Chủ Nhật, 23 tháng 10, 2011
Thứ Năm, 20 tháng 10, 2011
Strong Office sales boost Microsoft
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is trying to recharge his four-decade-old company.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Windows sales have softened, but strong demand for Microsoft's business software drove the company's revenue to a record seasonal high in the just-ended quarter.
Sales for the three-month stretch that ended Sept. 30 were $17.4 billion, up 7% compared to last year and slightly ahead of analyst expectations. Microsoft's net income for the quarter was $5.7 billion, or 68 cents per share, in line with forecasts.
Shares of Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) dipped slightly in after-hours trading following the report, dropping less than 1%.
Microsoft's strongest division right now is its business software group, which includes Microsoft Office. Revenue in that division rose 8% to $5.6 billion, driven predominantly by Office. But steady sales of business integration and messaging software, including SharePoint and Exchange, helped too.
Microsoft's Windows division eked out 2% sales growth as the company heads toward the end of its Windows 7 product cycle and begins laying the groundwork for Windows 8, which is expected to launch in the next year.
Microsoft is battling headwinds in the PC market from smartphone and tablets, which have cut into the demand for laptops and desktop PCs.
Microsoft's online services division, the home of its Bing search engine, continues to be a cash sinkhole. The division lost $494 million last quarter, a decline from the $558 million it lost in the same quarter last year.
"In search, monetization of our ad platform remains below our expectations," Peter Klein, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said in a call with analysts Thursday afternoon. The company recently extended a search-and-advertising deal wth Yahoo and continues working to generate better results from that partnership, Klein said.
Microsoft analysts treated the results as fairly routine. "I'm used to a little more controversy," Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund quipped. "It seems pretty clean."
Microsoft's core business lines continue generating plenty of money, but the 36-year-old company is on hunt for new growth engines. It's got a big cash stash to fuel any shopping it wants to do: Microsoft ended the quarter with $57 billion on hand.
Last week, Microsoft completed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, a popular Internet-based calling system with more than 170 million monthly users worldwide.
Microsoft plans to operate Skype as a quasi-independent business division, though its sales will roll up into Microsoft's "entertainment and devices" unit.
"We're really thinking deeply about ways that we can bridge the consumer, voice and video world with the rest of our products, especially on the business side," Todd Setcavage, Microsoft's director of investor relations, said in an interview after the company's earnings release. He added that Skype's leadership will report directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Microsoft is also rumored to be kicking the tires on Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), whose board is considering buyout options. Yahoo spurned an unsolicited $47.5 billion takeover bid three years ago from Microsoft. Yahoo is now valued at less than half that.
Asked at a tech conference this week about getting turned down by Yahoo, Ballmer quipped: "Sometimes, you're lucky."
Microsoft will need another shot of luck to regain its vanguard position in the tech industry. The company's archrival, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), is now blowing past it in sales. Earlier this week, Apple reported quarterly sales of $28.3 billion, up almost 40% from a year ago.
Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) is also on a growth tear, with sales that rose 33% in its last quarter to $9.7 billion. Its planned acquisition of Motorola Mobility (MMI) will make it an especially formidable rival in the smartphone market, where Microsoft is trying to make headway with its Windows Phone 7 platform.
But there are glimmers of hope. Chip maker Intel (INTC, Fortune 500), Microsoft's longtime partner, reported record quarterly revenue this week and said semiconductor sales in its PC division rose 22% compared to last year.
While U.S. PC demand is waning, thanks in part to the tablet and smartphone boom, global demand is rising in hot spots such as China, India and Indonesia.
Robotic sailboats built to clean up oil spills
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Engineer builds oil spill-cleaning robot
Editor's note: The staff at CNN.com has been intrigued by the journalism of Vice, an independent media company and Web site based in Brooklyn, New York. Motherboard.tv is Vice's site devoted to the overlap between culture and technology. The reports, which are being produced solely by Vice, reflect a very transparent approach to journalism, where viewers are taken along on every step of the reporting process. We believe this unique approach is worthy of sharing with our CNN.com readers.
