It wasn’t until dinner this past Sunday night that CEO Léo Apotheker told Todd Bradley, the head of its Personal Systems Group, that he was about to push key parts of Bradley’s huge unit off the cliff.

That included stopping selling hardware — smartphones and TouchPad tablets — based on the webOS it acquired from Palm last year, a $1.2 billion deal that Bradley played a big part in.

In addition, HP said it was considering spinning out its PC business and would “explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.”

But, until a few days ago, several sources close to the situation said, Bradley knew nothing of these plans and neither did webOS’s key driver of late, former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein.

This surprising lack of disclosure by HP to two of its key execs begs the question: Will they stay or will they go now?

According to sources, staying put is the plan for both for now, although it depends on what such a spinoff will look like.

It’s clear at this point that Bradley — who was once the CEO of Palm himself and was once considered the most likely successor to former CEO Mark Hurd, before Hurd’s sudden resignation last year — is the leading CEO candidate of its spun-out independent PC company if that’s what HP decides to do.

But it’s not a lock, either. And, apparently, Bradley has not been locked in with regards to a spinoff either and would likely have a lot of offers from tech companies in Silicon Valley to choose from if he wanted.

“Who will they get if Bradley goes at this point, if they want to spin it off?” said one person at the company.

But, added another: “Bradley is in the catbird seat if he wants to be and it’s his to lose.”

That depends, of course, on what his is.

Questions include:

Will that new company include any of the consumer part of the printer business — a huge cash cow — if HP is indeed leaving the arena?

Will webOS go with the new set-up, so that it can take advantage of the patents and licensing income?

Will HP continue to be the brand name on the devices this computer company spinoff would make?

These are just a few of the issues in a deal of untold complexity. But perhaps the most obvious one is who would get custody of Rubinstein?

To begin: Bradley is a big fan and would certainly want him around if there were a spinoff, said several sources.

But to do what?

Rubinstein, a well-known tech exec, had been leading the webOS efforts for HP, but was recently moved upstairs to a larger but fuzzy role, to run product development and innovation for the PSG unit. He has been reporting to Bradley.

At the time, the move was seen by many as the first step out the door by Rubinstein, with one person joking that “he’d much rather be at his Mexican beach house than HP.”

Among the disgruntlements: Several sources said Rubinstein felt that TouchPad wasn’t ready to ship and that Apotheker has reneged on a public promise not to until the tablet was “perfect.”

That ire is no surprise, since the device was then subject to tough criticism, including by AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg, who noted in his review:

“… In my view, despite its attractive and different user interface, this first version is simply no match for the iPad. It suffers from poor battery life, a paucity of apps and other deficits.”

In addition, unlike others there, Rubinstein has been more of a product guy and not an HP lifer. That begs the question of whether he’d like to sign up to another big company stint, even if he had more control.

“He’s been to that party before, and the reality is that he is not a career big company person,” said one person.

One important note: Rubinstein was unable to make webOS work when Palm was already a standalone independent company. And, although a new HP spinoff would be huge and better funded, it is still very much an uphill and competitive battle on the computer, smartphone and tablet fronts.

In addition, keeping a competitive operating system going is also a costly bear of an issue.

“It’s a cyclical, high-velocity business and there are other huge players from Apple and Google in smartphones and tablets to Lenovo and Dell in PCs,” said another source. “There might be a lot of great products in the pipeline for webOS, but it will not be easy to make them a success.”

That said, noted another person who knows Rubinstein well, “he really cares about webOS and does not want to see it go away.”

That might be true, although that is just what might happen if HP decides to sell it off to someone else or makes the spinoff a difficult endeavor.

In that case, it’s an offer Bradley and Rubinstein can refuse.

Related posts

• Hewlett-Packard Says Goodbye to PCs, webOS
• HP Pulls Plug on webOS Hardware, Leaves OS Future in Doubt
• HP And webOS: But They Seemed So Happy Together!
• Liveblogging HP’s “Everything Including the Kitchen Sink” Conference Call
• HP’s Apotheker: We Struck Out with WebOS, but Maybe Someone Else Wants a Swing?
• Viral Video: Like Palm’s Creepy Naked Lady, TouchPad’s Floating Celeb Heads Get the HP Boot
• Licensing webOS May Not Be Much of an Option for HP
• Hewlett-Packard’s PC Business: What Happens Next?
• Worth More Dead Than Alive: Could HP Turn a Profit on Palm’s Patents?
• With HP’s Raising of the World’s Biggest White Flag, Will Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley Surrender Too?

Let’s face it: Everyone in Silicon Valley — one way or another — fashions themselves as the next Steve Jobs.

And why not? Both the professional and even personal story of the legendary Apple CEO — which will be chronicled in November in a major book — are the stuff of tech legend and envy: Iconic, in charge, decisive, elegant, innovative, phoenix-like and visionary.

