As I read this TechCrunch post, I wondered immediately if the conclusion reached would match my own, i.e. Google should buy its way into the carrier business.

The Nexus One Was Google's Dream. The Carriers Were Freddy Krueger

Turns out, it wasn't, but this move makes sense. Having failed to wrest control from the carriers with the Nexus One experiment, Google can't be ready to give up and walk away from what they know is a good plan.

From admittedly a layman's perspective, it seems strategic for Google to buy a smaller carrier, e.g. Cricket, a subsidiary of Leap Wireless, with 4.7 million subscribers, to give it almost an end-to-end mobile business, i.e. from handset software, over the network, to the user's ears and fingers.

This is something that would make Apple, erm green, with envy.

Cricket boasts talk and text coverage in all 50 states, but their 3G EVDO network is pretty limited, mainly to large metro areas.

This might not be a huge problem initially, as Google could wet its feet before pouring money into expansion.

You could argue that Google wouldn't need large-scale success to shake up the carrier model sufficiently. Proof-of-concept in a large market like Chicago might be enough, but it would be better if Cricket had data in San Francisco or New York, where Google could hurt AT&T and Apple directly.

Another obvious downside is that Cricket is CDMA, whereas the N1 is GSM, but HTC, the N1 manufacturer, has CDMA capable models. I'm guessing HTC would be keen to work with Google to build a CDMA N1 and/or provide its CDMA handsets to Google.

Incidentally, Leap announced in February they were looking for a buyer.

Whether Google buys Cricket or a different carrier (ahem, Sprint), the move makes strategic sense. Sure, carrier operations aren't in Google's wheelhouse, but they have made strategic moves to buy up operations to benefit core business in the past, e.g. becoming an electric utility.

So, do you think a Google phone on a Google voice and data network would create positive change? Or would it represent another step toward the ultimate in Big Brother evil-doing?

Find the comments.Possibly Related Posts:

• Why Android Will Win
• 77% of iPhone 4 Sales Were Upgrades
• Nexus One Discontinued
• Who's the Bigger Big Brother, Amazon or Google?
• Android Considerations

Seesmic, the social-networking startup founded by French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur, today launched a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application that allows users to log in to more accounts from the app's single dashboard, and also allows them to customize their activity streams by adding plugins from an open marketplace. Plugins that support more than 40 other related social applications and services are available at launch, including Topsy, Klout, MySpace, Formspring, Google Reader and Ning. There's even a plugin for connecting to Zappos, the popular shoe retailer, that lets you share news of your purchases with friends.

The idea behind expanding Seesmic's repertoire came from the understanding that our users desired support of many different social services, more than just Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, LeMeur writes in a blog post about the launch of the new app. With the plugin architecture in SD2, you can easily add, remove and customize the platform to include only the services that matter to you. Seesmic is also available for both Windows and Mac users through Microsoft Silverlight, and there are web-based and mobile versions of the app as well.

In addition to the support Seesmic Desktop already provided for Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, LinkedIn and Foursquare along with common Twitter-based services such as Bit.ly and Twitpic the new version includes support for plugins that offer a variety of specific features. The Foursquare Places plugin, for example, looks for Foursquare links in your activity stream and then displays information related to that place. Another provides an image thumbnail for any link that comes from Twitpic, Yfrog, Tweetphoto (now called Plixi) or any of the other popular image-sharing services. A third provides a translation of any item in your timeline using Microsoft Translator.

The marketplace will be open to any developer who wants to produce a plugin, LeMeur says, and Seesmic will work with them to implement whatever features they want. In addition to some of the services mentioned, the new desktop app will also soon incorporate a plugin for Chatter, the social media tool from Salesforce.com, which Seesmic announced support for earlier this week. LeMeur says the company was working on support for multiple networks even before Twitter bought the Tweetie iPhone app earlier this year and made it clear it was going to compete with players in its ecosystem but that move reinforced the need to do so (luckily, Seesmic's name doesn't include the word Twitter, so it didn't have to change it, as some have).

For some time now, Seesmic has been engaged in a battle with a number of other apps and services that provide a unified dashboard for a variety of social networks including TweetDeck, HootSuite, Echofon and others. But the plugin marketplace and the extendability it offers could put Seesmic ahead of the pack, at least for now, since it allows users to customize their activity streams in interesting ways, and effectively customize the app as well. I have been a die-hard Tweetdeck user for some time, but these new features have me thinking about switching my allegiance. My big problem now will be getting a monitor big enough to display all the tiny windows.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd): As Twitter Develops, Developers Quiver in Fear

After a year's worth of work, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur just announced the launch of Seesmic Desktop 2 (SD2), a desktop client that goes beyond Twitter; We want to be the first platform for platforms, says Le Meur.

Running on Silverlight (to install go here), the desktop app now has plugin architecture that supports a multitude of content streams including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Flicker, Klout, Formspring, Myspace, Google Reader (!), GroupOn (!), Salesforce Chatter, E-Bay, Last.fm and so on and so forth.

With this latest iteration it looks like Seesmic has found a way to prove that it's more than just a one-trick, Twitter-platform pony, The inspiration to build SD2 came from the understanding that our users desired support of many different social services, more than just Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin Le Meur writes on his blog and in fact you can customize the app any way you like, If you don't like Foursquare, you can filter out Foursquare.

Seesmic has also gone the way of the App store and has developed a plugin Marketplace, where you can search and download your favorite news viewing or social interaction plugins. Note: There's a bit of turbulence in the installation process as you needlessly have to restart Seesmic Desktop in order to get the plugin to initially load.

Seesmic plans on launching payment options next year, but for the moment all plugins are free. And as Seesmic Desktop 2 is an open platform, Le Meur expects many more, If all goes well there will be hundreds, he tells TechCrunch hinting at more to come like E-Bay, ZenDesk, Gowalla, GroupOn, Visa, Blippy and Mint.

To encourage this he has built a SDK, offered up the Seesmic team for those companies that don't have the chops, and hired third-party developers tequilarapido to build some of the more popular plugins like YouTube and Google Reader.

