Microsoft is running a very confusing strategy here. Google understood that with Motorola and it's why they sold it off. Microsoft hopes to keep its monopoly in the PC space with its multi-OEM operating system, yet still try to get every PC consumer to buy its own devices. Something's got to give.
I expect Microsoft's partners will increasingly continue to push other operating systems into the market on their devices, even if initially it's not exactly what the market wants. But they will do it anyway, because they will increasingly hate Microsoft.
And it will work, because the PC ecosystem is much bigger than Microsoft, and Microsoft won't succeed fighting against it. They will lose more money from lost licenses than they will be making (in profit, since so far Surfaces have continued to lose them money) than they will be making from these devices.
There could be a multi-part strategy. Both Google & Microsoft probably covet the revenue and margins Apple received from selling their own devices. Those margins, in terms of phones and tablets are probably un-repeatable. Some next iteration of device however could contain offer big margins. That is something that could double Google's market capitalization. At the least Microsoft and Google understand that they need something to give them hardware experience.
Second, it allows Google & Microsoft to lead in hardware. Even if the Surface 3 flops, the OEMs have a guide pointing what is possible and which direction to go (or not to.) I imagined this was part of the reason why Google has had different manufacturers built their Nexus products.
The Surface buys Microsoft some time. The number of people who need Office and legacy systems is going to continue to shrink as special use case stuff is built -- whether from the analytical side like Tableau to something like FarmLogs. The operating system itself may very vanish in to the background, leaving us with some unix-based combination of Android and Chrome OS.
Yes, the choice was between no rules and weak rules, either of which will allow the telecoms to do whatever they want to service companies (despite the meaningless "commercially reasonable" clause). The Title 2 reclassification wasn't even on the table.
This should be the main issue at this year's elections. Unfortunately, this is America, where the main issues are only those the large campaign donors care about.
As an European I probably should be glad about this, since this combined with all the NSA spying issues and implementing backdoors into US products [1], should increasingly force innovation out of US and bring it to Europe, but somehow I'm not.
All the ISPs will slow down all the major companies services, unless they pay up. There is no "faster" Internet. It's just "paying to get normal Internet back", like they've already done with Netflix:
More likely isps in other countries will look to this and decide they can make more money there. I think some Australian ips still have low gigabyte caps per month
As we've seen with the recent patent case that reached the Supreme Court, once again because the Federal Court overturned the lower Court's ruling, it seems the Appeals Courts are a lot more inclined to be pro-patents, while the lower Courts (other than the East-Texas ones) and the Supreme Court aren't.
That being said, I hope this forces Google to deprecate Java on Android and start pushing developers to using Go. They should've been working on this since the trial with Oracle started, and not rest on their laurels.
Ugh, but Go is slow compared to Java and it's missing a lot of features.
Why not something like Mono? It's faster than their current Dalvik/ ART VM and it would allow for many more languages to be used natively than just Java or Go.
The last time I looked, Mono was in an even more precarious legal situation than Harmony, but who knows? Since Google is already paying Microsoft, they might just work something out.
Or just reach some licensing agreement with Oracle, which would finally make Android real Java. That would be a big win for the Android community: better performance, better compatibility, more supported languages.
I hope TextSecure/Whisper will get to have video-calling, too, soon. People need to stop using insecure platforms like Skype that make mass spying so easy.
I love Jitsi. Since the latest version even the remote desktop sharing on my ubuntu systems is working.
It is funny how you say 'right now'. Jitsi tends to be not that stable from time to time.. so I have the same feeling. :)
Advice: Use IPv6. If either party can not get a native connection look for a free tunnel provider. Start jitsi with -6 as parameter and it will prioritise v6 connections. This fixed all kinds of 'nat-nat-nat' setups that some friends are forced into. (Make sure the implications of having a public address are understood.)
Another wonderful thing about jitsi is the availability for multiple platforms and crypto support for otr or zrtp. There is also a video bridge is bandwidth is a concern on video calls.
Does anybody know an skype like echo system for sip or xmpp? Perhaps even with crypto and video support?
The fact that you think people are making excuses to use proprietary video conferencing platforms (or other communication platforms) is why things like TextSecure and Jitsi will likely never take off. You're really just making excuses for the TextSecure and Jitsi teams.
