microsoft

A great opportunity for Nokia that no one has mentioned…

July 22, 2011 By Dan Thornton

The news is full of reports on the abysmal second quarter results posted by Nokia today, which saw such a massive drop for the company that it has been surpassed by Apple in smartphone sales for the first time (16.7 million Nokias, compared to 20 million iPhones).

Some are suggesting that it’s a sign the move to Windows Phone 7 was the right one, but most analysis and opinion is that Nokia might not survive long enough at this rate, given that we’re only likely to see one WP7 handset by the end of the year, and although the operating system is a nice one, it might not be nice enough to make any impact into the growth of Android and iOS. For a full and complete analysis of how far Nokia have floated up the creek without any propulsion, Tomi Ahonen is as comprehensive as ever in his figures, predictions, and critical analysis of Microsoft and Nokia CEO Stephen Elop.

But I think I may have spotted a big opportunity for a core of growth for Nokia, and it’s all based around Windows Phone 7 and their relationship with Microsoft

Here’s where Nokia, Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 could nail it:

Microsoft posted record quarter profits for Q4 last year, and record annual profits of $69.94 billion.
The biggest growth has come from the Entertainment and Devices division, which includes Kinect, and the Xbox, which was picked out as contributing significantly to the record profits.
Whether you prefer WP7, Android or iOS, you can certainly see that WP7 is a good enough OS to on a par with the others, but the perception is that the huge app catalogues of Android and iOS and the continued increase in developers devoting time and effort to them make their leads pretty unassailable.

But here’s what I think would give Nokia, Microsoft and WP7 a significant core group of growth from which to build….

Xbox is growing and making significant revenue.
Kinect is a record-breaking success.
Integration with Xbox Live and gaming on mobiles has been mentioned by senior Microsoft staff for years, even before the Xbox 360 launched (One of the chief people involved in the Xbox project, J Allard, talked about it in-depth in an Edge magazine feature back in 2005).
The biggest selling entertainment product of last year, which broke records for all videogame sales, was Activion’s Call of Duty: Black Ops, which is currently time-exclusive for the Xbox, meaning all updates etc are released way earlier for the Microsoft Console.

Non-gamers may still be asking why this matters, but consider the fact that there is a huge group of Call of Duty gamers who have bought an Xbox purely to play Call of Duty. And these generally aren’t 15-year-olds – these are mainly late-20s and early-30s men (and some ladies) who also bought an iPhone when they became cool and fashionable because a guy at work showed them Angry Birds.

These are people with limited time, and limited interest in comparing operating systems, or app inventory. There are plenty of other great games on the Xbox, but they’ll possibly buy a football game (Fifa for English football, Madden for American football, or maybe a golf game, and that’s it. They’ve spent £200 for a console, £40 for a game, and £30 for additional content, plus a £40 annual Xbox Live subscription to play one game online with their friends.

Now most manufacturers using Windows Phone 7 also produce Android handsets which have a much, much higher rate of sale and adoption at the moment by a massive margin, so Nokia is in a position to be a massively preferential partner with Microsoft.
If Nokia hardware, which is still trusted by consumers, and Microsoft WP7 could be put to Activision in a way that gets exclusivity on the Call of Duty franchise for mobile in addition to the Xbox console, or if they’ve already set up the contract that it’s Xbox Live exclusivity regardless of device.
Suddenly you have hardware people still remember as trustworthy, even if Symbian was perceived as stone age compared to smartphone rivals. You have Xbox Live which is doing massively well as the established online videogame network, and you have the game which gets a large audience of adults with a disposable income in a position to spend £300 plus just to access that game. If they can figure out the right way to get CoD onto a mobile handset in a way which is enjoyable, ties into the console game as well (Most likely feeding into the new Call of Duty XP social network/stats package), then they’ve got a strong and solid core from which to build.

And given that the mobile/console interaction was being discussed 6 years ago, and increased Xbox Live connectivity is constantly being mentioned in every WP7 upgrade, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was announced pretty soon. Given the fact that one Nokia WP7 handset is out this year, and the next installment in the series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is due in early November, marketing for such a phone and app would have to begin pretty soon, but having work on a launch app for a previous Nokia handset, the turnaround times for actually producing something were relatively short in that case.

Now the one thing that would probably scare anyone inside of Nokia from the idea would be remembering the ill-fated N-Gage – the gaming/phone ‘sidetalking’ abomination which ranks as one of the most notable gaming hardware failures of all time (and also produced the stil funny ‘sidetalking’ meme of imitating the N-Gage will all sorts of objects).

