“I don’t think anybody has done a product that is the product that I see customers wanting. You can go through the products from all those guys … and none of them has a product that you can really use. Not Apple. Not Google. Not Amazon. … [Surface] is a first-class tablet that people can enjoy and appreciate. It’s a PC; it’s a tablet. It’s for play; it’s for work. It’s got a great price. That product doesn’t exist today.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

Microsoft is now one of the Top 5 tablet vendors worldwide, thanks to its Surface RT and Surface Pro devices — but not because either one is selling particularly well.

Research firm IDC says Microsoft shipped about 900,000 Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets in the first quarter of the year. That was enough to claim a fifth-place ranking on IDC’s latest worldwide tablet tracker, but with a very low percentage of the tablet market — just 1.8 percent.

That’s a pretty poor showing for a device that has been available since last October, though, to be fair, the Surface Pro didn’t begin shipping in North America until February. That late start almost certainly hampered sales.

That said, Microsoft shipped “just shy” of 900,000 Surface units last quarter, according to IDC, so the availability of the Pro version of the device doesn’t seem to have done all that much for sales. With both the Pro and the RT on the market, Microsoft’s tablet sales don’t even begin to come close to market leaders like Apple and Samsung, which shipped 19.5 million and 8.8 million tablets, respectively.

Not that anyone expected them to. Surface is a latecomer in a highly competitive market dominated by a company with a massive first-mover advantage. Still, you’d think that if Surface really did hit the sweet spot that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described in the quote above, shipments would be a wee bit higher, no? Clearly, the company has got a lot of work ahead of it if it hopes to change users’ expectations for tablets.

Microsoft, which has not yet disclosed any Surface sales data or guidance, did not respond to a request for comment.

The finding comes in a new report from Gartner containing the results of a survey of CIOs around the world. So it’s not for nothing that Gartner calls these BYOD strategies “the most radical change to the economics and culture of client computing” in a decade.

When you think about it, BYOD amounts to a pretty fundamental shift in the way companies handle the knotty questions around supplying employees the tools they need to get the job done. For years, standard operating procedure at pretty much every company was to give a computer and maybe a phone or BlackBerry to every employee who needed them, and for the company to bear the cost. (Gartner, incidentally, includes PCs in its BYOD definition.)

What started with an occasional request for the IT department to support smartphones and tablets with access to work email has blown up into a huge shift in the way that corporate IT services are supplied to employees.

Right now, Gartner said, mid-sized companies of $500 million to $5 billion in sales and 2,500 to 5,000 employees are most likely to be using a BYOD approach. BYOD-friendly companies are twice as common in the U.S. as in Europe, but employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device on the job.

And if you’re looking for some figures to drive the point home, here’s one: 38 percent of companies expect to stop supplying employees with their devices entirely by 2016. But executives aren’t yet completely sold on the idea: Only 22 percent say they’ve made a good business case for adopting a BYOD move. There are, Gartner said, many benefits, not the least of which are lower costs and a happier work force.

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference, according to Bloomberg. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

They certainly haven’t been a good business model for BlackBerry. The company’s PlayBook tablet was unquestionably a failure, one that forced it to take a $485 million charge to write down unsold inventory in 2012. But for other companies — most notably Apple — the tablet market has been quite lucrative. In Apple’s last quarter, the company shipped 19.5 million iPads — 7.7 million more than it did the year prior.

So what’s Heins’s problem with tablets? There would seem to be two. The first: BlackBerry doesn’t have a good angle on the tablet business yet — something it needs to compete in a market where profits can be tight. The company is reevaluating its approach, because right now the tablet market is a lousy place for BlackBerry and pretty much any company not named Apple or Samsung.

The second: The mobile computing space is evolving very quickly, and Heins seems to have doubts about the viability of tablets going forward. Now, regardless of how much credence you lend that view, you’ve got to concede that five years is an awful long time in tech; few companies know that better than BlackBerry, which saw its early lead in smartphones whittled away in short order by Apple and Google. Who knows? Maybe some new technology will emerge in the next few years that will kick the legs out from under the tablet market. Sounds implausible now, but a few years back, the BlackBerry was widely known as the CrackBerry, and no one was using iPhones.

In any event, BlackBerry’s official position is not to read too, too much into Heins’s dismissal of the tablet market.

“The comments that Thorsten made yesterday are in line with previous comments he has made about the future of mobile computing overall, and the possibilities that come with a platform like BlackBerry 10,” BlackBerry spokesman Alex Kinsella told AllThingsD. “We continue to evaluate our tablet strategy, but we are not making any shifts in that strategy in the short term. When we do have information about our PlayBook strategy, we will share it.”

Conducted during February, the J.D. Power and Associates’ survey asked 1,857 tablet owners to rate their devices on performance, ease of operation, design, features and cost. Respondents rated the iPad highest, giving it a score of 836 points out of a possible 1,000. That was enough for the device to nab the research house’s top tablet rank for the second consecutive time, though not by much of a lead. With a score of 829 out of 1,000, Amazon’s Kindle Fire came close to tying it. Samsung came reasonably close, as well, with a score of 822, though that came in lower than the industry average of 828.

So, another customer-satisfaction win for Apple, and one we’ll almost certainly see shown off at the company’s next tablet event. Apple’s last tablet award from J.D. Power and Associates is currently front and center on the company’s new “Why iPad” page. That said, it’s worth noting that while the iPad scored better than its rivals, it didn’t score that much better. Apple, Amazon and Samsung are all close enough to the study average that they’re more or less tied.

As if you needed another indicator about how much the old Wintel world of PCs has flipped in the last couple of years, take a look at the earnings results of the British chip designer ARM, which just reported quarterly earnings this morning.

Sales rose by 29 percent year on year to north of 170 million pounds (or $260 million), which was better than expected. Earnings on a per-share basis were five pence versus the expected four pence, amounting to a beat of a penny per share. Its shares are rising by 9 percent both in the U.K. and on the Nasdaq in the U.S.

