Steve Wildstrom – Page 11

Marty Cooper’s Billion Dollar Spectrum Contest Idea

It has been almost 40 years since Martin Cooper made the mobile phone call that earned him the title of father of the cell phone. Today he is still active in the industry, looking for ways to make mobile better. Like many others, he thinks t5hat finding enough spectrum to handle soaring wireless data usage is the great challenge. Unlike many, however, he has ideas that go beyond reallocating a limited pool of wireless spectrum.

One of his concerns is that what has been spectacular growth in the efficiency of spectrum use has slowed. “There’s not much motivation for the people who have the spectrum to get more efficient,” he says. “Why should they get more efficient when all they have to do is ask for more spectrum? Yes, they have to pay for it, but the cost of spectrum at auction is the bargain of the century. Just think about it. You may spend $1 billion to get a piece of spectrum but that spectrum is going to double in value every 2½ years.”

So Cooper, who has spent many years working on smart antenna technology that would allow more effective reuse of spectrum, has an idea to create an incentive. “One possible way, and a way that I suggest would be really valuable for the government to get people to operate more efficiently, is what I call the Presidential Prize. Suppose the government offers the industry the opportunity to get, say, 10 MHz of spectrum free of charge, no auction price or anything, All you’d have to do to get that 10 MHz of spectrum is demonstrate that you could operate at least 50 times more efficiently than existing people. Well, if somebody could do that, they’d have the equivalent spectrum of 50 times 10 MHz, or 500 MHz of spectrum today.

“So my suggestion is let’s have a contest to see who can get to 50 times improvement over the next 10 years or so. It’s going to cost a lot of money to do that, but we’re going to find that we’ll have some new carriers , people that have made substantial investments, and we’ll now be using the spectrum more efficiently. The spectrum belongs to us, to the public, not to the carriers. We only lease it to the carriers, and they are supposed to operate in the public interest. It is in the public interest to use that spectrum efficiently and make it available to more and more people. The only way to do that is to get the cost down.”

You can see much more of my interview with Cooper, including video, on Cisco’s The Network.

Open vs. Closed Systems: What the Future Holds

Since the beginning of the personal computing era. there has been a struggle for dominance between open and closed systems. The early open CP/M computers gave way to the relatively closed Apple ][. The closed Mac was beaten by the open Microsoft/Intel PC. A few years ago, with the rise of mobile platforms, it looked like the closed model was achieving dominance. The closed BlackBerry and the rising iPhone were demolishing the open Windows Mobile. In traditional computers, the Mac was at long last gaining ground on Windows.

Today, things are a muddle and it is far from clear which model will dominate the next phase. Note that my usage of open and closed has nothing to do with open or closed source; an open system, in this classification means one where a software vendor offers code to a variety of hardware makers while closed system companies allow their software only on their own hardware.

I have long thought that the closed approach was best for mobile devices, especially phones. Small devices benefit greatly from having software that is highly optimized for the specific hardware it runs on. This produces systems with superior size/battery life/performance tradeoffs and, often, a better user experience. This was true for BlackBerry in its heyday and it is true for Apple’s iOS today. Windows Mobile, by contrast, suffered horribly from its attempts to accomodate a wide variety of devices–with or without touch screens, with or without physical keyboards and D-pads, and displays in a variety of sizes and aspect ratios.

(Of course, closed was no guarantee of success. Palm prospered for a while as a closed system, but faltered when it couldn’t compete with financially stronger rivals. Symbian, nominally open but, in its later years, effectively proprietary Nokia software, was also swamped by the iPhone tide.)

The success of Android, which is the clear global leader as a smartphone platform, may be changing the equation. It’s not clear whether the considerable variation in Android hardware design has been a blessing or a curse, but recent iterations of the operating system, especially the current Jelly Bean, have made it easier for developers to optimize software for a variety of device types and sizes. It still falls short of Apple’s seamless integration and probably always will, but it has definitely improved.

Microsoft seems to be charting a third course. Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Phone 8 are all nominally open. But Microsoft is keeping a close rein on its Windows Phone OEMs, setting tight parameters for most key specifications. For example, at least for the time being, Windows Phone is supported only on Qualcomm applications processors. The approach leads to a more consistent user experience, though it also causes a certain sameness in the devices. (Windows 8 and RT are covered by the more traditional Windows hardware requirements.Microsoft is keeping a close rein on its Windows Phone OEMs, setting tight parameters for most key specifications.

It’s far too early to say how successful Windows Phone 8 will be. Microsoft is rich and patient and seems inclined to give the much praised but apparently so far little purchased platform time to find its footing. Meanwhile, Google may be moving toward greater control of the Android platform, at least the licensed part of it, both by its sponsorship of Nexus designs and its control of Motorola Mobility. Microsoft, of course, has also plunged into manufacturing with the release of the Surface tablet, though it has shown no indication that it will also do its own phone.

Regardless of the success of Windows Phone, I think the Microsoft approach may be the right model. Because Android is open source in addition to being an open platform, there’s really nothing Google can do about a proliferation of phones, especially in emerging markets, that ignore its guidelines. But I expect it to enforce greater control over “official” Android products as it integrates Motorola and seeks to improve the Android user experience across the board.

The Curious Gap Between Android Market Share and Usage

There’s been plenty of debate in these pages and their comments about who is winning and who is losing in the battles between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Asymco’s Harace Dediu takes a close look at Thanksgiving weekend data from the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark and reaches a surprising conclusion: Despite the sharp growth in Android market share, the iPhone and, especially, iPad share of online shopping activity is actually growing.

Dediu’s full analysis is well worth reading. But in the end, he is as mystified as everyone else by the phenomenon he calls the “Android engagement paradox”:

I’m not satisfied with the explanation that Android users are demographically different because the Android user pool is now so vast and because the most popular devices are not exactly cheap. There is something else at play. It might be explained by design considerations or by user experience flaws or integration but something is different.

The BlackBerry Death Spiral

“Notice of Intent to Sole Source iPhone Devices.” That dry headline, from a National Transportation Safety Board post on the Federal Business Opportunities web site, is news about as grim as it can get for Research in Motion. Though the launch of the new BlackBerry 10 smartphones the company is counting on for salvation is just over two months away, it may well be too late. Enterprise customers, long the backbone of RIM’s business, are abandoning the platform and without them, RIM has little hope of survival.

The NTSB. like many U.S. government agencies, has long depended on BlackBerrys for secure mobile communications. But they are beginning to fall away. Among others, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and two Homeland Security agencies, Customs & Immigration Enforcement and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives have announced plans to move to the iPhone.

BlackBerry’s advantages have long been security and reliability and, indeed, RIM recently announced that it had won FIPS 140-2 security certification for the BlackBerry 10 platform. But other devices, notably the iPhone, now also offer government-ready security solutions. As for reliability, NTSB says in its document justifying a sole source Verizon Wireless/Apple deal:

This requirement is for the acquisition of Apple iPhone 5 devices. These Apple devices will replace the NTSB’s existing blackberry devices, which have been failing both at inopportune times and at an unacceptable rate. The NTSB requires effective, reliable and stable communication capabilities to carry-out its primary investigative mission and to ensure employee safety in remote locations.

If that’s the way its staunchest customers feel, RIM’s BlackBerry 10, no matter how fabulous, is doomed.

Windows 8: Tepid Marketing–>Slow Sales

Kind of sad, isn’t it? This sorry attempt at a festive display of new PCs at a Micro Center store in Rockville, MD, says a lot about the thud with which Windows 8 seems to have landed.

Windows guru Paul Thurrott recently reported that Win 8 sales are running below Microsoft’s expectations. Microsoft executives, Thurrott says, put much of the blame on OEM partners for being late to market with exciting hardware. But much of the problem may be closer to home. Neither Microsoft nor its retail partners seem to be making all that great an effort to sell new systems, especially compared to past efforts.

