Oops:
If Bing’s first month represented Microsoft’s (MSFT) best shot at stealing search market share from Google (GOOG) — complete with Bing ads everywhere — it’s a huge disappointment.
Microsoft’s U.S. search market share was 8.4% in June, up from 8.0% in May, according to comScore.
They keep coming, coming and coming by 0.1% at a time.
But why? Give Apple a reason other than that you think is its the “right thing to do“, especially since they are not doing anything illegal, customers are choosing the platform and are free to purchase songs or movies from anywhere else.
Yet, the tight linkage between iPod/iPhone, iTunes, and the Music Store is a big wall for potential competitors to climb. And if Amazon can’t compete head-to-head with Apple, who can?
Of the two, App Store and Music Store, I am more concerned about music and other content. Suppose Apple were required to publish an open API for iTunes and support all models of players and phones? And multiple content vendors?
Why isnt the competition stepping up to provide a superior or even an adequate solution? Why does Apple need to help out its competitors?
PS Microsoft analogies fail because there is no anti-trust behavior and there’s plenty of competition. Apple does not impede development on its platform in any way or fashion.
I think they have the age of fossils wrong. Clearly, they can’t be more than 6,000 years old:
A dozen white, plastic fish boxes stand jumbled on the floor of a former fish-gutting plant in the pretty town of Urk in the northern Netherlands. Each box overflows with what appear to be large, serrated pebbles or small serrated boulders. In fact, they are the fossilised teeth of mammoths. Some are as big as melons. Others are the size of cricket balls – the molars of baby mammoths, which died prematurely from hunger, or the claws and fangs of a predator, 40,000 years ago.
All around is a prehistoric boneyard. Propped against the walls are immense, curved mammoth tusks or mammoth thigh bones, five feet high. On the shelves are fragments of the jaw bone of a woolly rhinoceros and the skull and horns of a 10,000-year-old, extinct species of giant bison.
The fact that the lower North Sea was once (until about 7,500 years ago) a land bridge between Britain and the continent is well enough known.
The spacious home where the newly wed Rhonda and Jason Holt began their family in 2005 was plagued by mysterious illnesses. The Holts’ three babies were ghostlike and listless, with breathing problems that called for respirators, repeated trips to the emergency room and, for the middle child, Anna, the heaviest dose of steroids a toddler can take.
It was not until February, more than five years after they moved in, that the couple discovered the root of their troubles: their house, across the road from a cornfield in this town some 70 miles south of Nashville, was contaminated with high levels of methamphetamine left by the previous occupant, who had been dragged from the attic by the police.
With meth lab seizures on the rise nationally for the first time since 2003, similar cases are playing out in several states, drawing attention to the problem of meth contamination, which can permeate drywall, carpets, insulation and air ducts, causing respiratory ailments and other health problems.
Roger Kay and Rob Enderle on Marketplace. Enderle is the “tech correspondent” on WSJ This Morning. WTF.
Are there no independent analysts out there for these outlets? The WSJ has Mossberg for crying out loud.
Next up, Target CEO will comment on Walmart. And Arthur Sulzberger will analyze the WSJ. Brilliant.
“Attacks exploiting the latest Microsoft vulnerability are quickly ramping up in quantity and intensity, several security companies warned today as they rang alarms about the developing threat. Symantec, Sunbelt Software, and SANS’ Internet Storm Center bumped up their warnings yesterday after Microsoft announced that attackers were exploiting a bug in an ActiveX control used by IE to display Excel spreadsheets. There is no patch for the vulnerability; Microsoft didn’t release one in today’s Patch Tuesday.
Nice:
“The US Postal Service has moved its Cobol package tracking software to HP machines running GNU/Linux. 1,300 servers handle 40 million transactions a day and cost less than the last system, which was based on a Sun Solaris environment.” The migration took a year. The USPS isn’t spelling how big the savings are, except that they are “significant.”
Can’t wait for Microsoft to sue the government.
The Total Music of apps stores:
Verizon is the latest to join the application-store fray, which is an uncharacteristic move for the telecom giant. Historically, the company has not given developers control over pricing of their apps.
How will Verizon compete with Apple? The company is adopting a “platform agnostic” philosophy, hoping to aggregate mobile apps from four developer communities: Windows Mobile, Palm, Android and RIM’s BlackBerry. This way, developers can code for whichever platform they wish. And they can decide whether to share their software with Verizon, which would provide APIs and tools to make the software compatible with Verizon phones.
From the wayback machine (actually not that way back – 2007):
Now, Morris is going on the offensive. The world’s most powerful music executive aims to join forces with other record companies to launch an industry-owned subscription service. BusinessWeek has learned that Morris has already enlisted Sony BMG Music Entertainment as a potential partner and is talking to Warner Music Group. Together the three would control about 75% of the music sold in the U.S. Besides competing head-on with Apple Inc.’s (AAPL ) music store, Morris and his allies hope to move digital music beyond the iPod-iTunes universe by nurturing the likes of Microsoft’s Zune media player and Sony’s PlayStation and by working with the wireless carriers. The service, which is one of several initiatives the music majors are considering to help reverse sliding sales, will be called Total Music. (Morris was unavailable for comment.)
Total Music totally died in 2009. They failed for the same reason all these big partnerships fail – they focus on how to lock in or how to screw the customer instead of providing value.
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