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Windows Laptops Need Better Engineering, Not Better Marketing

October 16, 2015

Vlad Savov, for The Verge:

The chief marketing officers of Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Lenovo, and HP will gather to host a webcast introducing a major new advertising campaign for the PC. It will mark the first time that the five biggest names in the PC industry have come together around a single, unified message to the consumer. […]

The PC industry really needs saving from itself, because its recent history has been one of either price wars that lead everyone to cut corners or, alternatively, the pursuit of high-margin gimmicks with low chance of success.

Apple gets the fundamentals right in a very serious and rigorous way, and then it gets fancy with its marketing spiel. PC vendors have tended to do the opposite, going for outlandish and gimmicky ideas in their designs, but presenting them in boring and clichéd ways. […]

Except for Apple, personal computer vendors use a common OS, common parts, and have a common approach and speed to computer innovation. It’s no wonder they can’t differentiate themselves. And now, it’s to the point that they’re desperate enough to use common advertising. Will one more “commonality” help? Unlikely.

The irony: PC makers have avoided custom R&D to, essentially, save money. Instead, it’s cost them so much that they’re doing this common marketing campaign. And this brings us full-circle to Savov’s title. Great title. Great point.

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Filed Under: Innovation, Microsoft, Personal Computer, Windows

Microsoft Pushes Deeper Into Hardware

October 7, 2015

Shira Ovide, for The Wall Street Journal:

The string of announcements underscores Microsoft’s accelerating push into computing hardware over the past three years, starting with the first Surface tablet model in 2012. Mr. Nadella has said developing hardware would be crucial to Microsoft’s ability to keep pace with rapid changes in consumer technology.

The best work Microsoft (and ex-Nokia staff) has done in years. I’m really happy for Microsoft and its employees.

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Filed Under: Microsoft, Smartphones, Tablets, Wearables - Other, Windows

Good Words by Microsoft’s Leaders

October 7, 2015

Good words by Microsoft executives at Tuesday’s Microsoft Windows 10 event:

We design our Microsoft devices to create and re-invent categories.

— Terry Myerson, EVP of the Windows and Devices Group

We’re making great progress towards our aspiration we shared in January: to move people from needing Windows, to choosing Windows, to loving Windows. […]

What matters most is the mobility of your experience, not the mobility of any single device. Because as devices come and go, and evolve, you persist. And the journey of personal computing has taught us this single lesson: No single device will be a hub of activity forever. The hub is you. […]

The concept of building a new device for an application experience is best brought to life by Surface*. […]

Every successful company has a soul, a unique sensibility that is the soul of its inspiration and its creativity.

— Satya Nadella, CEO

Regarding Myerson’s comments: good reasons. By the way, while I didn’t pick out any particularly exciting, stand-alone comments from Panos Panay, the CVP of Surface Computing and the head of the hardware division, he was the best presenter. When he introduced the new Lumia smartphones and the Surface products, he spoke authentically, with energy, and went beyond “what”, to explain “how” and “why”.

______
*I would preface this sentence with “At Microsoft”, because clearly Apple excels at this.

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Filed Under: Microsoft, Windows

Saturday Assorted Links

August 8, 2015

I’m digging out after being on a great vacation in Maui, Hawaii with extended family. It’s also good to be back, though. Below are some interesting articles or sentences that caught my eye recently.

1. Xiaomi rumored to launch a Windows 10 tablet in the upcoming months. I believe it’s possible. Largely because of this.

2. With Some Work, Cortana Could Be Windows 10’s Killer Application.

I have some travel coming up, and within seconds—literally—of asking Cortana some questions, I was able to check the weather forecast for my destination, find a handful of restaurants around my hotel, and find out what kind of facilities are offered there. I also quickly found a couple of specific recipes online, search for some images, launched some applications, and added a handful of reminders to my calendar. I even had Cortana remind me to get up and walk around every couple of hours, so I wasn’t glued to my office chair for too long each day.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. The first system-wide assistant on a large-scale OS.

3. Tiny sensor tells you when your favorite places are crowded.

The tiny infrared detector is effectively a smarter, more connected pedestrian traffic sensor: it tells apps how many people are entering or leaving a building at any moment, giving you a good sense of whether that restaurant is packed or blissfully empty.

It’s going to be a sensor-filled world. It’s just a question of when.

4. Why the ‘ruthlessly efficient’ editor-in-chief of The New Yorker never tweets.

“I don’t tweet, mainly because I’ve noticed that some of the other people with jobs like mine have either ended up doing all promotional tweets, which is boring, or writing something half-thought-out that would be better used in a more considered piece of writing,” he told Business Insider.

Words to ponder.