And, of course, more than just a little bit terrifying.

So why not Larry Page, too, and why not now?

One issue: By temperament and action — by which I mean genetically hyper-competitive and hammer-time aggressive — he’s been more like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has been the Yin to Jobs’ Yang in their deeply interconnected careers over the last decades.

As I wrote before Page took over again as Google’s CEO earlier this year:

After our first interview in 2001, my notes on the encounter had this one line underlined and in all caps:

LARRY PAGE=BILL GATES.

It was not meant as an insult, but I can tell you I never wrote such a note about Page’s co-founder, the jokey and affable Sergey Brin.

Even then, Gates had a fearsome reputation as a manically competitive exec, a cutting manner to those not as smart as he clearly is and a reputation as a very tough and often eviscerating boss. (And all that was also my experience whenever I was interviewing him.)

While much wonkier, friendlier and more of a sensitive new-aged male, Page, it seemed to me, had the exact same obvious drive and aggression as Gates.

The latest incarnation of that has been Page’s move — bold for now and we’ll-see later — to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, which Google announced yesterday.

By all accounts, Page was the key driver of the deal inside Google, where he now reigns firmly.

Although neither Gates nor Jobs has used acquisitions much as a key weapon in their arsenals, the size and scope of the deal is pure Gates: A focused, overwhelming and competitor-scaring display of might that speaks of industry dominance and play-to-destroy aspirations, masking what is also very reactive.

If Page’s doubling down on mobile reminds you a bit of Gates’s “Internet Tidal Wave” memorandum in 1995, that’s because the move-now tone is the same.

And, also, in that it is more than just a little bit sneaky. Case in point: Google’s yammering on about the importance of Motorola’s patents in the deal. While the patent love is true and an important element, bolstering Google’s own weak portfolio, it’s also a bit of a feint by the search giant, which can simply never come out and say what it is actually up to.

Which is to be the dominant and overwhelming player in the mobile market that Google sees as critical to its future.

“The company obviously wants everyone to focus on the patents, but its ambitions are so much larger in mobile,” said one person close to the situation. “So it underplays as it overplays.”

Indeed, in the time I covered Google, it has always been my experience when the search giant insists stringently on one thing, Page and others are playing a more complex version of “Star Trek” three-dimensional chess.

As the New York Times’ DealBook noted correctly:

If there’s any question about Google’s motivation to own a handset maker rather than just a portfolio of patents, consider this: InterDigital, a licensing company that owns some 8,000 wireless patents and has another 10,000 patent applications being processed, has been up for auction. Many industry insiders were sure that if Google were serious about acquiring a portfolio of patents, InterDigital would be its target. The company’s market value is only about $3 billion and it doesn’t come with all the baggage of Motorola’s handset business.

That’s exactly right, because Page’s ambition is about Google playing a big part in the mobile market — which is humanity’s next critical platform in computing — for its interlocked ecosystem of Google products — from its flagship search to social networking via Google+ to Gmail to its latest Google Wallet initiative to Google Maps to Google Voice.

In other words, it’s a Google world and we all just live in it.

At the heart of it is a desire to make and completely control the object at the center of the virtuous circle: The mobile device, whether it be a smartphone, tablet or whatever doodad you might wear around your neck.

In fact, as I also remember from Google’s earliest days, Page did sport a lot of such contraptions back then, such as a communicator of some sort he once joyfully showed off to me that allowed him to reach Brin quickly. Later, it was a kind of pollution sensor that took its place.

My recollection from that time was that Page adored such objects, visibly inspired by the idea of digital devices that delivered a myriad of helpful and smart services to users as they moved around the world.

You know, like an Apple iPhone, the ground-breaking technical achievement that Jobs rendered unto the world less than a decade ago, changing everything.

With Android and Page’s firm backing, Google quickly and smartly jumped partway into that market with its powerful and fast-growing mobile operating system.

Now, like Jobs, I have no doubt Page wants to own and control the whole value chain to solidify what Google started several years ago and which is its best hope to vault into the next era of computing.

It’s a leap that Gates and Microsoft largely failed at, not for lack of trying — something else Page has to have taken note of.

So, perhaps by making things — maybe even beautiful things like Jobs — Page will transform himself from a Gates into a Jobs.

Or, more likely, a little bit of both.

Until that reckoning, here is a terrific video of Spock playing 3D chess with Captain James T. Kirk — and, yes, he does look freakishly like Page here:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

We’ve interviewed the man-who-would-be-Motoogle, Andy Rubin, twice at big D: All Things Digital events, and Google’s mobile head has always had a lot to say about where this key market is headed.

