Microsoft’s understanding of the ecosystem is a big threat In the next generation console war, the first round has emphatically been won by Sony. The right pricing, strategy and marketing has led to the PS4 outselling the Xbox One 2 to 1 and there is no sign of that changing anytime soon. While Sony has...
Only bad marketing keeps the PC market from growth. Both Gartner and IDC have released their Q314A figures for the PC market which continues to show very little movement. Q314A Shipments have been essentially flat, falling by just 0.5% YoY to 79.4m units. IDC reported 78.5m units shipped representing a decline of 1.7% YoY. The...
At $10bn, even a financial return looks to be a challenge. Yahoo! has made a huge return from its investment in Alibaba but its fiduciary duty to prudently invest on behalf of investors remains unchanged regardless how much money is in the bank. Snapchat appears to be raising yet another round of financing this time...
Samsung is getting closer to the fate of its peers. Samsung has guided for Q314A results that strongly indicate that it is losing control of its handset business. Q314A revenues and operating profit will be KRW46tn-KRW48tn and KRW3.9tn-KRW4.3tn. The median of these figures is revenues of KRW47tn and operating profit of KRW4.1tn. Consensus was looking...
Usage of Chrome is likely to continue growing. The latest data from Net Market Share (see here) shows that Chrome is steadily gaining share when it comes to web browsing. Chrome now makes up 22% of all mobile web browser usage behind Safari at 45%. This is more than double the usage Chrome enjoyed just...
Small, lean and cheap is the way forward for wearables. ARM has announced a new platform for wearables called mBed that is designed to run on its new Cortex-M7 processor family that has been specifically designed for this segment. There are two pieces to the platform. First. The device software. This is an RTOS (real...
Windows 10 aims to keep the corporate cycle from collapse. Typically when Microsoft makes a major new release it fares badly and then the next version corrects all of the problems and fares much better. Windows XP and Windows 7 were superb releases that followed major upgrades to the OS that were unpopular. Microsoft is...
AOL is not the answer. A recent open letter from activist shareholder Starboard has correctly diagnosed all the issues at Yahoo! but its prescription will not fix the company. There is no doubt that performance of the core business has been extremely disappointing over the last 2 years. Revenues in its display and search based...
Quality will soon become the most important factor. As the smartphone market starts to settle down, quality of experience will become increasingly important. This is because in order to grow different ecosystems will have to start taking subscribers from each other rather than relying on new users. When it comes to quality, iOS comfortably wins...
Richard is founder, owner of research company, Radio Free Mobile. He has 16 years of experience working in sell side equity research. During his 11 year tenure at Nomura Securities, he focused on the equity coverage of the Global Technology sector.
Tablets – The long goodnight
The latest releases from Apple are unlikely to reignite growth. The tablet market has been the fastest market to go from birth to rapid growth to commoditisation to maturity. After a few short years of stunning growth, this segment already looks very mature with just 4% growth expected this year after 44% in 2013A. I...