Xbox 720: next generation “Loop” to get 6 times faster by release date

by Brandon Tucker

According to IGN’s sources they say that the next gen Xbox 720 ( Code name Loop ) will be 6 times faster than its predecessors once its release date arrives.

The extra boost in performance will put it in the lead over Nintendo’s Wii U making it 20% faster than the competition.

 

The graphics unit in the future console will be based off of AMD’s 6000 series chip featuring 3d capabilities and multi monitor out. AMD is going to put the new GPU into production by the end of this year. The next-gen Xbox 360 isn’t due until Q4 of 2013 next year before the holiday season. Hopefully we can catch a glimpse of it at this years E3.

Windows 8 puts Microsoft’s PC and tablet fates in same basket

by Timmy Falcon

Windows 8 arrives in time to take on the iPad 3 even as previous iPad tablet competitors circle the bowl. In terms of user headcount, Microsoft easily won the personal computer wars with Windows 1 through 7 but lost the MP3 wars as its Zune failed to make headway against the iPod. Now that its Windows Phone 7 is being kicked around by iPhone and Android, Microsoft is taking one more swing at finding the kind of mobile success it’s long enjoyed on the PC side. And it’s doing so by essentially placing Windows on a touchscreen. WP7 was “Windows” largely in name only, with the interface taking on a life of its own (the handful of WP7 users mostly rave about it, but the “handful” part paints it as a mainstream failure). With MS watching tablets gradually eroding personal computer sales, it’s looking to kill two birds with one stone. However, in this midst of eroding relevance, Microsoft is almost literally taking its desktop OS, dicing it up, and throwing it into a touchscreen salad, abandoning its efforts to build an OS with WP7 which tried to make sense for touchscreens from the ground up…

Microsoft’s problem is other than the highly popular Xbox, the company hasn’t successfully entered a new market in over a decade. The Zune was a flop of embarrassing proportions, being mostly an iPod knockoff which arrived years late (in brown, no less) and didn’t offer anything which anyone cared about. MS had been expecting to be able to capitalize on Xbox success with the Zune, even designating songs in the Zune music store with the same faux-currency used by Xbox gamers. It didn’t work. Meanwhile Apple largely owns the tablet market, with the iPad 2 single handedly outselling all competing tablets combined. The multitude of Android tablets fight each other for the same minority marketshare. The HP TouchPad has been canceled. The BlackBerry PlayBook is about to be. Microsoft’s move, then, turns out to be an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Windows. It’s an odd gambit…

Then again, Windows is in an odd position. Most of its users don’t appear to care much for it, considering it simply be the de facto operating system which all non-Apple computers happen to come with. And yet Windows has for decades had significant majority marketshare among personal computers. That’s been eroding for years amid Apple’s mainstream Mac resurgence, while hardcore geeks have largely come to favor Linux. But still, most computers in most houses are still running some flavor of Windows. Within a couple years, the new Windows 8 will be the most popular personal computer operating system in terms of user headcount. And Microsoft thinks it can spin that headcount popularity into tablet success, even despite the lack of Windows mindshare…

On the surface, it’s difficult to see where Windows 8 tablets will find their audience. Apple and its iPad 3 will continue to collect nearly all mainstream tablet purchases which haven’t been unduly influenced by geeks. Android will claim tablet sales to geeks along with those members of the mainstream whom the geeks can steer toward their own Android preference. The failures of the TouchPad and PlayBook seem to make clear that the tablet market is a two-horse race with little room for a third wheel. And yet Microsoft thinks it can carve out its own tablet space. Whom Microsoft thinks it’s going to take that marketshare away from is another story. Typically, Apple users tend to stick with Apple products for the long term amid overwhelmingly high user satisfaction marks. In other words, most of those using an iPad 2 now will end up on an iPad 3 later. And the geeks (along with those in the mainstream whose purchases they influence) long ago decided that they’d rather be in bed with Google than Microsoft given the choice, which for them means Android over Windows 8 Mobile. But with overall personal computer usage and sales giving way to tablet share, MS doesn’t have a choice but to try to leverage what Windows clout it has left into the tablet market. By next year, when Windows 8 tablets are up against the iPad 3, we’ll find out whether Microsoft has anything left in the tank or whether Windows 8 tablets are in fact the next lifeless Zune.

Verizon iPhone is wanted by everyone except these three people

Everyone wants the Verizon iPhone to happen. Verizon customers who’ve been waiting for the iPhone are the most obvious beneficiaries. Existing iPhone users in the U.S. want the Verizon iPhone to happen because it gives them a choice of carriers, might make for a less-burdened AT&T network, and could even (gasp) spark competition between Verizon and AT&T. App developers want the Verizon iPhone to happen because it’ll shift more of Verizon’s customer base from basic cellphones onto smartphones. Verizon and Apple both want the Verizon iPhone to happen for obvious reasons.