Alongside Seesmic Desktop UI mainstays like URL shortening, Search, Multiple Accounts, Lists, Photos/Video Twitter integration, and accounts support for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz, the most exciting new features being launched here are individual to each plugin. And while it would take forever to get into into each one, I will bring up some of the most notable.

YouTube

The YouTube plugin allows you to share and watch video within your Seesmic app, and enables you to keep tabs on your Favorites, Most Popular, etc.

Last.Fm

You can now listen to music through the Seesmic client, if you have a Last.fm Pro account.

Zappos

With the Zappos plugin, perhaps the first social commerce plugin, anytime someone tweets a Zappos link you can see the item and buy it If a Zappos link is tweeted by someone you follow you can now see all product information in your streams.

Techmeme

You can now view the tech news aggregator entirely on Seesmic, including discussion and related links.

Klout

The Klout plugin includes a small box under tweets in your stream which allows you to see the Klout or influence rank of of people who are tweeting.

Google Reader

Seesmic Desktop supports all Google Reader features, you can open any RSS and now use Seesmic as an RSS Reader.

Seesmic, which has received 12 million dollars in funding thus far, plans on monetizing Desktop 2 both from eventual Marketplace sales as well as with a classic freemium model which has at its core deep integration with the enterprise software and B2B space, which is where plugins like Salesforce Chatter and ZenDesk fit in. As TechCrunch Europe's Mike Butcher said about the Chatter integration, It's like the link enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.

Le Meur also plans to take many of the Seesmic Desktop 2 features, and port them over to the iPhone/Android platforms next year. Windows Phone 7 will come first, since it's the most compatible system with Silverlight.

We are pleased to announce a new design for the Sales and Trend reports module in iTunes Connect. This new design makes it easier to access and view important data about your app sales, including:

• A new dashboard with trending graphs of your daily and weekly sales data
• The ability to review summary data by selling category
• Top Products and Top Markets display
• Improved navigation to help you find the type of data you need quickly

You can read more about all the changes in the user guide, available within the Sales and Trends module in iTunes Connect.

Most of our readers probably use some consumer (as opposed to enterprise) collaborative tools in their daily work: Skype, Google Chat, Delicious, Twitter, Dropbox, etc. Such tools have been steadily creeping into the workplace for a number of reasons: perceived gaps in the capabilities (in either functionality or ease of use) of existing corporate tools, employees incorporating their favorite social and collaborative tools into daily workflow, the low cost of most consumer-grade tools, and a narrowing of the differences between tools designed for the consumer and those built for enterprise. The question is: Should businesses be using such tools?

In my latest Long View for GigaOM Pro, How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace (subscription required), I discuss the risks that the use of consumer tools present to businesses that come to rely on them, in particular, security implications, and the fact that these tools can change, or even disappear entirely, without warning. Yet businesses cannot ignore the benefits such tools undoubtedly bring to the workplace, and trying to block their use will likely be a futile exercise that will only lead to disgruntled employees. In my article, I outline strategies for mitigating the risks that the almost-inevitable use of consumer collaboration tools poses.

Fortunately, the gap between consumer and enterprise tools is narrowing quite rapidly. Gartner's Nick Jones says he expects there will essentially be no difference between enterprise and consumer mobile tools within five years, for example. Many tools that were once aimed at the consumer now also target business users: Skype has Skype for Business, while Netvibes today announced the launch of Netvibes VIP, for example.

Adding business-friendly features to consumer tools like guaranteed support, additional layers of security and ways for organizations to integrate the tools into their existing systems can not only attract new customers, but also open up lucrative new revenue streams for the application vendors. The gap is narrowing from both sides, too, as enterprise tools are taking inspiration from the innovations in the consumer space: Salesforce.com's Chatter, an enterprise social networking tool that borrows liberally from Twitter and Facebook, is a good example. Increasing numbers of collaborative tools that might once have been considered consumer will become more enterprise-friendly, and that's a good thing, because they bring innovative new features to the workplace and make businesses more efficient.

Do you use consumer collaboration tools in your work? Have you had any problems with them?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): How to Manage Consumer-Grade Collaborative Tools in the Workplace

Photo by stock.xchng user Eastop

I am often asked about File Server performance. The usual conversation evolves into a discussion on what registry settings would be recommend to make a file server work faster. We typically end up talking about specific settings for performance tuning and how they might affect application compatibility, prevent connection with older client versions, produce unwanted results in specific configurations or require more resources than a typical server might include. As you might have guessed, there's always a reason why a specific setting that improves performance is not the default setting.

I'm surprised to find that many have not heard that the Windows Performance team has published a guide aimed exactly at that. The Performance Tuning Guide for Windows Server 2008 R2 contains key performance recommendations for Server Hardware, Networking and Storage. It also contains performance tuning considerations for many server roles, including:

• Web Servers
• File Servers
• Active Directory Servers
• Remote Desktop Session Host
• Remote Desktop Gateway
• Virtualization Servers (Hyper-V)
• File Server Workload
• Networking Workload
• Remote Desktop Services Knowledge Worker Workload
• SAP Sales and Distribution Two-Tier Workload

Being a Program Manager in the File Server Team, I am obviously interested in the sections regarding that role. In that specific section, the guide talks about selecting the proper hardware, describes the Server Message Block protocol and offers a few configuration considerations. It then goes on to describe specific registry settings that affect the performance of the File Server and File Clients.

For File Servers, it offers details on the following settings:

• NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation
• TreatHostAsStableStorage
• AsynchronousCredits
• Smb2CreditsMin and Smb2CreditsMax
• AdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads
• MaximumTunnelEntries
• SrvMaxThreadsPerQueue
• RequireSecuritySignature
• MaxMpxCt

For File Clients, it describes the following general tuning parameters:

• DisableBandwidthThrottling
• DisableLargeMtu
• EnableWsd
• RequireSecuritySignature
• FileInfoCacheEntriesMax
• DirectoryCacheEntriesMax
• FileNotFoundCacheEntriesMax
• MaxCmds
• DormantFileLimit
• ScavengerTimeLimit
• DisableByteRangeLockingOnReadOnlyFiles

It is also helpful to look into the Networking and Storage subsystems for your file server. For instance, the document describes a number of parameters related to NTFS, storage arrays and network adapters' offload capabilities.