ARM, you’ll recall, is the company behind the designs that go into building the chips that land in most smartphones and tablets. Rather than make the chips, ARM licenses its blueprints to companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom and Nvidia, which then make their own chips. And since phones and tablets are growing a lot faster than traditional PCs (come to think of it, PCs actually aren’t growing at all), ARM is looking a lot healthier than traditional chip companies like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Here’s a pretty good indicator: Royalty payments for processors rose in the quarter by 33 percent versus a processor industry that’s up about 2 percent.

ARM is quickly turning out to be the company to watch in the chip space. Chips sporting ARM designs are everywhere these days, and there has been a lot of chatter of late about them heading into the data center.

Hewlett-Packard offers ARM processors as an option on its radical new server design, called Project Moonshot. Dell offers ARM-based servers, too, and there are even more plans for ARM chips in servers. I talked with CEO Warren East about this last year. (East is retiring this summer, by the way, and Simon Segars will be ARM’s new CEO, starting in July.)

The basic argument that ARM makes coming in is that its chips are good at managing power consumption, in part because they were designed from the beginning for mobile applications. And power consumption continues to be a huge problem, especially in data centers where thousands of servers are crowded together in one place.

Intel, the king of the chip world, has responded and created its own line of low-power chips called Atom. And as we learned from Mike Bell, head of Intel’s mobile chip business at D: Dive Into Mobile last week, it has gotten off to a slow start but is starting to get a little traction in mobile.

Another version of Atom, announced the week before last, will also defend Intel’s interests in the server space. But keep an eye on this, because there’s eventually going to be a rumble.

It’s now this much closer to your coffee table — or, replacing your coffee table. Lenovo today announced the Horizon is available for preorder and is expected to ship in late June. Prices start around $1,700, right in line with what Lenovo indicated in January.

In case you missed the news around CES time, this is a 27-inch, all-in-one “desktop” that can be propped up or laid flat on the table, and is geared toward game playing in addition to regular old computer activities. And in case its size didn’t give it away, the Horizon is meant to be used in the home, not on, say, an airplane tray, although Lenovo points out that it includes a built-in battery so it can be easily moved around the house.

The multi-finger touchscreen PC is running Windows 8 and comes with an Intel Core i7 chip and Nvidia GeForce graphics capabilities. Lenovo says the customized games include Raiding Company, Draw Race 2 and King of the Opera from Ubisoft, as well as Monopoly from Electronic Arts.

I played a quick game of air hockey on the device back in January, and I’ll admit that it was pretty fun. And it’s easy to see why some families might like a tabletop PC for game playing and picture browsing.

But this is a behemoth of a device, and it’s not alone in the big-screen market. There’s also the Sony Vaio Tap 20 and the Toshiba Excite 13 — a much smaller tablet, but one that is, again, meant for the home.

And as we know, PCs are hurting a bit these days. It’s likely going to take more than giant screens to fill the giant gap in the market.

That’s the word from research house IHS iSuppli, which has slapped an expiration date on the netbook, following the device’s continued decline into irrelevance. That date? The year 2015.

IHS figures that netbook shipments, which topped 32 million at their height in 2010, will be a mere 3.97 million in 2013. That’s a precipitous 72 percent fall from the 14.13 million shipped last year. Next year will see an equally gruesome drop, with shipments hitting a little more than a quarter of a million.

And in 2015: Zero.

Hardly a surprise. If anything, it’s a shock that netbooks are still around today. With tablets becoming increasingly ubiquitous, there’s little room left for the netbook in the market for which it was intended — that middle ground between laptop and smartphone. That niche has been fully occupied and expanded by the iPad and devices like it. One could make the argument that the lowly netbook’s decline began with the debut of the iPad, a device that offered a better set of answers to the questions posed by that nascent category.

“All of us use laptops and smartphones now,” Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said during the 2010 launch of the iPad. “And the question has arisen lately: Is there room for a device in the middle? … Some folks say this device is a netbook. … The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

Harsh words, but largely accurate. Certainly, they were borne out in the ensuing years. The massive surge of interest in tablets heralded by the iPad led to an equally massive loss of interest in netbooks. The PC industry shipped 32 million netbooks the year the iPad launched. Five years later — if IHS is correct — it won’t ship any. And the netbook will be little more than the wrong answer to that question Jobs posed back in 2010.

Earlier this week, I went for a visit to the San Francisco HQ of Circa, the startup that always seems to get lumped into the mobile news reader aggregation category with others such as Pulse, Zite and Flipboard. While it shares some obvious similarities — there is no original news gathering going on here with all of them — the approach that it has taken is different and a bit more nifty.

Built currently for the Apple iPhone, the mobile-designed app is aimed at rejiggering how readers consume breaking news. To do this, a team of writers crunches and munches small bits of information about a range of current news events from a variety of sources and forms them into separable flashcard lists to make up a story.

Circa is using the odd phrase — “atomic units” — to describe the end product, which users can swipe through quickly to get the key elements of a story, along with adds of art, photos, maps or graphs. While some disparagingly call it a Cliff Notes for breaking news, it is much more like a television report or a just-the-facts feed from wires services. If you want to get even more digital, it reminds me of a smart and collated version of Twitter.

While it could use more sourcing — I like to know from whence my atomic units are born — it’s a still a good way to consume news on the fly on a smartphone. Users can also follow favorites stories, which are updated and which increases engagement.

I talked about it all with CEO Matt Galligan, one of Circa’s several founders, as well where the next version of the product is going (expect an Google Android and perhaps an tablet version, for example)

How Circa is going to make money is a good question — it has only a few million in seed funding — since it does require people to create the stories, rather than some algorithm. But the market is hot in the acquisition arena for this category. Both Pulse and Zite have been bought (LinkedIn and CNN), as well as the decidedly less substantive Summly (Yahoo picked it up for the excessive price of $30 million), so one could see Circa also getting snapped up at some point.

