Linked List: July 21, 2011

Thursday, 21 July 2011

Bloomberg: ‘Apple Said to Consider Making Bid for Hulu’ ★

Andy Fixmer and Adam Satariano, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc., sitting on $76.2 billion in cash and securities, is considering making a bid for the Hulu online video service, two people with knowledge of the auction said.

That’d be one way to get rid of Hulu’s Flash-based interface.

Microsoft Quarterly Results: $6 Billion in Profit ★

Seems they forgot to report the number of Windows Phone 7 sales.

Nokia Q2 Loss of Nearly €500 Million ★

Ingrid Lunden, PaidContent:

Nokia today reported an operating loss of €487 million for the quarter, a decline of €782 million from the same quarter a year ago, when it made an operating profit of €295 million. The declines seen at the handset maker were near-total, represented by a string of negative percentages down the balance sheet. […]

Every single device category saw declines in sales, from smartphones to featurephones. Before today’s results were posted, analysts thought the company would see a hit from reduced demand for low-end devices, but it was actually the smartphones that saw the biggest decline. That’s the counter point to results from the likes of Apple, which is running away with competitors’ business.

I say they’re toast. They’ve bet their future on Windows Phone 7, which though it looks good, doesn’t seem to be getting any traction in the market.

Apple: Lion Downloads Top One Million in First Day ★

Seems like the upgrade process is working well for people, too.

David Barnard: ‘Everyone Borrows, Google Flaunts It’ ★

David Barnard:

In “Everything Is a Remix” Kirby Ferguson makes a compelling and fascinating case that innovation and creativity lean heavily on prior art. That’s always been the case in technology, especially software, but I can’t recall a single company going so far in “borrowing” from product after product as Google has done recently.

He cites Google+’s Facebook-likeness, and in particular the similarity of their respective iPhone apps.

Chrome Doesn’t Have Much Support for Lion Features ★

Chrome is a great browser, but it’s not (yet?) a good Mac browser. Better than Firefox ever was, though.

Strategy Analytics Tablet Market Share Numbers ★

Bloomberg, back in January:

Google Inc.’s Android software boosted its share of tablet computers almost 10-fold in the fourth quarter, narrowing the lead of Apple Inc.’s iPad, market researcher Strategy Analytics said.

Android devices captured 22 percent of global tablet shipments in the three months to Dec. 31, up from 2.3 percent in the preceding quarter, the Boston-based researcher said in a statement today. The iPad accounted for 75 percent of shipments in the period, down from about 95 percent, it said.

That’s the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab, the one that ran the non-tablet Android 2.3. And these sort of reports are what led to the whole sell-in/sell-out thing with Samsung later that month. So it seems pretty clear that today’s numbers from Strategy Analytics only reflect how many tablets are being put on the market, not how many are actually being sold to customers.

Arrington: Google Tried to Buy Color for $200 Million ★

Mike Arrington, AOL/TechCrunch:

About the same time, multiple sources have confirmed, Google was also making a run for Color, the mobile social network founded by Bill Nguyen. This was well before Color launched, and Google was looking at the company’s potential as well as the team. Google offered $200 million for the company, according to our sources.

A confusing poorly-designed product but which collects a ton of personally identifying information about its users? Of course Google wanted to buy Color.

Russia Classifies Beer as Alcoholic ★

BBC News:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a bill that officially classifies beer as alcoholic.

Until now anything containing less than 10% alcohol in Russia has been considered a foodstuff.

iPad and the Opportunity Ahead ★

John Paczkowski:

According to Good Technology, which provides mobile device management services to 49 of the Fortune 100 and 182 of the Fortune 500, 27 percent of the mobile devices activated by its enterprise customers during the second quarter of 2011 were tablets. And most of those were iPads.

More than 95 percent, actually.

As I wrote in January, Apple is to the post-PC era what Microsoft and Intel combined were for the PC era. They control the dominant software platform and reap the majority of the profits from hardware. When people argue that Apple has somehow already grown as big as it can get, they’re not seeing the size of the opportunity that remains ahead. Imagine how big a combined Microsoft and Intel would have been 20 years ago. Then consider that the post-PC/mobile market is going to be bigger than the PC market.

Lion Security Improvements ★

Dan Goodin:

“It’s a significant improvement, and the best way that I’ve described the level of security in Lion is that it’s Windows 7, plus, plus,” said Dino Dai Zovi, principal of security consultancy Trail of Bits and the coauthor of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook. “I generally tell Mac users that if they care about security, they should upgrade to Lion sooner rather than later, and the same goes for Windows users, too.”

Not a Good Sign for RIM ★

Reuters:

Tablets using Microsoft Corp software saw stronger sales than the high-profile Playbook from BlackBerry maker Research In Motion in the second quarter, according to Strategy Analytics.

Even though Microsoft has yet to launch a version of its Windows software designed specifically for tablet computers it still picked up a 4.6 percent share of the market in the second quarter compared with a 3.3 percent share for Playbook, which is based on RIM’s QNX software.

They say Android is up to 30 percent, and the iPad down to 61 percent, though. That doesn’t jibe at all with what I’ve seen with my own eyes on airplanes and in coffee shops. I see iPads everywhere. I’ve seen like maybe two or three Android tablets, total. If they’re selling one Android tablet for every two iPads, where are they? Other countries than the U.S., perhaps?

Update: Looks like those numbers are for units shipped, not units sold. Except that for Apple those numbers are one and the same, because they’re selling iPads as fast as they can make them. Judging by Google’s own numbers for Android OS versions in use, it sure seems like a lot of Android 3 tablets are sitting on store shelves.

Panic Introduces the World’s First Emoji Domain ★

What a crappy idea.

Nice to Meet You, Too, Steve ★

From Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller:

The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. “I am George Bodenheimer,” he said to Jobs. “I run ESPN.” Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard,” then turned and walked away.

That would be this phone, I believe, on which ESPN and Disney wound up losing $135 million. (Thanks to Beau Colburn.)

Save Sheet Shortcuts in Lion ★

Matt Gemmell on the new keyboard shortcut for the “Don’t Save” button in the standard sheet that appears when you close a document with unsaved changes — it used to be Command-D, but now it’s Command-Delete:

Since the user will probably associate Command-S with saving (it triggers the Save menu command, after all), it makes sense to also assign that shortcut to the Save button within the sheet. However, that creates a problem: the previously-standard Command-D shortcut for “Don’t Save” puts two opposing commands on adjacent keys (since S and D are adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard).

It would be unacceptable to invite the inevitable physical slips this would case, so “Don’t Save” is now triggered by Command-Backspace (which is an excellent shortcut, since not saving means your document’s contents will be deleted, in a sense, and hitting Command-Backspace is slightly more difficult than hitting Command-D).

He’s right that Command-Delete is safer for a destructive shortcut, but there’s another reason for the change. In previous versions of Mac OS X, choosing Save in this sheet would then open a second sheet, the standard Save dialog box. In Lion, this confirmation sheet has been combined with the Save dialog box. And in the standard Save sheet, the shortcut Command-D has always been a shortcut for changing the Save destination to your desktop. That’s still the case. So it’s not that Command-D no longer works in this sheet, it’s that it now means “change the location to the desktop”.