So who doesn’t want a Verizon iPhone to come to market? Here are three people, well actually two people and one specific type of person, who represent the only people on the planet rooting against the arrival of a Verizon iPhone:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It’s still not clear (perhaps not even to him) what exactly Google stands to gain from trying to get its free open-source Android operating system into as many smartphones as possible. Perhaps it’s merely an advertising real estate ploy, or perhaps there’s more to it. But the arrival of a Verizon iPhone is nothing short of terrible news for the continued growth prospects of the Android platform, as many buyers of Android phones are more than willing to admit that they only bought one because they wanted an iPhone but couldn’t get one from their carrier of choice.

Android fanatics. Tech geeks who’ve viewed the rise of products like the iPhone and iPod, based purely around mainstream ease of use instead of an obtuse list of vaguely usable features, tend to see Apple as a threat to their way of life. Even many tech geeks who use a Mac computer love to brag about how the iPhone is a toy and they prefer the geek-oriented Android platform. Or at the least, they’ve hacked their iPhone beyond the point of recognizability – anything to differentiate themselves from mainstream tech users, even if it means using an inferior product (Android, Zune, etc) or mutilating their iPhone into something less usable (they’ve even come up with propaganda terms like “jailbreaking” for it, in the name of belittling anyone who buys an iPhone and uses it as intended).

Watching mainstream Verizon customers being forced into buying a Droid phone has become a spectator sport for tech geeks who’ve viewed the rise of the Android platform as a validation of their way of life. And they know that the launch of the Verizon iPhone will now give those mainstream Verizon customers to option to go with the iPhone they wanted in the first place. As many public geek meltdowns as we witnessed in 2010 across the internet, expect even more in 2011 once the Verizon iPhone puts a stop to rising Android marketshare.

Steve Ballmer. With his Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office products all losing marketshare, his Zune a total flop, and his years of failing to get Windows-based smartphones off the ground, it’s a good thing the Microsoft CEO has his Xbox gaming division doing so well. But even as Microsoft gears up to launch its Windows Phone 7 products this month, the mere independent confirmation of an impending Verizon iPhone has completely overshadowed Microsoft’s official smartphone announcements. And on top of it all, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was just (fictionally) depicted in The Social Network, with the entire premise of his appearance in the movie being that a Harvard student didn’t recognize him.

Apple must prevent Microsoft acquisition of Adobe at all costs

Microsoft is considering buying Adobe Systems, say the headlines. It’s an odd move, considering that Adobe’s twenty-first century innovation most closely resembles that of a rotting corpse; the company inexplicably thinks it can build the embarrassingly obsolete technology known as Flash into some kind of platform of the future, while the company’s near monopoly in creative pro software markets like Photoshop and Dreamweaver is the only reason it still exists. Microsoft has a nearly limitless amount of cash on hand, so buying Adobe (currently worth about fourteen billion on the open market) would be easy enough. But even Microsoft isn’t crazy enough to bet on Flash as being anything other than the bane of internet users everywhere, meaning that Microsoft is only after one thing: the creative pro market.

And it all makes sense: while Apple’s Macintosh marketshare has been growing significantly each quarter for the past several years, Windows still has majority marketshare in every single user category, except one. When it comes to creative professionals, Macs rule the market and always have. Even stodgy corporations with strict Windows-only policies elsewhere in the company still typically have a graphic design department full of nothing but Macs. But these users rely on Adobe products first and foremost, and the one surefire way to make them think twice about continuing to do their work on a Mac would be to cripple or even take away entirely their ability to use said Adobe products. Even as much as Adobe and Apple seem to hate each other these days, Adobe would never consider pulling the plug on the Mac versions of its core products, because the financial impact on Adobe would be nothing short of devastating. But if Adobe were to become a mere (financially) small subsidiary of Microsoft, ditching the Mac versions and throwing away sales to Mac users in the process wouldn’t be anything more than a rounding error in Microsoft’s bottom line.

Assuming Microsoft really is eyeing Adobe for the sake of trying to force the creative market onto Windows, rather than the insane notion of wanting to be the owner of the boat anchor known as Flash, Apple would do well to block the move at all costs – even if that means Apple buying Adobe itself. Based on market capitalization, Apple is nearly twenty times the size of Adobe, so a buyout would certainly be possible even though it wouldn’t likely be entirely in cash. Such a move would allow Apple to seize control over Adobe’s creative apps, perhaps even burying the Windows versions. With Apple consistently demonstrating a better understanding of software design than Adobe, apps like Photoshop would benefit from the polish of being in Apple’s hands, while Apple could finally kill off Flash (and win the adoration of internet users everywhere for being the one to put it out of its misery). On the other hand, there’s the question of whether killing off the Windows versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver would be wise, as doing so would create a vacuum for competitors to thrive in when it comes to corporate environments in which creative professionals are being forced by policy to do their creative work on Windows PCs. As such, Apple might end up having to not only spread its resources thin to maintain the Mac versions of Adobe apps, but also invest resources in maintaining the Windows versions – a complete waste of time for Apple.

