Re: What?
The US T-Mobile is wholly-owned by the European T-Mobile which is a German company whose HQ is in Bonn.
49 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2012
It is interesting that you should post this just when Google's quarterly revenue/sales overtook Microsoft's for the first time in history. In the most recent reported quarter, Google grew by 20% to $22bn and Microsoft grew by less than 1% to $20bn. It looks as if Microsoft may have stopped growing for the time being, whereas Google, is still growing at double digit rates.
I think it is Microsoft that feel threatened.
Their mobile device management capability emphasising security but now applied to other mobile operating system i.e. Android, iOS (via Apple APIs) and Windows Phone in that order due to:
Android selling 325m phones ( 81% of global market) in 4Q 2015
Apple selling 72m phones (18% of global market) in 4Q 2015
MS selling 4m phones (1% of global market) in 4Q 2015
Blackberry sold 1m phones (0.2% of global market) in 4Q 2015
(http://www.mobile-phone-transfer.com/android-transfer.html)
I expect Microsoft to buy Blackberry shortly because it would be annoying to Microsoft for enterprise customers to start buying Android phones with a Blackberry "security layer", however implausible the actual security product might be - it's all about the brand.
Still, it will be much cheaper to destroy Blackberry than Nokia, because the price is much lower due to BB already self-immolating.
My local Sainsbury has about 15 charging points.
Also, as soon as they start providing contactless charging bays at Sainsbury, your self-driving car will be able to go out on its own, during the day, foraging for nearby electricity whenever it gets hungry.
And then when they achieve Artificial Intelligence as a result of the Darwinian stresses of driving in south-west London, they can socialise there, too - and the marketing people can start to exploit them by offering different types of higher status electricity - "Mine's a tall, green, skinny lattetricty..."
It is more like "the painful realisation that a significant number of senior executives in tech companies are embarrassingly inadequate when it come to delivering either innovation or decent customer service so they want to distract shareholders and the general public from this humiliating truth" hence M&As aplenty.
Microsoft employee 1 writes:
"I know I'll probably get loads of downvotes for even asking this but has anyone actually checked whether any of this information actually does get sent anywhere if you don't sign up to the 'Let us see everything you're doing programme' or as Microsoft call it the 'Customer Experience Improvement Program' ?"
And Microsoft employee 2 immediately replies (a coincidence, perhaps?):
"Whilst I'm not defending them for collecting it, I think it's pretty refreshing to see that a company can be open about what they do collect. So many hide it, or try to."
Dear MSE 1 - perhaps Microsoft will check for you and discover "Lo, none of it gets sent anywhere"
Dear MSE 2 - "refreshing" is a lovely word to describe data piracy, perhaps you should ask FAST to investigate on your behalf.
This is rather cheeky but here is a story from somewhere else...
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2415589/microsoft-might-dump-windows-phone-in-favour-of-android
I find it quite plausible, as Nadella is not wedded to the past, and has shown signs of wanting to takeover Android but then use it as a trojan horse for making Microsoft services compulsory on their Android phones.
and I wonder if it is because all the modern equivalents of Lotus123 are Internet things like Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube which are designed not to make many demands on the local PC because they want to reach as many people as possible, even if their PCs are somewhat antiquated. All the hard work is done in the Cloud, so the PC ends up being a bit like a tv being broadcast to.
Hence the lack of need for an upgrade every two years.
The Motorola Atrix had a laptop-style dumb docking station which provided simply a mouse, keyboard and screen which connected to the phone's full-fat desktop operating system, giving a PC run by a smartphone.
It was somewhat underpowered (2011 smartphone CPU, of course), so didn't take the world by storm, but the subsequent Atrix 2 ran adequately well, as did the Motorola Photon smartphone released a little while later.
As it is April 2015 now, the article is about 4 years out of date really, though I have been waiting for Apple to do their magic and make a consumer-delighting equivallent to the Atrix 2, and make a lot of money. Though they may have an agreement with Microsoft that forbids them doing this...
But it will come, sooner or later, though when it does, it will be very bad news for Microsoft.
Some of the other commenters seem to be unaware of this precedent.
I have seen your posts before and I have formed the view you are a Microsoft employee who is paid to put these kind of comments as near to the top as possible.
Can you list me maybe half a dozen of your apps on each of the two ecosystems you mention, please? or even 1 of each.
Thank you.
...there was a three month period when 90 million PCs were sold.
68 million sounds rather sad by comparison.
With PC margins so thin, I guess Microsoft may be having to hold the price of Windows down to stimulate sales. And Dell clearly did something to annoy Microsoft - perhaps it shouldn't have made those chromebooks so desirable. Is Dell the new Compaq, shortly to be gobbled up by Lenovo, I wonder?
....90 million PC were sold in a single quarter.
So the current 68 million looks somewhat pathetic.
And it sounds like the margins for PC makers are so thin, that Microsoft may well be unable to charge them so much for Windows.
And Dell clearly did something to annoy Microsoft - perhaps it was making those chromebooks that MS couldn't forgive. Is Dell the new Compaq, soon to be eaten by Lenovo, I wonder?
Windows PCs are actually down marginally, the growth in PC form factor numbers is because Apple Mac sales are increasing.
Full version of Windows includes unbelievably tiresome updates, and the option to receive viruses and zero day attacks whenever you like...it sounds like you haven't tried a chrome book for any length of time, you seem to have swallowed Microsoft's FUD propaganda wholesale without checking for yourself.
