Android vs. Apple and the state of smartphone industry: 4 takeaways

By Larry Dignan | July 28, 2011, 7:16am PDT

Summary

Nielsen data indicates that Android is the top smartphone platform and Apple is the top manufacturer. In between those data points is a lot of nuance.

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Nielsen data indicates that Android is the top smartphone platform and Apple is the top manufacturer. In between those data points is a lot of nuance.

First, here’s Nielsen’s money graphic.

That graphic says a lot about the state of the smartphone market today. Here are my top four takeaways:

1. There’s a toss-up between integrated and partner-based platforms. The smartphone industry is often compared to PCs in the early days. Once upon a time, Apple controlled hardware and software. Microsoft partnered with OEMs. Microsoft won that market share game. So far in the smartphone industry, we have a draw for the most part. Consider that Research in Motion and Apple both control their software and hardware and integrate the two. Combined RIM and Apple have 48 percent of the market. Considering that RIM hasn’t had product on the market for a year that integrated share is impressive. Toss in HP, which controls the WebOS and you have half the market with an integrated system approach. On the partner side of the equation, Android has 39 percent share and Microsoft chips in another 9 percent.
2. RIM isn’t dead yet. Imagine a company that has management issues and a product void that has lasted forever in smartphone terms and still had 20 percent of the OS market. That’s RIM. If RIM’s BlackBerry OS 7 devices can do anything in the market, the company has a shot at being a major player.
3. Microsoft needs more hardware partners. Look at the sliver that is Microsoft’s platform share. Then look at the partners. Microsoft has two friends on the smartphone block—HTC and Samsung. The software giant will need more OEMs if it’s going to compete. Given Nokia is a no-show in the U.S. there are no guarantees that Microsoft’s partnership with Finland’s leading tech company will matter much.
4. Android looks zero sum for hardware players. The Android partners—HTC, Motorola and Samsung—have carved up the market nicely. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see Android doing much better in market share than it is today. That fact means that HTC, Motorola and Samsung are going to wind up killing each other to grow share.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/android-vs-apple-and-the-state-of-smartphone-industry-4-takeaways/53392?tag=nl.e539

Microsoft: Cloud need only be open surface, not open source

By Paula Rooney | July 27, 2011, 12:23pm PDT

Summary

At Oscon 2011, Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft, said as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open, that is, open surface, customers don’t care about whether the underlying platform is open source or closed source.
Microsoft also announced a new version of Azure SDK for PHP is now available and the company is announcing new tools to cloud enable open source applications for Azure.

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Microsoft is more open — at least on the surface — and that’s all that matters in the cloud era, one company exec maintains.

At Oscon 2011, Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft, said as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open, that is, open surface, customers don’t care about the underlying platform.

So, it does not matter that the cloud is built primarily on open source technologies, notably Linux?

“Am I saying that openness doesn’t matter in the cloud? No, openness is extremely important [but] I argue that in the cloud the source code is the Terms of Use and the SLA,” Rabellino said, referring to service-level agreements.”

He coined these terms — open surface and open core — to describe a continued commingling — or a blurring — of open source and closed source software that lies at the core of the enterprise and the cloud.

Open core, or open source, is the existing model in which core features are open source and value-added proprietary commercial software is built on top of it to monetize the technology.

The open surface model, Microsoft’s approach, can be done with APIs, protocols and standards, the Microsoft exec said. The two models are coming together nicely.

He noted, for example, that PHP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform “pretty well” and that Microsoft is working with WordPress, Drupal, Zoomla, Eclipse and other open source projects to ensure interoperability on Azure.

“This is what’s happening in the cloud. the cloud changes a lot of things. the [traditional] yardsticks we had aren’t there anymore. What version of Facebook are you running? it doesn’t matter anymore,” he noted. “In the cloud, you have all this technology blurring . Sometimes you don’t see them and when you see services , does it matter? Can you tell what stack has been producing JSON or XML feed? No.”

Microsoft also announced a new version of Azure SDK for PHP is now available and the company is announcing new tools to cloud enable open source developed applications for Azure. The company is also working with almost 400 open source projects to ensure interoperability, including an open source project called PHP Cloud Sniffer.

