GigaOM » technologyinternet

Why Windows 8 is Microsoft’s most vital launch in years

Tom Krazit — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:12:51 +0000

Microsoft Windows was a fact of life for an entire generation raised on the PC. But we live in a different world now, and perhaps nothing underscores how much that world has changed more than the fact that the version of Windows that Microsoft is getting ready to launch this year is its most important product launch in decades.

It has been 17 years since the general public was genuinely excited by a new version of Windows: people actually lined up to buy Windows 95 like it was the iPhone or something. Years of meandering followed: Windows ME was a joke, Windows XP was an updated but essentially similar experience to Windows 95, Windows Vista was an attempt to correct XP’s security issues but turned into a joke of its own, and Windows 7 was what Vista should have been yet failed to inspire. In the meantime, Apple and Google captured the attention of software developers and the public with mobile computers built around iOS and Android.

But Windows 8 is going to be different. Tomorrow morning in Barcelona (at a telecom industry conference, of all things) Microsoft is going to unveil the Consumer Preview Edition of Windows 8, and if it arrives on schedule and without incident later this year, it could accelerate the world’s transition toward a mobile-first vision of general purpose computing.

Windows 8 is a huge development for Microsoft in several ways:

The Windows user experience has been radically overhauled with the Metro user interface, which has been a critically acclaimed (if not revenue-generating) part of the Windows Phone design. Metro will be unfamiliar to the millions raised on the concept of the “Start” button (now the Windows logo button on Windows 7) in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, but it allows Microsoft to embrace a new era of computing that is more and more about the touch screen.
Microsoft developed a version of Windows 8 for ARM processors, a chip brand unfamiliar to most average computer users but which is at the heart of nearly every single smartphone and tablet sold over the last several years. Even though Intel seems to have finally gotten its act together in the power-sensitive mobile space, ARM is an industry standard for mobile processing and will allow PC companies like HP to build power-efficient tablets in hopes of competing with the iPad.
Microsoft has always had a big problem: introducing radical new changes in Windows breaks a lot of business applications that were built for previous versions, which has led the company to move slowly through transitional periods. Windows 8 represents one of the biggest leaps forward for mainstream Windows developers in what seems like forever, but Microsoft had no choice but to include a “Desktop” user interface version of Windows 8 that will run old applications. The transition between Metro and Desktop could be jarring, and conservative support for Metro may not expose as many Windows 8 users as possible to the best parts of Windows 8.
Applications written for the Metro user interface will be sold through the Windows Store, as opposed to the more traditional shrink-wrapped or downloadable software sold for Windows. Sharing revenue with Microsoft will be a new experience for the Windows development community, although it’s established practice for iOS developers and Microsoft will actually take a smaller cut than Apple once an app’s revenue passes $25,000.

The traditional PC isn’t going anywhere just yet, but just ask HP and Dell: nor is it in good shape. Wednesday could be the first day when we realize whether or not Windows 8 can be a product that allows the traditional PC industry to refocus itself around both traditional PCs in lighter forms as well as iPad competitors.

The stakes for Microsoft are enormous. The company largely subsists on two cash cows: Windows and Office, and Windows sales are under pressure with the slow decline of the PC market.

But there’s also an existential crisis at hand for Microsoft. It defined personal computing in the years after Apple lost its way in the 1980s, and now that Apple is very much back in that role Microsoft desperately wants to remind the world that it is capable of setting a new bar for personal computing.

After getting a few glimpses of Windows 8, the tech industry started wondering if Microsoft has finally come up with something unique. Come Wednesday, when enthusiasts can begin to put the software through the paces, we’ll start to get a better idea of whether Microsoft is ready for a new era.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Google’s Schmidt preaches tech utopia to the choir

Tom Krazit — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:38:18 +0000

Google chairman Eric Schmidt

Google chairman Eric Schmidt is a passionate advocate for the technology industry, and he laid on the charm in an hour-long appearance at Mobile World Congress that was part Chrome commercial, part techno-utopian vision, and part high-brow version of Reddit’s Ask Me Anything. Here’s what he said:

On future wireless networks: “Smartphones don’t have to talk to a central hub, they can just talk to each other.” Schmidt spent a few minutes on the concept of wireless mesh or peer-to-peer networks, like the ones being set up by The Serval Project. Such networks would be much more difficult for authoritarian leaders to shut down as to squelch protest, he said.

