Grand Theft Auto V Clocks $1 Bn in Sales

 

 

"It transcends the standard gaming demographic," explained Jon Hicks, editor for Xbox 360 - The Official Xbox Magazine UK. "I think that's one of the reasons why it's so successful: Everybody who buys video games buys GTA, and many other people who don't routinely buy video games will also buy it. It's got to that level of sort of cultural weight."

It's not every day that a video game becomes a mainstream tech story. Then again, it's not every day that a video game promptly records US$1 billion in sales.

 

Grand Theft Auto V did just that, however, eclipsing the 10-figure mark three days after its Sept. 17 release. The game's success is an emphatic declaration that the GTA brand -- first introduced in 1997 -- is still going strong, and that it will be a force as the next generation of game consoles comes to life.

In a chat with Jon Hicks, editor for Xbox 360 - The Official Xbox Magazine (UK). Joining us from London, Hicks talks about how GTA appeals to video game aficionados and laymen alike, why the UK-made game is so America-centric, and how GTA gets away with being so ... GTA.


Us: There was so much made of the launch of the game last week, and of the insane production costs, which reportedly went over $250 million, and there were also a lot of revenue projections about when it would hit the $1 billion mark. But it's perhaps worth stepping back and asking how the actual game is. As a video game fan and as a video game critic, what were your initial takeaways, and what do you think about the game itself now that the dust has settled a little bit?
Jon Hicks: Well, I think its success was almost a foregone conclusion. GTA is one of the biggest gaming franchises, and it's particularly potent because it's quite a rare release still. I mean, I haven't actually seen the relative values compared, but the other big-money franchises kind of drop in every single year, like Call of Duty and FIFA. They sell very well, and they do good business, but because they arrive every year there's diminished excitement around them. They're a sort of regular fixture.

GTA -- it's been five years since the last one came out, it has this huge audience, it transcends the standard gaming demographic. People will buy GTA and they will buy almost no other games. I think that's one of the reasons why it's so successful: Everybody who buys video games buys GTA, and many other people who don't routinely buy video games will also buy it. It's got to that level of sort of cultural weight.

On top of that, it's a really exceptional game, as well. Rockstar [which makes the game] are amazing at creating open worlds, and certainly they really pushed the boat out with Grand Theft Auto IV, which was on Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2008. They've actually gone back and kind of stepped it up another level here in terms of the virtual recreation of Los Angeles -- the size of the world, the characters of the world, it's got this really ridiculous level of detail ... It's just a really, really spectacular piece of work.
TechNewsWorld: It's interesting to hear you talk about how GTA is kind of a transcendent game; I wanted ask you about that. It was interesting reading your official review of the game, and you mention some other titles that you could perhaps compare GTA to -- there was No Russian, Righteous Slaughter, Red Dead Redemption. As I was reading it -- I'm not a video game connoisseur, and I really didn't know these games, but I do know Grand Theft Auto, and I have known Grand Theft Auto for 10 years, ever since I had GTA III on my PlayStation. What is it about the game that makes it so transcendent to the point where someone like myself -- someone who has a video game console but doesn't have a particular fascination with video game -- why would somebody like me or my layman's demographic be so fascinated with GTA?
Hicks: I think it's the freedom the games give you. Most video games, they have very specific formats, there's a very specific challenge. To go to the other big one I mentioned, Call of Duty, it's basically a shooting gallery in single player, and it's a sort of free-for-all in multiplayer. FIFA is football. They're kind of quite regular.
GTA -- it took off with GTA III. That was the first time the game really hit massive mainstream success, and I think it's because they give you the whole city. You can just kind of wander around with your character, and you can steal cars and drive cars and beat people up and drive into the ocean and all this kind of stuff. It's a very instantly rewarding, kind of sandbox experience: Even if you don't really play video games, it's possible to pick up a controller and play GTA and just mess around with it in a really satisfying way. And again, because the games get more advanced every single time, there's always an extra layer of systems in there. There are different radio stations to listen to, or the pedestrians react in a certain way...
Most games you have to sort of explain the setup -- "you are a soldier and you're trying to get inside the battlefield" or... I don't know, video games aren't historically very good at storytelling. They all revolve around shooting aliens or something for some sort of spurious reason. And if you aren't particularly engaged in that, and you don't find the actual act of shooting very rewarding, then it's quite easy for people to sort of bounce off that sort of thing. I think with GTA, you can just go, "Here's a world. You can do pretty much what you like. Get on with it."

Google Upgrades Search Algorithm

@drealdavidify

 

Google has unveiled an upgrade to the way it interprets users' search requests.

The new algorithm, codenamed Hummingbird, is the first major upgrade for three years.
It has already been in use for about a month, and affects about 90% of Google searches.
At a presentation on Thursday, the search giant was short on specifics but said Hummingbird is especially useful for longer and more complex queries.

Google stressed that a new algorithm is important as users expect more natural and conversational interactions with a search engine - for example, using their voice to speak requests into mobile phones, smart watches and other wearable technology.

Hummingbird is focused more on ranking information based on a more intelligent understanding of search requests, unlike its predecessor, Caffeine, which was targeted at better indexing of websites.

“Start Quote: We just changed Google's engines mid-flight - again” End Quote - Amit Singhal Senior VP, Google Search

 

It is more capable of understanding concepts and the relationships between them rather than simply words, which leads to more fluid interactions. In that sense, it is an extension of Google's "Knowledge Graph" concept introduced last year aimed at making interactions more human.

