Here's a static image of the graph from last year, with AAPL added for contrast: 2010.
Here's the graph from 2002 to the end of last year: Dead money.
People don't buy stocks so they'll be as reliable as stuffing the money in a mattress. The point of investing capital is to participate in the growth that can be achieved with pooled capital. This ain't getting that done. A dollar invested in Microsoft these past eight years isn't working for you, it's vacationing in the Bahamas. That's not what you want to be happening with your earned money. With your earned money you want to put it to work, so it can pay for you to be vacationing in the Bahamas.
Your comment, it's just not true. (not my chart, btw). The integrated Facebook app is a good indicator of a mobile platform's market performance. Facebook users are common enough that they make a significant and representative statistical sample.
WP7 peaked below 1.5% market share on release, and is declining. It's now seeing about 4,300 new adopters each day worldwide, which is pathetic even for Windows Mobile. There is no way this can be described as "doing just fine." Its user base will never hit the 1.5 million units Microsoft claims are already delivered on its current trend, so somebody's about to get stuck with some dead inventory.
Its replacement Windows 8 has already been shown running at CES and the roadmap has a 1/7/2013 in-store availability scheduled. W8 being a full Windows rather than a mobile OS will of course not be compatible. Intel has committed that they will field phone platforms with it that run regular Windows applications on x86 phones. They're "all in".
So there's no reason to buy a WP7 phone. It failed to thrive, its execution date is set. There's no reason to develop apps for a phone with few users and no long-term prospects either.
Funny story: the KIN had about 8,000 sales and 300,000 Facebook likes. The integrated WP7 phone Facebook app has a little over 300,000 users now and less than 4,000 Facebook likes. It looks like buying Facebook likes has gone out of vogue with Microsoft's marketing department. But apparently hiring astroturfers to post on slashdot has not.
You don't need nuclear weapons from the moon, nor toxic weapons either. Apparently the moon has a rich supply of these mysterious city-killing weapons called "rocks" which, when catapulted out of the moon's gravity well naturally fall into Earth's. The Earth's gravity operates on the mass of the rocks, accelerating them to great terminal energy - enough to look as much like nuclear weapons as makes little difference. Done with sufficient precision, or simply enough quantity, it should be more than enough force to get the Earth to capitulate. Scary thought: the entire moon is made up of these disastrous weapons of mass destruction, which require no fine art to deploy. I read a book about it once, a long time ago. Wish I could remember the title.
Odd note of geek trivia: the "Toynbee Tiles" enigma is precisely about this.
Not at all functional, either on my Epic or on Iceweasel, the desktop browser I use. Had to fire up an alternate browser just to post this. Otherwise the sections display is helpfully placed over the Submit comment button as well as obstructing the comments, the masthead appears to float to cover whichever comment I'm reading. Performance is hideous. Not at all delightful.
This year you're about to have a much bigger selection of computers from vendors who don't sell Windows at all. Samsung, Apple, HTC, LG Philips, Vizio to name a few. And it will be awesome.
Sometimes posts get modded down by accident. Sometimes by bias. A moderator can erase their moderation by posting in the thread.
If you're both a subscriber and have good karma through a long history of good comments, you can post a comment like this one, which draws attention to the parent.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works in reverse and you get modded down multiple times for the same comment. But if you believe your pose is worthy, and unfairly moderated, this is how you fix it.
So, hey, how about that parent post, eh?
Yes, we are approaching an optimax population for a transitory climate. Even if heating trends continue and we plow what is now permafrost yielding many times more food, it will only encourage more population growth to consume the available food supply. Something's got to give.
I hate to say it, but we're a pest. Individually we may be smart enough to dig into the origins of the Universe, to question the quantum physics. Collectively, we eat and breed to fill the Petri dish we're in, like bacteria.
We need to enter a spore mode and escape the dish. Or we're hosed.
Going back to the top, the transitory warm climate that supports our current population: it's not the norm. Not by a long shot. It's a transitory blip in geologic time. It's a rare positional fluke that humans were ready to exploit this brief moment in the sun. But that doesn't extend the duration of the moment, and we spent a good deal of our window eating each other.
