Tweet The conventional PC business is now on the decline and yet share prices for of key players Microsoft and HP are moving up. Why? In an April press release, IDC painted a bleak picture for the PC. Compared to last year’s first quarter, worldwide shipments of PCs are down 13.9%, the “steepest decline ever [...]
January 27, 2013 – 9:25 pm
Tweet To perform painful surgery on its business model, Dell needs to take the company private. Seeing challenges in raising the needed $22B, Microsoft “generously” proposes to contribute a few billions. Is this helping or killing the deal? The news broke two weeks ago: Dell wants to go private. The company would like to buy [...]
January 6, 2013 – 11:46 pm
Tweet As Samsung dominates the Android market, one has to wonder, who controls whom? Is Google really in charge, or is Samsung so strong it can now rule the Android game? This morning’s thoughts are harder to focus than usual: I’m sitting across the street from Sciences Po — the Paris Institute of Political Studies [...]
December 2, 2012 – 8:16 pm
Tweet At CES 2011, Ballmer told the world Windows would “fork”, that it would also run on lower power ARM chips for mobile devices. This was seen as a momentous breach in the long-standing Wintel duopoly. Two years later, the ARM tooth of the fork looks short and dull. This is what I wrote almost [...]
November 18, 2012 – 7:38 pm
Tweet In 2007, Microsoft introduces a new version of Windows called Vista, a grand name for what turns out to be an embarrassing dud. (Memories of my first and determining interaction with Vista can be found here.) Steven Sinofsky, once a Bill Gates technical assistant and, at the time, head of Microsoft Office development, is [...]
August 12, 2012 – 8:54 pm
TweetThe idea for today’s off-topic note came to me when I read “Microsoft’s Lost Decade“, an aptly titled Vanity Fair story. In the piece, Kurt Eichenwald tracks Microsoft’s decline as he revisits a decade of technical missteps and bad business decisions. Predictably, the piece has generated strong retorts from Microsoft’s Ministry of Truth and from [...]
TweetMy appetite whetted by three days of rumors, I went online last Monday and watched Microsoft introduce its Surface tablets. After the previous false starts — the moribund Tablet PC and the still-born Courier — Microsoft finally took matters into its own hands. Ballmer & Co. could no longer wait for OEMs to create vehicles [...]
February 12, 2012 – 8:31 pm
TweetLet’s go back to Spring 2010. Nokia friends invite me to their US headquarters in White Plains, NY, where we’ll discuss Apple with an audience of local management and remote viewers in Europe. As the conversation proceeds, I’m struck not by what I hear but by what I don’t. They’re right to wonder about Apple, [...]
January 15, 2012 – 8:15 pm
TweetWe continue along the lines of last week’s Monday Note kriegsspiel with the latest speculation Will Microsoft, at long last, buy RIM? The idea has been kicked around for at least five years: Days after the iPhone’s introduction in January 2007, Seeking Alpha suggested that the Xbox maker ought to buy RIM in order to [...]
December 18, 2011 – 10:59 pm
TweetWhatever 2011 was, it wasn’t The Year Of The Incumbent. The high-tech world has never seen the ground shift under so many established companies. This causes afflicted CEOs to exhibit the usual symptoms of disorientation: reorg spams, mindless muttering of old mantras and, in more severe cases, speaking in tongues, using secret language known only [...]
