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Will Apple surpass Exxon to become the world’s biggest in market capitalisation?

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The relative trends in share prices of the two companies suggest that the oil company may be knocked off its top spot – and possibly as soon as next week

If past trends are any guide, then some time in the next few months, Apple will become the largest company in the world by market capitalisation – passing the mighty Exxon corporation, which is presently valued at $331.2bn, compared to Apple’s $274.2bn. (Microsoft, since you ask, is valued at $219.3bn.)

Remember that market capitalisation isn’t about profit; it’s about the share price multiplied by the number of outstanding shares (which is how one reaches a valuation for Facebook, or any small company when venture capitalists buy a chunk; or for any publicly-listed company). It can be described as the market’s guess at the net present value of the total future profits of the company.

In the case of Exxon, it’s been a tough couple of years; its share price has drifted down. Meanwhile Apple, with the iPod, iPhone and most recently iPad, has been going from strength to strength. (Apple has even passed PetroChina, formerly the world’s biggest by market cap, presently worth about $262bn.)

How will we know when it’s happened? Well, Apple has 913.6m shares outstanding (issued); Exxon, 5.092bn. A quick bit of maths shows that when Apple’s share price reaches or exceeds 5.573 times that of Exxon, its valuation is also greater.

At present, it’s sitting just below the 5.0 mark – so the differential needs to grow by another 10%, though WolframAlpha suggests that that could happen by January, based on current trends. (The picture shows a “random walk” forecast based on the share prices’ previous movements.)

Exxon has of course come a long way down from its peak – in 2009 it touched about $500bn in market cap. But for Apple, it’s been an enormously long way back from 13 years ago, when it was valued at just $2bn in May 1997, “reflecting Apple’s loss of market share in an increasingly Windows-dominated world.”

How things change. Though of course for Apple if it does take on the mantle of the world’s most valuable company, there’s only one way to go subsequently.

And meanwhile we might wonder: if Exxon is falling, where is the new energy company – based on wind, solar, nuclear or something else – to replace it? When there’s a suitably big company that doesn’t rely on extracting fossil fuels for its revenue, we’ll know we’re in a new energy paradigm.

But for now, keep watch on that Apple/Exxon ratio. No doubt there will be some glasses raised in Cupertino if it hits 5.5. And with Apple due to announce quarterly results on Monday evening – during which it will announce how many more million iPads and iPhone 4s have been sold – it might be worth watching that ratio when the US markets open on Tuesday lunchtime.

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Gene Simmons gets kiss of death from notorious web forum

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Kiss bassist is bumped offline after comments endorsing aggressive stance against copyright infringement

Never one to bite his tongue (sorry), the public face of Kiss, its bassist Gene Simmons, has become the latest target of assiduous online attackers, Anonymous.

Two of Simmons’ official websites, SimmonsRecords.com and GeneSimmons.com, have been hit by the group of activists as an apparent reprisal for insisting that musicians should be far more aggressive in the pursuit of illicit filesharers. The Anonymous group, linked umbilically to influential online forum 4Chan, have forced several websites linked to copyright-protection bodies offline in recent weeks.

The offending comments were made by Simmons on a panel about building a successful entertainment brand. He said on Tuesday: “Make sure your brand is protected. Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don’t let anybody cross that line.

“The music industry was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t have the balls to sue every fresh-faced, freckle-faced college kid who downloaded material. And so now we’re left with hundreds of thousands of people without jobs. There’s no industry.”

Ouch. You can almost hear Anonymous wheeling around their (illegal) DDoS missiles. And, sure enough, little more than 24 hours later Simmons’ online brand has been knocked off the internet.

(Though we have to point out that Simmons has perhaps forgotten about the efforts made by Metallica, for example, which named 300,000 users of Napster back in 2000 and got them kicked off the system. Dr Dre did the same. Asleep at the wheel? Hardly. It’s just the flipside of the benefit that being big brought – where the record companies could output something to lots of people at once. When they had to chase individuals, their problem became much bigger.)

As Slyck rightly points out, the loose-tongued rocker is the latest target of a group which counts the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America, Copyright Alliance, Ministry of Sound, solicitors’ firms DG Legal, ACS:Law and Gallant Macmillan among recent victims. The latter, interestingly, appears to have been too strong to knock offline.

There is, of course, an oft-overlooked voice in the music industry that Rich Huxley pointed out.

Huxley, as is most likely with other artists paving new forms of distribution, says: “There has never been a better time to be an enterprising musician,” adding: “I am part of the music industries and I want representation.”

His point: “There’s no way to stop sharing and we shouldn’t be striving to do so. That it takes place on the internet just means that in some ways it’s track-able and identifiable.

“It’s useless and impossible to enforce anti-sharing laws as it’s always been the case that humankind finds another way. If sharing music online becomes illegal then people will revert to DVD/hard-drive sharing or find untraceable ways of continuing to to share. Maybe we’ll swap CDs with our friends again? Maybe we’ll borrow from libraries. To blame the internet is to blame the medium. To quote Steve Lawson ‘It’s like blaming Microsoft Excel for tax fraud’.”