Luckily, Rubin is also booked for an onstage interview at our AsiaD conference in October in Hong Kong, where a lot of Asian handset manufacturers will be listening carefully to what the leader of Google’s Android mobile operating system has to say about what the search giant is up to with its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

This morning, Google announced the massive deal, which is expected to shake-and-bake the already competitive mobile market and spur regulatory scrutiny.

Until we hear more from Rubin — the longtime industry vet for whom the purchase of Motorola must be sweet justice from his days trying to make his iconic Danger device a success — here are two onstage interviews he did at previous D events.

The first is at D: Dive into Mobile last December with Walt Mossberg and me; the second is with Walt alone at D@CES in early 2010:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110815/watch-google-android-kingpin-and-motorola-acquirer-andy-rubin-unplugged-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110815/motoogle-the-phone-business-just-got-completely-blown-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20110815/motoogle-the-phone-business-just-got-completely-blown-up/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:30:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=109770 With the entry of Google into the handset-making market, the search giant has just declared a number of things, most especially that its own future is all about mobile.

With the $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, the iconic but struggling maker of mobile devices, Google has put a huge stake in the ground in this highly competitive market and thereby shaken up the entire ecosystem.

A lot of this is about patents, as Google CEO Larry Page said in his blog post about the megadeal this morning, and about acquiring a bigger portfolio that Google has long sought for its Android mobile operating system and has been unsuccessful at getting for itself, despite onerous efforts. Since Motorola has been in the mobile arena for so long, it has a large trove of important ones.

But the dramatic acquisition by Google is also a declaration that mobile is more important to it than the skein of alliances it has built for Android with phone makers worldwide, as part of its objective of making it the dominant mobile platform for smartphones and tablets globally.

While Google has been reaching out to other hardware partners to assure them, and has said they all will remain the same in Android-land, the large mobile manufacturers who have placed their trust in Google — especially Samsung or HTC — have to be wondering what to do now.

Make no mistake — they already resent Google from time to time, the way Compaq or Dell has resented Microsoft in the PC business.

But, since Google already showed favoritism to Motorola by letting them do the first Honeycomb tablet, the Xoom (although it didn’t do any good), that discomfort will only increase now.

While Google managed to get them into lockstep on today’s announcement, with a whole Web page titled “Quotes From Android Partners,” each of them using the exact same phrase “defending Android” in their quotes feels a little like they are victims of Stockholm syndrome.

Yes, we concur with everything the Borg tells us to! Defending! Android! We’re Droids too! (Calling Patty Hearst, stat!)

The impact on everyone — from Microsoft and its partner Nokia to Apple to Research In Motion and, also, to all the wireless carriers — will be felt immediately.

And, of course, by government regulators, who have watched warily as Google has marched into business after adjacent business to its core search one.

This deal — which will require approval — is sure to even further put all of Google’s businesses in the crosshairs of rivals, who will agitate for fervent investigations.

While Android has been conceived at Google and has an “autonomous unit” with the company — run by longtime mobile vet Andy Rubin — it has now entered a new and perhaps dangerous phase for all involved, including Google.

Because while such a union is not uncommon in the mobile business — Apple and RIM do software and hardware together and Google has released its own Nexus phone (made by others) — no one has done it via acquisition and in such a definitive way.

And what an acquisition it is. Or, perhaps more accurately, could be.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

(Image courtesy of the United States Department of Energy)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110815/motoogle-the-phone-business-just-got-completely-blown-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110803/microsoft-pr-ninja-strikes-back-at-google-patent-whine-with-email-jujitsu/ http://allthingsd.com/20110803/microsoft-pr-ninja-strikes-back-at-google-patent-whine-with-email-jujitsu/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 04:38:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=106190

After Google’s legal head David Drummond let forth with a blog post about how Microsoft and Apple had formed an evil patent cabal against the search giant, the software giant’s PR head Frank Shaw was not having any of it.

In his post, Drummond had claimed the pair ganged up on Google and had not offered to partner over key former Novell patents, in an attempt to stop the growth of its Android mobile operating system.

Except not, according to an email that Shaw posted on Twitter from Google’s legal counsel Kent Walker to Microsoft’s legal head Brad Smith.

Tweeted Shaw: “Free advice for David Drummond – next time check with Kent Walker before you blog. :)”

It was followed by the image of the email, in which Walker seemed to turn down an offer of a partnership over the patents. “After talking with people here, it sounds as though for various reasons a joint bid wouldn’t be advisable for us on this one.”

Smith also piled on on Twitter, noting: “Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.”

Wax on, Google!