5. You Need More than ‘Natural Talent’ to Make it as a Photographer.

Mr. Turlington: Any dips**t can take pictures […] Art, that’s special. What can you bring to it that nobody else can?

Applies to many things in work and life.

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Filed Under: Assorted Links, Innovation, Intelligent Assistance, Leadership, Microsoft, Productivity, Sensors, Tablets, Windows, Xiaomi

Microsoft, Capitulation and the End of Windows Everywhere

July 30, 2015

Good words by Benedict Evans, from Andreessen Horowitz, on his own blog, ben-evans.com:

Though a big part of Microsoft’s mobile strategy has been to push towards common code across Windows on the desktop and on mobile, so that it’s easy to write apps for both at the same time, in practice that’s largely irrelevant. The apps that people want on smartphones are not being written for desktop Windows anyway. Uber doesn’t have a desktop Windows app, and neither does Instacart, Pinterest or Instagram. […] You can’t tempt developers to support Windows Phone by saying ‘it’s easy to deploy your desktop app to mobile’ if there is no desktop app. So Windows is not a point of leverage for Microsoft in mobile. […]

So, Microsoft has missed mobile […]. […]

The smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits it […]. […]

Microsoft has two huge, profitable businesses in Windows and Office: they will slowly go away, so how do you use them to create something new? Instead of every new project having in some way to support Office and Windows, how do you use Office and Windows to support the future? […]

I don’t have a complete sense of what that looks like, but admitting defeat [as Microsoft has done by drastically scaling back its smartphone efforts] is the first step to working it out.

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Filed Under: Microsoft, Smartphones, Windows

Microsoft’s Likely Path Forward with Smartphones

July 8, 2015

I’m sure you’ve heard: Microsoft is laying off approximately 7,800 employees, mostly in the handset division, which is primarily comprised of former Nokia employees.

Certainly a sad day for many good men and women from Nokia. I hope they take some comfort in knowing they’ve made a lot people’s lives better.

Here’s an excerpt of Satya Nadella’s email to employees:

In the near term, we will run a more effective phone portfolio, with better products and speed to market given the recently formed Windows and Devices Group. We plan to narrow our focus to three customer segments where we can make unique contributions and where we can differentiate through the combination of our hardware and software. We’ll bring business customers the best management, security and productivity experiences they need; value phone buyers the communications services they want; and Windows fans the flagship devices they’ll love.

Not sure why Nadella didn’t include more detail. Perhaps, at this moment, it would be a distraction from communicating the main decision. But then, again, the detail would have helped to convey the decision with far greater clarity.

In terms of the likely path forward with smartphones, here’s my initial take:

  • “Business customers” = One or two Surface smartphone models, intended for enterprise users.
    • Also intended to set a high bar in terms of mainstream specs and quality, but without the broad distribution and marketing that would threaten OEMs. Basically, it’s there if a consumer wants it, and if OEMs make crappy products. But if an OEM has a better product, sharper marketing, or wider distribution, they won’t lose consumer business to Microsoft.
    • Microsoft might be thinking that business customers will demand less hardware and software innovation, easing the pressure on Microsoft to out-do Apple. It sounds like, for now, Microsoft will be happy with Surface-like results (low unit sales, at a decent profit on a product basis).
  • “Value phone buyers” = Low-priced Lumia smartphones.
  • “Windows fans” = Choose your brand: Lenovo, other OEMs.
    • More likely to carry leading-edge components: “riskier” cameras, displays, sensors, materials, batteries, sizes, and forms than a Surface model.
    • More likely to carry lower prices than what Microsoft will offer with Surface. Reminds me of Xiaomi’s recent experiment with Microsoft. Basically — Xiaomi or not — imagine Xiaomi-like or Oppo-like quality (I’m not saying it’s great), but with Windows, at a competitive price.

Microsoft’s calculation is that it can rely on the Surface team and remaining handset employees to satisfy the first two sets of users. And rely on OEMs to attract anybody else, via: no license fee for Windows; no competition from Microsoft; “inspiration” on reference designs / capabilities from the Surface models.

Will it work? While I support the idea of a third major mobile OS, at this point it’s difficult to anticipate more than – to use the phrase I used above – “Surface-like results”.

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Filed Under: Microsoft, Nokia, Smartphones, Windows

Former Nokia CEO Elop Leaving Microsoft

June 17, 2015

Shira Ovide and Chelsey Dulaney, writing for the WSJ:

The departure of Mr. Elop along with one of his closest deputies, Jo Harlow, is the latest sign Microsoft is hitting the reset button on its struggling smartphone hardware business. The more than $9 billion purchase of Nokia’s handset business—a deal struck by Mr. Nadella’s predecessor Steve Ballmer in late 2013—was supposed to make Microsoft a relevant player in smartphones.

