Nexus 7

The Nexus 7: Google just brought a knife to a gunfight

By: Zach Epstein

Google on Wednesday unveiled the latest version of its Android operating system and along with it, the company’s first own-brand tablet. Dubbed the “Nexus 7,” Google’s tablet is a direct response to the difficulty Android vendors have had thus far in competing with the wildly popular Apple’s iPad. The Kindle Fire burst onto the scene when it launched last year, but sales have seemingly fizzled since then and the buzz surrounding other Android slates has been tepid at best. If there’s one device that has the potential to change this, however, it’s Google’s new Nexus 7.

The Nexus 7 looks like an outstanding offering from several angles. A quad-core 7-inch tablet running the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system for just $199? Sign me up. But as sure as I am that this budget-priced tablet will find an audience — perhaps a sizable audience — Google just did its vendor partners a massive disservice by making it even harder to add value to future Android tablet offerings.

Google’s tablet is a fantastic-looking tablet. It features a quad-core processor, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a more sturdy build than many are used to seeing on an Android device. It also sports an unbeatable price tag. At $199, Google has matched the lowest price we’ve seen for an Android tablet from a top-tier vendor, and Amazon has been the only company able to pull it off thanks to the money it makes selling other Amazon services on the Kindle Fire.

Yes, Google’s margin is likely so thin that it will barely make any money at all selling its tablets at this price, and other vendors may find it impossible to cut prices this much and remain profitable — adding their own apps, services and other value-adds costs money that simply won’t be recovered at margins this thin. So why is Google launching the Nexus 7 if it likely won’t make any real money on sales?

For Google, this is a land grab.

Google is an advertising company first and foremost. Its products and services exist, at least in large part, to serve its clients’ ads to users. This is how Google makes the bulk of its money. Just like Facebook — whichGoogle is so desperately trying to emulate with Google+ — the more users Google reels in, the more money it makes.

The company loves to tout daily Android device activation numbers because at its core, it is an advertiser’s metric. This is the audience. Google confirmed on Wednesday that it now activates a staggering 1 million Android devices each day. 1 million! That number is positively remarkable. And the craziest part? It’s still growing.

Google is trying to spread things out a bit with the Nexus 7, adding a Kindle Fire-like model that makes the company’s various content services a central focus of the device. However successful or unsuccessful these efforts may end up being, they will always play second fiddle to Google’s core money-maker, which is advertising. This is Google’s mission.

Is Apple’s mission any more noble? Of course not.

Apple is a business — a ridiculously successful business — and its goal is to make products for as little as possible and sell them for as much as possible. Try as it might, Apple doesn’t make a significant portion of its revenue by selling ads, so the company has to make money the old fashioned way. Like other product vendors, it does this by taking advantage of cheap labor costs in China and Brazil, and then selling its wares at enormous markups. It also offers an expansive range of content through iTunes, which Google is now doing its best to match with Google Play.

Why does Apple make so much more money than its competitors? Simple: it’s better at playing the game. Late co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs surrounded himself with brilliant minds and collectively, they design gorgeous products powered by user-friendly software. Then, Apple spends $1 billion a year marketing them. Add in a remarkably simple user experience that makes it all too easy to buy music, movies and other content, and you have a recipe for success.

So, Google brought a knife to a gunfight. The hardware isn’t as sleek, the software isn’t as user friendly and the content market isn’t as established. It won’t beat the iPad, but it’s not supposed to. The goal isn’t to win the battle and steal iPad users from Apple, it is to undercut the iPad and grab as many new tablet buyers as possible in this emerging market. The goal is also to force other Android vendors to do the same.

Guns might win wars but knives are cheap and everyone uses them. By creating a low-cost tablet and forcing other vendors to do the same, Google is creating a scenario that gives Android its best chance of spreading in the ever-growing tablet market. There is no terribly compelling argument that might convince the mass market to choose the Nexus 7 over the iPad, and there is no innovative differentiation that might genuinely pique the mass market’s interest. Instead, there is a solid Android tablet, a comprehensive ecosystem and a rock bottom price tag.

Whether or not this model is sustainable remains to be seen — remember, Samsung is the only major global Android vendor making money right now — but in the near term it will likely help put Google’s services, and ads, in front of as many eyeballs as possible. And that’s the name of the game.

Link: http://www.bgr.com/2012/06/27/nexus-7-ipad-comparison-sales-apple-google/

Windows 8 Phones

Windows 8 Phones Easily Managed--Because It's Windows

I recently wrote about how how Windows Phone 8 is an actual Windows environment and the important implications of this.

I left out one big implication, perhaps the most important one, especially if you're in IT: Because Windows Phones run Windows and join Windows networks, they can be managed like Windows systems.

Microsoft discussed this some, but not extensively, at the Windows Phone Summit last week in San Francisco. Below is a video of the entire two-hour event. The relevant parts start at 0:27:27.

Out of the gate, most mobile platforms were completely unmanaged. BlackBerry was the clear exception to the rule, and its excellent security and manageability is what keeps it alive. (Heaven knows it's not the software.) But after Apple revealed APIs for manageability, an industry developed around management of mobile devices known as Mobile Device Management (MDM).

The best-known and most popular of the MDM products is MobileIron, but there are perhaps 100 companies in this business now, and MDM is commoditized. The real action has moved a step up into what is known as Mobile Application Management (MAM), a much more sophisticated approach that allows IT to use policy to control the security and capabilities of individual applications, among other things. It's a dynamic and exciting market with several important players fromApperian to Citrix to BoxTone.

Of course, there's a downside. Management of mobile devices has to be done outside the existing management infrastructure, potentially a very large system with a lot of investment behind it. To manage mobile devices administrators have to go to a separate console and potentially manage a separate policy repository.

But for Windows Phones things are different. Are you a Windows network admin? If so, you probably know what's in the picture below:

That's Active Directory Explorer, one of the core management tools for Windows networks, but there are numerous third-party tools that use the same APIs and protocols to do the same management. Windows Phones will be manageable through these standard tools. There will need to be extensions built into the management system for Windows Phones, but they are extensible. In this way, administrators can stay in their existing management environment and maintain better control of policy.

All the main security features IT would want are in there: Bitlocker and secure boot so--if your credentials are strong enough--you don't have to lose sleep over lost devices. All software updates are over the air, and Microsoft pledges to provide updates for all devices for at least 18 months. "Registered enthusiasts" can get early access to updates.

Later in the Windows Phone Summit (1:34:57 in the video above) Microsoft demonstrated the "company hub." This is a group of IT-controlled components on users' phones that display whatever IT wants to put there. There can be the equivalent of an internal app store, company news, and many other things. In some ways it resembles the home page for a SharePoint user, but it's much more. It comes with a collection of templates for companies to use or modify.

One more thing--even though it's not specifically an IT issue--WP8 will roll out with language support all over the world, 25 more countries than iOS. This isn't surprising because Windows has always had the best international support, and Windows Phone 8 is Windows.

It's true that many people are itching for something new and better than Windows, and the mobile markets provided a first glimpse of a real opportunity. But this could change as users and companies come to realize that the same reasons that argue for Windows on the desktop, where it's still overwhelmingly dominant, argue for Windows Phone 8.

Larry Seltzer is the Editorial Director of Byte.

source: http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/personal-tech/240002886