As a result, the industry saw a double-digit decline in physical software sales at retail, according to NPD, which tracks the industry.

It said last year new launches represented 13 percent of videogame sales in January, but that last month, the performance of new launches dropped by 99 percent, said NPD analyst Liam Callahan.

Videogame sales for console and handheld game units from retail totaled $356 million in January, falling 38 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Overall sales, including hardware, accessories and software, dropped 34 percent.

But the drop can’t be blamed entirely on the lack of new launches. Sales of titles launched in the fourth quarter also performed poorly, falling 31 percent in units compared to the year-ago period.

“As shoppers were not drawn to stores due to new launch activity, this potentially impacted additional software purchases made on impulse,” Callahan said in a release.

NPD also estimated sales from used games, downloadable content and social and mobile games. It says those channels accounted for an additional $350 million to $400 million in sales.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 continues to be the best-selling console, and Activision’s first-person shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 continues to be the top-selling game title. Sony is banking on a spike in sales from the launch of the PlayStation Vita portable unit, which is expected to hit the market Feb. 22, along with 25 new titles.

Fortunately for me, the topics were largely familiar, as several were topics I had written about, including layoffs at Nokia, Microsoft’s preview version of Windows 8, and the impact of the iPhone on Sprint.

Here’s a video of the show. It’s 45 minutes, but Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane and Iyaz Akhtar are a lot of fun. Plus, if you watch until the “randomizer” segment at the end, you will get to see this super crazy robotic pack mule the Army has cooked up:

Evidently, Google has no trouble with that percentage at all.

In a letter to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) today, Google said that should it complete its proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility, it will license the company’s standard-essential patents under “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” terms (FRAND). To that end, it will honor Motorola Mobility’s existing essential patent licensing commitments and grant new ones going forward with “a maximum per-unit royalty of 2.25 percent.”

Now that might not sound like an untoward sum, but applied against a device’s selling price, it’s sizable. A rate of 2.25 percent on 2011 iPhone sales, for example, would have amounted to about $1 billion in potential royalties for Motorola.

That doesn’t seem fair or reasonable. More to the point, it runs contrary to the principles of FRAND licensing commitments, and bolsters arguments recently made by both Apple and Microsoft that the mobile industry really needs a consistent patent-licensing scheme.

“It’s a prohibitive royalty rate as long as they want to apply it against the selling price of what they call the ‘relevant end product,’” says FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller. “If they asked for 2.25 percent of the price of a baseband chip, they would at least propose a reasonable royalty base and one could then talk about how many patents go into such a chip and what the relative value of their patents is. But 2.25 percent of the selling price of the product as a whole is absolutely out of step with the concept of FRAND and with industry practice.”

“Plan B is that Plan A must succeed,” Saeijs told Swedish business daily Dagens Industri.

That’s quite a bet, particularly when success is anything but guaranteed. While Nokia has managed to ship one million of its Lumia Windows Phones to date, it continues to struggle. The company recently posted its third consecutive quarterly net loss, as smartphone shipments fell 31 percent and overall handset sales dropped 29 percent.

That said, the positive reception given the device so far does bode well for Nokia. Morgan Stanley expects shipments of Nokia’s new Windows Phones to hit 37 million units in 2012 and 64 million units in 2013.

If that proves true, there may be no need for a Plan B.

Sales grew by 53 percent over the year-ago period to $22.5 million, which beat the average estimate of analysts by more than $1.5 million, while Q4 billings of $36 million were up 40 percent. Plus, the IPO raised more than $180 million in cash.

And while that’s all good, on an old-school GAAP basis, Jive finished the quarter with a $12.7 million loss that was roughly twice the size of the loss in the year-ago period. While that may seem at first to be kind of a bad thing, it’s not. Since Jive sells subscriptions, it defers a lot of its revenue to later periods, so the revenue it does book doesn’t readily outweigh the costs it incurs to get the sales growth done. This is common with SAAS companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, who also tend to run net losses on a GAAP basis, but focus on their non-GAAP results, which are more indicative of the state of the business.

I talked briefly with CEO Tony Zingale about this and other things, after he finished up his conference call with analysts. A summary of our chat is below, and below that is an interesting infographic that Jive’s PR team included with the earnings release. I thought it was a nice touch, so I’m sharing it here.

AllThingsD: Tony, for those who don’t know, walk us through the key metric in your results that, in your mind, made this a good quarter for you.