On the digital divide: “The gap between the top and the bottom will be larger, not smaller, because of the technology I’m describing.” A lot of people think technology will bring the world closer together, but because of the speed at which technology is developed and its cost when first released, those at the top of the food chain will get farther and farther ahead, he said.

On enforcing intellectual property claims in China: “Google’s been willing to take on China pretty well,” Schmidt said, curiously referring to the company’s move in January 2009 to stop censoring its Chinese-language search engine and remove search servers from mainland China: a decision he opposed. But given that Chinese regulators are currently evaluating whether or not to approve Google’s purchase of Motorola, Schmidt danced around a question regarding whether he would enforce violations of Motorola’s intellectual property in China.

On Chrome: “If you don’t like speed or security, it’s free.” Google demonstrated the version of Chrome it created for Android at the beginning of Schmidt’s talk, having unveiled it a few weeks ago.

On ITU control of the Internet: “Be very careful about moves which seem logical but have the effect of balkanizing the Internet.” Perhaps Schmidt’s strongest words were saved for a question about the International Telecommunications Union angling for a stronger role in managing and regulating the Internet. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea.

On a mobile future: “Why don’t you just buy a smartphone?” Schmidt’s flip remark to a questioner who wanted to know why Android isn’t on feature phones was designed to make the point that feature phones as we know them will likely go away as smartphones get cheaper. The better question is when smartphones will cost as much as feature phones, and that could happen next year, he said.

On helping resistance in Iran: “In prison, it’s like, there’s no bandwidth.” Schmidt sympathized with a questioner who wanted to know if Google would introduce some of its products in Iran in order to help dissidents organize, but said his hands were tied by U.S. laws putting sanctions on Iran, and that Google wasn’t going to violate U.S. law.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

How Evi spent a weekend in App Store limbo

Tom Krazit — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:19:42 +0000

The mobile world got another reminder over the weekend that the whims of Apple’s App Store review process can make or break a mobile business. In a span of about 48 hours, Evi, a voice-recognition app that has a few things in common with Apple’s Siri, was headed for the App Store’s trash bin on Friday for being a little too similar to Siri before Apple abruptly reversed course.

TechCrunch first noted on Sunday that Evi had been flagged by Apple’s reviewers as “confusingly similar” to Siri, with True Knowledge, the company behind the app, having received notice late Friday that their app would be pulled from the App Store. True Knowledge had submitted a minor update to Evi that had languished in App Store review purgatory with no explanation for some time until Apple finally contacted the company about the update on Friday.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, CEO of True Knowledge, told TechCrunch that “I don’t think it takes too much of a leap of the imagination to realize that ‘confusingly similar’ is code for ‘competitive with’.” He went onto imply that Apple was worried about reviews of Evi–a natural language search engine that is a bit more sophisticated than Siri on certain queries–making the $199 iPhone 4S less compelling than the $99 iPhone 4, on which Siri is no longer allowed to run.

But after popular sentiment turned against Apple over the weekend, True Knowledge received a call from Apple reversing that ruling in the wee hours of Monday morning in Barcelona, where they were preparing for Mobile World Congress, sources familiar with the saga told GigaOM. Evi remains in the App Store, as noted earlier by The Verge, and Apple now plans to work with True Knowledge on creating a version of Evi that satisfies Apple’s concerns.

Sources familiar with the back-and-forth said that at this point Apple told True Knowledge it just wants the company to change the user interface of the app, rather than its basic functionality. And Apple also confirmed to the company that voice-driven search and voice-driven personal assistant features (setting up appointments and the like, planned for a future release of Evi) are fair game for outside developers within the iOS developer rules.

It’s unclear whether Apple really does mean that only cosmetic changes are necessary, or whether it’s just setting True Knowledge up with another series of hoops. Evi is similar to Siri in that it takes voice commands and returns search results, but Evi is actually the result of a True Knowledge “pivot” (read: now what are we going to do?) from a Web search company to a mobile-focused company. True Knowledge has curated hundreds of millions of facts and serves those up in response to queries, using (like Siri) Nuance’s technology to translate speech into machine-understandable queries.