This week, I stopped by several big box retailers, the sort that generate most of the sales of Windows PCs, and what I saw was dispiriting. Instead of the end caps, banners, ceiling-high stacks of boxed software, and the occasional brass band that accompanied past Windows launches, I saw a distinctly low key effort. Windows 8 has only a modest presence on TV–most of Microsoft’s ad buy is dedicated to Surface, which is sold only online and in Microsoft’s own sparse retail outlets–and I saw no sign of any Microsoft promotional effort at my local Best Buy, Staples, Microcenter, or H.H. Gregg. In fact, the display below, at Staples, was about as flashy as it got:

Now it is a fact of life in retailing that vendors literally get what they pay for in terms of shelf position, end-cap displays, store advertising, and other promotion. It appears Microsoft isn’t paying much this time around. It doesn’t help that Microsoft is not, at least at this point, selling Windows 8 as physical media, so there are no in-store displays of the software itself. Still, it’s telling that Windows is missing from this row of promotional posters at the Micro Center entrance:

On the shelves, things are just as bad. The main selling point for Windows 8 is touch, but most of the new touch models have yet to come to market. Laptops are generally grouped by price, sometimes by size. In no case did I see touch models grouped together or in any way featured. Best Buy at least had little tags on some non-touch models proclaiming their lack of touch screens, but otherwise, you had to figure it out for yourself, either by reading the detailed product descriptions or by touching the screen and seeing whether anything happened. (A clue: If it costs less than $1,000, it probably doesn’t has a touch screen.) In most stores, there are some Windows 7 machines mixed in among the newer models, and I wouldn’t be surprised if few shoppers managed to figure out just what was supposed to be superior about Windows 8.

Unless Microsoft is going to open a whole lot more of its own stores (there is only one full-fledged Microsoft Store in the Washington area–in Arlington, Va.,–and just two pop-up stores, really glorified mall kiosks, in the entire state of Maryland), it should work with OEMs and retailers to do something to improve a horrible shopping experience. Most of the machines I saw on shelves made it impossible to get any sort of meaningful Windows 8 experience. Many of the machines were dead, or were locked into demo screen shows. Of those that were running Windows 8, almost none were both connected to the internet and linked to a Microsoft account, two features necessary to understanding what the new OS is all about. And while I understand the need of retailers to keep stock from walking off, their approach to theft prevention is lethal to sales. For example, it’s impossible to get a real sense of the sleekness of this Hewlett-Packard Spectre XT Ultrabrook at Staples with that horrible anti-theft clamp and cable device on its side:

Even worse was a similar clamp (at Best Buy) that prevented a Lenovo Yoga convertible notebook/tablet from going through its agile tricks.

I only ran into one true Windows tablet in my shopping tour, a $600 Asus Vivo Tab RT. To my complete lack of surprise, the display was free of any information on the differences between its Windows RT software and the full Windows 8 on the systems surrounding it, another bit of consumer education that Microsoft is sorely ignoring.

The Autonomy Catastrophe: Going from Bad to Worse at HP

Léo Apotheker’s brief, unhappy tenure at Hewlett-Packard is the gift that keeps taking.

The highlights of his 10-month reign, which ended in September, 2011, included a loss of $30 billion in market capitalization, the shuttering of webOS operations, and turmoil caused by public musing about a possible sale of spin-out of the Personal Systems Group. His big move to redirect HP: The $12.5 billion purchase of business analytics software company Autonomy.

Oops.

HP announced today, as part of its dismal fourth fiscal quarter financial report that it was writing off $8.8 billion of Autonomy’s grossly inflated value. From the HP release:

HP recorded a non-cash charge for the impairment of goodwill and intangible assets within its Software segment of approximately $8.8 billion in the fourth quarter of its 2012 fiscal year. The majority of this impairment charge is linked to serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy Corporation plc that occurred prior to HP’s acquisition of Autonomy and the associated impact of those improprieties, failures and misrepresentations on the expected future financial performance of the Autonomy business over the long-term. The balance of the impairment charge is linked to the recent trading value of HP stock. There will be no cash impact associated with the impairment charge.

Looks like one of the many things Apotheker wasn’t very good at was due diligence. In an uncommonly blunt statement HP accused Autonomy of mischaracterizing “negative margin” sales (i.e., stuff sold at a loss) that made up 10% to 15% of Autonomy’s revenue and inappropriately using licensing transactions with resellers “to inappropriately accelerate revenue recognition, or worse, create revenue where no end-user customer existed at the time of sale. ” With language like “disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations,” I suspect former autonomy executives and investment bankers will be hearing from HP’s lawyers before long. Autonomy founder Mike Lynch joined HP after the acquisition, but left the company in May.

Of Tablets, Phones, and Apps

This began life as a reply to a comment on Part 4 of John Kirk’s “Why Android Is Winning the Battles, But Google Is Losing the War,” but quickly got out of hand.

John’s post sparked a discussion of Apple’s and Google’s different approaches to developing apps for tablets vs. handsets. Commenter rj said that Apple’s approach is to favor development of “Universal” apps that will run on either the iPad or iPhone. This is correct, but it rather misunderstands what a Universal app is. If implemented following Apple’s user interface guidance, a Universal app will effectively create two different versions in a single package.

The Android guidelines focus heavily on scaling and are marked by a belief that, at worst, developers need make only modest adjustments to phone apps to make them suitable for tablets:

Provide different layouts for different screen sizes

By default, Android resizes your application layout to fit the current device screen. In most cases, this works fine. In other cases, your UI might not look as good and might need adjustments for different screen sizes. For example, on a larger screen, you might want to adjust the position and size of some elements to take advantage of the additional screen space, or on a smaller screen, you might need to adjust sizes so that everything can fit on the screen.

Apple is much more concerned with the need to redesign apps for different display types:

Ensure that Universal Apps Run Well on Both iPhone and iPad
If you’re planning to develop an app that runs on iPhone and iPad, you need to adapt your design to each device. Here is some guidance to help you do this:Mold the UI of each app version to the device it runs on. Most individual UI elements are available on both devices, but overall the layout differs dramatically.

Adapt art to the screen size. Users tend to expect more high-fidelity artwork in iPad apps than they do in iPhone apps. Merely scaling up an iPhone app to fill the iPad screen is not recommended.

Preserve the primary functionality of your app, regardless of the device it runs on. Even though one version might offer a more in-depth or interactive presentation of the task than the other, it’s important to avoid making users feel that they’re choosing between two entirely different apps.

Go beyond the default. Unmodified iPhone apps run in a compatibility mode on iPad by default. Although this mode allows people to use an iPhone app on iPad, it does not give them the device-specific experience they want.

But reading the two sets of programming guidelines, I noticed a much deeper difference. Both, of course, are intended as developer references and contain a great deal of nitty-gritty information about APIs and how to implement specific features. But the Google version is full of code snippets and parameter definitions while Apple’s approach is much more concerned with reminding developers that what matters is the user experience and how good app design contributes to that experience. The Google approach is more practical, but Apple’s may be more useful. I don’t want to read too much into a couple of pages from developer manuals, but at least to me, they do sum up important differences in how Apple and Google approach the world.

After Sinofsky Can Microsoft Move Beyond Windows?

The departure of Windows chief Steven Sinofsky, hard on the heels of the release of Windows 8, came as a shock, but not a surprise. But the important question is less what led to the departure of the talented but abrasive Sinofsky than how Microsoft uses its latest executive shuffle to move forward in a tech world it no longer dominates.

Microsoft is, in many ways, the anti-Apple. Unlike Apple’s tightly centralized, unified structure, Microsoft has long been a collection of fiefdoms. Although promoting Windows was the goal of just about every Microsoft product and effort, operating groups were often silos and turf was fiercely defended. Sinofsky, who had run the Office group, took over Windows after the Vista fiasco and proved his chops with the successful delivery of Windows 7 and Windows 8. (While it is far too early to judge the commercial success of Windows 8, it was an exemplary development process, especially in contrast to the chaos that gave us Vista.) Along the way, Sinofsky built the power of the Windows group by gaining control of mobile device efforts. (Windows Phone operations are part of the Entertainment & Devices group, but have increasingly come under the sway of Windows.)

It’s hard to overestimate Microsoft’s dependence on Windows. The chart shows the company’s operating profits by division:

Windows and Microsoft Business are responsible for nearly all of the company’s profits, and the business division, consisting primarily of Office and Office-related back-end services such as Exchange and SharePoint, is very heavily Windows-dependent. Only the tiny Entertainment & Devices unit (primarily Xbox) and the money-losing Online Services (mostly Bing) and meaningfully independent of the Windows empire.