Rabellino, who came to Microsoft from Italy nine months ago, said employees in more than half of Microsoft’s 60 buildings in Seattle are working with open source projects.

“We have changed as a company. We have become more open. We want to work with open source comunities,” he said.

Microsoft is a Diamond sponsor of OSCON 2011.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/microsoft-cloud-need-only-be-open-surface-not-open-source/9308?alertspromo=&tag=nl.rSINGLE

MacBook Air and OS X Lion synergy: A big hurdle for Windows 8

By James Kendrick | July 22, 2011, 5:37am PDT

Summary

The synergy between these the new MacBook Airs and OS X Lion is powerful stuff, and demonstrates the big task ahead for Microsoft’s work in progress, Windows 8.

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Unless you have been sleeping in a cave somewhere, you know that Apple released new MacBook Air notebooks and OS X Lion together. The joint release is significant because Lion is designed from the ground up to optimize the user experience on Apple hardware. The synergy between these Apple products is powerful stuff, and demonstrates the big task ahead for Microsoft’s work in progress, Windows 8.

OS X Lion has a raft of features designed to make working with a MacBook Air, even older MacBooks, as intuitive as possible. The ability to have lots of programs running and easily get to any one of them is already changing the way I work with OS X. The handling of the small notebook screen is pure genius, as is moving between programs occupying the entire display via simple touch gestures. The hardware and software have been written from the ground up to work together.

Apple hasn’t done this overnight, it has been laying the groundwork for this synergy for a while. It started by putting large touchpads on every MacBook, and carried it over to non-notebooks with the release of the Magic Mouse and Magic TrackPad. The groundwork for a touch optimized experience was laid even before the iPad hit the scene. The company had a good plan and has executed it well.

This is the giant hurdle Microsoft faces with the next version of Windows, not so cleverly codenamed Windows 8. The sneak peeks Microsoft has given us of Windows 8 show an exciting new direction for the platform. Windows 8 attempts to do what Apple has executed, making the OS work efficiently with the system in the user’s favor. What will determine how well consumers react to Windows 8 when released will be how easy it is to use, especially on notebooks. Windows 8 must find a way to handle smaller displays intelligently like OS X Lion, and bring touch (not necessarily the screen) into the equation.

This is a daunting task for Microsoft as a software company. The legacy of Windows is that by design of Microsoft’s business plan, it must work on a wide variety of hardware made by other companies; this is not a complication faced by Apple. Microsoft decided long ago to be a software company, and this is now a competitive disadvantage. If it has to compromise the user experience offered by Windows 8 to make it work on some hardware, it will not compare well with OS X. That is a simple fact of life in this competitive environment.

Computer users have evolved the last few years to expect systems to be easy, even enjoyable to use. In the early days of Windows we all expected things to be complicated, and keeping everything going properly required access to an “expert”. Those days are gone, folks now expect their computer to just work, and be intuitive at that. This is the biggest obstacle facing adoption of Windows 8, as it means the OS must work on whatever hardware Microsoft certifies it for, and run well.

I am optimistic about the next version of Windows, more so than with any version in a long time. I hope that Microsoft’s decision to broaden the scope of hardware that Windows 8 will service doesn’t turn into a bad decision. Apple’s ecosystem is getting better due to the limited hardware focus needed due to building everything internally. Windows 8 doesn’t have that luxury, and that may be an awfully big a hurdle to jump.

Related:

• Why my next laptop will be a MacBook Air
• First impressions of OS X Lion for mobile workers
• The 11-inch MacBook Air is the best laptop I’ve ever owned
• Apple (mostly) kills off the white Macbook
• Apple MacBook Air: The original Ultrabook gets even better
• Apple rocks China: Can it outrun counterfeiters?
• Apple’s corporate iPhone, iPad app strength bad news for rivals
• Apple Q3 a blowout: 20.34 million iPhones; 9.25 million iPads

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/macbook-air-and-os-x-lion-synergy-a-big-hurdle-for-windows-8/3403?tag=nl.e539

How Microsoft plans to sell a 'couple hundred million' more Windows 7 PCs before Windows 8

By Mary Jo Foley | July 22, 2011, 7:35am PDT

Summary

Given there’s still a year (give or take) until Windows 8 launches, what is Microsoft’s game plan to keep the bottom from dropping out of the Windows PC market?