Here’s the image of the email:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110803/microsoft-pr-ninja-strikes-back-at-google-patent-whine-with-email-jujitsu/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110728/look-out-android-and-ios-here-comes-alibabas-aliyun/ http://allthingsd.com/20110728/look-out-android-and-ios-here-comes-alibabas-aliyun/#comments Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:13:55 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=103755 E-commerce giant Alibaba Group is striking out in a new and unexpected direction. The company said Thursday it has developed a mobile operating system and that the first smartphones to use it are already headed to market. The Linux-based OS is called Aliyun and is reportedly capable of running Android apps as well as Web-based ones created with JavaScript and HTML5. It also features cloud-based email, Web search, GPS, and the ability to synchronize and store call data, text messages and photos in the cloud.

The first device to run Aliyun, Tianyu’s K-Touch Cloud-Smart Phone W700, will go on sale in China at the end of this month for about $416. It will be followed in short order by a tablet.

Alibaba is working on an English-language version of Aliyun and hopes to have it finished by the end of this year. It has no plans to make a handset of its own, though, preferring to leave that task to the OEMs. “We shouldn’t make a phone,” Wang Jian, president of Alibaba Cloud Computing, said during a press conference this morning. “We’re not in that ecosystem, and it’s a very good decision not to make a phone.”

[Image credit: Penn Olson]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110728/look-out-android-and-ios-here-comes-alibabas-aliyun/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110720/mossberg-lion-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20110720/mossberg-lion-review/#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:32:31 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=100410 With its iPhones and iPads, Apple has led people toward a new way of operating digital devices that relies on direct manipulation of items with finger gestures, not a mouse and scroll bars. App icons are arrayed front and center, not buried deep in a file system or limited to a strip at the bottom of the screen.

Now, Apple is bringing those concepts and others to the personal computer via its most radical new Macintosh operating system version in years. It’s called Lion and it goes on sale Wednesday for $29.99—a price that allows installation on as many personal Macs as you own.

Lion is a giant step in the merger of the personal computer and post-PC devices like tablets and smartphones. It demotes the venerable scroll bar at the side of windows and documents, relying primarily on direct manipulation of documents and lists. It eliminates the need to save your work, automatically saving every version of every document. It resumes programs right where you left off. It can display programs, or an array of all your app icons, in multiple full screens you simply swipe through. And it elevates the role of multitouch gestures and adds new ones.

The new system doesn’t turn a Mac into a tablet. It retains traditional computer features not present on smaller devices—like the usual file system, multiple windows, the mouse and physical keyboard. It still runs traditional Mac programs, still can handle Adobe Flash, and doesn’t run iPhone or iPad apps. It doesn’t use a touch screen, instead continuing to rely on the touch pad to perform finger gestures.

But it’s a big change. Lion also is a harbinger of things to come. Apple’s historic rival, Microsoft, is working on its own radical overhaul of the dominant Windows PC operating system, due next year, which is also aimed at putting multitouch and other concepts borrowed from smartphones and tablets front and center.

I’ve been testing Lion on four Macs, and I like it. I believe its many new features—250 in all—make computing easier and more reliable. I found upgrading easy, and compatibility with existing apps to be very good. Only one app I use frequently proved incompatible, and its maker says a new revision solves that problem.

I only suffered one crash in Lion. It occurred on one of many occasions I used iTunes, but Apple says a forthcoming version of iTunes made for Lion should eliminate that.

Pressing a special key on a new Mac, or an icon on an old one, brings up a full screen, iPad-like display of app icons.

To take full advantage of new features such as full-screen mode (which hides menus), auto-saving and auto-resuming, programs will have to be rewritten. But, in my tests, current versions ran fine. I am writing this column on a MacBook Air running Lion using an unrevised version of Microsoft Word for the Mac, with no problems.

An Adjustment Process

There are, however, downsides to anything this new and major. In my view, the biggest of these is that switching to Lion will require a major adjustment even for veteran Mac users, though it will be easier for those who use iPhones or iPads. Lion will significantly increase the learning curve for Windows users switching to the Mac.

One of the biggest changes is in scrolling. Instead of moving the top of a page upward by dragging the scroll bar down, or moving your fingers downward on the touch pad, you do the opposite—you just push the page up. A scroll bar appears only while scrolling. (Older programs may still have the traditional scroll bar.)

Standard programs and features like Apple Mail are significantly different, too, and there are smaller changes in almost every corner of the operating system, including some keyboard shortcuts. Just mastering all the new and altered touch-pad gestures—a couple of which are so unnatural I actually had to practice them—will take time. (Luckily, almost all of the actions performed by the gestures can also be done with a mouse, icons, menu commands, or keys.)

If you dislike some of these changes, Apple provides settings to return to traditional scrolling, the classic Mail layout, and to turn off gestures and other things.

Upgrading

Another big change is in the way Lion is being distributed. It won’t be sold on a disk, initially only via download from the Mac App Store. Since it’s a 4 gigabyte download, that could be a problem for people with slow Internet connections. Apple says its stores will help such users with the download, and that it will sell Lion on a USB thumb drive for $69 in August.

