Archive for June 27th, 2009
Following an iSuppli teardown, it is revealed that Apple makes over $400 profit on every 16GB iPhone 3G S, and a whopping $500 on every 32GB iPhone 3G S. It’s not so much iPhone 3G S as iPhone 3G $$$!
Yep, you read that right. After factoring in component costs and even manufacturing costs, Apple still gets change from $200.
Here’s the cost of components breakdown as carried out by iSuppli:
Now, once you’ve absorbed that, consider that Apple sells 16GB iPhone 3G S handsets to AT&T for around $600. Customers might not pay the full price all in one go (if you’re a new customer, you can pick up the iPhone at a reduced price), but over the course of the two years you can rest assured that they do pay $600 for the handset.
Remember that the shipping, advertising, R&D and so on eat into that profit per handset, but even with these variables factored in, Apple is pulling in a tidy profit per handset.
The iPhone 3G S could be the recession-busting pill that Apple was looking for.
If you’re one of those Windows 7 testers still running the Beta — and not the Release Candidate — of Microsoft’s next-generation client, it’s time to get the lead out.
Bi-hourly shutdowns of the Windows 7 Beta (which Microsoft released officially in January of this year) are set to begin next week, on July 1. On August 1, the Windows 7 Beta will be marked as “non-Genuine” software, with those running it becoming subject t the punishments that Microsoft has earmarked for pirates.
Testers have until August 15 to download the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) build, which Microsoft made available for download starting in May 2009. The RC is set to begin its own bi-hourly shutdowns in March 2010 and to be designated “non-Genuine” in June 2010.
Windows 7 is expected to be released to manufacturing in July and will be generally available starting October 22, 2009.
Microsoft’s Startup Business Accelerator (the folks who brought you the Microsoft Vine public-information service) are introducing another new service on June 24. That offering, known officially as Hohm and which which handles home-energy management, looks like yet another generic Web 2.0-type service.
But Hohm is more than an attempt by Microsoft to establish its cred in the “save the planet” movement. Recently, I had a chance to ask Troy Batterberry, the Hohm product manager, about the service. After talking to him, here are five reasons I think Hohm is more than initially meets the green eye:
1. Hohm is a hosted serice running on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. There are relatively few Microsoft services that already are running fully on top of Azure. HealthVault is one; Live Mesh is another. The calculations upon which the Hohm service is built are “really complicated,” Batterberry said, and require historical modeling. By running on Azure, Hohm can be scaled up or down, depending on demand, to use lots of compute cycles during peak demand.
2. Speakng of HealthVault, Hohm was patterned after it and uses the same security and privacy mechanisms that Microsoft’s health-information service uses. While energy consumption data doesn’t seem as in need of guarding that patient health data is, energy usage and pricing are information that is sensitive and to which access needs to be controlled, said Batterberry.
3. Hohm is one of Microsoft’s first — but not only — product tailored to the energy market. (The Dynamics team already launched an energy-management dashboard product last year, making it Microsoft’s first energy-specific “product.”) Remember how Microsoft began hiring doctors and healthcare experts — and even bought a healthcare-specific company — in order to build and field HealthVault and Azyxxi? The company is planning a similarly serious foray into the energy field, building out additional energy-centric software products and services, Batterberry said.
4. Is Microsoft working on an energy-centric search capability/engine, the same way that Microsoft has incorporated health-specific search data into Bing? “It could make sense to go into the decision-specific energy area,” Batterberry said.
5. Microsoft considers Hohm part of a “10-year (investment) journey” into the energy market. Microsoft’s energy-specific focus will encompass consumers, utility companies, device makers and more, Batterberry said. Microsoft may end up fielding some kind of enerprise-focused energy-management product/service, he said. The company may become a player in the energy-centric device-control space (not a big stretch, given Microsoft’s work in embedded operating systems with Windows Embedded Compact).