Zingale: Growth. Growth in revenue. It’s further amplified in a new market where growth is the paramount metric, and of course it’s measured against a path to profitability. And we communicated that in our guidance to the analysts. But it’s all about growth. If you can’t capture market share as measured by deals with large enterprises and paying customers, then the profitability metric comes into greater play. Plus, in SAAS software companies, profitability always lags because of the ratable revenue model.

How are you finding life as the CEO of a public company? I know it’s not new for you, specifically, but it’s new with this company.

I think it is a testament to social becoming viable and real in the enterprise. You’ve been following the story for more than a year. You can’t go public without recurring, substantial growth, and the kind of customers and the kind of growth as measured by the repeatability of the model. All at the same time, you have to continue to innovate, fend off the competition and deliver that value. It feels good to have cleared the bar of going public, but otherwise, it’s back to work.

Let’s talk about the competition. Are you seeing certain people out of deals where they show up against you?

We do exceptionally well in a head-to-head competition, especially when we see a request for proposal. We’re seeing more of those as we go into 2012. It lends credibility to the social business space, as corporations are thinking of social software as a line item in their budgets. The competitive landscape hasn’t changed. It continues to be the large enterprise software players like Microsoft and IBM. And certainly Salesforce.com shows up when we’re competing for business in the sales department, and a little bit in the marketing department. Salesforce is very well-entrenched in these situations. But we coexist with them all the time. But the landscape hasn’t changed much. It’s competitive in the early part of the process. But when it comes to competing inside and outside the enterprise — the flexibility of our delivery model and the strength of our reference customers — the competitors tend to fall away.

Earlier today, I had reported that Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock was stepping down.

He is, and the full letter he just released saying so is below.

Bostock did not say in the missive who will be Yahoo chairman in his place. Intuit CEO Brad Smith has a full-time job, and the newly installed Weather Channel CEO David Kenny does, too. Among the current directors, that would leave Sue James, Patti Hart and newly installed Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson — or one of Yahoo’s new board members.

In the letter, Bostock outlined the departures of four board members and the addition of five more directors (two of which were just named); did a little back-patting of his recent efforts to turn Yahoo around (after presiding over the board that got the Silicon Valley Internet giant into this mess); noted that the Asian talks to sell Yahoo’s stakes there are proceeding (it’s coming!); gave Thompson a thumbs-up (go, Scott!); and delivered kudos to Jerry Yang, the co-founder who left only weeks ago.

“Working with Jerry was always a delight,” wrote Bostock.

(Me, not so much, I would guess! Bygones?)

All kidding aside, Bostock has been the subject of a lot of criticism about Yahoo’s troubles, both deserved and undeserved, most especially for the non-sale to Microsoft several years ago. Many, including activist shareholder Daniel Loeb most recently, have called for his resignation.

It has not been an easy job, to be sure, so it must be a bit of a relief for the longtime advertising exec, who serves on other prominent boards, to finally pull away from the Yahoo black hole.

So, who’s next?

One interesting line in the letter, which everyone already knew, was that none of the various bids from outside investors have passed muster.

Wrote Bostock: “We have engaged with potential investors and reviewed proposals concerning an equity investment in the Company, although at this time there have not been any proposals which have been deemed by the Committee to be attractive to our shareholders.”

Here’s the Bostock letter:

Yahoo! Releases Chairman’s Update for Shareholders

SUNNYVALE, Calif., February 7, 2012 – Yahoo! Inc (NASDAQ: YHOO), the premier digital media company, today released the following shareholder update from its Chairman Roy Bostock.
February 7, 2012

Dear Fellow Shareholders:

I write today to update you on the actions the Yahoo! board has taken, and the actions it is pursuing, to increase shareholder value and position the Company for growth. These actions result from a process I initiated about six months ago in a special meeting of the independent directors in which we analyzed the reasons why Yahoo! was not meeting either our own expectations or those of our shareholders.

The board decided then to move aggressively on three fronts to position Yahoo! for future success: one, we initiated a search for a new Chief Executive Officer with a vision and set of skills to lead Yahoo! into the future; two, we undertook a comprehensive strategic and structural review of the business; and three, we decided to assess the composition of the Company’s board of directors relative to its ability to enhance the prospects for Yahoo!’s future success. We have made progress on all three fronts.

First, and most importantly, we have appointed Scott Thompson as CEO to lead our company. Scott is a capable and dynamic leader who brings the experience and expertise the Company needs to achieve robust growth and success in the marketplace. Over the coming months and years, Scott will lead an outstanding team of Yahoos to deliver engaging user experiences driven by innovative products.