Nokia NGage — Just pretend the sidetalking taco phone never happened…

Fortuntely we’ve come a long way since then, with the Sony Xperia Play as the ‘Playstation Phone’ and the success of games including Angry Birds lifting simple mobile games. At the same time, most big games publishers, such as Activision and EA, are already publishing their games on the bigger mobile OS platforms.

If I was Stephen Elop and wanted to grab an established userbase which has disposable income for both hardware and digital content, and already has a strong word-of-mouth community with an established property, I’d be trying to get in a room with Ballmer and Robert Kotick in days or hours to get a deal done.

Is Xbox Live better than golf for digital business networking?

July 14, 2010 By Dan Thornton

I’ve never managed to get into golf as a sport, but I’ve often been made aware of it as a useful social gathering for business people to get together. Was I missing out due to my lack of interest, ability and plaid sportswear?

‘My Lucky Golf Outfit‘ by Jeff the Trojan on Flickr (CC Licence)

Well, if golf was the social context for business networking in the past, I’m rapidly realising that Xbox Live appears to have replaced it. Obviously my network is self-selecting to an extent, but a quick scan of my friends includes:

a couple of founders of significant start-ups (i.e. companies you’ll definitely know).
a fair number of journalists, including a couple of editors.
5-10 fairly prominent digital marketers.
a handful of tech experts in specialist areas.

Theoretically it’s possible I could keep up with all of these friends in the pub, although it’d take a mighty amount of diary juggling and even then, some of them are rarely in the same city with enough free time.

But it’s easy for me to meet up with them online and spend some time gaming (and occasionally chatting about general tech stuff in between). And without wishing to provoke the wrath of Sony/Nintendo fans, the fact that Xbox Live has long been the most seemless and best integrated online networked console experience, means it’s a pretty good time all round…

It interesting how this facet of being social has become integrated into the digital world automatically and subsconsciously alongside keeping in touch with family, friends, colleagues and the looser circle of connections around them both on a personal level, and sharing links, information etc…

And even if the game of choice is pretty much always Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360), I could probably even be tempted into a spot of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 (Xbox 360).

Did Microsoft China copy and clone Plurk?

December 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Is Microsoft China’s MSN Juku a straight theft of code and design from Plurk, the microblogging service which has had major success in the Asian world?

Despite fading after initial interest in the West, Plurk now claims to be ten times bigger than Twitter in Taiwan alone, and the preferred method of microblogging in many Asian countries, despite access to the site being banned by China in April 2009. At the time, Plurk’s top five countries were Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, the U.S and China, so it was a big issue.

Now the issue has got even bigger, as described in a blog post by Plurk co-founder and lead developer, Amir, which states what they think has happened:

Microsoft China officially launched its own microblogging service, MSN Juku/Hompy/Mclub, some time in November, 2009.
The service’s design and UI is by and large an EXACT copy of Plurk’s innovative left-right timeline scrolling navigation system.
Some 80% of the client and product codebase appears to be stolen directly from Plurk!
Plurk was never approached nor collaborated in any capacity with MS on this service.
As a young startup, we’re stunned, shocked, and unsure what to do next and need your support and suggestions.

And judging by the images and code displayed on the Plurk blog, it seems far too suspicious to be a mere coincidence.

It’s pretty amazing that a company of the size of Microsoft China would even think about stealing code to power a new launch, and that it’s gone this far if so. The only logical reason could be that China’s internet laws and lack of access to the outside world could lead to people thinking no-one would notice.

The question the Plurk team is asking is how to tackle the problem?

My guess is that the bad publicity wouldn’t necessarily worry Microsoft China, but might worry Microsoft itself a little more, particularly given all the efforts to fight Chinese piracy and protect intellectual property that Microsoft has supported. It’s a big harder to do that when you’ve got a clone of a reasonably well-established and successful company sitting there for all to see.

Techcrunch has also covered the story, and I’m looking forward to seeing what, if any, response they get from Microsoft.

My guess will be that MSN Juku will go quiet for a while, before perhaps reappearing with a slightly more unique codebase and design. If not, perhaps the only other option will be for Microsoft to get into acquisition mode – something that didn’t work out well for Google and Jaiku, and isn’t likely to work when the starting point is a complete rip-off!

Update: The outcome is that yes it’s a clone, but apparently done by a third party developer when everyone else was obviously on holiday or in a meeting. The site has been taken offline indefinitely, and the only remaining question is whether Plurk, which is a pretty small and young startup, will bother to try and take matters further, which given the legal resources MSN has, is probably unlikely…

Will Microsoft listen to the FixOutlook Twitter backlash against Outlook 2010?