Until then or whatever news breaks on it, here’s my video interview with Galligan:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130409/circas-matt-galligan-on-building-a-different-kind-of-news-reader-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130404/pc-sales-shrink-tablets-and-phones-dominate-in-four-year-tech-forecast/ http://allthingsd.com/20130404/pc-sales-shrink-tablets-and-phones-dominate-in-four-year-tech-forecast/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:32:29 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=309178 As if we needed any more data pointing to the rise of mobile devices and the decline of traditional PCs, market research firm Gartner is out today with some new forecasts for sales of all three through the year 2017.

As you might expect, there’s good news for any company in the business of building tablets and mobile phones, and lousy news for those building PCs. Worldwide sales of “devices,” a category that combines PCs, tablets, mobile phones and ultramobiles (tiny notebooks, presumably), will approach a combined three billion units by 2017, representing growth of 34 percent from 2012.

Growth will be led by tablets, which are expected to grow by 70 percent, to 467 million units. Phones will break the two-billion-unit mark in 2017, Gartner says. Traditional PCs, on the other hand, will decline by fewer than 300 million units by that year. Obviously, this is bad news for the PC players, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, who are both struggling to get their PC divisions back on track, while at the same time trying to kick-start mobile device plays. (Click the chart below to make it bigger.)

Another nugget in the Gartner report: Google’s Android devices will dominate, accounting for nearly a billion and a half unit sales by 2017. Its nearest competition will be Microsoft’s Windows, and Apple’s combined portfolio of Mac and iOS devices, which will split about a billion devices between them.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130404/pc-sales-shrink-tablets-and-phones-dominate-in-four-year-tech-forecast/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130403/a-look-inside-one-of-samsungs-new-stores-at-best-buy/ http://allthingsd.com/20130403/a-look-inside-one-of-samsungs-new-stores-at-best-buy/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 04:01:45 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=308961 From a distance, the Best Buy in Lewisville, Texas, looks like the big-box retailer’s typical outlets that dot the suburban U.S. landscape.

The blue-and-yellow logo shines atop a large building in a sprawling strip mall, next to a Guitar Center and not far from a Costco, a Chipotle and a Steak ’n Shake.

Inside, though, it is home to one of the first Samsung shops to be located inside a Best Buy. Samsung’s 450-square-foot shop occupies less than 1 percent of the Best Buy’s overall area, but its central spot means that anyone looking to buy an iPad or Mac has to walk by the giant display of Samsung laptops, phones and tablets.

That makes life pretty good for Brian Hagglund, the consultant Samsung hired to oversee operations at the store. Hagglund, who has worked as a representative for other electronics companies in the past, said he is often able to sell would-be iPad buyers on the benefits of Samsung’s pen-equipped Galaxy Note tablet.

“That’s one of our biggest opportunities,” he said, noting he has a pretty easy sell if he gets just five minutes to show off the Samsung tablet.

The Lewisville location is one of six stores where Best Buy has been testing the store-within-a-store concept ahead of Thursday’s formal announcement.

So far, Saturdays are the busiest times, for potential buyers as well as those coming in to fix a problem or ask a question. (How to take a screenshot is the most common query, Hagglund said.)

Hagglund and his part-time helpers can do basic support tasks such as updating a phone’s software or diagnosing hardware issues. They also have a phone they can use to call if they need further help.

That phone has only been needed three times, Hagglund said, oddly enough all on one day filled with particularly challenging issues.

With the Samsung Experience Shops inside Best Buy, the Korean electronics giant is hoping to give its customers a place to see multiple Samsung products in action, get help and build some of the same brand loyalty that Apple, Microsoft and Sony get through their stores without having to make the same investment in real estate.

Samsung has made smaller retail ventures in the past, including a New York City showroom that it closed about a year ago after running it for several years. Retail head Ketrina Dunagan said the Columbus Circle location was popular internally, but did little for customers.

More recently, Samsung had 14 kiosks during the past holiday season where it pitched its Galaxy range of products.

Best Buy officials said the retailer found it had to do surprisingly little shifting to clear the space for Samsung, noting that what appears to be prime real estate was previously home to CDs and DVDs, not exactly the hottest segment of its business.

But it is making a big investment in Samsung, hoping that the fast-growing brand will help bring in more customers at a time when physical retail store sales are struggling.

Best Buy will continue to display Samsung phones, tablets, cameras and PCs in their respective categories, in addition to handing over the space needed for the Samsung shops.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130403/a-look-inside-one-of-samsungs-new-stores-at-best-buy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130402/dell-laptop-does-flips-to-try-to-be-a-thick-tablet/ http://allthingsd.com/20130402/dell-laptop-does-flips-to-try-to-be-a-thick-tablet/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 01:03:06 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=308711

Welcome to another in our series of reviews on efforts by Windows PC makers to make laptops that are also tablets, with very little success. This time, the attempt comes from Dell and is especially creative, and even kind of cool. But as with many other convertible laptops, it still results in a computer that’s a perfectly fine laptop, but a thick, heavy tablet.

Dell has been in the news lately mainly due to a proposed corporate restructuring, but that topic won’t be addressed here. The company still makes PCs for consumers. So I have been testing its flagship convertible, the XPS 12, a Windows 8 Ultrabook that starts at a pricey $1,200, and has a vivid, bright 12.5-inch touchscreen.

To turn the XPS from a laptop to a tablet, push the bottom of the screen from the back and spin it around to the opposite direction.

What makes the XPS 12 notable is the method Dell has chosen to enable it to morph from a clamshell laptop to a tablet. While other companies have resorted to slider mechanisms, or hinges that require bending or twisting the whole lid, Dell has created a flip screen. The screen pivots within the frame of the lid to either face toward the keyboard, or away from it.

