Intel's marriage of CPU and GPU not ready for prime time
A spokesperson for Intel confirmed to Betanews this morning that the company's highly anticipated initial release of a commercial processor product based on its CPU+GPU architecture, code-named "Larrabee," will not come within early 2010 after all. This despite the first public demonstration late last September that seemed to indicate all was on track for a release in the first half of 2010.
"Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we had hoped to be at this point in the project," stated spokesperson Nick Knupffer. "As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics preoduct, but rather be used as a software development platform for internal and external use."
An alternative to Research in Motion's enterprise e-mail? There's an app for that
Hardly a day goes by when our inboxes and feeds aren't flooded with messages from companies announcing that they have created a new iPhone application. They range from the disappointingly simple to the disconcertingly arcane, but as a whole skew more toward the consumer. So when a significant player in enterprise services releases an iPhone app, it's worth looking into...especially when it's from an "underdog" company trying to challenge a market leader.
Good Technology, a long-running provider of mobile e-mail solutions, today debuted its Good for Enterprise iPhone app, which provides secure access to corporate e-mail, calendars and contacts with companies using the Good for Enterprise mobile e-mail solution.
Now you can tell Microsoft what to do
Microsoft advertising has people claiming that "Windows 7 was my idea." I'd like to make "my idea" more real for Betanews readers, by offering a soapbox to give Microsoft a piece of your mind (be polite, but firm); first some context on why do it now.
For Microsoft, the New Year really is a new beginning. January 1 marks the half-way point in the company's fiscal year and the period leading into the annual review process. Employee reviews can't be good this year, with Microsoft morale low (or so I've been hearing) following calendar 2009 layoffs.
Lala could make iTunes' Genius smarter
Apple's apparent acquisition of music streaming service Lala is about improving iTunes music discovery and competitively combating Google search as a music discovery tool tied to free music streaming services. I say apparent acquisition because there is no official confirmation from Apple, although I'd be shocked if All Things Digital's Peter Kafka got it wrong. He has confirmation of a done deal, and Kafka's reporting record is outstandingly excellent.
Apple gets two major assets from Lala, some technology and the development team. While the development team is likely more important, the technology is valuable, too -- and both lead to the same place: Apple improving iTunes music discovery.
Microsoft pulls Windows 7 Family Pack, so you can spend more for the holidays
I've got a new spelling for "Scrooge." M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t. The company has ended the Windows 7 Family Pack promotion, which is a nice Ba Humbug to you and yours for the holidays. Sure, it could be good for Microsoft's bottom line and perhaps partners' PC sales. But for the masses considering upgrading existing Windows XP/Vista PCs to 7, a good thing is suddenly bad.
Maybe Microsoft executives looked at Apple charging so much for Macs and thought, "Why discount Windows 7?" Perhaps, but generally companies offer greater discounts as the holidays approach, not take them away. Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack offered three upgrade licenses for the tidy sum of $149.99. Now the upgrade price is $119.99 per license.
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."
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