If we're going to spore, and get off-planet, we had best do it now. If we don't the ice will scour us off and the planet will try again as it has before, perhaps with dolphin descendants next time.
If you've got a solution that doesn't involve the dreaded Malthus, I'd like to hear it.
Checking... I don't think I mentioned a gender. My own posts are being as brutally moderated as yours are. Good luck with that. I've got an old-school karma pool to deal with it, but I might not get mod points for a long time because I ventured several controversial opinions.
Yeah, but when about half the record years in the last 30 years are in the 15 most recent years, to conclude to the presence of an underlying trend is hardly an extraordinary claim.
It is an extraordinary claim when even Michael Mann, the inventor of Mann-Made Global Warming admits that the variations in temperature since 1998 are not "significant". There's not enough difference to overcome the errors in measurement and processing. There is no warming since 1998 that is provable to a scientific degree, even to a scientist who has tied his entire reputation and career hopelessly to the AGW train.
Considering the Mann Hockey Stick graph had people projecting relentless huge and growing increases every year, the fact that statistically significant warming stopped in 1998, but CO2 increases didn't is odd. Either we somehow dodged the apocalypse without halting CO2 production, or perhaps something else. Perhaps the alarming shape of that graph had more to do with the way the data was processed than the significant underlying data. We shall see in a decade or five. In the meantime unless some statistically significant warming recurs it wouldn't do take some rash action to stop a process that wasn't happening.
If we're going to build big immobile cities we're dumb. Throughout the global climate record the good places to live and farm Move. Even more disconcerting: they are usually the empty set. For the majority of the climate record the temperature has been nowhere near warm enough to either live or farm, on almost all of the planet.
The creationist thing is a meme - it's supposed to be funny. The AGW thing is a flamewar, and one of the admins with unlimited mod points is on the Warmer side.
A little flamewar now and then does help liven things up.
Hurd got tossed in a Mata-Hari, that has now claimed control of the BOD. Mata-Hari didn't act on her own. What we see here is the hand behind the strings.
Hp is hosed.
Sony is still a believer in the Holy Grail of content providers: A DRM that consumers will embrace. Perhaps it's because they own so much content. It's also probably why they backed Mariah Carey's entry into film, "Glitter" with a three-film contract they had to back out of with $50m cash. They let their motivations guide their judgments, and they don't understand western culture.
Intel though, they should know better on several levels. Intel has enough smart people around to know that an acceptable DRM won't work for several reasons, of which here are a few:
It won't ever work on a technical level because of the analog hole. We're used to equipment that's HD now, but folk who pirate would take stuff that's recorded from HD which is good enough - better in some cases because a little blurring would add a lot to some HD movies.
And then there's the nerd problem. We like puzzles. Every new form of DRM is like an IQ test. We can't pass it by. There are so many nerds, and implementation of DRM will always be so imperfect, that it will be broken.
Then there's ABC problem: If Al needs to sent a secret message to Cindy across the untrusted carrier Bill he can encrypt it with Cindy's public key, Bill can carry it, and Cindy can decrypt it with her private key. This doesn't work when Bill and Cindy are the same person. They can try and work around this by making it so Cindy has no control over her equipment, but then it fails the "acceptable" test. Cindy then can't play the home movies she took herself, or stuff she downloaded that's not restricted, so she won't pay for it.
Then there's the end-around or "common knowledge" problem. If the message isn't a secret then it doesn't matter how well it's encrypted. Every piece of content is available now long before it's even available in a DRM'd version, to anybody who wants it, on the Internet. Perfectly encrypting it just ensures your DRM published version wasn't the public source. It doesn't prevent it from being jacked before it even was encrypted, and that hole will never close. This could be prevented by requiring that all equipment supports the DRM, but that won't be accepted. There is now, and always will be, equipment available to play open content because these are the same formats our family camcorders make of the holiday picnic - and we make content we care about too so much that we won't buy equipment that won't display it.