I consider this 93-page document a "must read" for all Windows Server administrators. However, these advance settings are not for the novice. I definitely do not recommend experimenting with them unless you understand exactly what they do. You should definitely not try these settings in a production system without proper testing. The guide does include the default settings for the parameters, so you can return to them if your changes don't produce the expected results.

Find the guide online at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv-R2.mspx

It's hard to believe, but two years ago I wrote a blog post railing against VMware's assertion that the operating system was dead. This was about the same time that the great VMware exodus occurred and VMware replaced Diane Greene with Paul Maritz an ex-Microsoft executive.

What do you do when you are backed into a corner? You release an upgrade that breaks your install base. You fire your CEO and begin to lose key personnel. Hire a Microsoft Executive to become your new CEO because he'll be out of a job soon. Pick a fight with the largest software company on earth. Awake the sleeping giants in IBM, Sun, HP, and more as they want their slice of the pie. Finally, you bring your most loyal customers to VMworld and proclaim that you are still the king.

Looking back, I failed to understand the transformation that VMware was about to begin. As a technologist, it's hard to accept that great technology does not equate to great profits. VMware's leadership understood this and set down a path to become the new Microsoft. I write this with the highest respect and admiration as few software companies in the world have achieved the growth rates, sustainability, profits, and broad market presence as Microsoft.

Today, VMware is a marketing driven technology company. Look no further than VMworld 2010 as an example of this transformation. While there were labs and hard-core technology sessions, the message was always on-point and precise, Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds. While cultivating a legion of developers and partners, VMware repeated that if you want it cheaper, faster, better then you'd buy it from them.

While I do not always agree with VMware's vision of the future, it would be foolish to dismiss their plans and underestimate their marketing efforts. VMware's plans fall heavily on The New Infrastructure; it looks and feels a lot like the old Microsoft as The New Infrastructure is made up of VMware's lucrative products and powerful partners like EMC, Cisco, Google, and Salesforce.

Give credit where credit is due, Maritz and VMware have done a masterful job in transforming the company while painting an obtainable vision of the future. In order to make the transformation complete, VMware must cultivate one final group, the application vendors. For once the old guard embraces the new cloud paradigm, the world will forever change and the provider of this technology is going to be worth billions and billions of dollars.

In our brief video interview, an enthusiastic Mayer touts Google Instant as a whole new way to search,a game changer akin to the introduction of power steering in the automotive industry. It's certainly a neat feature that optimizes the search experience, but the real question remains: how does Google Instant fundamentally change consumer behavior, and in turn SEO and Google's ad sales.

Mayer was more tentative on this front. See video above. Apologies for the muffled audio on my end, only one wireless mic was working at the time.

There has been a lot of debate as to how Google Instant will impact Search Engine Optimization. By effectively compressing the time of each individual search and allowing users to edit searches in real time, Google Instant has the potential to radically upend the current mechanics of search and the discoverability of sites. According to Mayer, it's too early to determine how the new feature will affect the company's bottom line and she believes there will only be a small change for the SEO community.

That said, she does expect consumer usage patterns to dramatically shift, including her own. For Google, the hope is that the net effect is not just faster searches, but more searches: One of the things I've seen in my own personal usage, is that while each search is faster, I spend more time doing searches. Because I actually see the results coming in and out as I'm doing my searches I learn things as I go. And after I've actually fulfilled my query, a lot of times I'll see interesting suggestions, so I'll scroll around and learn different things and so I think ultimately, it may increase engagement of our users.

Mayer also told us that Google Instant will eventually hit the other sections of search within the next few months, including Google News and image search.

Bonus footage: After Mayer's interview, we got a chance to talk to Steve Cheng, a product manager on Google's Mobile team, who gave us a quick demo on Instant on mobile and discussed their upcoming rollout strategy. See video below.

The read/write enterprise isn't just about using social media in the enterprise - increasingly, it's about employees actively choosing the technologies they use to get their jobs done instead of relying on decrees from on high about what sorts of technology to use. The term "Shadow IT" refers to "IT systems and IT solutions built and used inside organizations without organizational approval." In the past few years, it's gone from being cosidered a problem to being consider something to be embraced and learned from. Thanks to SaaS, entire companies have been built on Shadow IT decisions.

Sponsor

Salesforce.com got its start selling to sales departments who needed a solution that IT wasn't having success providing. Now its a major player in enterprise. Here are five companies that are thriving in the shadows at enterprises large and small.

Yammer

Yammer announced last week that it's expanding from its narrow focus on microblogging into general enterprise social networking. That will bring the company into even deeper competition with established players like Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com and Jive.

David Sacks, CEO of Yammer, talked up the technology behind Yammer in a phone interview, but we think the company's real differentiator is its freemium business model. Employees are signing up to use Yammer independent of IT and management, and that lets end users try the product before a purchasing decision is made.

"The freemium model is absolutely key to what we're doing," says Sacks. "When employees are given a choice of what to use, they are going to choose the product that is easiest to use, not necessarily the company that has the biggest sales team. We're not afraid to let customers use the software first."

Sacks is quick to point out that the company does work closely with IT once a company develops an interest in Yammer. "IT is usually the buyer, we do spend a lot of time with IT making sure they're comfortable with the security and so on, but it's employees that are driving it."

Huddle

Huddle, a SaaS project management and document collaboration solution (see our previous coverage), has landed large enterprise customers like Proctor and Gamble through shadow IT. "We generally don't sell directly to IT," says Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin. Instead, Huddle will sell directly to business users unsatisfied with what their IT department are offering them. "IT generally gives these companies or organizations some big system like Sharepoint that is too complex or not flexible enough for their needs."

Another driving factor, McLoughlin notes is the need for external collaboration. Increasingly, employees are finding a need to work with people outside of their own companies and internally facing tools aren't adequate for their needs.