In one example, shown at the presentation, a Google executive showed off a voice search through her mobile phone, asking for pictures of the Eiffel Tower. After the pictures appeared, she then asked how tall it was. After Google correctly spoke back the correct answer, she then asked "show me pictures of the construction" - at which point a list of images appeared.

Big payoffs?
However, one search expert cautioned that it was too early to determine Hummingbird's impact. "For me this is more of a coming out party, rather than making me think 'wow', said Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land.

Tamar Yehoshua of Google Search demonstrates Google's new user interface, by looking for information on impressionist painters

"If you've been watching this space, you'd have already seen how they've integrated it into the [predictive search app] Google Now and conversational search.

"To know that they've put this technology further into their index may have some big payoffs but we'll just have to see how it plays out," Mr Sullivan said.

The news was announced at an intimate press event at the Silicon Valley garage where founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page worked on the launch of the search engine, which is fifteen years old on Friday.

At the event, the search behemoth also announced an updated search app on Apple's iOS, as well as a more visible presence for voice search on its home page.

Apple Rumours

The fourth-generation iPad.

Each week, there are dozens of Apple rumours, reports, and patent filings that hint at what’s coming out of Cupertino next. Some are legit, but most are totally bogus. We parse the week’s rumors for you, ranking them in order from “utterly ridiculous” to “duh, of course.” First up…

DON’T COUNT ON IT: Apple Working on a 12-Inch iPad
Apple could be super-sizing the iPad. China’s United Daily News (via Apple Insider) says that Apple is working with its Korean manufacturing partner Quanta, which currently produces the MacBook Air, on a 12-inch iPad model. While I’m sure Apple is exploring tablets (and smartphones) of different sizes, I don’t see it introducing a large 12-13 inch tablet any time soon. If Quanta is just getting into producing touchscreen tablets, it will take a while for the manufacturing process to get streamlined enough for Apple to rely on. I also think it will take a year or more for Apple to be able to create a 12-plus inch iPad that doesn’t weigh an obscene amount.

DON’T COUNT ON IT: Apple Patent Lets Authors Sign Fans’ E-Books
Apple’s trove of intellectual property filings are always interesting to explore. This week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published an Apple patent for embedding an autograph in an e-book. This technology would let users get e-books autographed or personalized by the author, much like they would on a physical book. This could also be done for other digital media like movies and music albums. While it’s a cool idea, and the technology could be implemented in other types of signing applications as well, part of the reason a signed book or movie poster has emotional value is because the author actually touched it with their pen. I don’t think a digital autograph would hold quite the same value for many of us.

SIGNS POINT TO YES: Purported Photos of New iPad Shown in Space Gray, Silver
The next iPad is going to look a whole lot like the iPhone 5/5s, according to purported photos of the next-generation tablet. The photos show the iPad coming in two of the same colors as the iPhone 5s: Space Gray and Silver. Keeping the colors consistent throughout its mobile product lines certainly makes sense. The iPad mini is also rumored to sport the same color scheme as the 5s. The big question here though is: Will the iPad also come in gold?

SIGNS POINT TO YES: Photos of iPad Mini in Gold Emerge
Ask and you shall receive. Today photos emerged claiming to show the iPad mini in gold — and also sporting Touch ID in its home button. While the photos themselves may or may not be real, as we said above, it would make sense for Apple to keep the color scheme consistent among its iPhone and iPad line, as it has in the past.

GamePad Reinvented

Valve has unveiled the Steam Controller, a complete re-imagining of the traditional gamepad designed to bring any and all keyboard-and-mouse PC games to the living room. Image: Valve

As part of its quest to bring PC gaming into the living room, Valve now wants to totally reinvent the gamepad.

 

The company behind Half-Life, Portal and the Steam digital gaming service announced the Steam Controller on Friday morning, but it’s not just a traditional controller with a few tweaks. In an attempt to make PC games designed around a mouse and keyboard interface fully playable in a living-room situation, Valve has rethought the handheld gamepad experience. Steam Controllers won’t have a D-pad or an analog joystick, the two constant features of nearly every standard game controller since 1983. Instead, it will feature two trackpads.

 

“The trackpads allow far higher fidelity input than has previously been possible with traditional handheld controllers,” Valve wrote on the announcement page. “Steam gamers, who are used to the input associated with PCs, will appreciate that the Steam Controller’s resolution approaches that of a desktop mouse. Whole genres of games that were previously only playable with a keyboard and mouse are now accessible from the sofa.”

 

While the dual trackpads are certainly the most visually striking and fundamentally transformative elements of the new controller, Valve did not stop there. It added a touchscreen in the middle of the controller. There’s advanced force feedback, which it calls a “higher-bandwidth haptic information channel than exists in any other consumer product that we know of.” It’s symmetrical, so that left-handed and right-handed players will never find themselves at a disadvantage.

An example of how the Steam controller might work with Valve’s Portal 2. Image: Valve

 

And there are buttons, buttons everywhere. Each trackpad can be clicked like a button. The touchscreen can be clicked like a button. Valve says that there are 16 buttons total, and eight of them can be accessed without moving one’s thumbs off of the trackpads.

 

Is this genius or insanity? Sure, it looks weird, but didn’t we all think that the first time we saw the ridiculous three-pronged Nintendo 64 controller? It’s tough to imagine how one might use it, but didn’t we think the same thing about the Wiimote before we tried it for ourselves? And weren’t we all sure that a phone without buttons would be horrible?

 

On the other hand, the most successful innovations in game controllers tend to simplify the experience, not complicate it. If you thought standard game controllers had a sharp learning curve, take a look at Steam Controller with its 16 buttons and dual trackpads. Our contributor John Mix Meyer messaged me a few moments ago to call this “the Homer of controllers,” everything people say they want but might not actually want in practice.

