Will Microsoft Get Lucky With Yahoo?

Microsoft may have been "lucky," as CEO Steve Ballmer put it, that its 2008 bid to buy Yahoo for $47 billion fell through. Nevertheless what he might have as a matter of fact meant was that now, Microsoft may be able to scoop up Yahoo for a fraction of that sum, a venture it's reportedly pursuing. In the meantime, Google shows Ice Cream Sandwich, RIM shows BBX and Apple shows its teeth.

Although Microsoft's and Yahoo's search engines are already connected in a roundabout sort of way, an all-out purchase could put a little more kick into Yahoo's ailing search business. Microsoft's been able to bring Bing a long way in its short time on the market. And in spite of Yahoo's problems with vision and direction, its properties all in all get tons of traffic. Visitors may skew a little on the older side, nevertheless that means more disposable income. Microsoft could get all of this for much less than it would have had to pay in 2008.

What Google has right now is Google Music Beta

What Google has right now is Google Music Beta, a service that doesn't as a matter of fact sell music -- it just gives you space where you can store it and access it later, on the whole you so choose. How you get that music in the first instance is your business, and honestly, I would guess Google actually doesn't want to know how a lot of its users in fact do acquire it. Nevertheless whatever it is and in return you got it, you can stick it in Google's cloud and come back any time to get it.

Whether it sells downloads or runs on more of a subscription model, an actual store would mean charging users money for access to music they didn't already have, and that's what The Wall Street Journal claims Google is getting ready to do. This would mean Amazon and Apple would have a huge new competitor to deal with.

The globe to do battle with Samsung

Apple's lawyers have been dispatched to all corners of the globe to do battle with Samsung, which now bears the distinction of being Apple's most worthy target. The patent fights have been going on for months in places like the U.S., Germany, South Korea and Australia, and many of them have to do with the physical design of the iPad, which Apple says Samsung copied when it designed its Galaxy Tab.

You never hear about companies suing each other for similar designs in the world of flat-screen TVs or computer monitors, but most of them look identical to each other. However these are the formative years of the mobile devices market, and the way these battles play out will determine specifically how this part of the gadget world grows up. Patent skirmishes are being fought on both the software side, in which it's on the whole Google vs. the world, and the hardware and design side, where many of the bigger battles involve Apple somehow or other.

The score so far?

So what's the score so far? So then, Apple seems to be on a bit of a roll. Recently it won a preliminary injunction in Australia that will prevent the Galaxy Tab from being sold there until a resolution is reached. Technically that doesn't mean Samsung has been defeated, nevertheless now all Apple has to do is keep the proceedings dragging on for a few months and it'll really achieve what it came to do: ruin Samsung's holidays down pursuant to this agreement.

Meanwhile, a judge stateside has declared that the Samsung tablet does in point of fact appear to violate Apple's patents. That's the same case in which lawyers couldn't ID the right tablet from across the room. That probably isn't the single biggest factor that influenced the judge's decision, nevertheless it couldn't possibly have helped Samsung's argument. A preliminary injunction in the larger U.S. market would be a much bigger bruise for Samsung, yet the judge in such a case stopped short of issuing one just but. She said Apple would first have to prove its patents are valid in the first instance, so the ball's in Apple's court on that one.

While this was happening, Samsung went on the offensive and asked courts in Japan and Australia to ban the importation of the iPhone 4S in those markets on patent violation grounds.

This international patent brawl is turning Apple's strange relationship with Samsung even stranger. Apple happens to be Samsung's biggest customer of flash memory chips, but here it is stomping on the little finger Samsung has on the tablet market by trying to abolish the Galaxy Tab.

Often these kinds of patent fights are solved relatively quickly and quietly with a nice fat check, with one company paying the other a licensing fee in order to carry on business as usual, long earlier a judge as a matter of fact makes a ruling. I'm not privy to whatever behind-the-scenes negotiations might be going on here, nevertheless this fight doesn't seem to be going in that direction. Apple's already sitting on piles of cash. Right now, it looks like it actually is going for the Galaxy Tab's throat -- or until further notice aiming to put it into the hospital until at once February.

Little differently this year

Apple's usual game of teeter-tottering iPhone sales played out a little differently this year, and the company's stock was given a big kick in the teeth as a result.

AAPL shares lost near 6 percent just afterwards the company released its financials for the quarter ending in September. This is in spite of revenues and profits that made serious gains over the year-ago period and all-time highs for Mac and iPad sales.

In fact, Apple's stock value itself had hit an all-time high recently and was hovering above $400 for several days previously it took the dive. Days earlier the numbers were released, some analysts were already bracing themselves for bad news -- BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis even downgraded the stock from "buy" to "hold" on the basis that AAPL's valuation was just so ridiculously enormous that a hiccup was sure to come along, afterwards which it might be safe to put it back in the "buy" bucket.

What we just saw

Maybe that hiccup is what we just saw, like as not not, nevertheless the reason Wall Street yanked down Apple's value so abruptly at first sight seemed kind of strange: Not enough iPhones had been sold, and analysts found that very sad and disappointing. That's odd, because just a day or two earlier, Apple claimed to have sold 4 million iPhone 4Ses in a single weekend, which it said was more than double the iPhone 4's debut weekend sales and a new record for any cellphone. That's disappointing?

Actually, the period covered by the quarterly report -- the one with the sub-par iPhone sales -- ended in September, weeks earlier iPhone 4S hit the shelves. And although Apple sold 17 million iPhones in that quarter, the Wall Street guys expected to see more. What may have thrown them off was all the rumor and uncertainty regarding when the then iPhone would when all is said and done arrive. Apple changed its release rhythm this year and skipped its usual June release, with no word on when anything new would come along. Sales always dry up right previously buyers expect a new phone is right around the corner, and maybe analysts were expecting the uncertainty would to tell the truth stabilize sales to a certain degree.

The rumor mill

But you can't stop the rumor mill. Evidence began to pile up that October would be the month, and as usual iPhone sales ground to a halt as everyone waited for the at once big thing.

Autumn is bringing in a big harvest of new mobile operating systems. Microsoft was on the early side with Windows Phone Mango a few weeks ago, at that time Apple pushed out iOS 5, and just now Android and Innovation In Motion have shown previews of their latest mobile OSes.

Future RIM phones, nevertheless, will be endowed with something called "BBX," a hybrid of QNX and the usual BlackBerry operating system. It's supposed to combine the best of both worlds, featuring an improved gaming engine, a new browser with HTML 5 support and a revamped user interface.

Virtualized environment

BBX will as well support Android applications in a virtualized environment. It's not quite clear whether all Android apps will work on BlackBerries or if the selection will be limited, nevertheless users will be able to venture outside RIM's modest collection of native software and use apps from the other platform.

There are some risks here for RIM. Every major platform wants to have its very own line of applications, especially proprietary systems like BlackBerry. When that platform starts letting in foreign apps, developers will have fewer reasons to create anything for BlackBerry at all. It could lose a degree of control over the software running spontaneously phones, and the move could as well theoretically raise questions about security, which is for all that one of RIM's biggest selling points.

Meanwhile, over in Hong Kong, Google and Samsung shared a stage to roll out Ice Cream Sandwich, the long-awaited 4.0 version of Android. The previous version, Honeycomb, was developed especially for tablets, nevertheless Ice Cream Sandwich will be ready to run on both tablets and phones, which will hopefully give developers fewer headaches.

The new OS will give them a boatload of new APIs to play with, and end users will get interactive notifications, resizeable widgets, a faster browser and a People app that integrates social network feeds. There's a new voice control engine, improved multitasking capabilities, and much more.