McLoughlin says that although Huddle has occasionally been blocked because it's been mistaken for a file sharing service or social network, the company hasn't had much trouble with IT. "Push back has been decreasing over the past two or three years," he says. He notes Proctor and Gamble has a policy of allowing its employees to use whatever tools they need to get their jobs done.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey has proven that simple, single use tools can be extremely successful in the enterprise. SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg told us the company has 100% of the Fortune 100 and over 95 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers, but all of them signed up individually. "We don't do group sales or work with purchasing or IT departments- we don't have any sales people. So for us, this isn't a trend, it is our whole business."

UserVoice

We mentioned in our article on trends in idea management that UserVoice CEO Richard Whitemore has been seeing more enterprises using UserVoice as an internal tool instead of an externally facing one. Whitemore says this has been driven by largely by Shadow IT - business units are frequently unhappy with the larger idea management packages installed by IT or included as part of another system, and just want to quickly gather ideas from staff.

Google

Forrester has described information workers as Google's "trojan horse" into the enterprise, noting 39% have used tools such as Google Docs in the workplace. Google Apps adoption will likely be driven not by IT management, but by the rank and file who will want to use familiar technologies like Gmail and Google Docs.

Photo by
Hamed Parham

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

A lot of attention is being paid to Google Doodle logos with the company's impending press conference today, and the public's curiosity about the search engine's animated logos really paid off for one toy maker.

On September fourth, Google's Doodle logo was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Buckminsterfullerene molecule, a spherical allotrope made up of 60 carbon atoms which closely resembles the geodesic domes made famous by American Engineer Buckminster Fuller.

When users clicked the logo, it brought up a Google search for the term "Buckyballs."

But the first three results this search returns are not for the Fullerene molecule, but rather they are for a magnetic desktop toy going by the same name. That little curiosity earned the company more than $250,000 in orders that day, or more than 10,000 units.

This is a clear indication of the amazing power Google has for driving traffic to top-listed sites, even if it is only through a silly coincidence.

Twitter presenceCHECK

Facebook Brand PageCHECK

YouTube ChannelCHECK

Socialized Business StrategyTBD

While showing up to the party represents a noteworthy effort, a bona fide social media strategy this checklist does not make. Creating presences, listening to conversations tied to keywords and superfluously responding to updates and questions creates a facade of engagement that is at best trivial. And, quite frankly, without a true investment of intention, attention and conviction (I.I.A.C.), we minimize the opportunity before us as well as the thoughts, emotions, and overall potential of our communities rich with would be advocates and influencers.

Much of my time these days is spent working with businesses to first deepen their understanding of social media and subsequently broaden their outlook for what's possible. As a result, we flip the switch to a more sophisticated level of creativity, vision, and execution. So, when I stumbled across recent research that reported most businesses claim that they are operating with a genuine social media strategy, I was surprised and also unsurprised. Many executives and brand managers believe that once social media shifts from pilot programs to a dedicated function, regardless of goals, objectives, purpose, or capacity, it becomes strategic.

In June 2010, King Fish Media, HubSpot and Junta42 published an interesting report, 2010 Social Media Usage Attitudes and Measurability: What do Marketers Think?

According to the results, 72% of businesses claim to operate under a banner of social media strategy. 27% stated that they did not possess an official strategy. The trio surveyed 457 US marketers and managers, with 52% of the respondents representing the publishing, media, advertising, and marketing industries.

Companies with a Social Media Strategy, June 2010

While these numbers indicate maturation and comprehension, I question the definition of social media strategy.

To the contrary, a May 2010 study by Digital Brand Expressions found that 52% of social marketers are running social media programs without a defined game plan. This finding was in line with an April report by R2Integrated that documented one-half of marketers were reacting to social rather than leading it.

The study also found that a majority of the businesses polled planned to increase their social media investment over the next 12 months.

Companies that Plan to Increase their Social Media Investment in the Next 12 Months

Defining Social Media Strategy

Social media are measured by the sum of its parts. In general, many strategies I've reviewed are designed to generate visibility. Social services such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, et al., respresent syndication channels to push content. Listening tools are then used to measure activity, responses, reach, and sentiment. In addition, the activity that fills the columns of a brand, community or social media manager's brand dashboard triggers responses, conversations and engagement that do not contribute to overall business performance metrics or missions. I believe, there are differences between visibility and presence. In social media, presence is felt. Presence is driven by a strategy and architecture designed to inspire impressions, evoke guided responses and drive desired outcomes.

Consumers, or let's just say people, are learning how to navigate social networks more than we may think or credit. They are defining and personalizing their experiences based on who they connect with, what they consume, share, and discover, and in turn, what they publish. Simply earning a response, like, RT, comment, or the coveted follow, does not equate to anything more than a moment in time. Friends, Fans, Followers (The 3Fs) are neither KPIs or metrics worthy of establishing or measuring a social media strategy.

Social media is bigger than any one departmen. A true 360 approach will eventually socialize and transform organizations, processes, and platforms from inside-out to now also include outside-in perspectives and all that it inspires.

Marketing
Service
Product Development (R&D)
Sales
HR/Employee Relations
Communication
Finance

We have much work ahead of us and together we will lead social media from the confiinments of corporate silos and weave it into the very fabric of the brand and organization.

The socialization of business is a sophisticated framework of reimagined philosophies, business processes, supporting technologies, each enlivened by the cast of characters who faithfully portray the brand and its personal characteristics.

Social Media programs are not rewarded with participation ribbons simply for their existence. Recognition, response, and trust are the rewards for the investment of ongoing, thoughtful, and personalized listening (really listening, not monitoring) and engagement. Programs and actions rooted in empowerment galvanize advocacy and loyalty. And, strategies built with processes that feed into decision making cycles that lead companies to innovate and adapt through outside-in learning ensure relevance and contribute to legacy.

A true social media strategy socializes the entire business as well as the individual pieces that perform dedicated functions both inbound and outbound. Again, when integrated, social media is measured by the sum of its parts and the interconnection of strategies and processes and as a result, starts to construct the hallmarks of sCRM.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Facebook
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It started with netbooks--those cheap little compact laptops that were once the greatest thing since sliced bread: In the months leading up to the iPad's launch, the growth of sales of netbooks hit a wall (see chart at right).