 

Sure, it makes all PC games playable from the couch, but is that really something people will want to do? Will the war over the couch be won by making games suitable for the couch — or making the couch suitable for the games?

 

With Steam Controller, Valve’s position is laid bare. Let’s see if it turns out to be the right move.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer steps down in a Tear-Stained Goodbye To Microsoft Employees; It Was Like A Rock Concert

Every year, Microsoft holds a big, crazy event for its employees. This year, the event centered on Steve Ballmer. It was his final company meeting as Microsoft's CEO, a position he's held since 2000.

But the "meeting" seemed much more like a rock concert, with screaming fans, blaring music, long lines and ultimately, tears.

First, 13,000 Microsoft employees headed to Key Arena in Seattle where the farewell took place. Software engineer Bob Ulrich snapped a picture:

The line to get into Key Arena to see Steve Ballmer's final Microsoft meeting.

Here's what the arena looked like as Microsoft employees poured in (via Geekwire).

Music blared including Michael Jackson's "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" which Ballmer played at the first annual meeting he held 30 years ago.

"He then proceeded to jump and dance around the stage screaming at the top of his voice 'the sound of Microsoft!'" The Verge reports. Ballmer then told Microsoft employees they work for "the greatest company in the world." 

The meeting ended with Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes' "I've had The Time of My Life."

By the end, Ballmer reportedly had tears streaming down his face.  He screamed along with his send out song, "I've had the time of my life!" and Microsoft employees screamed back, "We love you!".

New Security Risk

Screenshot

Using nothing more than a smartphone resting next to a laptop, researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new technique for logging your keystrokes based on sound and vibration.

In the paper on the project, they describe that a stationary smartphone is capable enough to translate typing sounds into actual text by estimating where on a keyboard the stroke landed based on its volume and force.

By "teaching" the phone a dictionary of words based on what they sound like typed out, they were able to get accurate text in return. Initially the accuracy was quite good, but as they added more and more words to this dictionary, it became less accurate in its interpretation.

It's a pretty strong reminder that our devices are getting more and more versatile, enabling all kinds of new applications, good and bad alike. A smartphone is one of the most innocuous devices we see every day, and this is an unpleasant (but healthy) reminder to be mindful of your security as our technology becomes more and more developed.

Intel said to seek Web TV backing from Samsung, Amazon

The chip giant is looking for a partner to provide funding and distribution to get the set-top box to market by its year-end deadline, sources tell us.

 

Erik Huggers, head of Intel Media, describes Intel's latest TV effort at an ICT media conference in February.

 

The clock is running out on Intel's promise to deliver an Internet-based TV service by the end of the year, and the company might be looking for help from heavy hitters to make its deadline.
The chip giant has approached Amazon and Samsung about providing funding and distribution for the service, people familiar with the service told us. The report suggests that the set-top box project could be scrapped if a strategic partner isn't found soon.

An Intel representative declined to comment. CNET has contacted Amazon and Samsung for comment on the report and will update this report when we learn more.

Dubbed OnCue, the service was described during a media conference as allowing users to watch live TV, on demand, and other offerings. Intel said it would be providing the hardware and services directly to consumers and that the box -- powered by an Intel processor, of course -- would come with a camera that can detect who is in front of the TV.

Intel is said to have 300 employees working on the project under Erik Huggers, the head of Intel Media. A version of the service running on Intel hardware is said to be in testing with 3,000 Intel employees.

While Intel has been testing the product for months, it still faces some hurdles. One of those is reaching content deals. Intel has yet to announce any TV programming partners, and Time Warner Cable and other cable TV providers have been pressuring channel owners to shun pacts with Intel and other Internet-based TV providers.

It wasn't immediately clear what contributions Intel might be seeking from the companies. Samsung, which ships millions of smart TVs, could distribute the service as a bundle, while Amazon could provide access to its growing library of movies and TV shows. However, Amazon is said to be working on a set-top box of its own.

Besides competing with the likes of Roku, Apple TV, Xbox, PlayStation, and every TV manufacturer that now builds smart-TV apps like Netflix and Vudu, Intel has a shaky history in the TV industry. It was early to push Google TVs and other smart televisions, with its processors powering a Sony Google TV and a Logitech Google TV set-top box. However, such products flopped, and Intel shuttered its TV business in late 2011 after failing to gain much traction.

Global Warming: Blamed on Humans at Last

A new assessment by hundreds of scientists strengthens the earlier conclusion that the planet is warming and that human activity is its dominant cause.

The IPCC report shows significantly increased temperatures at the Earth's surface over the last century.

 

The top authority for assessing scientific research on climate change has concluded that global warming is "unequivocal," that humans are "extremely likely" to be the dominant cause, and that there's stronger evidence now for placing the blame with us.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, first convened by the United Nations in 1988, periodically releases reports to assess global warming research findings, and on Friday, its 259 authors from 39 countries announced the IPCC's fifth report -- a major update since the last one in 2007. The new report won't surprise anyone who's followed scientists' conclusions about how greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide trap heat and thus warm the atmosphere and oceans.

"Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes," said a summary of the IPCC report (PDF) released Friday. "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century," the report said, and the evidence for human influence is stronger now than when the group wrote the 2007 report.
Several facets of global warming have been observed, the report said, and the evidence leaves no doubt:

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.

The evidence of human involvement is stronger, too. In the previous report, the IPCC researchers concluded it was likely that humans played a role in cold days getting warmer and in hot days getting hotter. Now human influence is rated as "very likely" for both of those phenomena.
The full report is scheduled for release on Monday.
In the report, "likely" means scientists are 66 percent to 100 percent sure of a particular conclusion, and "very likely" means 90 percent to 100 percent.