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As Microsoft’s fourth-quarter fiscal 2011 earnings made clear, Windows 7 sales — with the glaring exception of netbooks — are good, but not as good as they used to be. Given there’s still a year (give or take) s until Windows 8 launches, what is Microsoft’s game plan to keep the bottom from dropping out of the Windows PC market?

The enterprise market will likely keep Windows 7 sales chugging, as many larger businesses are only now finally deploying Windows 7, after months of planning and testing. And, as Microsoft execs said during yesterday’s earnings call, the emerging market countries are snapping up a lot of Windows 7, though at lower prices — and with substantially higher piracy rates — than the “developed” nations.

It’s probably safe to assume Microsoft will launch another upgrade-guarantee program, as it traditionally does a few months before a new operating system launch, allowing those purchasing current Windows-model PCs to get a free upgrade to the next Windows release once it’s out.

But Microsoft needs to keep consumer demand coming in for Windows 7 if the company plans to sell “those couple of hundred million PCs between now and ‘Windows 8′” that Microsoft expects to move, according to OEM Chief Steve Guggenheimer, who spoke at Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference. (Note: Microsoft officials said that the company has sold 400 million Windows 7 licenses since the product was introduced in 2009.)

Even though Microsoft doesn’t make Microsoft-branded PCs, increasingly it is positioning itself as selling Windows PCs (no doubt thanks to a little lot of pressure from archrival Apple). This is one of the slides Microsoft General Manager of Worldwide OEM Distribution, Terry Hagerty, showed during her session on “OEM Through Distribution” (slide deck available to registered partner show attendees only) at the Worldwide Partner conference in Los Angeles on July 11.

(click on the image above to enlarge)

Microsoft has begun making available a “Windows 7 Featured PCs” list to distributors to try to get more information out about the breadth and depth of Windows 7 PCs available to consumers and businesses, Hagerty told her Partner Conference audience. This is a “best in class” list for sales, marketing and technical teams that Microsoft is hoping they use to “create excitement and demand for Windows 7 PCs.”

There are a number of Windows PC form factors and models that many current and potential users — who don’t go to trade shows where they can see lots of different Windows PC models from different vendors side-by-side — have no idea even exist. Retail chains usually only stock a few Windows PCs, and Microsoft brick-and-mortar stores, for now, are very few and far between. (Microsoft officials have said they plan to open 75 more MIcrosoft retail stores in the next two to three years, and will expand the stores internationally.)

(click on the image above to enlarge)

Here’s a sample of the July Windows 7 Featured PC list for consumers from Hagery’s slide deck:

(click on the image to enlarge)

Here’s a sample of the Windows 7 Featured PC list for businesses:

(click on the image to enlarge)

One observation: Microsoft isn’t touting any of the available Windows 7 PCs as “tablets” in these materials. It uses the word “companion” to describe slates/tablets in its two Featured PC sample pages. And the PC matrix slide above doesn’t use the “tablet” designation at all, either. Instead, it describes Windows “slates” as “PCs with no built-in keyboard or mouse and which use touch and/or pen for input.” Maybe Microsoft is trying to distance itself from its less-than-successful tablet past (and not-so-plucky tablet present)?

In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens with Windows and Windows 7 PC demand in the coming few months, as Microsoft finally begins sharing more specifics about Windows 8….

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/how-microsoft-plans-to-sell-a-couple-hundred-million-more-windows-7-pcs-before-windows-8/10147

‘We view a tablet as a PC’: Microsoft chooses to repeat history

By James Kendrick | July 13, 2011, 5:36am PDT

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It is beginning to look like Microsoft is about to repeat the Tablet PC history with Windows 8, and that is not a good thing.

