Thursday, November 19, 2009
Google’s Chrome OS: “It Just Works”
Speaking at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this past July, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said of Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS, “Who knows what this thing is?” Today, he found out. The operating system, a direct challenge to Microsoft Windows, was on display at a media gathering at the company’s HQ this morning, and in the words of Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management, it is intended to make computing a “delightful” experience.
Much has changed at Yahoo since May 17, 2006, the last time the company held an investor day gathering. In May 2006, Yahoo’s shares traded at about $30 and the company claimed 28.98 percent of the U.S. search market. Today, its stock is worth a little over $16 and its share of the search market has fallen to 18.8 percent. Ugly declines, both of them. Fitting then, that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, speaking at the company’s first investor day gathering in three-and-a-half years, would describe Yahoo’s future as “a journey back to respect.”
There’s a new BlackBerry Bold headed to market. This morning, Research in Motion uncrated the BlackBerry Bold 9700, a more refined verison of its popular enterprise device, the BlackBerry Bold 9000. 
The Apple store went offline Tuesday morning and when it returned, it did so with a groaning board of new hardware, including a range of aluminum and edge-to-edge glass iMacs, new Mac Minis, a 13-inch unibody polycarbonate MacBook and a wireless, multitouch “Magic Mouse.”
The broader advertising recovery may take time, but search advertising is clearly beating a hasty path back toward normalcy. Or it is in Google’s case anyway. Reporting third-quarter results after market close Thursday, the search giant posted revenue of $5.94 billion, an increase of seven percent compared to the third quarter of 2008.
Motorola has finally announced its bet-the-company Android handset. At GigaOM’s Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco this morning, Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of the company’s handset division, uncrated the CLIQ, a device it describes unremarkably as the “first phone with social skills.”
When Steve Jobs described the iPhone at D5 as “the best iPod we’ve ever made,” he set the bar high for future iterations of the iconic device. Now, in the run-up to tomorrow’s invitation-only Apple event, the question is: Will Apple reach the bar? And with what? The answer, if the latest rumors prove true, depends on your feelings about iPods with cameras.
When Motorola announces its new Android handsets at a scheduled Sept. 10 event in San Francisco, AT&T isn’t likely to be among their carriers. Sources close to the company tell MKM Partners analyst Tero Kuittinen that AT&T balked at Motorola’s Sawgrass and Heron handsets, allegedly because of their dated display technology.
Apple on Wednesday released OS X 10.5.8, the latest point release to Mac OS X Leopard, even as Amazon takes pre-orders for its next iteration–Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). 10.5.8 is largely a maintenance update, though it does patch a number of security vulnerabilities (18 to be exact), some of them fairly old.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says the company’s newly inked search advertising pact “comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo,” but you wouldn’t know it to look at the company’s share price. Yahoo’s shares slipped into the mud on the deal’s announcement, declining nearly seven percent to $16.07 in early trading.
Consumers may have trouble distinguishing netbooks from notebooks, but that’s clearly not preventing people from buying them. DisplaySearch, an NPD Group subsidiary, estimates that netbooks will claim a 20 percent share of the world-wide market in 2009. 
If the netbook market is a race to the bottom, then Sony is bringing up the rear. Not a year after Sony execs disparaged netbooks as undeserving of its premium brand attention, the company announced its token entry into the market: the Vaio W. 
