WebOS Dies a Sad, Preventable Death

I can’t say that this should come as a surprise.  I saw the writing on the wall months ago, but now my fears have been confirmed: HP is killing off its webOS development and products.  The company that we all thought could save Palm’s last golden egg instead publicly crucified the platform, never giving it a chance to blossom into a real competitor.  The death of webOS was drawn out and painful.  Worse yet, it could have been prevented.

Let’s turn back the clock a year or so: HP buys Palm at the end of last year as the father of the PDA flounders under debt and its own inability to successfully market its new webOS platform.  WebOS is a powerful, capable platform yearning for the hardware and developer support that it can truly leverage.  HP vows to offer webOS that support by bringing the software to tablets, new smartphones, PCs and printers.  Then comes February of this year, a day I affectionately called “The Resurrection of WebOS”, when HP shows off stellar new hardware offerings: the tiny Veer, the powerful new Pre 3, and the TouchPad tablet rocking webOS 3.0.  Next in the timeline…. nothing.  The same catastrophic mistake that Palm made with the original Pre and webOS repeated itself.  HP waited far too long to release these new products, clearly demonstrating that these were not completed products but only targets.  The Veer was released in mid-May to a lukewarm reception, 3 months after its initial announcement.  The Veer was a cute, low-end smartphone, but in no way an appropriate choice as the flagship for the relaunching of this platform.  Where was the Pre 3?

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Google Buys Motorola Handset Division

Google has announced their acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a major manufacturer of cellphones and Android smartphones, for $12 Billion. The deal is a major game changing event in the mobile landscape as Google, maker of the Android Mobile OS, has now acquired a hardware division. With this, Google has mobilized a new army in the smartphone wars.

Motorola Mobility was a company that emerged from the splitting of the original Motorola. Once mighty presence in virtually every sector of the tech industry, the company fell on hard time in the latter part of the last decade. The company split into Motorola Mobility, in charge of the handset business, and Motorola Solutions, in charge of the company’s IT, Telecommunications, and heavy industry business. Since then, Moto Mobility has had a major resurgence as a premiere Android handset maker – the company was responsible for launching Verizon’s Droid line of premium smartphones back in 2009. Motorola’s Android history is not all roses, but it has had far more wins than many other OEMs with great handsets like the Atrix, Photon, Droid and Droid X smartphones.

Now here we are, with Android’s own mother swallowing up one of the platform’s most stalwart contributors. It’s a ballsy move for a company that has so far refuted claims of opening a hardware division. Google claimed they wanted to be gatekeepers to Android, only worrying about licensing to other manufacturers. With the exception of the Nexus One and Nexus S, the company has lived a perfectly comfortable life with others worrying about the hardware side of the Android platform.

So why now has Google absorbed one of the largest cellphone makers in the world? Many believe it has to do with patents. Google, Microsoft and Apple have been on patent buying binges over the past year, trying to secure any and all innovations in the ever more competitive mobile market. Apple and Microsoft led a power play initiative to block Google from the purchase of several patents from Nortell, a Canadian telecommunications company that went under in 2008. The move places Google behind its competitors in terms of IP stockpiles. Meanwhile, Motorola has decades of innovation under its legal belt in the areas of mobile phone technology. This move gives Google access to a large backlog of patents.

But this seems like too huge a purchase to be simply for patents. If Google wanted Moto’s IP, the company could have worked out a far more affordable licensing agreement. While Larry Page maintains that Motorola will still be operated as an independent company and not the hardware arm of Android, I believe that’s nothing more than fluff. Google has seen the success in Apple’s draconian control over hardware. Apple shapes the hardware to perfectly marry software in a way Google can only dream of. Throughout the history of Android, every OEM has skinned, modded and hobbled their Android offerings into an inconsistent platform. Wildly different features, platform fragmentation, and poor customizations have all lead to an Android that can’t be as Google envisioned the OS. Licensing deals were good for the platform’s infancy but Google doesn’t want to be reliant on the endeavors of third parties anymore. Google wants to run the show.

