Lumia 900 won’t be sold by T-Mobile in Germany due to lack of WP8 upgrade path

” A member of T-Mobile’s support team in Germany has revealed, after asking around inside the company, that the reason the Lumia 900 won’t be making an appearance on the company’s shelves has to do with Windows Phone 8 — specifically, the fact that this new phone won’t be upgradeable to the upcoming OS version. As she tells it, T-Mobile opted not to incur the wrath of its users by selling them a new Lumia 900 today and denying them an upgrade to the very latest Microsoft mobile operating system a few months down the line.”

The Verge

NewImage

As i already said here this obsession of tying everything to “big” Windows is not only nonsense but a giant liability waiting to drag Microsoft to the end.

Can’t we somehow stage an intervention, “How I met your mother” style?

Heart and Soul

“We’ve ushered in a new era of cloud computing, embraced mobility, are attempting to transform entertainment, and Windows is the heart and soul of Microsoft”

Steve Ballmer

This explains why Microsoft is in a downwards spiral (and until further details from Surface are provided i don’t think that will save it either). Windows should never have become “heart and soul” of Microsoft. Office is what people really need/want, Windows is just a tool to an end, or a tool for the use of another tool. And not a really good one.

As long as you can do your Office work, in a compatible and “usual” way, it really doesn’t matter if you have Windows, Linux, Mac or some other OS. Focusing on Windows instead of Office will be the key event of Microsoft downfall.

Three to Six Months

I don’t get this. Microsoft announces in June that they will ship a tablet somewhere around Fall, with a undisclosed price! Does this makes any sense?

If it would ship today, then many people would probably buy it as a impulse purchase and this single momentum alone could probably make sure that the product “sticked” to the market and kept on selling. After an initial run of several hundred thousand sales, is probably difficult to just ignore a product all together.

But making everyone wait for three to six months? First, the only way the “regular Joe” will have access to the Surface experience is through journalists and commenters and regular “tech pundits”. But what if those folks, which are usually hyper-critical and always have an axe to grind or an angle to the story, slander it? What if they say that the battery sucks or the keyboard-cover is useless or it gets too hot? With the iPad there was a deluge of bloggers and regular folks saying that the whole “warmgate” was an absurd and exaggeration from Consumer Reports. Mouth to mouth communication helps a lot spreading the “good news” of a product and fighting doubts and confusion. Regular, intermediated, press on the other hand is always a risk and usually tend to focus on the defects.

As usual Microsoft seems to try to take a step forward that then translates into a risky movement and ends in two steps towards oblivion. Until the Fall, Surface can either disappear in the wind or surge again with bad reviews. But it won’t stay on the news with praises and excited covers and reviews for four or six months that’s for sure. Maybe i’m wrong, but this has pretty much been the pattern in the last years.

Instagram’s Buyout: No Bubble to See Here

“If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $28 for each of Instagram’s 35 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)”

[…]

But if you look at the payout per employee, Instagram is completely off the charts. If split equally, each of Instagram’s 13 employees would make nearly $77 million (though Wired’s Mike Isaac reported exclusively that CEO Kevin Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger would take home $500 million themselves alone).

Andy Baio – Wired.com

The author tries to prove that this is no bubble by stacking it together with other bubble purchases and using random custom-made ratios and indicators that involve absolutely no revenue or profit measures.

Yep, it sure makes sense… (( Sarcasm sign in case you didn’t get it… ))


One of the best parts of the article for me is a small comment by Paul Arnold:

“The financial measures you mention do not work well for a pre-revenue company like Instagram. Neither does looking outside the tech world where you don’t have comparable companies that can scale like this.”

It fully reveals why another bubble is growing in Sillicon Valley if this kind of reasoning is accepted and considered valid. (( please note that i have no idea about who the commenter is or if he has any relationship with the Valley.))


The good parts of this deal are that a) Instagram founders and stock-holders just made a boatload of money, money that they would probably never make and b) Facebook just got a billion dollars poorer; and anything that accelerates the end of Facebook just makes me smile a bit more.

I can’t simply wonder in my mind that most, if not every time, these large IT companies start to make these absurd value acquisitions they are always very close to their decline.

Stardock 2011 Report

Other Platforms

Stardock expects to make some announcements later this year in this area.