The problem Microsoft faces today is that it has to move beyond Windows, but its recent instinct seems to have been to extend the franchise. The Surface tablet is an interesting product, considerably more PC like than the iPad and Android tablets. It’s a good match for a space Microsoft is trying to create between traditional PCs and the new tablets, heavily dependent on a keyboard and with an operating system that is a stripped-down version of the full Windows 8 experience and access to Microsoft Office applications–but only at the price of running in traditional desktop mode.

I don’t think Microsoft can afford to leave the more tablet-y market to the competition, because while the Windows and Office lines of business will remain profitable for years to come, they provide very little opportunity for growth. Sinofsky was widely blamed, or credited, with derailing the imaginative Courier tablet that came out Entertainment & Devices group. I don’t know that Courier was the right device for Microsoft to make or even if it was a viable product, but it was very un-Windows-like in a way that probably sealed its fate.

For many years now, Microsoft has been built on the proposition that its products exist to promote the greater glory of Windows. This kind of thinking has been most destructive in the mobile business, where efforts to force a Windows-like user interface onto Windows Mobile devices produced some of the world’s clunkiest smartphones. The unification of the Metro design language, originally developed for Windows Phone 7, across desktops, phones, and tablets is a step in the right direction. But when you scratch the surface on the Windows 8 desktop or go beneath the Surface, you find the same old Windows. And it is increasingly a bad fit for the way people want to use devices today.

Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller, who are taking over Windows engineering and business operations, respectively, are able executives with solid track records. But they won’t have Sinofsky’s power within the organization. If that means they will be less able to protect the windows-centric thinking that has long been at the heart of Microsoft, it will probably be a good thing for all concerned.

Tech Could Learn from the Election: Big Data Rules

$XKCD xartoon$

I have wanted to write about the growing importance of big data and analytics for a while, but this is a tech site and I did not want to get it embroiled in the political tempests. But now that the votes have been counted, we have a stunning demonstration of the power of data, as suggested by the XKCD cartoon above.

In the closing days of the campaign, New York Times blogger Nate Silver emerged as a lightening rod. He drew fire from both Republicans and traditional pundits of all stripes for his insistence that despite the closeness of the polls, both nationally and in key states, that President Obama was an overwhelming favorite to win re-election by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a much larger one in the electoral college. He was, of course, dead on.

People who are now hailing Silver as the greatest political pundit ever are completely missing the point, because Silver’s approach was about as far as you can get from the seat-of-the-pants, anecdotal methods of pundits. He went with the data.

Silver’s best friend was something known to mathematicians and statisticians as the law of large numbers. What this theorem, first developed in the 18th century, says is that as you take many samples some some phenomenon, say the percentage of voters supporting Obama in Ohio, the results of these tests will cluster around the true value. (The law’s cousin, the central limit theorem, allows much great specificity about the nature of that clustering, but also is subject to much more stringent restrictions.)

Pundits kept focusing on individual polls and the fact that the difference fell within the margin of error.* Silver understood that as you used more and more polls, the probable error of the aggregated result shrank. In other words (and very roughly) if 10 polls each show Candidate A with a one point lead, you can be reasonably confident that A is in the lead even though the error of each poll is plus or minus three points.

Silver also used a tool that gave him a way to quantify predictions. Now a model necessarily involves making a lot of assumptions. For example, Silver’s novel (which he has been reasonably transparent about, though he has never released its detailed specification) assigned a fairly heavy weight to key economic indicators early in the campaign, but reduced the weight as time went on based on the assumption that new data have less effect as election day nears. It also involves weighting the influence of polls based on their track record and “house effect” (a tendency to favor on party or candidate relative to other polls. He then used to model to run thousands of daily simulations of possible outcomes, a sort of Monte Carlo method. His probability of victory on any given day was simply the percentage of simulations in which a candidate emerged as the winner.

This sort of analysis has only recently become possible. First, we didn’t have the raw data. There were fewer polls, and greater lags between the collection of data and its release. Second, until the recent massive increases in cheap and available computing power, doing thousands of daily runs of a model of any complexity was impossible. A similar phenomenon lies behind the increased accuracy of weather forecasts, including the extremely accurate predictions of the course and effects of Hurricane Sandy. Weather forecasters use supercomputers for their simulations because the models are far more complex, but the techniques and the beenfits are much the same.

Too bad we don’t have more data-driven analysis in tech. Of course, there’s the big problem that a lot of the necessary data just isn’t available. Only Apple, Amazon, and Samsung know exactly how many of which products they sell, and they are not inclined to share the information. Still, there are analysts who make the most of the data. Two who come to mind are Horace Dediu of Asymco, who keeps tabs on the handset business, and Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins, who provides infrequent but deep data dives. We could badly use more data and less posturing.

—

*–Poll margin of error is one of the most misunderstood concepts around. First of all, the term should be abandoned. The correct concept is a confidence interval; what you are saying when you claim a margin of error is plus or minus three points is that some percentage of the time (the confidence level, typically 95% in polling) the actual result wii be within three points of the reported value. Pollster should act more like engineers and surround their point values with error bars. Second, the size of the confidence interval is purely a function of the sample size and says nothing whatever about how well a poll is executed. So a poll with poorly put questions and a badly drawn but large sample will have a tighter confidence interval than a much better done poll with a smaller sample.

In Praise of Old-fashioned PCs

. Photo of IBM PC (Wikipedia)

I’m a big fan of tablets, especially the iPad. Altrhough I find myself spending more and more time with a tablet and less and less with a traditional computer, I can’t imagine getting by without a Windows PC or a Mac. And that is why, though the market for traditional computers will shrink, they aren’t going away.

The tablet is the only computer a lot of people will ever need. If the iPad or an Android tablet isn’t quite up to the job, the new, more PC-like Microsoft Surface might well be (See Patrick Moorhead’s post on Surface’s advantages.) But a lot of people falls well short of all people.

When he introduced the iPad in2010, Steve Jobs famously observed that that PC was like a truck and the iPad was a car, and most people don’t need trucks. He was right, but seriously underestimated the importance of trucks. Nearly half of all vehicles sold in the United States are light trucks. Even if you eliminate the more car-like crossover SUVs (maybe those are the Surfaces), trucks still account for about a quarter of the sales.

I’m writing this on a Windows desktop PC (for a change; I usually work at my iMac when I’m at home.) Because I can. I’ve done WordPress posts entirely on the iPad (with a Zagg keyboard) and while it is quite possible, it isn’t much fun. I regularly work with multiple windows open and often cut and paste material from one app to another. You cannot easily do that on a tablet.

There are three activities that keep me on the traditional PC. I do a lot of technical writing and editing, which generally involves large (100-pages plus), highly formatted Word documents. There is no alternative to Word, and often Excel and PowerPoint for collateral material. A lot of tech pundits who keep predicting the imminent demise of PCs and heavyweight Microsoft Office applications underestimate how deeply these are ingrained into enterprise workflows.At the recent Apple product announcement, the thing I found myself lusting for was not the featured iPad mini but the new 27-in. iMac with a Fusion drive.

I also do some video editing. Not a large amount but enough to know that I want the fastest, most capable system I can lay my hands on. Even simple editing is taxing on a system and transcoding and rendering video can get really time consuming. Also the process of capturing an hour of live video and editing it down to a five- or ten-minute cut can generate many gigabytes of files.

Finally, there’s photo editing. I love the hands-on aspect of photo editing on a tablet and iPhoto for iOS is a fun tool. But for serious work, whether it is preparing graphics for Tech.pinions posts or processing my own photos, I turn to Photoshop.

While we are talking about threes, there are three things that PCs have and tablets lack. First is processing power. Today’s tablets have plenty of power for the tasks they are intended to do, including rendering HD video. But to achieve 10 hours of battery life in a very thin, light tablet, thingsa have to go, and one of those things is raw computational power. There’s no way an ARM chip or even an Intel Clover Trail Atom is going to match the performance of an Intel Core i5 or i7 with Intel’s latest integrated graphics, let alone with a discrete graphics system.

Second is a big display. Some tasks, especially those involving multiple windows, want all the display real estate you can throw at them. I generally work with 27-in. displays and am thinking of going to dual monitors if I can figure out how to make them fit. A tablet limits you to one smallish window (one and a half, sort of, on the Surface.)