The Nexus One and Nexus S established the defacto design of Android 2.0 and 2.3. Google likes being in charge of hardware design, even if they won’t admit it. Now, with Motorola, Google has an entire company that it can point in the right direction. Ensuring you get Vanilla android, and hardware that perfectly matches the software. Sure, Google will play nice with HTC, Samsung and LG – Google still needs them to control the market – but from now on, Google will run the show. They have an entire hardware team at their disposal now with an legendary brand name. Sure, the name Motorola will endure, but beneath the branding this will be all Google from now on.

In the end, this could be good. Android devices may now get that Apple-like polish they deserve from Google’s devices while offering choice from other OEMs. Is it the best of both worlds? Maybe. OEMs might revolt, Apple might go on the offensive again, and the Nokia-Microsoft partnership might whip up something really jaw dropping. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Intel: Apple Shapes Our Roadmap

File this one under “interesting.”  Intel has made some interesting comments this morning in a Reuters interview which basically asserts that Apple, one of Intel’s highest profile clients (yet one of the smallest in terms of products sold), is actually quite integral to Intel’s chip roadmap.  This revelation is an interesting one because it breaks the notion that Intel and Microsoft are as tightly knit as once thought.  Perhaps the reign of “Wintel” has come to an end?

The understood convention for most of the 90s and early part of the previous decade was that Intel stood with Windows, while PowerPC from Motorola and IBM stood with Apple.  Intel and Windows were synonymous.  Microsoft and Intel could collaborate together, ensuring that Windows leveraged the newest technologies from Intel’s latest chips, and likewise Intel could mature their chips in order to support the new technology Microsoft was developing.  Microsoft’s major upset came in 2005 when Apple announced their transition to Intel processors.  Now, Intel had OSX as another platform to support, but also to benefit from.

Apple is a forward thinking company.  Not to say Microsoft is not “forward thinking” – indeed all companies are “forward thinking” – but Apple is a company that constantly thinks towards new ways of designing products and powering their devices.  The company has been unafraid to make hard changes in their history.  The move from 68k to PowerPC; the transition from Classic OS to OSX; and finally the move from PowerPC to x86.  This constant pressing the cutting edge is a trait of Apple that Microsoft lacks.  Microsoft, for the good products they make – and they do exist – has become bogged down by a lot of legacy demands.  Windows Mobile was an evil kludge of an operating system.  There was the atrocity of Vista, the zombie-like persistence of IE6, etc.  Apple has avoided these problems by and large by making tough choices and having the balls to depreciate outmoded technology.

This is the kind of energy that Intel respects in a partner company.  I can see why Intel would see Apple as a far more influential partner than someone like Microsoft.  Not only does Apple have software, but also hardware.  That is more important than partnering with a simple software company like Microsoft.  Look at products like the Macbook Air.  This ultra thin laptop is not only the future direction of notebooks, but also an example of form factors that need special silicon.  The original Air could not simply use a low voltage processor, it required a smaller form factor chip that Intel delivered.  Apple is in a unique place with its combination of hardware and software to be a powerful partner for Intel.  Wintel is dead.  All hail Aptel.

Now, if only Intel could deliver a decent tablet chip.

Microsoft Buys Skype, Just For the Hell of It?

File this one under “Out of Nowhere” but Microsoft has bought Skype, the number one video conferencing firm in the world, for a cool $8.5 Billion.  Google tried to pick up Skype back in 2009, but it looks like Microsoft has succeeded where the Search giant failed.  The problem is, we don’t really know why Microsoft bought Skype.  Redmont has shown little interest in a video conference infrastructure over the years, and most of its “chat” infrastructure under MSN has long become irrelevant.  Perhaps this is an attempt for Microsoft to revamp that long unimportant section of its online services?

More likely this is about Apple and Facetime.  The Mac maker announced Facetime last year at the same time as the iPhone 4 as an open standard for video chat between mobile devices and computers.  Since then, no other companies have adopted Facetime but Apple has begun to push the technology by renaming the iSight cameras “Facetime HD” cameras.  Even if Facetime is lacking support (and 3G connection), it’s a burgeoning and capable standard that could become prevalent in the future for iOS and OS X.  Having Skype gives Microsoft a capable fighter against Facetime and Google Voice and Talk in Windows Phone 7.  As of right now, the mobile OS lacks any video chat standard.  While a Skype application could be made, direct integration of the service into the OS could be more useful.

