Tag: techeye.net

Microsoft’s Nokia plans as clear as mud

cunning-planFor a while we had been wondering what Microsoft was doing with its Nokia purchase. For the last week, Vole has been doing its best to slim down the former maker of rubber boots, but there did not seem to be much logic to it.

When the shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve “there is a kind of hush” Ballmer wrote a $7 billion cheque for the company we all wondered how an elephant like Vole was going turn around a giant Lemming like Nokia.

Nokia cost Microsoft eight cents from its earnings per share last quarter, but the costs are starting be contained.

CEO Satya Nadella, who replaced Steve Ballmer in February expects Nokia to break even by 2016.

The plan appears to be to focus on high and low cost Windows smartphones, suggesting a phasing out of feature phones and Android smartphones.

Two business units, smart devices and mobile phones, would become one, thereby cutting overlap and overhead. Microsoft would reduce engineering in Beijing and San Diego and unwind engineering in Oulu, Finland.

It would exit manufacturing in Komarom, Hungary; shift to lower cost areas like Manaus, Brazil and Reynosa, Mexico; and reduce manufacturing in Beijing and Dongguan, China.

Expected to die will be the Nokia X Android phones, Asha and Series 40 phones.

Nadella said that devices, he said, “go beyond” hardware and are about productivity. “I can take my Office Lens App, use the camera on the phone, take a picture of anything, and have it automatically OCR recognised and into OneNote in searchable fashion. There is a lot we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity.”

It would seem that Redmond wants the sale of a smartphone to mean other sales.

This all makes sense when you factor in Microsoft’s goal to have the next generation of Windows, Windows 9 as a single operating system.

This would mean then that while Nokia might lose the smartphone market it will have a new role driving network access to corporate cloud systems.

Chinese regulators gun for Microsoft

microsoft-in-chinaIt seems that after claiming the rump of Qualcomm, the Chinese antitrust regulators want to take a bite out of Microsoft.

Apparently representatives from China’s State Administration for Industry & Commerce (SAIC) popped in for a quiet chat to the Microsoft offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu.

No one is actually saying what the conversation was about, but it is not thought that the Chinese water torture was used at this point of the investigation.

SAIC is not just in charge of antitrust matters, it also takes the lead in any bribery and corruption investigations as well as intellectual property rights abuse cases,

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company was happy to answer the government’s questions but did not say what those questions were.

Qualcomm is facing penalties that may exceed $1 billion in one such Chinese antitrust probe, following accusations of overcharging and abusing its market position.

Needless to say this is getting the US jolly cross. It favours letting businesses do whatever they like or senators are not going to get their usual Christmas presents from their favourite lobby group.

The US Chamber of Commerce earlier this year urged Washington to get tough with Beijing on its use of anti-competition rules, and warned that “concerns among U.S. companies are intensifying”.

Microsoft has been having a little bit of trouble in Big China lately. Earlier this month, activists said Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service were being disrupted.

In May, central government offices were banned from installing Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system, on new computers. This ban has not been lifted, as multiple procurement notices since then have forbidden the use of Windows 8.

Intel accused of gouging customers

Intel-logoAn American newspaper claimed that Intel is taking advantage of its near monopolistic position by hiking microprocessor prices for servers.

The Wall Street Journal said over the bank holiday weekend that ASPs for Intel server chips soared.

Intel told the Journal that customers wanted higher end CPUs for server systems. But the Journal points out that now Intel microprocessors represent 97 percent  of the server market.

AMD used to be a contender but it isn’t any more, and only has a teeny weeny three percent of the market, according to US outfit Mercury Research.

Intel’s pricing isn’t competitive any more and it needs someone to kick its butt, said the Journal, quoting a manager from Tyan, a Taiwanese server motherboard company.

Intel had no comment to make at press time. Our sister pub, TechEye, said this morning that AMD is planning some kind of response.

TechEye hacks launch tech comedy site

sod-the-net-ce330Techeye hacks Nick Farrell and Nermin Hajdarbegovic have launched a “news for nerds” site which aims to “take the Nintendo” out of everything to do with science, technology and this horrible industry.

Sodthe.net covers news which is part satire, part true, or complete satire. Farrell and Hajdarbegovic are long-term inmates of Mike Magee’s growing stable of tech magazines, which are game changers in that they are closer to blogs than orthodox technology magazines and occasionally use swear words.

“What we realised was that while some people wanted technology news presented to them in the style of an Intel press release, others wanted to be entertained,” Farrell said.

Farrell and Hajdarbegovic wondered what would happen if you did only that in one magazine and just dropped every pretence of being serious about it. That is probably why they decided to launch the site in August, the worst possible month for anything tech-related.

The pair are freelancers working for Fudzilla, TechEye, ChannelEye and anyone else who will give them money. Farrell has been a “serious journalist” for 29 years and written silly stuff for the last eight. He is also a veteran INQster, which means he’s not new to tech lunacy. Hajdarbegovic is a former graphics designer and currently news editor at Fudzilla.

The aim is to get a close knit community of fundamentalist geeks who will populate the site with deranged comments of their own and click the adverts.

“It is very important that people click the adverts or we will be really f****“ Farrell added. “Did we mention that people are supposed to click on the adverts?”

ChannelEye launches and injects zest into the supply chain

Hands across the waterPrakasha Publishing Ltd has launched a title designed to inform, educate and entertain the influential supply chain in the United Kingdom.

ChannelEye, (channeleye.co.uk) is edited by industry veteran Mike Magee. The editorial team that launched another channel title this time last year, will upset the apple cart and provide hard hitting news, interviews and pithy comment that reflect the concerns of distributors, resellers and the rest of the community.