And then there's the incumbency problem. If a form of DRM were invented that defeated all of these, to succeed it would have to magically retrofit every video device ever made.
Then there's the real killer of DRM: the control problem. You see, DRM isn't really about monetizing content, it's about content owners being able to assert control over the content. If the technology gives them the power of control, they are insane enough to use that control in a way that prevents the DRM from being accepted, every time. They're sick, and that's why they want the control in the first place. If you give them the impossible perfect DRM tech they'll use it to ensure nobody buys that tech by asserting that control in implausibly ridiculous ways.
Intel can't win here. They should not play this game. It makes them look bad. I have an idea why they try, and it doesn't reflect well on them as individuals, as a company, nor as a brand. In almost everything else they do I have a great deal of respect for Intel, but this stupid game gives me doubts.
Get with it folks: the goal isn't to prevent people who won't pay from getting the content. You can't do that no matter how hard you try. The goal is to get all the money you can from the people who will pay. That is a goal you can achieve by being an easy place to buy the content.
Content owners should get used to the idea that most people want to pay for what they get. They are decent people. They have pride. Sell them what they want. You're not going to sell stuff to the
They don't have to know why. When we tell them "Yeah, the droid is nice but you will like the Samsung better." They go buy the Sammy usually. They trust us because we don't lead them wrong.
Oracle is evil, and I'm not going with anything that they've got or derived from anything they've got in a way that they can control, no matter where it came from. I don't care if it's Sun-based or whatever. If it's got the Oracle taint on it I ain't interested. A fork that ain't beholden to them might be interesting.
After the Windows on ARM announce at CES there was talk of nvidia + ARM + Windows in server, desktop and mobile. That is now almost certainly quashed. A shame, too. They could have made something really cool out of that. I guess the bad old days of market dominant players halting progress to preserve their market share aren't completely over yet.
For years here on/. there were Vista fans who would not stop praising that piece of ineffable crap. A few persist still. It sucked. We all knew it sucked. "Buy a new PC" they would say, and the replies came back - "It is a new PC and it came with this crap." And still they would not quit. A thousand sockpuppets praising it from your Bangalore blog center are not going to make it not suck. Berating honest folk who tried it and share their sucky experience are not going to make it fly, nor quench the flood of people who are reporting that yes, it does have negative atmospheric pressure. The problem with it wasn't the marketing. It was the engineering. To get some traction here on/. and in the real world, the thing has to actually not suck.
WP7 is not good. It's not even close to good. It STILL lacks features like multitasking and copy & paste in 2011. A new contender doesn't have to have some good stuff - it has to hit all the corners and then have something special nobody else has got. Some new WP7 features are now promised, but updates to the KIN were promised too. Top-ten category apps are moving in the single digits of units - lifetime, not monthly or daily. It is a joke on itself.
I'm rereading this before posting, and am finding that this part doesn't have enough emphasis. So I'll say it plain: There are Top Ten apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace that have five sales total ever. This is not going to fund a development budget. They've reached 5,000 apps now so the vast majority of developers have to have no buyers at all, and probably less than a dozen downloads too. That is some serious suction.
Microsoft has somehow pushed 1.5M units into inventory at the merchants, probably on consignment, but they have no hope of actually selling them. The backlash when this all unravels will be epic.
Do you want to make a product that gets the/. crowd fawning all over you? I'll tell you how: raise the bar. Deliver something that does something current tech won't do. Make something that enables and empowers us to do the stuff that we want and need to do. Let us connect better with the people we care about. Let us get our work done more easily. And when we want that, get the hell out of our way.
Quit trying to believe that enough money thrown at marketing will put over a product that sucks. I know the advertisers you're working with say they can sell a turd sandwich, but we're not buying it. Their job isn't really to sell us stuff, it's to sell you advertising.
We here know that KIN had 300,000 facebook friends and under a thousand buyers. You can't put that BS over here any more. Try PCWORLD or Computerworld or whatever. They'll take your ad money and fluff your dolphin, or whatever the euphemism is today.
