Over the last several months, we’ve seen moves by the US carriers to introduce a new model for paying for devices in addition to the traditional subsidy model. The new model allows customers to pay for their devices over a period of time in monthly installments. It began at T-Mobile in May 2013, and the … Continue reading How Carriers’ Move Away From Phone Subsidies Could Hurt Them
I have stated publicly I believed Apple would launch a larger screen iPhone than the current 4″ model this year. The market is simply at the point of its maturity where options are necessary. As markets mature, consumers become more self-aware of their needs, wants, and desires. It’s at this point the competitive dynamics change … Continue reading Big Questions about the Big iPhone
Like many new industries, the smart wearables market is filled with lots of startups looking to create interesting new products and build a successful business. Unlike previous hot trend markets, however, the launch of the wearables market also happened to coincide with the rise of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It’s a fortuitous combination … Continue reading Wearables Cautionary Tale
In the hiatus between Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and the wildness of South By Southwest in Austin, the last week saw an assortment of eclectic tech news, ranging from Apple’s growing automotive efforts, to new thinking at Microsoft, to, well, general strangeness surrounding Bitcoin. Apple Rolls Out CarPlay Giving Drivers a Smarter, Safer & … Continue reading ICYMI: Of Cars and Bitcoins
Given the beating Apple’s cloud services often take, I am sure you will be surprised at what I am about to say. I like iCloud. I rely on it quite a bit. What’s more, I trust iCloud. My expectations for iCloud have always centered on synchronization. This has always been the killer cloud value proposition … Continue reading In iCloud I Trust
Perhaps I should have titled this “India Is The Future Of The Smartphone Wars”? The appointment of the highly capable Satya Nadella to lead Microsoft only partly explains why I am thinking more about India and technology. The other reason is that it increasingly appears that the future of smartphones, and the winners and losers … Continue reading India And The Future Of The Smartphone Wars
Apu Kumar has held senior leadership roles at iconic technology brands as well as early stage start-ups, Phoenix Technologies, CNET.com, mySimon and is currently the SVP, Chief Deal Hacker at BlueStacks – GamePop. This is part 1 of a 2 part series from Apu on the PC industry. Trepidation “Trepidation is either the sign of … Continue reading The Future PC
For decades now, debates have raged, developers have been wooed and dollars have been spent trying to convince the world of the value of various consumer-focused computing platforms. From the early days of Apple DOS, AmigaOS, Atari TOS, and MS-DOS; through the middle period of Windows and MacOS; to the modern battles of Android, iOS, … Continue reading The New Platform Battle
E-commerce has been a buzzword in the industry for more than a decade. I have come across some interesting data points that paint a new picture of the e-commerce marketplace than one that has previously existed. Not surprisingly, this shift in e-commerce trends is being driven by mobile devices. The implications of mobile on e-commerce … Continue reading Report: Smart Devices and E-Commerce
Back in 2012, Microsoft’s then CEO Steve Ballmer started talking about Microsoft as a Devices and Services company rather than as a software company. This was a major strategic shift, and it was behind major moves like the launch of the Surface and the acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services business. This is a signal … Continue reading How to make Devices and Services work for Microsoft
Business is a combination of war and sport. ~ André Maurois The Long Summer Of The Microsoft Monopoly Olympics Computing was pretty simple for the last 15 years: PC plus a browser. Both are splintering now. ~ Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) Once upon a time — long, long ago in 2006 — the Personal Computing Olympics … Continue reading Who Won The Mobile Tech Olympics?
One of the hottest topics in personal technology these days is the smart watch, one of several new categories of smart wearable devices. The idea with a smart watch is to offer tidbits of “glanceable” information and various types of notifications within a small, lightweight form that people are already accustomed to wearing on their … Continue reading Watch What Happens
Today at Mobile World Congress, Nokia announced a new family of affordable smartphones called the Nokia X. What is notable is that these devices are not coming from Nokia’s Smart Devices group which creates the Lumia and ships Windows Phone as their smart devices OS. This group within Nokia is the group that sells feature … Continue reading Nokia’s Bold Move Supporting Android
Mark Zuckerberg cooly plunked down $19 large last week for a SMS-like app that most Americans had never used, probably never will. The move was labelled bold, brilliant, strategic. Zuckerberg branded a badass, a visionary, the next Steve Jobs. I suspect had Zuckerberg offered, say, a mere $5 billion, the echo chamber would have suggested … Continue reading How Is It Possible That Google Is So Bad At What It Should Be Great At?