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Microsoft is trying to excite the tech crowd with Windows 8, the next version of the platform that the company is pushing for computers of all types, including tablets to compete with Apple’s iPad. The folks from Redmond have been showing early prototypes of Windows 8 that look a lot like the Windows Phone 7 interface, with live tiles sliding around the screen. It is obvious the attempt is to keep the Windows platform as the dominant line for Microsoft, while the rest of the mobile world has realized that full-blown computers are not what tablet customers want. It is beginning to look like Microsoft is about to repeat the Tablet PC history, and that is not a good thing.

“We view a tablet as a PC”.

This statement given yesterday by Windows Phone president Andy Lees at the Worldwide Partners Conference as reported by Electronista was directed at putting to bed any ideas that outsiders have for a tablet OS based on Windows Phone.

According to Microsoft’s transcript of Lees’ talk the PC theme remained, but had a few caveats (emphasis mine).

One of the key important things here, though, is the change that’s yet to happen, but it’s about to happen, and that is the bringing together of these devices into a unified ecosystem, because at the core of the device itself it’s possible to be common across phones, PCs, and TVs, and even other things, because the price drops dramatically. Then it will be a single ecosystem. We won’t have an ecosystem for PCs, and an ecosystem for phones, one for tablets. They’ll all come together. And just look at the opportunity here.

In 2010, if you count all of these things, there’s just under 700 million units sold in that year. And yet if you look at the predictions from IDC and add them up, that will increase to over a billion units that are sold in 2012. And notice how it’s additive; it’s not that this is about replacing the PC. And that’s why our strategy is that these new form factors are within a single ecosystem and not new ecosystems themselves. Windows has always spanned different PC form factors. And with Windows 8 we’re going to take this to a whole new level including tablets.

Now, a lot of people have asked me, are we going to produce a phone that is a tablet? You know, are we going to use Windows Phone 7 to produce tablets? Well, that is in conflict with this strategy. We view a tablet as a sort of PC. We want people to be able to do the sorts of things that they expect on a PC on a tablet, things like networking to be able to connect to networks, and utilize networking tools, to get USB drives and plot them into the tablet. To be able to do things like printing, all of the things using Office, using all of the things you would expect from a PC and provide a hybrid about how you can do that with the tablet, as well.

The comments shined a light on Microsoft’s view of the tablet market that is not accurate. It keeps alive the mistaken view that drove Microsoft’s Tablet PCs, that full-blown computers are what consumers want in a tablet. That didn’t work with the original Tablet PC, and that is not going to work for today’s consumer tablets. It’s looking like Microsoft is determined to repeat history, and a failed one at that.

Apple set the consumer space on its ear with the release of the iPad, the first tablet that breached the mainstream market in numbers. The iPad defined an entire market that has companies scrambling to penetrate, and none have done so successfully to date. What caught consumer’s eyes in the iPad was the fact that it wasn’t a full PC with all of the complexities those bring. No, the iPad was a pure mobile OS that focused on bringing a touch tablet experience that was simple yet full-featured enough to let users do the things that matter. Getting on the web, playing games and consuming media were the focus of the iPad with iOS, and consumers bought into the system by the millions.

The original Tablet PC designed by Microsoft is a full PC that nobody bought in significant numbers, and it has been around for a decade. The iPad sold more tablets in the first nine months than all of the Tablet PCs bought combined over a decade. That is a significant indicator of what consumers want, a simple mobile tablet and not a full-blown PC.

Microsoft seems to be pushing the ‘tablet as a PC’ philosophy in a desperate attempt to keep the Windows line driving everything it does outside the smartphone space. The choice to repeat history will likely have the same results as the first time; nice products that nobody buys because they are too complex to operate, maintain and develop apps for. Consumers don’t want tablets that are PCs, they want them to just work.

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Top Five Linux Contributor: Microsoft

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | July 17, 2011, 1:45pm PDT

Summary

While you shouldn’t expect Windows to be open-sourced in your life-time, Microsoft—yes, Microsoft—is the fifth largest code contributor to Linux 3.0.