Once you enter the mobile world, you find yourself having to play by Apple’s rules. Perhaps the most famous example was the showdown between Apple and Google over Google Voice, which Apple believed was confusingly similar enough to the main iPhone dialer as to restrict it from the App Store. A federal investigation led to its eventual approval and an acknowledgement from Apple that it needed to be more permissive when it came to potentially competitive apps.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Nokia unveils new Windows Phone, but keeps Symbian afloat

Tom Krazit — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:05:53 +0000

One year after it dramatically altered the course of its history by signing a landmark deal with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7, Nokia took to Mobile World Congress to introduce a few new smartphones in its Lumia lineup — and talk up new phones based on its aging and doomed Symbian software.

Nokia introduced the Lumia 610, a new lower-cost Windows Phone that will sell for €189 euros (around $250) when it arrives on the market in the second quarter. The company will also make a version of the LTE-based Lumia 900 that AT&T will carry in the U.S., featuring a DC-HSPA radio for use in countries that have yet to getting around to deploying LTE. Unsubsidized, that device will cost €480 ($645).

Yet despite pushing Lumia, Nokia also made sure to highlight its Symbian phones, which perhaps makes sense at a conference devoted to the worldwide smartphone picture — where Symbian is still a well-known operating system. It was a little odd, however, to see Nokia executives highlight three Asha-brand phones as well as a Symbian handset — the Nokia 808 Pureview — bearing a crazy camera: a 41-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera.

Still, there’s no doubt Windows Phone is the future of the company. Nokia announced that it will launch versions of the Lumia product line in China over the course of the year, tapping into one of the fastest-growing markets for smartphones as well as the largest overall potential market for the technology.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Sprint, MetroPCS were “hours away” from now-dead $8B deal

Tom Krazit — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:08:19 +0000

What is it with wireless carriers and merger discussions on the eve of major trade shows? Nearly one year after AT&T shocked the wireless industry en route to CTIA with news of a deal to purchase T-Mobile, Sprint and MetroPCS nearly gave those headed over to Spain for Mobile World Congress something to talk about.

CNBC reported Friday that Sprint and MetroPCS were “hours away” from announcing an $8 billion merger agreement, but the deal was thwarted by Sprint’s board of directors. CEO Dan Hesse was said to have endorsed the deal, which would have seen MetroPCS owning about 30 percent of the combined company, but it would have been a challenge.

For one thing, MetroPCS and Sprint don’t operate in the same spectrum bands, according to The Verge. That means blending the two customer bases would have been quite difficult. On top of that, Sprint is already carrying substantial debt and won’t make money on its extremely expensive iPhone deal for several years, leaving the company with few options to generate cash.

Consolidation in some form seems inevitable in the wireless industry, as only AT&T and Verizon are posting consistent profits. But this deal was apparently too rich for Sprint’s directors, and their rejection might cause investors to wonder about Hesse’s future at the company. Details are sketchy at this point, but stay tuned for our Mobile World Congress coverage as more details emerge once everyone gets on Barcelona time.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Will Apple dump the iPhone’s aging 30-pin connector?

Tom Krazit — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:32:30 +0000

For a company as forward-thinking as Apple has been in the mobile world, it still depends on a relic of its pre-iOS days as the primary connection for charging iPhones and iPads. But now that Apple can update its iOS devices over wireless networks, the 30-pin connector may have run its course.

iMore.com reported Friday that Apple will likely get rid of the 30-pin connector in the next version of the iPhone in favor of something smaller that could help it accommodate 4G LTE radios, and it’s about time. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t think Apple will follow the lead of the rest of the smartphone market and embrace the micro USB standard for phone chargers, but it’s still a notable development.

The 30-pin dock connector has been the primary doorway into the iPod for years. It was the only way to install software updates on an iPhone or iPad until iOS 5 introduced over-the-air updates, and an easy target for those who believed Apple wasn’t living up to its “post-PC” words by requiring a physical connection to a computer for such an important task.

Eliminating the (relatively) bulky connector could make it easier for Apple to include 4G wireless connections in the next iPhone without having to make an iPhone as big as some of the Android models (like the Galaxy Nexus) that connect to 4G networks. It also means a legion of accessory makers will have to get on board with a new standard on which Apple will probably continue to charge royalties to use in their products. The success of an iPhone accessory maker like Square that bypassed the 30-pin connector altogether with its credit-card reader may have also prompted Apple to come up with a new connector that offers unique advantages.

