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The Weekly Round-Up: 07.09.07
The phoney war...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 07 September 2007

There was a deafening cheer from Microsoft's marketing legions this week as the news broke that the Zune now stands a good chance of making serious inroads into the hard drive-based MP3 player market currently dominated by the iPod.

The Zune has trailed the iPod since it launched and looked unlikely to erode its rival's market lead any time soon. A market lead so significant that Amazon now has a 'Bestselling Non-iPod MP3 Players' section in its electronics site. Rather a depressing state of affairs for the Zune. So it goes...

Had the world finally woken up and realised that brown iPod clones are the future? No chance. It's just that Apple has decided to continue its migration towards players with flash-based memory and updated its entire iPod product range leaving only one 'classic' device with a hard disk. And then, the Round-Up suspects, only because mega capacity flash memory is too scarce and expensive to stick into devices to cater for people who simply have to carry around 40,000 songs in their pocket.

No, the bad news is that Zune sales remain pretty lousy. Despite ploughing millions into marketing the device in the US, the Zune still trails SanDisk in Amazon's 'also-ran' product category.

Apple in the meantime has widened the gap on its competitors and extended its iPod product line. This includes a redesigned Nano, which looks like it should have been renamed the Chubby, and a new iPod called the Touch. The new device is essentially an iPhone but without the phone, camera and horribly expensive two-year contract with AT&T. Plus it does internet access over wi-fi - wiping out the Zune's USP.

Apple has also revamped the Shuffle range. By changing all the colours. Old habits die hard, eh?

So back to the drawing board again for the Zune. But wait - the glimmer of an idea! Why not add phone functionality to the Zune? After all, if Apple is going to copy Microsoft with a wireless MP3 player, why can't Microsoft copy Apple? They'd never expect that.

The Redmond giant is considering just that, at least according to Mindy Mount, which sounds suspiciously like a porn star name. Not that the Round-Up is insinuating anything, far from it - she's the chief financial officer of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, which, the Xbox 360 aside, sounds like a nice, quiet job.

Mount told some investors: "It wouldn't be unreasonable to think at some point there might be some integrated thing."

Translation: we haven't got a clue what we're doing anymore, why don't you ask us about Windows Vista instead?

The messages from Redmond about the Zune phone have been mixed, with the device's marketing division bigging up the idea from day one and CEO Steve Ballmer denying it's a concept the company would ever pursue.

But this latest statement seems to indicate the Zune phone is firmly wedged in Ballmer's product pipeline. Which the Round-Up can't believe will be music to the ears of the mobile hardware partners that Microsoft traditionally does business with by powering their devices with Windows Mobile.

Windows Mobile is one of Microsoft's biggest success stories of recent years with licence sales expected to nearly double this fiscal year to more than 20 million copies. However, it remains a product largely targeted at office workers.

The tech world has been rife with speculation that the company is about to make a bid for BlackBerry-maker RIM in recent weeks.

Again, this may have been a pre-emptive attempt to head off Apple at the pass - by taking on the iPhone in the enterprise space. However, Microsoft may have been alarmed this week to hear the latest ramblings from analyst house Gartner claiming that Apple might start making enterprise-class iPhones or incorporate more enterprise-friendly features into existing models.

A Gartner analyst this week stated: "I would expect Apple in the future might see some potential in the enterprise market." Wow! You think?

The iPhone is a sophisticated smart phone, after all. It's difficult to imagine what other features Apple might add to the device for it to appeal to business users other than support for Microsoft Exchange and other enterprise mobile mail solutions.

Gartner also had the cheek to suggest a lack of perceived security around the Mac OS X-based device. Something that's never been a problem for Windows Mobile, of course.

So scandal and outrage all round this week. Not least for the rather silly people who camped out overnight outside Apple stores back in June to ensure they got their hands on the iPhone when it launched - Apple has also announced a $200 drop in the price of the device just a couple of months after it went on sale.

Remember this guy?

The Round-Up's betting he's not whooping now...

The old adage states that we are a nation of dog lovers. Unfortunately the mobile telecommunications revolution has put pay to that.

According to a report by the increasingly anachronistically sounding Carphone Warehouse, we'd be more worried about losing our mobile phone than we would be about losing a beloved pet.

Two-thirds of people surveyed said they would be upset at losing their mobile, slightly more than the 64 per cent who said they would feel the same way if they lost a family pet.

