I finally got around to watching Microsoft’s Windows 10 Devices Event (nope, they’ve haven’t shaken their addiction to long names). What i saw is a company just discovering all the amazing things that that are possible when you design hardware and software together. The presenters seemed drunk giddy with excitement showing off all their products. And why shouldn’t they?! Proudness is what happens when a team comes together and makes something great. Check us out. We made this. Together. And it’s awesome.

The Only Way Out Is Through

I wonder how many current and former Microsoftians are kicking themselves for not owning the full hardware/software stack sooner, like Apple. You know what? Scratch that. Probably very few. Hindsight is 20/20.

The truth is Microsoft had to go through this journey of licensing a powerful yet tasteless and derivative operating system, and robust office suite, to corporations for decades—leveraging their weight and muscle when necessary—until the day they realized they were not equipped to make truly “personal” and mobile computing experiences people would love to use inside and outside the office.

Once Microsoft had this realization—this is after Ballmer dismissed the original iPhone as a threat—Apple’s iPhone and iPad trojan horses had already infiltrated corporate America. I saw it firsthand as a design consultant for Bloomberg in Manhattan in 2008-9. I watched senior VPs roll into meeting with iPads on their laps while we presented our work. In the past (pre-iPhone) corporate IT departments could shoo off the occasional request for pesky Mac assistance, but you can’t pull that shit when C-suite men and women are ordering you to, “get my iPad and iPhone on our network. NOW.”

Hey Guys, They Get It!

It’s taken Microsoft 40 years to realize the true potential of their software. They’re not turning a blind eye and hoping OEMs make the best hardware they can possibly make.

Microsoft now understands why Apple has been spending all these years monkeying with stupid bezels, clickwheels, and aluminum finishes, and designing not just thoughtful but beautiful software experiences. Microsoft now wants to make their own multitouch screens and keyboard cases and styli that communicate and integrate seemlessly with their operating system. If I had to give Microsoft a new tagline it would be: We Finally Get It (hat tip to The Motherfucking Editor).

Panos Panay did a great job as the main presenter. You could feel how genuinely proud he was of all the hard work that went into their Bands, Lumias and Surfaces and the how well the software was integrated into the hardware. Seeing him on stage bragging about the thinness of the new Surface and the feel of the new keyboard covers, I felt as though I was watching a company graduating from Apple Boot Camp. He showed off their new ads throughout the presentation, just like Apple has been doing for decades. He held up his Lumia phone to the audience. When he handed out Surface Pros, I was reminded of Steve Jobs handing out empty, unibody MacBook Pro shells in 2008 (jump to the 24:50 mark).

I don’t follow sports but I but shamelessly consider myself on Team Apple and I indulge in any and all Microsoft schadenfreude I can get. I despise the old, 800-pound gorilla version of Microsoft but I am slowly coming around as I see them taking product design seriously and not muscling their way into market segments just because they can.

It feels good to see your team on a winning streak, but it’s even better to see them up against a worthy opponent who gives them a run for their money. 

We’re seeing a glimpse of that with the new Microsoft.

Sometimes Enough Is Not Enough

Despite all the huge strides Microsoft has made in the last few years to reinvent itself and adapt to the changing tech landscape I’m not convinced it’s enough get what they want.

Actually, what do they want?

Do they want to regain the size and influence they once had in the software world? Highly unlikely. The world was much smaller when Microsoft ruled to the roost. There was no Google, no Apple and none of the numerous small-to-medium size technology companies all over the world creating amazing hardware and software. Can and will they continue to contribute? Absolutely.

If they’ve come to terms with the fact that they’ll never be the giant they once were, are they truly committed to building amazing, integrated software and hardware experiences, potentially at the expense of unit sales?

This last question is tricky to answer because although they’ve graduated from Apple Boot Camp and fancy themselves newly minted product design Jedis, they don’t live in Apple’s world. They’re still licensing Windows to OEMs like Dell, Lenovo and HP.

This is akin to Porsche building the best cars they can possible make and also licensing their engines and name to Kia, Hyundai and Toyota. 

This last, very minor point around Windows licensing tells me Microsoft hasn’t pushed all its chips in.

Microsoft finally gets it.

Or do they?

Steve Cheney’s post on Apple’s insurmountable platform advantage is making its rounds around the Internet, because it’s good:

One of Steve Jobs’ biggest legacies was his decision to stop relying on 3rd party semiconductor companies and create an internal silicon design team. I would go so far as to argue it’s one of the three most important strategic decisions he ever made.

In 2007, when Steve Ballmer famously declared “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance”, Jobs was off creating a chip design team. If you study unit economics of semiconductors, it doesn’t really make sense to design chips and compete with companies like Intel unless you can make it up in volume. Consider the audacity back in 2007 for Apple to believe it could pull this off. How would they ever make back the R&D to build out a team and pay for expensive silicon designs over the long run, never mind design comparative performing chips? Well today we know. Apple makes nearly 100% of the profit in the entire smartphone space.