But to take things a step further, is Apple also willing to embrace wireless charging with the next iPhone, along the lines of what Palm introduced for certain models of the Pre? That might force the company to make some tough decisions about the materials it uses in the iPhone, a notoriously sensitive subject. But wireless charging is a great idea for users, and it would also allow Apple to sell some sleek wireless charging stations at a tidy profit.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Facebook: Social trumps searching for mobile apps

Tom Krazit — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:33:16 +0000

It’s easier than ever to create a mobile app business from scratch, but it gets harder and harder every month to stand out from the crowd. Hours after Apple’s plans for improving app discovery emerged, Facebook reminded mobile developers that it offers an awfully big platform and discovery engine for their work.

The company published a blog post Friday morning outlining how it believes the Facebook can help developers concerned about the discoverability problem. Getting noticed in places like Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market, or the other big third-party Android app stores is tricky and often fleeting; sometimes the result of a fluke appearance on a “best of” list.

“On many of today’s mobile platforms, distribution is often a function of ranking and position in curated app stores,” wrote Facebook’s James Pierce, head of mobile developer relations. “While this benefits established apps and (those) that are editorially featured, for the majority of developers, getting an app discovered can present a real challenge.”

Facebook’s argument is that if app developers use Facebook to have users log into their apps, new users will discover that app naturally as friends share activity within the app on their News Feed. It cited examples such as Foodspotting’s iOS app and Diamond Dash, an iOS game that enjoyed a traffic increase “by a factor of 3″ after it started using Facebook’s Single Sign On technology. But Facebook would obviously like developers to think of Facebook itself as an app development platform, highlighting the Washington Post’s Social Reader Facebook app. (Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Company, is a Facebook director and investor.)

Getting into bed with Facebook isn’t necessarily a recipe for instant success: of the 425 million people who accessed Facebook through a mobile device in a month, just 60 million, or 14 percent, go on to visit another app. Still, Facebook mobile usage is growing, and Facebook’s argument that people enjoy discovering new products, information, and perhaps apps from their friends is at the heart of what could be a historic initial public offering.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Google scales back e-book affiliates program, drops some users

Laura Hazard Owen, paidContent — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:27:32 +0000

When Google launched the program, it was available to“retailers, bloggers, book publishers and other website owners.” They earned referral fees ranging from 6 to 10 percent of a book’s selling price, depending on the number of sales referred. That was a higher rate than the one offered through Amazon’s referral program, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Associates.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Motorola prepares to hail new Google overlords

Tom Krazit — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:22:16 +0000

Google is still waiting for the Chinese government to approve its purchase of Motorola Mobility, but it’s starting to line up new leaders for the company once the deal goes through, according to a report. And it sounds like Sanjay Jha, who brought Motorola back from the brink but was unable to create a breakout hit after the initial Droid, will be on the outside looking in.

Bloomberg reported Thursday that Jha will be replaced by Dennis Woodside, currently the president of Google Americas and a Google veteran. Woodside, who had already been named to lead the integration process for the $12.5 billion merger alongside Jha, will apparently get top billing if and when Chinese regulators approve the deal.

Blending Motorola, a storied Midwestern phone manufacturer, with Google, about as California as a massive Internet company can get, is going to be tricky. Google has pledged to operate Motorola as a standalone unit in order to calm the fears of Android partners that Google will treat Motorola differently than the rest of the Android world. Naming a longtime Googler to head the new operation, however, will raise a few eyebrows.

As for Jha, he was unable to completely fix the mobile devices mess left behind by former Motorola CEO Ed Zander while working amidst the chaos of Motorola’s separation into two separate companies. Motorola Mobility is at least in the game when it comes to the smartphone market thanks to Jha’s aggressive embrace of Android, but it is losing ground to rivals like Samsung and HTC and especially struggled over the second half of 2011.

He did, however, return a ton of value to Motorola Mobility’s shareholders by orchestrating the Google deal. After losing a pivotal auction for mobile patents formerly held by bankrupt Nortel, Google was desperate to find any patents it could get and wound up paying a huge premium for the business.

Google declined to comment on Woodside’s future role, reiterating that the deal has yet to close while the Chinese government decides whether or not to intervene. U.S. and European regulators have already approved the deal.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Big tech, Obama and the politics of privacy

Jeff Roberts, paidContent — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:34:58 +0000

The White House announced major privacy initiatives this week amidst a growing hubbub over how technology companies use consumers’ personal data. The news sheds light on both the privacy debate and on how the players involved are attempting to maintain political control of the issue.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.