Apple is having amazing growth in smartphones also and the inclusion of more carriers in the US may help them some. I know a lot of people who just won't do business with AT&T even for an iPhone. There are a lot of Verizon customers who would like to give it a go. The share numbers don't exactly tell the whole tale either as the market for smartphones is also growing at an amazing pace. Apple makes a lot of money on every phone, they're selling a huge number of phones, and they're having huge growth. They should see a good bump when they open up to other carriers in the US. Their vast economies of scale are saving them on the Cost Of Goods Sold also. Any time Apple wants to take market share from Android all they have to do is indulge in that fragmentation bugaboo that seems to not be holding Android back and offer a variety of phones with different feature sets and price points for the folk who aren't a good fit for The iPhone. Frankly I hope they don't - they're consuming a large enough share of the world's production capacity for displays and Flash memory already.
But Google and Apple are not Microsoft. Neither of them has taken the position that for them to win everybody else has to lose. Their goal is not to own the market and use their dominance to suppress progress like it's some tech version of King of the Hill. Apple is going to take for the most part the premium end of the business and Android will take the volume. They'll each get a chunk of RIM's enterprise share. Every developer worth their salt is writing for both platforms now so they're getting some app-fusion going on. In the end there will be a lot more Android phones than Apple phones if for no other reason than not everybody in the world can afford an iPhone and the iPhone feature set doesn't meet everybody's needs and can't, no matter how awesome that feature set is because people have conflicting needs. Some people need battery life, some daylight-readable displays, some huge storage, some need low price, some need a physical keyboard, some want the thinnest possible phone. Apple will get a bunch of dollars, Google will get many more dimes and it will work out well for both. They'll both innovate as fast as they can to compete with each other, so we all win.
Everybody else though? It sucks to be you. You can't have the premium end, you can't have the volume end. You can't crack enough market share to get good developers because one cheesy breakout app on iOS and Android (Angry Birds) moved 50 million units and that's the KaChing lotto developers are looking for. You can't get the mobile ad dollars either. If you create a niche hardware feature it'll be on an Android phone in six months. If you create a useful evolution of the user interface it'll be a UI skin available on both iOS and Android with a dozen competing versions in three weeks ranging in price from ten dollars to free, and the developers will make more money on the skin than you will on the platform. Apple and Google have between them got this thing sewn up. Just to make it completely unfair those app and media stores and the Google home page are awesome places from which to sell the next generation products that latecomers are not going to have access to.
Tablets? I don't see any reason why the same story shouldn't play out there. Android's getting a late start like it did with phones, but there's only one iPad just like there's only a couple models of iPhone. There are hundreds of Android slates coming out to hit every price point and feature desired. They're not quite too late to the party. Apple should get the premium end again with the lion's share of the profits at a good margin because they have the innovator's advantage, the product is damn good, and the iPad 2 will be even better. Android should get the volume again and have to work harder for their money but rake it in too. By the time a credible third player shows up we
1. Windows XP still has more market share (57%) than Windows Vista (12%) and Windows 7 (21%) combined. More to the point since Vista and XP are affected, more than three quarters of Windows systems are affected. They should care. We sure as hell care. If all Microsoft cares about is W7, that tells us a lot about their commitment to support and security. It's not 2002 any more. It's now 2011, and if being "all in" in the cloud and "all in" in mobile, and committed to "Dynamics" (whatever the heck that was) has distracted from their commitment to security, then we need to know because WE USE THEIR SOFTWARE for more than a year or two.
2. Windows is a brand. A label. A blank symbol. It's not, and never was an operating system. It has been an operating environment for some time, or as some would say, several. It doesn't, and can't, "give a flying fuck" about anything. Windows is a brand that's owned by a legal fiction, a "corporate person". Since there is some fictional personhood attached to the legal entity Microsoft, and some history, we may be able to ascribe some motivation to that with the understanding that anthropomorphizing soulless corporations is in itself a trap. Some here would probably say that Microsoft is the cruel bargainer the devil himself hopes to be someday, but at least we're agreed that it has some personification to hang motivations on. Please don't say "Windows" when you mean "Microsoft" it confuses many issues. They also make very good mice. Ok, they don't actually make the mice, but you should get my drift.