Brooklyn, New York (Motherboard.tv) -- In April of last year the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men, injuring 17 others and triggering what is generally recognized as one of the greatest human errors ever made and officially the largest unforeseen marine oil catastrophe since people started drilling for oil. By the time the leak was capped in July 2010, enough oil to fill 4.9 million barrels covered the Gulf in a toxic slick.
See the rest of "Sailing Drone" at Motherboard.tv.
Enter Cesar Harada. After visiting the oil spill in June 2010, the young engineer decided to leave MIT in Boston to develop an open source oil spill cleaning robot, Protei. Our current array of oil spill skimming technologies — mostly private boats retrofitted with skimming equipment and skimmers maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard — are only able to collect three percent of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico and carry health risks to humans and heavy economic costs. Protei is unmanned, autonomous, relatively inexpensive and open hardware (anybody can use, modify and distribute its designs), making it a potentially powerful weapon in the battle to clean up the Gulf of Mexico while preserving the safety of the workers who would otherwise be exposed to the toxic mess. Already Harada imagines other uses for the sailboat drone, like oceanography and surveillance.
In the first episode of our "Upgrade" series, Motherboard goes to Rotterdam to watch Harada's ragtag team of scientists and engineers as they hustle to assemble the first Protei prototype and dodge the Dutch harbor patrol for their first water test.
MC Hammer launching his own search engine
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MC Hammer, pictured at a party sponsored by Motorola Xoom, has a team developing a search engine called WireDoo.
(CNN) -- You can't Google this.
OK, maybe you can. But MC Hammer doesn't want you to.
The venerable rapper, who helped usher hip-hop into the pop mainstream in the early '90s, has rolled out a search engine he hopes will outperform Google, Bing and other established tools.
The project, called WireDoo, has been two years in the making, said Hammer (real name Stanley Burrell) Wednesday at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.
At the conference, he said what will make his search tool better than Google (or, too legit to quit, if you will) will be its "deep search" ability.
"It's about relationships beyond just the keywords," he said, according to Mashable, a CNN.com content partner.
The rapper-turned-entrepreneur (after some late-90s difficulties) said a search would render not just direct results, but also information on possibly related topics. Its tagline is: "Search once and see what's related."
Other details about the product were scarce.
WireDoo, which Hammer said he has a team developing, is still in pre-beta. Its website is currently letting people sign up to test the search engine when a beta release is ready.
AT&T's Android sales are catching up to iPhone
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- AT&T's wireless customer base topped 100 million for the first time this quarter, even as iPhone sales slowed while customers waited for the new model.
AT&T (T, Fortune 500) activated 2.7 million iPhones in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, a decline from the 3.6 million iPhones it activated in the previous quarter. That trend should reverse in the current quarter: The new iPhone 4S hit stores Oct. 14, and Apple said it sold a record 4 million iPhones in the first three days it was available.
AT&T activated 1 million new iPhones in the first few days after the launch, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said Thursday on a conference call with analysts.
"It's been our most successful launch in history," he said.
But Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android is chipping away at the iPhone's lead. Sales of Android devices doubled compared to last year, and almost half of the 4.8 million smartphones AT&T sold this quarter were Android devices, the company said.
AT&T plans to release its first 4G LTE-capable smartphones this quarter. That plus the iPhone should make for "blockbuster" sales, de la Vega told analysts.
"We expect to have the best fourth-quarter smartphones sales we've ever had," he said.
AT&T's revenue for the third quarter was $31.5 billion, down very slightly compared to last year, but its sales from its two growth engines -- data and wireless services -- rose 5%, to $21.7 billion. The amount of money AT&T makes monthly off each of its core "postpaid" subscribers (those who take out long-term contracts) also rose for the 11th quarter in a row, reaching an average of $63.69. AT&T's net income for the quarter was $3.6 billion.