Plus, we could see Skype support on the Xbox 360.  Kinect has a powerful set of cameras and already has video chat support between Xboxes. Skype would allow for communication between mobile phones and computers from the Xbox as well.  Of course, all of this could have been done by simply making a deal with Skype.  An $8.5 Billion acquisition seems a bit much for what will be a pretty peripheral set of enhancements to Microsoft’s hardware and software.  Skype is one of the youngest and freshest faces in the tech industry.  Seeing them get swallowed up by something like Microsoft is just unfortunate.

Why Microsoft spent this much for what could have been done in a deal is beyond me.  Maybe they’re just on a power trip.

AT&T, a GSM Monopoly, and Net Neutrality

Over the past few months I have been trying to write a follow up on US Net Neutrality law since the FCC released its plan back in December of 2010. First it was going to go into more detail on the plan, then I was going to weigh the opposition’s thoughts, and eventually things fell through. See, no matter how I tried I couldn’t make it relevant enough for my readership and it was awfully dry.

But then AT&T announced last month that they would buy T-Mobile and become the sole GSM cellular service provider in the United States. All of a sudden the word being cried from seemingly every mountain top was: monopoly! Our greatest fears had been realized: Ma Bell was back, but this time it would control not only voice, but data too. GSM, the most popular cellular technology in the world, would now be locked away behind the iron gate of an AT&T service contract.

But cutting away the melodrama, what were we really left with?  What does the merger really mean for us?  Is it this all-terrible monopoly or a blessing in disguise?   Can anything stop it?  Can anything regulate it?  The answers to all these questions are unfortunately unclear, but here’s my best crack at an answer.

Breaking: AT&T Buys T-Mobile USA

In what can only be called a ground breaking business transaction, today Deutsche Telekom, the German parent company of T-Mobile USA, the 4th largest cellular wireless company in the United States, has agreed to sell their American branch to AT&T for a cool $39 Billion.  This is one of the most significant changes in the US telecom market since AT&T’s merger with BellSouth in 2006 and the greatest change in the wireless market ever.  With this, AT&T will now become the largest cellular service company in the US by a huge margin.  The company will encompass over 130 million customers, against Verizon’s 93 million.  In addition, this merger will make AT&T the only supplier of GSM cellular service in the continental United States – a de facto monopoly.

The reasons for this merger are many but can be attributed primarily to the less than stellar performance financially for T-Mobile, which has struggled against larger CDMA companies like Sprint and Verizon, and the poor network performance of AT&T.  As the only other supplier of GSM cellular service in the US, T-Mobile was an obvious choice for an acquisition.  Taking over T-Mobile’s towers is a painless process for AT&T, and allows for a massive increase in capacity and coverage redundancy in many high-traffic markets.  AT&T building out this infrastructure by themselves would have taken over 5 years according to the company’s press release today.  This massive increase in capacity and redundancy is a big win for AT&T which desperately needs to improve their network fast.

In that capacity, this is a great, though expensive move for AT&T.  The company has been struggling with pretty terrible reliability in 3G coverage against Verizon, mostly because traffic on AT&T’s network has saturated their network throughly.  T-Mobile provides native expansion of the existing GSM/GPRS/EDGE technology on the same 850/1900Mhz spectrum.  The only issue that will arise is adapting 3G.  T-Mobile uses the AWS spectrum for their UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+ network, which operates on the 1700Mhz and 2100Mhz frequency spectrum.  transferring T-Mobile’s 3G network back to 850/1900Mhz is not a terribly difficult problem, but it does raise major radio incompatibility issues for existing T-Mobile customers.