Second, we have made significant progress on the comprehensive strategic review which is overseen by the board’s Transactions and Strategic Planning Committee, chaired by director Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit. The Committee’s guiding principle has been to assess alternatives which would increase value for all Yahoo! shareholders, and the Committee has been open to any transaction or initiative that would serve this objective.

As part of this review, we have pursued a wide range of discussions with potential partners. We have engaged with potential investors and reviewed proposals concerning an equity investment in the Company, although at this time there have not been any proposals which have been deemed by the Committee to be attractive to our shareholders. We are also in active discussions with our partners in Asia regarding the possibility of restructuring our holdings in Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan. The complexity and unique nature of these transactions is significant. While we continue to devote significant resources to these discussions, we are not in a position at this time to provide further detail or to provide assurance that any transaction will be achieved.

Finally, the board has concluded that in order to accelerate the Company’s transformation, the combination of a new Chief Executive Officer with an enhanced team of independent directors would provide Yahoo! with the expertise and perspectives necessary to drive innovation and growth going forward. Therefore, Mr. Joshi, Mr. Kern, Mr. Wilson and I have volunteered not to stand for re-election at the next shareholders’ meeting.

Furthermore, the board today elected two highly qualified independent directors, Alfred Amoroso and Maynard Webb, Jr. Mr. Amoroso served as President and CEO of Rovi Corporation until December 2011 and, among other positions, had previously served as the President, CEO and Vice Chairman of META Group, Inc., the President and CEO of CrossWorlds Software, Inc. and as a member of the world-wide management committee of IBM Corporation. Mr. Webb, the Chairman of LiveOps, Inc., served as that company’s CEO until July 2011. Prior to that, Mr. Webb was Chief Operating Officer of eBay and Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Gateway, Inc., in addition to management, leadership and board positions at several other companies spanning his 30-year career.

The board continues its search for additional independent directors. This search is being led by director Patti Hart, CEO of International Game Technology, Inc., who chairs our Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. We anticipate announcing additional directors to round out the board as soon as this process concludes.

Separately, as previously announced, Jerry Yang has resigned from the board of directors and other positions within the Company to pursue his many interests outside of Yahoo!. Working with Jerry was always a delight. He is a visionary and a pioneer who contributed enormously to Yahoo! since he co-founded the Company in 1995. He will be missed. The board thanks him deeply for his service and commitment to the Company.

Thus, following this year’s Annual Meeting a majority of Yahoo!’s directors will be new to the board this year, and all directors will have joined the board since 2010. We believe that this reconfigured board, with a fresh set of perspectives and diverse set of skills, will enable the Company to move forward even more aggressively.

It has always been a privilege for me to serve as Chairman of Yahoo!. The employees of Yahoo! remain the heart, soul, and future of the company. And with Scott Thompson leading them, they are the reason why I believe Yahoo! will create significant shareholder value over the coming years.

In September, this board moved proactively and decisively to improve the performance of the Company for the benefit of its shareholders. These actions could not have been accomplished without the support and active participation of each director on the board. For that, I thank them. And I thank them for the knowledge, expertise, talents and commitment they have brought to Yahoo!. We all take pride in the fact that we are positioning Yahoo! for success in the future. Yahoo! is an incredibly strong brand with formidable assets. I have every expectation that under Scott’s leadership, working together with the reconstituted board, the Company will thrive for many years to come.

Sincerely,
Roy Bostock
Chairman of the Board

The new release will support the iPhone, iPad and Android devices, as well as BlackBerry and Microsoft’s own Windows Phone operating system.

“In today’s hyperconnected world, customers need to be able to access their business-critical data on the device of their choice from wherever they are,” Dynamics CRM General Manager Dennis Michalis said in a statement.

The release continues a Microsoft trend of developing mobile apps for the competition’s platforms. In December alone, Redmond added iOS support for Kinectimals, SkyDrive and Lync, along with an iPad version of OneNote.

Of course, the big question is whether Microsoft will bring full-blown Office to iOS.

“The rumors are true,” Watson said in a Twitter post. “The team is in great hands.”

At Amazon, Watson will lead a group working on Kindle applications for various Amazon-made and non-Amazon devices.

Watson’s move was earlier reported by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley.

Update: Microsoft confirmed that Watson’s last day is Monday.

“Brandon did a great job helping us build a vibrant developer community and we wish him well with his next adventure,” a representative said in a statement.

Microsoft did not immediately say who would pick up Watson’s duties.

