Wired: “Microsoft kisses up to Tim Cook in front of millions”

I was recently looking at the IDC global tablet sales and was surprised to see that sales of Microsoft’s Surface are not yet showing up. I thought I’d read somewhere that the were selling reasonably well, but I guess not enough to show up on the global sales numbers. That means they’re selling less that 1 million units a quarter because LG and Huawei, both selling 1.6 million in 2Q15 take slot 4 and 5 in IDC’s stats, and others (?) are grouped together as 20M, but who knows what’s counted in that category (there’s probably as many as 20M different companies flooding the market with Android tables at this point).

The only Surface sales I could find mentioned was a $888M revenue number that Microsoft announced in it’s last quarterly earnings statement. Given that the Surface price ranges from models around $500 up to $1700 for a full loaded Surface Pro 3 (why wouldn’t you just buy a MacBook Pro for that price?) let’s take an average: $888M at $1000 a unit, well, yeah, that’s 888,000 units a quarter. That’s not too many. Not when Apple are flogging 11M units a quarter and that’s even with their numbers dropping quarter after quarter.

So the Wired article really summed it up for me. I was about to write something witty about why Apple are producing a new tablet with a keyboard and a stylus, something that Jobs said people would never want or need. But 888,000 sales of Surfaces is 888,000 of lost sales to Apple, so, hey, why wouldn’t they produce one of those too.

Choice quote from the Wired article:

For Microsoft, it was a moment of apotheosis. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO last year, the company has pushed Office onto the iPhone as well as the iPad; open sourced its crown jewels of software development so people can build more Microsoft software that runs on Apple gear; and jettisoned its $7.6 billion effort to dominate the smartphone market with Nokia, a Finnish company famous for recent failure.

Kissing Cook’s ring was the next logical step.

 

And here’s the truth of the matter:

If you hadn’t noticed before, the mobile wars are over. For a while there, Microsoft was confident its Windows operating system would capture a sizable portion of the market. But that’s not gonna happen. The company still sells phones and tablets, but relatively few consumers will ever buy them.

 

That’s a harsh reality in a changing, post-PC world.

Windows Phone – is it dead yet?

In recent weeks, Microsoft has axed Stephen Elop, former CEO from acquired Nokia and recent lead of their Mobile Devices Group, written off $7.6 billion as a loss from their failed acquisition of Nokia, cut 7,800 jobs, mostly in their Windows Phone business, is getting slammed with bold statements in the press such as “Windows Phone is dead. Microsoft Lumia is dead”, and still, pro-Microsoft industry bloggers like Paul Therrott are holding on to beliefs that maybe it’s not dead yet, with statements like “Analysis: Microsoft is scaling back on Windows Phone Drastically“.

Uhuh. Really? It’s Dead. Let it go. It sucked and no-one bought it. Apart from that one guy somewhere.

Why for me the AT&T buyout of T-Mobile means I’ll cancel my contract as soon as I can

AT&T and T-Mobile US announced this week that AT&T will be buying T-Mobile US from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion. This seems like great news for AT&T since they’ll benefit from T-Mobile’s existing network, but everything to lose for existing T-Mobile customers. In no particular order, here’s why:

  • AT&T will become the only GSM based mobile carrier in the US. If one of your criteria is to buy a phone that allows you to easily roam on another networks worldwide and easily swap SIM cards, then your only option will be with AT&T. Sprint apparently offer some CDMA/GSM dual technology phones, but since their US network is CDMA, they don’t have many of the dual phones on offer.
  • Find me one AT&T customer (past or present) who says they love AT&T’s customer service. I’ve been with T-Mobile for over 4 years and every interaction with them has been awesome, either in person or over the phone.
  • Find me one AT&T customer who will tell you that AT&Ts coverage is great
  • Find me one AT&T customer who will tell that they’ve never had a dropped call. From memory I think I may have had one dropped call once on T-Mobile, but I can’t honestly remember (any AT&T customer reading that will probably raise their eyebrows at this point. “Huh? Really? I get a dropped call at least once a day”
  • Compare T-Mobile’s plans with AT&T. My current plan on T-Mobile with unlimited data (throttled at 5GB), unlimited texts, 1500 anytime minutes, free nights and weekends is $65. I just looked at AT&T’s site and the equivalent  options to get me anything close to the service I currently get with T-Mobile (900 mins, unlimited texts, 4GB data capped) will cost me $130 a month. That’s almost TWICE what I currently pay. No thankyou.

So, I plan to stay with the merged company for as long as my current contract is in play and I get the same service for the same cost, but as soon as anything starts changing to the service or my plan to get rolled onto an AT&T equivalent then I’ll be looking to terminate my contract. I have no plan whatsoever so pay $120 a month for what I currently get. No thankyou AT&T.