That incompatibility is the big question mark for this merger.  Existing T-Mobile customers needs to be able to access their network without hardware radio changes.  As of now, most AT&T quad band phones support 850/900/1800/1900Mhz radio spectrums, as these are the most popular GSM frequencies in the US and Europe.  Pentaband phones exist in small quantities but honestly we’re looking at a future where hexaband phones could be necessary, supporting 850/900/1700/1800/1900/2100Mhz frequencies.  The reason for this ridiculous amount of baseband diversity is because T-Mobile customers will still need access, which means AT&T needs to support the 1700Mhz and 2100Mhz frequency bands.  But if AT&T wants to improve their 3G coverage for existing AT&T customers, they’re going to have to get T-Mobile’s 3G on their spectrum.  Maybe this can be solved by on the cell tower side, I’m honestly not sure, but the point is that this is a compatibility issue to deal with.

Now the question is whether we have a monopoly here.  I’m not usually one for market dominance by one entity, I like competition a lot.  However, the US cellular market is a pretty big, garbled, bloated mess as it is.  4 major companies are frantically trying to build out all these competing networks that never seem up to snuff and it is obnoxious to see little progress (especially when you are an AT&T customer).  So if T-Mobile moving to AT&T creates a powerful, unified and reliable GSM network in the US, maybe that’s not a bad thing.  This country desperately needs to improve its wireless broadband infrastructure and maybe this is the answer: consolidation instead of fragmentation.  The Justice Department might block this merger for being anti-competitive, but if it goes through we might gain quite a bit from it.  AT&T for one gets a lot of extra network and some awesome phones to boot.  T-Mobile customers get far more ubiquitous coverage (they are on the smallest network after all) and AT&T customers finally, hopefully, get reliable coverage.

The last question mark is 4G.  T-Mobile has already rolled out a fast HSPA+ network, which will no doubt be rolled into AT&T’s small existing network on the same technology.  This should accelerate the glacial progress AT&T has made in this area.  Also, for T-Mobile customers, they now have a clear roadmap to LTE, something that T-Mobile had no plans to adopt.  AT&T is also in a position to leverage the AWS spectrum as a supplement to the 700MHz LTE network they are building.  Again, more frequency chaos but good for redundancy.

Still, there is a big chance this won’t go through government approval, and in that case AT&T has to make some network concessions to T-Mobile.  Guess we’ll have to see what happens.

PS, look on the bright side T-Mobile: iPhones!!

State of the Telecoms: Devices

Last year, in a vain attempt to create some sort of quarterly feature, I published the “State of the Telecoms” accessing each of the four major carriers and their pros and cons.  I think it was a pretty dry post.  So instead, I’ve decided this year to focus in on what you guys really want. Specifically, the phones that really stand out from each carrier.  In the end, that’s what draw people to carriers now.  So here’s how this breaks down, I will list no less than 3, but no more than 6 phones from each carrier.  They cannot all have the same operating system and can’t all be essentially the same phone.  There has to be some kind of diversity for a phone to make the “recommended list”.  So for example, the Samsung Continuum won’t make the list for Verizon because it’s basically a Galaxy S, which Verizon already has a version of.  The point of this break down is to highlight the best phones from each carrier and show the diversity in their line up.  And it’s only going to be smart phones.

And The Platform Crumbles: Nokia Jumps to Windows Phone 7

Man, I am so bad at this.  Every time a company is floundering with their platform, I tell them to endure, but they always jump the ship.  First Palm and now Nokia.  Am I just naive or plain stupid (don’t answer that).  Still, two days ago I discussed the failure of Nokia’s venerable (though antiquated) Symbian OS.  The system is old and needs help.  Nokia needs help as they struggle between a rock (Symbian) and a hard place (the still to come MeeGo).  I maintained that Symbian could be modernized and MeeGo could be accelerated to market.  My hope was that Nokia could maintain the platform they started for the industry’s sake, in the name of diversity.

