Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

In its first public presentation, AMD’s new leadership explained a new direction of the company to align itself with an evolving CPU and GPU market. In 2013, AMD will be releasing its first SoCs for desktop and tablet computers. Execution will be key for the company to succeed in a highly competitive market that is dominated by ARM vendors and challenged by Intel.

January 2012 has been a remarkable month for the web browser as we know it. Those who closely follow the popularity of web browsers already know that Chrome has, according to StatCounter, surpassed Firefox in market share in November 2011, thus rearranging the rules of the browser game and turning it, for now, into a two-horse race. Now, Chrome is beginning to approach IE in most regions around the globe and has reduced its distance to IE, on one day, to less than four percentage points. If the current trend, which has lasted for more than 3 years, continues, then Google will surpass IE within 3 months.

Intel will try to prove its claims that it can be a powerful manufacturer of processors for smartphones and tablets when its Medfield platform emerges in commercial products in H2 this year. In the same time frame, ARM vendors will release their first notebooks that challenge, conceivably, Intel’s most important and profitable business today. Both Intel and ARM are staging aggressive launches and prepare for a fight that will be much more bloody than the historic processor battles between AMD and Intel. Does Intel have what it takes to dent ARM’s segmentation-driven application processor market? Can ARM deliver processors that are compelling enough to face Intel’s prestigious and performance-driven CPUs?

eBay has never been a huge attraction for me as the idea of entering into auctions on-line just wasn’t something that I was that interested in.  However after hosting me on campus last year, I was convinced that eBay was trying to be more like Amazon in terms of buying experience and they were showcasing an interesting additional step of providing apps that could point you to stores that had products you might want to buy. In other words, they were moving beyond actions and into consumer-focused commerce much more aggressively.

Recap – The CES opening keynote has, traditionally been not just a keynote. Placed in the heart of the Las Vegas strip, the opening keynote has always been a show with flashy announcements and explorations of future computer and consumer electronics technologies (with the exception of the initial Bill Gates appearance in 1998). After 13 keynotes, Microsoft will depart from CES and some may agree that it was time for Microsoft to move on as there were no CES worthy announcements during a 70 minute marketing pitch that was an hour too long.

Earlier today, HP launched the HP Envy 14 Spectre and I was immediately reminded of the 2009 Dell Adamo, which was Dell’s halo product that year. Both are wrapped in glass, both look stunning in black and both would cause you to drool. But the Adamo was a bit ahead of its time, Intel hadn’t yet figured out how to package performance, we weren’t yet divorced from our optical drives (streaming was in its infancy), and Adamo had some nasty tradeoffs, not the least of which was a very high price.

Intel has created and “speced” a new form factor for notebooks it is calling ultrabooks. Many have speculated that this is a direct response to the popularity of the MacBook Air. But if this effort is only focused on that narrow vision, it will fail. Ultrabooks represent a much bigger strategic vision (and investment) that could revolutionize the notebook market, if Intel is successful.

Cisco has been on a roll. They started by trying to come out with a competitor to Sonos, which had the catchy name “Linksys by Cisco Wireless Home Audio System”. It was expensive and too hard to set up, but with some modification, it may have been competitive. It consisted of a broad line of whole house entertainment products and instead of fixing the offering, they killed it. Then they purchased Flip, the most successful digital video camera ever brought to market in terms of volume largely because it was under $100 and very easy to use.

Chrome ended 2011 with 42.50% market share gain for the year and the highest monthly market share growth in its history, according to data released by StatCounter. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the only browser to lose market share, but slightly slowed its losses over 2010. Firefox had a tough year with a loss that more than quadrupled over 2010.

Next year will prove to be an interesting year for a lot of vendors. Market leaders like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft will face their greatest challenges and strongest opportunities, new arrivals will undoubtedly have us wondering why we hadn’t come up with a similar billion dollar idea, and in the U.S., we’ll likely have an election whose outcome will be controlled by computers for the first time. Granted, some of the concerns coming this decade will likely cause all of this to be trivial by comparison, but let’s look ahead to 2012 anyway.

Analysis – Google is rumored to be paying at least $1 billion in advertising revenue, or royalties, depending on your view, to Mozilla over the next three years. This investment may seem over the top, especially since Mozilla has seen its market position weaken in 2011 and since we have seen plenty of public Mozilla firing poisoned darts in the direction of Google’s Chrome team. However, even at a billion dollars, it’s a good idea for Google to have Mozilla on its side. It appears that Mozilla has played its cards very well.

The Kindle Fire has showcased that a product well differentiated with a strong user experience running Android has the potential to challenge the iPad’s shipment numbers. However, Amazon had to create a unique Amazon controlled version of Android to make the Fire approach its potential. Google may not do what is necessary to achieve a similar result.