by Pablo Carlier.
MIT Technology Review: “In 2009 Microsoft’s software was on 90%of all computing devices (PCs, phones, tablets). Today, only on 23% of devices sold”.
It happened without them noticing, but Microsoft lost its empire overnight. Mobile, consumerization of IT and Cloud apps are to blame.
“I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!
We promise not to screw it up.”
I love Marissa’s style. 0% BS. Business Speak, that is (of course).
I wish all corporate communications, internal and external, were more open, direct, concise and to the point. Many times businessspeak gets in the way of productivity, disruption and enablement.
Godspeed Marissa and Yahoo!
"Google has always been about inferring and serving up information. Facebook is about implicit actions. The new Google+ design is an extension of that thinking. And as Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Google+ said: “We have put Google in Google+."
Om Malik on Google+ redesign.
Amazon.com Inc is known in the advertising industry as the sleeping giant because the world’s largest Internet retailer harbors a trove of consumer-spending data…
Amazon is a singular company. They run a gigantic retail operation virtually at zero profit. They excel at delivering goods to customers in an inexpensive, efficient and satisfactory way. In many ways, Amazon is the perfect store.
They just do not make money from selling. What is their long-term business plan, then?
It’s simple. They are the new and improved Google. Google 2.0.
Google entices users with an exceptional search engine for free. Millions search there. Google takes the knowledge of what people search, and resells that knowledge to advertisers.
Amazon entices users with an exceptional shopping experience, and takes almost no cut. Millions shop there. Amazon takes the knowledge of what people actually purchase, and, now, is reselling that knowledge to advertisers.
If you were to pick a knowledge base to market your product, would you rather get the users that search for your product or the users that buy your product? Me too.
There it is. Amazon just became a mighty player in the ad-selling arena. And Google faces yet another behemoth to go against.
Jo Best of ZDNet looks at Nokia’s Windows Phone and remaining Symbian devices versus the low-end Series 40 and Series 30 devices:
After all, unlike the smartphone segment, there are still battles to be fought and won for Nokia in the mid and low-end. Nokia’s Windows Phone and Symbian ranges may have an average selling price of €186, bringing in €1.2bn in sales, it’s still small fry compared to S40 and its lower-end cousin S30. Devices on the platforms manage an average selling price of a mere €31, but when Nokia is shifting around 80 million of them in the last quarter, that’s €2.5bn of sales – double what those fancy Windows Phones bring in.
How poorly is Windows Phone doing for Nokia? So poorly that not only are S40 and S30 phones outselling their (true) smartphone brethren, they’re bringing in double the money.
Best’s parallels between Nokia with Symbian competing in the high-end of the mobile market versus Nokia with S40 and S30 in the low-end of the market is interesting as well. Android. Is. Coming.
This is skeuomorphy: old ways, new tech.
The Lunar Baby Thermometer was inspired by parents’ natural tendency to place their hand on their child’s forehead in order to check their temperature.
(via givedesignachance)
"Amazon Web Services is the world’s most ambitious—and successful—result of service-oriented architecture. This philosophy drives product innovation and flows down to its intended usage. When competitors like Rackspace argue “persistence” as a competitive advantage, they’re missing the entire point of AWS. EC2 is the antithesis of buying a server, lovingly configuring it into a unique work of art, and then making sure it doesn’t break until it’s depreciated off the books. Instead, EC2 instances are intended to be treated as disposable building blocks that provide dynamic compute resources to a larger application. This application will span multiple EC2 instances (autoscaling groups) and likely use other AWS products such as DynamoDB, S3, etc. The pieces are then glued together using Simple Queue Service (SQS), Simple Notification Service (SNS), and CloudWatch. When a single EC2 instance is misbehaving, it ought to be automatically killed and replaced, not fixed. When an application needs more resources, it should know how to provision them itself rather than needing an engineer to be paged in the middle of the night."
Why an EC2 Instance is Not a Server (via irq)
(via irq)