Josh Halliday


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Apple teases with lion and invitation for ‘Mac event’ on 20 October

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Is it going to show off some of 10.7, the next version of Mac OSX? Or just some updated laptops? Timing suggests only the latter (Updated)

Apple has sent out a press invite to an event on Wednesday 20 October at its Town Hall building at the Cupertino campus, with an invitation showing a lion (a lion? All its OS versions have had tiger big cat-themed names, or possibly German tank-themed names) apparently peeking out from behind a silver Apple logo, with the words “Back to the Mac.”

That has of course set off the rumours that this will be a preview of the next version of Mac OSX – you know, the operating system that used to be Apple’s biggest seller, before Pixo and then “iOS” became its biggest sellers by miles.

Update: ..and other sources suggest that that is indeed what there will be: “a sneak preview of the next major version of Mac OSX”.

Many had expected that Steve Jobs would show off Mac OS X 10.7 at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference in June, but that event was entirely iOS-focussed.

Mac OSX 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) was shown off on 8 June 2009, and released on 29 August 2009 (we reviewed it: our independent reviewer liked it).

That said, this seems far too soon for any sort of promise of 10.7. Looking at the period between releases, there’s an average of about 18 months between releases for the more recent versions, and Apple has got enough on its hands with its iOS work (it doesn’t believe in big teams working on separate operating systems; it keeps it small, but that focusses effort where it’s most required).

Update: that suggests that the soonest you would see 10.7 is some time next spring, as there hasn’t been any time for developers to get in-depth hands-on.. and more importantly to begin rewriting their apps so they’ll work with its little niggles. More likely would be autumn 2011.

Intriguingly, a job ad from earlier this year suggested that Apple has a “truly revolutionary” feature in the works:

An ideal candidate will have a degree in Computer Science (or equivalent), five years of professional experience developing C / C++ / Objective-C libraries or frameworks for use on end user systems, experience with developing for Internet technologies and services, and a passion for doing “really hard” things that have never been done before.

An exceptional candidate will also have up close and personal experience with the HTTP protocol as well as other protocols layered atop it, have participated in or lead the architecture of large web scale systems, have shipped multiple “platforms” for use by millions of users.

Hmm.. C++ and HTTP? And the stuff that goes on top? Your offers please for what the “revolutionary” feature is going to be, and whether Apple will show it off. (They’re bound to get asked about it next week.)

Possibly the more likely explanation what will also happen is some new hardware – especially going by the Macrumors Buyers’ guide, which points which products look likely to get an upgrade, based on how long in the tooth they are, both the MacBook Pro (top-end laptop) and MacBook Air (thin and light, low-powered) laptop are looking ready for updates. (The low-end MacBook was updated in May, so probably won’t get an unicorn horn sprinkled over it.) The Xserve server could also be in line for a refresh. Oh, and the iPod Classic is looking peaky. But that’s probably just how it is.

Charles Arthur


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Nottingham University offers masterclasses in dealing with open data – for free of course

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Less than a year on from the release of data.gov.uk and open data sets, university offers classes around the country to those who want to do something with the data flood

Want to become an armchair auditor? Or, even better, push along the free data movement? Then the free masterclasses (though the only requirement is an inquiring mind and “a reasonable working knowledge of web browsing and Microsoft Excel”) being held by led by Horizon Digital Economy Research and the Centre for Geospatial Science at The University of Nottingham may be the ones for you.

“The idea is that it will teach people about how to best extract and interpret the data to produce meaningful statistics which may be useful to them as individuals or their organisations,” say the organisers.

Previously you’ve needed to be something of a web developer to take the best advantage of this information. But now with Eric Pickles and Francis Maude carrying on the work that the previous government had begun, open data is all around – and the real problem is getting enough people to make use of it.

There are more details at the University of Nottingham pages: they’ll run from Monday 8 November through to Friday 3 December. Each class can take 30 to 40 people but tickets are going fast, so be quick.

The events are taking place at: the University of Newcastle on November 8; University College London on November 10; The University of Nottingham on November 12; the University of Aberdeen on November 17; the Royal Geographical Society in London on November 18; and the University of Southampton on December 3.

The aims of the classes are

to teach the general public about the tools and techniques needed to use and analyse the increasing amount of national and local data being made available via the internet, while avoiding the pitfalls of interpreting statistics.

Even if it can manage only the latter, that will be fantastic: there are far too many “surveys” which lack any sort of statistical rigour which get re-reported in, well, the media.

As the organisers say: “The programme of events is open to anyone with an interest in obtaining and using public information on a whole range of topics including crime, healthcare, transport, schools and census data.”

It’s worth considering just how far we have come in just under a year. A year ago, there was no London Datastore; you couldn’t get postcode data for free (and indeed the crew at ernestmarples were getting nastygrams from lawyers); you’d have spent endless time writing FOI requests to local councils if you wanted to know about expenditure over £500, and they’d have probably been turned down on the basis of commercial confidentiality; and there was no way in the world that Ordnance Survey would have let you have its StreetView mapping data for free or allowed it to be incorporated into OpenStreetMap.