When the XPS 12 is in the classic laptop position, you just push in at the bottom of the screen from the rear and it spins around so the screen faces in the opposite direction. You then close the lid and the touchscreen is facing up, ready to be used as if it were a tablet. To return to laptop mode, you open the lid and reverse the screen-flipping process. When you flip the screen from one position to the other, it snaps back into the aluminum frame of the lid firmly and reassuringly.

I found this method easy and reliable, and commendably innovative from a company that hasn’t historically been hailed for industrial design. I found it a bit quicker and less of a hassle than some of the other mode-shifting techniques I’ve tested.

Then, close the lid so the screen is facing up.

However, as with all of its competitors I’ve tested that don’t completely separate the screen and the keyboard, the XPS 12 doesn’t make for a very usable tablet, both for hardware and software reasons. The hardware weighs 3.35 pounds, more than double the weight of the heaviest iPad. At its thickest point, it’s twice as thick as an iPad. It’s also much larger.

The XPS 12 was uncomfortable to use as a tablet, in my hands or lap, for long periods. Like its convertible rivals, it is, at best, a standard laptop that can be occasionally used in tablet mode, preferably on a desk or table.

And then there’s the software. Although it’s now six months old, Microsoft’s Windows 8, in my view, hasn’t made much progress in improving its tabletlike aspect, the Start Screen. Its core Start Screen apps, like email and calendar, while improved, are still crude. The latest insult: You can no longer directly sync Google calendar data to the new Windows 8 calendar app. And its store still lacks key apps common on Apple and Android tablets, such as an official version of Facebook, or the popular news app, Flipboard.

As a traditional laptop, the XPS 12 does better, but still has drawbacks, especially when it comes to battery life.

Its strongest point is the screen, which is especially bright, crisp and very responsive to the touch. It has a sturdy body, partly made of carbon fiber. It was able to run everything I threw at it, handily and speedily. This included not only Microsoft programs, like the latest version of Microsoft Office, but traditional desktop programs from competitors, such as Adobe Reader, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s iTunes.

On the Start Screen, it ran tablet-type, full-screen apps like Twitter, Kindle, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Dell has cut way back on the amount of craplets — unwanted software or trials and come-ons — it preloads on this machine.

However, partly because of the flip mechanism and the hidden components needed to make it work, the XPS 12 is heavier and thicker than the largest MacBook Air, which starts at the same price and has a bigger screen, at 13.3 inches.

Battery life is a big downside on this Dell. In my tough laptop test, where I turn off power-saving software, crank up the screen to 100 percent, leave the Wi-Fi on to collect email, and play a continuous loop of music, the XPS 12 lasted just 3 hours and 31 minutes. That’s awful compared with the 6 hours and 13 minutes I got on the 13-inch MacBook Air in the same test.

In more normal use, with power-saving on, I suspect you could get 4 to 5 hours on the XPS 12, but that’s still nothing to write home about.

And there’s one more issue with this Dell: Available storage. Of the 128 gigabytes on the solid state drive, only 102 were available to me out of the box. Dell explains this is because of things like the space claimed by Windows 8, and an Intel system that guarantees fast starting and resuming.

One consideration for consumers buying any Dell product is the company’s proclaimed strategy to cater mainly to business customers. But Dell executives insisted they remain committed to the consumer market.

Dell deserves credit for a clever flip screen design in the XPS 12. But it’s very hard to make a computer that’s both a great laptop and a great tablet, even if the operating system contains elements of both.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130402/dell-laptop-does-flips-to-try-to-be-a-thick-tablet/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130328/sweet-biz-stone-is-poised-to-launch-new-mobile-startup-called-jelly/ http://allthingsd.com/20130328/sweet-biz-stone-is-poised-to-launch-new-mobile-startup-called-jelly/#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 22:49:32 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=307635

According to sources, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is close to launching a new startup called Jelly, which one person called a “native mobile” effort.

While it’s not clear exactly what that means, sources said the well-known entrepreneur has already hired four or five employees to form a team on the mystery product that will likely be aimed at smartphones and tablets.

It’s an interesting move, since Stone is also running a small incubator called Obvious with one of his Twitter co-founders, Ev Williams. They left their daily roles at the high-profile microblogging service to create Obvious, which has startups such as Lift, Branch and Medium in its portfolio.

There has been low-level chatter in Silicon Valley about Stone’s startup, which some have taken to mean he is no longer working as much with Williams at Obvious. But sources said that is not the case and both are involved in helping their small group of startups.

That said, Williams has been focusing more on Medium, an effort to rejigger blogging and content platforms. Meanwhile, another Obvious principal, Jason Goldman, has been focused on Branch, an online conversation-focused site.

Presumably, Obvious will invest in Jelly, but that’s not clear.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130328/sweet-biz-stone-is-poised-to-launch-new-mobile-startup-called-jelly/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130327/the-building-is-the-new-server/ http://allthingsd.com/20130327/the-building-is-the-new-server/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:02:19 +0000 Scott Weiss http://allthingsd.com/?p=307138

Image copyright Oleksiy Mark

The personal computer is dead. As quickly as we moved from the desktop to the laptop, we are moving to the tablet — never to return. With the death of the PC, an entire ecosystem dies with it. The chipset is ARM-based, rather than Intel. The operating system is all iOS and Android, rather than Windows. The applications are hosted cloud apps like Box, Google Apps and Evernote rather than SharePoint, Office and Outlook.