Smartphones aren't the only devices AT&T customers are snapping up: Data-only gadgets including tablets, aircards, MiFi hotspots and data-tethering plans are proliferating. AT&T added 505,000 data-only device connections to its network this quarter, for a total of 4.5 million.
AT&T archrival Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500), the nation's largest wireless carrier, will offer its third-quarter financial results on Friday.
Why Google doesn't (and shouldn't) care about tablets yet
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Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS is demonstrated on a Motorola Xoon tablet.
(WIRED) -- Google held two big events within 24 hours: one with its subsidiary Motorola in New York, and another with its partner Samsung in Hong Kong.
While there was some loose speculation around the web that maybe we'd see a new Xoom tablet or a preview of the next Galaxy Tab running Android's new Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, the focus was rightly on what Google, Motorola and Samsung do best: making really great Android smartphones.
Ice Cream Sandwich is billed as Google's unified mobile OS, working the same way on both tablets and smartphones. So far, though, what that means (as Google's Hugo Berra wrote after Google I/O this summer) is that "Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb on your tablet to your phone."
It's about making the phone experience bigger, more interactive, more capable. It's about making the phone literally bigger -- the Galaxy Nexus has a 4.65″, 1280 by 720 pixel screen, which while not unprecedented, is still really big for a smartphone, and way bigger than the 3.7″ Nexus One screen.
Motorola, too, continues to treat the smartphone as the center, not periphery, of a new computing economy. It builds out its Droid RAZR with the Motoactv media player, dedicated cloud syncing and backup, and a range of docks and peripherals that all communicate with and augment the computing power of the handset.
The PC used to be the command center of your digital life; now, it's the phone. Anything with a hardware keyboard is again relegated to the role of a specialized workstation.
But wait; what about tablets? Tablets are supposed to be the devices that bridge phones and PCs. They're all anyone can talk about. Everybody loves tablets now:
-- Apple sold eleven million iPads last quarter;
-- Manufacturers tripped over themselves to pump out tablets before a tablet-optimized version of Android was even ready (and continue to do so, even though Google hemmed and hawed about making Honeycomb's source code available);
-- Amazon's coming out with one (you probably heard about it);
-- HP incited tablet fever when it slashed prices to clear Touchpad stock;
-- Even global e-reading company Kobo has a brand-new Android tablet, the Vox, that will probably ship before Amazon's Kindle Fire.
So what's going on here? Why isn't Google embracing this, racing to get out ahead of the tablet market, pushing the envelope on pricing and capabilities, and generally looking to disrupt the whole show?
Ultimately, tablets just aren't that big a part of Google's business, nor are they likely to be. Google-approved Honeycomb tablets have only sold an estimated 3.4 million devices total.
Nor have tablets been a top priority within Google for very long. Android's head of user experience Matias Duarte told This Is My Next's Joshua Topolsky that Honeycomb was an "emergency landing," a crash-the-plane-in-a-cornfield attempt to stop manufacturers from shipping Android tablets with artificially up-sized smartphone builds: "Any corner we could cut to get that thing out the door, we had to." He explains, "That's the sole reason we haven't open sourced it."
Ice Cream Sandwich finally opens up pieces of the new platform to everyone, but the focus is decidedly not on tablets, at least for Duarte: "Ice Cream Sandwich is where we say 'huh, okay, how are those changes [first introduced in Honeycomb] going to work on phones?'" It may not be until Android Jelly Bean that we see Google's full attention turn to tablets, if then.
It may seem like I'm being harshly critical of Google or Android. Actually, I'm not. So I'll spell it out: Google moving slowly into tablets while it focuses on smartphones makes perfect sense. It's smart. It's good strategy. It fits perfectly with where Google is today and how it needs to position itself tomorrow.
Tablets are overwhelmingly consumer media devices. They can do many other things, and there's some room for very specialized devices for the enterprise market. At their broadest base, though, tablets are best for sitting on the couch and reading books or magazines, browsing the web, playing games and watching video. This is why Apple, the quintessential consumer electronics and media company, has been very successful with them. It makes money from selling the shiny package, and it makes money again from filling it up with apps and media.