Meanwhile, more than a quarter (27 per cent to be precise) described their mobile phone as a 'treasured possession'. And women are more attached to their phones than men.

At first the Round-Up was appalled by this. But then it got to thinking. Sure, you don't get the same amount of love and loyalty out of a mobile phone but are pets themselves becoming anachronistic as our lives become increasingly reliant on personal technology and mobile communications?

Does a dog allow you to send picture messages? No. Can a cat give you quad-band coverage in remote corners of the globe? No. Can a guinea pig supply your laptop with high speed 3G data access? Not without some very cruel and pointless surgery.

Look at it another way. Does your Nokia do its toilet on your new lounge carpet? No. Does your Samsung scratch up the side of the sofa? No. Does your Motorola nibble appreciatively on a sunflower seed? Possibly, check the manual.

It's all beginning to stack up against Rover, isn't it?

If you were stuck down a well - who would you rather have to hand? Your trusty N95 or Lassie? Your N95 won't run off and communicate your predicament via a series of incomprehensible barks. You could just call the emergency services, assuming the well had sufficient network access.

The Round-Up has a theory. Want to hear what it is? Well you haven't got a choice.

The Round-Up suspects that this is all a grand marketing plan on behalf of Carphone Warehouse to anthropomorphise the mobile phone and reposition it in the public mindset as a member of the family. After all, its own adverts feature a walking mobile displaying a range of emotions from joy to despair and a female owner beaming at it lovingly.

Could this be the next great evolutionary step in personal technology? A bond of love between man and machine. Nope. It's just another daft silly season press release. For which the Round-Up is eternally grateful.

Walkies, Rover!

Finally this week, yet another dispatch from the news nexus that exists between the closely aligned worlds of internet technology and kung fu.

The kung fu monks of the Shaolin Temple in Henan Province, China, are outraged at an internet chatroom post that claims that a solitary ninja warrior took out an entire temple of their high-kicking predecessors.

A badly dubbed statement from the monks said: "The so-called defeat is purely fabricated and we demand the internet user to apologise to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did."

The sacrilege was committed by a forum poster calling him or herself 'Five Minutes Every Day', which sounds either like a reference to a health regime or nothing much to boast about.

The post stated that the ninja challenged the monks and opened a whole can of whupass in the temple, defeating all challengers. "The facts (sic) that these monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed they were named as kung fu masters in vain," stated the post, in an idiom befitting a Bruce Lee movie.

Fighting talk in more ways than one. The easily slighted monks of the Shaolin Temple are outraged, which in itself is a searing indictment of their spiritual training, which one would imagine calls for inner peace, tolerance and an understanding of the highest spiritual aspects of our ephemeral existence.

Stuff that, they're going postal. They're preparing a fierce retaliation. And what could this entail? The five point exploding palm technique? The drunken fire monkey dance killing strike? Hell no, it's more fearsome than that - they've hired a lawyer and he's demanding an apology.

It's all got a bit out of hand and the Reuters report which covered the news isn't really helping. The article deemed it necessary to refer to the "sensitive" nature of relations between China (home of kung fu) and Japan (home of ninjutsu) and then sees fit to drag up the fact that the Chinese are still a bit miffed over Japan's invasion and occupation of China during the first half of the 20th century.

As the Round-Up's venerable old sensei used to say: a bit of perspective goes a long way.

For the record, the Round-Up suspects that the forum post could be an erroneous reference to the exploits of Takamatsu Toshitsugu, the 33rd Grandmaster of Togakure Ryu ninjutsu, who spent many years in China learning martial arts, getting into fights, running up trees and all other sorts of mystical nonsense. Then again it could just be a spotty 14-year-old boy trolling monks for fun.

Did the Round-Up just write 'nonsense'? Surely not. The last thing silicon.com needs right now is the enmity of thousands of enraged ninjas.

The Silicon Towers security guard (Bob) is pretty handy but the Round-Up doubts he could dispatch dozens of black-clad assassins. Especially not with his arthritic knee.

Once again, the Round-Up is eternally grateful that this column is written anonymously. And remotely.

Judo chop!

Until next week, keep your thoughts on ninjas firmly to yourself, watch the shadows and kick back and enjoy the Weekly Round-Up podcast available here and via iTunes.

And did the Round-Up not mention our weekly Caption Competition? Slap! Here it is…

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