In my tests, the download alone took under half an hour on a very fast connection, and about an hour and a half on a more typical one. Once I downloaded the product, the rest of the installation took about an hour.

Also, you can only upgrade to Lion directly from the prior OS version, Snow Leopard. So, if you’re running an earlier version, you’ll first have to pay to upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Each auto-save creates a “version” of a document and all the versions can be viewed in a visual stack.

In addition, Macs with the older PowerPC processors can’t run Lion, and even some of the earliest Macs with Intel processors are shut out. These are mainly machines released in 2006. Older programs originally designed for PowerPC, which still ran on Snow Leopard, will no longer work in Lion. The best known of these is Intuit’s Quicken 2007.

Migrating

Even if you buy a new Mac with Lion pre-installed and your older Mac has Snow Leopard, you’ll have to download a new version of Apple’s migration program for Snow Leopard in order to move over all your programs, settings and files. The company made this new migration utility available on Tuesday. When I tried to migrate my stuff from a Snow Leopard machine to Lion using the current migration program—normally a strength for Apple—the process failed. Apple sent me the new version and it worked.

Lion also introduces a new migration feature that will move data and settings—but not programs—from a Windows PC to a Mac, though it requires a free Windows migration utility that Apple couldn’t provide in time for this review.

New Macs

Speaking of Macs with Lion pre-installed, Apple also is upgrading its thin and fast MacBook Air laptops so they use faster chips from Intel. It’s killing off the bottom model of its laptop line, the plain MacBook. But the new MacBook Airs, available Thursday, have the same design, prices and base storage capacity as their predecessors, so this review is focused on Lion.

Features

Here are some of the main new features in Lion:

• Auto-Save and Versions: Apps running in Lion automatically save your work when you pause or every five minutes. There is no interruption during this process and you can still save manually. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s implemented beautifully and can work on all programs whose authors issue new versions to take advantage of it. Right now, it works on some of Apple’s own programs.

The best part of this is that each auto-save creates a “version” of your document and you can view all these versions in a visual stack arranged by date, next to your current version. You can swap back to an older version, or even copy and paste text from one version to another. These versions are created by storing the changes behind the scenes, not by creating numerous files.

To prevent auto-saving, you can lock a document and, for privacy, when you share or transfer a document, only the latest version is copied or sent.

• Resume: If you relaunch a program, any document you were working on appears again with the cursor right where it was, and even any highlighting is preserved. If you restart the Mac, all your programs are resumed in this manner, unless you check a box to prevent this.

• Full-screen apps: You can launch some apps, or individual browser tabs, in a full screen, by just clicking on an icon at the top right. In full screen, the menu bar and other controls are hidden unless you move the cursor to the top of the screen.

• Launchpad: Pressing a special key on a new Mac, or an icon on an old one, brings up an iPad-like display of all your app icons in full screen. If they occupy more than one screen, you just swipe through them.

• Mission Control: One of the nicer features on the Mac was called Exposé, which, with one click, showed all your open windows in miniature. Now, it’s been subsumed into something called Mission Control, which does the same thing, but also displays any fullscreen apps or extra desktops. I found it cluttered and wished the simpler, prior feature had been retained.

• Gestures: The Mac already had a variety of iPhone-like gestures you could perform on the touch pad. But Lion has changed some of these and added more. One I liked: You can double-tap with two figures to resize a section of a Web page or PDF to zoom in to fill the screen, just like on the iPhone or iPad. Two I dislike: the gestures for calling up Launchpad and Mission Control require pinching or zooming with three fingers and a thumb—a clumsy method for such important features.

• Mail: Apple’s Mail app has been totally overhauled to look and work more like the Mail app on the iPad. One particularly nice feature is that it sports a beautiful optional conversation mode, which combines and numbers each message in a thread. It also hides duplicate emails. There are too many changes to detail here, but, after hating the new Mail at first, I have come to like it. And you can switch to Classic mode if you wish.

The Bottom Line

The past two major computer operating system releases, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, were incremental. Lion is very different. It’s a big leap, and gives the Mac a much more modern look and feel for a world of tablets and smartphones. If you are willing to adjust, it’s the best computer operating system out there.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110720/mossberg-lion-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110712/steve-ballmers-dr-hyde-and-mr-jekyl/ http://allthingsd.com/20110712/steve-ballmers-dr-hyde-and-mr-jekyl/#comments Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:43:44 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=96722

Whenever I know Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is going to speak at a major public event, I get two feelings at once: Excited anticipation that the chances are high that he’ll say something controversial and dread that the chances are high he will say something, well, controversial.

Which is just what happened at his opening keynote speech yesterday at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, which is taking place in Los Angeles this week.

At the event, Ballmer got off several good ones, which always happen when he makes fun of himself or Microsoft products.