This is rocking the industry. Dell is being taken private — closing a curtain to start the dirty work of restructuring. HP, Microsoft and Intel are all trading well off their peaks when the Dow has recently hit an all-time high. IBM looks like the sole winner, jettisoning its PC business years ago to China-based Lenovo. Well, it’s a good thing all of these companies also play a big part in the $55 billion server market¹ — that’s not going away anytime soon, right? The worst days are over, and hopefully their collective market caps will recover? Not so fast …

Modern Web services, such as Google, Apple and Facebook, are pushing the limits of data center scaling to unprecedented levels as they deal with an exponential growth in user traffic. They are playing a massive game of Tetris as they grapple with deploying and operating data centers with tens of thousands of servers versus hundreds. They are all on the bleeding edge of trying to contain costs while cramming as much capacity into a physical building as possible. The result is a complete architectural rethink of data center designs, and the incumbent server vendors are struggling to stay relevant in this new reality.

The new data center designs use only commodity “vanity-free” components procured directly from the original design manufacturers (ODM) — the current incumbent’s suppliers. For easy serviceability, components are Velcro-ed together, versus mounted in a box. All bells and whistles are stripped off, and the hardware is purpose-built for a specific application and therefore carefully tuned. As compute-utilization rates skyrocket from virtualization and parallel processing, the CPUs are running harder and hotter, and therefore the new expense bottleneck is all about power and cooling.

Take, for instance, Facebook’s Open Compute initiative, which lays out a blueprint for an energy-efficient hyper-scale data center that is 38 percent more energy efficient and 24 percent less expensive than current data centers. Locating in cold climates and next to super-cheap hydro power has become de rigueur. Power distribution, cooling and building layouts have been redesigned from the ground up to maximize mechanical performance and electrical efficiency of the data center. And unfortunately for Intel, the relentless march of Moore’s law no longer affords them differentiation, as customer needs have shifted from performance to power efficiency, an area where they lag rival ARM processors.

The evolution of the modern hyper-scale data center reflects the hyper-scale needs of the applications that run on them. Modern Web 2.0 (and increasingly SaaS) applications need to handle thousands of user requests per second, processing terabytes of information in real time across hundreds of customers. They are by necessity massively parallel, and work in concert to service a user request. This is the modern equivalent of a giant supercomputer — except cobbled together from commodity server components and interconnect fabrics. It’s a profound software and hardware architectural shift that is taking us from a world where data centers consisted of a small number of independent high-performance branded servers to a brave new world where the giant data center building is the server.

Meanwhile, on the enterprise front, the corporate data center is becoming increasingly sedate as on-prem applications give way to their SaaS counterparts. The new data center architectures, born of necessity from the giant Web service providers, have the potential to massively drive down the cost of providing software as a service, the new winner in enterprise applications. As such, the cloud service providers (CSPs), such as Amazon and Rackspace, are adopting these “scale-out” architectures.

So, fast-forward: SaaS will win the enterprise market. Face it — it’s just so much better, and now infinitely cheaper than any of the alternatives. And modern SaaS applications will be delivered through hyper-scale data centers that do not have branded servers from Dell, HP or IBM, but rather highly optimized, scale-out white-box servers made by Asian ODMs. In addition, the operators of these massive data centers will be experts in servicing their creations — monitoring, fixing and rapidly swapping out their expected-to-fail components. Therefore, there will no longer be a need for the recurring revenue, high-margin service and maintenance contracts that have been a mainstay of the OEM server industry.

I wonder if Lenovo is in the market for a server business, too.

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I would like to thank my partner, Ramu Arunachalam, for his research, analysis and material contributions to this blog.

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¹IDC estimates (2012)

Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. Follow him on his blog or on Twitter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130327/the-building-is-the-new-server/feed/ 17 http://allthingsd.com/20130326/new-flipboard-news-and-posts-handpicked-and-shared/ http://allthingsd.com/20130326/new-flipboard-news-and-posts-handpicked-and-shared/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:02:58 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=306977

One of the best ways of following topics that are interesting to you is Flipboard, a popular app for Apple and Android mobile devices that automatically turns social-network posts and news from online publications into beautiful, magazine-like pages you “flip” through by swiping.

Now, a new second generation of Flipboard, out Tuesday, is extending the app so it allows users to create and share their own handsome digital magazines with a few clicks and without any design talent required. If you make your magazine public, anyone with Flipboard, which is a free app, can read it and comment on it.

I’ve been testing this new version of Flipboard, which has some other improved features, over the past week or so, on several iPads and an iPhone. My verdict is the new features make a great mobile app even better. There are some limitations to the new capabilities, but they make your mobile device more personal and more of a creative tool, rather than just a means of consumption. For now, the new version is only available for Apple’s devices, but an Android edition is in the works.

Walt Mossberg’s Flipboard magazine on the American Revolution

The original Flipboard, which is produced by a small, private Silicon Valley company of the same name, was aimed at helping people wade through the welter of information on social networks and the Web, by allowing them to corral posts on popular topics like, say, baking or basketball, into attractive collections. The company says that capability has earned it 50 million registered users and a smaller, but active, core group of millions who use it daily.

I have long used Flipboard to follow tech and political news, or to leaf through everything posted on Twitter or Facebook by particular people or sites. These collections would update as new posts meeting the criteria appeared. If I had a collection about, say, the economy or smartphones, based on tweets on those subjects, it would stay current, showing me automatically any Web pages referenced within those tweets.

With the new personal magazine feature, however, I can make my own Flipboard-hosted publications on particular topics of interest, handpicking the posts or articles I want to include, rather than relying on feeds or algorithms. And it’s easy to do. When you find a post, video or article you want to include in your magazine, you just click a plus button next to it, choose which of your magazines to “flip it” into and it appears in that magazine. The magazine only updates when you decide to update it with a new article, photo or video. The original creators are credited.

Above, one person’s Flipboard page with personal magazines and subscriptions

During my testing, I made five magazines, some public and some private. Since these were just for testing, they weren’t carefully created. But I was impressed by how quickly I could produce them and how nicely Flipboard laid them out, with handsome cover photos, bold headlines and a logical arrangement of photos and articles.

I made public magazines on the American Revolution, Ancient Wonders, the Boston Red Sox and my favorite current TV dramas. I also made a private magazine to store content I wanted to read later.