And yeah if it drives adoption of their new product off of their old product without too much escape to actually good product as a goal, we'd all have thunk it. Because that's what they do. The prevention of actual progress is their goal.
The Microsoft dividends don't add up to much at all, and reinvested are a wash.
Which leads to a question: If Microsoft is spinning off tens of billions of dollars profits each quarter and using them to pay dividends and buy back stocks... why are the shares not worth double now what they were a decade ago? They've had enough profits to buy back the whole company twice over, right? Something funky with the numbers here.
Seriously, how do you achieve no-growth in a company that turns a billion dollars a month with a gross margin of over 80% - not just for a month, or a quarter or a year, but for an entire DECADE? It defies reason.
Slashdot Mirror
2% dividends against a stock that decreases in value by 7%, both annual for last year, isn't exactly a great way to grow your retirement fund.
Here's a static image of the graph from last year, with AAPL added for contrast: 2010.
Here's the graph from 2002 to the end of last year: Dead money.
People don't buy stocks so they'll be as reliable as stuffing the money in a mattress. The point of investing capital is to participate in the growth that can be achieved with pooled capital. This ain't getting that done. A dollar invested in Microsoft these past eight years isn't working for you, it's vacationing in the Bahamas. That's not what you want to be happening with your earned money. With your earned money you want to put it to work, so it can pay for you to be vacationing in the Bahamas.
(Image credit: Google Finance screen scrape)
Your comment, it's just not true. (not my chart, btw). The integrated Facebook app is a good indicator of a mobile platform's market performance. Facebook users are common enough that they make a significant and representative statistical sample.
WP7 peaked below 1.5% market share on release, and is declining. It's now seeing about 4,300 new adopters each day worldwide, which is pathetic even for Windows Mobile. There is no way this can be described as "doing just fine." Its user base will never hit the 1.5 million units Microsoft claims are already delivered on its current trend, so somebody's about to get stuck with some dead inventory.
Its replacement Windows 8 has already been shown running at CES and the roadmap has a 1/7/2013 in-store availability scheduled. W8 being a full Windows rather than a mobile OS will of course not be compatible. Intel has committed that they will field phone platforms with it that run regular Windows applications on x86 phones. They're "all in".
So there's no reason to buy a WP7 phone. It failed to thrive, its execution date is set. There's no reason to develop apps for a phone with few users and no long-term prospects either.
Funny story: the KIN had about 8,000 sales and 300,000 Facebook likes. The integrated WP7 phone Facebook app has a little over 300,000 users now and less than 4,000 Facebook likes. It looks like buying Facebook likes has gone out of vogue with Microsoft's marketing department. But apparently hiring astroturfers to post on slashdot has not.
You don't need nuclear weapons from the moon, nor toxic weapons either. Apparently the moon has a rich supply of these mysterious city-killing weapons called "rocks" which, when catapulted out of the moon's gravity well naturally fall into Earth's. The Earth's gravity operates on the mass of the rocks, accelerating them to great terminal energy - enough to look as much like nuclear weapons as makes little difference. Done with sufficient precision, or simply enough quantity, it should be more than enough force to get the Earth to capitulate. Scary thought: the entire moon is made up of these disastrous weapons of mass destruction, which require no fine art to deploy. I read a book about it once, a long time ago. Wish I could remember the title.
Odd note of geek trivia: the "Toynbee Tiles" enigma is precisely about this.
Not at all functional, either on my Epic or on Iceweasel, the desktop browser I use. Had to fire up an alternate browser just to post this. Otherwise the sections display is helpfully placed over the Submit comment button as well as obstructing the comments, the masthead appears to float to cover whichever comment I'm reading. Performance is hideous. Not at all delightful.
How do we turn this off?
This year you're about to have a much bigger selection of computers from vendors who don't sell Windows at all. Samsung, Apple, HTC, LG Philips, Vizio to name a few. And it will be awesome.