Finally there’s storage. I haven’t taken an inventory lately of how much storage I have connected to my local area network, but it’s more than five terabytes, with a terabyte of local storage on my two main desktops. A tablet offers 64 GB, max. Yes, there is all but unlimited storage in the cloud, and I keep a lot of stuff in the cloud. But I want local copies of my important content, and that includes lots of music and photos, as well as thousands of documents.

For all these reasons, my PCs aren’t going to disappear. And neither, I suspect, are an awful lot of others. (On the other hand, I do find that I am using my Mac and Windows laptops less and less, as tablets take over the mobile chores.) Many business users are going to continue to need full-bore PCs as well, although there too we may see fewer laptops and a return to desktops.

At the recent Apple product announcement, the thing I found myself lusting for was not the featured iPad mini but the new 27-in. iMac with a Fusion drive. I love the super-portability of the tablet, but I still need the heavy iron too.

Why Does Microsoft Make It So Hard?

Are you planning to use a new Microsoft Surface for business? You might want to think again, at least if you are concerned about legal niceties.

At ZDnet, Windows guru Ed Bott examines the strangely complex legalities of using Microsoft Office on Surface. Office 2013–at least its Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote applications–is part of the Surface’s Windows RT operating sustem. But the bundled software, Office Home & Student 2013 RT, prohibits use of the programs “for any non-profit, commercial, or other revenue-generating activity.” Which seems to mean that if I were writing this in Word on a surface, I would be violating the license.

It’s not as though you have a choice about the version of Office on your Surface. Office RT comes with it and is the only version that can be installed. (The forthcoming Surface Pro will support any Windows version of Office, but probably does not come with any Office software included.)

There are several ways out of this. If the Surface is owner by a company and if the company has an Office Volume License Agreement, the restrictions are waived. Same if you subscribe to a business version of Microsoft’s forthcoming Office 365 service, $150 a year for Small Business Premium, $20 per user per month for Office Professional Plus.

Bott says you are probably also in the clear if you own a fully licensed version of Office 2013 Professional and maybe Office 2013 Home & Student, although those products won’t ship for a couple of months.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote aren’t the greatest word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software in the world. But at least if you buy these iPad apps, for $10 apiece, you can use them for whatever you damn well please.

Why Surface Will Be Good for the iPad–and the Rest of Us

For the past 2 1/2 years, iPad as has ruled the world of tablets. Except for Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet, both special-purpose devices dedicated to consumption, there has been no competition worth mentioning. But with the entry of Microsoft into the fray, both with the Surface and an assortment of third-party Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets, the business is about to get a lot more interesting.

I start from the premise that only competition keeps the tech business driving forward and that in the absence of effective competition products stultify. This definitely happened in PCs. After Apple failed to respond to the introduction of Windows 95, the Mac market share fell to the low single digits and without effective competition, Microsoft innovation faded. It has only been Apple’s across-the-board success in recent years that lit a fire under Microsoft.

The iPhone never had iPad’s grace period. It entered a crowded market, where it had to displace the entrenched market leaders: BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian. That proved to be surprisingly easy, helped by lunkheaded competition, but Android soon came along as a serious challenger. I don’t think there is any doubt that the iPhone and Android have made each other better and I expect this process to continue, especially if Google can build and app and services ecosystem that rivals Apple’s. And I think the entry of Windows Phone 8 can only improve things, pushing both Apple and Android, though its commercial success is an open question.

The fact that iPad has improved quite a bit since its 2010 introduction seems largely the spillover of iPhone features into the tablet space: better apps, better services, faster processors, and the retina display. The first notable effect that tablet competition has had on the iPad is the introduction of the iPad mini, which is clearly a response to smaller tablets finding at least some success in the market.

Android tablets, especially the larger ones, have suffered from many problems. but the overwhelming issue is the lack of decent software. The success of iOS devices and even, to some extent, of Android phones has proven that consumers want native apps. But Google has had a very hard time seeing beyond the browser. The Android app situation remains calamitous, with most of the available choices being blown-up phone apps that are terrible on a 7″ tablet and unspeakable on a 10″.

Microsoft is not making this mistake. The selection of Windows RT apps is still quite limited, but Microsoft understands the care and feeding of developers. The RT apps that are available are designed for the Surface’s display (and those of Windows 8 laptops and tablets) and consistently speak the Metro (for lack of a better name) design language common to Windows 8/RT and Windows Phone. Many of the apps are quite good (a notable exception being the built-in Windows 8/RT Mail app, whose awfulness is both inexplicable and inexcusable.)

Equally important, Surface is being launched into a mature Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft has spent years seemingly pouring money down the holes of Xbox and what used to be called the Windows Live collection of online services. But now, those investments may be about to pay off, as the company pulls together the entertainment content of Xbox and cloud services such as SkyDrive, Outlook.com, and Office 360–not to mention the deep understanding of cloud services it has gained from its enterprise back office offerings. iOS devices sold a lot of Macs because of the way they work so well together in the Apple ecosystem. The same dynamic could work for Microsoft in reverse: the vast installed base of Windows PCs could sell Surfaces and Windows Phones to gain the advantages of the Microsoft environment.Surface is being launched into a mature Microsoft ecosystem..

Surface is not designed as a head-on competitor for the iPad. In many ways, from its ability to work with USB peripherals to its all-but-mandatory keyboard, it is far more PC-like. Like the iPad itself, it represents a new device class in what is turning out to be a surprisingly big space between smartphones and traditional PCs.

It’s going to take a while before we can judge the success of the Surface strategy. Microsoft, however, is a patient company that is smart enough not to expect an instant payoff from its very big bet. But by offering tablet-hungry consumers a worthy alternative to the iPad, Microsoft has put pressure on Apple to keep its game up. That can only be good for all of us.

A Surface Retail Reality Check

Whatever the buzz that got some people to line upo for the midnight launch of Surface sales at Microsoft Stores last night seems to have dissipated quickly. This afternoon, I stopped by the popup store in Westfield Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Md. It was a slow time of day, about 3 pm on a Friday, but the heavily staffed store wasn’t having a lot of luck even getting passing shoppers to stop and take a look at its assortment of Surface tablets and Windows 8 laptops. At one point, I counted five customers (at least in the sense they were looking) and 10 store employees, probably mostly contractors.

Here’s a very of the same store, located at the crossing of two main aisles, from the level above:

And here, for contrast, is a shot of the Apple Store located directly above the Microsoft popup. It’s actually pretty empty by Apple standards, but Microsoft would die for this sort of quiet time.

Windows 8, Windows RT, and Surface: A Strategy Emerges

Microsoft has begun the tough job of answering three questions vital to its future: Why Windows? Why Windows RT? And why Surface? The arguments given at the Windows 8 launch event in New York on Oct. 25 won’t close the deal, but they mark the emergence of a strategy out of what has sometimes seemed a muddle

Why Windows

Microsoft has clearly been watching Apple and learning. It understands that when customers buy iPhones, iPads, or Macs, they aren’t just purchasing hardware; they’re buying into an ecosystem of products, services, apps, and content where everything works together.

Microsoft has long had the pieces, but lacked the integration. Now it is putting them together. Content moves seamlessly from your Xbox to your PC to your tablet to your Windows Phone. The new Xbox Music brings a Spotify-like music service to all devices. SkyDrive lets you share your files easily and all the devices have access to some form of Office. Clever Windows 8 apps connect to Bing services. Windows users will be able to “plug into the largest ecosystem anywhere,” says Windows chief Steven Sinofsky.

How well this all works in practice remains to be seen. Microsoft, with its deep experience in enterprise back-end operations, has a considerable advantage over Apple, which has stumbled often with network-based services. For once, it is Apple that is stuck with the legacy of iTunes, which Microsoft is starting clean. And the Microsoft offering leaves Google, which has tons of stuff but none of it very well integrated, in the dust. Neither Apple nor Google was mentioned by name in the lengthy presentations, but I got the sense that Google, which has left an opening by failing to exploit its early advantage in cloud services, may be the primary target.