Those were the sorts of things that the Free Our Data campaign was trying to change. Did it succeed? Well, actually, we’d still like the flood map data from the Environment Agency. Perhaps we’ll make a call.

Then in December came Gordon Brown’s sweeping announcement that Ordnance Survey data would go free (except at Mastermap level and Landranger level), the launch of data.gov.uk, and then the London Datastore, and plenty more to come.

Or as Nottingham puts it:

“The launch of sites making government data freely available and the publication of significant geographical data by the Ordnance Survey came following a concerted open data movement, led by web developers, and a Free Our Data campaign by the national Guardian newspaper.”

Dr Hanif Rahemtulla, a research fellow in Horizon Digital Economy Research and the Centre for Geospatial Science, said: “The past few months have seen a number of high profile announcements in relation to the release of central and local government data for free.

“The data.gov.uk portal was launched by Gordon Brown during his premiership but has been embraced by the new coalition Government as a means of opening up data, promoting transparency and re-building the general public’s trust following the damaging MP’s expenses revelations.

“There is great excitement in the developer community and many new mashups and apps have been produced from the released data already. Our master classes are designed for individuals who could really benefit from being able to access this data but don’t have the same technical expertise in extrapolating statistics from it.”

The events are being funded by the Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, data.gov.uk through the Cabinet Office, the OS (Ordnance Survey) GeoVation challenge and ESRI UK, the software leader for geographical information systems (GIS).

Charles Arthur


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Microsoft warns on botnets amid biggest ever security release

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Technology giant says increasing sophistication of botnets is down to cybercriminals – and issues 49 flaw fixes

Over the past six months Microsoft cleaned more than 6.5m computer botnet infections – more than double the same period last year, according to the company’s biannual Security Intelligence Report (SIRv9) released on Wednesday.

The software giant uses its latest report – available at Microsoft.com/sir – to throw focus on the crippling effect of botnets. Cliff Evans, Microsoft UK’s head of security, says the nature of today’s botnets – networks of infected computers controlled remotely, often for malicious purposes – is “evidence of the way cybercriminals are utilising malicious software.”

The report follows the release of Microsoft’s biggest ever batch of security updates – 49 separate problem fixes – issued yesteday, including one patch for the vulnerability exploited by the Iran-centred Stuxnet worm.

Botnets are commonly used to attack third-party sites through “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attacks, which swamp the target with useless connection attempts; to generate billions of pieces of spam email; to host fake phishing sites which attempt to capture bank details and passwords; and to store stolen or illega data, including child pornography.

Win32/Rimecud, the “backdoor” worm that spreads mainly by removable drives and sends malicious hyperlinks to a victim’s contacts, was far and away the most commonly detected bot in the second quarter of 2010. Rimecud triggered nearly 70% more detections than the next most common worm, but saw a gradual decline from January after an inexorable rise towards the end of 2009.

Cliff Evans, Microsoft UK’s head of security, told the Guardian: “The botnets we’re now seeing are really geared up to delivering spam, and it is evidence of the way cybercriminals are utilising malicious software.

“There’s not been a dramatic change in the number of botnets detected in the UK – 2.7 [bot cleanings per 1000 MRST executions] is less than average.

“The threat is coming from applications with vulnerabilities, like Adobe, which are more accessible from a criminal perspective. The positive from this research is that the total number of vulnerabilities across the industry is down 7.9%, and they’re harder than ever to exploit.”

Evans said the proposal put forward by a top Microsoft researcher last week to quarantine virus-infected computers and cut off the worst-infected from the internet, was “conceptually something that makes sense.”

He added: “I made the point about the UK being stable, but if the rest of the world is seeing increasing numbers [of infected computers] how do we make sure it doesn’t spread?

“From a technical standpoint, it’s already deployed in enterprises – computers have to have a standard bill of health otherwise they’re put in quarantine. But it requires countries and industries to come together and decide, it needs cooperation. We need to look at the security and privacy implications and make sure those are being addressed.

“It’s conceptually something that makes sense. The publishing of the [research] paper is a first step then we’ll continue talking to governments.”

Josh Halliday


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Facebook: here’s how we’re using HTML5 now: Places, video and more

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The giant social network is moving ahead in its adoption of the emerging web standard, as it explains


Facebook and HTML5, sitting in a tree, p-a-r-s-i-n-g.

Facebook’s engineering team (the people who in The Social Network are only seen “wired in” – wearing headphones while they code as though their lives depended on it) have sung a paean to HTML5 in their latest blogpost.

As they point out,

“It’s worth understanding that the term ‘HTML5′ has come to mean more than just the single HTML5 specification, but really represents the next evolution of the web platform and thus dozens of related specifications. Many of them have already been implemented across recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.”

So rather like them, we’ll use it interchangeably to include CSS3/Javascript as well.

And what does Facebook like about HTML5? Where is it using it?

• for an HTML5 video player to serve iPad and iOS users. (This was the work of a “summer intern”, apparently.)

• in Facebook Places, for the iPhone/Android/other location-aware mobile device with a HTML5-capable browser that can use the Geolocation API, which sets out a standard interface for location data.

