52% of Clearwire Customers Live Where Clearwire Has No Service

One way of describing the impact the HTC Evo has had is to look at Clearwire net additions in the second quarter of 2010.

As of June 30, 2010, 52 percent of the company's wholesale subscribers resided outside of Clearwire's currently launched markets, Clearwire says. That's the impact of revenues paid by Sprint Nextel HTC Evo users who live in areas where all they can get is 3G network access.

That's some trick!

Clearwire ended the second quarter with 1.7 million total subscribers consisting of 940,000 retail subscribers and 752,000 wholesale subscribers.

During the second quarter, Clearwire added 722,000 total net new subscribers including 127,000 retail additions and 595,000 wholesale additions.

Clearwire Corp - Investor Relations

FCC Hits Wall With Private Net Neutrality Talks

The direct talks between Google and Verizon would seem to take on a new importance now that the Federal Communications Commission has hit a wall in its efforts to get the major stakeholders to agree on the outlines of a net neutrality solution. The formal end of the private stakeholder meetings, which have been said to have been unable to move forward on any of the key issues, now have been formally ended.

That means any agreement Google and Verizon can reach, even though it is a voluntary set of agreements, assumes greater importance as a way of crafting a compromise agreement potentially able to garner wider support, and avoid a nasty, litigious process that will slow, not expedite, faster innovation and investment in broadband access facilities.

If the talks have failed to reach consensus. it likely is at least in part because some stakeholders will not budge on re-regulation of broadband access as a common carrier service.

Net neutrality supporters say the only option they want is the Commission classifying ISPs as common carriers based on Title II of the Communications Act." That is pretty much a deal breaker for ISPs, both telco and cable, so it is obvious why the talks got no serious traction.

Net neutrality fans cheer as FCC gives up on "backroom" talks

Will Microsoft Let Mobile Eat the Desktop?

One of the safest bets anybody in the technology business can make is that the leaders of the past wave of computing architecture will not be the leaders of the next wave.

And since there is relatively universal agreement that the next wave, whether you want to call it the "mobile computing" or "cloud computing" wave, is coming.

And though executives at each company will strongly contest the notion, that means slim odds Apple, Google, Microsoft or Cisco will be among the top-five biggest names in computing infrastructure as the next wave is established.

As shocking as that sounds, that is precisely what has happened in all of the earlier computing eras.

Some point to Microsoft as the company most endangered by mobility. In this view, the company has no answer for a market in which the operating system is free, and the dominant application isn’t Office, as that is where Microsoft makes most of its money.

The argument is that Apple and Google have managed to create a market where operating systems are subsidized by revenues from hardware, advertising or third-party applications, while social applications like Twitter, Facebook and blogs are the way users increasingly communicate ideas, rather than through Word documents or PowerPoint presentations.

Those are apt observations, but even those developments do not capture the full weight of the challenge. Any company that today is a top player in the computing ecosystem, history suggests, will fall in the next wave.

History will have to made if the pattern is not to repeat, and it isn't simply Microsoft that is at risk. Every leading company today has to worry.

Will Microsoft Let Mobile Eat the Desktop?

Google Denies Reports It Has a Deal for Packet Prioritization

Despite reports to the contrary, Google says it doesn't have a deal with Verizon on "network neutrality" that includes packet prioritization, much less paid-for prioritization, Multichannel News reports.


"We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google or YouTube traffic," said Google spokesperson Mistique Cano. "The New York Times piece is quite simply wrong."

"The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken," said Verizon spokesman David Fish. "To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect."

The original reporting from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg had suggested agreement on a framework that would have included both "best effort" and "prioritized" services.

All we can say at this point is that the extensive talks between Google and Verizon Wireless will bear fruit. Each company has too much to gain, and much to lose, if the two parties cannot compromise on packet prioritization in ways that allow both firms to move forward.

Each has investors to persuade, at the very least, and both face a more-uncertain framework as the Federal Communications Commission proceeds with its network neutrality proceeding, as that process seems largely deadlocked on the important issues.

Google's Failures are a Good Thing

Many management consultants would say that the typical company learns faster when it tries new things faster, accelerating the rate at which it can sort the good ideas from the bad.

Few firms actually practice what the consultants preach very well. Failure still gets punished, and the bigger the failure the bigger the punishment. Google is among the firms that fail fast and frequently, and that is a good thing. The faster it sorts through initiatives that don't work, the faster it will stumble upon the good ideas.

Though people tend to remember the successes and forget the failures, given a sufficient passage of time, both Apple and Google have failed at some initiatives, in Google's case many initiatives.

That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Google is set up so that failure is not dangerous to the company's core business. That isn't always the case at other firms.

Some will defend a slower pace of trial and error precisely for that reason: some firms cannot handle a major failure as they experiment. That is one reason why it is good to have a platform that allows frequent innovations to be tested, at low or reasonable cost.

In a business where good ideas have to be discovered, there is almost no way around experimentation and failure. Companies simply need to improve their prototyping and testing processes, with the caveat that some companies (software firms, especially) have inherent advantages in that regard, and always will. That's why much, perhaps most, meaningful innovation now comes in businesses that are driven by software.

Google doesn't so much fail as experiment faster, and more frequently, than most companies can.

200,000 Android Activations a Day; 1.4 Million a Week; 5.6 Million a Month

You bet Android devices in use are growing fast. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, says 200,000 Android devices are activated every day. Do the math: that's 5.6 million a month. If you are a platform supplier, or building a business on a platform, those are big numbers.

Are Mobile App Store Efforts Damaging Handset Makers?

The conventional widsom, which is not to say the conventional wisdom is wrong, is that application richness is a key driver of value for handset brands. But are handset vendors, in general, making a mistake pouring resources into mobile app stores? Some think so.

Acoording to the "MEX Handset Industry Insight" service, since 2007, the combined average annual profit margin of the five major handset manunfacturers (Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson) has fallen from 12.5 percent to 6.3 percent in 2009.

In the second quarter of 2010, margin dipped yet again, reaching 5.3 percent. In real terms, this means the total combined profit made by these five companies has fallen from about $15.1 billion in 2007 to $5.8 billion in 2009.

In other words, as important as the mobile app stores might be, the handset vendors largely cannot afford to support them.

The other part of conventional wisdom is that service providers cannot create or maintain such mobile app store initiatives as well as handset suppliers. In the long term, that might not prove correct.

If margin pressures force the app stores to be divested, among the logical buyers are the service providers, or at least some third-party entities owned collectively by service providers. People might say it is hard to do so, as rivalries between service providers are too fierce. That is true, at least in principle.

But a recent agreement by AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA to collaborate on a new mobile payment business is evidence that given a big enough carrot, or a big enough stick, cooperation is possible.

MEX - the strategy forum for mobile user experience