Microsoft isn’t forgetting the enterprise, but for the moment, at least, it seems to be taking it for granted; the messaging at the Windows launch was nearly 100% consumer. Except for tablets (Microsoft seems to have given up on the idea of calling them “slates”), the company has no illusions of large-scale enterprise adoption of Win 8 any time soon. But corporations remain wedded to Microsoft and these days, the company makes more enterprise revenue from servers and tools than from desktops and laptops, or even Office.

Why Windows RT

Windows RT, the version designed for tablets based on ARM processors, is a tougher proposition. At the launch, Microsoft started the hard job of differentiating between the two new versions of Windows. The selling point for Windows 8 is fairly simple: Although the new user interface will require a fair amount of learning by users, the operating system remains compatible with the vast array of existing Windows software. If you want to run Autocad or Photoshop or even Microsoft Outlook, you need the legacy support of Windows 8.

But that legacy also brings a lot of cruft with it, and if you don’t need to run these desktop programs, you may be better off with the lean, clean Windows RT. Windows has made great leaps in security since XP, but a traditional operating system that gives programs full access to system resources is always going to be vulnerable

Windows RT is much more locked down and only allows installation of apps through the Windows Store. This should provide an environment that is resistant to both malware and the complex problems caused by software interactions that plague tradition Windows and, yes, Mac OS X

The troubling question is whether users pf RT-based tablets will be able to get the apps they need. As of today, the answer is no. I had hoped that launch day would see a sudden profusion of apps on the barren shelves of the Windows Store, but it hasn’t happened. There have been some very welcome additions, such as a client for the SugarSync cloud synchronization service and a Kindle reader, and a Twitter client is sad to be coming soon. But the Windows Store remains deeply impoverished compared to the iTunes App Store or even Google Play

The preloaded Microsoft apps are a mixed bag. The biggest issue is the awful mail client, which lacks such basic features as a consolidated inbox and support for POP mail services. Microsoft has promised improvements, and I hope that either they come soon or that someone steps up with a third-party offering. Having major components of Office–Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and One Note–certainly distinguishes RT from other tablet OSes, but the allegedly touch-optimized applications still aren’t very touch-friendly. Their use pretty much demands a keyboard and a touchpad or mouse.

Why Surface

It’s clear that Microsoft regards Surface, its first plug into computer hardware, as an entirely new type of device, neither a tablet nor a PC or, more accurately both. Microsoft offers it without either of its two keyboards–either the flat $100 Touch Cover, which looks unusable but actually works quite nicely, or the $129 Type Cover, with keys that actually move a little–both to hit a $499 price point and to avoid a profusion of SKUs. But if you are buying a Surface, don’t even think about getting it without one of these keyboard-plus-touchpad covers.

Apple considers the iPad a post-PC device. Microsoft considers the Surface a kind of PC. Thee difference was summed up, in hyperbolic language, by the respective chieftains. Sinofsky describes the Surface as “not just a tablet but the best tablet I’ve ever used. Not just a laptop, but the best laptop I’ve ever used.” But Apple CEO Tim Cook, who hasn’t actually seen it yet, dismissed it as “aa fairly compromised, confusing product…. I suppose you could design a car that flies and floats, but I don;t think it would do any of those things well.”

Surface is in many ways a more ambitious device than the iPad because it can do everything most consumers want from a PC. Sinofsky even makes a big deal of its ability to work with printers and other peripheral devices through a USB cable (personally, I don’t want to think of connecting a tablet to anything except over a wireless link.

It will be interesting to see how the market shakes out between the ARM-powered Surface and the Surface Pro, which uses an Intel Clover Trail processor and standard Windows 8. The Pro version will be heavier and considerably more expensive. It will truly be a PC in a new design: lighter than an Ultrabook and less capable, though probably capable enough for most uses

To the extent to which enterprises go for the Surface, they are going to choose the Pro (expected to ship some time in Novmber), both for software compatibility and because it, unlike the regular Surface, can be centrally managed like a PC. IT managers may see the Surface Pro as an way to stop the creeping invasion of iPads, giving executives the tablets they want while retaining the manageability IT desires.

Microsoft still has a lot of work to do to sell Windows 8. It’s biggest immediate challenge ia to set customer expectations for Windows RT correctly to avoid a wave of returns of Surfaces (and RT tablets from Lenovo, Dell, and Asus) by consumers who did not understand the software limitations. But Microsoft is off to a good start. It’s good to see the tablet battle finally fully joined.

The iPad Mini Could Spur an Education Revolution

I have long been a skeptic about the role of personal computing in education, especially for K-12 schools. Yes, the internet has made a wealth of information accessible to students. But the instructional revolution promised by technology optimists seems to hover forever on the horizon. The tablet—and for now, at least, that really means the iPad for reasons I will get to—could be the tool that finally makes the difference. And the new iPad mini could greatly accelerate the trend.

There are many reasons why technology has been an educational disappointment for three decades. Probably the most significant is that the computer has never become students’ constant companion but remains instead an occasional tool.

There have been experiments that equip large groups of students with laptops, but they have been far from a roaring success. Laptops are expensive to buy and even more expensive to maintain—both hardware and software. They are heavy for kids to carry and often lack the battery power to get through a school day of steady use. While many textbooks and other instructional materials are available for Windows and Macs, reading on a laptop screen is a mediocre to terrible experience. In theory, laptops opened the door to new educational experiences, from rich media to a wide-range of custom generated instructional content. In practice, the device itself got in the way.

Tablets are fundamentally different. They are intensely personal and no more obtrusive than a textbook. Reading on them is a delight. While they can break if abused, they are far more rugged than laptops. Perhaps more important, their software is secure by design, making them all but immune to the malware and corruption that plague conventional PCs.

Apple is best equipped to take advantage of the K-12 tablet market. It has quietly worked with schools to develop tools for successful classroom use and to improve the manageability and delivery of custom content and applications. (A case study of a large-scale iPad school pilot in the Australian state of Victoria gives a lot of information on how this can be done.) Apple offers extensive training and support for educators. And the iPad Mobile Learning Lab is a charging cart designed for classroom sets of tablets.Apple is best equipped to take advantage of the K-12 tablet market..

There’s nothing like this in the fragmented Android world and Google does not appear to be taking on a leadership role in education. (It is promoting Chromebooks for educational use, but not Android.) Microsoft might have a shot with its new tablets, but an obscure technical decision will limit their appeal. One of the big attractions of Windows, at least to school system IT departments, is the ability to manage devices centrally, including deploying software and locking down systems. But Windows RT devices, including the Surface and other tablets based on ARM processors, are not able to join Windows Active Directory domains.

What seems like a really geeky move by Apple could greatly enhance the ability of educators to create custom instructional content for the iPad, especially in math and the sciences. Mathematical typesetting for ebooks of all types has been a source of enormous pain for as long as ebooks have been around. Apple has just made it easy. The just-released update to the iBooks authoring app allows text to be created in three forms widely used for mathematical typesetting, LaTeX, MathML, and MathType. This is a simple example of text including LaTeX that I entered into iBooks Author in about a minute:

$LaTeX text$

This attention to the needs of education is likely to pay big dividends for Apple. And the iPad mini should prove particularly attractive to educators. Educational volume discounts could take the unit price well under $300. And the lighter weight and smaller size makes it better suited for younger students, who are likely to find the larger iPad heavy and bulky.

A lot has to happen in education before tablets can reach their potential. Most important, the people who run schools have to overcome their deep-seated fear of students in possession of connected devices. Yes, they can facilitate cheating and distractions, but teachers have always had to deal with cheating and distraction in classrooms and this is a terrible reason to deny students the advantages to students of everything from a library at their fingertips to instructional materials enabled by the tablet. The upfront cost of the tablets will be an issue, though savings on textbooks and other educational materials that will no longer be needed in physical form could allow a rapid recovery of the investment.

Schools, particularly K-12 education, is a sector that has lagged badly in the adoption and use of computer technology. The explosion of tablets may finally be about to change that.

Why Apple Is Keeping the iPad 2 [UPDATED]

Some commentators have expressed surprise that Apple is keeping the iPad 2 in its lineup after announcing what it calls the fourth-generation iPad on Oct. 25. The company’s normal practice would be to keep the n-1 product while dropping anything older. Instead, Apple dropped the third-generation iPad announced just last spring.