Still, Apple can’t allow Adobe’s creative apps to fall into the hands of rival Microsoft, even if the latter promised to continue development of the Mac versions (knowing Microsoft, they’d be crippled in one deniable manner or another). Although apps are looking like the future of computing, and desktop software is increasingly looking like the past, this is one instance in which Apple might have to invest in the past to protect itself in the present.

Brutal but true tech headlines: Facebook, Kinect, Droid X, Bumpers, more

- After recent lawsuits, no one is sure who really owns Facebook at this point. As opposed to MySpace, which no wants to admit owning.

- If the Facebook ownership lawsuits do turn out to be valid, then we all learned how to spell “Zuckerberg” for nothing

- Don’t worry, no one at Verizon knows what the “X” stands for in “Droid X” either.

- Microsoft Kinect to sell for $149. Even less, if you’re willing to take a free Kin with it.

- Amazon Kindle sales up in spite of iPad popularity, proving that 30% price cuts never hurt.

- Speaking of the Kindle, it’s surprising that Amazon hasn’t yet gotten around to suing Microsoft for using names like “Kinect” and “Kin” – though in the latter case it may simply be out of pity.

- Next time you manage to get a flashlight app approved with a hidden tethering feature built in, keep it to yourself.

- Why yes, “Bumpers” is in fact the dumbest name for a case ever.

- Question of the day: will BP change its name back to “Amoco” before AT&T changes its name back to Cingular?

Microsoft Kin canceled already: whatever it was, it didn’t last long

Whatever the Microsoft Kin was, it didn’t last long. The new phone, which Microsoft sent to market seemingly just days ago, has already been end of life’d as a separate product and instead folded into Microsoft’s Windows 7 phone team, which has been a long-running failure itself. The bizarre part is that the end of the Kin has come even as its initial run of television advertisements introducing the product to the public is still airing. And that’s before one considers the name “Kin” itself which was a beyond bizarre choice when one considers the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle.

When the Kin was first introduced, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber prophetically wrote “Microsoft Announces Kin, Its Next Two Failed Phones” – yet one has to wonder if even he expected it to disappear this quickly.

Microsoft Kinect is a naming diskinect

Microsoft has announced that its long-demoed “Project Natal” is in fact real and its commercial name will be Kinect, provoking two questions: huh? and double huh? After the small handful of people who had actually test out Natal swore up and down that the wireless gaming technology was actually real, which included the incredibly rare Microsoft innovation of removing the baton from the wii motif and allowing gamers to finally not have to hold anything in their hands, and largely not getting believed, it turns out Natal is apparently real after all. But the real head scratching comes when one examines the product’s new name: Kinect?

Okay, so it’s a bad misspelling of the word “connect” in that it forces you to slightly mispronounce an extremely common word just to say the name of the product. This is no surprise; with stinkers like Zune and Bing, it’s clear that Microsoft lost its way with product names awhile ago. It’s also part of a new brand name convention that the company is apparently attempting to build on, as the company is also launching a smartphone called the Kin. Get it? Kin? Kinect? Alright, makes sense. Except, oops, isn’t there some other product out there with a vaguely similar name, one that’s been on the market for a few years, and comes from a rival company? Ah yeah right, the Amazon Kindle. Even with its hard earned reputation of copycatting with the best of them, Microsoft’s launch of products called “Kin” and “Kinect” at a time when Amazon has an already well established gizmo called the “Kindle” is nothing short of stunning. It makes you wonder just what Amazon’s legal department might be thinking today as it weighs its options. It doesn’t take a legal expert to see how Amazon could argue that Microsoft is attempting to lure customers into thinking that its new Kin and Kinect are somehow kinected (sorry, couldn’t help it) to the existing Kindle platform.

The fact that “Kinect” is an uncomfortable name to try to say to begin with, combined with the fact that it may well (and arguably should) see legal action from Amazon, is unfortunate considering that gaming is the one area in which Microsoft is actually innovating, and that the Natal/Kinect technology could be the most innovative thing that Microsoft has brought to market since… well, maybe ever. That’s what happens when you spend three decades setting the bar so low for yourself. Not that the dumb name, or even a lawsuit, would keep Kinect from becoming a success – that’ll come down to how closely the actual real world user experience resembles the magical one we’ve seen demoed in tightly controlled environments.