Six
Sometimes posts get modded down by accident. Sometimes by bias. A moderator can erase their moderation by posting in the thread. If you're both a subscriber and have good karma through a long history of good comments, you can post a comment like this one, which draws attention to the parent. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works in reverse and you get modded down multiple times for the same comment. But if you believe your pose is worthy, and unfairly moderated, this is how you fix it. So, hey, how about that parent post, eh?
Yes, we are approaching an optimax population for a transitory climate. Even if heating trends continue and we plow what is now permafrost yielding many times more food, it will only encourage more population growth to consume the available food supply. Something's got to give.
I hate to say it, but we're a pest. Individually we may be smart enough to dig into the origins of the Universe, to question the quantum physics. Collectively, we eat and breed to fill the Petri dish we're in, like bacteria.
We need to enter a spore mode and escape the dish. Or we're hosed.
Going back to the top, the transitory warm climate that supports our current population: it's not the norm. Not by a long shot. It's a transitory blip in geologic time. It's a rare positional fluke that humans were ready to exploit this brief moment in the sun. But that doesn't extend the duration of the moment, and we spent a good deal of our window eating each other.
If we're going to spore, and get off-planet, we had best do it now. If we don't the ice will scour us off and the planet will try again as it has before, perhaps with dolphin descendants next time.
If you've got a solution that doesn't involve the dreaded Malthus, I'd like to hear it.
Checking... I don't think I mentioned a gender. My own posts are being as brutally moderated as yours are. Good luck with that. I've got an old-school karma pool to deal with it, but I might not get mod points for a long time because I ventured several controversial opinions.
Yeah, but when about half the record years in the last 30 years are in the 15 most recent years, to conclude to the presence of an underlying trend is hardly an extraordinary claim.
It is an extraordinary claim when even Michael Mann, the inventor of Mann-Made Global Warming admits that the variations in temperature since 1998 are not "significant". There's not enough difference to overcome the errors in measurement and processing. There is no warming since 1998 that is provable to a scientific degree, even to a scientist who has tied his entire reputation and career hopelessly to the AGW train.
Considering the Mann Hockey Stick graph had people projecting relentless huge and growing increases every year, the fact that statistically significant warming stopped in 1998, but CO2 increases didn't is odd. Either we somehow dodged the apocalypse without halting CO2 production, or perhaps something else. Perhaps the alarming shape of that graph had more to do with the way the data was processed than the significant underlying data. We shall see in a decade or five. In the meantime unless some statistically significant warming recurs it wouldn't do take some rash action to stop a process that wasn't happening.
If we're going to build big immobile cities we're dumb. Throughout the global climate record the good places to live and farm Move. Even more disconcerting: they are usually the empty set. For the majority of the climate record the temperature has been nowhere near warm enough to either live or farm, on almost all of the planet.
The creationist thing is a meme - it's supposed to be funny. The AGW thing is a flamewar, and one of the admins with unlimited mod points is on the Warmer side.
A little flamewar now and then does help liven things up.
Not any more. WebOS is dead. Nokia will now also take up WP7. It's hardball time.
Hurd got tossed in a Mata-Hari, that has now claimed control of the BOD. Mata-Hari didn't act on her own. What we see here is the hand behind the strings. Hp is hosed.
Sony is still a believer in the Holy Grail of content providers: A DRM that consumers will embrace. Perhaps it's because they own so much content. It's also probably why they backed Mariah Carey's entry into film, "Glitter" with a three-film contract they had to back out of with $50m cash. They let their motivations guide their judgments, and they don't understand western culture.
Intel though, they should know better on several levels. Intel has enough smart people around to know that an acceptable DRM won't work for several reasons, of which here are a few:
Intel can't win here. They should not play this game. It makes them look bad. I have an idea why they try, and it doesn't reflect well on them as individuals, as a company, nor as a brand. In almost everything else they do I have a great deal of respect for Intel, but this stupid game gives me doubts.
Get with it folks: the goal isn't to prevent people who won't pay from getting the content. You can't do that no matter how hard you try. The goal is to get all the money you can from the people who will pay. That is a goal you can achieve by being an easy place to buy the content.