But it did not come to pass.  Today Nokia announced a convergence deal with Microsoft.  Windows Phone 7 has become the primary mobile platform of Nokia’s future mobile handsets.  As for Symbian, it’s dead.  Technically, Symbian is now a “franchise platform” which Nokia will license out to other handset makers, but by and large Symbian will wither and die against more modern choices.  It’s depressing to see such a hallmark OS go the way of the Dodo, but then it was on its last legs.  As for once-promising MeeGo, which Nokia assured us was the future of the company?  It’s now an “opportunity to learn” and nothing more than that.  They might get a device out by the end of the year, but there are no plans to make it into a larger platform.  Instead, it will be an experimental platform like Maemo was for the N900 in 2009.  Everything is going Windows Phone 7 in the mainstream.

The choice of Windows Phone 7 is strange though.  Microsoft’s revamped mobile OS has yet to make major in-roads against Android or iOS.  Some estimates have it selling less than 2 million units since its release in October of last year.  Wouldn’t it make more sense for Nokia to jump on board a more mature and popular OS like Android?  I chalk it up to three things.  1) Money.  Microsoft has been trying to woo handset makers to their platform for a while.  As the mid-90s adage goes: “If you build it, they will come.”  Microsoft probably saw Nokia’s problems from a mile away and offered them a big incentive to partner up.  2) Opportunity.  Android has already saturated the market with hundreds of identical devices and consumers have made their choice about the most desirable models now.  Nokia has an excellent chance to get in on the ground floor of Windows Phone 7 and become a preeminent device maker.  Plus, if Nokia ever wants to gain access to the US market, using the Windows branding is not a bad way to do that.  And 3) Relationship.  Nokia’s CEO is Stephen Elop who worked for Microsoft before joining Nokia in these turbulent times.  That relationship must have made this move far easier.

So while Nokia has gotten a new lease on life with Windows Phone 7, it’s Microsoft that really wins in the exchange.  According to the deal, Nokia’s Ovi app store – Nokia’s Symbian app distribution system – will be integrated into the Windows Phone Marketplace, bringing some new developers and apps into the fold of Microsoft’s small app count.  The Ovi maps, one of the better parts of Symbian, is being integrated into Bing and should improve the map experience.  But most of all, if Nokia continues to make their handsets with the same finesse and style of the N8 and E7, Microsoft will finally have some AAA devices to carry Windows Phone 7.  Until now, most Windows Phone 7 phones were relatively similar, with none standing out from the crowd.  Having devices with the gorgeous design and stunning features Nokia is known for will help move Windows Phone 7 significantly.  I’d even take a look at Windows Phone 7 if I could run it on something like an N8.

As deals go, this one has a lot of promise.  Microsoft getting veteran mobile phone maker Nokia is a big name for their platform.  And Nokia gets to start anew with an up and coming platform that seems pretty competent.  This past week has been huge for the mobile phone sector.  First the resurrection of webOS, and now Nokia gets another shot at prosperity.

Oh, also…. Nokia fired 1000 people.  Not so good at all for a company that comprises over 3% of Finland’s GDP.  My heart goes out to the unfortunate workers who have lost their job, and I wish them luck in further endeavors.

Nokia on a “Burning Platform”

 

Over the past 4 years, the world of mobile software has drastically changed.  First, 2007 brings the iPhone, which completely changes our expectations of smartphones.  Then 2008 ushers in Android, making open source mobile operating systems viable and powerful.  2009 saw Palm’s ambitious revamp with WebOS (though poorly executed as a business strategy).  And 2010 has seen Microsoft finally become modern with Windows Phone 7.  As you can see, the past 4 years have all seen at least one major mobile OS debut.  It’s hard to imagine the smart phone market without these juggernaut players (I use that term loosely in reference to WebOS and Windows Phone 7) that we have today.  But low and behold, there were smartphone operating systems before 2007.  Perhaps the most famous and successful of all was Symbian, the adopted brain-child of Nokia.