Windows 8 concerns

Stardock remains concerned about the direction of Windows 8. Since we are not currently a crossplatform development shop, our success relies heavily on the success of Windows.

It is our projection that if Microsoft does not address the following items in Windows 8, then that version of the OS will be considered a general failure:

  1. Allowing desktop users to use Windows 8 entirely as a desktop OS. Specifically, interface and experience changes are necessary to prevent users from being shifted back and forth between the desktop and “Metro”.

  2. A realistic way to organize programs on Metro. Currently, Microsoft has termed “Groups” as being columns of tiles with a column label. Users are expected to either show a tile or hide it. If they are hidden, they can only be found through searching (typing). There is no folder concept in Metro as there is on the desktop, Android, Mac, or iOS.

  3. A migration away from mouse-over discovery of features back to visual discovery features. In the present consumer beta, Windows 8 requires the user to move the mouse around the screen to discover new elements, which work inconsistently depending on the context or the application.

[…]

Stardock Customer Report 2011

The times, they are changing…

Better wages

“Apple is pushing for Chinese worker reform now because with its huge margins, better worker wages & fewer hours hurts Apple competitors.”

Glenn Fleishman

I’m not sure if the Apple Board / Tim Cook would actually go for this maquiavelic strategy, it really doesn’t seem their thing. Apple has, since 1997, pretty much did their thing and let the rest of the world follow their own path. In fact, it seems something more out of Bill Gates book of strategy.

But if true, it will work. Boy, how it will work… And pretty much nobody will withstand it. It will drive the prices of competing laptops right into the Mac(s) price range. And if that happens around the time of Windows 8 spectacular launch and an even spectacular crash, Apple’s share of the PC market will sky rocket, and a giant turmoil will follow in the “PC world”.

As a secondary outcome, it’s a step further for the factories coming back to the western world. Or moving to other less developed countries, spreading richness and well-fare around, improving life conditions and reducing the wind behind China’s sails.

Now that i think of it i can only see positive outcomes on this…

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

“When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. “

Walter Isaacson – Harvard Business Review

Focus is one of the most underrated things in modern world/business.

TV Is Broken & Moderation

“Why did you turn the movie off, Daddy?”, Beatrix worriedly asks, as if she has done something wrong and is being punished by having her entertainment interrupted. She thinks that’s what I was doing by rushing for the remote.

“I didn’t turn it off, honey. This is just a commercial. I was turning the volume down because it was so loud. Shreck will come back on in a few minutes” I say.

“Did it break?”, she asks. It does sometimes happen at home that Flash or Silverlight implode, interrupt her show, and I have to fix it.

“No. It’s just a commercial.”

“What’s a commercial?”, she asks.

”It is like little shows where they tell you about other shows and toys and snacks.”, I explain.

“Why?”

“Well the TV people think you might like to know about this stuff.”

“This is boring! I want to watch Shreck.”

Minimal Mac

Actually she is absolutely right. TV (or the idiot box as it is colloquially known) is dying, senile and on it’s way out. And not a moment too soon.

The interesting part is why it is dying, it’s why i have flashblock and adblock extensions on my browser: Adverting and Marketing lack of self-moderation, respect and the search for a quick buck on the short term. Instead of a single ad that i would actually pay attention to, they put 20. And if no one clicks then they need to be more colourful or more noisier or animated. And you end up with this.

moderation

There is a perennial lack of moderation on our times. Moderation, Respect, Restraint. All of what is needed to truly build a self-sustainable environment; and by environment i mean the whole encompassing “sphere” of our “activity”, and this includes the human life, human society, the web, the advertising business, the TV.

We somehow behave as stupid as the virus that infects and kills everyone as soon as it can. And obviously runs out of hosts in a remote village in Africa wiping itself in the process. Fill the websites with so much ads that everyone installs an adblocker. Extend commercial breaks to 20 minutes or make one in every 10 minutes and nobody will watch TV anymore. Consume junk products in massive quantities until there is no more space to store them or stuff that works or anything that is not made in China for absolut bottom-prices.

We really need a philosophical change regarding our future. One that exalts some sort of moderation and reflection before “action”. One that simply includes respect for the “Other”, for if nothing else so that we can continue to maintain a relationship. One that includes a more restrained satisfying life instead of this voracious consumption of nothing.