Most effective was the tiny market share of the very laudable Windows Phone 7, which replaced its failed Windows Mobile efforts.

Said Ballmer with verve about the situation: “We’ve gone from very small to very small…”

Funny, right? Especially when he also made it clear that he thought Microsoft had made the right bet in moving to Windows Phone 7, which was a deft way of both poking fun at the company and praising it at the same time.

Of course, like the skunk at the garden party he often can be, Ballmer also could not resist dragging out his oldest chestnut about how much bigger that PC market is than that of its longtime rival, namely Apple.

But because he’s Ballmer, he plays it cute and can’t ever seem to bring himself to actually say the name of the company that has always been top of mind at Microsoft and always has remained the target of grumbly frustration.

The solution? Pretend Apple does not exist by belittling the competitor’s weakest point.

Thus, he trotted out the usual stats about how big the PC market is in comparison — about 350 million units with the Windows operating system compared to about 20 million of Brand A.

All true, except it only makes Ballmer look petty and backward-thinking, since those 20 million represent so much more than just laptop computers.

In fact, when talking about Apple, it also means smartphones — where the iPhone dominates Windows Phone 7 handily — and also tablets, a market where there is no contest between the iPad and anyone else so far.

And it also leaves out the excitement and thrill that Apple always manages to engender among consumers, the media and techies alike when it launches new products, which will be happening just a week from now with Apple’s new MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs debut.

Because, while Ballmer can make fun of Apple’s laptop sales all he wants, it only makes him look silly rather than witty.

In fact, when you’re as big a company as Microsoft, it’s only funny when you are shooting at a behemoth like yourself over failings. Best of all, you never run out of material.

And, if you do, there’s always Google to kick around.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110712/steve-ballmers-dr-hyde-and-mr-jekyl/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110701/hps-leo-apotheker-talks-webos-touchpad-and-more-the-full-d9-interview-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110701/hps-leo-apotheker-talks-webos-touchpad-and-more-the-full-d9-interview-video/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:21:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=93715

Léo Apotheker got to Hewlett-Packard less than a year ago, but what a year. From a board shake-up to executive shuffles to new strategic directions to layoffs and — oh, yes — a new tablet offering, called TouchPad and based on webOS, he’s been a busy man.

As head of the world’s biggest maker of PCs — Hewlett-Packard last year acquired Palm for its webOS operating system — Apotheker is in a crunch position, as Apple iOS and Google’s Android race ahead.

Here’s his take, in an onstage interview with Walt Mossberg at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110701/hps-leo-apotheker-talks-webos-touchpad-and-more-the-full-d9-interview-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110426/a-probe-in-your-pocket-heres-apples-steve-jobs-and-googles-andy-rubin-talking-privacy-at-d8-and-dive/ http://allthingsd.com/20110426/a-probe-in-your-pocket-heres-apples-steve-jobs-and-googles-andy-rubin-talking-privacy-at-d8-and-dive/#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:19:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43052

We’ve done a lot of onstage interviews at our D: All Things Digital conferences with the leaders of tech.

That includes Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google smartphone kingpin Andy Rubin, both of whom are now dealing with the fallout over a series of reports that iOS and Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to both companies.

The privacy implications are obvious.

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried wrote last week:

Questions about what location-based information Android makes use of followed reports that Apple’s iPhone and 3G-equipped iPads are storing a history of location information in an unencrypted database on the device. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday noted that both Android and Apple devices are sending certain location information back to the companies.

In addition to that issue, there are separate issues over the length of time such information is stored, both on the device and by Apple and Google. The iPhone (and 3G-equipped iPads) appear to be storing a long-term directory of where a device has been and keeping that information in an unencrypted database. Google keeps a small cache of such information, to allow mapping and search to work even if a device temporarily loses GPS signal. However, it doesn’t keep a long-term record on the device.

That’s why we cut this video of Jobs and Rubin talking about privacy, specifically and respectively at the eighth D: All Things Digital last summer and at D: Dive Into Mobile in December.

“We take privacy extremely seriously,” said Jobs, who addressed the smartphone location data issue in particular. “A lot of people in [Silicon] Valley think we’re old-fashioned about this.”

And I pressed Rubin on Android being a “probe in your pocket,” and he said its mobile open source operating system did not collect data, although Google services did.

“I think this is a trust and verify,” Rubin noted.

Both Jobs and Rubin make some pretty strong privacy-related statements in these videos, so it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110426/a-probe-in-your-pocket-heres-apples-steve-jobs-and-googles-andy-rubin-talking-privacy-at-d8-and-dive/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/seven-questions-for-rajen-sheth-who-wants-to-put-chrome-os-on-your-desktop/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/seven-questions-for-rajen-sheth-who-wants-to-put-chrome-os-on-your-desktop/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:50:08 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=5423 There’s something about Rajen Sheth that makes him want to attack seemingly immovable objects. Five years ago, who would have thought there was any point to offering an alternative to the one thing that everyone has installed on their workplace PC, whether it’s running Windows or Mac OS: Microsoft Office.