There was plenty going on this week, but it didn’t take long for Mark Zuckerberg to spend $19 billion for Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp to become the week’s dominant news. Fortunately, a number of writers who have been paying attention to the explosive use of messaging services outside the U.S. have offered us plenty of … Continue reading ICYMI: Facebook’s Move on WhatsApp Changes the Week
When you are as big as Apple only certain markets work because real growth must come in staggeringly huge increments. Only platforms matter—not technologies—because platforms become ecosystems; properly nurtured, they are self sustaining. Witness the iPhone: a radio, a screen, and some processing handed over to app developers becomes a game box, a newsreader, a … Continue reading iWatch: It’s About The Ecosystem
For Insiders I wrote a while back about Samsung’s precarious position in the market place. Samsung finds themselves between a rock and a hard place. It is not surprising that a bit of news surfaced stating that the next version of their Galaxy Gear will run Tizen not Android. Tizen is a joint venture OS … Continue reading Samsung and their Fragile Relationship with Google
The CEO succession at Microsoft and the approaching Build conference have made Windows 8 a hot topic again, raising lots of questions about where the OS goes from here. While there are lots of theories, few people seem to be going back to where Windows 8 came from in the first place, which is really … Continue reading The Windows 8 Mistake
On September 13, 2011, Zach Epstein, explained to us us why Windows 8 was the dawning of a new age. And on February 9, 2014, Paul Thurrott explained to us why the sun was prematurely setting on that age. [pullquote]Calling Windows 8 a “software design” is like calling bald a hair color.[/pullquote] Between those two … Continue reading Windows 8 In Hindsight
Failure is fascinating. Failure highlights our limits, our strengths, our mortality. My ‘explorations in failure’ will this week examine the iPhone 5c. At the very moment Apple was about to slice deep into the Android behemoth, offer the world a glorious low-cost iPhone, it fell flat on its face. How could this happen? I don’t … Continue reading Trying To Understand How The iPhone 5c Failed
Last week, after a painfully long 6 month search, Microsoft made the transition from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella at CEO. As of late, Ballmer had become the master of making nothing happen, very slowly. Microsoft is still cash rich, but their strategic position has been deteriorating rapidly. Microsoft dominates sales of Operating Systems sold … Continue reading Microsoft’s Puppet CEO
A great deal has been written recently about the challenges that the PC market faces in comparison to other product categories, such as smartphones and tablets. But there hasn’t been much discussion about some of the self-inflicted wounds that PC makers have placed upon themselves. In the consumer market, in particular, many people find PCs … Continue reading Talkin’ ’bout Touchpads
As a new feature for Tech.pinions Insiders, we will be featuring an end-of-the-week list of links to some of the best tech writing on the web. “Microsoft’s Mobile Muddle” At Stratechery, Ben Thompson consistently produces some of the best analysis, particularly on Apple, Android, and Microsoft. This one dissects Microsoft’s confused mobile strategy. “Apple … Continue reading ICYMI: News and Opinions of the Web Worth Reading
In a recent column I wrote what I called my Blueprint for the future of Microsoft. In it, I proposed that Microsoft be broken into three separate companies or divisions – one focusing on IT, Enterprise and Business; one focusing specifically on mobile; and another aimed squarely at entertainment and the connected home. Many of … Continue reading My Blueprint for the Future of Microsoft-Part 2
Facebook and Twitter are at different points in their histories: Facebook just celebrated its 10th anniversary, generates profits each quarter, and has become a dominant force in global social networking, while Twitter has a fraction of Facebook’s users, loses money and seems to suffer from a crisis of identity about its role in the world. … Continue reading Facebook and Twitter’s growth challenge