I don’t think Apple’s advantage is insurmountable like Cheney says, but I don’t think there’s any way in hell companies like Microsoft, Sony, Dell and HTC are going to make a significant dent as competitors.

Guess what: Blackberry still makes phones and apparently their CEO doesn’t know how to use them:

Last week, BlackBerry confirmed plans to launch the Priv: an Android-powered slider smartphone that it says combines the best features of Google’s mobile OS with “BlackBerry security and productivity.” It’s a sensible selling point, but as this hands-on with the Priv featuring BlackBerry CEO John Chen shows, the Android operating system isn’t familiar territory for the company. Chen repeatedly says that the Priv “runs Google,” and falters during the demonstration, opening up Chrome (which is slow to respond) before closing the app when realizing the phone isn’t logged in to a Google account.

Hey Chen, at least act like you give a shit.

Vlad Savov on Apple, Google, and Microsoft all solving the same problems:

Consider all the overlaps that have developed in recent times between the strategies of America’s three foremost tech corporations. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are getting into the connected car business that Microsoft has been in for years, while the latter’s Cortana personal assistant echoes the voice-activated Google Now and Siri software of its competitors. Where Apple has Continuity to keep people working across various devices, Microsoft has Continuum, and Google has the universality of the Chrome browser and its range of web apps. Besides the connected car and the connected you, all three are also connecting the TV — through AirPlay, Chromecast, and the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter — and developing app and gaming platforms such as the Xbox One, Android consoles, and the new Apple TV.

Savov is right, but what’s the alternative? Not built a product or service your competitor has and risk ceding ground to them now or in the future?

It seems better for the three top dogs to build redundant solutions to the same problems than not build them.

There was a slim chance that Windows Phone might have been able to overcome all this and establish itself in 2011, when Nokia’s partnership was announced. There was no chance at all by the time Microsoft bought Nokia in 2013. and so the write-down of that acquisition now comes as a matter of regret but not surprise. Windows Phone has failed to achieve enough scale to be attractive to developers: it is a third choice, or perhaps even fourth, after the greater appeal of just doing another iOS or Android project. There are fewer apps, and those that are there are later and have fewer features than those on iOS or Android. Consumers notice. Some people love their Windows Phones, but not nearly enough.

—Benedict Evans, Microsoft, Capitulation and The End of Windows Everywhere

Microsoft says Windows 10 is installed on 75 million devices after just a month of availability.

Guess what? Only 5 of those devices are phones and tablets.

Remember, Windows currently owns less that three percent of the worldwide smartphone market.

Over at The Verge Tom Warren says there’s no such thing as post-PC:

2015 is the definition of an era where there are multiple choices for computing, where you can choose a device and your data will follow. It’s also a year where mobile data networks and devices are fast and sufficient for browsing from a phone, and a time when PCs have matured enough that you don’t need to replace the one you bought years ago if it’s still working. As iOS 9 turns the iPad more into more of a PC, and Microsoft turns phones into PCs, the questions over which devices will be important in the future won’t be around their traditional forms, but their function. PCs will continue to evolve, as will the versatility of devices that are shaping the mobility of computing. Perhaps it’s time to kill off the idea of “post-PC” in favor of just personal computing. After all, smartphones, tablets, and laptops are all just PCs anyway.

Don’t be a fucking dick.

We’re absolutely in the post-PC era when PC is understood to mean “desktop computer” and “laptop computer” and Warren knows this. Let’s not get all cutesy with semantics.

If Warren wants to take his semantics to their logical conclusion he can go ahead and call his car, refrigerator and television “PCs” too.

That’s where the switching number comes into the picture. This Scenario 2 is shown in the figure above and suggests that although Android gained 8 million new users, it lost 6.4 million to iPhone for a net gain of 1.6.

Apple may have also lost a few users to Android but overall gained switchers from other platforms, mainly Android. This is what would support Tim Cook’s comments.

Thinking further ahead, as the markets mature globally, they may well evolve into the way the US market evolves today. Apple’s brand promise ensures loyalty while competing platforms slowly “leak” users. If this sounds eerily familiar then you’d be right. This is exactly how the PC market behaves today.

—The new switchers, Horace Dediu

An obituary for iTunes by Adam Clark Estes at Gizmodo:

It was swift and relatively painless. On June 30, 2015, iTunes gave birth to Apple Music, a much-awaited and disappointing pay-to-play streaming service. By this time, iTunes was in poor health, due to the viral popularity of streaming music services. Apple Music, I thought, would bring new life to the tired program. I was wrong.

At first, I welcomed Apple Music’s arrival to the world, realizing that it could make or break iTunes. I hoped iTunes would feel young again, fun again. But the opposite proved true. A few weeks after Apple Music was born, it was apparent that it couldn’t save the addled iTunes.

