Finnish mobile giant Nokia today released its fourth quarter financial results, posting a €1.07 billion ($1.4 billion) loss as sales declined by 21% year on year with smartphone sales and mobile sales down 31% and 1% respectively. Whilst it shows Nokia still has a lot of work to do, it sold 19.6 million smartphones and 93.9 million mobile devices, meaning that over the quarter, sales were up 17% and 5% respectively on the last quarter.
Matt Brian, Microsoft Paid Nokia $250m for Windows Phone Use via TNW

(via thenextweb)

Jerry Yang (Finally) Leaves Yahoo

Jerry Yang has left Yahoo, a few weeks after Scott Thompson took the reins as CEO. I looked back and found this from 2008, a rumor that Yang would be leaving the company as part of an acquisition by Microsoft. That deal — for $47B— fell through, and the company is now worth less than half that. As I said then, Yang fumbled the future at Yahoo, and should be shown the door. Now, he finally is out.

A Prediction: IBM and Microsoft

Roughly equal companies in terms of market cap — $220B — but with IBM’s enterprise value about $50B, I am predicting a merger of IBM and Microsoft with IBM leading the merged company, Ballmer retiring, and Microsoft being run — at least for a while — as a branded line of business in the twice as large, new IBM.

The fit of Microsoft’s enterprise solutions — Office, Exchange, Sharepoint, database, programming tools — with IBM’s corporate offerings is great. Also, IBM is the perfect partner to capitalize on the (eventual) migration away from Windows as a PC and server O/S.

As part of the deal, IBM would spin out various parts:

  • The gaming side — Kinect, Xbox — would be spun out as a standalone.
  • Phone software — spun out or sold off. Merged with Nokia?
  • Bing — a money-losing proposition, might be sold off.

We’ll see, but I think $25-50B could be saved in a merger, with all of that going to the bottom line for investors.

The Windows Phone Problem In Three Words: Way Too Late.

I can reduce a way-overlong post by Paris Lemon about what’s wrong with the Microsoft Phone:

Too late, not an order of magnitude better.

The iPhone was easily an order-of-magnitude better that the shit phones we all tolerated when it launched. Microsoft had years to come up with something awesome, and it’s ok. Which means death, today.

(via underpaidgenius)

This war with Apple is starting to piss me off. Google rolls out great new features for maps, for example, that are only available on Android. Jon Brodkin via Ars Technica Indoor Maps was added to version 6.0 of the Google Maps application for Android, and will presumably be added to additional mobile platforms in the future. We asked Google if Indoor Maps will work on desktop Web browsers, but were told that “the new indoor maps feature of Google Maps is only available on Android mobile devices at this time.” Microsoft, by the way, already has indoor mapping of major malls for Windows Phone and indoor mapping of airports and malls for the desktop.
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This war with Apple is starting to piss me off. Google rolls out great new features for maps, for example, that are only available on Android.

Jon Brodkin via Ars Technica

Indoor Maps was added to version 6.0 of the Google Maps application for Android, and will presumably be added to additional mobile platforms in the future. We asked Google if Indoor Maps will work on desktop Web browsers, but were told that “the new indoor maps feature of Google Maps is only available on Android mobile devices at this time.” Microsoft, by the way, already has indoor mapping of major malls for Windows Phone and indoor mapping of airports and malls for the desktop.

Facebook's iPad App Works Kind of Like an Operating System - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

Adam Clark Estes

It took months of waiting, a couple of false starts and a whole lot of speculation, but Facebook has finally launched an iPad app. However, the upgrade is much more than a tablet-friendly version of the website. Facebook is also carrying over its developer platform to mobile. This means that all of the slick new class of Facebook apps that Mark Zuckerberg announced a couple of weeks ago at the f8 developers conference will be more integrated into the mobile experience. The specific details are a little bit confusing at first as Facebook is spoon-feeding the functionality to users, but we can already tell: Facebook is starting to function like an independent mobile operating system.

[…]

As [Facebook’s Luke] Shepard explains [here], Facebook apps will now be fully integrated into the mobile experience as their own apps within the Facebook app. If you receive a notification or request from a friend in a compatible app, tapping the update will switch to the mobile app if you have it on your phone or take you to Apple’s app store to download it. Shepard uses Words with Friends as an example. Let’s say your pal plays the word “quixotic”—a high scorer, by the way—you’ll receive a notification and tapping it will take your straight to the app to make your move. Facebook is also extending Credits to the mobile apps so you can also buy things within their framework. Again, it’s like its own little operating system within Apple’s iOS.

Facebook is headed toward a direct confrontation with Apple and Google (and Amazon and Microsoft) for the future of computing: the social operating system.

Apple certainly shouldn’t let Facebook create an independent app store.

When is Facebook going to develop its own tablet?

For another metric, we measure adoption. If you look at Windows 7, it took them about 20 weeks to reach 10% of their base. It took Lion 2 weeks. - Tim Cook
Six million copies of Lion downloaded so far — 80 percent more than Snow Leopard - The Next Web (via thenextweb)

(via thenextweb)

Daring Fireball: All His Life Has He Looked Away, to the Future, to the Horizon. Never His Mind on Where He Was. What He Was Doing.