Microsoft to ship five million imaginary Project Natal units in 2010?

New rule: if you’re still referring to your new project as “project” then you don’t get to release sales predictions for it. Microsoft has said that it expects sales of at least five million units for its Project Natal by the end of 2010, an odd claim for a product which lacks a public launch date or even a name. Natal has been demoed in controlled environments at conferences and on television shows as being a form of Nintendo Wii but without the Wiimote, instead allowing users to simply simulate swinging an imaginary tennis racket with their bare hands, for instance, while playing a tennis video game. While the demos have looked impressive, Microsoft is known for its vaporware including products like “Surface” which don’t exist outside of a certain Vegas casino even years after successful public demos. The claim from Microsoft that a Natal fueled Xbox will sell millions of units this year, as relayed by After Dawn, could be a confirmation that the company truly believes it can get Natal to market in 2010 or it could be a mere attempt at hyping a product that’s still a long way away from being launched at the intended expense of competing products that are actually on the market, another tactic the company is famous for.

Apple has little in common with AOL or Microsoft, thankfully

The headline of the day proclaims that Apple is both the “new AOL” and the “new Microsoft” but neither comparison holds water in the larger view. America Online made getting onto the internet possible at a time when the rat’s nest of other geeks-only options made it otherwise literally impossible for most consumers, but AOL never offered a subsequent ounce of innovation and was before long passed up in usability by nearly every other internet option on the market. Worse, AOL misunderstood the “make it easy enough for your mother to understand it” moniker so thoroughly that the company dumbed down the internet the point that AOL’s interface assumed that the user was either a Kindergartener or mentally challenged, thus retarding (pardon the awful pun) the evolution of the internet. In contrast, Apple has continued to innovate beyond its initial innovations with each of its new product ventures, and more importantly, it offers products that are easy for the typical consumer to understand and use without insulting them; the only users who tend to feel insulted by Apple products are uber-geeks who feel technology should be as complex as possible for the mere sport of it.

Likewise, while Microsoft gained its software dominance in the nineties via a variety of successful tactics, none of them involved innovation or understanding the consumer. If anything, Windows and Office were, and still are, a geek’s warped perception of what a consumer might want. While Microsoft’s business plan involved getting consumers to settle for using the same cheap junk at home that they had already been forced to use by their IT overlords at work, Apple’s business plan consists of convincing those consumers to ignore what the geeks have been trying to foist them on, to have some self respect when it comes to choosing technology products for themselves, and most importantly, to learn to trust the platform sufficiently that they’re willing to move forward with the company into new innovative territory. It’s why Apple has been able to convince regular consumers to give complex new technologies like smartphones and tablets a try as soon as those products hit the market, while Microsoft has failed miserably in those areas.

So even as Apple overtakes Microsoft in market cap to become the largest technology company, and even as Apple holds the same “consumer oriented” title that AOL once boasted about, Apple actually has little in common with either company in their past or present incarnations. Only a geek with no actual understanding of what consumers want could make such a mistaken comparison.

Google ditching Windows internally for Mac, Linux, Chrome

Google is abandoning the Windows platform internally for what it says are security failures, making the search giant the latest in a string of corporate entities leaving Windows behind. More interesting, however, is that Google plans to shift not merely to its own experimental Chrome operating system and the open source Linux platform, but also the Macintosh platform which comes from its rival Apple, according to a PC World report. Google’s (partial) move to the Mac internally comes at a time when Apple itself is reportedly considering abandoning Google as the default search tool for its Safari browser on its iPhone and iPad in favor of a Microsoft product, the oft-scoffed Bing. While Google has made no official announcements regarding its internal choice of operating systems (nor is there reason to believe that the company ever will make an official announcement one way or the other), the report states that Google employees have been informed that they’ll need approval from a higher up if they feel they need to continue using Windows while at work. The fact that Google is set to partially rely on the operating system of an increasingly bitter rival in Apple, rather than fully committing to its own Chrome operating system, suggests that Chrome OS isn’t nearly as far along or as tenable of an option as some geek pundits have proclaimed.

Apple to stab at rival Google with iPhone Microsoft Bing deal

The bad blood between Apple and Google is set to get worse as Apple prepares to replace the iPhone’s default Google search engine with that of Microsoft’s rival Bing service. The once- friendly companies have seen that relationship sour of late, as Google has continued to move into Apple’s markets even as the companies appeared to have an alliance cemented the presence of Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Apple’s board of directors (he’s since been removed from the board). At present, Google is the default visible search tool in the mobile Safari web browser for Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices (and for that matter, the Mac and PC versions of Safari), with an option in the app’s settings to change it to Yahoo! Search instead. If the TechCrunch report about the move to Bing as the default turns out to be true, it’s likely that Google would remain a user option. However, as the majority of consumer technology users tend to stick with most or all of default settings throughout the lifespan of their device, such a move would have a significant negative impact for Google. Meanwhile Google is pushing forward with its Android cellphone platform in an attempt to compete with Apple’s iPhone.