For the most part, no one cares whether they're using something that is open source or proprietary. Most people don't event care much about abstract concepts like "security" or "encryption" when it comes at the cost of their real goal -- communicating with family and friends. Once some secure platform is as easy to use[0] and as prevalent[1] as Skype or Google Hangouts, maybe people will start using them.
[0] A sibling post suggests setting up Jitsi with IPv6 and starting the program with the -6 parameter to fix some connection issues. I would hope it's clear why needing to use certain command line parameters and understanding "the implications of having a public address" to use a chat program makes it a non-starter for a vast amount of people.
[1] As it turns out, advertising and marketing matter! You can't have a popular chat platform if no one knows you exist!
> For the most part, no one cares whether they're using something that is open source or proprietary. Most people don't event care much about abstract concepts like "security" or "encryption"
You say it as if it's universal and intractable. Awareness has jumped since Snowden's revelations began, AFAICT, and I've read several places that security-oriented services have seen a very large jump in demand.
"Modern" IE that doesn't support WebRTC, HSTS, and the most behind in supporting HTML5 features [1]. If that's "modern", I'd hate to see how their "non-modern" products look.
Not many sites use HSTS yet. IE says they'll support it in the next version anyway. For everything else you mentioned, they're right on par with Safari, which is not bad.
Maybe it was an execution problem, too, but I think it was mainly a strategic problem - i.e. the leadership didn't want to try and replace Symbian very quickly. They still thought Symbian could be made into an iOS/Android competitor if they just put touch on it. They thought that was the only real problem with Symbian - not having touch. When in fact there are many other major problems with it, such as being very hard to develop for, and having a big problem from an image point of view (nobody thought Symbian could ever be as good as iOS or Android for touch).
Olli just refuses to take responsibility. He kept dismissing both the iPhone and the adoption of Android for its phones for 4 years after the iPhone came out. That's a ridiculous amount of time in today's tech world.
> In the end, timing is all about intuition.
Saying he needed intuition, is like saying any advanced technology is like "magic". He didn't need intuition to "get it". He just needed to understand the disruption innovation theory and to have read Innovator's Dilemma (seriously, how can any CEO ignore the teachings of that book 10 years after it came out? It should be every large company's BIBLE. If they don't really get it, they should be reading it again every single year until they do).
I strongly recommend reading Blue Ocean Strategy, too. Innovator's Dilemma focuses on technology mostly, but Blue Ocean is a similar theory that applies to any industry.
They are pretty much the same theory, though. They are not that "new", just much better researched by these two books, and more fleshed out. Peter Drucker was actually talking about this strategy in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship decades ago, although while it was obvious he "got it" himself, his book doesn't do a great job of explaining it to the reader in a way that he can understand it very well and then go and apply it. But I think Innovator's Dilemma and Blue Ocean Strategy authors were inspired by that to research their theories.
Innovator's Solution sequel is also pretty great, if you want to read it after Innovator's Dilemma (especially for the integration/disintegration insights).
But really these books and these theories have taught me so much about how technology companies can succeed or fail, and I think they are so critical to a CEO, especially a large company's CEO, that if I was a board's Chairman, I would not hire a CEO that doesn't have a deep understanding of the disruption innovation theory.
Oh, and btw, Steve Jobs was a big fan of Innovator's Dilemma (it's mentioned somewhere), and I remember thinking years ago that Steve Jobs is the CEO that is applying the most the disruptive innovation/Blue Ocean theory, out of all existing CEOs in the world at the time.
Ta. I had a read of the Amazon reviews at any rate. It takes so long to read an actual book! I'm supposed to be launching a business that's kind of Blue Ocean so we'll see how that goes.
I've also noticed sites like TheVerge do native advertising in a way that's very hard to tell until you actually see the article. And I don't think I've seen any "Sponsored" or similar tag anywhere close to the article, which I believe is in Google's policy.
Google itself seems to be doing this, too (not properly labeling ads), while telling everyone else not to do it and penalizing them.
I expect Microsoft's partners will increasingly continue to push other operating systems into the market on their devices, even if initially it's not exactly what the market wants. But they will do it anyway, because they will increasingly hate Microsoft.
And it will work, because the PC ecosystem is much bigger than Microsoft, and Microsoft won't succeed fighting against it. They will lose more money from lost licenses than they will be making (in profit, since so far Surfaces have continued to lose them money) than they will be making from these devices.