Gruber responds to a Windows 8 fan boy, Paul Thurrott, who twittered ‘Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win.’ after seeing a demo on a Samsung-produced tablet:

John Gruber via Daring Fireball

What did Microsoft show, though? They showed a Metro-style touchscreen tablet user interface that is, without argument, original. No accusations of ripping off the iPad here. Microsoft is admirably blazing its own trail.

But the OS reportedly isn’t coming out for at least a year. The demo tablet hardware from Samsung they’re showing it on (and giving to Build attendees) is a Core i5 Intel-based PC replete with a fan. Spec-wise these units are much more like MacBook Airs than iPads. Presumably actual shipping iPad-competing Windows 8 tablets will use low-power mobile CPUs — be they ARM, Atom, whatever, just so long as they get iPad-caliber long battery life and low temperatures.

How will Windows 8 run on such hardware? When will they actually ship? How many as-yet-unannounced iPad 3s will Apple have sold by the time the first Windows 8 tablet hits stores? (Not to mention the many tens of millions of iPad 2s Apple will sell in just the next quarter alone.)

It’s all in the future. All potential, nothing actual. Think about how different Apple’s and Microsoft’s approaches are. Apple unveiled the iPad to the public only when it was a completely finished product, two months before it hit stores. The demo units we in the press had access to that day were exactly like the mass-produced iPads that shipped to customers two months later. Can you imagine Apple doing with the iPad what Microsoft is doing with Windows 8? Say, showing a prototype iPad at WWDC in June 2009, running on MacBook Pro-caliber Intel hardware? Letting the public and the press play with the OS in half-finished alpha state on prototype hardware? Impossible even to imagine. (There were no hands-on demos, let alone take-home prototypes or developer downloads, when Apple showed a “sneak preview” of Mac OS X Lion at last year’s “Back to the Mac” event.)

I’m not passing judgment here — at least not yet — regarding which strategy is superior. I simply wish to direct your attention at how utterly different the two companies are.

Gruber seems to be making a corporate culture argument, but I think this is also a case of Microsoft playing catch-up, from way back in the pack.They hope to stall some buyers from buying an iPad, thinking that some razzamatazz might hypnotize them.

But iPad is clearly dominating the tablet space, and I don’t think Microsoft has a chance.

I am still betting on a Microsoft/Facebook social OS alliance. I wonder how closely integrated Facebook will be in Windows 8, when it launches.

Apple is taking over the world. Microsoft has not realized how bad things are going to get for them. They think it’s bad now, just wait,” he said, adding that “It’s always frightening when one powerful group owns all of the clients. Maybe it won’t be as frightening under Tim Cook.
YC’s Graham: Apple is taking over the world, Microsoft hasn’t realized how bad things will get - TNW Insider (via thenextweb)

(via thenextweb)

Learning From The Google+ Experiment: Operating System, Platform, Apps

As part of the chorus singing about Google+ (see Armano’s insightful The Social Layer: Six Thoughts On Where Google Plus Is Going as just the most recent example), let me make a few observations:

It’s very hard to separate foundational concepts of Google+ from what might considered features or apps. Foundational elements would include identity, following, streams, and sparks. But Circles, Hangouts, and Huddle are best considered apps, in the broadest sense. So apps are a foundational element of the Google+ architecture, and they can closely integrate into the user experience of Google+, like Circles does.

But we are moving toward a world where most of the foundational elements of Google+ will be part of a next generation version of Android, and the things that feel like apps on Google+ will be, in fact, apps running on that future social OS.

This means that I could drop Circles, and use some other app as a mechanism for organizing my sociality. Imagine an imaginary app, called Groupings, that works very differently than Circles, but does build on the foundational elements of identity, following, streams and sparks.

But I would want to follow people not just on the Google+ enhanced version of Android, but the Twitter-enhanced, social versions of iOS and OS X, as well. So long as these two operating systems provide similar social foundations, Groupings could run on my OS X laptop and on my pal’s Android smartphone.

In this model, the operating systems become the platform, and apps like Circles or Groupings could run on either, or on a future, social Windows 9 (once Facebook acquires the phone parts of Microsoft). 

I could opt to follow someone, with a globally unique identity provided by the operating system of choice: in my case, let’s say by OS X, and the person I want to follow, David Armano, by Android. We would also be able to use those identities on any device.

Once I opt to follow, the basics are provided: I will get what he drops in his public stream, and it will appear in my ‘upstream’ — the unfiltered collation of all those I follow. What I post or repost falls into my ‘downstream’ which would be directed to everyone who is following me.

Obviously, the various operating systems have to support the fundamental protocols for this social messaging to work, and we will see this in due course, although it’s likely that we will see several contending models that don’t interoperate, and closed worlds built by the various operating systems providers.

We need the social operating system equivalent of http and email protocols to arise, so that an open social web can emerge.

We need the social operating system equivalent of http and email protocols to arise, so that an open social web can emerge.

So one thing we can learn from the Google+ experiment is this: I shouldn’t have to login to Google+, and use Circles, to follow David Armano’s writing over there. The works of those I follow should find me no matter what applications or operating systems I use. I don’t have to have Outlook running to read Armano’s email, and I don’t have to browse his website with Chrome, just because those are the tools he uses. 

And the developers of these applications, platforms, and operating systems need to be pushing aggressively in that direction, because in the meantime we are dividing the space for social discourse online into a maze of contending, non-interoperable models that don’t harmonize yet.