But when you look at the products, this call is not at all surprising. The key is that it’s a big stretch to call the new iPad (the 9.7” version) a fourth-generation product. All that is new for the iPad announced this spring is a processor bump from the A6 to the A6X and the replacement of the 30-pin dock connector with the new Lightning connector used on the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini. If Apple hadn’t already had an event scheduled, this announcement probably would have been made by press release.

Then there’s the question of pricing. There’s probably very little difference in the bill of materials between the new-new and the old-new iPad. So dropping the price of the third-generation iPad to $399 to maintain a $100 differential between the products would have forced Apple to take a significant margin hit. So the iPad 2 stays and the third-gen version is retired.

The real fourth-generation product is the mini. Although it uses a non-retina display and an older processor, it is amazingly thin and light. Its stunning new case, made with a new manufacturing process, echoes the design language of the iPhone 5.

I expect that come next March or April, Apple will hold its by-now traditional iPad announcement. Then we will really see a new-generation product. Look for a thinner, lighter tablet with the perfect chamfered bezel edge that is Apple’s latest design hallmark.

UPDATE

The announcement of the new iPad has set off a remarkable and totally unjustified chorus of whining, such as this piece by Cnet’s Roger Cheng, “thanking” Apple for rendering his months-old third-generation iPad obsolete. It’s no more obsolete today than it was on Monday. It’s true that the new iPad features a faster processor, but I haven;t heard anyone complaining about the current model being slow.

Wireless Charging: It’s Coming, but Probably Not to iOS

Pre with Touchstone

Wireless charging has been around for a long time. It’s what powers electric toothbrushes and cordless shavers and well as a lot of medical devices. But it has been very slow to make it to mobile electronic devices, but the Wireless Power Consortium aims to change that as it pushes ahead with its Wireless Qi (pronounced Chee) standard.

To date, wireless charging of mobile devices has been associated mainly with companies on the brink of doom. Palm and, briefly, Hewlett-Packard offered the Touchstone wireless charger for both Pre phones and the TouchPad tablet. Nokia is now offering it on its Lumia phones.

The principle of wireless charging, called resonant inductive coupling, is simple. An alternating current in a coil induces a current in a nearby coil. If the two coils are tuned to the same resonant frequency, the power transfer between them can be very efficient. And if the two coils are the same size, the magnetic field will be contained in the space between them.

The current Qi standard provides for 5 watts of power, adequate for smartphones but not for tablets, which take too long to charge at low wattage. A 10 W standard is on the way, but like all standards bodies, the WPC moves slowly and may take a while. But this is an area where standards are crucial. One of the reasons previous efforts failed to catch on is they were proprietary and the advantage of wireless charging lies in the ability to power a variety of devices from a single charging pad.

A number of handset makers, including Samsung, LG, and Motorola, are members of the consortium and while that doesn’t guarantee they will offer products, it at least shows interest. Delphi, the former General Motors electronics and parts division has just joined, increasing the prospect of automotive charging systems. But Apple is prominently missing from the membership list.

Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller recently dismissed wireless charging as bringing no real advantage to consumers. But WPC Chairman Menno Treffers, of Philips Electronics, says he was off the mark: “That’s a real misconception about what the point is. The point is the difference in the charging experience. I can best explain it by talking about my own experience. I used to have a USB charger on my desk, but in practice, I didn’t use it; it’s a hassle and you tend not to do it.If you have a Qi phone, you just put it on the pad and you pick it up. People keep their batteries charged much better.”

It’s Time To Fix DMCA Takedowns

Tech Dirt t-shirt — T-shirt at the Techdirt Insider Shop

A few days ago, a teacher posted a copyright Pearson Education personality inventory on a blog at Edublogs.org. Pearson served a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice, which set off a series of events that led to nearly 1.5 million student and teacher blogs going temporarily dark after Edublogs’ hosting service took its servers offline. (You can read the details of the affair in this Techdirt account. By Oct. 16, Edublogs was back up, apparently with a new hosting service.)

My purpose isn’t to defend or attack Pearson–plenty of others have done that–or even to rail against DMCA, which is full of both useful and ridiculous provisions. But its clear that a section of the law that was created to protect web sites hosting third-party content has gone off the rails.

DMCA requires site operators to take down copyright-infringing material at the request of the copyright holder. The key language, known as Section 512 or the safe harbor provision, is part of a compromise that bars infringement claims against sites such as YouTube as long as they make good-faith efforts to keep infringing content out and comply with takedown notices. It was this provision that allowed YouTube to fend off a suit by Viacom (still wending its way through appeals) charging massive copyright infringement. Without it, the whole idea of user-generated web content would long ago have collapsed under an assault of copyright suits.

But there are problems with the whole DMCA takedown process and they are getting worse. To ensure safe harbor protection, many sites have turned to algorithms that hunt for infringing content and these programs make mistakes, lots of them. For example, YouTube blocked posts of Michele Obama’s speech to the Democratic National convention because the address had been carried in copyrighted network broadcasts.

Content owners also use algorithms to hunt for infringement, and these too have caused trouble. Earlier this month, a Microsoft infringement-hunter went a bit crazy and sent Google 440,000 takedown requests, including pages posted by Wikipedia, the BBC, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Aggressive copyright enforcement backed by takedown requests has targeted political advertising. Some of this is legitimate, if perhaps unwise; copyright holders have the right to disapprove the use of their material in ads. But much, including network objections to the use of news clips and BMG’s attempt to block airing of ads featuring President Obama singing an Al Green song, stomp on the fair use exemption built into copyright law. (The Center for Democracy & Technology has a good analysis of the problem. It was written during the 2010 election season, but applies as well to this year.)

On the whole, the Section 512 and the DMCA takedown process has worked reasonably well at balancing interests, but there is evidence that the playing field is starting to tilt toward rights holders. I think some relatively modest reforms are needed to restore balance (even though I am always reluctant to propose any copyright law changes on the principle that the law almost always emerges from Congress in worse shape than it went in.)

First, we need a way to minimize collateral damage. Takedowns should be limited to to pages containing infringing material and the practice of taking down whole sites because of a small amount of potential infringement must stop. In the case of Edublogs, the takedown came after the site operator, wpmu.org, had blocked the offending post but had accidentally left a copy in a server cache. The hosting service just did the quickest and simplest thing and pulled down the whole site.

Second, the practice of making sweeping takedown requests at the least hint of infringement needs to be reined in by penalizing false or overbroad claims. Section 512(f) of DMCA makes it possible to recover damages for a takedown that “knowingly materially misrepresents” a claim. But the law sets a very high bar for such recovery and it simply is not a viable alternative for a blogger, or anyone much smaller than YouTube, to bring a damages case against, say, Warner Bros. We need a more effective way to discourage over broad takedown requests and to compensate victims of false claims.

Copyright law, and intellectual property law in general, is all about striking a balance, weighing the rights of content producers against those of users and consumers. In recent years, the debate has been dominated by copyright maximalists, who want to restrict fair use into oblivion, and minimalists, who believe copyright is evil in principle or who think that fair use is whatever use they wish to make. Both are wrong, and they stand in the way of reasonable solutions.

An Interesting Take on Android in China

Android is doing very well in China. But in something of an exclamation point on John Kirk’s musings on Android’s contribution to Google’s bottom line, Android in China may not be doing at all well for Google.

That’s the conclusion of a post at Telecomasia.net by Ovum analyst Siv Putcha (tip of the hat to Steve Crowley). Putcha argues that because the Chinese government blocks access to many Android services:

Chinese device vendors are using Android for their own purposes, and are increasingly at odds with Google’s preferred vision of Android’s developmental direction. As a result, Android is fragmenting beyond Google’s control, and Google’s Android strategy is rapidly coming undone in China with no immediate prospects for correction.

It’s not clear whether these millions of not-quite-Android phones being sold in China ever get registered with Google or count in Google’s activation total. But it seems certain that they are contributing little or nothing to the strategy of giving the software away and hoping to monetize services.

How Google Should Fix Android

It’s time for Google to step up and take charge of the Android platform it has created.

I know this sounds odd. By at least one standard, Android is a runaway success. It is by far the world’s most popular smartphone software standard and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. But in many other ways, the platform is a mess. If Apple’s iOS is the good child, a little too neat and a bit too tightly wound, Android is the child raised by wolves, undisciplined and unpredictable.