And now, says UBS analyst Maynard Um [great name], iPads have become such a force of nature that they're cannibalizing the whole PC industry:

Sales of traditional notebooks appear to be feeling pressure from the iPad, causing a scramble by vendors to launch iPad-like tablets... We believe that a majority of this impact is occurring on the lower end of PC sales as the iPad is priced close enough to this range that it becomes attractive to consumers looking to make purchases within this segment. We are not sold that the iPad is purely cannibalizing PC sales, as the functionality of the iPad can not yet fully match the functionality of notebook PC's. However, consumers who purchase iPads may be more willing to delay purchases and upgrades of existing PC's.

Who is this bad news for?

Mainly, Microsoft and the PC hardware vendors.

Many netbooks run Linux and/or stripped-down versions of Microsoft Windows, so a slowdown in their growth did not wallop Microsoft. Regular PCs run full-fledged versions of Windows, though, so every lost sale of a PC as the result of an iPad sale is a license fee that moves directly from Apple to Microsoft.

Dell and HP can't be happy about this, either. And the farther ahead iPad gets in the tablet market, the harder it will be for Google's Android to catch up (though Android has done a fine job of catching up in the smartphone market).

It's great news for Apple, though.

via: John Paczkowski, All Things D

See Also: WOW: The iPad Is Killing The Netbook Business

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• Apple's iPad Is Going To Destroy The Netbook Market, Says Goldman (Sorry, Microsoft)
• WOW: The iPad Is Destroying The Netbook Business
• CHART OF THE DAY: iPad Browser Share Already Beating Android, BlackBerry

How businesses and brands deal with social media has become one of the defining issues of the recent web era. Today a pretty big leap is taking place which may define the next phase. Two of the biggest players have come together to create certainly one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I've yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds. Seesmic is to integrate Salesforce's internal Twitter-like app, Chatter, into their platform. That makes Seesmic the first realtime social consumer app to go directly into the enterprise space. Seesmic will also suddenly have the potential to access to over 20,000 Salesforce customers who have used Chatter so far.

The news was unveiled at a 3,000-strong Salesforce conference in London today. Below we have an exclusive interview with Loic Le Meur of Seesmic and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

Once you see Seesmic working with Salesforce's Chatter it make perfect sense. Suddenly you can be having internal and external conversations at once.

It's clear this is part of a long term strategic partnership between the two companies, and the rapport between the two CEOs is evident. While Seesmic has made a virtue of its ability to develop strong social clients on Adobe Air, Android, BlackBerry, Windows and (via Silverlight) Mac, Salesforce is clearly gunning for the space opened up by enterprise social' services like Yammer. We're seeing the first integration of the realtime web and the enterprise, and there is plenty more to come.

At an interview in London, Seesmic's Loic Le Meur told me It's not enough to have these two worlds silo'd any more What we bring is the connection to the outside world without making it scary. With chatter you can directly send someone on the social web [via Seesmic] directly into the enterprise.

For Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, it's all about the movement to what he calls Cloud 2: mobile, social, realtime.

Indeed, he wrote a TechCrunch guest post this year, The Facebook Imperative, where he said New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration.

So how will the integration work?

Here's an example: A Salesforce user on Seesmic will be able to push, for instance, a Tweet onto the Chatter wall of someone inside a company. That could mean pushing it to a sales rep or a social media response team. You name it. The upshot is a great ability to respond, in realtime, to social conversations around brands or products.

That could mean much better customer service or more some interesting sales pitches, depending on which side of the fence you are on. But suddenly, instead of needing to physically cut and paste a reference to a Tweet or a Facebook Group or whatever, people who monitor social media can bring that data directly into the enterprise and work out a response. It's going to make a lot of social media community managers pretty happy at least the ones who use Salesforce (for now).

When companies need to respond to customer complaints on social media, they need to see context in terms of the prior conversation, internal company feedback etc this Salesforce Chatter/Seesmic integration effectively makes the whole process a lot easier. It's like the Missing Link between the enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.

And by moving first on this plane, Seesmic is in a prime position to open up a completely new front against its competitors, like Tweetdeck, which remain locked in the social web and not at all integrated into enterpise systems.

Seesmic's integration with Chatter has been made possible by its switch to the Miscrosoft Silverlight platform which allows for plugins. Adobe Air does not afford this, so, on the face of it, competitors could well struggle to create the same kind of ecosystem around their core product.

Much of this is discussed in our exclusive video interview with Benioff and Le Meur below.

IDG today boosted its smartphone sales outlook for 2010 by 10 percent, citing greater-than-expected demand for the do-it-all devices. Based on the revised expectations, IDG anticipates 269.6 million smartphones to ship in 2010, up from 173.5 million sold last year. Those are big numbers, but still a drop in the bucket compared to the over 4 billion handsets already in use. More intriguing is how IDG sees the mobile operating system shaking out by 2014: Google Android devices are expected to be the no. 2 mobile operating system, behind only Nokia's Symbian platform.

Android surpassing both iOS smartphones and BlackBerry devices actually isn't such a surprise, since here in the U.S., Android devices are already outselling both platforms. We know the overall smartphone market will experience growth over the coming years, so all of the platforms could experience sales growth, even as they lose market share. In other words, all boats will rise with the tide, but Android will rise much faster. Here's a snapshot of the IDG data I put together in a graph:

It's interesting that IDG has high hopes for Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 product: Windows Mobile has lost market share for the past three years, but IDG thinks Microsoft's mobile effort won't be a total failure similar to the Kin. We'll hear more on this topic at our Mobilize event later this month: Microsoft GM, Developer and Platform Evangelism Matt Thompson is sharing thoughts in his talk titled The Future of Mobile, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 (and Why iPhone and Android Developers Will Care). Clearly, there's little expectation from IDG that webOS will do much for smartphones out of Hewlett-Packard, which acquired the platform when it purchased Palm in April this year. And Nokia is once again expected to lose market share, says IDG.