Unthinkable two decades ago, Apple and Microsoft have had partnerships and agreements of some sort or another in place since Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, including a longstanding (no longer active) deal to have Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the default web browser on Macintosh computers as well as a deal to keep Microsoft Office in development for the Mac. A deal for Bing, however, would represent new territory for the two companies, which might best be described as frenemies; Apple and Google, however, no longer appear to have any such gray areas in their rivalry.

How Apple beat Microsoft: catering to the non-geek majority

Apple is now doing so well that it has to explain to the government why it’s so handily beating its opponents, while Microsoft is now so embarrassed at being surpassed in market cap that it has to explain to its shareholders what it plans to do to right the ship. But while the answer to how Apple managed to grow larger than Microsoft is fairly straightforward, it’s not the answer that immediately comes to mind: sure, Apple’s diversification into everything from music players to cellphones to music sales to tablets has given the company a wider revenue base upon which to capitalize. But Microsoft has also moved into every one of these markets and failed each time, so it’s not as simple as the fact that Apple has broadened its product line. Why is it that the iPod worked and the Zune didn’t? Is it because the iPod came first and cornered the market before the Zune got out the door? If so, then how does one explain the dominance of the iPhone over Windows Mobile phones, when the latter have been around longer? And how about the iPad? Microsoft has wanted to go there for what seems like a decade, and then newcomer Apple steps in and steals the whole market?

Microsoft’s original strategy in the eighties and the nineties, and a highly successful one at that, was to cater to the technology geeks who made the buying decisions on behalf of the non-geek majority. That meant making sure its products were suitable to the corporate IT geeks who not only directly influenced the buying decisions for their companies, but also indirectly influenced the home purchases of their non-geek coworkers who invariably turned to them for advice. And it meant catering to geek technology pundits, upon whom regular non-geek folks also relied upon for buying advice. And man did it ever work when it came to getting people to adopt not only Windows, which was a geek’s warped vision of what a consumer might want in an operating system, but also Office, which represented such a warped vision that it took the concept of typing words on a screen and hitting the print button, what should have been the simplest (and least expensive) task in all of computing, and instead turned word processing into something that cost hundreds of dollars and involved having nineteen toolbars on the screen. And yet the strategy worked so well that it even had non-geek regular people paying for PowerPoint slide show presentation software for their home computer, which they could not possibly ever have a home use for.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he knew that he was never going to be able to change the geeks’ minds. So instead his strategy was to try to change the game by getting the non-geek majority to stop paying attention to the geeks altogether – and that strategy has taken a long, long time to pay off. Looking back over the years you can see the early incremental stages of it, whether it be something as subtle as offering all in one computers in a choice of colors to get consumers chewing on the possibility that buying a computer might be their decision to make and not that of the local resident geek, and releasing a portable music player in the iPod whose interface was so drop dead simple that even the most technology averse among the population couldn’t come up with a reason to be intimidated by it.

As consumers have grown to trust Apple to offer products that are actually aimed at them instead of the geeks, the company has grown progressively bolder in its moves by offering products like the iPhone, a smartphone which, while still being straightforward in its functionality, offered a far more sophisticated array of features. And because the public trusted that the product would be geared toward them instead of being geared toward the computer store salesmen of the world, they bought in.

Meanwhile Microsoft has continued to offer up one geek’s warped vision of a consumer product after another. While the Zune was a similar product to the iPod, the difference between the two was akin to someone who could speak the language vs. someone who was only capable of making gibberish noises which sort of sounded like the language; consumers saw the Zune for the faux-consumer product that it was and stayed away. The same goes for every new failed cellphone that Microsoft has launched in the hopes of staving off the mobile marketshare it’s been losing to the iPhone over the past three years. Ironically, Microsoft’s problem is that because the vast majority of consumers are current or former Windows users, they know first hand just how unsuitable Microsoft’s products are for consumers – and even if they’re still using Windows it’s only because they think they have to, and they’re not about to expand their reliance on Microsoft products one inch more than they absolutely must.

So now that a new sequel in the Apple vs. Microsoft saga is about to begin playing out after the current plotline ended with Apple catching up to Microsoft and becoming an equal sized company, there’s every reason to believe that the current trend will continue to play out in the next chapter of the two companies’ decades-long battle. For Microsoft to regain momentum it would have to suddenly gain an understanding of what consumers actually want and figure out how to speak that language, but that’s just not part of Microsoft’s DNA and never has been. They’d need a new outside CEO, for starters, but the problem is that there’s only ever been one CEO in the history of consumer technology who’s understood how to give consumers what they want and had the guts to do so at the expense of riling up the geeks, and he’s already running Apple. It’s no coincidence that the one and only market in which Microsoft is seeing growth is that of hard core gaming with its Xbox, one of the few consumer technology markets that’s still dominated by geeks, for the simple reason that most gamers are geeks.