June 25, 2009 By Dan Thornton

One of the strengths of Twitter is the ability to get quick feedback, but Microsoft might not be seeing it as a positive right now.

I first picked up on the complaints about Outlook 2010 and the resulting FixOutlook site via Hacker News on Wednesday morning.

The reason the movement have started is that Microsoft intend to use the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010, and this means:

for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

That means angry developers, which is never good on the internet. The use of Fix Outlook, which is a nicely presented stream of people ReTweeting the message (HT to Neville Hobson for a nice summary and digging a little into who is behind the site), and the move from core users to mainstream means the site went from 7,500 tweeters at around 1pm UK time on Wednesday to 16,676 just five hours later. And it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down yet!

Especially as it’s now being picked up by the likes of Mashable.

The main questions are how significant Microsoft will see this protest, in comparison to the likely number of potential Office customers who don’t use Twitter and won’t understand or care about tables or CSS – and whether that significance will result in any action on their part.

But even if it’s a small group numerically, considering the relatively high proportion of digital workers and developers using Twitter, it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few days.

Techcrunch and Microsoft: Two WTF? moments…

June 15, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Two items appearing in my Google Reader subscriptions almost led to me exclaiming WTF? on a crowded Monday morning commuter train. (Post now updated due to more info – see below)

First up was the strange experience of seeing Michael Arrington and Techcrunch complain about someone posting a video of the Crunchpad which ‘was not a sanctioned or official video‘. And which has since been taken down. The video was of the CEO of Fusion Garage, who are partnering with Techcrunch on the Crunchpad, unboxing the last prototype.

Let me repeat. Techcrunch has complained and taken down video which was ‘not sanctioned or official’.

Techcrunch.

On the plus side, it’s relegated the Mike Arrington call to end handshakes to the second most bizarre thing I’ve read on Techcrunch.

On a more positive note, Techcrunch also revealed a major Microsoft marketing blunder.

If you download Internet Explorer 8 through this specific site, Microsoft pledged to donate 8 meals per download to a group called Feeding America.

As MG Siegler pointed out, there’s a slight problem. For each download, Microsoft pledged to donate $1.15 to a maximum of $1 million.

‘Only complete downloads of Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 through browserforthebetter.com from June 8, 2009 through August 8, 2009 qualify for the charitable donation to Feeding America®. Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000. Meals are used for illustrative purposes only. Meal conversion is effective until June 30th, 2010.’

Which means that each ‘meal’ would be $0.14.

*update 1pm*

As revealed in the comments below, the figures for the cost of meals is actually directly from Feed America’s figures, so it’s incorrect to state that Microsoft set the cost of a meal at $0.14. Rather, it’s bloody impressive Feed America manage it!

I’d still argue that $1 million is a relatively small commitment comparative to the other marketing campaigns etc which Microsoft is running – and that the IE8/Feed America donation is definitely part of a marketing plan.

Oh, and for the record, I’m an MS fanboy if anything as a PC person over Macs, and an Xbox fanatic!

*end of update*

As MG has gone on to explain in an update, it’s a good thing that Microsoft has pledged money to a good cause – it’s just that $1 million is somewhat dwarfed by the $80 million that is being spent on Bing promotion – and linking it so tenously to the number eight is marketing gone mad.

You can imagine the meeting:

“Why don’t we do something with social responsibility – how about donating some money when someone downloads IE8?”

“Yeah, but how does that promote us? Where’s the brand? Hang on, why don’t we donate 8 meals per download, and that way it promotes IE8”

“That will cost us a lot, though”

“Yeah, but if we limit it to $1.15 in the fine print, noone will notice, and we’ll look like we’re as nice as that company who do no evil”

Lesson 1:

If you’re going to embrace the idea of social responsibility properly, it’s probably better to be honest and open about what you’re actually doing, and build on that goodwill, rather than trying desperately to tie it into your brand message and then looking like a bunch of cheapskates.

Lesson 2:

And as a journalist, I’m well aware of the need to offer companies a ‘right to reply’, and the benefits of going through official routes to fact check etc – but I’ve also lost count of the Techcrunch stories which get put out as quickly as possible, and then updated as facts are checked to ensure speed of information, and a fast placement on news aggregators.

If you’re going to live by the sword of fast tech blogging or social responsibility, then you also have to be willing to accept a few flesh wounds…