microsoft

FCC proposes new map-based collection method for broadband availability reports

19 July 2019 by Steve Blum
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The ever increasing volume of complaints about the accuracy of broadband availability data published by the Federal Communications Commission is producing results. In August, the FCC will vote on a proposal to require Internet service providers to submit electronic map data that shows where they offer service, at what speeds it’s offered and which technology it uses.

The current data sets are based on census block reports, with a census block reckoned as served at a given speed level if one home or business within it can get that level.… More

FCC doesn’t swallow broadband map spam, but still does an availability victory dance

7 May 2019 by Steve Blum
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Carmen miranda 625

The Federal Communications Commission re-did its annual analysis of broadband availability in the U.S., after a broadband advocacy group and Microsoft separately called bullshit on the first version. But it’s not backing away from its claim that “significant progress has been made in closing the digital divide in America”.

Free Press is the broadband advocacy group that spotted a truckload of map spam when the FCC pushed out a press release in February, claiming broadband “is being deployed on a reasonable and timely basis”.… More

Microsoft’s rural broadband gamble might have millions of winners

12 January 2019 by Steve Blum
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The rural/urban broadband divide is deep, according to a report by Microsoft. For people living and working in rural areas, it’s confirmation of what they already know, but it’s valuable nonetheless. Microsoft’s critique of the available data – and the 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps upload speed standard – is a useful corporate counterweight to the claims made by AT&T and Frontier, which are the telcos receiving the lion’s share of federal broadband subsidies for 10 Mbps down/1 Mbps up service in rural California.… More

Windows mobile suffers the Blue Screen of Death, Microsoft moves on

15 October 2017 by Steve Blum
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Microsoft is done with the mobile operating system business. The man in charge of Windows 10, Joe Belfiore, announced the end of the mobile version in a tweet. Like Bill Gates, Belfiore switched to Android.

Current Windows mobile users – both of them – will continue to get security updates and other tweaks, but development of the system has ended. The market just wasn’t there, Belfiore tweeted…

We have tried VERY HARD to incent app devs.

… More

Microsoft discovers Google's business model in spectral gaps

22 July 2017 by Steve Blum
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Me too.

Microsoft’s TV white space broadband initiative is many things – a worthy effort to expand Internet access, a way of squeezing more useable bandwidth out of finite radio spectrum, a call to action for rural economic development and, as willingly acknowledged, a business opportunity.

It is also a foray into the market economics of free software. White space is the gaps between active television channels, which vary according to where you are in relation to whatever TV stations might be around.… More

Google, Facebook, Microsoft follow Ford's vertical integration path

9 July 2016 by Steve Blum
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Another big, transpacific fiber cable is now lit. Less than two years after it was announced, the FASTER consortium has completed construction of a link between Bandon, Oregon and two landing sites in Japan, with a further extension to Taiwan. The group’s membership includes Google as well as several Asian telecoms companies, including China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and Singtel. NEC built it.

Google is taking one-sixth of the capacity, 10 terabits per second out of a total of 60 Tbps.… More

Microsoft doesn't offer a plausible proposition to the mobile world

24 January 2015 by Steve Blum
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The’s more to mobility than moving around the conference room.

This week’s coming out party for Windows 10 confirmed Microsoft’s slow shift from a shrink wrapped products company to a service provider.

The company will not execute that strategy quickly enough or effectively. To be a universal platform for desktop and mobile computing means mobile telecoms carriers and manufacturers will have to make a major shift away Android and adopt the Windows operating system and all the cloud services that surround it.… More

The Blue Screen of Death is still deadly, but only for Microsoft

22 November 2014 by Steve Blum
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Microsoft’s cloud platform – Azure – had a stormy week, but the silver lining is that the company isn’t shying away from the necessary pain involved in transforming itself from a shrink wrapped software hawker to a computing services provider.

The 11 hour outage was the result of a poorly done system update. At the risk of taking a cheap shot, that’s the kind of glitch that the Windows operating system – and its predecessors – have routinely experienced for more than 30 years.… More

Microsoft won't win consumer hearts by appealing to IT minds

10 September 2014 by Steve Blum
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Suit, check. Hair cut, check. Mojo, oops.

You have to give Microsoft credit for trying. It was a distant third (or fourth or fifth or worse, depending on how you count) in the mobile operating system and smart phone races coming into the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas. No matter what happened, it wouldn’t narrow the gap significantly leaving it.

But if it ever wants to matter in the mobile world it has to start changing perceptions, and CTIA is a good place to begin.… More

Job cuts show Microsoft CEO is serious about new direction

19 July 2014 by Steve Blum
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Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, has gotten it right. His 10 July 2014 email to Microsoft employees set out a clear path forward for the struggling giant and this week’s announced layoffs of 18,000 employees turned that vision from clear into ruthless. Which is the only way the company will survive as a major tech player in the 21st century.

Star legacy businesses – Windows OS, Office productivity software, Xbox – will survive, but primarily as stepping stones to cloud and mobile services, which are intended to reach customers regardless of whether they’re using Microsoft products…

All of these apps will be explicitly engineered so anybody can find, try and then buy them in friction-free ways.

… More