Technology Ramblings

Late in the day on May 26 - MS released Windows 10 for PC build 14352 for Fast Ring Insiders.  There was no 14352 release for Mobile.  More on that later. 14352 Added some new features to Cortana, Ink, Game Bar and Feedback apps as well as some improvements to the Enterprise Edition deployment.  Additionally it included about 2 dozen fixes, many of which focused on the Action Center as well as platform specific fixes to Surface Books, Precision Touchpads, etc. As always I installed 14352 on desktop, laptop and tablet platforms.  Versus 14342, this install did seem smoother and overall ran better.   I had some issues with my tablet with 14342, but 352 installed no problem There were a large number of app updates - From Mail & Calendar, to Maps, MSN Apps, Groove, Games, Sticky Notes, etc.  Some 16 in all.   And one big yea - the Store finally shows a history of most recent apps and updates.  If you select Downloads and Updates, the cli...

The Apple iPhone 6S, Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG G5 are all great examples of modern "flagship" phones.  With multi-core processors, high end graphics, cameras, etc.  They are the leading edge of what you can buy today. The challenge however with many of these phones are their price tags.  Ranging from $650 - $950 - few people buy these devices outright anymore.  Many use the various monthly plans available from the vendors or carriers.  But these often have 24 - 30 month commitments.  In many cases you can buy a nice laptop for the price of some of these phones. As I commented on in an earlier post this year, the average price folks in the US are paying for a smartphone is $352.  In other countries like China - $250US is the sweet spot.  Folks are also holding on to their phones longer.  3 - 4 years now common. When you go shopping for a phone in the US with a major carrier like ATT or Verizon and look at the price filters, there are huge...

Last week I commented on a news release from MS regarding the sale of the Nokia feature phone business based in Vietnam.  In the commentary the question was raised regarding whether MS was not only selling off a feature phone business but also the Lumia brand and line of phones. Well today, MS announced the layoff of nearly 1900 employees and a $900M write down that were the remaining Nokia Devices group employees based in Finland. So effectively all Nokia employees that were part of the $7.6B MS acquisition of the devices group have effectively been let go and MS over the last 2 years have written off somewhere between $10 - 11B as they exit the smartphone business. Back in January of 2015 I wrote a couple of posts discussing the risks with the current approach that MS was taking with Windows Phone and that 2015 was going to be a tough year.  Well I was correct.  Windows Phone went from around a 2.6% WW market share to less than 1% today.   The most recent 5...

At Google's I/O 2016 Conference last week, one of the big announcements by Google was the support of apps from the Android Play Store on Chromebook devices running Chrome OS. Today, Chromebooks fill a unique niche in computing.  They are based on a simple concept of the browser being the primary app for a laptop.  So the laptop themselves can be simpler requiring less CPU and RAM and therefore lower cost. You can often buy a quality Chromebook for $250.  First introduced in the fall of 2011, they have seen slow, steady sales growth over the last few years. Since they are not designed to be a "general purpose" computer they don't need many of the additional capacity for storage, ports, etc and have excellent battery life (10 hrs or more). While many enthusiasts do not consider them to be be real computers, for many use cases, Chromebooks makes a lot of sense.  This is especially true in the education space, where Chromebooks have been selling very well. Chr...

I've been a Windows Insider since the inception of the program and have been actively testing Windows 10 builds on PCs, Tablets and Mobile for quite some time.  Typically I install on the day of the new build release and consistently am looking forward to the next one.   On May 16, MS released the 14342.1000 version of Windows 10 Mobile to the Fast Ring.  As usual I downloaded and installed the build... And that's when the trouble started.   In my case and as experienced by many others, post the "spinning gears" portion of the update, the phone hung at the Windows Logo during boot up.    The issue was obviously significant enough that A) a notice was published in the Feedback Hub of this being a known issue and B) Build 14342.1003 was released two days later to correct the issue. But the problem I have is not so much that a particular build had an issue - these are "test" builds - but it was the recovery experience that was absolutely...

Today, May 18, MS announced that it had come to an agreement with FIH Mobile Ltd and HMD Global, Oy for these two companies to acquire the feature phone business that came along with the Nokia Phone Division purchase in 2014. The acquisition included the Microsoft Mobile Vietnam division based in Hanoi along with some 4,500 employees.  Sold under the Lumia brand, these "feature" phones included the 105/215/230 models.  To be clear these phones were not "Windows phones" per se, they ran what was called the Series 30+ OS and provided basic voice and SMS/MMS capabilities.   Designed to sell in the low income parts of the world - these phones sell for as little as $29US. But what made a lot a noise with some of the MS watchers in the short 3 paragraph announcement, was the following statement: Microsoft will continue to develop Windows 10 Mobile and support Lumia phones such as the Lumia 650, Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL, and phones from OEM partners like Acer, ...

You hear it over and over again and I know many of you have experienced "drowning in data".  Even for simple sales pipeline and other kinds of reports, it's often a manual multi-step process of extract, transform and load (ETL) from some data source like a SQL Database into an Excel Spreadsheet and then creating various views of the data. And while MS has done a good job with Excel in terms of providing graphs, pivot tables, etc.  Basically it's still a pain in the ass.  Additionally, since this is manual - you have to repeat the process on a weekly or monthly basis.  S ure you can automate with some macros and use ODBC to connect to a SQL Source for example, but it can still be hit or miss. Once you have your spreadsheet good to go, now you have to disseminate the info to your team and that often means email or posting to a file share, SharePoint site, OneDrive, etc.    And once you have disseminated the info, the view of that data that is important ...

Late in the day on May 10, MS released Windows 10 Build 14342 to fast Ring Insiders for PC only - No new mobile build was released. Several news sites called this an early release which to me is actually wrong. The previous Build release - 14332 - was released on 4/26 and this release was only 10 builds newer but released 14 days later.  MS rarely releases the current days build, but it still has been a two week gap and the first released post Bug Bash.   14342 included improvements are Edge, Bash, Skype UWP, Ink Workspace along with a change to the UI notification for UAC acknowledgements and about 25 issue fixes.  MS Defender also got a new icon.   As always I installed the build on desktop, laptop and tablet devices and as always the download/install process was smooth and without issue. I experienced some inconsistencies with apps across my platforms with this build.  For example on my laptop - the build broke an AT&T Connect App for Web Con...

Today - Microsoft announced that Windows 10 has reached the 300M active devices milestone. Back in April 2015 at the Build Conference MS announced that it expected to have 1B active Windows 10 devices in 2 - 3 years.   So here we are at effectively 9 months and 300M.  So figure 33.5M devices / month on average.  At that pace - there should be nearly 400M by the anniversary date on July 29 and so by the 2.5 year mark - assuming a steady pace - MS will reach that 1B goal.   So the pace of upgrades are good and in fact better than Windows 7 or 8. But as I've stated in other posts - in the same time period that MS is expecting to get to 1B, some 3.5B mobile devices will be sold - with some 85% of them being Android based which works out to 2.975B so nearly a 3:1 ratio. While there are a lot of critics of Windows 10 (often including myself) - overall I do think that based on performance, features and capabilities - it is the best Windows OS.  I...