While Microsoft is now left to its own devices to come up with a strategy for getting consumers enthusiastic about its offerings, the company surprisingly no longer has any momentum left on its side at all. Even the geeks have given up the Microsoft ghost – and no, the geeks haven’t turned to Apple, which they largely view as the devil for making technology “too easy” and taking all their power away; no, the geeks have turned to Google, whose unofficial mission statement now consists of trying to turn back the hands of time back to that era in which the geeks were calling all the shots. And while it’s incredibly unlikely that Google will be able to pull that off, at least the company has a strategy. Microsoft, on the other hand? The company recently announced that it’s now going to focus on products – which begs the question of just what it is that they’ve been focusing on for the past three decades.

In hindsight, while a quick surmising of the two companies’ histories will leave you scratching your head as to how Apple could now possibly be a larger company than Microsoft, a closer inspection is likely to leave one wondering how it is that it took Steve Jobs thirteen entire years to pull off, considering the competition. The real question now is whether Apple continues to keep its foot on the consumer-oriented gas pedal now that it’s won this stage of the battle.

Apple may surpass Microsoft in market capitalization tomorrow

If Apple’s stock price climbs by six dollars tomorrow or Microsoft’s drops by a mere fifty cents, or some combination of the two, Apple will become a larger company than Microsoft. The development would have seemed stunning a decade ago, when Apple was toying with bankruptcy and benefitted from a Microsoft cash infusion. But with Apple gaining momentum on several fronts including its hot selling iPad, iPhone, and iPod products, along with dominance in digital music sales with iTunes and continued growth of its Mac computers, the company has attracted investors who’ve steadily driven its stock price and market capitalization over the past several years. In contrast, Microsoft is treading water with its popular Windows and Office product lines and has only seen momentum with its Xbox division, while some of its other efforts like the Zune have flopped to the point of embarrassment.

While tomorrow may or may not be the day in which Apple supposes Microsoft in market cap size, it now seems inevitable barring major bad news out of the Apple camp or major good news from Microsoft; as it turns out the major news on the horizon is Apple’s expected introduction of the next iPhone model in early June, which is widely expected to be viewed as good news for the company.

iPad shows Microsoft Office 2010 represents computing’s past

Microsoft Office was once so vital to personal computing, or so everyone thought at that time, that ensuring the continued development of MS Office for Mac was one of Steve Jobs’ first priorities when he returned to Apple back in the late nineties. But while the move was vital at the time, the notion that the Mac (or for that matter Windows) platform lived and died with the productivity suite, seemingly none of the pundits of the day could be bothered to do the quick headcount which would have revealed just how many Mac and and PC users have never had any version of Microsoft Office on their computer. And while geeks will insist that the free open source clones of Office are the future (anything that’s perpetually unfinished and has no price tag is always “the future” when geeks are pontificating), it’s actually Apple’s own iWork suite which has today’s Microsoft launch of Office 2010 feeling like a desperate attempt to cling to the past – and we’re not talking about the Mac version of iWork, either.

The compatibility myth that long kept most PC users fearful of using anything not made by Microsoft began to fade when those users started buying Apple iPods and iPhones and plugging them into their Windows PC and seeing that the world didn’t explode in a ball of flames. But while that revelation has caused a fraction of them to either switch to the Mac for their computing environment or decide to do so once their current PC has seen its end of days, the real breakthrough is more likely with the iPad. It’s not just that the tablet Mac (let’s call it what it is) will lead a higher percentage of those PC users to switch to the Mac, which it will. It’s that Apple’s iWork productivity suite is available for the iPad and Microsoft’s Office productivity suite isn’t.

Despite its almost literally limitless resources, Microsoft is perhaps the slowest company on the planet when it comes to developing new versions of its software (even more odd since that’s the main thing the company does), so it’s not yet clear whether Microsoft has decided not to develop Office for iPad or whether the company is simply in the quiet early stages of what would likely be a multi-year development project for its turtle-speed developers. Either way, Apple has taken advantage of the situation by having iWork not only ready to go for the iPad on day one, but also practically giving it away for ten bucks per app, which stands in almost startling contrast to the triple-digit prices generally associated with MS Office.