• using the HTML5 History API so it can selectively load content via Ajax [asynchronous Javascript] while also having human-readable URLs:

“Previously, current application state was stored in the URL fragment which resulted in unseemly URLs like ‘profile.php?id=1586010043#!/pages/Haskell/401573824771′. Now, because HTML5 allows us to decouple the currently displayed URL from the actual state of the application, we’re able to display pages more quickly, save bandwidth, and avoid polluting users’ location bars.”

One thought about the History API: it surely should have some sort of signing, because a cursory glance makes it look like it could be used to mess with your browser’s behaviour in all sorts of malicious ways. Wrong? Right? Surely the W3C have thought about possible malicious use?

• Web Storage:

“to cache typeaheads and give us more control over how we cache CSS and JavaScript. While we’re not using it in production today, we’re extremely excited about how it can be used in lower bandwidth environments such as mobile.”

• Web Sockets for chat: this opens a two-way (possibly secure) port between client and server, which “will hopefully replace long polling” – which seems to be a variant of push (but why Web Sockets is better than long polling isn’t immediately obvious; feel free to impart an explanation in the comments).

And if you need a reminder of how things stand in terms of browsers, head over to the HTML5 Readiness pages to see where they all stand (though you’ll need an HTML5-capable browser to get anything like the best out of it.

If anyone knows of a mobile equivalent of HTML5 Readiness, we’d love to know too – again, tell us in the comments.

Charles Arthur


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Twitter: Gladwell’s social media argument ‘laughable’

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Ev Williams and Biz Stone hit back at the New Yorker article that got everybody tweeting

Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone have derided Malcolm Gladwell’s contention that the effect of online networks on social change is greatly exaggerated, saying his argument is “laughable”.

Williams, who stepped down as chief executive of the social networking site last week, said Gladwell’s New Yorker article was “entertaining but kind of pointless”, while Stone said it was “absurd” to think that social networks were not “complementary to activism”.

The pair are the latest to launch a riposte to Gladwell’s dismissal of social networks, after the article – subheaded “Why the revolution will not be tweeted” – began to make waves on Monday 4 October.

Williams said: “It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable.

“Anyone who’s claiming that sending a tweet by itself is activism, that’s ludicrous — but no one’s claiming that, at least no one that’s credible. If you can’t organise you can’t activate. I thought [the article] was entertaining but kind of pointless.”

In his argument, Gladwell cited the American civil rights movement of the late-fifties and sixties as an example of social change that was based on intimate friendship, suggesting that the “weak ties” connecting people online were not of the same influence.

“Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that [Martin Luther] King’s task in Birmingham, Alabama, would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail,” Gladwell argued.

“But [online] networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterises Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure.

“And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where 98% of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed – discipline and strategy – were things that online social media cannot provide.”

Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, said on Monday: “The real-time exchange of information — a service like Twitter — it would be absurd to think it’s not complementary to activism. When it really comes down to it, it’s not going to be technology that’s going to be the agent of change. It’s going to be people; it’s going to be humanity.”

The pair did, however, hold back from the kind of hyperbole heaped upon Twitter for its role in last year’s Iranian election protests, saying that no one had intimated that ‘the revolution will be tweeted’.

“It’s always been our goal to reach the ‘weakest signals’ all over the world, such as the recent usage in Iran and Moldova,” Williams said.

Josh Halliday


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Windows Phone 7 and Angry Birds: it gets messier

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Apparently its team were just being ‘aspirational’ when they used another company’s game logo to suggest Windows Phone 7 would have its app. Really, Microsoft?

Over the weekend, a page leaked out from Microsoft which suggested that Angry Birds – which has proved a bit popular (among the addicts of the iPhone version is tennis player Andy Murray) – was going to be on Windows Phone.

Not so, said the Angry Birds developers, who posted an angry tweet (somehow appropriate):

“We have NOT committed to doing a Windows Phone 7 version. Microsoft put the Angry Birds icon on their site without our permission.”

I did ask Ashley Highfield, the Microsoft UK managing director, at lunchtime Monday for some clarification. He didn’t have any, but now Microsoft has responded formally with the following statement:

“We’re big fans of Angry Birds. Our website team created a mock up image of aspirational titles for launch. That image was not updated to reflect our launch titles. We’re working with leading ISV and an extensive developer community to provide a great selection of apps and games to anchor the categories that people value most; Games, Entertainment, Music & Video, Photo, Social and more. We have already announced the first wave of over 50 games coming to Windows Phone 7, including Rocket Riot, The Sims 3, Bejeweled, Crackdown 2 Project Sunburst and others.”"

So basically, no Angry Birds on Windows Phone 7. And: piece of advice, Microsoft developers? Don’t “mock up” stuff of amazing-selling apps to suggest that you’re going to have a hit app arriving at launch on your new phone platform. That’s the sort of thing that could get you into trouble. Oh look, it already has.

John Gruber wondered if the Tap Tap Revenge icon that was there (see this image) was the result of the same “aspiration”. Again, I asked Highfield about it. Again, he didn’t have a definitive response. But looking in the Marketplace as it stands right now, there’s no Tap Tap Revenge in there. Touch too much aspiration, really.