"Observations of changes in the climate system are based on multiple lines of independent evidence," said Qin Dahe, a co-chair of IPCC Working Group I that wrote the report.
The ocean is absorbing most of the heat, he added, and some global warming effects will accelerate. "As the ocean warms, and glaciers and ice sheets reduce, global mean sea level will continue to rise, but at a faster rate than we have experienced over the past 40 years," he said.

The changes will lead to more climate extremes at the local level, said Thomas Stricker, also a co-chair. "As the Earth warms, we expect to see currently wet regions receiving more rainfall, and dry regions receiving less, although there will be exceptions," he said.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Interview

Charlie Rose grilled Marissa Mayer at an Advertising Week event in New York City.

  

Famed interviewer Charlie Rose grilled Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on Tuesday about Yahoo's brand, the company's future ... and that controversial Vogue photo shoot.
Rose and Mayer appeared onstage at the IAB Mixx conference as part of New York City's Advertising Week. After Rose asked Mayer about gender issues as a female CEO -- to which she answered, "I really don't feel it" -- he segued into last month's flap over Mayer's photo shoot in Vogue magazine.

The magazine published a two-page photo spread of Mayer, along with a 3,000-word article about her in its September issue. In the spread, Mayer posed upside-down on a chaise lounge, hair fanned out, holding a tablet featuring an image of her face.
That photo, along with an accompanying article Vogue published about what Mayer wears to work, set off yet another Mayer-focused debate about women in the workplace.

Related - Marissa Mayer: Yahoo gets 12,000 resumes a week
Rose began to ask "about that Vogue cover," but Mayer cut him off.
"It wasn't the cover!" Mayer said, smiling a bit sheepishly. She added simply: "It was a nice photo."
Mayer walked Rose through her Vogue experience. She explained that she showed up to the Vogue shoot, where the staffers offered her a choice between a black dress or a blue one. As a rule she doesn't wear black, she said, so she chose the blue Michael Kors. At first she simply sat on the chaise, but after just two minutes the photographer said he wouldn't be able to use the prim "First Lady-like" shots, Mayer said.

"He said, 'This is not going to work at all ... Would you try kind of going upside down?' I said, 'Will it look good?' and he told me not to worry," Mayer said.

 

Mayer didn't read the accompanying Vogue article. She's said several times that she avoids reading press about herself, a point that she echoed on Tuesday,
"Madeleine Albright once said that press, good or bad, it influences you and it changes you," Mayer told Rose. "I think that's really true. It pulls you off your center. I know who I am, I know what I like, and I have a clear view of what I want Yahoo to be."

The press has closely covered Mayer's decisions, including her ban of telecommuting at Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500). But the woman herself is clearly focused on staying "on message" at public events like Tuesday's, shying away from controversial questions about gender politics and repeating ad nauseum that Yahoo is on the road to a turnaround.

Blackberry Gasps: Posts Loss of $965 million in 1 Quarter

 

It's a bleak day for the smartphone maker as it lays out its official fiscal second-quarter results. And don't go looking for additional details on its plans to go private. Also the mobile phone maker is also shedding weight.

The BlackBerry Q10 in action.

 

BlackBerry offered no real surprises as it posted a fiscal second-quarter loss of nearly $1 billion amid the continuing struggles of its smartphones in the marketplace.
The Canadian company said Friday that it lost $965 million, or $1.84, compared with a year-earlier loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share. Revenue fell 45 percent to $1.57 billion, from $2.86 billion a year ago.

The official results come a week after BlackBerry released preliminary figures and said it would cut roughly 40 percent of its staff as it shifts its focus away from consumers and more towards business customers. On Monday, the company announced a $4.7 billion deal to go private through a group of investors led by Fairfax Financial.

As a result of the warning, the numbers are roughly in line with the loss of 45 cents and revenue of $1.6 billion analysts had projected, although the results were dramatically worse than the figures Wall Street had expected prior to last Friday.

As previously noted, the biggest reason for the dramatic loss was the $934 million write-down in inventory of the BlackBerry Z10. Evidently, few people bought the Z10, which was the company's first phone to run the next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system.

The newer BlackBerry phones as a whole haven't seemed to resonate with consumers. The company said it shipped 3.7 million BlackBerrys, but a majority of them were devices running older software, which remain popular in emerging markets because of their low price.

The company ended the quarter with cash and investments of $2.6 billion.

BlackBerry is shifting its focus back to serving business customers with products and back-end systems. It said that its BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 has more than 25,000 commercial and test servers installed to date, up from 19,000 in July.

Whether that's enough to save BlackBerry -- whether it goes private or not -- remains up in the air.

Bill Gates: Ctrl+Alt+Del was a Huge Mistake

The Microsoft founder says the triple-key login should have been made easier, à la Apple's Macs, but that a designer insisted on the more complicated step.

 

"We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button," Gates said Saturday during a question-and-answer session to launch a Harvard University fund-raising campaign. His comments have gained attention since a video of his Harvard Q&A was posted on YouTube on Tuesday.

 

Smiling, Gates tried to follow through on the thought, noting it was a basic security feature. But he eventually surrendered to common sense.

 

"And so we had ... we programmed at a low level that you had to ... it was a mistake," he said, throwing up his hands to laughter and applause from the crowd.

Gates defended innovation on the earliest Microsoft software though.

"We did some clever stuff," he said. "We were able to experiment with a lot of stuff, but more on the software side than the hardware."