It's possible to outsource the electronics bit, but not the media bit or the consumer focus. This is why Barnes & Noble has been fairly successful with the Nook Color, and Amazon will probably be quite successful with the Kindle Fire. These companies can tailor Android for their own purposes and use them as remote digital retail outposts.
Until very recently, Google was neither a consumer electronics nor a media company. It's a search, communications, advertising, software and services company. If you look at their existing line of applications, only a few, like Gmail, Maps or YouTube, make a lot of sense for tablets. The vast majority of their apps, from search to document editing, make much more sense on either a traditional PC, a smartphone or something like a Chromebook.
Real media companies -- that is, content companies -- haven't been able to figure Google out. That, at least, is what Android chief Andy Rubin told Walt Mossberg Wednesday at the AsiaD conference.
"Google is in the very, very early phases of adding consumer products to our portfolio," Rubin said. "The media industry didn't see us as that. They saw us as a search company."
Over time, that could change. The landmark Google Books agreement, now at a lawsuit-imposed standstill, could be retooled and resurrected. YouTube and Google TV may become vehicles for original or licensed content to compete with Hulu or Netflix. Google's nascent efforts in music could really take off. And Google could continue to treat all its Android handset makers equally while continuing to use Motorola as its officially sanctioned tablet manufacturer, bringing something unique and distinctive to those devices.
Until then, Android tablets will be a solid value proposition for media retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Kobo, and a much less attractive one for Google itself than smartphones or even Chromebooks.
So stick with phones, Google, at least for now. You're getting really good at this.
LinkedIn founder: Facebook isn't competition
"Not everything is social," says Reid Hoffman, the creator of the leading professional networking site LinkedIn.
SAN FRANCISCO (CNNMoney) -- Professional networking site LinkedIn has stayed "incredibly steady to its original vision," says co-founder Reid Hoffman, by focusing on its specific niche -- and Facebook isn't a competitor to that strategy.
Hoffman seemed keen to focus on the power of data during his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, but conference moderator John Battelle coaxed him into talking about whether LinkedIn considers Facebook a rival.
"I want to ask you to pretend we're not in front of hundreds of people and pretend we're at an intimate dinner party," Battelle started, prompting laughter from the audience. "And I say to you, 'Reid, what's your real opinion of Facebook?'"
"Has anyone ever responded to these hypotheticals?" Hoffman replied, laughing.
"Well, I remember when [Mark] Zuckerberg was saying every vertical is going to be socialized, even your work profile," Battelle said. "But LinkedIn has obviously grown in its way. Do you feel that Facebook is a competitor to LinkedIn?
"No," Hoffman said. "Facebook is obviously an amazing product that's gotten big. But I'm not sure everything is social."
Hoffman said he's acutely aware that people have "different aspects" to their lives -- a persona at work, one with friends, and so on.
He later elaborated on the theme, saying that "LinkedIn has remained incredibly steady to its original vision" both in terms of focus on professional networking and its business model.
"My general view is [Facebook is] great, it's amazing, but I think we'll see many things that are important to bring the people coefficient in," Hoffman said. "Some of that will be LinkedIn, some of that will be Facebook, some of that will be Twitter."
What exactly "the people coefficient" will look like as it evolves is an open question, Hoffman said.
"None of us know right now. And that's why I love being an investor," he said, referring to his status as a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Hoffman joined the firm in 2009.
Battelle then asked about another area of uncertainty: the IPO market for startups. The Web 2.0 conference included several grumblings about the slow and often rocky process of going public. But Hoffman took a rosier view -- not surprising considering that LinkedIn (LNKD) went public in May.
"I think that long-term-focused companies can get out," Hoffman said. "I mean, it is a painful process. You go through a lot of turbulence."
The public market for tech companies "is relevant for someone to think about," he added, "but I don't spend too much time thinking about that because it is what it is."
He closed his thoughts on the topic with a sentiment often echoed by others in the tech field: "I'd like an nation decided by engineers, not a nation decided by lawmakers."
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