Charles Arthur


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Windows Phone 7 launch: liveblog from Londonblog!

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The software giant is kickstarting its new mobile OS platform with a $400m marketing campaign and simultaneous launches in the US, UK and, for all we know, Ukraine

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1.48pm: 12 minutes to kickoff. If you haven’t already had a read, then take a look at my early review of the Windows Phone 7 interface. It’s an interesting data point that while many people have expected Microsoft to fail completely – after the failure of Windows Mobile 6.x once the iPhone appeared – the fact is that I’ve not come across anyone who has laid hands or eyes on a working version of Windows Phone 7 and not been impressed by it. So take a moment, before everything kicks off, to read what I thought.

1.50pm: An excited press release drops into my inbox from Gartner Ovum:

“There’s a huge amount resting on the launch of Windows Phone 7 for Microsoft, its device and operator partners, and for the ecosystem market in general. As such, the commercial launch of Windows Phone 7 devices by OEMs and carriers looks set to mark the most important watershed in the smartphone market since the launch of Apple’s first iPhone.”

So far so fairly predictable. But why is it a watershed?

“If Windows Phone 7 devices sell in large numbers, Microsoft will rightfully be able to congratulate itself for starting with a clean sheet of paper in its efforts to return to the smartphone top table – a strategy launched by CEO Steve Ballmer in early 2009.”

And Gartner reckons this is the last roll of the dice:

“If it fails to claw back market share lost to iPhone and Android, then Windows Phone 7 may well mark the point at which Microsoft turns its back on smartphones forever: targeting its mobile resources at creating compelling services and attracting advertising may prove a better option than beginning again with another mobile operating system, in that instance.”

1.59pm: Moments away: but they’ll have to chase all the press out of the ICA bar, where they have set up fiefdoms and strongholds that would make an Afghan warlord stroke his beard in admiration.

Meanwhile, for those who want the multi-arrowed indication of where all the money is going in the smartphone market, here’s Asymco’s breakdown of who’s a star and who’s a flop.

Or just have a look at the image:

No, Microsoft doesn’t appear there because it’s not a handset maker. I’ll update later with some of what Ashley Highfield, the UK managing director, said about the WP7 business model.

2.30pm: It’s 2.30 and though we’ve been evicted from the bar, the gathered journos are restless. The Wi-Fi (which is what they all want to use) fails if you’re under a theatrical rig. Everyone looks up. The ceiling is covered in theatrical lighting rigs.

The main cause of the delay, though, is a leopard on the line in New York where Steve Ballmer is meant to be kicking it off. Well, not actually a leopard, but it would have to be something comparable, we’d hope. More once it starts …

2.37pm: I’m meanwhile coming courtesy of a 3 network Mobile WiFi-to-3G dongle, which is currently reaching the heat of a nascent star in my top pocket. Forget the winter fuel allowance, give these out as handwarmers. Still no action, though.

2.49pm: Andy Lees president of mobile for UK.

“Microsoft should hire Bozo the clown to run Windows Mobile. At least the antics would be funny.” So that makes me a clown, Lees says.

There’s a huge inflection point coming in the smartphone market. We start with the consumer. (Interesting that Microsoft is talking about the consumer all the time now. Enterprise is completely forgotten in this discussion.) “We had an internal mantra that the customer is king…give them the ability to do everything on their phone but easier and faster. Less stop and stare, more glance and glare.”

They made a book of what it would be like. Shows attractive couple not talking to each other while they message on their phones. Um. OK. Emailing their divorce lawyers?

Steve Ballmer showed off the phones in the manner of a phoneshop staffer who had just seen them for the first time last week and who was about to inquire when your contract ended. The nine phones – in the US livelink relay – were laid out on a tablet. And then in the cheesiest of moments, they were rolled away like something out of a TV episode of the 50s. They’ve still got some way to go with his presentation skills.

2.55pm: Ballmer spoke about what their goals were for WP7: “….It has to be modern in its design principles, in the way that people use modern internet services, and we’ve taken a very different tack at the same time.

“I’d focus on two key things, Always Delightful and Wonderfully Mine. We wanted it to be delightful through a range of different devices and across experiences. We wanted it to be that way for the consumer and for the developers who will build the growing set of Windows Phone applications. We wanted it to be always delightful for you whether you’re looking for a place to eat, emailng friends, or making a phone calls for example.”

Shows his own phone. It has pictures. It can be made into his own.

He shows off his avatar. It is surprisingly svelte. Possibly the mirrors in avatarland are a bit wonky.

Customisation is very important. 9 phones. He standa behind a tablet like he’s in a phone shop. It’s really a bit embarrassing. I’m almost expecting him to tell me that it’s a very affordable contract and inquire when mine is going to run out.

2.56pm: We’re getting the ways that the phone can be customised so that it will do all sorts of things.

More interestingly, there’s a rumour that Stephen Fry is going to be involved in the presentation. What! People gasp. But he often does these sorts of things for tech companies – I recall him doing one for Psion a few years back where he gently but thoroughly chided them for not having Mac compatibility. Wonder if he’ll do the same about the lack of Mac integration here?