Content owners should get used to the idea that most people want to pay for what they get. They are decent people. They have pride. Sell them what they want. You're not going to sell stuff to the
They don't have to know why. When we tell them "Yeah, the droid is nice but you will like the Samsung better." They go buy the Sammy usually. They trust us because we don't lead them wrong.
Oracle is evil, and I'm not going with anything that they've got or derived from anything they've got in a way that they can control, no matter where it came from. I don't care if it's Sun-based or whatever. If it's got the Oracle taint on it I ain't interested. A fork that ain't beholden to them might be interesting.
So where are we at with this?
Actually, I think getting a slashdot article on the issue is a whole lot more likely to get it fixed. They do come here you know.
I just don't see it happening. No motivation.
After the Windows on ARM announce at CES there was talk of nvidia + ARM + Windows in server, desktop and mobile. That is now almost certainly quashed. A shame, too. They could have made something really cool out of that. I guess the bad old days of market dominant players halting progress to preserve their market share aren't completely over yet.
For years here on /. there were Vista fans who would not stop praising that piece of ineffable crap. A few persist still. It sucked. We all knew it sucked. "Buy a new PC" they would say, and the replies came back - "It is a new PC and it came with this crap." And still they would not quit. A thousand sockpuppets praising it from your Bangalore blog center are not going to make it not suck. Berating honest folk who tried it and share their sucky experience are not going to make it fly, nor quench the flood of people who are reporting that yes, it does have negative atmospheric pressure. The problem with it wasn't the marketing. It was the engineering. To get some traction here on /. and in the real world, the thing has to actually not suck.
WP7 is not good. It's not even close to good. It STILL lacks features like multitasking and copy & paste in 2011. A new contender doesn't have to have some good stuff - it has to hit all the corners and then have something special nobody else has got. Some new WP7 features are now promised, but updates to the KIN were promised too. Top-ten category apps are moving in the single digits of units - lifetime, not monthly or daily. It is a joke on itself.
I'm rereading this before posting, and am finding that this part doesn't have enough emphasis. So I'll say it plain: There are Top Ten apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace that have five sales total ever. This is not going to fund a development budget. They've reached 5,000 apps now so the vast majority of developers have to have no buyers at all, and probably less than a dozen downloads too. That is some serious suction.
Microsoft has somehow pushed 1.5M units into inventory at the merchants, probably on consignment, but they have no hope of actually selling them. The backlash when this all unravels will be epic.
Do you want to make a product that gets the /. crowd fawning all over you? I'll tell you how: raise the bar. Deliver something that does something current tech won't do. Make something that enables and empowers us to do the stuff that we want and need to do. Let us connect better with the people we care about. Let us get our work done more easily. And when we want that, get the hell out of our way.
Quit trying to believe that enough money thrown at marketing will put over a product that sucks. I know the advertisers you're working with say they can sell a turd sandwich, but we're not buying it. Their job isn't really to sell us stuff, it's to sell you advertising.
We here know that KIN had 300,000 facebook friends and under a thousand buyers. You can't put that BS over here any more. Try PCWORLD or Computerworld or whatever. They'll take your ad money and fluff your dolphin, or whatever the euphemism is today.
Apple is having amazing growth in smartphones also and the inclusion of more carriers in the US may help them some. I know a lot of people who just won't do business with AT&T even for an iPhone. There are a lot of Verizon customers who would like to give it a go. The share numbers don't exactly tell the whole tale either as the market for smartphones is also growing at an amazing pace. Apple makes a lot of money on every phone, they're selling a huge number of phones, and they're having huge growth. They should see a good bump when they open up to other carriers in the US. Their vast economies of scale are saving them on the Cost Of Goods Sold also. Any time Apple wants to take market share from Android all they have to do is indulge in that fragmentation bugaboo that seems to not be holding Android back and offer a variety of phones with different feature sets and price points for the folk who aren't a good fit for The iPhone. Frankly I hope they don't - they're consuming a large enough share of the world's production capacity for displays and Flash memory already.