This process is greatly helped by a much-enhanced search feature in Flipboard, which finds items both in Flipboard itself and in a long list of social networks and sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr and streams of content, called RSS feeds, produced by various sites.

You can add content to your magazines using a special bookmark for most browsers on PCs or Macs. When you see something on the Web you’d like in one of your magazines, click this bookmark and a small Flipboard window opens with thumbnails of your magazines, allowing you to add the item. Alas, this bookmark is very difficult to install on the browsers on the iPad and iPhone.

There’s a new Notifications feature that tells you when people have liked or commented on your magazines. A “By Our Readers” feature suggests public magazines the Flipboard staff considers outstanding.

Publishers are making use of the new magazine feature in Flipboard. Esquire has created a magazine that’s a collection of its interviews and Rolling Stone has published a Flipboard magazine collecting some of its articles on the Beatles.

If you find a magazine you like, you can subscribe to it, for easy and continued access, or share a link to it via Twitter, Facebook or email. If somebody who has Flipboard wants to view the magazine, it’ll automatically open. Otherwise, the link will take a person to a Web page with instructions on how to get Flipboard.

Unfortunately, what you can’t do is to edit your magazine much, or add original or local content to it. You can’t rearrange articles, or create your own text articles, or add photos or videos that live only on your iPad or iPhone. You also can’t rearrange articles. Because Flipboard is so oriented to pulling in content from online sources, to use one of your own photos or videos in your own magazine, you’d have to first post it to a site like Flickr. To use an article you write for your own magazine, you’d have to first post it online.

The only tweaking you can do directly is to change the cover picture, which is typically drawn from the most recent article you include that has a photo; remove an item; create and change the title and a short description of the magazine; and change its status between publicly visible or private.

You also can’t charge for your magazines or sell ads in them, though any ads embedded in the content you include would travel with that content into your magazine.

Flipboard says it expects to add some of these features, like the ability to use photos and videos stored on your device, in updates.

Overall, Flipboard’s new personal magazines are a very good addition to a very good app.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130326/new-flipboard-news-and-posts-handpicked-and-shared/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130319/how-much-of-a-tablet-can-you-get-for-under-300/ http://allthingsd.com/20130319/how-much-of-a-tablet-can-you-get-for-under-300/#comments Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:03:02 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=305039

This month marks the third anniversary of Apple’s iPad. Since it hit the market, it has sold over 120 million units, and tablets in general have taken off. But large-screen tablets like the 9.7-inch iPad have remained dear for many budgets. The latest iPad and Microsoft’s new Surface RT start at $499. Even lower-priced, full-size tablets from name-brand companies typically cost $300 to $400. To pay significantly less, you’ve had to opt for a much smaller unit, in the 7-inch range.

Now, major manufacturers are lowering prices for some larger-screen tablets to at least slightly below $300. This week I’ve been testing two of these sub-$300 models. One is the largest Kindle Fire HD, with an 8.9-inch screen and a price that was just cut to $269 from $299. The other is a new 10.1-inch tablet from Asus, the MeMo Pad Smart 10.1, which sells for $299. The Kindle’s display is smaller than the roughly 10-inch tablets, but I consider it close enough to include in the category.

Left, the Asus MeMo Pad Smart; right, the Kindle Fire HD

What kind of large tablet do you get for under $300? Pretty good ones. While neither of the two I tested is as good as the iPad, each delivers decent value for the price.

These two tablets are quite different from each other. The new, awkwardly named, Asus is a standard Android tablet, replete with built-in apps from Google, which makes Android, and a few from Asus. It has front and rear cameras, and the standard 16 gigabytes of internal memory. And it has access to the Google Play store, which features over 700,000 apps, only a fraction of which are designed to take advantage of a large tablet screen.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9, like its popular $199, 7-inch sibling, is technically an Android tablet. But it buries Android under Amazon’s own user interface, doesn’t feature Google’s apps and uses its own tablet-oriented, highly curated app store, which currently has 50,000 choices. It is capable of managing email, browsing and social networking, and running popular third-party apps and games. However, the Kindle Fire HD is mainly a hardware front end to Amazon’s vast collection of digital books, music and video. It also comes with 16 gigabytes of internal memory.

The Asus, available at various online stores, runs the current major release of Android, called Jelly Bean, albeit a slightly older version of that software. However, the Kindle, consistent with its general demotion of Android to mere plumbing, is running a version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, that’s a whole generation behind. It’s available at Amazon.com.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two was in battery life. I ran my usual rigorous tablet battery test on each, turning the screen brightness to 75%, keeping Wi-Fi on to collect email in the background, and then playing videos until the units shut down for lack of power.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 scored 8 hours and 16 minutes in my test, nearly two hours less than the iPad, yet better than many tablets I’ve tested. But the Asus MeMo did quite poorly, lasting only 5 hours and 27 minutes, almost 3 hours less than Amazon’s tablet.

To get the Kindle for $269, you have to put up with ads, some on the lock screen and some in the form of recommendations for buying other content on the home screen. You can turn off the latter in settings—a new feature. But to get a model without the full-screen ads, which Amazon calls “Special Offers,” you have to pay $15 more, either when purchasing the device or by going to an obscure page on Amazon.com.

Other downsides of the Kindle HD 8.9 are that it lacks a rear camera and its browser, called Silk, remains in my tests a bit slower at loading Web pages than either the iPad or standard Android browsers.

On the other hand, the bigger Kindle offers a crisp, sharp screen, and can also be purchased for just $30 more with twice the memory, and for $399 with a cellular data option in addition to Wi-Fi. It’s lighter and slightly thinner than the full-size iPad, and slightly thinner and lighter than the MeMo 10.1, though the latter is also lighter than the iPad. It has much higher screen resolution than the MeMo’s, but less than the iPad’s.