Users (in the U.S. only for now) interested in test-driving Hohm — which was codenamed “Niagara,” as the energy pioneer Nikola Tesla did a lot of his research in Niagara Falls — will be able to sign up for the beta this week on the Hohm page. Microsoft is expecting the final version of the service to be released in about six to nine months, Batterberry said.
Microsoft’s decision to change the rendering engine in its Outlook mail client from HTML to the Word rendering engine back in 2007 wasn’t one of its most popular moves. In fact, there are still more than a few Outlook users who are hoping against hope that an online campaign might result in Microsoft backtracking with Outlook 2010 and going back to HTML rendering.
Microsoft’s response: Outlook isn’t broken and Outlook 2010 will include the Word rendering engine, just like Outlook 2007 does.
The Outlook team posted its response to the Twitter-based campaign designed to convince the company to go back to the HTML rendering default on the Outlook Team blog on June 24. From that post:
“First, while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages.”
The post, authored by William Kennedy. Corporate Vice President of the Office Communications and Forms Team, goes on to say that there is no consensus in the industry around which subset of HTML would be appropriate for e-mail. He blogged:
“There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The ‘Email Standards Project’ does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products.”
Microsoft reiterated the reasons it moved from HTML to Word for e-mail rendering in athis white paper.
On June 25, Microsoft took the wraps off its Windows 7 retail pricing. Bottom line: If you preorder (U.S., Canada and Japan only for now), you can save more than 50 percent over what comparable Vista versions cost. If you don’t, you’ll pay roughly the same for Windows 7 as you paid for Vista at retail.
(My ZDNet blogging colleague Ed Bott has a more thorough look at the retail pricing for each Windows 7 version.)
There’s still plenty we don’t know about Windows 7 pricing, such as how much Microsoft is charging PC makers per copy of Windows 7, which may have an impact on what PC makers will charge for new Windows 7 PCs. Microsoft isn’t talking about whether it will offer a Family Pack for Windows 7 and how much that will cost. (I asked; no dice.) And, as Bott noted, there’s no word on what the Anytime Upgrade pricing — for users who want to jump up to a more feature-rich Windows 7 SKU — will be.
Microsoft also acknowledged on June 25 that the Windows 7 Upgrade Option program will kick off on Friday, June 26, as was expected. Participating PC makers and retailers will be offering users who buy Vista PCs as of June 26 a coupon for a free copy of Windows 7 once it is available, after October 22. The official details on how the program will work are available on Microsoft’s Upgrade Offer site.
Some industry watchers had been predicting — and hoping — Microsoft would get a lot more aggressive with Windows 7 pricing, especially given the state of the economy. Others had been anticipating Microsoft would likely hold pricing steady, even though Windows 7 already is shaping up to be a lot more popular than Vista.
Microsoft is offering a retail price cut of 8 percent (for the upgrade version) to 17 percent (for the full version) for the Home Premium version of Windows 7. IDC analyst Richard Shim said that is a good start, and added he is expecting the preorders, with the 50+ percent cuts to “likely fly off the shelves.”
But given the fact that Microsoft sells new versions of Windows via PC preloads and volume-licensing deals — not in the form of retail copies — there are other more pressing pricing matters.
“The more important question is what are the cuts like to the OEMs?” Shim said. “That’s where Microsoft makes a majority of their revenue when it comes to the OS. Last time around with Vista, OEMs weren’t too pleased with the multiple versions, the delivery delays and the removal of some significant features and they grumbled about it quite a bit. This time around, Microsoft might want to try to win back some goodwill with OEMs.”
Charles King Principal Analyst with Pund-IT praised the “global uniformity” of Microsoft’s Windows 7 retail pricing, and said that Microsoft already has done a lot to make pricing simpler and easier to understand than Vista’s. While he said he is expecting fewer users to want to downgrade to Vista or XP from Windows 7, King said he was curious how downgrades will be priced by PC makers. Will users have to pay extra for “downgrade rights”? No word on that yet.