude more typewriter users
: than Mac users. 

Well, no.  To have "orders of magnitude" more typewriter users than Mac 
users, you'd have to have 100 times as many typewriter users than Mac 
users.  There are about 20 million Mac users (at least- assuming *only* 
one user per Mac).  That would mean 2 *billion* typewriter users.  Or one 
out of three people in the world using typewriters.  Don't bet on it.

: And more typewriters are sold every day than Mac's.

Not any more.  There's not that many companies even *making* them any 
more- they've all switched over to making printers for computers.  
All of the typewriters I see in offices nowadays are "legacy systems," 
and aren't being replaced when they wear out.  The only places that still 
use typewriters as a major office tool are decripit companies and 
government bureaucracies.

: They're one order of magnitude cheaper and don't become obsolete with the
: same speed as the Mac's do.

A cheap, professional quality typewriter costs anywhere from three to 
five hundred dollars.  They'd have to cost under a hundred to be "one 
order of magnitude cheaper."  And they're completely obsolete.

By the way- do you know what "order of magnitude" means?  Ask one of the 
scientists at CERN- they should know.

:  A 30 years old typewriter is still perfectly
: usable.  Can you say the same about a 10 years old Mac?

A 10 year old Mac would be a Plus.  And I have a lot of clients who use 
them every day for lots of tasks.  And a 30 year old typewriter probably 
*isn't* usable, due to the lack of companies making replacement parts for 
them.  It's hard enough even finding ribbons for most of the typewriters 
in the world.

: In the US, there are only three car companies still in business.  Shall
: we conclude that this industry was far better off 50 years ago, when there
: were a lot more companies? 

Actually, if you want to compare to the auto industry, you're in a whole 
different economic model.  But there are a lot more than three "car 
companies" than that, due to the presence of Japan and Germany- they 
build cars here too now.  So besides the "big three," you also have 
Toyota and Mitsubishi and VW and Mercedes-Benz and Volvo and...

By the way- 50 years ago there weren't that many companies making cars.  
50 years ago was 1944, and we were too busy building tanks and planes to 
make a lot of cars.

For a better analogy, compare the US auto industry of 30 years ago (the 
same time frame of those typewriters you love so much).  It was stagnant, 
turining out oversized cars with low gas mileage and indifferent quality, 
and only turned around after the success of the imports in the 1970s 
forced the US manufacturers to get their shit together.

If it weren't for Apple (and the resot of them, you'd be seeing MS-DOS 5 
instead of Windows 95.  Maybe.

-- 

Chad Irby           /    My greatest fear: that future generations will,
cirby@gate.net     /      for some reason, refer to me as an "optimist."