In hindsight, Microsoft started losing this battle when entire PCs started selling for price tags that weren’t much higher than the price tag for Office, leaving those budget users to settle for whatever word processor came with their machine. Office 2010 will sell well this year on Windows, and Office 2011 will sell well next year on Mac. But one has to wonder if this sudden shift toward tablet computing, and MS Office’s complete absence from it (and for that matter, Microsoft’s complete absence from it altogether), with seemingly no ability to get into the game any time soon even if it wants to, isn’t already casting a pall over today’s launch of Office 2010, which feels more like a last hurrah than anything else.

The interesting thing about Office for iPad is that even if Microsoft does decide to make it happen, Apple will get thirty percent of each sale right off the top. That’s a far cry from 1997 when Apple had to cut a desperate deal with Microsoft just to keep an Apple version of Office in development. Things sure can change in thirteen years.

Apple is now ninety percent as large as Microsoft

A few years ago, Steve Jobs allegedly sent a company wide email to his employees to brag about the fact that Apple had just surpassed Dell in terms of marketcap, meaning that – according to the stock market, at least – Apple had become a larger computer than its computer selling rival. This may have had something to do with the fact that Dell CEO Michael Dell had once suggested during Apple’s lowest point that the company should be shut down and the money given back to the shareholders. But with Apple now having eight times the marketcap of Dell, that particular battle is fairly far into the rearview mirror. In fact, with a string of good news out of Cupertino continuing to drive Apple’s stock price ever higher here in 2010, the company is now threatening to surpass a rival of a different kind. That’s right: at least on paper, Apple is now about ninety percent as large as Microsoft itself.

How is that possible? While Microsoft continues to largely be a three-trick pony in terms of revenue (Windows, Office, Xbox), the company’s steady growth isn’t exactly exciting investors as they realize that most of the company’s most rent high profile launches (Zune, Bing) haven’t taken off in any meaningful way. In contrast, Apple, despite its continued small share of the computer market, is showing its greatest ever gains in that area – along with dominance of the digital music market (on the hardware and software side), great success in the smartphone business with its iPhone, and has recently become the first company to have any notable success in the tablet computing market. In other words, Apple gives investors plenty of reasons to get excited about opportunities for significant growth, while Microsoft now more resembles a bank than a technology company; an investor’s money is almost certainly safe, but the growth potential is limited.

As it stands at the moment, Apple’s marketcap is $236 billion, while Microsoft’s is at $266 billion (according to Yahoo! Finance). This means that Apple’s individual share price would have to jump from its current $260 mark to roughly $290 a share, with Microsoft’s share price standing still, in order for Apple to surpass in marketcap the rival which so many people once mistakenly thought either owned Apple or had already put it out of business.

Majority still use Internet Explorer, despite attrition

Comments like “no one uses Internet Explorer” are common among the fraction of web users who in fact don’t use the once-ubiquitous web browser. And that fraction is growing, according to the latest statistics which show usage of non-IE browsers to have grown to as much as forty percent. While that’s a startling defection rate for the browser which less than a decade ago was being used by the majority computer users on both the Windows and Mac platforms, forty percent is still not quite a majority.

It can easily argued that perhaps no one should use Microsoft’s web browser, which has never been more than slightly adequate even in its best stretches. And it’s easily understandable why Mac users have made a nearly wholesale shift from the Mac version of Internet Explorer over to Apple’s own Safari web browser; the latter has the one-two punch of being a significantly better product and the pre-installed default. And even on the PC side, where Internet Explorer is still the default install on Windows, an increasing number of users have grown frustrated enough with IE’s shortcomings to take the step of installing the free Firefox; despite its obvious open source shortcomings which make it feel to many as if it’s been in perpetual beta for its entire existence, many mainstream users have still judged it to be the lesser of two evils – and that’s to say nothing of other geek browsers like Chrome and Opera which have also seen a level of grudging adoption by some mainstream users.

But none of that changes the fact that according to the cold hard facts, three out of every five computer users are still in fact clinging to Internet Explorer like a cold wet blanket. And while you can successfully argue all day as to why that shouldn’t be the case, those defectors claiming that “nobody uses IE anymore” are merely making themselves look as foolish as those who are still using it.

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Tagged: firefox, Internet Explorer, majority, Microsoft, Safari, web browser

Next generation Zune found in a bar, nobody cares [satire]

May 3, 2010 by Beatweek · 3 Comments 

An employee of Microsoft recently lost a top secret next generation Zune MP3 player prototype when he inadvertently left it behind in a Redmond bar. The individual who found the Zune prototype attempted to sell it to the highest bidder, but various publications balked at the idea. They were initially believed to be hesitant to make the transaction after last month’s iPhone 4G fiasco which saw a journalist’s house raided by police even after the prototype had already been voluntarily returned to Apple. However, further investigation revealed that none of the publications involved found the finder’s fifty dollar asking price for the Zune prototype to be worth the cost.

