I had fun this week. I got home on Friday to find my computer under attack. Two things had happened that day a Windows update and a Firefox update. It of was a betting man it would be on the Windows update but it could have been anything and that date was payload day. The same virus attacked my mother’s and brother’s computers. The first sign was the browser slowing down and then not responding. Ctrl-Alt-Delete did not bring up the menu to access the task manager and even trying to get to the CMD line to do this manually didn’t work.
Figuring it was a Windows problem I rebooted. Not long after that had finished the symptoms repeated. Reboot into Safe Mode and disabled some of the boot processes and tried again. Another boot and my anti-virus program told me that something had turned off the active protection, I turned it back on, did a full scan of C: then my main download drive where it found a couple of Trojans and all has been quiet ever since. Still not sure exactly what it was and if it has gone back to sleep and will reappear in the future.
So ‘scientists’ claiming to represent the world’s scientists have issued their demands before the "Rio+20" summit. Distilled down they say that old people have to work longer, people should stop procreating and we should stop the growth of modern technology, including I suppose computers. Those from the richer nations need to scale back and the poorer? Well it looks like they are not going to get any better. The organisation making all these demands? That would be the IAP found in Italy and implying that they represent 105 science academies around the world which would include Britain's Royal Society and a lot of others. The ‘science’ behind all of this is dubious at best and when you dig down it turns out the IAP is yet another of those Greenie like organisations that want to dictate policy to the rest of humanity based on the evils of one molecule of carbon and two of oxygen in a close relationship. They are anti-nuclear, ignore the benefits of technology and make a great case for getting rid of scientists, well of their ilk at least. They will have to pry my computer from my cold dead hands.
So why is it that after Nokia fired a bunch of their employees their stock price still went down? I think I’ve already answered that one but to summarise, Nokia made a number of bad business decisions, bad directions in mobile phone design and development. In other words they misread the market and got it wrong. Then they didn’t fix it. Then they lost their market dominance and Apple and Google (via Android) have stepped into the vacuum created.
If you think about it none of the old tier one player like Motorola, Sony and others are in the hunt for first place in the mobile phone marketplace. Sony has made so many bad decisions over the past decade it is a mystery how they are even still in the electronics market. Nokia is now at the mercy of Microsoft and others for their success, a scary proposition for anyone I’d say.
As for Microsoft well they are glowing over the announcement of their new Surface, which would be a 10.8 tablet running Windows 8 on both the ARM and Intel platforms. That means at least two versions a 676 gram Windows RT tablet running on the Arm and a larger 909 gram Intel based device running Windows 8 Pro. They come in 32 and 64 GB versions in a 16:9 display format with a USB 2.0 port and a MicroSD slot, i.e. already better specs than an Apple iPad.
The units will come in a variety of colours, well the covers will at least. No you won’t see them for a while and there are no prices yet but expect them to be close to an ultrabook. There is the usual Microsoft hype but nothing like the six months before we get from the Apple loving crowd.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has a solution to the downward spiral of the world economy. Invest in a nice big serve of broadband infrastructure. Yes another group that has a solution for the G20 in Rio. In a latter they urge the world’s leaders to “support the development of the broadband infrastructure and broadband-enabled applications and services which enable digital economies to grow and provide benefits to societies across the globe.” The letter goes on to suggest that it must also provide “for advanced online services, locally relevant content and services, and support for media and information literacy development to address inequity and deliver broadband inclusion for all.”
Then it starts to get a bit, well you can read it for yourself. “For global broadband roll-out to contribute most to development, human activity must transform information into knowledge that can support individual empowerment and sustainable social and economic development, including institutional and political transformation and the development of knowledge societies that rest on four pillars: freedom of expression; quality education for all; universal access to information and knowledge; and respect for cultural and linguistic diversity. Broadband development cannot be limited to technical infrastructure; the availability of relevant broadband-enabled content, applications and services in multiple languages should also be ensured.”
I agree with most of it, well just about all of it. Broadband should be universal and available to all; it should be priced so that people can afford it (at < 5% of monthly income); it should be available to connect to across the widest possible audience. I do have one small, well huge quibble with the letter they use Australia as the example to follow. The problem with that is so far the rollout has been poor, the take-up rate almost non-existent and the base prices close to double the current costs of high speed broadband is now. In other words the Australian example seems to be the opposite of what the ITU ideal appears to be.
So if we take a look at the marketplace who is making money from smartphones at the moment? According to ABI Research Apple and Samsung are pulling in more than 90 per cent of the market's profits for about 55 per cent of the unit sales during the period. The figures break down as 144.6m units sold, with Samsung shipping 43m and Apple behind with 35m. Next came Nokia and RIM with 11.9m and 11.1m smartphones. After that Sony, Huawei and ZTE sold 7m, 6.8m and 4.9m. The last two are Chinese and are moving up with Sony likely to be behind them in the near future. That being said only Sony and Samsung saw any strong growth. Nokia saw a 40 per cent decline in shipments quarter on quarter and the outlook is not good. ABI estimated it will need to increase its Windows Phone business by a whopping 5000 per cent this year just to offset its slump in Symbian based shipments.
No comments:
Post a Comment