The Asus lacks a higher-memory or cellular model, though it has a memory-card slot for adding storage. It also has a nice feature that permits continuous burst shooting of up to 100 continuous photos. This photo feature worked, but some of the shots were out of focus.

With the Kindle, I never had a crash or a glitch. On the Asus, I ran into a couple of minor, but annoying, problems. An Asus app called BuddyBuzz, one of many attempts by device makers to meld your social networks in one place, crashed frequently. However, I doubt many users will rely on it. And while playing movies rented from Google, I got several messages saying the movie couldn’t be authenticated. One tap fixed this, but no one wants to be interrupted like that while watching “Inception.” Asus said it couldn’t replicate either glitch but would investigate.

Many people may prefer smaller tablets, which typically sell for around $200 or even less. But for those who want a full-size slate at a lower price, these two sub-$300 models are good choices.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130319/how-much-of-a-tablet-can-you-get-for-under-300/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130319/a-pc-and-tablet-brick-for-the-price-of-one/ http://allthingsd.com/20130319/a-pc-and-tablet-brick-for-the-price-of-one/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:13:35 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://allthingsd.com/?p=304986

Just because two things work well on their own doesn’t mean they’ll be great together. Think spaghetti and ice cream, or Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. In the tech world, companies regularly try to combine two or more products into one device. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.

This week, I reviewed an example of the latter. I tested Asus’s Transformer AiO, a $1,300 PC available April 12 that offers dual functionality in both its software and its hardware. It’s an all-in-one desktop computer with a wireless keyboard and mouse that runs Windows 8 and, with the press of a button, switches to running Google’s Android operating system, Jelly Bean 4.1.

As the Transformer’s name suggests, it also transforms into another device: Pull up on the PC screen to separate it from its stand and it becomes a tablet you can move around the house. It has a handle and a kickstand for propping up on flat surfaces. Like the desktop version, the tablet runs two systems: Windows 8 Remote and Jelly Bean 4.1.

Though this concept sounds smart, it’s laughable in practice. The screen measures a whopping 18.4 inches diagonally and weighs an arm-straining 5.3 pounds. Apple’s iPad screen measures 9.7 inches and weighs 1.4 pounds; Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2 has a 7-inch screen and weighs 0.8 of a pound. At home, carrying this around and using it on my lap elicited fits of laughter from my husband. When I flipped the tablet into vertical mode, it looked like I was reading from a giant, stone tablet. And in Android mode, the tablet’s battery only lasted five hours.

So where does this Asus Transformer AiO fit in? In tablet mode, I propped it up on my kitchen island to watch a YouTube video while cooking, and though the giant screen took up a lot of space, its display looked sharp and didn’t force me to lean down to the screen as much as I do with my iPad. Some people may prefer making Skype video calls on the front-facing camera of this movable screen rather than using a stationary computer. Families might even gather around this tablet to play a digital coffee-table game. As an all-in-one desktop PC, this Asus works fine.

But as a desktop and a tablet, the dual software systems made me scratch my head. I found myself forgetting about Windows 8 while I used Android and vice versa. I’m willing to bet that most people will stick to one operating system rather than frequently switching back and forth.

In either tablet or PC Station mode, above right, the Asus Transformer AiO runs Windows 8 and Jelly Bean 4.1. Left: Pull up on the PC screen to separate the screen from its stand and it becomes a heavy tablet you can move around the house.

In my harsh tablet battery test, where I play a constant loop of video with the screen set to 75 percent brightness and Wi-Fi on to retrieve email in the background, I got almost exactly five hours, which is Asus’s official battery life estimate.

The Android and Windows operating systems each have their own independent storage, so if you save something on one system, it won’t be saved on the other. Asus calls the Transformer’s desktop stand the “PC Station.” The model I tested runs on Intel’s midrange Core i5 processor and offers a one-terabyte hard drive. The tablet runs on Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor and comes with 32 gigabytes of storage. I didn’t notice any significant lag in either one of these modes.

The PC Station is loaded with five USB ports, four that use the newer USB 3.0 technology and one that uses USB 2.0, but this USB 2.0 port is designed for a small Bluetooth dongle that corresponds with the included Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I liked typing on the keyboard’s Chiclet-style keys, and the flat mouse gives clever haptic feedback where a mouse wheel appeared on older models. The PC Station also has speakers, a slot for three types of memory cards and a DVD drive.

The Asus Transformer tablet also has speakers, though I found these weren’t nearly as strong as those built into the PC Station. It, too, has a memory card reader for MicroSD cards, just in case you wanted to offload some photos and didn’t have the tablet in its PC Station stand. It also has a mini USB 2.0 port. The tablet’s front-facing camera worked fine in Android mode; in Windows mode the camera failed, but Asus said this would be fixed before the Transformer is out next month.

I was relieved this 5.3-pound, 18″ x 12″ tablet didn’t have a rear-facing camera. I’d get a bicep workout just from holding this thing up to take a photo, and I can imagine the strange looks I would get from passersby.

The Asus Transformer tablet can’t be discreetly tucked away on the lower shelf of a coffee table; it’s massive. After using it for a little while one night, and then letting it just sit on my lap, I had to move it to the floor five minutes later because it weighed so much.

If you move the tablet too far away from the PC Station and you’re running the Windows operating system, it will automatically switch to Android tablet mode. An Asus spokesman said this shouldn’t be a problem within 30 to 65 feet of the PC Station on most setups.

Asus tried to kill two birds with one stone when it created the Transformer AiO, but wound up building a giant brick. Your best bet is to stick to a traditional PC that does one thing well.

Email Katie at katie.boehret@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130319/a-pc-and-tablet-brick-for-the-price-of-one/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130314/why-you-can-watch-ncis-on-your-ipad-but-not-big-bang-theory/ http://allthingsd.com/20130314/why-you-can-watch-ncis-on-your-ipad-but-not-big-bang-theory/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:58:09 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=303709 CBS has a new iPad and iPhone app that will let you watch many of its shows for free. That’s not interesting at all.