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Cats and dogs; apples and oranges; Linux and Microsoft. Two of these three things do not go together. Would you believe that Microsoft—yes Microsoft—was the fifth largest contributor to the soon to be released Linux 3.0 kernel? Believe it.

In a Linux Weekly News story, currently only available to subscribers, an analysis of Linux 3.0 contributors reveals that Microsoft was the fifth largest corporate contributer to Linux 3.0. While only 15h overall, that still puts Microsoft behind only Red Hat, Intel, Novell, and IBM in contributing new code to this version of Linux.

To be exact, Microsoft developer K. Y Srinivasan gets the credit for helping to improve Linux. Of course, as you might guess, neither Srinivasan nor Microsoft are doing this due to any particular love tor Linux per se.

The vast bulk of Microsoft’s contributions has been to its own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s 64-bit hypervisor-based virtualization system. It’s Microsoft’s answer to VMware and Linux’s own native Kernel-based Virtualization Manager (KVM).

Microsoft you see wants it to be possible for both Linux to run Server 2008 R2 instances and for Windows 2008 R2 to run Linux instances using its own virtualizaton tools. Microsoft has been working on this for some time with Novell, now SUSE.

At first, this code wasn’t open-sourced at all, but in 2009, it was discovered that some GPL code was already in Hyper-V’s Linux drivers. So it was that “In a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.”

It also helped, of course, that Microsoft, ever so reluctantly, has been forced to work with Linux to try to keep their market share. As Matt Asay, a noted open-source executive and author said at the time, “The news reflects Microsoft’s continued interest in lobotomizing its virtualization competition through low prices, but also the recognition that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat, Novell, and others in the open-source camp.”

In the months after that though Microsoft did little to improve its code. Indeed Greg Kroah-Hartman, who oversees code staging to the Linux kernel, has complained at times that “The [Microsoft] developers again seem to have disappeared, this is getting old” and he threatened to remove the code from Linux.

Microsoft seems to have finally gotten the message. In the last few months they’ve worked hard to improve Hyper-V and Linux interoperability.

This may not last, and it’s really only for Microsoft’s own goals, but for now, Microsoft, yes Microsoft, is a leading contributor to Linux. Now, in these days of miracles, let me see if I can get my dogs to stop barking at my neighbors’ cats.

Related Stories:

New Name, Same Linux

Could you do Linus “Linux” Torvalds job?

The Five Best Desktop Linux Distributions

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http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/top-five-linux-contributor-microsoft/9254

Another Outlook-sync problem hits Microsoft BPOS users

By Mary Jo Foley | July 19, 2011, 10:45am PDT

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Users of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) suite are reporting on July 19 yet another “service disruption” — one that sounds very much like the June 22 one that affected a number of users of Microsoft’s cloud service.

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Users of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) suite are reporting on July 19 yet another “service disruption” — one that sounds very much like the June 22 one that affected a number of users of Microsoft’s cloud service.

As happened last month, the BPOS disruption resulted in the service health dashboard not updating, leaving frustrated BPOS users in the dark about what was happening.

The problem this time, again, seems to be linked to Exchange Online, the cloud version of Exchange that is at the heart of Microsoft’s Google Apps alternative. Today’s downtime is affecting users in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, according to a notice posted on Microsoft’s BPOS status feed.

(click on the image above to enlarge)

“Would you believe, another BPOS outage?” said one customer who e-mailed me around 1 p.m. ET on July 19. “I’m seeing issues with the web-based OWA (https://mail.microsoftonline.com), usually brings up a login page, and our mobile devices are having trouble syncing.”

“BPOS is experiencing yet another service interruption. Just like the one on June 22nd,” said another user who pinged me around the same time.

BPOS is a bundle of Microsoft-hosted Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Communications Online. The successor to BPOS is Office 365, which Microsoft launched at the end of June. Microsoft officials have said they expect Office 365 to be more resilient than BPOS because Exchange Online in the Office 365 version has been architected to be multitenant from the get-go. (The Exchange Online version in BPOS is based on older Exchange 2007 code that was adapted to work in the cloud.)