“It’s high time that stuffy, old fashioned channel magazines whether online or in print are consigned to the dustbin of history,” Magee said.  “The supply chain continues to be essential to deliver vendors’ offerings to end users.  We will break the mould and deliver essential information to the key players in the market.”

“This is a fantastic development for IDG” suggests Jonny Busse, head of the IDG Tech Network. “Commercially representing this website will now allow IDGUK a strong presence in this important marketplace with ChannelEye offering a clean and unique style coupled with hard hitting content”

In addition to news, ChannelEye will cover wider matters including reviews, interviews with key players, moves in the industry, product information, gossip, and sparky, solid information. Avoiding re-cycled press releases, ChannelEye will avoid business jargon that only marketers understand, and will deliver gritty and realistic depictions of stuff that matters to the channel.

About Prakasha Publishing Ltd.  Prakasha, headed by CEO Mike Magee, already publishes well respected technology title TechEye.  Founder of both the Register and the Inquirer, Magee was listed as the 35th most influential person in UK technology by the Daily Telegraph.  He can be contacted at mike.magee@channeleye.co.uk  He brings on board a team of journalists that has close contacts in the channel and the wider IT community.

Samsung flattens Apple in smartphone helter-skelter

Samsung rules the roostA report suggests Apple will see its sales of smartphones peak this year and from then on will pursue the seemingly unstoppable rise and rise of Samsung.

According to ABI Research, smartphones will represent 50 percent of all handset sales in 2013, and by 2018 2.4 billion smartphones shipping will represent 69 percent of all handsets. By then, LTE handsets will represent 50 percent of smartphone shipments and 35 percent of all handsts.

Michael Morgan, a senior analyst at ABI, said: “Apple will be chasing Samsung’s technology, software device leadership in 2013 through the foreseeable future.” He said that the Korean chaebol grew its smartphone market share from eight percent to over 30 percent last year. Apple will remain flat until 2018, he predicted. While Samsung is relying on Google Android for 90 percent of its smartphone shipments, ABI thinks that it will use other OSes including Bada, Tizen and Windows Phone.

Even though many handsets will support LTE in the future, people may not have access to LTE networks.  ABI thinks that LTE will be the fastest growing WWAN in history.

Samsung has plenty of advantages over Apple – it is a vertically integrated company and is able to keep costs down by providing essential components from its own manufacturing arsenals.

Juniper Networks kisses the cloud and its partners, too

JuniperJuniper Networks has made bold promises with an announcement outlining changes to its Partner Advantage program.

The network company, which claims to support around 12,000 partners, has decided to take advantage of the growing cloud trend and incorporate these products into its services.

Of course, this isn’t a ground-breaking ploy, with companies moving to take advantage of the cloud and the revenue it offers for a good few years now, and it could be argued that the company has been a bit slow on the uptake.

However, Juniper is pushing ahead also announcing a range of new support, maintenance and professional partner services.

It says its Partner Advantage Cloud programme will depend on, rather than compete with, partners and help to bring “cloud-ready products to the market”. It also claims its strategy is to acknowledge partner cloud service and infrastructure capabilities and connect them with Juniper’s technology partnerships to create cloud-ready bundles that are easier for providers to deploy and manage. Whatever that means.

Partners in the programme will be given relevant tools and resources to drive cloud differentiation and growth.

The company has also outlined two specific areas: Partner Support Services and Partner Professional Services.

Juniper’s Partner Support Services will focus on support and maintenance services with partners treated to four new services troubleshooting workshops, including service provider routing, enterprise routing, enterprise switching and security, designed to help partners improve service delivery effectiveness, later this year.

Juniper’s Partner Professional Services is said to focus on validating partners’ professional services capabilities. We assume there will be a cost. Juniper didn’t say.

The programme also promises revenues and rewards to partners, although how hard they have to work, or how much they have to originally stump up for marketing and training to achieve this, is anyone’s guess.

HMV “fights losing battle” for quite a while

HMV_NewcastleIllegal downloads, competition from online stores and legal streaming services have all contributed to HMV fighting a losing battle.

The once popular music store, which was a haven for 90s teens buying their first singles and albums, has become the latest casualty on the high street, announcing earlier this week that it was to go into administration.

The company, which has around 250 stores nationwide, made the announcement claiming that like-for-like sales were down 10.2 percent for the half year to 27 October and the Christmas period had not helped push profits up.

Trevor Moore, the former Jessops boss who took over as HMV CEO in August, said in a statement that the company had held discussions with its banks over the weekend but failed to agree on new terms for its debt.

“The board regrets to announce that it has been unable to reach a position where it feels able to continue to trade outside of insolvency protection and in the circumstances therefore intends to file notice to appoint administrators to the company and certain of its subsidiaries with immediate effect,” he said.

Michael Perry, a retail analyst at Verdict, said the chain had been “fighting a losing battle for some time,” pointing out that it hadn’t been able to compete with the likes of Amazon on either price or range, while grocers had also been slowly claiming market share.

“Illegal downloading has also had a part to play, particularly over the last few years as consumers look to save money. To many, the monetary benefits of downloading outweigh the risk of being caught, resulting in online piracy continuing fairly unabated,” he told ChannelEye.

“The same can also be said for legal streaming services such as Spotify or Netflix, which have largely negated the need to purchase physical media for many consumers.”

And the public are also suffering. Not only are there around 4,500 jobs at risk, but customers are left with vouchers that they can’t use.