When he first joined Google nearly seven years ago to start its enterprise division, Gmail was barely out of the gate and Blogger was the search giant’s most notable acquisition. What could Google offer enterprises that they weren’t already getting from Microsoft and Oracle and IBM and scores of other established software and hardware vendors?

The answer? An alternative. Sheth pitched Google’s trio of senior executives–Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin–on the idea of experimenting with standard office applications–a word processor, a spreadsheet–that operated entirely within a browser. The product evolved into Google Apps, and while Microsoft Office still dominates the enterprise desktop, it’s widely accepted that Google Apps has made some important inroads against it: 3 million businesses use it in some way, and some 30 million people use it in their businesses.

Aside from the scores of companies, governments and non-profits that have adopted it, there are millions of college students using it, attracted by the zero-dollar price tag. Microsoft has responded with its own cloud-based office offering, Office 365, but its clear that Redmond’s traditional grip on the enterprise desktop isn’t quite as tight as it once was.

Now Sheth has an even bigger target in mind. If Office isn’t so sacred, why does Windows have to be? As the Group Product Manager Chrome OS for Business, he makes an interesting argument that the Redmond-centric world of corporate desktops is quietly nursing a desire for change. Where will it come from? A combination of cloud computing, and a desktop that’s stripped down to nothing but a browser. I talked with Sheth by phone earlier this month and my first question was about his education.

NewEnterprise: You did your undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, but now you work in software. Circuit design wasn’t for you?

I realized I liked software a lot more than hardware. But I was most of the way through with electrical engineering at Stanford. So I did my masters in software.

Does having been educated first on hardware give you a different perspective on any of the work you’re doing at Google?

It is actually relevant. A lot of what I’ve done involves software and user-facing interfaces, but it also involves a lot of infrastructure. When you look at VMWare, which is where I worked before Google, it’s about what you can do with a combination of hardware and software and change the game. It’s similar with Google Apps. It’s a big set of user-facing applications, but the big thing is the cloud computing infrastructure that’s underneath. The fundamental question is about how you wire computers together in the most efficient way possible. That is really the bread and butter underneath Google Apps. And finally with Chrome OS it’s the same question: What can you do to the form factor of the hardware if you’re really only running a browser on it. The background in hardware has served me well.

So you joined Google about seven years ago with the mission of creating something–you basically had a blank sheet of paper–that Google could offer the enterprise. And your first idea got shot down. What was it?

At the time I joined Google the enterprise division was literally 25 people. We had a few engineers and salespeople, and we brought in a manager, Dave Girouard. I came in with the explicit mission of starting something else within Google that was to be aimed at businesses. And that something else was completely undefined. When I was still at VMware, a friend sent me a Gmail invite, and I started using it, and it was better than my corporate mail. I thought it could be a very interesting enterprise product. After I joined, I pitched Eric, Larry and Sergey on the idea of putting Gmail into an appliance and shipping it out to corporations. They didn’t go for it. I went back six months later, with some new insight, specifically that we could use our server architecture to make it easier for businesses and educational institutions to deploy and manage email, and that from there we could move up-market to deploy applications. We got exactly one engineer to work on that.

It was very much like running a start-up. I was the product manager and was tasked with starting this new business and we went through all the classic things that a start-up does. Building the product, building the team, selling the vision to an early set of adopters–San Jose City College was our first college customer and Northwestern and Arizona State followed after that. We started small and incubated it within Google. We did a lot of experimenting with that small team to see what was viable and eventually we were able to get more resources to make it bigger.

So how does the Google Apps experience compare to your new role in building a business around Chrome OS for businesses?

It’s very similar. In Chrome OS I’m back in start-up mode. Essentially I’m trying to build a vision. We have a small team of people that all sit together in one area, building out the business model, and we’re trying to start small and grow from there. One way to look at Google is as a closed confederation of start-ups. All these teams are empowered to build something that is visionary. But we all have a lot of leverage behind us, and so we’re able to do a lot more than we ever would have been able to do if we were a small company.

I see a potential problem there: Don’t all these start-ups within Google run the risk of creating independent silos or fiefdoms that aren’t all on the same page? We hear a lot of criticism of the silos at companies like Sony or even Microsoft. Even at Google, there’s Google Voice, which is a great product but doesn’t really fit with anything else, though I understand it eventually will. But how do you avoid this silo problem?