Hubs. Hubs are things around which applications work. The idea is integration – so that everything comes together. “Recent” for people is about who you’ve interacted with, whether by Facebook or Twitter or email or phone calls or um, yourself. (Because you might update your Facebook status.)

3.02pm: OK, so I’ve seen WP7 interface before. It’s interesting because it assumes a pervasive data connection, and it assumes that you don’t really care how much data you’re going to use. What happens when your network is down?

Aaron Woodman, Microsoft’s head of the WP7 business, over from Seattle: “This is going to be the best phone for people looking for productivity”. Ah, here comes the enterprise sell. But no, it goes off to the Zune software. Although Ashley Highfield did suggest to me in an interview earlier that this is going to be a great consumer phone. And there doesn’t seem to be an enterprise sell at all; it’s all about getting consumers to buy them and persuading enterprises to support them. Microsoft seems to have decided that Apple’s approach – subvert the IT department – is the way forward.

3.07pm: Woodman: Half a million downloads of the developer kit. Including Twitter.

Now we get Tesco’s app. On Windows Phone “it feels like a Windows Phone application”.

Hubs, favourites, search… he nearly searched for app… then went back to “spam”.

Then train travel. It’s not just an icon but it has “a route I care about”. “Panoramic, designed experience”.

OK, at this point I will say that the thing that strikes about the WP7 interface is that it is, indeed, calm. But it is also, and this may be a problem, not information-dense. It’s not even information-average. It’s information-light. There’s not a huge amount of type on a single page.

3.11pm: “I’m excited to announce that EA will be on the Windows Phone platform.” When?

I earlier asked Highfield about Angry Birds and Tap Tap Revenge – will they be on the WP7? He was fairly sure they would – which is interesting given that there was all sorts of grumbling about it last night, as Angry Birds developers said they hadn’t committed to a port.

OK, so that’s done and now we’re back with Jeff Lowe. Developers… phones.. operators…

From October 21st.

3.15pm:And now the phones:

1: HTC Mozart, 8MP xeon flash.

2. Samsung OMNIA 7 – 4″ AMOLED screen, 5MP camear, Orange, T-Mobile, 3.

3 HTC Trophy, Dolby, 3.8″ screen, Vodafone.

4 LG – plays to DLNA (home networking), LG Optimus 7, voice to text,

5 HTC HD7 with horizontal kickstand, because it’s got a big screen.

6 Dell Venue Pro, 4.1″ screen, physical keyboard.

3.19pm: Ah, but now we have the point: the carriers will be able to put their own software onto them. Tom Alexander told him that Orange+T-Mobile, would be able “with amazing software” to do so much.

“Our companies had so much in common… ” And now to explain why Orange is the lead partner in terms of bringing these phones to market.. Tom Alexander of Everything Everywhere (Orange+T-Mobile).

(This is the Revenge of the Carriers: they hate the idea of being dumb pipes who deliver connectivity to you; they want to hold your data, put the software on your phones, and sometimes stop you from doing things with your phone that might interrupt their revenue streams. It’s the opposite of the internet model where anyone can build anything without permission, as Lawrence Lessig pointed out about Facebook.)

3.22pm: Alexander: “ability for Orange customers to roam onto T-Mobile… T-Mobile customers to roam onto Orange.. two networks for the price of one.” (You are one company, though, why should that be a surprise?)

Handsets. He can’t remember the name of the handset – “Mozart” yells the prompt. (This is looking woefully underrehearsed, or are we too used to Steve Jobs demos?)

“It’s a key part, a really key part, of our Q4 plans. So I’d like quickly to hand you over to Ashley [Highfield of Microsoft].” He wanders off.

Highfield: “we know this is not going to be an easy journey.” Bit like Bing then.

3.25pm: Highfield reads out a quote which likens the former Windows Mobile platform to 1960s council architecture. And here indeed is Stephen Fry who says he’s not being paid to be here: “I’m here as an amateur in any sense.”

“Amateur is the French for lover.. I’ve made no secret of my admiration for what the chaps and chappesses at Cupertino have done since 2007.”

He defends his description of Microsoft’s old environments as being like 1960s grey council architecture. “Now they get it, that all human beings, are human beings first – you don’t judge the machines you use or the houses you live in by listing their functions. The first thing you do is say how you feel about your office. When you buy a house, essentially they make the choice on feeling.”

3.28pm: “Even when RIM came up with the Torch… I felt pleasure, the first feeling should be one of delight. When I heard Mr Ballmer use the word ‘delight’ I thought what joy there is in heaven when one sinner does repent.”

…lots of how Microsoft has needed to get the idea of pleasure in devices…

“Only one I get to keep, though I’m not being paid.” Er…

“Is it fun to drive? You know that story about the Volkswagen Bug when they reinvented it.. they were devastated to hear that people bought it because they liked the flowerbud vase on the dashboard.. they should recognise that people buy things because they feel the emotional pleaasure.”

“Yes I can say that it has its deficiencies. And that’s what people fell on with the iPhone .People laughed to scorn the iPhone because it didn’t have those functions. But remember the tedious drilling down to get to the wireless. People embraced the iPhone because it was simple, closed and clear.”