 

Long the first interface step for PC users, Control-Alt-Delete still exists in Windows 8 as a way of either locking the computer or accessing the control panel. While the system defaults to a log-in screen, users may tweak their settings to return to the old way of logging on to Windows.

Sometimes informally called the "three-fingered salute," the login required users to use both hands and was intended to avoid accidental keystrokes from rebooting a computer.

Engineer David Bradley, a designer on early IBM computers, said he invented the combination as a shortcut during development.

 

"I originally intended for it to be what we would now call an Easter egg -- just something we were using in development and it wouldn't be available elsewhere," Bradley said while appearing on a 2011 panel that included Gates. "But then (software publishers) found out about it. They were trying to figure out how to tell somebody to start up one of their programs, and they had the answer. Just put the diskette in, hit Control-Alt-Delete, and by magic your program starts."

 

He then tried to deflect what he perhaps wryly called "credit" for its continued use.

 

"It was like a five-minute job in doing it. I didn't realize that I was going to create a cultural icon when I did it," he said "... I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous."

 

A tight-lipped Gates appears to force a smile in a video of the panel but does not respond.

Gates attended Harvard until he left during his junior year to start Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975. While at Harvard, he lived down the hall from current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Gates received an honorary degree in 2007.

 

Gates remains Microsoft's chairman although he stopped full-time work at the company in 2008.

During Saturday's session, Gates reflected on a variety of topics, from the philanthropy he's made his life's work since stepping back from an active role at Microsoft to his company's relationship with Apple in the early days.

 

That included helping keep what would become Microsoft's fiercest rival afloat in the 1990s when it was foundering.

 

"In the Apple II era, we were kind of friendly competitors," he said. "We actually put more people on the Mac than Apple had."

 

When co-founder Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, "he sort of says, 'I want this, this and this and I'll give you this, this and this.' ... We did the deal in three days," Gates said.

 

That included buying a 6% share of Apple, which lawyers convinced Gates that Microsoft shouldn't keep for antitrust reasons.

 

"It would have been nice if we had," he said.

Microsoft Unveils 2 New Tablet Models

Microsoft's new additions to its Surface line of tablets don't seem to offer a solution to its biggest problem: lack of a clear identity. "You can't think of the Surface Pro 2 as a tablet, you have to think of it as an Ultrabook or netbook," said Bob O'Donnell, a program vice president at IDC. The enterprise has resisted Ultrabooks and netbooks, though -- so why would it want the Surface?

  

Microsoft on Monday announced the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 tablets.

They are faster and have more battery life than their predecessors.

Microsoft's Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2

"The crux of the matter for Microsoft remains the same," Jeff Orr, a senior practice director at ABI Research, told us, and that is "finding an audience that's interested in hearing what Microsoft has to say that positions it as unique and valuable compared to Apple, Android players or its own partners."

Surface Tablet Tech Specs

The Surface 2 is built around an Nvidia Tegra 4 processor, which increases battery life to up to 10 hours and makes apps run faster and more smoothly, according to Microsoft.
It has a 10.6-inch ClearType Full HD display.
Both the Surface 2's 3.5-MP front camera and the rear 5-MP camera can capture 1080p HD video; both have improved low-light performance.
Surface 2 will ship with Windows 8 RT 8.1, which offers improved personalization, search, and multitasking; built-in apps; and cloud connectivity.
The Surface 2 will include Xbox Music for streaming songs and an updated video app, and it will come preloaded with Microsoft Office RT, including Outlook RT.
The Surface Pro 2 is built around an Intel Core i5 Haswell processor.
It has a 512-GB flash hard drive.
Users can snap apps side by side, and open as many windows as they need.
The Surface Pro 2 has a pressure-sensitive Surface Pen with palm-blocking technology. It has a 1080p HD screen.
Both tablets have a full-size USB 3.0 port, an HD Video Out port, and a microSD reader.
Both tablets come with one year of free calling to landlines in more than 60 countries; free Skype WiFi at more than 2 million hotspots worldwide; and two years' free access to 200 GB of additional storage on SkyDrive.

Retro Me, Sathanas

The devil is in the details, and consumers should examine them before purchasing either tablet.
Some functionality is limited in Office 2013 RT for example.
The year's free calling excludes special, premium and non-geographic numbers.
Internet access fees may apply when Skype WiFi is accessed, and calling is restricted to select countries and lines only.
Microsoft Office for the Surface Pro 2 will be sold separately, so factor that into your calculations.
"It's important for businesses to understand that -- as before -- Office included on Surface is for noncommercial use," Wes Miller, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, told us. "It requires additional licensing and costs for a business to have Office licensed correctly."

Pricing and Availability

The Surface 2 will be offered in 32-GB and 64-GB configurations. Pricing will begin at US$450.
The Surface Pro 2 will be available in 64-GB and 128-GB configurations with 4 GB of RAM, and 256-GB and 512-GB versions with 8 GB of RAM.
Prices begin at $900.
Pre-orders can be placed starting Tuesday.

Initial Reactions

"Surface 2 is still at least $50 higher than it should be, and the market will likely reflect that," Miller asserted. "Surface Pro 2 is a lot of great hardware built into an even better package than last year, but that is indeed a relatively high price that ascends rapidly when you accessorize it."
However, "you can't think of the Surface Pro 2 as a tablet, you have to think of it as an Ultrabook or netbook," Bob O'Donnell, a program vice president at IDC, told us. "But that category is still price-challenged."
Perhaps the most controversial issue is Microsoft's continuing with Windows RT in the Surface 2 despite taking a $900 million writedown on Windows RT tablets.
"The Surface 2's running Windows RT is in and of itself a huge challenge, because most people have voted with their dollars and decided to go with Surface Pro," O'Donnell remarked.
On the other hand, moving to Windows RT is the right strategy for Microsoft, argued ABI's Orr. "I'm a vocal proponent that Microsoft needs to depart from its aging code base of Windows OS when it comes to mobile devices."