Android’s most fervent defenders, from whom I’m sure I will hear shortly, rather like things this way. The great variety of available hardware and the openness of the software to modification are among Android’s top attractions to folks who love tinkering with their devices. But at the same time, the fragmentation is keeping Android from reaching its full potential, both by denying many customers the latest software and by making life difficult for developers.

Ownership lacking. A big problem is that Google owns Android, but fails to take full ownership of it. The software is free for anyone who wants to use it. Authorized users who adhere to some fairly loose standards get important perks, including Google services, access to Google Play, and the use of Android branding. (I’m really not concerned here with other uses, such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook.) The freedom given to OEMs yields both innovation and chaos.

Manufacturers are free to choose from a wide variety of processor and graphics combinations, with systems from Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and most recently Intel in use. The software must also support a wide variety of display types, sizes, and resolution. This prohibits the sort of very tight, super-efficient hardware-software integration that Apple achieves in iOS and that Microsoft, to a somewhat lesser degree, seems to be striving for in Windows Phone.

A bigger problem is the latitude OEMs have to modify the software. Almost all major Android OEMs have provided their own tweaks to the user experience, with only the Google-designated Nexus guaranteeing a “pure” Android experience.

Whether the software modifications required both to support a range of hardware choices and varied user experiences are good or bad, they have enormously complicated Google’s task in keeping the software platform unified. Operating system updates take many months to roll out and a lot of phones are never upgrades from the major OS version they shipped with. This by now familiar table tells the story.

Version	Codename	API	Distribution
1.5	Cupcake	3	0.1%
1.6	Donut	4	0.4%
2.1	Eclair	7	3.4%
2.2	Froyo	8	12.9%
2.3 – 2.3.2	Gingerbread	9	0.3%
2.3.3 – 2.3.7	Gingerbread	10	55.5%
3.1	Honeycomb	12	0.4%
3.2	Honeycomb	13	1.5%
4.0.3 – 4.0.4	Ice Cream Sandwich	15	23.7%
4.1	Jelly Bean	16	1.8%
Data: Google, October 1, 2012

The Moto Mystery. At one point it looked like Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility was a serious bid to take ownership of Android. In fact, there were widespread fears that Moto’s position as Google’s “house” OEM would give it a tremendous advantage over competitors such as Samsung and HTC.

But far from using Moto to dominate the Android market, Google has not even used it to demonstrate leadership. It has just released new Droid models that run on the superseded Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android. And it committed the cardinal sin of declaring that purchasers of its Atrix phones would not receive a promised upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich, leaving them stuck with the ancient Gingerbread.

Buyers of an iPhone or iPad know they will get the latest version of iOS and that it will be updated, up to the limits of the hardware, for at least three years (the one notable exception being the 2 ½-year-old original iPad, which was dropped from iOS 6.0.) Android buyers are likely to get a new device with software that is already obsolete, with possibly a promise of an upgrade that may or may not be honored.

Android’s biggest fans aren’t going to like this, but what Google should do is rein in Android’s freedom in the interests of a more unified platform. On the hardware side, Google doesn’t have to go as far as Apple and maybe not as far as Microsoft, which is limiting Windows Phone 8 OEMs to a single system-on-chip family and has imposed other significant design restrictions.

Google should also put much tighter limits on the ability of manufacturers to modify the basic Android software. It’s not clear that any of the modifications have improved the Android user experience significantly and very clear that they are a major impediment to timely upgrade of existing devices.

Finally, Google should require an enforceable pledge that manufacturers will supply timely operating system updates—say within three months of release—to all devices for a minimum of two years after sale.

The result of tighter limits on manufacturers would mean less choice for consumers. But there will be a payoff in remedying an environment that software developers find difficult, hostile, and a very tough place to make a living. Android today offers devices that are superior, at least in specifications, to the iPhone. But the app experience is definitely worse in terms of both comprehensiveness and quality. Reducing the fragmentation of the platform could alter the landscape for developers, making Android more attractive and improving the experience for users. That’s a tradeoff worth making.

The Return of the Tablet PC

Photo of Acer Iconia W510 (Acer) — Acer Iconia W510

Microsoft’s decision to offer tablets in two flavors–Intel-powered slates running full windows 8 and ARM-powered units running Windows RT–has created a marketing and branding problem for manufacturers: How these very different products going to be distinguished for buyers?

One solution that seems to be gaining popularity is to call the Intel/full Windows versions “tablet PCs.” This seems to assume, probably correctly, that customers have little memory of the ungainly and, outside of some niche markets, unpopular, touchscreen laptops and slates that went by that name starting in 2003, and that they are willing to give the name, and the category, a fresh look with Windows 8.

Acer today announced its latest entrant, the Iconia W510 Tablet PC, a 10.1″ , 1.3-lb.slate powered by an Intel Atom Z2760 (Clover Trail) processor. The W510 will start at $499 for a 16 gigabyte version and $599 for 64 GB. A keyboard and battery dock that turns the tablet into a sort of notebook adds $250 and doubles the weight to 2.6 lb.

Hewlett-Packard is also using the tablet PC moniker, though it applies it to a broader ranger of products. On its small business website, the Slate 2, an 8.9″, $849 pure tablet currently shipping with Windows 7 is called a Tablet PC. But so is the EliteBook 2760p, a more traditional 12.1″ touchscreen convertible (meaning the screen can rotate and flip over to form a bulky slate) notebook. It runs an Intel Core i3, i5, or i7 processor, weighs 4 lb., and starts at $1,479.

Dell calls its current 10.1″, $679 Latitude ST Windows 7 tablet a Tablet PC. It also uses the name for a the Latitude XT3, a design similar to the HP EliteBook but even heftier with a 13.3″ display. Dell’s web site does not make clear whether it will use the Tablet PC names for its upcoming XPS 10 pure Windows 8 tablet or the XPS Duo 12, a sort of old-fashioned Tablet PC with a novel screen that can rotate vertically.

Lenovo, interestingly, calls the ThinkPad X230, the latest version of a conventional Tablet PC that has been in its product line for several years, just a “convertible tablet.” Like Acer, Lenovo is also shipping Android tablets in addition to planning for the windows versions.

Microsoft, meanwhile, seems to believe its customers will know what its tablets are when they see them. It plans both Windows 8 and Windows RT versions of the Surface, which will come with a very thin membrane keyboard that doubles as a cover. But Microsoft is staying out of the naming game. Its web site avoids calling them either tablets or slates, let alone Tablet PCs. They are just Surface.

Windows 8 Mail App: Better, but Still Bad

The good news is that the lame Mail app in Windows 8 is about to get better. The bad news is that it will still fall well short of any reasonable expectations of a modern mail client.

As the Oct. 26 ship date of Windows 8 approaches, Microsoft has announced new versions of many of the key Metro (since Microsoft still hasn’t given us a better name for them) apps. The new features of Mail are described in the screen grab on the right: message threading, better IMAP support, proper handling of calendar invitations, and better search. The new app hasn’t actually rolled out yet, so I couldn’t test how well it delivers on these promises. But even if these new features are very good, they only nudge mail closer to marginal acceptability.

The biggest missing item remains a consolidated inbox for all your accounts. Also missing are such abilities as saving searches into smart mailboxes, message sorting, and the ability to flag messages.

This is important because at least in Windows RT, which means on all ARM-based tablets including Surface, this is the mail program you are going to have to use. It’s possible that third-party mail apps will emerge soon, but as of now there are none in the Windows App Store. For anyone who considers email important, and that is still an awful lot of people, that puts RT tablets at a significant disadvantage to the iPad, whose mail app is quite good, and Android, whose mail app is not so great, but still a lot better than this.

HP’s Future: Apple, IBM–or Dell?

On Oct. 3, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman will give analysts her strategy for restoring the battered tech giant. A close look at the company’s financials and its business suggests that it has the strengths to stay around for a long time. But years of boardroom drama have taken a heavy toll that make it difficult for the company to return to industry leadership.

