Playing catch-up in 2010: Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian
With iPhone and Android picking up more popularity every day, it's urgent for rival smartphones to enhance their mobile software environments, some analysts say. But while Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia are working on better user experiences, phones outfitted with new features aren't likely to show up until way after CES 2010.
Microsoft has the longest way to go in playing catch-up in market share, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, in an interview with Betanews.
Five 2009 predictions that widely missed the mark
As the holidays approach and New Years not long beyond, analysts turn ESPers as they try to predict the future. Sometimes, the predictions are so crazed, they're somewhere between alcoholically induced and reaching into an alternative universe where reality beats to other drums. The best measure of accuracy for the future is the past -- what analysts predicted for 2009.
I've randomly picked five that show just how wrong the predictions can be. Keep them in mind when reading 2010 predictions, like IDC's audacious claim that iPhone applications will triple -- to 300,000 -- by end of 2010.
Advertising is the wrong model for the open Web
Some Betanews readers made such excellent comments to yesterday's post, "Can there be a free Web if no one makes money?," I will respond to some of them with another post rather than piecemeal in comments. The current advertising model isn't sufficient to handle all the online content out there -- and there will be more of it.
Yesterday, commenter bigsexy022870 wrote: "Maybe I am missing something. But I thought that ads paid for all this free stuff. I mean Google produces nothing yet it's super rich. Every Website is loaded with ads."
Report: Microsoft to randomize Europe's browser screen choices
The New York Times has cited an unidentified source said to have knowledge of Microsoft's ongoing negotiations with the European Commission, as saying that the company will comply with a suggestion made by three of its chief rivals in the Web browser business -- Mozilla, Google, and Opera. Specifically, the report says, future editions of Windows 7 for European customers will randomize the order in which users' choices for default Web browsers will appear during setup.
You'll notice that Apple was not listed among those making the suggestion, and that may be because Microsoft's revised plan in order that Internet Explorer would not be listed first, would have alphabetized the list by manufacturer's name, placing Apple Safari first instead.
Will Nokia's plans further alienate American consumers?
The world of mobile communications has changed considerably since Nokia reached market dominance in the late '90s, and the Finnish telecommunications leader is shifting its strategies to keep ahead as mobile behavior continues to change. This week, the company revealed some of its plans for the next couple of years, which could amount to something of a spring cleaning for the cluttered Nokia house, or could simply keep the company on the same path.
Most interestingly, Nokia said it is going to release fewer smartphones. The company is going to follow the lead taken by Research In Motion, Apple, and Palm, and offer a smaller, more concentrated portfolio of these devices and hopefully attract more consumers with their mid-range prices. This does not necessarily mean Nokia is looking to eliminate any of its product lines, but rather perform an overall cutback, reducing its roster of smartphones by more than half, and offering cheaper models. Nokia expects 33% of its 2010 smartphone lineup to have both touchscreens and QWERTY keypads, another 33% to have QWERTY only, 25% to have all touch, and the remaining 9% to have an ITU-T keypad.
Bing bonked by service outage Thursday, Microsoft configured the wrong server
For about 40 minutes starting at approximately 9:30 pm EST Thursday evening, by Betanews estimates, the main page of Microsoft's Bing Web site was inaccessible to users. In its place was a message filled with hexadecimal code, leading off with the message, "This isn't the page you wanted!"
No kidding. But was Bing being hijacked? As Microsoft acknowledged this morning, its own administrators were responsible for the outage.
Survey reveals there are more women than men, including on social networks
This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey, and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84%) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all have more women visiting them.
The average ratio of all sites surveyed, according to Pingdom, was 47% male, 53% female.
Acer eclipses Dell for #2 spot in global PC shipments, says iSuppli data
At the rate at which Acer (which now also includes Gateway, Packard Bell, and e-Machines) was catching up with Dell, analysts predicted at this time last year that it could conceivably top Dell in units shipped worldwide by the third quarter of 2009. For once in this wacky economy, the analysts' predictions turned out to be correct: Acer is now the world's #2 PC producer in terms of units shipped, according to iSuppli.
But Acer is not catching up to Hewlett-Packard too fast, in any other regard besides placement on the list. HP's market share continues its strong rise, as the entire PC market enjoyed a nice recovery last month...and Dell shared in absolutely none of it.
Microsoft, don't hang up on Windows Mobile, but do call for help
It hasn't been a good day for anyone working on Microsoft's Windows Phone team. This morning, IDC made the ridiculous prediction that the number of iPhone/iPod touch applications would triple to 300,000 by end of 2010. Later, here at Betanews, Carmi Levy slammed Microsoft's Windows mobile strategy.