Steve Ballmer's likely Successor as Microsoft CEO: Alan Mulally

Unnamed sources tell us that, despite his initial claims to the contrary, Ford CEO Alan Mulally has warmed up to the idea of succeeding Steve Ballmer and is now a front-runner candidate.

 

Ford CEO Alan Mulally next to an electronically augmented S-Max concept car this month at the IFA show in Berlin.

  

Ford CEO Alan Mulally's name has already been bandied about the candidate pool for replacing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who announced his retirement last month. And it seemed the lively executive wasn't too interested in the post -- at least initially -- vowing to remain with his company in the upcoming year.
But All Things Digital is reporting Mulally may have had a change of heart. Citing unnamed sources "close to the situation," AllThingsD's Kara Swisher said Mulally "has become more amenable to the idea in recent weeks." Mulally, who has been CEO of Ford for seven years and has earned kudos for a restructuring plan that helped return the carmaker to profitability, has yet to respond to Swisher's request for comment.

Alan Mulally took over Ford in 2006.

 

Ballmer said he plans to retire within 12 months, once a replacement is found who will carry out Microsoft's new vision of offering devices and services, not just software. The company's board has formed a special committee to seek out potential candidates. Meeting with Microsoft's shareholders, the committee has been narrowing down its list of possible successors from an initial 40 people, both internal and external.
Soon after Ballmer's announcement, Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.2 billion, which made its chief executive, Stephen Elop, a top contender for CEO of the software giant.
Among others rumored to be leading the list of candidates are Microsoft Executive VP Tony Bates, who had previously been CEO of Skype, Computer Sciences CEO Mike Lawrie, former Windows Chief Steven Sinofsky, and former Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson.

Bill Gates Spits Fire: Is this the "END" of PC Era?

Gates Spits Fire: Is this the "END" of PC Era?

Microsoft co-founder recounts how IBM drastically underestimated the potential of nascent PC business -- which impacted early negotiations over terms for the DOS operating system.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

 

Most of today's coverage of Bill Gates' latest Harvard talk -- including ours -- has rightly honed in on his acknowledgment that the control-alt-delete login was "a mistake." Good for a headline, but there's another big one buried in what was a fascinating interview conducted before a live audience with David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group.

Turns out Microsoft knew that it had a sucker in its negotiations with IBM right from the start.

Asked whether he thought IBM made a mistake by not buying operating software from Microsoft as opposed to licensing it, Rubenstein asked.

"Yeah they certainly made a mistake," he said, triggering a moment of audience laughter. "But IBM is a great company that's done many, many great things. The actual project that did the IBM PC was started by the IBM management committee more to prove that they could do products quickly. They were seeing 4 year cycles bet when they decided to do something and something shipped."

Gates's famously sharp business acumen served him well in what was a fluid situation -- this would be IBM's initial attempt to try its hand in the nascent personal computer market and he understood that Big Blue's goal was to deliver something out "really quickly" as it tested the prospects of a market it underestimated.

 

"The volume projections they had for it were 200 to 300 thousand units over three years so they didn't view it as important. Ironically, then, that thing was hyper-successful," Gates noted. "The fact that they didn't know it as going to be such high volume meant that the way they negotiated with us -- we thought it was going to be super-high volume and they didn't. And that led to them thinking they got a good deal which they didn't."

We know how the rest of that story turned out.

Google Clocks 15 years

Google celebrates 15 years of its biggest product: You

Google knows more about you than ever before, and you like it that way. How did the popular yet controversial company convince you of its trustworthiness.  

When it was just 2 years old, Google kicked off its annual tradition of pranking the Internet on April Fool's Day with a doozy.
The Google MentalPlex was supposed to read your mind as you visualized the search term you wanted.
Google.com instructed you to remove your hat and glasses, stare into a swirling blue-and-red spiral below the search box, and to not move your head as you projected in your mind's eye what you wanted to search for. When you clicked the spiral, search results for "April Fool's" would appear with a fake admonition at the top such as "unclear on whether your search is about money or monkeys."