“We’re not going to pay fifty bucks to bring in an extra twenty-seven page views,” said the publisher of one prominent tech blog, “particularly since seventeen of them will come from Steve Ballmer’s desk.” The publisher then went on to explain that the Microsoft CEO’s interest in the new Zune model would be less likely to come out of outrage over the lost prototype, but instead more likely because Ballmer himself probably hasn’t yet gotten around to taking a look at the low priority Zune in-house.

However, the publisher did admit that he had briefly considered “putting one of those Apple logo stickers on the back of it” and trying to pass it off to readers as being the new iPod touch.

When pressed, none of the journalists in question could recall the generation number of the next Zune, or what the current generation looks like.

[/satire]

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Tagged: found in a bar, lost, Microsoft, prototype, Zune

Why iTunes won: it was obvious six years ago

April 30, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment 

Yet another digital music service has ceased to exist today, even as the iTunes Store continues to rake in a progressively larger chunk of overall music sales. Why is it that Apple has been the only substantially successful company in the history of digital music, while most other companies (large and small) who’ve tried have failed miserably? It might be part of the overall trend of Apple designing its products for the least-geeky 99% of the population while all the other consumer tech companies are designing theirs with the geekiest 1% in mind, but that’s another story for another day.

Digging through Beatweek’s earliest archives from early 2004, I came across this fairly arrogant missive I wrote more than six years ago about why iTunes had already won the digital music downloads war, and more specifically, why Microsoft had no real chance:

Microsoft is incapable of writing quality software, so the product will undoubtedly be terrible. Microsoft only succeeds when it can attain a monopoly in given market, and iTunes already has a lock on that. Hewlett-Packard has already inked up an exclusive deal with iTunes. Microsoft will be the only download service that can’t realistically abandon the Windows Media Audio format. The next version of Windows, which would presumably have Microsoft’s service bundled with it, won’t be out for another three years, by which time the game will largely be over.

I say “arrogant” in hindsight because it was more than a little presumptive to claim to know that a company with limitless resources was guaranteed to flop in its efforts. But then again, it was kind of obvious when you look back at it, wasn’t it?

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Tagged: 2004, 2010, Apple, iTunes, Microsoft

Microsoft cancels iPad competitor that never existed

April 30, 2010 by Beatweek · 6 Comments 

Microsoft has been pushing the idea of tablet computing for far longer than Apple, with the only difference being that Apple is pushing an actual tablet product in the iPad, while Microsoft has largely been pushing tablet products that only ever existed on paper. In a surprising fit of apparent honestly, however, Microsoft has admitted that at least one of its imaginary tablets won’t ever exist. The move comes as a surprise, as it’s not clear why the early success of Apple’s iPad would cause Microsoft to conclude that it would be be served by no longer pretending to be interested in pursuing the market itself.

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has spent years promoting a new computing concept in theory, only to see Apple later take up the concept with an actual product in hand. In fact the gesture-based touchscreen technology in which the iPad’s interface is based on bears some resemblance to Microsoft’s “surface” technology, which was announced several years ago but to this day doesn’t exist in practice outside of a certain Las Vegas casino. Similarly, Microsoft’s “natal” technology appears to have advanced the idea of full body virtual gaming farther than Nintendo’s wii, and yet natal doesn’t exist outside the occasional demonstration on the Jimmy Fallon show.

While these products were obviously further along than Microsoft’s imaginary tablet computer, one has to wonder if today’s news represents a new leaf for the company, one which might see the company cancel all of its various vaporware products.

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Tagged: Courier, iPad, Microsoft

Microsoft Bing advertises imaginary version of itself

April 26, 2010 by Beatweek · 2 Comments 

You’ve seen the Bing ads on television by now: someone asks a routine question, and their counterpart drops into a robotic listing of hilariously unrelated answers and suggestions which just happen to involve some of the same words from the question. The laughably irrelevant results are obviously intended to parody Google, while Bing presents itself as the smarter, more practical alternative. Only one problem: while Google search in 2010 still has its faults, the search engine portrayed in the Bing ads is more accurately reminiscent of the search engines of a decade ago, before Google came along and taught them all how to do it right. Actually, the ad has a second, more glaring problem: true to form for Microsoft, Bing is more or less just an attempted Google clone with a more interesting background picture. We’re not sure exactly what the imaginary Bing being promoted in the television ads does, but we know from having tried the real Bing that the two bear little resemblance to each other.

Even with the bizarre distinction of being the only major search engine named after a “Friends” character, we’d love to give the fanciful version of Bing that Microsoft is advertising in the television commercials a shot; it sounds intriguing. Trouble is, as best we can tell, it doesn’t exactly exist.

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Tagged: ads, advertisement, Bing, Google, Microsoft

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