A collection of links, articles and stories.
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia co-founder, was recently trying to buy some “soothing cough drops” from a pharmacy in London, but was instead offered a homeopathic remedy called “Oscillococcinum”. The chemist went on to describe the remedy — here’s what Jimmy has to say:
But he went on to give some "scientific" details - if I took Oscillococcinum it would disrupt the DNA of the virus before it could make me ill.
Well, that kind of lie is what makes me ill.
Not bad:
For the latter quarter of 2012, sales of its iPhone accounted for 34 percent of all mobile phone sales in the US—including feature phones—according to the latest data from Strategy Analytics.
Kyle Orland writes a piece for Ars which I think has a few flaws, but is interesting to think about: Apple, the living room and gaming.
Kyle states:
Apple has now sold more than 10 million Apple TVs, but the 5-year-old streaming box has often been referred to as a "hobby" inside Cupertino.
I am reminded of this recent Tim Cook quote:
“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years,” Cook told Williams. “It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”
So the Apple TV has *recently gone from a “hobby” to an “area of intense interest”. Things are warming up.
Back to Kyle:
There are some things you can always seem to count on in the video game industry. Activision is always working on a new Call of Duty game. Ubisoft's Beyond Good and Evil sequel is always "just around the corner." The PlayStation 3 is constantly hitting its stride. And Apple is perpetually on the verge of releasing a living room video game console that will revolutionize everything.
I don’t think Apple is going to enter the console market in the same way Sony and Microsoft did. Apple is more of a general computing company: people can work and play games on their Macs, iPads and iPhones. Why would Apple restrict a living room product to just gaming? If the Apple TV sees an update soon (which seems likely), I see apps as the future.
I think what Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, is trying to get at with the quote included in Kyle’s piece, is exactly that: imagine the effects apps had on the smartphone business happening to the living room. It would be huge.
Here’s Gabe’s exact quote:
“The threat right now is that Apple has gained a huge amount of market share and has a relatively obvious pathway towards entering the living room with their platform. I think that there's a scenario where we see sort of a dumbed-down living room platform emerging—I think Apple rolls the console guys really easily. The question is can we make enough progress in the PC space to establish ourselves there and also figure out better ways of addressing mobile before Apple takes over the living room?”
I think Valve has a chance to do well in the living room, but Gabe is just concerned Apple will take all the pie.
Damn.
Some interesting information about Microsoft’s involvement in Dell’s plans to go private have surfaced (pardon the pun). Peter Bright at Ars has the story:
According to one of the people involved, "under one scenario being discussed, Dell would agree to use Microsoft's Windows software to power the vast majority of its devices."
Given that this is how Dell already operates, it appears that Microsoft may be trying to prevent any radical reorganization or departure from the PC market. A desire to substantially alter the way the company does business, including breaking its dependency on PC sales, is believed to underpin Dell's desire to go private in the first place.
Speaking of gaming’s future, it’s starting to look dubious whether Nintendo’s hardware division will be a part of it. Some tough numbers were announced recently:
Nintendo sold 3.06 million Wii U units worldwide from its November launch through the end of 2012. That's nearly as much as the 3.19 million units of the original Wii Nintendo sold back in the 2006 holiday season.
Less Wii U units sold, but six years later. So much for growth.
This is a great article over at Kotaku, echoing the talk the author, Ben Cousins, gave back in March 2012.
I’ve viewed Ben’s presentation many times since March last year and every prediction and assumption made, as far as I’m concerned, is accurate. I see the mainstream future of gaming as mobile, with Valve taking up what’s left. And I like how the future looks.
I’ve said many times before that I think Valve has a huge potential to win the living room gaming market. Gabe Newell, Valve’s CEO, seems to share a similar opinion.
He acknowledges Apple TV’s threat, but I agree with him — if Valve makes some smart decisions, the living room could be a huge win for the company, taking them from hardcore gamers to the exploding casual market.
John Moltz quotes Dan Frommer in this really short piece. I wasn’t expecting to be left quite so speechless after reading it.
Check out the quote from Steve Jobs, shortly before he returned to Apple. As Moltz says, mission accomplished?
Microsoft’s been in the news a little recently. Here’s my take.
This analyst roundup suggests sales for the Surface RT in the last quarter were somewhere between 230,000 and 1,000,000. No matter how you look at it, those numbers aren’t great. For comparison, Nokia sold 4.4 million high-end Lumia smartphones in the same time. (Apple sold 23 million iPads.)
What might be even more worrying than the-not-very-impressive numbers is that Microsoft didn’t announce any numbers themselves. Those Surface figures quoted above — between 230,000 and 1,000,000 — are pure analyst speculation. The numbers from both Nokia and Apple were reported directly from the respective companies. Officially. Not so with Microsoft. Not giving away sales figures for such an important and new product gives the impression Microsoft isn’t proud of them. Imagine if Apple released a new product then didn’t mention how many units were shipped during their next earnings call. There would be chaos.
How many times do I have to say it: The Microsoft Surface is a turd.
At least I figured out why the Surface RT exists. It’s more to protect Microsoft’s margins than to delight their customers. I still need to figure out why the Surface Pro exists.
My fear is that even if the Surface gets updated frequently and well, all customers who’ve bought one so far will be left out in the cold. Their Surfaces will be obsolete faster than they’d like.
And nobody wants that.
Unfortunately, today brings even more bad news for Microsoft: the 64GB Surface Pro will only have 23GB free storage space. Marco hits the nail on the head:
If your computer’s “1 TB” hard drive has 50 GB of preinstalled software and unusable space, you still have 95% of its space for user storage, which is hard to complain about. But advertising a “64 GB” Surface Pro that only has 35% of its space available to the user is a very different story.
Here’s a quick comparison of mobile device advertised storage space versus actual available space:
It's worth noting that the space taken up with preinstalled software is generally fixed, so the smaller the device’s storage, the lower the average percentage of free space available will be. Even though that’s the case, compare the difference between a 16GB iPhone’s percentage — 83% — and the 64GB Surface Pro’s — 35%.
This is a problem.
So, this is what I think matters. First, Microsoft can (and hopefully will) make swift and meaningful updates to the Surface products, both hardware and software. These may very well make the devices more attractive to new customers. This is a good thing. However, the downside is that the more software improves, the higher system requirements this software will have. This will shorten the life of current Surfaces. If a customer purchases a Surface today, only to have Microsoft release huge software updates a few months from now which cause the device to run at a snail’s pace (or, worse, updates which the current device doesn’t even support), is the customer likely to stick around in Microsoft’s ecosystem?
The more optimistic take on the Surface is that Microsoft has a ton of money to blow and will keep beating the horse until it does what they want. The more pessimistic take is that the Surface-horse stumbled out of the gate and is only going to continue to fall down as time goes on.
I think what will actually happen is somewhere in between these strained metaphors. It’s just not roses.
Since Tim Cook became CEO, Apple has been making some very positive changes in this department. Good to see it’s continuing.
As usual, smart observations from Horace.
IP-based messaging (read: iMessage, Whatsapp, Skype, etc) are on the rise, cannibalising SMS. I wonder how carriers feel about that.