Get real? Perhaps you meant "Get a chromebook"...
...says someone with recent experience of trying to help a friend with a Windows 8.1 PC whose wireless printer prints effortlessly from his wife's Apple Mac but refuses to even display the printer in the TIFKAM email client he was trained to use by the shop that sold him the PC. Twice re-installed the printer driver, same result. But having sampled MS forums about people with very similar problems being given more and more sweeping remedies that fail to work but would leave the PC in a worse state than before, I was not brave enough even to go back to the previous restore point...
But if you are a Microsoft employee posting, as I suspect you may be, please disregard this, and I apologise for my discourtesy.
At work we dock our Windows laptops into a docking station to get a decent mouse, keyboard and screen, and a power supply for the short-lived battery, on health and safety grounds.
However, I could do the same with my smartphone instead, and throw away my laptop.
In the short term I would use a Citrix session delivered to the attached screen to get the legacy Windows applications. In the longer term, I could run a full size browser to access the Cloud applications that will gradually replace them.
Then I can carry my 4oz PC in my pocket and use it as a smartphone when away from my desk, but use it as my mouse, keyboard and screen "PC" when docked at my desk to run my desktop applications on a large screen.
Most line of business apps will run happily through a browser today anyway, even though they are not yet Cloud-based. As as applications migrate to the Cloud, this will make the phone plus docking station plus browser the standard way to access all desktop applications that need mouse keyboard and screen. So the Windows desktop market does have a big threat hanging over it, and contrary to your rather old fashioned view, it may start a rapid decline within the next 36 months.
Peak Windows PC sales were 2011 when they averaged 90 million a quarter.
The quarterly PC sales mentioned in the article were 74 million, but 4 million of those were Apple Macs, and some were Chromebooks, so the Windows PC sales would be around 69 million.
Quite a drop from 90 million I would say. And that is before the effect that I am talking about starts to kick in.
Seattle Computer Products QDOS which Microsoft sold on without permission to IBM as "MSDOS".
Peter, was that theft also?
Microsoft coughed up $1,000,000 for that when the law caught up with them 2 years later...but they poached the employee from SCP who had actually written QDOS so that makes it OK, doesn't it?
You are terribly out of date - the top laptop bestseller on Amazon has been a Chromebook for the last 8 months. And over Christmas, the top two best sellers were Chromebooks. You may say these are consumer purchases so they don't count. But alas, the NPD data for the first 11 months of 2013 about commercial and government laptop sales in the USA indicates that Chromebooks have 20% of that segment, too, and by inference 10% of the commercial/govt PC market in the USA.
I cannot help thinking you may be yet another minion of the dark lord, Steve Baldemort...who always seem to come out in droves when Chromebooks are mentioned. Why would that be, I wonder?
I read this post with increasing amusement until I reached the final sentence: "So I'm not sure what isn't clear in there about the switch." which I thought was being said in a deliciously ironic tone.
Unfortunately, I then realised no irony was intended, and that it was a serious post from someone who presumably works for Sky.
Ouch!
Those instructions are long and complicated, suitable for someone with an IT background but not for the average person in the street. Classic case of instructions being written by technical staff with no thought for the diversity of the audience they may be addressing. Written, in fact, as one technical person would write to another technical person.
I don't know Sky's demographic profile, but I assume someone in the organisation does, so perhaps they should have used this information in formulating an appropriate set of communications.
The fact that the article suggests that the forums are in meltdown means that people would probably not be able to find suitable assistance from the help page in this instance.
On the language point, there are 5 million native Finish speakers, and 360 million native English speakers plus a further 1.125 billion with English as their second language or spoken as a foreign language.
To be a global business from Finland, it is useful to adopt English - 5 million v roughly 1.5 billion.
I agree with most of your comment which is almost entirely valid, but one Nokia trick you have missed is that Nokia just re-designated their very cheap Asha feature phone as a smart phone. Gartner, IDC etc have never considered the Asha a smart phone and still don't, but Nokia are suddenly now saying it is.
So the number of Nokia smartphones miraculously rockets, and it is easy for people then to make the false assumption that Windows Phone is the cause of the rocketing sales.
In my opinion, this is a disingenuous attempt, presumably by a Microsoft PR company, to give the impression that secure boot is not an anti-competitive practice. Whereas I believe it will certainly hurt Ubuntu and similar, in that it will obstruct you from using Ubuntu to extending your PC life for another 5 years after MS Windows has started to run so slowly you think you otherwise would have had to buy a new PC.
I am reasonably technical, but I shudder to think how many hours I would have to spend on that "With a little extra effort with a signed bootloader, when the user has added the key."
And whether what Microsoft "say" will be what Microsoft do:
"Microsoft have said that they will sign boot-loaders for other companies who can't"
Didn't Microsoft tell the EU they would abide by the browser ballot anti-competitive ruling? And then fail to do so?
Saying and doing can be different , can't they?
Because most other providers aren't interested in providing a PC replacement component to their smart phones (since the Atrix, Photon etc no longer seem to allow it) - and if Ubtuntu proves it to be a serious option, then others will jump on board, and it means I won't have to buy PCs anymore - my phone will replace my work PC once I attach it to a mouse/keyboard/screen.
Indeed, with those mini-projectors (to replace the need for a screen) and workable voice recognition to replace the keyboard, you could get away with just using the phone in the long run.