What I don’t understand is what changed between when Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO and now? Meaning, what factors did he consider when he *didn’t* make this decision during the past year. I don’t mean that critically, either. Perhaps Satay Nadella, too, wanted to believe Microsoft smartphones might succeed, and decided to wait a year. Unfortunately, we are at a point in the smartphone and tablet market where a decent product, or even a good product, isn’t enough to succeed.

Basically, there are two sets of factors1 that drive product success:

Product factors: Superior performance, features, ease of use, design, etc. Or superior price.

Business system factors: Having a consumer installed base, a developer base, a brand, distribution channels, and marketing spend.

At this point, Apple and Samsung have scale and high performance in both sets. And no one else comes close. (Notably, Microsoft’s installed base of Windows and Office users, its developers, and its brand don’t matter when it comes to handsets.) Even if you have a good product – say a Moto X or a recent Lumia model – if you don’t have the business system behind it, you won’t succeed. You simply have less access to the market.

I often use an exaggerated example to illustrate this: you could give Samsung any mobile company’s flagship smartphone — Moto X, LG G4 or, in this case, a Microsoft Lumia 830 — and Samsung could push it thru its business system to sell 30M – 50M units. Done. In contrast, those brands struggle to sell a fraction of that many flagships. And if you’re Microsoft, you’re not only trying to sell product, you’re also trying to grow your platform, Windows Mobile.

This has multiple implications but, to keep this post short, let me just introduce one, in the form of a question: If you’re a smaller smartphone maker, and you stumble upon a killer feature (or offer a 3rd platform, like Windows Phone), what do you do? Meaning, you could launch it, get some modest uplift in sales, and then watch your (larger) competitors copy its best elements. And then what? Or you could sit on it. And then what? (Assume licensing is not an option; and it basically wasn’t a viable one for Windows Phone, with Microsoft making hardware.)

You’re almost better off treading water with your product and focusing on building up your business system – your distribution, customer service, marketing, etc. Meaning, keep your powder dry until you have the market reach to benefit from your innovation. …If you can ever reach that point… There’s really no good answer.

Back to licensing (mentioned above): If you *are* making a platform, like Windows Phone, and if you don’t have a good hardware business of your own, then you’re better off increasing the odds that others use it… obviously… For Microsoft, that means 1) Lower the price, to zero and 2) Stop competing with the mobile device makers that you want using your platform. #1 is done. #2 just happened, and it means you don’t need a smartphone hardware business and, hence, a leader for it.

This is one way to frame the situation that Microsoft faced. Add this to the fact that cloud computing is key to Microsoft’s future, and it probably became even harder for Mr. Elop and others to defend the investment that Microsoft would have needed to even have a shot at succeeding with smartphone hardware. Basically, it was too much of a drag or distraction for Microsoft, with a very low odds of success. Let’s see what Microsoft actually does with Windows Phone and Lumia models in the next few months.

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1. As much as I love R&D, I’m not calling it out specifically here because it’s represented by the product factors, and because I want to focus on aspects that directly touch the buying consumer.

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Filed Under: Microsoft, Nokia, R&D, Smartphones, Windows

SDKs are Signs of the Times

May 30, 2015

I couldn’t resist. These are all great companies, but they wield different degrees of influence, depending on the area. It’s also a reminder: The order of influence wasn’t always the same. Things change.

Apple: We have SDKs for iOS. Google: We have SDKs for iOS & Android. Microsoft: We have SDKs for iOS, Android & Windows. #io15 #ioxnj

— Nick Landry (@ActiveNick) May 28, 2015

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Filed Under: Android, Apple, Google, iOS, Microsoft, OS, Windows

Market Scan Highlights: 2015-05-17

May 17, 2015

Screen Shot 2015-05-17 at 6.11.23 AM

Highlights from this week’s Market Scan. Read it here. Subscribe here.

  • China wireless carriers to slash contract prices, could spur 4G boom (Reuters)
  • MediaTek aims to go head-to-head with Qualcomm in high-end chips using Helio X20 platform (FierceWireless)
  • Amazon VP: ‘Anyone working on NFC is focusing on last century’s problem’ (Mashable)
  • Apple: Top Israeli Tech Exec says Apple’s 700 Israeli-based Engineers Mainly Work on New Chip Designs (Patently Apple)
  • Xiaomi coming to U.S., U.K., France and Germany with accessories to sell (Phone Arena)
  • Microsoft: Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything (Ars Technica)
  • Microsoft will bypass carriers, push Windows 10 updates directly to phones (PC World)
  • Samsung reveals a few facts about its round Gear smartwatch (Engadget)
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Filed Under: Amazon, Apple, Assorted Links, China, Contracts & Subsidies, Intelligent Assistance, Interface, Market Scan, MediaTek, Microsoft, Processors, Qualcomm, Smartphones, Smartwatches, Voice Recognition, Windows, Xiaomi

Market Scan: 2015-05-03

May 3, 2015

The week’s most important headlines. (Except for earnings coverage; plenty of that elsewhere.) Sign up here.