In past posts, I expressed some doom and gloom for Nokia when faced with data such as this, but a few things have me holding back from repeating that mantra. To its credit, Nokia has been able to reverse its smartphone sales losses but not profits indicating that it can still fight back in the market that it once dominated. I've also had a recent and candid phone conversation with Niklas Savander, executive vice president and general manager of the Markets unit at Nokia. If nothing else, Savander has proven to me that Nokia fully understands the challenges it faces; he believes in the company's strategy and told me, amid my fair criticisms of such strategies, Nokia needed to be confident that MeeGo was the right position before making it the platform of choice. We'll see if that strategy pays with the first MeeGo devices, which could arrive by the end of this year. If it does, we'll see how much of an impact the new platform has on the next several years of smartphone sales.

Until then, however, it's an Android world because those manufacturers who embrace it notably Motorola and HTC are reaping rewards by growing profits. For that reason, I previously suggested that Nokia embrace Android too. Savander disagreed in fact, he began our conversation by asking me to justify my suggestion but today there's another group in the Nokia should go Android camp. AllThingsD shared smartphone sales estimates from the analysts at Piper Jaffray that are similar to the IDG numbers, along with this startling quote:

We believe long term both RIM and Nokia will be share losers in the smartphone space because they do not have a core software competency. Over time, we do not see the benefit of RIM and Nokia continuing to push proprietary software that can't compete with the market and eventually expect one or both to capitulate and move to utilizing third party software. Ultimately, we believe Android is likely to control over half of the smartphone market in the next five years.

For as brash as I was suggesting Nokia go Android, Piper Jaffray is doubly so for including BlackBerry too. But RIM's future is constrained by its prior success; as shown by the new Torch handset, the company can't completely alienate its loyal user-base by changing too much too soon.

Will Android own 25-, 50-percent or more of the smartphone market by 2014? Given the fast pace of change in hardware, software, services and connectivity, it's too soon to tell for sure. Looking out four years from now is a bit of a stretch to account for all of those changes as companies adopt and re-prioritize strategies. Until someone shakes up the market though, the Android army has little reason to stop marching forward.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: It's Time for Nokia to Embrace Android

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Online Sales Huge for Domino's

There is no denying that we are amidst a smartphone boom. Not a day goes by when we don't hear about a new device hitting the market, hoping to topple Apple's iPhone from the top of the totem pole. In this fiercely contested market it is important for phone makers to stand apart from others whether that is via design, user experience or special software offerings. Samsung, Motorola and HTC clearly are going down this route.

However, equally important is the actual shopping and retail experience. Where and how you buy a device is actually as important as what you buy. That realization came this weekend when a good pal of mine who is shopping for a smartphone, dragged me to our local Best Buy store.

He wanted to get a close look at various different smartphone options. Best Buy has been pushing itself as a place to see and buy many of the latest phones from major brands and major carriers. (Just to be clear, this is not one of the speciality Best Buy Mobile Only stores there were 100 in early August that are popping up across the country.)

The aisles of the store were full of phones from brands like HTC, Blackberry, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. There were some hideous devices that were being sold under carrier brands as well. Many of them seemed as if they belonged on a different planet. Since we were not there for those monstrosities, I paid no heed to them. True to their word, major national carriers such as Sprint, Verizon and AT&T were represented at the Best Buy store.

We were looking for smartphones, and there quite a few Android phones including some of the new ones from HTC. The only problem was that many of these Android phones turned out to be non-working replicas, which made it difficult to learn how these devices actually functioned. Had we been able to spend time with a phone, my friend would have gone from casual observer to an actual buyer. But we soon left, and the experience, to put it politely, was cluttered, drab and utterly forgettable.

In sharp contrast, when you enter the Apple Retail Store, you find a well-lit place that is inviting and aesthetically appealing. No wonder a million folks come through Apple's retail stores every day. But more importantly, the company let's you play with its devices as much as you want. Nothing makes the sale as effectively as the iPhone or the iPod Touch itself. You like what you see, and then you buy. If the experience isn't for you, you move on. Say what you like, the Apple on-site sales staff is often clued in, if somewhat annoyingly smarmy. (Related Post: Infographic the Retail Phenomenon Called Apple)

Like Apple's stores, I have found that Verizon Wireless' company owned stores are actually a much better retail experience, as the devices on display actually work (even if they are difficult to use because of security tags which are impossibly large), and most of the sales staff is well trained to answer the questions. Now only if they had the iPhone.

I believe because smartphones are decidedly more complex than feature phones, requiring some kind of familiarity with the user interface, it is important to think differently about how these phones are pitched to the likely buyers. If the mobile industry expects the mass audience to become smartphone buyers, improving the retail experience would be a good start. This is a good place to copy Apple shift from the idea of selling, to the notion of educating your potential customers.

This is where I think Google needs to step in and set-up a chain of Android stores or work with retail chains like Target to build Google Android Experience Kiosks that focus a lot less on actual sales and instead focus more on making an average buyer comfortable with Android and many dozens of phones and tablets that use the OS.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Apple's Path to the Living Room

I was thumbing through Twitter messages on my Blackberry on Monday (I use Twitter as a mobile first, web second product) when I saw the following Tweet (see graphic).

I resisted the temptation to jump in with a response because I knew it was too complicated of a topic to discuss on Twitter. But I thought I should do a quick post on the topic.

1. Options are gravy - I lived through the first dot com era where we used stock options as a recruiting tool. I freely admit this (along with nearly everything between 1999-2000) was a mistake. We set our sites on our IPO price and then worked back to our current valuation and showed potential employees what we thought they could earn (with all legal caveats) if the company was successful.

The stupid thing is we sort of believed it ourselves. If Ventro was worth $8 billion on $2 million of sales surely a paltry $1 billion would suffice. Goldman Sachs was an investor and the assured us an IPO would happen and riches would be had by all. I think they believed it, too.

We obviously attracted the wrong people for the wrong reasons and this led to a lot of disappointment. We had a lot of re-setting of expectations to do.