It’s a great question, and its something we’ve thought about a lot. There are basically two extremes. The first extreme is on one hand you have different teams doing things completely different from each other. The other extreme requires that everything be integrated extremely well together. We tried to find a happy medium. The benefit for one is that you can move quickly. But if you do the other extreme, you slow down innovation. Your project may take several times longer. One big advantage is the Google infrastructure is all there. You don’t have to think about user authentication or how to store files. That’s all done for you, so everyone is using the same infrastructure. A lot of the parts you need are there and you just build on top of them. You can never strike a perfect balance, but we think ours is pretty good.

So what’s your mission with the Chrome OS?

My mission is to bring Chrome to business and to ask how we make it something that can reshape the enterprise desktop. The thing that was really intriguing for me, is that cloud computing has done so much for businesses. You don’t need to think about deploying the hardware, you can just turn things on. You don’t need to worry about massive up-front payments for hardware, you can just pay monthly for what you use. And your applications just keep getting better. In my mind the cloud really stops at the desktop.

The desktop is tremendously hard to manage. It costs a lot to maintain, most of the cost for a business is all in the maintenance. It doesn’t get better over time, it gets slower as you use it. I think there’s a huge opportunity to bring the principles of cloud computing to the desktop. It gets better, and it’s fast and secure. That’s the vision. We think we can do that because we have a unique operating system. It’s just a browser that’s completely stateless. As a result of that, you can boot up in 5 to 10 seconds. And no matter where you go, you log in, you have your entire desktop. If the system breaks, that’s not a problem, you just jump on to another system. If you lose it, it’s not a problem because its stateless.

There are people who would say its crazy to try and dislodge Windows as the operating system of choice for businesses, and yet you think you can do it. What kind of results have you seen so far?

If you just have a browser and take out everything else, life gets a lot simpler. And this is why I think that the desktop OS is ready for a radical change much like the enterprise applications were a few years ago. One thing we’ve found is that very significant portions of the population are using only a browser right now. Those trends show that this area is ripe for a change. If you look down the line in three years, the majority of those business users will use only a browser. We created this pilot device called the Cr48, which is a notebook with Chrome OS installed on it. We received 50,000 applications from businesses interested in trying it, and we now have thousands deployed in the field. We have companies like Intercontinental Hotel Group, Virgin American and Groupon using them for different things. We’ve even heard from the US Army Intelligence Office. We heard from a lot of companies we didn’t expect interest from.

I think you’ll see some early adopters, groups of users within companies, this year. Some companies’ pilot programs want to do large roll-outs to call centers and to customer service reps and some want to roll them out to mobile sales people. Many will find that it makes sense to them because it brings the cost down. No one wants to pay to have to fix a system that’s broken because two applications are in conflict with each other. No one wants to pay to go patch an operating system. That kind of thing is going to become a lot easier with Chrome OS.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/seven-questions-for-rajen-sheth-who-wants-to-put-chrome-os-on-your-desktop/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20110421/pre-200-million-valuation-flipboards-mike-mccue-at-sxsw-the-full-onstage-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110421/pre-200-million-valuation-flipboards-mike-mccue-at-sxsw-the-full-onstage-video/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:30:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42950

In March, BoomTown travelled hipster-Texas-style for the South by Southwest festival in Austin.

I was there to check out the geek-packed scene, but also to interview Flipboard’s Mike McCue in an onstage interview there.

The Silicon Valley start-up, which makes an innovative and highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad (iPhone and Google’s Android mobile operating system to come), recently raised $50 million in new funding, giving it a $200 million valuation.

This interview with McCue took place before that, but it’s still a wide-ranging map to where the much-touted Flipboard is headed.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110421/pre-200-million-valuation-flipboards-mike-mccue-at-sxsw-the-full-onstage-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110419/sonos-john-macfarlane-talks-about-new-android-controller-launching-today-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20110419/sonos-john-macfarlane-talks-about-new-android-controller-launching-today-and-more/#comments Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:00:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42796

Yesterday afternoon, BoomTown pumped Sonos CEO John MacFarlane full of fancy tea and queried him about today’s rollout of its new Android controller for the innovative wireless music players.

As has been previously reported, the Santa Barbara, Calif. consumer electronics company will finally be launching an app for the Google mobile operating system.

Sonos will also be releasing a free software update for its software to make it easier to play Apple AirPlay music sources, as well as offer multitasking for the Apple iPad and Apple iPhone.

Until now, Sonos has been boosted by its Apple app that allows you to control its various players wirelessly with a smartphone or tablet.

The impact of the iPhone and the iPad on sales of its various devices has been clear enough, with just under one million sold. But the move to Android is key given the explosive growth of the mobile platform.

Here’s the video interview I did with MacFarlane, as well as an image of the app on an Android phone:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110419/sonos-john-macfarlane-talks-about-new-android-controller-launching-today-and-more/feed/ 0