That's not quite so hilarious anymore.
On Friday, the still-young corporate entity celebrates its 15th year, and it's closer now to possessing the kind of precognitive powers you'd expect from sci-fi rather than the real world. It knows a lot about your daily communication habits and Web browsing, it can use the latest data analysis tools to predict what you're looking for and what you might need, and it wants to know more.
This is the story of a unique company that has acquired an extraordinary amount of personal information about the people who use its products and services. History shows that each time Google expands the amount of information it collects on us, people have grown comfortable with it. Even as Google expands into dramatically different domains, you shouln't expect that trend to stop, though, because Google has proven adept at striking the right balance of hackle-raising intrusiveness with terrific products.
Google's early-years expansions into advertising and online services like Gmail might have come as a surprise, but it would be foolish to be surprised by anything new Google does now. It's got a whole division, Google [x], for crazy ideas that just might work, and it's trying everything from balloon-mounted Internet access points to self-driving cars to kite-based power to extending the human lifespan. It makes Google Glass computerized eyewear look positively ordinary.
"We're really excited about the possibility for science and technology to change people's lives," Page said at a recent event in Arizona. "We underestimate the impact of large-scale change."
Pleased to meet you, Argus Panoptes
The company's mission -- "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -- has proved remarkably durable. But its well-known guiding principle, "don't be evil," has been harder to maintain as the company expanded far from its search-engine roots.
As Google expands even more, expect its intrusiveness to grow accordingly. If its track record holds -- Google hasn't yet seriously alienated its customer base -- you should also prepare for the public to tacitly consent as Google gradually becomes even more of an electronic Argus Panoptes.
In its earliest days, Google usage exploded as people discovered how well it transformed the Internet's chaos and mystery into a medium that was packed with worthwhile content. It did so with a clever middleman strategy: instead of judging Web pages by the quality of their content, it judged them by the esteem shown by other Web pages. Google piggybacked on work that the rest of the world had already done but that remained largely invisible.
When the information Google is organizing is the public Internet, "don't be evil" poses some complications -- hate speech vs. free speech, for example, or tips for burglars vs. tips to thwart burglars.
But things get really thorny when you consider the direction Google is headed. Increasingly, the information it's organizing and making useful is profoundly personal. That means it's a lot harder to judge when Google is crossing what Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt called the "creepy line."
Instead of just perusing the Web to help us fix leaky faucets or solve crossword puzzles, Google is keeping a fully indexed copy of our e-mail archive. It's remembering our social contacts and their personal information. It's running image-recognition algorithms on photos we upload to our online document repository. It's transcribing our spoken words into text messages. It's seeing where in the physical world we're located and where we want to go. It's seeing where on the Internet we go, too. On top of that, Google scrutinizes all the data in detail to anticipate what we want or need.
Whether those actions are benignly helpful or frighteningly intrusive depends on countless factors -- and the factors change. They don't just change from person to person, but also from moment to moment as individuals change and Google's role in our lives change.
Perhaps nothing reveals the creepy line's imprecise location more than the revelations of just how intrusive the US National Security Agency has become through data taps, encryption cracking, and subpoenas for information stored at Internet giants. A year ago, we might have been comfortable with how Google handled our personal information, balancing our privacy against the desires of advertisers to know our minds. Now there's a new snoop in town, and Google has much less leeway in resisting its data demands.
New millennium, new ambitions
The Google name came into being in 1997 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin changed the name of their BackRub search engine, built for the Stanford computer science graduate program. They started doing business as Google a year later and quickly attracted new users by word of mouth.
The year 2000 was seminal for Google as its started turning search power into ad profits.

Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer

(Credit: Google)

Only two months after everyone was chuckling about the MentalPlex, Google's search index reached 1 billion Web addresses, the largest in the world. And in October, Google launched AdWords, its self-service system for matching ads to the search terms people typed into Google.
Critics jeered that AdWords was a one-trick pony. But even if Google lacked a diversity of revenue streams, AdWords was a powerfully profitable trick that let Google fund its expansion into online services and pay for acquisitions. Advertising revenue makes up around 97 percent of Google revenue -- $42.5 billion in 2012 -- although that now includes graphical "display" ads, too.
With a growing supply of money on hand, Google expanded its search services. It launched a toolbar for Internet Explorer in 2001, making it easier for people to search and therefore driving the volume of search queries upward. It spread beyond English, supporting 72 languages by early 2002 -- Swedish Chef and Klingon alongside dozens of genuinely useful languages -- to make Google into a global brand.

Gmail logo

After building a swarm of specialized search services -- video, shopping, images, book text, patents, and more -- Google blended them all back together into a single "universal search" interface. Its appetite for data remained voracious as it expanded into these new domains: its database of 250 million images in 2001 reached 1.1 billion images within four years and later became the underpinnings of Google's image recognition database.

Google AdWords

(Credit: Google)

The quality of its search results vanquished all comers -- from AltaVista and Ask to Microsoft -- and currently claims about two-thirds of global search traffic. But Google also worked to build a good-guy image through other means. It gave free ads to nonprofits and funded scholarships. It made it easy for outside developers to hook their programs into Google search and sponsored coding contests with generous cash payouts. It replaced its search-page logo with amusing doodles that paid tribute to computing visionaries and artists. The very technologists sophisticated enough to fret about Google's growing power instead were charmed, and they became its allies instead, convinced that Google's way was the right way.
The balancing act was easier during this early phase of Google's existence. Search ads weren't much of a privacy intrusion, because search queries present advertisers with very limited, precise, and deliberately shared information.
The bigger problems came when Google searches revealed information about people that they didn't want revealed. But even here, Google could claim it was merely surfacing Web sites that others created and that critics were just trying to shoot the messenger.
It's a legitimate claim, but it didn't change the fact that society had to start adapting to a new level of personal disclosure. Googling a potential love interest and managing your online reputation became a fact of life.
We put up with it, though -- our appetite for more information outweighed our outrage at the intrusion. Evidence of an earlier generation's follies molder away in filing cabinets and shoeboxes full of film, but the new generation is growing up knowing that digital data can be easily copied and shared.
New services
The privacy balance changed during Google's middle ages, when it changed from a search and search-ad company to an online services company. Between 2003 and 2008, an acquisition spree and countless internal projects laid the foundations for what today are now major products.
Among acquisitions in that five-year span, Pyra Labs became Blogger; Keyhole became Google Earth; Writely turned into Google Docs and thus the core of what's now called Google Drive; Grand Central became Google Voice; JotSpot became Google Sites for simple-to-build Web pages; Urchin became the site analysis tool Google Analytics. Two of the biggest are tremendously important to Google and millions of people: YouTube and Android.