Options are obviously a very important economic motivator for your first 3-5 employees and your most senior management team. But unless you become Facebook or Zynga they likely aren't going to pay off big for everybody else.

So I developed this standard line that I used for all employees. I've said versions of it on this blog before so I hope it's not too repetitive. But it's critical to get this right:

Join our company if you think you'll learn from being here. I think you will.

Join if you think your career will progress because you'll be given more responsibilities than elsewhere and if you're good at what you do you can move up quickly. We're a meritocracy.

Join because you know you'll be earning less than you could elsewhere at some meaningless job cranking out non-core code, producing Powerpoint slides or shuffling paper. You can always earn more. But join here if you want to grow.

Join because you like the culture. You think you'll have fun. You'll consider your colleagues close friends.

Join because in three year's time when you look at this job and this company on your CV you'll feel proud and it will be part of how you got where you were going.

Join because as we grow our ability to reward you will grow and your income will grow with our success that you contributed to.

We give out stock options. I hope they're worth money to you some day. But let them be icing on the cake. If they pay off handsomely that's great. But don't count on it. Don't let it be your motivator or your driving decision.

Not because we don't want them to be valuable, but because we don't want to create an options culture around here. Option cultures are corrosive, create the wrong incentives and attract the wrong sort of people.

I've said similar hundreds of times. And I believe it. If you find out one day that company you went to work for was Facebook then consider it the lottery. And that would be nice.

But if you're the CEO who is spinning up a story about how the options for non-founders, non-VPs is going to be worth a lot some day then you're probably doing some young entrepreneur a disservice at your expense.** And when they figure it out some day they're not likely to be very loyal moving forward. Do the harder work and convince them to join anyways without the stock option bravado.

** Unless you really are Mark Pincus, Mark Zuckerberg, Ev Williams or similar. Then go ahead

2. The best policy is transparency The stream on Twitter, as best as I can tell, started with Chris Dixon sending the following Tweet (see graphic)

My interpretation of this Tweet was harmless enough. I thought Chris basically meant that investors know what most deals (not just their own) get done at so they have a pretty good sense how to price seed, A, B, etc. rounds and still be competitive. This is mostly true. I don't know whether I fully agree that they keep them secret for informational advantage but maybe.

I tend to keep valuations secret because I'm usually told by a trusted source and feel it isn't my place to reveal confidential information. I wouldn't be a VC for very long if I did. I see people's private information for a living.

Anyhow, on the above Tweet Andrew Weissman (a VC) disagreed with the premise I'll assume Andrew read it how I did followed by Nate Westheimer who wrote the Tweet that Henry Blodget retweeted (opening image) about companies wanting to keep their valuations from stock-holding employees.

Quickly dissecting

• I think Nate's response slightly veered off topic. There's a difference between companies wanting to hide valuations and investors doing so.
• I think Chris's initial comment was about investors
• Investors generally are not the people to reveal valuations to anybody it is the business of the company and the CEO should manage this information.

Whatever the intent of the dialog let me encourage all management teams to be transparent with their employees. My personal preference is to tell people the amount of stock options they are receiving (total number), the value of those stock options (say $100,000), the value of the company (e.g. $10 million post money) and therefore if we sold for $100 million dollars one day your gain would be approximately $1 million).

If you perform extremely well in this role there is always a possibility of further allocations although that is clearly not guaranteed or promised.

3. That said, don't complicate the topic If you're the founder of a company you likely know a lot about things like Liquidation Preferences and how they affect value allocations when the company is sold. You also understand that there are future financing rounds and in tough times this can change the value equation of stocks.

Some founders err on the side of telling employees absolutely everything. I prefer not to. It's not that I don't want transparency it's just that some issues are technical complications that aren't material to the employees understanding of the issue. I know some people will take issue with this approach and that's fine. But here's my rationale:

I see way too many employees trying to understand all of the complexities and spending way too much time trying to calculate how much their options are worth through each fund raising round. This really conflicts with my view that options are to be put in the top drawer of your study at home and treated like upside gravy.

The most complexity the more angst the more options end up working against your intent if you think about them the way I do.

Obviously I'm not talking about your most senior 3-5 employees who hopefully own meaningful stakes, are making salary sacrifices and have the experience in understanding stock option nuances. Much experience tells me that most people don't.

It kind of reminds me of sales employee bonus plans. If you make them easy people spend their time selling. If you make them complex to maximize every possible way to incentivize behavior sales people end up spending 10% of their sales time calculating how much their bonus would be if they structured their deal this way or that way. Ah, the law of unintended consequences.

4. Valuation or percentages it's up to you. I think either strategy is OK. I prefer percentages (e.g. you're getting 1.5%) for the top employees (in addition to the method I described above) and staying away from percentages for everybody else.

If you're transparent about the value of the number of their stock options, the value of their stock options and the market cap of the company then they can do the calculation themselves (98% won't know how, but they have all the information they need).

Why do I feel this way? It's really meaningless to say to somebody that you own 0.18% of the company. It doesn't make somebody feel better. And by telling them the value they have all they need to assess whether or not it was a good deal. Sometimes a percentage can be equally meaningless.

But I can buy both arguments. I choose my way. Either way, make sure not to over sell. And I would opt for transparency. There is nothing worse than an employee who wakes up one day feeling duped or a sense of mismatched expectations. Then everybody loses.

Shared by phillip
Ordered from Amazon.

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Balazs Mohai/MTI, via Associated Press

Dave Murray, left, and Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden performed in Budapest in August.

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Iron Maiden's The Final Frontier album.

This weekend, I've been catching up on some reading. One post that was of particular interest to me was David Beach's article from last week about developing for Android. Beach, who is a product manager at eBay Mobile and a co-founder of 12seconds, basically says that the experience sucks for a number of reasons (all of which Google can fix, but will take quite a bit of work and time). But one quote in particular stuck out to me:

Android has succeeded despite Google. In fact it's safe to say that Android is successful for one primary reason. The iPhone is only available on AT&T. If the iPhone was on Verizon a year ago. Android would be no where near as popular.