3.31pm: Stephen Fry: “We can see how bad we all are at predicting how things work out. In a year’s time where will be RIM, ioS, HP WebOS, Android,… yes I do love Apple but I’m not a monotheist, I want biodiversity in this market.

“Will I be using this Windows Phone 7? Yes, with a BlackBerry Torch.. and an iPhone in the other pocket…

“But here I am standing on a stage saying Microsoft has done this thing it can be proud of. Better than Vista… no shit on my shoe, no, Stephen, behave…” Laughter.

“I think of Leeds United. There was a time when they ruled the 1st division, they were so powerful. And then you feel sorry for them. Who thought there would be a day when Microsoft would make an announcement as the underdog? And the British part of me says that’s always interesting.”

3.34pm: Highfield breathes a sigh of relief at the fact that Fry didn’t tear Microsoft off a giant strip. “That was high-risk, wasn’t it?” he says rhetorically.

Which brings us to the end of the formal proceedings. There’ll be more periodically. (Apologies for the delays at the start which were brought to you by Unruly Technology That Cannot Be Tamed.) I’ll deal quickly with comments…

3.36pm: What we didn’t see: it’s often important to note the things that haven’t been shown in a demonstration. Here’s a few of the things that one might reasonably have expected to see in a demonstration of a new smartphone platform – yet were oddly missing here:

• loading Facebook. Come on, it’s the biggest social network in the world. Could we see it either as a web page or as an app? Howcome not?

• loading Twitter. The biggest real-time conversational/microblogging network around. There was a Twitter app in one of the phone screens – yet we didn’t get to see mobile.twitter.com loaded on a browser, or in an app.

• anything on any browser. No web pages. At all.

• any email. Why not?

• YouTube or any sort of Flash content. Surely this is rather an important element these days? Yet if it’s true that this is shipping without any Flash capability (which seems weird if true, yet that was the implication of the conversations I’ve had before – Highfield didn’t contradict me when I suggested, before the launch, that there won’t be Flash or HTML5 capability in the browser).

Most peculiar: for a launch that has been planned absolutely forever, this had a slightly rag-tag feel to it; the fact that the closing speech came from Stephen Fry who was speaking unscripted indicates that.

Now it’s time to go and play with the phones for a bit. If anyone happens to have a good idea why those sorts of demonstrations were missing in the talk, and finds out before I do, please tell us in the comments…

4.15pm: So I’ve laid hands on a few of the phones and got an answer to a couple of those previous questions, at least.

• Why no YouTube demo? Because Internet Explorer (on WP7) can’t show Flash (as we knew), which means that that is handed off to an application that has to be downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace. This I find surprising – Apple similarly hands off the task of showing YouTube video to another app, but it has had it built in there from day one.

But with WP7, the YouTube app won’t be available for download until later on this evening (or possibly early morning UK time). So that’s the YouTube answer.

• Why no email? slightly more confusing. Possibly because Microsoft would have felt obliged to demo Hotmail, and the web layout of that looks really a bit of a mess, if I’m honest. The font isn’t optimised for a small screen (I found it less legible than the iPhone/iPod Touch font) if it’s trying to show web elements as well – the zoom doesn’t seem to be able to reformat the content smartly enough.

• no browser demo? Hard to explain. The browser is OK. But maybe they felt there would have been the inevitability of showing any page somewhere on the web that might have had, oh noes, Flash on it.

4.22pm: and re Facebook and Twitter – I think ledevelyn has half a point in saying that “Because it’s integrated into the user experience so you don’t need a separate app.. surely that’s forward thinking?”

Certainly updating your Facebook status is something that’s tightly integrated. Twitter status too? Could be – remains to be seen.

Oh, and I also got a brief chat with a British blogger called Stephen something for the podcast – listen in tomorrow..

5.27pm: Having seen O2′s new phone – which is the biggest of the bunch, both in screen size (4.3″) and storage (16GB; the standard for Windows Phone 7 is 8GB) – I’ve now RTB, as taxi drivers say. The O2 phone is free on a 24-month contract wiht 750MB of data; I’ll be trying it out over the next couple of weeks, and later on we’ll aim to do a comparison of handsets, OSs and prices. (Maybe we’ll enlist your help to compile that, dear reader.)

Overall thoughts: Windows Phone 7 is a huge advance on anything that Microsoft has done before in the mobile space. It has rough edges and loose ends – the question of developer support and the value chain and where Microsoft will make sufficient money to recoup its investment (assuming that matters), for instance. But from next week, the mobile OS market will get a jolt. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

.

Charles Arthur


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Meanwhile, back at Nokia…

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The head of its MeeGo division has gone, leaving the timing of its next product in doubt, and former staffers say it is stuck in a manufacturing mindset that’s no longer appropriate

Never mind Windows Phone 7, at least until this afternoon. What’s been happening at Nokia?
You’ll recall that Stephen Elop was drafted in from Microsoft’s Business division as chief executive when its previous chief executive’s Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo challenged the board to “back me or sack me”, to which the response was “actually, there’s been something we’ve been meaning to say…”

Since then the resignations and departures have come thick and fast. Anssi Vanjoki, head of Nokia Mobile, resigned, essentially because he hadn’t been offered the CEO job.