Someday.

Though its Symbian platform is burning down to ashes and it has lost its title as the world’s largest smartphone maker, Nokia is going to be just fine, says outgoing chairman Ollila. In fact, with the help of Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system, the company will remain among the top three players in the smartphone market, despite its plunging market share.

“Nokia will make it into the three,” Ollila told Finnish broadcaster YLE. “It’s completely obvious and the first signs are already there. None of the operating systems have taken off quickly. It will take time, as we have seen and as was expected.”

Well, not completely obvious — particularly after the horrendous 73 percent decline in fourth-quarter earnings the company recently reported. But Ollila says such financial tumult is to be expected from a big transition like this and the earnings slip doesn’t belie its potential for success.

“When looking at the bigger picture, it shows that three operating systems will dominate in the near future and each of them will have one strong manufacturer, with Nokia having a very good chance to be one of the three,” he said.

The companies — along with others such as financial-service companies Bank of America Corp., FMR LLC’s Fidelity Investments and eBay Inc.’s PayPal — are hoping to create an environment that allows the recipient of an email from, say, a bank, to feel secure that it isn’t a trick.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Earlier today, Harvard University and New Enterprise Associates announced the Experiment Fund, aimed at making sure that future Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates can stay on campus and innovate without having to head West.

The irony of the pair of legendary entrepreneurs dropping out — decades apart — of the even more legendary university to start two of tech most significant companies, Facebook and Microsoft.

No longer, apparently.

The early-stage incubator, which will award funding to four to six start-ups in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000. It will focus on seed ventures in the Cambridge, Mass. area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Experiment Fund came from an idea born Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which involved NEA. Today, SEAS Dean Cherry Murray hosted an event that unveiled the initiative.

But, while faculty members will advise for the fund, Harvard has no financial stake.

In an interview NEA’s Patrick Chung said the intent was to enable talented students to “build a company here in Boston rather than have to go elsewhere.”

NEA will have full-time staffers working on the fund, investing in a wide range of companies. It has already backed a health app company, as well as a live Internet television offering.

“There has been an envy of the left coast, certainly,” said Chung. “Now, these talented engineers don’t have to leave when they reach the boundaries of the university where the ideas are formed.”

Added Chung: “They can walk right out of class and into a place that can make those start-ups real.”

In other words, let’s hope the third time’s a charm.

Here’s the map of exactly where the Experiment Fund is and official press release:

XFund press release

Let’s take another peek, courtesy of SNL Kagan and Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente, who has an updated list of wholesale prices by channel* (the list on the right is for ad rates, which we can ignore for the purposes of this story):

Takeaway from today’s chart: Nothing has really changed — you’re still paying a lot for sports, and you’re paying a lot for ESPN.

That’s why Disney’s sports channel is the most valuable asset on your cable dial. And it’s also why you’ve been hearing increasing grumbling — from both customers and ESPN’s non-sports cable competitors — about ESPN’s drag on your cable bill. (We’ll talk to new ESPN boss John Skipper about this topic next week at Dive Into Media.)

As I’ve noted before, the odds are that this doesn’t change anytime soon: Disney and ESPN can charge that much because the cable guys, like Comcast, think the programming is worth it to their customer base. And they’re signing up long-term deals that will keep that fee structure in place for the next decade.

But there is a chance that a “virtual” cable operator, using the Web, decides to offer a package that doesn’t include ESPN. They could either use that unspent money to lower customers’ bills, or plow it into other programming.

Again, this will also mean that subscribers couldn’t get any Disney programming, because Bob Iger has zero interest in splitting up the bundle. But I know of a few folks who have at least contemplated the idea.

So what about that “over the top” option, anyway? Some industry observers, like BTIG’s Rich Greenfield, are sure that someone — Apple, Google, Verizon, who knows — will offer one this year. Today, Bernstein’s Craig Moffett has a long essay describing why that won’t happen for a long time, if ever. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said something similar this week, alluding to the fact that Microsoft has reportedly bailed on its Web TV subscription plans.

*The 2012 chart omits regional cable channels, which is why Fox Sports Net has disappeared in the new chart. I don’t know why the new one includes outliers like 3net, a 3-D channel that isn’t widely available (and/or relevant, as best I can tell).

[Image: ESPN]

As part of Thursday’s earnings report, Nokia noted it received $250 million from Redmond in the first of many quarterly “platform support payments.” It’s part of what the company says will ultimately be billions of dollars in support of its shift to Windows Phone.

