The Kin Story – Why MS is almost irrelevant today

by jhritz

Feature: Post mortem: KIN’s tragic demise (and the fading of Danger)
[Via Ars Technica]

The now-dead KIN was not a bad idea (read our hands-on with the platform). Microsoft’s ambitions with the KIN were sound. As much as the iPhone and, lately, Android handsets garner all the press attention, smartphones represent only a minority of phone sales—a growing minority, but a minority all the same. There are many, many people who don’t have a smartphone, and don’t even particularly want one, and they easily outnumber smartphone users.

Redmond wanted to be a part of this broader market. The company was already a big player in the smartphone market with Windows Mobile; the KIN was a product of its ambitions beyond that space. So rather than starting from scratch, in 2008 Microsoft bought Danger, the company behind the T-Mobile Sidekick line.

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And

Life and death of Microsoft Kin: the inside story
[Via Engadget]

Since our piece on Wednesday, we’ve had more trusted sources step forward to fill in some blanks and clarify the story behind the amazingly swift fall from grace that Microsoft’s Kin phones have experienced since their launch just a few weeks ago. It’s a fascinating tale, and we wanted to share everything we’ve learned.

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MS has gotten a reputation recently of being a place where corporate politics is more important than producing great products. MS’s foray into its own phone is a great example of how large companies so seldom innovate – too much time is spent on killing the creative innovations of rivals than actually doing a good job.

And what is fascinating between these two stories is not the general aspects of in-fighting, territoriality and just shear incompetence. That is to be expected. It is that MS was also willing to screw over its cell phone partner also.

Read both stories. This is a company that really has no long-term direction or vision. What was a smart decision – buying the technology to produce a cheap, useful phone for young adults – became horrible in its execution. What sort of company purposefully sabotages a released product like that?

This sort of infighting is not only exhausting, wasting resources that should be devoted to great products, it is demoralizing to the vast group that is actually creating the innovations the company needs to survive. The smart, creative guys are going to Google and Apple. To them, MS is becoming more and more irrelevant as it fights its internal turf battles.

You do not see the guys at Apple in charge of iPods undercutting the iPad, even though the percentage of revenues from the iPod are dropping and it is becoming less and less important. In its first quarter the iPad will eclipse the revenues of the iPod.

How about Apple TV or the Mac mini? Hobbies that may very well position Apple to take on the TV market when things are ripe. At MS, VPs would be working to kill those projects so that they could incorporate those resources in their own departments.

Not at Apple.

Apple has a strategy where its products fit together and support one another. It recognizes that all of its products have to collectively work together in some sort of cohesive fashion; they each leverage the other. iPods help sell Macs. iPod touches and iPhones help sell apps. Apps help sell Macs (Objective-C required to develop). iPhones help sell iPads (same GUI, etc.) They are all pieces of the same puzzle. Once someone buys one of them, they can easily transition to another one.

And they all run the same operating system, just with slightly different GUIs, so what is learned while developing for one device can be applied to another. The developers get smarter and so do the customers.

Collectively, they are more potent than any one product.

MS has a bunch of Randian Galt-like characters all working for themselves. No collectivism for them. For example, there are at least 6 different operating systems for mobile MS devices, with very little development cross talk between them.Tablets will use a different operating system than will phones. PCs will be a totally different one. No leverage.

It is as if Apple is putting the puzzle together by using the picture on the box and starting with the edge pieces while MS is just randomly sticking pieces together.

Which company would you rather bet will succeed?

Problem with iPhone IS Apple’s fault, just not what is expected

by iowa_spirit_walker

Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4
[Via Apple Hot News]

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple’s history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design.

At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this?

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

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As I wrote the other day, the problem is not the iPhone itself, it is with how Apple has ‘calibrated’ the meter:

Apple has set the meters such that people think they are in much better reception areas than they are used to. That is, the reception of signal can vary over a range of 10,000 without seeming to change the meter. But a simple loss of signal by 50-fold could take the meter from 5 bars to 1.

So, a lot of people in strong areas are reporting seeing no change in the meter, because a 20 dB attenuation by holding the phone will not appear to change the meter much when it takes up to 40 dB to change it from 5 bars to 4.

Simply adjusting the meter, so that the signal strengths for each bar are set up differently would make the perception quite different.

That is exactly what they are saying today. They made a mistake in the equation they used for signal strength, giving the impression that reception was greater than it was. In effect, the meter was not displaying useful information. Either there were 5 bars or there was one.

Apple admits they did this wrong and now says they will change how the meters display signal strength:

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

I wonder if this will calm people down.

Flash security problems at educational web sites

by Husky

Flash, aaaaagh!
[Via Eureka! Science News]

Most educational websites in the U.S. are using Flash applications that fail to adequately secure these pages. This is a growing problem for the Internet as vulnerable sites can be hijacked for malicious and criminal activity, according to a paper published in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics this month.

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This is a pretty worrying report. Scanning 250 educational web sites, the researchers only found 2 that had no Flash vulnerabilities. Twenty percent had medium-level security problems. Passwords and other sensitive information can be gathered.

As the release states:

However, although provider Adobe releases regular security patches to address problems as they arise, many sites are not kept up to date and so remain vulnerable. Companies such as Apple, refuse to allow Flash to run on their consumer devices for this very reason.

Having such a ubiquitous process that has many vulnerabilities and can so easily be placed on web pages by almost any researcher is quite worrisome. Especially as most people are more concerned about the educational aspects of their Flash applications, not the security problems.

Grants for oil-eating microbial research

by U.S. Geological Survey

How fast can microbes break down oil washed onto Gulf beaches?
[Via EurekAlert! - Policy and Ethics]

(Florida State University) A new Florida State University study is investigating how quickly the Deepwater Horizon oil carried into Gulf of Mexico beach sands is being degraded by the sands’ natural microbial communities, and whether native oil-eating bacteria that wash ashore with the crude are helping or hindering that process.

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and

Gulf Oil Spill: NSF Awards Rapid Response Grant to Study Oil Found on Alabama, North Florida Beaches

[Via NSF News]

The first determination of “beach-fall” of oil along the Alabama and northwest Florida beaches has been made, say National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded geologists at the University of South Florida (USF).

Ping Wang and USF graduate students Mark Horwitz, Tiffany Roberts, Katherine Brustche and Jun Cheng report that tar balls have been found along 160 kilometers (more than 99 miles) of the overall 180 kilometers (nearly 112 miles) of beaches the team studied.

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Nice to see that some work will be done to actually understand how rapidly microbes break down oil and its constituents. These will provide not only a nice baseline but help us examine the ecosystems that degrade oil.

Perhaps it will allow us to do a better job next time.