Yes, Windows Mobile is down -- really low -- but the operating system isn't bad. The mobile OS is good at the core, meaning the kernel, and multitasks pretty well. It's the user interface and partner model that needs a makeover -- and awfully fast. Microsoft is quickly falling behind Apple and Google, but there's hope. Android is a bigger threat than anything Apple has got, because of competing licensing and partner models. Don't give up, Microsoft, but for frak's sake do get a move on.
Can there be a free Web if no one makes money?
Paywall is suddenly a hot topic as free content turns many longstanding businesses -- news among -- to apparent ruin. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is mad as hell, and he's not going to take this anymore. This week Murdoch repeated his call for paid services during a U.S. Federal Trade Commission public workshop. "We need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high-quality, reliable news and information does not come free," he said. "Good journalism is an expensive commodity."
But how is the value of the digital content, whether news or some other commodity, determined when so much of it is free? Bill Buxton, principal researcher for Microsoft Research, briefly addressed this topic during an October talk at the Business Innovation Factory. "When the cost of goods approaches zero, the effective price inevitably for that product goes to zero," he said. "We've seen it in music, and the music pirates -- maybe they were bad, maybe they weren't -- were not causing it; they were just accelerating it. Every single other entity that goes digital has zero cost of goods. So, whatever's happened in music is going to happen in literature, news, cinema, theater and so on."
Android team updates 'Donut' and 'Eclair' SDKs
Part of the allure of Motorola's Droid smartphone is that it's the first, and currently only, device built upon Android 2.0 ("Eclair"). While Droid users are treated to a new Web browser, new personal navigation features, and new contact list structure, the rest of the Android devices on the market run Android 1.6, also known as "Donut," which began to appear last October.
There has been no official word about which existent Android devices will be able to upgrade to 2.0, and today, we begin to see a bit more of that dreaded Android fragmentation as both versions got updates to their SDK components.
See ya later, WinMo: Microsoft's mobile strategy needs a reboot
There are lots of winners in the wireless wars. Microsoft, unfortunately, isn't one of them. Thirteen years after it first introduced Windows CE, its homegrown OS for small devices finds itself perilously close to oblivion. With market share for Windows Mobile OS in freefall, vendors fleeing and its mindshare in meltdown, now is as good a time as any for the company to dive into a full-on re-think of its mobile strategy.
Or an exit from the market until it can figure out what makes the most sense.
The Black Screen Syndrome, or, Tech news in search of the apocalypse
Was the "Black Screen of Death" issue (KSoD) covered by Betanews earlier this week a real story? This is a serious question, especially in the wake of security firm Prevx's admission that it was very premature in its conclusions that KSoD incidents had been triggered by last month's round of Patch Tuesday updates.
Let's discuss this rationally. Although it does not appear to be an exploitable security problem by malicious users, and we have reason to believe it cannot become one, the KSoD problem (differentiated from BSoD, the "Blue Screen of Death," something else entirely) is a strange symptom that has cropped up on some machines over the years -- in our experience, some Vista-based systems. Some. It is a significant enough problem that when Betanews encountered it first-hand last June, and I discovered a way for users to fish themselves out from being stuck with it (without installing any new software), I wrote about it and presented a solution that, at least, worked for me.
Microsoft's Bing Bar takes the clutter and complexity out of browser toolbars
I despise browser toolbars. They're ugly, clutter up the browser and reduce viewable content space. But unexpectedly, I've found a better toolbar. This old crankypuss might soon be spending time at the new Bing Bar, which is a helluva good name, by the way.
There's much to like about Bing: The advertising, the name and most importantly the approach to user interface design. I love Bing TV commercials, by the way. Good advertising uses familiar motifs, scenarios and situations, stuff that most anyone can relate to. Familiarity is important. Who can't relate to information overload -- too much needless information coming too fast to process?
Online advertising evolves away from display, toward interactive software
Digital advertising is evolving beyond the desktop computer, leaving companies relying solely on Web sites and display advertising woefully behind the eight ball. More and more, brands are relying on software development to create engaging consumer experiences that span multiple open platforms. Branded mobile applications are fast becoming an important element of this new digital ecosystem, as evidenced by Apple's announcement that its App Store had surpassed 100,000 apps in early November.
This shift away from more familiar mediums for brand communication has important implications for the composition of, and interaction between, established groups within agencies. The pervasive dynamic between technology and creative groups is not always conducive to more technically demanding campaigns because of a fundamental disconnect between these two groups' proficiencies.
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