Nokia also notes that it pays Microsoft royalties on each phone and has guaranteed minimum commitments, an amount it also expects to ultimately be measured in the billions of dollars.

Last quarter, though, the money flow was clearly toward Nokia, with the company saying it shipped somewhere north of 1 million Windows Phones.

Those payments are going to be needed by Nokia, which noted on Thursday that its Symbian sales are slowing considerably faster than it had predicted.

Nokia had hoped to sell 150 million more Symbian devices even after announcing its Windows Phone transition. It said on Thursday that it no longer expects to reach that level. It didn’t provide a new estimate but said it took charges in the fourth quarter related to both excess inventory and future purchase commitments.

But Apple is still a consumer-focused personal computer company, and one trend I like to revisit is how Apple continues to grow its presence in business and professional settings.

Here’s a pretty good indicator: If you’re in the business of designing things like machines or buildings, there’s a chance you’re using software from Autodesk. Its latest mechanical design software, called Inventor Fusion, is used by mechanical engineers to design cars and planes and factory assembly lines. It’s heavy-duty software that’s currently available on Windows. A new trial version for the Mac has just recently come out is coming out soon.

While engineering software like this tended to be run on beefed-up Windows workstations during the last decade, the Mac has started to make serious inroads among engineers and designers, especially the younger ones, says Autodesk product manager Kevin Schneider. “The younger generation of engineers has grown up with computing expectations that are completely different,” he says. They used Macs at school, probably learned to edit photos and video in Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, so when they start using CAD and other software, naturally, they want it running on a Mac, too.

Autodesk makes four applications available on Apple’s App Store, and the results are pretty stunning. Those applications — Autocad LT, Autocad WS, Motion FX and Sketchbook Pro — have clocked up 2.2 million downloads via the App Store. That’s a lot for any software, and it’s a heck of a lot when you consider that these applications don’t come for free. Sketchbook Pro goes for $59.99; Autocad LT costs $899.99.

The number is even more impressive when you consider that Autodesk apps account for about 2 percent of total downloads on the App Store. Late last year, Apple announced that its store had broken the 100-million-download mark, generating 100,000 downloads a day, and making it the biggest software download site in the world.

It’s just another indication that the Mac is still making inroads against Windows in the workplace. A new Forrester Research survey of 3,350 IT decision makers finds that 46 percent of all firms in North America and Europe issued Macs to their employees in 2011; that figure was up by more than half since 2009.

You recently reviewed an iPad app that lets you use Microsoft Office programs on an iPad. But does this support the “Track Changes” feature of Office, which I cannot find on any of the office-type apps I’ve tried on the iPad?

A:

Yes, it does. And tracked changes are synchronized with your PC or Mac.

As I noted in the review, the new app, called OnLive Desktop, gives you the complete Windows version of Office on an iPad, via the cloud. So all features in the Windows version, including the tracking of changes, are available.

Q:

I am a new Mac user and would like to become a Quicken user. I read your February 2010 critique of Mac Quicken. Is there a new and improved version of Mac Quicken?

A:

Intuit, the maker of the stripped-down Quicken Essentials for Mac I reviewed then, has improved the product. But more important, the company now says its last full version of Quicken for the Mac, called Quicken 2007, will soon be revised so that it runs with Lion, the latest version of the Macintosh operating system.

There was outrage from Mac Quicken users when Intuit earlier had declined to rewrite the full version to work with Lion.

Q:

Could you please tell me which smartphone today is a must if my last phone was the iPhone 4? Your review of the iPhone 4S indicated it wasn’t a “must” upgrade for iPhone 4 owners.

A:

Changing to a different phone would only be a “must” for you if you were unhappy with your iPhone, or wanted one of a couple of key features only available on competing phones.

One would be a larger screen. The iPhone screen is 3.5 inches, but some newer Android phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, now have giant screens as large as 4.65 inches. Personally, I find that too large for comfort, but you might not.

Another important feature is LTE wireless capability. A number of Android phones, such as the Motorola Droid RAZR, support LTE, a fourth-generation wireless technology that is much, much faster at data downloads than 3G, though it also tends to use up your battery faster. No iPhone yet supports LTE.

Write to Walt at mossberg@wsj.com

Organizing your inbox might sound tempting. The Radicati Group reports that the average employee spends about 25 percent of their day on email; by 2013, approximately 507 billion email messages will be sent each day. Many people dream of hyperproductive days unhampered by junk mail, forwards and unimportant exchanges. We’re envious of (and slightly annoyed by) friends who accomplish that “inbox zero” feat (and then post about it on Facebook or Twitter — you know who you are).