How does HP make its money? As the table below shows, more than half its revenues come from personal systems, primarily Windows desktops and laptops for consumers and businesses, and from imaging and printing, a line of business ranging from $50 inkjets to Indigo presses for commercial printing. Services, largely enterprise systems integration and outsourcing, contribute about 28%, and enterprise servers, storage, networking, and software most of the rest. The problem is simple: The companies HP wants to be most like are Apple on the consumer side and IBM for enterprise. But the company is that the company it currently most resembles is Dell.

HP 2011 Performance by Sector
	Net revenue	Share of sales	Earnings from operations	Net margin	Share of earnings
Personal Systems	39,574	30.4%	2,350	5.9%	15.1%
Services	35,954	27.6%	5,149	14.3%	33.1%
Imaging & Printing	25,783	19.8%	3,973	15.4%	25.6%
Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking	22,241	17.1%	3,026	13.6%	19.5%
Software	3,217	2.5%	698	21.7%	4.5%
Financial services	3,596	2.8%	348	9.7%	2.2%
Total from operations	130,365	100.0%	15,544	11.9%	100.0%

A SWOT analysis–strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats–is useful for assessing HP’s prospects.

Strengths: For all its recent problems, HP has the most important thing for a company in need of reinvention–a solid financial base. It remains nicely, if not spectacularly, profitable and has strong cash flow. It is the dominant player in its two largest sectors, PCs and printing. It has mastered supply-chain and channel management, It competes on a global scale and enjoys strong worldwide brand recognition.

Weaknesses: Unfortunately for HP, this is a much longer list. The overarching problem is a consequence of endless boardroom turmoil. Mark Hurd replaced a flailing Carly Fiorina. He dramatically improved execution, but at the expense of ruthless cost-cutting that trimmed muscle as well as fat. Hurd’s dramatic ouster was followed by the brief, disastrous tenure of Léo Apotheker. When Whitman was appointed, she took command of a disoriented and badly demoralized company, knocked between post and pillar by ever-changing top-level strategies. Given that, it’s a wonder that HP isn’t in worse shape than it is.

Personal systems is #1 in many of its markets. According to Gartner, HP has been tops in worldwide unit PC volume for five straight years. It beat back a surging Acer, though it is now threatened by a rising Lenovo. The problem is that these are largely commodity markets in which HP’s products offer little differentiation and not a lot of profit. And the question facing the traditional PC business is not whether it will decline, but how quickly.

The action is moving to phones and tablets, and HP is not yet a player in either market. HP was a leader in handheld devices in the pre-smartphone era. The Microsoft PocketPC-powered iPAQ, acquired when HP bought Compaq in 2001, was the most successful challenger to Palm in the PDA market. But unlike other PDAs, the iPAQ failed to evolve into a phone and HP was left behind.

HP’s 2010 purchase of Palm was supposed to solve two fundamental PSG problems: Its weakness in mobile and its total dependence on Microsoft for critical software. It was a bold plan, and PSG chief Todd Bradley talked bravely of a version of webOS that would run on Windows PCs to give a unified experience across PCs, phones, and tablets. Unfortunately, Apotheker wanted to dump PSG, not invest in it. The webOS operation was tossed in a cell, starved, and ultimately taken out and shot, leaving HP without a dog in the increasingly important mobile fight.

HP’s enterprise businesses–hardware, services, software, and financing–contribute about half of sales and about 60% of profits, but they are hardly industry stars. This years, HP took an $8 billion writedown of its 2008 acquisition of EDS and its 2011 purchase of Autonomy enterprise analytics software–at an $11 billion price that many analysts considered too high–has yet to pay dividends. HP continues to be a pale challenger to industry leader IBM in nearly all enterprise categories and the jury is still out on its challenge to Cisco’s dominance of enterprise routing,

Threats. The failure of the webOS strategy left HP more beholden to Microsoft than ever. HP have a reasonably attractive line of products including Ultrabooks, hybrid tablets with keyboard docks, and straight tablets ready for the Windows 8 launch. For the time being, HP has decided to forgo entering the Windows RT (ARM-based) tablet market infov of Intel-powered Windows 8.

One challenge is that the introduction of the Surface tablets, Microsoft is also becoming a competitor. For HP to get into the mobile game, it needs Windows 8 to make it big, but without Surface becoming the iPad of Windows products. This could end up being a very narrow path.

HP also has to complete its portfolio with a smartphone line. Having blown the webOS opportunity, HP’s only real choices are Windows Phone 8 and Android, and HP’s general Windows-centricity argues for WP8. But once again, that would leave HP at the mercy of Microsoft’s success, and competing as a new entrant against HTC and Nokia, the latter having bet the company on Windows Phone.

The printer business continues to be a cash cow for HP, with sales of high-margin ink and toner providing reliable annuity income streams for some years to come. It’s also true, however, that printing is in a long term secular decline that is likely to accelerate as tablets replace printed documents. This will cut into HP’s sales of generally low-margin printers and hihgly profitable consumables.

HP’s enterprise service business is big and reasonably profitable, but it is concentrated in the relatively low end of the business, such as operations outsourcing, rather than the high-end integration dominated by companies such as IBM and Accenture. HP has to find a way to push its way up the food chain.

Opportunities. The data center switching and routing market is ripe for disruption. HP is pushing its OpenFlow technology hard as a software-based alternative to specialized, dedicated hardware (read Cisco.) HP is right about the direction of technology, but Cisco has read the same tea leaves and has shown itself to be a nimble competitor.

Autonomy was a big play to get into the fast growing but fragmented enterprise analytics market. The high price will limited the return on investment in purely financial terms, but if HP makes it work, it could make the company a much more significant enterprise software player.

HP’s culture—the vaunted “HP Way” created by Dave Packard and Bill Hewitt–has taken horrible blows in recent years. HP Labs, once second only to IBM Research in the industry, has been hollowed out by savage budget cuts and staff reductions. But HP is still an engineering company at heart and retains a great deal of talent waiting to be used effectively. That–not spending cuts, better marketing–is the only real route to HP’s long-term success,

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Confessions of a Reviewer: How the iPhone Maps Mess Was Overlooked

How did they miss it?

If you go back and read the reviews of the iPhone 5 published on the first day that Apple allowed recipients of early samples to write, you would be stunned by the furor the soon broke out over the quality of Apple’s Maps app. Of the major early reviewers, only The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg noticed major flaws in Maps, noting its “big minuses” in his second paragraph. Others either failed to mention Maps at all, or praised the app. The New York Times‘s David Pogue may have set some sort of record by writing an initial column in which he called the Maps app one of the iPhone’s “chief attractions” and coming back a week later with a column calling that same app “an appalling first release.”

I spent 15 years reviewing tech products for BusinessWeek and the depressing truth is that oversights and errors like these are painfully easy to make. I wrote reviews of major products that had been in my hands for as little as 36 hours, which barely gave me enough time to figure out what the major features were, let alone test them thoroughly. (My best guess is that iPhone reviewers had their test units for five or six days before they had to write.) I relied too heavily on the review materials and demos provided by the manufacturers, and these tend to steer reviewers to the features that work best and away from the ones that are dicey.

It’s hard to say whether the extreme time pressure facing reviewers is the result of a deliberate strategy by companies or a necessity of the product cycle; it probably varies from case to case. The companies are often working under very tight schedules themselves and the products, particularly their software, is often not final until just before release. I was always grateful to companies that provided products extra-early, even on the understanding that the hardware was a pre-production sample the software wasn’t quite finished. I could log the defects and see if they were fixed in the final product. (My favorite was very early in my tech career, when I spent more than a year watching Windows 95 evolve through its testing.)

The Maps problems were particularly easy to miss. iPhone reviewers were focused on the new hardware and Maps is actually part of the general update of iOS software for iPhones and iPads. Testing mapping software is time consuming and the problems of the apple app are much more serious in some locations than others, so it depended on where you looked. I was lucky. I installed iOS on my iPad, opened up Maps, and discovered a glaring flaw right in my neighborhood: the main campus of the National Institutes of Health was missing. That got me looking and I quickly discovered lots of other problems.

I think the bottom line here is pretty simple: The pressures reviewers are under all but guarantee that mistakes will be made, though I can’t remember one quite as glaring or near-universal is this. Don’t put too much faith in the fevered first batch of reviews, especially of products that inspire a reviewer feeding frenzy. The problems will be discovered quickly enough.

HP 2011 Performance by Sector