What is interesting are the decisions the network has made about what you can watch on the apps, and when you can watch them. Because they say a lot about the state of the TV business, and the way it is and isn’t adapting to digital reality.

Stuff to pay attention to:

• CBS, which for a long time kept most of its shows off the Web, now offers almost all of them on the Web, and you can see most of those on the apps. The omissions in the mobile lineup are the shows that CBS doesn’t own. “Big Bang Theory,” for instance, comes from Time Warner’s Warner Bros. studio, so it’s not on the app.
• You can see most of CBS’ daytime and nighttime programming (soaps, “David Letterman”) on the apps the day after they air. But its primetime stuff — (“NCIS,” “The Good Wife,” etc.) won’t show up until eight days after it airs on the network.

The state of mobile, or at least the state of TV’s thinking about mobile, has a lot to do with both of those decisions.

For starters, while regular human beings recognize that stuff they look at on a tablet or a phone is the same as the stuff they see on TV or a Web browser, that’s not how biz dev and legal people think. So CBS, for instance, doesn’t have the rights to show “Big Bang Theory” on your iPad, even though it can let you watch it on its website.

And even when CBS does have mobile rights, it can’t convince advertisers to give it full credit for the eyeballs that watch its shows on phones and tablets, for technical/measurement reasons. So it’s not going to put stuff on mobile until it has wrung out the full value of its TV ad dollars.

When it comes to “Letterman” and “The Young and the Restless,” that’s the next day. But CBS and other networks are trying to convince advertisers that they should get credit for shows and ads that people watch in the seven days after an episode first airs. That’s not happening right now — currently, they get credit for shows watched live or on DVRs in the first three days after air — but CBS is hoping/assuming they’ll get what they want in the next couple years.

CBS isn’t the only network paying attention to the so-called “C7” window; you can see evidence of that in Fox’s decision to keep its shows off the Web except for “authenticated” viewers who are also paying for cable TV. (News Corp., which owns Fox, also owns this website.)

But that thinking isn’t universal, either: Right now you can watch the episode of “The Neighbors” that aired last night on ABC, on the network’s site or its iPad app, or on Hulu, for free, without any kind of sign-in/registration.

Actually, you can watch it here, too (unless you’re reading this on a tablet or mobile, because, see above). Enjoy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130314/why-you-can-watch-ncis-on-your-ipad-but-not-big-bang-theory/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130226/asus-padfone-infinity-brings-better-screen-faster-processor-and-high-price-tag/ http://allthingsd.com/20130226/asus-padfone-infinity-brings-better-screen-faster-processor-and-high-price-tag/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:45:54 +0000 Bonnie Cha http://allthingsd.com/?p=298554 If the idea of holding a seven-inch phablet up to your head doesn’t sound appealing, then you might find the Asus PadFone Infinity to be a better solution.

Announced alongside the Asus Fonepad, the PadFone Infinity features a five-inch smartphone that transforms into a 10.1-inch tablet when docked into an accompanying accessory. (The Samsung Galaxy Note might have put the term “phablet” on the map, but I’d argue that the PadFone was the original.) It’s the third model in the PadFone series, and it improves on previous versions with a faster processor, bigger screen and more.

The 4G LTE smartphone runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and features a five-inch, 1,920 by 1,080 touchscreen. (The PadFone 2 has a 4.6-inch, 1,280 by 720 display.)

On the back there’s a 13-megapixel camera that incorporates technology to help capture more details and improve low-light performance. There’s also a front-facing two-megapixel camera. Powering the device is a quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

The tablet part of PadFone Infinity is simply a shell and doesn’t work until you dock the smartphone into the back. Once connected, it provides access to everything you have on your smartphone, and it automatically reformats everything to fit on a 10.1-inch, 1,920 by 1,200 pixel touchscreen.

I got a chance to check it out here at Mobile World Congress, and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, the PadFone Infinity has a high-quality design. The smartphone’s screen is simply gorgeous.

Also, the transition from smartphone to tablet was seamless. Once docked, the tablet came to life and, as far as I could tell, there weren’t any problems with apps not displaying correctly on the larger screen.

The benefit to such a design is that you don’t have to sync your apps between two devices. It also saves money on your mobile bill, since you don’t have to add another device to your data plan.

That said, it doesn’t help reduce clutter, since you still have to carry around two gadgets. It’s also incredibly expensive, at about $1,300. For $600 less, you could get the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 tablet.

The Asus PadFone Infinity is expected to be available in the U.K. starting in April. There are currently no plans to bring it to the U.S.; though, like previous versions, you should be able to buy it online.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130226/asus-padfone-infinity-brings-better-screen-faster-processor-and-high-price-tag/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130212/broadcom-readying-its-first-lte-chip-which-it-claims-will-be-smaller-than-rivals/ http://allthingsd.com/20130212/broadcom-readying-its-first-lte-chip-which-it-claims-will-be-smaller-than-rivals/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:00:03 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=293663

After being stuck in 3G land for a while now, Broadcom said it is getting closer to having a modem chip that supports faster LTE networks.

The chip, which it is sampling now and is set for volume production next year, is said to be a third smaller than many rival chips, while supporting all the key standards and technologies. Among its features is support for voice calls over LTE, as well as a feature to bond together different frequencies that a carrier has into one faster pipeline onto the Internet.

“We think it is going to be a winner,” Broadcom CEO Scott McGregor said in an interview.

Thus far, Qualcomm has dominated the LTE market with its chips, though other chipmakers are starting to enter the market.

“Other people have announced some chips that maybe nibble away at the low end of the market,” McGregor said.

By contrast, Broadcom’s goal is to have a product that can go in the highest-end products.

“The real goal here is to create a product that really is a world chip for the flagship smartphones and tablets,” he said.

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