Yes, for almost a decade Symbian was the only way to get into a truly “smart” smart phone in much of the world (Windows Mobile wasn’t big outside of the US) and it was that fact that rocketed Nokia to the top of the global smartphone market.  We in the US rarely got a potent Symbian device, but even more lower end phones were backed by the technology under the guise of some interface designs like S40 and S60.  A lot of those lower end phones were very popular in the US.  While not the most remarkable of phones, Nokia was (and still is) known for making a very svelte and classy looking device.  As the iPhone came on the scene, I was still tempted by the N95 (Nokia’s flagship phone circa 2007) because it was such a looker.  But well made device can’t be saved by poor software and Symbian was most certainly that.  In a world now occupied by touch screens, Symbian was meant for physical keypads.  The software and hardware had little to no support for the rich media playback found in the iPhone or Android and its browser (though built from webkit) was decidedly poor.  By 2008 it was clear, Symbian as a mobile OS was clearly out of date.  This was only enforced by Nokia’s adoption of Maemo, another Linux-based OS meant for their fusion tablet-phones like the N900.

Could Steve Jobs be the Hero HTML5 Needs?

Fall out continues from Google’s announcement last week of dropping H.264 support from the Chrome browser.  It has become clear that while Google hides behind a veil of promoting openness on the internet and ending the codec schism, they are really making a move to promote WebM and even send support to their buddies at Adobe.  It’s bad people and every media outlet with some stake in the future of HTML5 has come out with near universal disapproval.  Of course, some support it in the genuine belief that we should not have royalties associated with HTML5.  While that is a completely valid belief, don’t think for a second that’s Google’s real intention.

So I’m going to suggest something pretty radical here, and bear with me as I explain.  We don’t need Google to be HTML5’s guardian.  Instead, I nominate Steve Jobs.  Over the past few years, Jobs has on rare occasions released manifestos of sorts on topics that he feels are worthy of an extended response beyond his usually terse emails.  It was Jobs who placed the last nail in the coffin on DRM for music downloads when he released his “Thoughts on Music” essay in 2007.  Few fully comprehend how much of a landmark effort that was by Jobs, unequivocally placing Apple is support of a world without DRM.  By later that year, EMI was offering DRM-free content and eventually the entire music industry folded in 2009.

Then, in 2010 Jobs provided another manifesto against the current state of web video with “Thoughts on Flash”.  While less ground breaking than ending DRM, the remarks about Flash laid down the law in Apple’s development community that they will do all in their power to move away from the plug-in that they only begrudgingly have to support.  Jobs alluded to HTML5 often in that essay, but I think he can guide HTML5 away from the damage that Google has created.  It may involve the “Reality Distortion Field” but HTML5 needs an enthusiastic leader.  Jobs and Apple was that leader for iOS, but they now need to lead the rest of the internet.

I’m not saying this because H.264 has to be the codec of choice, but because Google propping up Flash with their move towards WebM.  It’s no secret Google has gotten very cozy with Adobe over the years.  They bundle Flash 10.1 with Android 2.2, Youtube continues to be one of the largest repositories of Flash video on the net, and Chrome now has Flash player bundled in it.  In Google’s ideal world, you will have two options for video: Flash with H.264, and HTML5 with WebM.  Sure, Google may want to see HTML5 end Flash eventually, but not as long as they have such a rich relationship.  Think about it: clearly Adobe was very threatened by Apple’s refusal to adopt Flash video on iOS.  So they turned to Google as their trojan horse into the mobile space.  Google makes it clear they are ok with Flash continuing, this is a quote from their Chromium Blog post yesterday regarding the issue:

H.264 plays an important role in video and the vast majority of the H.264 videos on the web today are viewed in plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight. These plug-ins are and will continue to be supported in Chrome.

See?  Google is saying that if you want H.264 video, just turn to Flash and Silverlight plug-ins.  Plugins like the WebM version arriving for Safari and IE9 soon.

Given that Adobe and Google are creating a power play against Apple and the rest of the MPEG, I think Jobs is the man to continue the support of H.264 as the preferred codec for HTML5.  There should be no compromise.  How does Jobs do this?  Apple extends an olive branch by forgoing the royalties they would get from their contribution to the H.264 standard.  The time is now for Apple to nail Flash’s coffin shut by ensuring that H.264, the best video codec on this damn earth, does not remain a jewel in Flash’s crown.  Help us Steve Jobs, you are our only hope.