But before you get obsessive-compulsive about color-coding and labeling emails, keep in mind that over-organizing doesn’t necessarily solve your email problems. In fact, you’ll likely remember less of the information that’s in the emails if you do that.

A study conducted last year by IBM Research — originally posted on MIT’s Technology Review — found that while “active foldering” reduces the complexity of the inbox, there’s a lack of systematic data about the extent to which these folders are actually used, so it’s hard to determine whether the hours occupied by filing emails to folders is time well spent.

Also, “frequent filers” tend to remember less than non-frequent filers about their email messages. The IBM Research study, which analyzed 345 frequent users’ methods of finding emails, found that email users tended to have pretty good memories when it came to content, purpose, or task-related information in emails, recalling more than 80 percent of such information; those who moved things into folders were less likely to remember these things, possibly because they were not frequently exposed to the information in the inbox.

Of course, users aren’t going to remember everything that’s conveyed in every email. But when it comes to effective search — which in some cases negates the need for all that foldering — remembering key words is, well, key.

Lastly, the study suggests that email threading is the better alternative to manually moving emails into designated folders. People with high thread-count emails were less likely to use or need to use folders, and people with more threads were less likely to need to scroll through their inboxes, as well, suggesting that threads were an effective way to compress inbox information.

Gmail already has a pretty efficient search function and collates emails into threads. But as part of Google’s efforts to push Google+ in other areas — like search — the company is also suggesting Gmail solutions through Google+. In fact, new Gmail users don’t have a choice when it comes to Google+; building a profile is part of the sign-up process. (Google’s current Gmail user base: 350 million; Google’s social network users: Murky.) Searching for emails through Google+’s circles seems a bit confusing for the average user, though, and would benefit only those users who have spent a lot of time building up their Google+ contacts.

For those looking for outside apps to aid in email organization, some of the more popular ones include Xobni and Postbox. Others, such as Shortmail and Clarify, think simpler, shorter emails could put you on the path to inbox nirvana.

(Photo courtesy of robep/Flickr)

The publication surveyed 22 analysts and found estimates ranging from 800,000 to two million Lumias, with just one offering a number less than one million. The average number: 1.3 million.

Which isn’t too bad; the caveat to that being these are shipments, not sales that we’re talking about.

“The numbers look promising,” Storebrand Asset Management analyst Espen Furnes told Bloomberg. “If Nokia is able to have a strong launch and surpass at least 1 million and keep that type of momentum, this would help put them in a credible position that is crucial to winning back investors.”

Nokia reports earnings on Thursday, and analysts aren’t expecting much from them.

“In the past three years, Nokia has been squeezed by low-cost Asian players in the lower [end of the market] and the more sophisticated players in the higher end, like Apple and Samsung, and it should be a continuation of that,” said Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston. “We’ll pretty much see a recurrence of what’s happened in past few quarters: volume and value under a little bit of pressure, a lackluster level of unit shipments and possibly profit margins that are not quite as healthy as they might once have been,” he said.

That’s the takeaway from new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who told analysts this morning that he thinks the company is in pretty good shape, all things considered. Sure, in the U.S., it has been roughed up by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, but it’s still used by lots of people, has lots of fans in big companies and big government agencies, and lots of users around the world.

And the new tech that the company has in the pipeline — a revised version of its PlayBook tablet, and a new operating system due out in the fall — are great. You’ll see: “I don’t think there is a drastic change needed.”

No surprise there, given that Heins, RIM’s former chief operating officer, has been at the company for the past four years. If RIM really wanted someone to blow things up and start over again, they’d bring in an outsider.

Instead, the only external help Heins seems to think he’ll need will be the talents of a new marketing guru, whom he is counting on to reach out to consumers, in particular. But if RIM can’t make a better product than its competitors — or, at the very minimum, one that’s at least as good — I don’t see how messaging will help.

EARLIER

Time for a change. But not too much change!

That’s the messaging around Research In Motion’s CEO swap. The company has yielded to irate investors by moving out longtime co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. But they’ve moved up an insider — former Chief Operating Officer Thorsten Heins — into the top spot. And if you listen to him, RIM is doing great.

Here’s the “meet the new boss” video that the company put out last night, where Heins says that “sometimes we innovate too much.” And that he likes to ski, but that the hills around RIM HQ in Waterloo, Ontario, don’t really compare to the Bavarian mountains in his native Germany:

Wall Street doesn’t seem overly impressed with the move, or the suggestion from a Wall Street Journal source that the company refuses to consider a sale, and RIMM shares are down 3 percent in pre-market trading. [Correction: RIMM shares are up 3 percent in pre-market trading.]