But Google and Apple are not Microsoft. Neither of them has taken the position that for them to win everybody else has to lose. Their goal is not to own the market and use their dominance to suppress progress like it's some tech version of King of the Hill. Apple is going to take for the most part the premium end of the business and Android will take the volume. They'll each get a chunk of RIM's enterprise share. Every developer worth their salt is writing for both platforms now so they're getting some app-fusion going on. In the end there will be a lot more Android phones than Apple phones if for no other reason than not everybody in the world can afford an iPhone and the iPhone feature set doesn't meet everybody's needs and can't, no matter how awesome that feature set is because people have conflicting needs. Some people need battery life, some daylight-readable displays, some huge storage, some need low price, some need a physical keyboard, some want the thinnest possible phone. Apple will get a bunch of dollars, Google will get many more dimes and it will work out well for both. They'll both innovate as fast as they can to compete with each other, so we all win.
Everybody else though? It sucks to be you. You can't have the premium end, you can't have the volume end. You can't crack enough market share to get good developers because one cheesy breakout app on iOS and Android (Angry Birds) moved 50 million units and that's the KaChing lotto developers are looking for. You can't get the mobile ad dollars either. If you create a niche hardware feature it'll be on an Android phone in six months. If you create a useful evolution of the user interface it'll be a UI skin available on both iOS and Android with a dozen competing versions in three weeks ranging in price from ten dollars to free, and the developers will make more money on the skin than you will on the platform. Apple and Google have between them got this thing sewn up. Just to make it completely unfair those app and media stores and the Google home page are awesome places from which to sell the next generation products that latecomers are not going to have access to.
Tablets? I don't see any reason why the same story shouldn't play out there. Android's getting a late start like it did with phones, but there's only one iPad just like there's only a couple models of iPhone. There are hundreds of Android slates coming out to hit every price point and feature desired. They're not quite too late to the party. Apple should get the premium end again with the lion's share of the profits at a good margin because they have the innovator's advantage, the product is damn good, and the iPad 2 will be even better. Android should get the volume again and have to work harder for their money but rake it in too. By the time a credible third player shows up we
1. Windows XP still has more market share (57%) than Windows Vista (12%) and Windows 7 (21%) combined. More to the point since Vista and XP are affected, more than three quarters of Windows systems are affected. They should care. We sure as hell care. If all Microsoft cares about is W7, that tells us a lot about their commitment to support and security. It's not 2002 any more. It's now 2011, and if being "all in" in the cloud and "all in" in mobile, and committed to "Dynamics" (whatever the heck that was) has distracted from their commitment to security, then we need to know because WE USE THEIR SOFTWARE for more than a year or two.
2. Windows is a brand. A label. A blank symbol. It's not, and never was an operating system. It has been an operating environment for some time, or as some would say, several. It doesn't, and can't, "give a flying fuck" about anything. Windows is a brand that's owned by a legal fiction, a "corporate person". Since there is some fictional personhood attached to the legal entity Microsoft, and some history, we may be able to ascribe some motivation to that with the understanding that anthropomorphizing soulless corporations is in itself a trap. Some here would probably say that Microsoft is the cruel bargainer the devil himself hopes to be someday, but at least we're agreed that it has some personification to hang motivations on. Please don't say "Windows" when you mean "Microsoft" it confuses many issues. They also make very good mice. Ok, they don't actually make the mice, but you should get my drift.
And yeah if it drives adoption of their new product off of their old product without too much escape to actually good product as a goal, we'd all have thunk it. Because that's what they do. The prevention of actual progress is their goal.
The Microsoft dividends don't add up to much at all, and reinvested are a wash.
Which leads to a question: If Microsoft is spinning off tens of billions of dollars profits each quarter and using them to pay dividends and buy back stocks... why are the shares not worth double now what they were a decade ago? They've had enough profits to buy back the whole company twice over, right? Something funky with the numbers here.
Seriously, how do you achieve no-growth in a company that turns a billion dollars a month with a gross margin of over 80% - not just for a month, or a quarter or a year, but for an entire DECADE? It defies reason.