Obviously, Beach isn't the first person to bring this idea up. But he brings it up in a way that he's able to back-up his feelings from a developers' perspective, while at the same time roping in what isn't ideal from a consumer perspective about Android as well.

This is going to sound like flame bait, and everyone knows that I love the iPhone but I have to agree with Beach. I've used no less than six Android phones for extended periods of time over the past couple of years. I really am trying to like them. But I just can't.

Now, don't get me wrong, almost all Android phones are a million times better than the phones we had just a few years ago before the iPhone burst onto the scene. And if the iPhone didn't exist, there is no question that I would use an Android phone and would probably be very happy with it. But the iPhone does exist. And I simply can't bring myself to use an Android phone when I know a superior device is out there. That's my only requirement for me to use a product: it has to be the best.

The only valid argument I can see for the iPhone not being the best is the AT&T requirement. So let's put that aside for a second.

While I obviously understand that people have different tastes, I can't see how you can objectively say that the overall experience of using an Android phone isn't worse than using an iPhone. There are a dozen or more elements that are better about the iPhone. Everything from the big: the App Store versus the Android Market (from the consumer perspective) to the little: the multi-touch and overall touchscreen responsiveness.

Even the most diehard Android loyalists I know (like Jason and Mike) will readily admit that the iPhone offers a better user experience. So why do they love Android (again, besides the lack of AT&T requirement)? The openness. They hate that you can't get Google Voice on the iPhone (I hate it too). And in general they hate Apple's restrictive policies for the App Store (which I don't like either). But those are problems that most regular consumers don't think about or realize exist at all.

Instead, like Beach says, the thing some consumers don't like about the iPhone is that it's AT&T only (in the U.S., obviously). Even if you live in an area where AT&T doesn't absolutely suck, having no choice of carriers is a big restriction. People have work plans, family plans, etc, etc, that they just can't switch. Or they don't want to.

If the iPhone was on Verizon (which is a larger network, remember), is there any question that it would be selling at least double the amount of units it is right now in the U.S.? I don't think so. What if it was available on all the networks? And what would happen to Android sales if that was the case? That is the big question here.

Next year, it's looking increasingly likely that we'll get at least a partial answer. If the iPhone is available on Verizon or even just T-Mobile, will the pace of Android sales slow down in the U.S.?

I know a number of people who are Android users simply because of the iPhone/AT&T restriction. If and when the devices comes to Verizon, they will jump ship. The big question is: will millions of others follow? Or, perhaps more importantly, will millions of new users that would have gone with Android now go with iPhone?

I'm seriously curious to know why you like Android over the iPhone if you do. Is it because of the openness ideal? Is it the variety of devices? Is it the variety of carrier choices? Or is it something else?

The Market is a mess, the media situation is arguably worse, and the user experience is still just off when compared to the iPhone. Google is working on improving all of those things, but Apple is rock solid in all of those areas right now. Both sides will keep improving, but Google's problem is that Apple is ahead and has remained ahead. Can Google surpass them? I'm just not sure I can see how unless Apple regresses which they've shown no signs of doing. What I can see is a Verizon iPhone. And so do plenty of others.

Apple and Google are in the midst of a PR war for who is activating more devices each day. Google is doing 200,000 a day. Apple is doing 230,000 a day. But Apple says Google's numbers may include upgrades. Google says Apple is wrong. This will go on and on.

It's great that there is competition in the market right now. But would it be as fierce in the U.S. if it weren't for the AT&T situation? Would most people just be using an iPhone? Beach states it as a fact, but I don't think it's an unreasonable question to consider. And it's something I'm sure Google is considering as the Verizon iPhone approaches.

[photo: flickr/laihiu]

About a month ago, there was a great call to action on the WorkAwesome blog:

What is the best professional advice you ever received? And where did it come from?

I meant to write a post in response to this, but the usual events (news, work, family) thwarted my efforts. Given that today is Labor Day here in the United States, I figured it was a good time to revisit this topic.

The Best Professional Advice I Received

Early in my career, around 1998, I was working as a consultant. A project that I was designing had a fundamental constraint, internet access could not be assumed at all times when using the application. So, we needed to have some sort of synchronization process. Our initial design was a complete failure, due to the lack of research in some key technologies where they would not truly support our processes. So, I went to my boss to deliver the news. I told him that the synchronization process would not work as designed and we would need to start over. He asked what options we had and how long they would take. I stood there without an answer. My boss had a fairly hot temper, but this time he obviously restrained himself and said:

When your design will not work, do not come in here with complaints, only come in with options.

It is very easy to get mired in the failure itself. I was still young (around 26) and had not dealt with much project failure. Dave Winer has a very good tale on one of his potential failures as well:

Over on Ycombinator one of the commenters, TotlolRon, quoted Apollo 13 Flight Controller Jerry Bostick. When bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. I think that's pretty close to the sentiment. You're out there, you're alone, and if you fail, you aren't coming back. That is the feeling I had outside the office that night.

The key in Dave's story is that you need to think about the options to avoid failure and not dwell on the failure itself. In that doomed project, I was dwelling on the failure. So, I took my boss' advice and came back the next day with options. Granted, the options did not appear like a vision, I needed to work on them. I was dealing with a mobile sales force that might only connect to the internet while at the office, or so I thought. I talked with the VP of Sales and the CIO, and found that a connectivity deal had been signed just a few days before our meeting. So, I could now depend on constant connectivity through dialup modems.

With connectivity came the answers. So, the next day I presented my options with potential issues to my boss. I had a recommendation ready among the options as well as contingency plans for the issues. From that point onward, the project was fine and we delivered a solid solution within the budget.

Failure is not an option is a widely used mantra. I think this misleads people to think that all failure should be avoided. Let's change this mantra to Failure as an end status is not an option. You can fail along the path, but you need to learn from those failures. You need to think of options to your failure in order to achieve success. In some cases, the answer may be obvious. In other cases, it will be much easier to just complain about the failure. The next time you fail at something, first think about what options you have. You may find that a alternative solution is easier to deal with than the consequences of the failure.

So, what are you offering, complaints or options?

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