Industry

  • Nest CEO Tony Fadell on the Future of the Internet (WSJ)
  • Google Now becomes a more robust platform with 70 new partner apps (ZDNet)
  • iPhone trade-ins eroding Chinese Android sales: Report (ZDNet)
  • Cyanogen looking to work with Chinese vendors to load its software on more smartphones (Android Central)

Smartphones

  • Apple: Future iPhones may sport both telephoto and wide angle cameras, patent application suggests (AppleInsider)
  • Apple: iPhone’s New Growth Engine Illustrated: China’s Middle Class (Mobile Forward)
  • More than Half of Apple’s China Levers are Unique to Apple (Mobile Forward)
  • Samsung Pay scheduled to launch in the second half of 2015 (GSMArena)
  • Xiaomi tries to end waiting period for phone buyers, amid complaints (PC World)

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Acquisitions, Android, Apple, Assorted Links, China, Cyanogen, Google, HTC, Imaging, India, Intelligent Assistance, Interface, IOT, Market Scan, Micromax, Microsoft, Nokia, Payment, Processors, Samsung, Sensors, Smartphones, Smartwatches, Sony, T-Mobile, Tablets, Wearables - Other, Windows, Xiaomi

Turning Phones into Tiny, Full-blown PCs *Sounds* Appealing, But it Isn’t for Everyone

April 29, 2015

Brad Chacos, writing for PCWorld:

Microsoft’s Continuum Turns Windows 10 Phones into Tiny, Full-blown Windows PCs

Microsoft aims to turn Windows 10 phones into full-blown PCs when they’re connected to PCs. […]

Continuum is Microsoft’s solution for shifting among various form factors.

If you prefer to buy only one device to serve as your phone and computer, this is a great idea*. Even for other people, it’s still a very appealing idea — perhaps because we view computing resources (namely CPU, GPU, storage) as so precious that it’s a shame to duplicate them (in your phone, computer, set-top-box, etc.). And then there’s the syncing, and all the issues that brings. One device eliminates syncing issues.

But if you’re on the fence, or simply unsure about the idea, consider this: Switching back and forth between modes (e.g., phone to PC or tablet to PC) can be a pain. It’s fine for the 1st time, the 5th time, maybe the 20th time. But 100 times? 1,000 times? If this would be an issue for you, dedicated devices will work better.

______

*Or, if you’d like an old device to play a new role: for instance, you upgrade your phone (or tablet) regularly, but would rather not spend the money to upgrade your computer. With Continuum, your old device becomes your “new” computer. For a good number of people, that works.

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Filed Under: Microsoft, Smartphones, Windows

Market Scan Highlights

April 26, 2015

Peruse the whole thing here (it’s easy). Some highlights, with my comments.

1. The real way to tell whether Google’s wireless service is a success (BGR)

2. Why Apple has purchased camera technology company LinX and what will happen now? (i-Micronews)

  • Good read RE computational imaging, dual cameras

3. Xiaomi Boosts Its Business In India With Strategic Investment From Tata Sons Head (TechCrunch)

  • Dollar value not clear. PR value very clear

4. Xiaomi’s $205 Mi 4i mirrors the iPhone 5C design, claims 1.5-day battery (Ars Technica)

  • High performance to price ratio. Profitable? TBD

5. Full video of Vogue interview with Apple designers Jony Ive and Marc Newson posted to Web (AppleInsider)

  • Always worth it to hear the thoughts of subject matter expert or influential leader

6. Apple: First Look: Apple Watch Apps & Stats (App Annie)

  • Top category (so far) is Utility; 12% of all apps

7. Google: Android Wear’s Low-Power Ambient Mode (Daring Fireball)

8. Samsung filed for “Glastyle” and other Key Trademarks this Week (Patently Mobile)

9. Imaging: Yole on Image Sensor Future (Image Sensors World)

10. Microsoft CEO thinks there’s one BIG reason you’ll love Windows 10: Cortana (Business Insider)

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Filed Under: Acquisitions, Android Wear, Apple, Assorted Links, Design, Google, Imaging, India, Intelligent Assistance, Market Scan, Microsoft, Samsung, Sensors, Smartphones, Smartwatches, Wearables - Other, Windows, Wireless Service, Xiaomi

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