Now we’ll see if Heins can help make his case in person: He is hosting his first conference call, and we’ll cover it live here, starting at 8 am ET.

8:02 am: Greetings. Apologies in advance, because our nifty liveblog tool seems to be MIA this AM, so things will be a little slower than usual here.

RIM official sets expectations: No financial guidance here. Just Heins and new BOD chair Barbara Stymiest.

Stymiest: Thanks much to Mike and Jim for building RIM. “It is, still today, one of the leading brands in the world.”

Stymiest: Runs through Heins’s resume, heaps praise on him. “The board is very excited about RIM’s prospects for the future.”

Heins: Thanks! RIM isn’t “just a device company,” it’s an integrated service company, with devices and networks. Unique opportunity. “We have an exceptional foundation to build upon.”

“RIM has undergone, and is still completing, a major transformation.” Sure, has “hit a few bumps along the road here and there,” but that happens. Purchasing QNX to create new platform for company was a bold move, and we’ll see that it was the right decision over time. PlayBook 2.0 will be great. So will BlackBerry 10.

Q&A:

Q: Please go into detail: What are your priorities for the next 100 days?

Heins: We need to get better at market communications. We have strong tech, strong customer base, growing overseas. “The U.S. is a bit different.” Public opinion there is that we’re still strong in enterprise, but we need to be better about explaining ourselves as a consumer company. “We need to engage more with the consumer base … we need to take them with us on the journey of exploring BlackBerry in the future.” Also, we need to execute better. We have to scale processes further, need to have “rigid” management for product development, etc. Gotta understand RIM has grown very quickly. But “we innovated while we were defining the product,” and “that needs to stop” — need to have “way better execution.” “I’m pretty sure this will really help us a lot, and really help our customer base a lot.”

Q: Seems like lots of your success has been in the “low-end market” in Asia. Thoughts on that? Also, thoughts on getting BlackBerry 10 out next fall as planned?

Heins: You say “low end”, I say “entry level.” We can’t make phones with less power. But there’s a big market that is still using feature/“dumb” phones, and we can move them to smartphones. They won’t go to the most powerful phones right away. We need to give them a good landing point. Once we prove to them that BlackBerry is a great place to start, we’ll move them up the ladder. “That’s the strategy behind the ‘BlackBerry for Everyone’ strategy.” As far as BlackBerry 10 — it’s not just a new OS, it’s a whole new infrastructure. Need to be clear about that. “That work is underway.” By the way, we’re also going to have an Android player with PlayBook 2.0, so we can leverage the “long tail” of all those apps, if people want those.

Q: Last year, you also were bullish about QNX. Why are you still confident about that? That seems like a “me-too OS, that is just catching up” to Android, iOS.

Heins: Again, QNX is an existing OS. Used on power grids. “It is a proven OS.” Allows true multitasking — “I mean, true multitasking.” “It is an extremely competitive OS as of today.” Very smart of Lazaridis to buy this instead of trying to build our own.

Q: On last RIM call, you guys talked about strategic options the company was looking at. Those options still available?

Heins: You mean licensing? Let me be clear: We can’t just be in the device-only business. “We are strong because we have an integrated solution … I want to build on that. I will not in any way split this up.” As far as inbound licensing requests, I’ll listen to them, and if they make sense, but “it’s not my Focus One.” Apple, “the other fruit company,” only other company with this kind of integration, and I want to take advantage of that strength that we have, too.

[Missed Q, but Heins is now talking about marketing, which he says needs to get better, specifically with consumer marketing.]

Q: You’ve been here four years. What can you do now as CEO that you couldn’t do as COO?

Heins: We were still kind of a start-up when I came on. But “start-up processes don’t scale.” So we need to change that. I’ve been able to study how the culture works. “I don’t think there is a drastic change needed”; we are “evolving.” “I don’t feel I was held back in any way to do what we needed to do.” But we do need to get better about “processes.” Again, I do want us to focus more on consumer marketing.

That was a fast call, and now it’s over.

Veghte joined HP in 2010 after 20 years at Microsoft, where he managed the $15 billion Windows business and oversaw the launch of Windows 7. At HP, he has been credited with growing its software revenue by 18 percent last year.