Google Street View has been no small source of controversy for Google.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Internally, Google launched Gmail, Orkut, News, Print, Talk, Reader, Calendar, Finance, iGoogle, Books, and Knol. Google Apps arrived for businesses willing to pay for e-mail and productivity tools. Google Maps revolutionized cartography -- especially with Street View. The Chrome browser, bare-bones during its debut, now is a vehicle to deliver many Google ambitions.
It's a dizzying list that touches on nearly every aspect of digital living. The large-scale successes should restrain people from laughing too hard at duds like Knol.
With the services expansion came new privacy concerns. Some were upset that Gmail computers scanned e-mail text to try to place related ads.
But guess what? The appeal of what at the time was an absurdly large capacity for storage space was more compelling, and Gmail grew like a weed to become the top e-mail service in 2012. People were willing to share address books and phone numbers with Google. Google encouraged users to save messages in Gmail's archive rather than delete them to save space, and the convenience outweighed any drawbacks of giving Google an extensive record of who e-mailed whom and how often.
Chrome, too, added a new twist. By combining the search box and the navigation box into one "Omnibox," Google's servers got to hear what sites people wanted to visit, not just the search terms they wanted to use. Did customers squawk? Not much, and in fact the design has now spread to Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer.
The expansion also planted the seeds for the next chance for Google to run into trouble: display ads. Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick -- twice as much as YouTube's price tag -- to leap into the business.

Orkut

(Credit: orkut)

DoubleClick, like other ad services, tracks user activity, often using cookies. The idea is to show ads that are effective -- meaning the ones you'll find persuasive rather than irrelevant clutter. Using browser cookies, ad services keep track of who's visiting sites and tries to show them ads befitting their age, gender, interests, residence, income, and other factors.
Advertisers have targeted ads toward specific populations for decades. The difference online is that instead of targeting large groups -- Us Weekly readers or Monday Night Football viewers -- Web sites can target individuals. And using cookies, they can track you across multiple Web sites. And with the newer behavioral targeting technologies, they can track on the basis of what you do -- links you click, search terms you use, differences in how long you spend with different sorts of content.
There are signs of resistance -- software such as AdBlock Plus and the Do Not Track standard to tell Web sites you don't want to be tracked. These sorts of efforts are at the periphery, though.
Missteps
It's had real missteps. It has paid millions in cumulative fines for tracking cookie, search- and Street View-related privacy violations. It may be forced to change its search business in Europe. Just this week, Google got caught keeping a search loophole open under the guise of making search traffic more secure.
So far, it hasn't come anywhere close to hurting Google's bottom line, but it's definitely not good press for the company that preaches the "don't be evil" gospel. And it's not handling complaints as well as it did, some believe.
"They don't want to respond to criticism. Now they just look at [critiques] and say, 'How do we deflect that,' instead of addressing some of the concerns," said Danny Sullivan, who's been a level-headed voice writing about search engines since 1995. Sullivan also writes columns for CNET.
The revelations about the NSA's surveillance open a new worry: Google is required by law to respond to investigators' requests for information. Although the company says it pushes back on overly broad requests and is fighting in the courts for permission to disclose how much it's shared, even the best of intentions can't stop the prying.
The government surveillance puts a fresh light on a 2009 warning that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt made back when he was still CEO.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt said. "But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time...We're all subject, in the United States, to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
The first line of that remark didn't sit well with those such as security researcher Bruce Schneier, who rebutted, "Privacy is a basic human need," not something to cover up misdeeds. But you should heed Schmidt's caution about government surveillance -- especially as Google slurps up more and more information about its users and Schmidt's resistance to prying seems at times only lukewarm.
Google+, Android, and beyond
The newest privacy challenges for Google users stem from the current era of Google's expansion into mobile and social technologies. With more than a billion Android devices activated, Google has countless new account holders, a treasure trove of new information about where they use phones, what they search for, where they drive, and whom they're talking to.

A Google Glass prototype.

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Google Glass takes that one step further by adding new eyes to the Google panopticon. Google has tried to make it hard for people to take photos and videos without others' being aware, but it's not unreasonable to expect people to wonder if they're being recorded when a Glass wearer shows up. It's not clear yet how the public will adapt if such devices become common, but it is clear that image recognition and audio processing could make Glass a powerful new source of very personal data that Google happens to store.
Another new data-harvesting frontier is social networking. After flailing with Orkut, Wave, and Buzz, Google finally found a social-networking product it could get behind with Google+. At launch in 2011, it mostly followed the Facebook model, with people publishing updates that followers could see. But the company has steadily fulfilled its ambition to make Google+ much more -- the "social spine" of all it does.
Google+ touches more and more at Google: photo sharing, Gmail, online chat, YouTube accounts and comments, and even search results. To make it possible, Google centralized user data previously associated with independent products. That triggered privacy complaints and even Congressional scrutiny, but not so much that anything changed.
Google's bold moves into very different domains like self-driving cars and medicine mean we'll have to grapple with new privacy issues. Will you want to share your genome with Google even if that means better medical treatment? Will you want to let your Google-driven car keep track of your driving habits to optimize route selection?
But if the past is anything to go by, any useful new Google projects will catch on -- and Google will accurately gauge how far it should push people to share new data in exchange for a better service.
The fact is that Google remains a powerful brand that scads of people feel very positive about. Its expansion could keep that brand fresh and exciting despite privacy encroachments.
As Google begins to invest in more and more areas of everyday life unrelated to Web search, it's hard not to imagine the company spending its next 15 years wanting to become an extension of your mind.
And along with your brain, your nose. Part of 2013's April Fool's Day prank from the company was Google Nose, a mock olfactory knowledge base for searching by smell.