And now October’s outpourings: the vice-president in charge of its Linux-based MeeGo devices has resigned. Ari Jaaksi (for it was him) left before the company could get one of its next-OS-generation devices out of the door. The schedule had suggested that the first one would be out of the door by the end of this year. Now Nokia is saying that there will be “an update on MeeGo” before the end of the year. That’s not necessarily a device, though.

Which means that Nokia will have to rely on its newly-shipping N8, E7 and C7 devices to wrest buyer interest away from the shiny phones now arriving from Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 partners, let alone the iPhone 4 and the growing tide of new Android phones.

Yes, there’s the new N8, which has finally started shipping (I’ll have a review later this week).

But there’s also the question of whether Nokia’s Ovi Services are making any progress. Having shelled out a huge amount acquiring NavTech for its free Ovi Maps service, it needs people to be using it.

Some at least are: in a press release issued at the start of the month, Thomas Husson of Forrester notes that

“Nokia just issued a press release this morning insisting that Ovi Store downloads are now reaching 2.3 million per day for a total installed base of 140 million active users. Bear in mind that a user is considered active on a six-month period and that this figure includes multiple Ovi experiences, including the 17 million Ovi mail and chat users as well as users of Ovi Maps, Ovi music, and Ovi life tools.”

Husson thinks that among other things success in the long run will depend on the “the success of MeeGo moving forward” (he wrote that before Jaaksi resigned), on creating a viable business model for third parties and developers (Husson queries how many are achieving paid-for downloads), better analytics, a wide choice of payment and pricing (Nokia has an advantage because its relationship with carriers should mean it can offer in-app billing, or operator billing, or subscriptions), and finding new ways for people to discover things they want in the Ovi Store.

Or as he puts it more bluntly, “Nokia simply cannot afford to fail.” He thinks instead that it may be catching up, “particularly in emerging countries, where Nokia clearly differentiates thanks to its unique local presence and relationships with operators.”

And then we come to an ex-insider’s thoughts on Nokia, which are penned by Charlie Schick, who built and ran Nokia Conversations, started Ovi.com, launched the Nokia Lifeblog and Series 60 platform, and provided internet strategy consulting throughout the company. As he puts it, he “worked for Nokia for a long time mostly in marketing and product development” but who left in “the Great Exodus of talent in the summer of 09″. You might suggest that means they’re out of the loop, but it tells you what was going on during those important years when the iPhone appeared, Windows Mobile started strangling and Android came to look like a viable platform.

It’s in two parts (here’s the second).

He starts off asking:

“The crux of the question is why, with world class design, manufacturing, research, and logistics, is Nokia repeatedly whipped in cutting edge areas (it still excels in mobile phones for the masses)? Is it because it is run by Finns, mostly located in southern Finland? Is it a malaise normal to mega-corporations? Is it because of the Nokia heritage in manufacturing? Or is it a cultural and structural dysfunction that fails to produce amazing products?

“In part, its all of these things. In a classic Innovator’s Dilemma, Nokia’s excellence is killing it. “

Nokia is terrific at cranking out designs, Schick says, but

“A classic problem at Nokia is locking specifications 2 years before a product is released. And that long-term cycle is ingrained at Nokia, even target setting is no shorter than 6 months, meaning at least a year to react to anything.”

By contrast, he points out, Facebook and YouTube changed how we think about the web in just 18 months. “In short, traditional factory processes make Nokia 2 years too late for everything.”

In part two he lays into the management approach:

“When Nokia decided to be an “internet company”, instead of bringing in leaders and workers with experience and knowledge, Nokia put top managers (with zero Web skills or understanding) in charge (not to mention inappropriate repurposing of coders with the wrong skill-set). I’ve seen a ton of bad decisions in products and services because the division leader (a manager, of course) had no clue what the product was about (but, he was a good finance man, indeed).”

This, he says, led to “zombie products” that didn’t keep up with the times.

The Nokia N96, he says, was “a product built with no leadership”:

“It started as a blip on the TV strategy and I watched it get tugged by multiple groups adding to the spec list as it morphed into a “flagship” “everything but the kitchen sink” product. And I was really upset when a top executive lambasted it after launch, when clearly, it was that top executive’s responsibility to make sure Nokia didn’t ship krap products. “

However he is upbeat – suggesting that all the people who left the company in 2009 will be eligible, once their standard two-year redundancy exile is over, to come back into it, via startups or other approaches.

His closing thoughts?

“Nokia’s future is not about lack of understanding or intelligence or even skill. It’s future just happens to be on the other side of habits from a manufacturing age, habits that are comfortable and quite profitable, but just happen to be holding Nokia back from being a kick ass company again.”

So – what do you think? Is it Nokia’s manufacturing heritage that holds it back? Yes, we’ve all heard the retorts that “Nokia sells 40% of the world’s smartphones”. However, it’s making a long way from 40% of the world’s smartphone profits, which indicates that it’s getting squeezed. The question is, can it right that?

Charles Arthur


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