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Showing posts from May, 2016

Microsoft are a midwife at Nokia Rebirth

A peculiar press release appeared on Nokia’s website this week. It said that Nokia were re-joining the mobile phone device market again. However not with the Windowsphone platform but Android. You can read the detail here; Hello again The wording is a little more careful saying the “Nokia brand” is returning. So what has happened at Microsoft? In short two years ago Nokia had 97% of the Windowsphone sales but, despite making nice devices, it wasn’t making money. So it was slowly going bankrupt. This wasn’t new. When Stephen Elop, the former Microsoft executive, came to Nokia as CEO he cancelled the development of Nokia’s own smartphone OS called Symbian and went all in on Windows. His reasoning was that there was no distinctiveness in Android. This latter comment was also true because most Android phone makers are also not making much money. As Nokia headed downhill if they suddenly went under then Microsoft would have almost no-one making Windowsphone. So CEO Steve Ballmer spent $7

Flight Tracking

One of the promises of Windows 10 is to become more personal. The tool that is most obvious in this vision is Cortana- your digital personal assistant. One feature of Cortana is tracking aircraft flights and keeping you informed. Your flight booking arrives by email and Cortana keeps you informed. However Cortana is still a work in progress. So much so that it has never successfully tracked any flight I have ever taken. That’s right - 100% failure. Meanwhile since I have side loaded Cortana on an Android device I can do a comparison with Google Now. By complete contrast Google Now seems to know al my travel plans, buses, work location, traffic conditions, metro delays and flights. This is much more than technology though. Google has a reputation of delivering loads of a free stuff to consumers that is useful. Microsoft, on the other hand, if you read the bloggersphere is this rapacious company that spies on customers and sends their data back to it’s corporate servers. Yet the two