Well-played.

When you combine iTunes and the Music app on iOS, the situation is almost to the point of being untenable for me.

Does Apple decouple iTunes from Apple Music? Make separate apps for audio and video? I don’t know. All I know is on it’s current trajectory, iTunes (and Music app) is not working.

For four years Samsung Electronics Co Ltd has basked in the success of its Galaxy smartphones, making billions of dollars competing with Apple Inc in the premium mobile market.

The coming years are set to be more somber for the South Korean tech giant, as it is forced to slash prices and accept lower margins at its mobile division in order to see off competition from rivals including China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and Xiaomi Inc in the mid-to-low end of the market.

Behind Samsung’s reality-check is the fact it is stuck with the same Android operating system used by its low-cost competitors, who are producing increasingly-capable phones of their own.

—Samsung glamour days over as it fights to save mobile market share, Se Young Lee, Reuters

Having Android running on everything from shitty, bottom-of-the-barrel phones to premium devices is great example of democratizing technology: getting it in everyone’s hands, regardless of income. But how do you differentiate your product if you’re an OEM?

You could argue that if Samsung had always just sold premium hardware they might have avoided having to make their current price cuts. The truth is they (and many other OEMs) have always thrown as many price tiers of Android devices to the wall to see what sticks. This has resulted in Android brand doesn’t conjure up thoughts of amazing, premium devices.

It’s as if Ferrari licensed their body panels and frame to other car makers to put whatever engines and electronics they wanted into them. Sure, you could find better/faster Ferrari versions than others but anyone could get a “Ferrari”.

Zack Whittaker on Android’s fingerprint vulnerability:

New research, set to be announced at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, by FireEye researchers Tao Wei and Yulong Zhang outlined new ways to attack Android devices to extract user fingerprints.

The threat is for now confined mostly to Android devices that have fingerprint sensors, such as Samsung, Huawei, and HTC devices, which by volume remains low compared to iPhone shipments. But down the line by 2019, where it’s believed that at least half of all smartphone shipments will have a fingerprint sensor, the threat deepens.

Of the four attacks outlined by the researchers, one in particular — dubbed the “fingerprint sensor spying attack” — can “remotely harvest fingerprints in a large scale,” Zhang told ZDNet by email.

Open always wins, right?

Interesting web browser results on power consumption:

We measured the power consumption of watching videos on YouTube, browsing Reddit, streaming on Netflix vs Putlocker, creeping on Twitter and FaceBook, composing emails on services like Gmail and Hotmail, and searching for stuff on Google, Bing (yup, surprisingly, it’s still used), and DuckDuckGo. We used a factory-restored MacBook Pro Retina 13” to test each website on one internet browser at a time. No programs other than the browser were open.

Averaging data from all websites tested, Safari won first place with 6hours 21min of total usage, Firefox second with 5hours 29min of usage, and Chrome last with 5hours 8min of usage.

Basically, if you simply switch to using Safari instead of Chrome, on average you could get an extra 1 hour of usage from your battery life. It’s actually a pretty good browser, and now has a fair amount of extensions available.

Not a big deal if you work at a desk all day, but if you’re on the road a lot, what browser you use can make a huge difference.

via Daring Fireball

At the Verge, Josh Dzieza reports on an interesting little media site, The Awl:

Soon cities will be stratified into classes of on-demand laborers, Herrman says, “app playgrounds” zoned by service radii. It’s going to get more interesting when you replace those people with robots, Buchanan says, adding that everyone will be eating soylent while the rich eat solid foods in surge-priced restaurants. “I can’t wait for the progressively priced food market,” Herrman says, with genuine enthusiasm, “that’s going to be great.” Struggling to keep a straight face, Buchanan describes college lectures with professors delivering sponsored native ads indistinguishable from the course — environmental science brought to you by Exxon. “In-app purchases for college! College premium! I can’t wait!” Herrman says. “The future is going to be amazing,” Buchanan says, dryly. “I’m so glad I’ll be dead.”

I’ve known about The Awl for a while now, but I can’t say I’ve read it lately. I might have to change that.

Horace Dediu: iOS v. Windows and Immunity to Disruption:

Which reminds me. This week Microsoft just wrote off the acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone business. The growth of mobile as an alternative to desktop/laptop computing was foreseen by Microsoft a decade before the the data in the graphs above. It began in 1994 with Windows CE development, proceeded with a PDA operating system by 1998 and the Pocket PC brand in 2001 and Windows Mobile in 2004 and Windows Phone in 2009.

After anticipating, predicting and dedicating decades of work why didn’t Microsoft participate in its own vision?

The curious thing about disruption is that predictability does not result in immunity. If the new trajectory threatens the current profit formula, the trajectory is not joined with enthusiasm. There is an uncanny unwillingness to self-disrupt.

Just because you were first to market doesn’t mean you had the right vision.