Given Veghte’s history as a software guy, his appointment to this role can’t help but be seen as a key signal by CEO Meg Whitman of the role she sees software playing in HP’s strategy going forward. That was one of the things I asked Veghte about when we spoke by phone earlier this week.

AllThingsD: What, in your view, is the role of the chief strategy officer at HP, and what do you expect it to entail in the coming year?

Bill Veghte: As we’re out talking to customers, they’d like to buy more from HP; they’d like HP to be more successful. They look at the advances we’re making in networking or storage or printers, but they want to know why the whole is greater than the sum of is parts. What is HP’s strategy for continued leadership in the market transitions that are going on? And some customers would say that where HP is concerned, that’s not a fully realized opportunity.

And you’re coming at it from the software part of the business, and we’ve heard from Meg saying she’d like to grow opportunities in software. Your appointment, to me, sends a bit of a signal that software is going to be a big part of HP’s strategy to get things turned around. Is that accurate?

I think, certainly, as I talk to Meg and Ray [Lane, HP chairman], and with the members of the executive committee, I’ve found that this is a catalyzing role. If done right, there are different models of strategy in different Fortune 500 companies. And the one that makes sense here is catalyzing with other business units. Whether that’s Vijay Joshi in printing and imaging, or with Todd Bradley in PCs, or John Visentin in the enterprise group, there’s a strategy that each one of those is trying, and which is accretive to a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And so, to the extent that software is glue or networking is glue, I think it’s a statement that has more to do with a pan-HP strategy than something that’s specific to software.

What’s Job One, starting on your first day?

Job One is making sure that as we have those conversations with customers, they see an HP that is unified around a set of constructs and offerings that deliver what they need. It’s different from having offerings that are, by themselves, individually great. It’s about having unifying themes and constructs.

It seems that you’re talking about finding a way to routinely and thoughtfully combine different things that HP makes or does, in ways they aren’t being done now. Is that what you’re getting at?

I think that very accurately characterizes the opportunity. When we talk to the leadership team, we hear a lot of the same thing. There is a lot of great stuff within HP, whether you get that in terms of market position, or IP, or people. I like how you put that: How do you routinely and thoughtfully combine things, particularly in light of the market inflections that are happening. We are in a tectonic shift, and that can be an opportunity, if you clearly spell out the value proposition for customers. Not only in each one of the units, but where you’re thoughtfully combining them so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I thought of an example around meeting the needs of the market. There was an IHS iSuppli report out earlier this week about cloud servers, which are growing. But customers are going to Taiwanese ODM companies to get customized products, while at the same time cloud servers are growing generally. Is this the sort of thing that might affect HP?

I was talking to Dave Donatelli [general manager of Enterprise Servers] about this recently. It’s interesting, because it seems like in more recent months it has flipped back, because of the integration within that customization. A great example that Dave and I have been working on is the whole cloud system piece. You’ve got a lot of great stuff in automation and orchestration software that is inherently cross-platform, and which crosses virtualization engines and marrying that deeply with the converged infrastructure. We’re the only company that can give you a single stack, soup to nuts, from a single vendor. The core construct is that there’s a lot of private cloud build-out going on, and those customers who are doing it are saying they don’t want to be the systems integrator for six different vendors, and they also prefer not to be locked in to a single vertical stack. That’s a huge advantage for us. And to your point about routinely and thoughtfully combining, we should do exactly that. It’s been doing well for us in the marketplace, but how do you make that routine against the opportunities we see in the marketplace?

You spent about 20 years at Microsoft. How does that inform what you’re bringing to this job?

At the core, any of these jobs are about identifying and exploiting market shifts for customers. I had the privilege of having a front-row seat during some big marketplace disruptions, and helping catalyze businesses and delivering superior market positions and solutions. It’s all about handling change, and turning it into an opportunity.

As part of its earnings report, the company noted a 6 percent year-over-year revenue drop in the unit that includes Windows. There were several factors responsible for that, including the impact of a hard drive shortage brought on by flooding in Thailand. But the drop in Netbooks was a major factor, as well.

Consider these two stats:

A year ago, netbooks represented about 8 percent of the PC market, according to Microsoft. Now they account for just 2 percent of the business.

The consumer PC business was down 6 percent last quarter. However, excluding netbooks, the business actually grew 2 percent.

For those looking to see the impact of the iPad on Microsoft’s business, I’d point to those statistics. While they are clearly two totally separate products, they have filled a similar niche: A good second device for those who already have a PC and want an easy way to surf the Web and consume some content, on the couch or on the go.