I’ve contacted Microsoft Online Services for a status update on today’s BPOS disruption. As of 1:45 p.m. ET or so, te @MSOnline twitter account is saying that there’s an investigation of e-mail connectivity issues affecting the Americas.

As of 2 p.m. ET, @MSOnline said that the disruption was over and service restored:

As one of my twitter followers noted, all these BPOS issues are going to give a migration push to those willing to stay with Microsoft’s cloud service. But in the meantime, the disruptions are definitely detrimental for partners and customers who are sold on Microsoft’s cloud platform.

I’ve asked Microsoft officials if there is any plan to shore up BPOS as it exists now, knowing that migrations to Office 365 may take a year. If I hear back on that, I’ll let you know what the plan is.

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http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/another-outlook-sync-problem-hits-microsoft-bpos-users/10098?tag=nl.e539

Microsoft vs Apple: The back-to-school battle

By Manan Kakkar July 19, 2011, 3:01am PDT
Summary

In August, a new academic year begins and many — like me — are looking for a new a personal computer. The Macs seem to be a popular choice, according to statistics; and until this year Apple had a very enticing Back to School offer: a free iPod Touch with the purchase of a Macbook. I expected the offer to continue and was waiting for a refresh to the 13″ Macbook Air. Apple announced their Back to School offer for this year and I was disappointed. It is a $100 iTunes Store credit that one can use to buy applications or media. Microsoft had announced their Back to School offer before Apple and it now seems like a better deal. An Xbox 360 free with a $700 PC is a bargain.

The base Xbox is available at $200 while the 8GB iPod Touch is $230. It is amusing how a game console is cheaper than a portable music player, but keeping that aside, the price difference between the devices isn’t huge to the end consumer. The choice is quite personal: a portable media player that can do free video calls and games vs. a gaming console that can be used with the hottest selling accessory, has the best gaming experience and access a huge portfolio of multimedia content.

This brings me to up-sell on these devices for both companies. In Apple’s case, apps, books, games and multimedia on the iTunes Store generated revenues of $1,782,000 in 2010 with 82.7% market share. (Asymco says the App Store generated $3 billion in sales.) Users download a lot of apps. Some numbers about the iPod Touch and iTunes store:

• Average iOS user will download 83 apps in 2011 compared to 51 in 2010 (Source)
• App downloads have overtaken song downloads on the iTunes Store (Source)
• More than 50% of the iPods sold were iPod Touch devices (Source)
• More than 15 Billion apps have been downloaded. (Source)

Comparing this to the revenues Xbox generates for Microsoft:

• Xbox LIVE has more than 30 Million members
• 53 Million Xbox 360 consoles
• 40% time spent on XBox is for non-gaming activity (Source)
• Xbox (console, Kinect and LIVE) were responsible for Microsoft’s strong Q3 results (SEC Filing)

Xbox offers Live TV, Hulu, Netflix and access to the Zune marketplace. Point being, both devices are not a onetime investment for the customer, they are gateways to revenues for the companies and partners through value added services.

While writing this piece I came across an article where analysts are predicting death of the iPod. A lot of users own iPhones, it offers the same features as the iPod Touch and more, so does the iPad. According to Apple’s numbers, Macs and iPhone or iPads make for the preferred combination and in such a scenario, a $100 store credit does make sense. However, I prefer to have a dedicated music player, primarily because I can survive with a media player with no battery but not a phone with no battery life.

Many consumers who buy the Macbook won’t be buying the iPod Touch. While the deal offered by Microsoft is more value for money for the consumer, unfortunately the PCs don’t compete with Macbooks. For example, the base Samsung Series 9 is $1650 and a similar Macbook Air is $1300 (minus i5 & backlit keyboards, both are expected as part of the refresh most likely at the same price). The Macbooks are good hardware but a $100 store credit doesn’t entice me. I would have spent that $100 even if I got the free iPod Touch, and herein lies my dilemma: Do I go for the better PC or the better Back to School deal?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/microsoft-vs-apple-the-back-to-school-battle/52560?tag=nl.e539