Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 08 Feb 2013 18:21

From ZDnet article:

My tests on a production Surface Pro 128 confirm that amount almost exactly. I found that the factory image provided 89.7 GB of free space. (Why the difference? A source inside Microsoft tells me the employee who confirmed the numbers did so using pre-production machines that contained different disk images and debug code that is different from final shipping units that will be on sale beginning this weekend.)

*facepalm*

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 08 Feb 2013 20:39

Raja Bose wrote: Really, you think so? Think again (or ask the IT managers who pulled their hair out or heck, ask my mom ). In fact compared to a USB key, a box package with a recovery CD/DVD turns out to be much safer but software is no longer going to retail on discs any more so that option is out.

It is a weak argument and I'll tell you why. Apple doesn't create an OS image partition on the disk of a Mac. That is left up to you, if you want, or you can put it on an external disk. The OS image is provided on a USB stick or you can download the OS, or take your Mac to an Apple store where they will install an OS image for free. This USB stick won't be used like one to dump files on and carry it in your purse or pocket. It is, IMVHO, a better option over partitioning your disk from the beginning and if you should have physical failure of the disk and don't have a back up, your options aren't limited.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 08 Feb 2013 22:38

Mort Walker wrote:
Apparently Fruit Co made a deliberate decision to report disk sizes differently (instead of as a power of 2)....I smell the hand of Mahdi here.
No, it has to do with iLife applications taking up space such as iPhoto, iMovie, and Garage Band. There is also iTunes, iCal, and Address Book. These apps are useful to many people and if you don't want them, you can uninstall them to get that space back. And they are NOT bloat ware in any sense of the imagination.

Read that article again, there are 2 things he mentions - 1st is Fruit Co's reporting disk sizes differently. And the 2nd is the applications each OS comes with.

In both cases, you can remove installed software to further free up disk space. The MacBook Air includes iLife ‘11, while the Surface Pro has 18 included apps, some or all of which can be removed.

So the argument went from Surface Pro doesn't have any disk space left to MacBook Air hogs its disk space with useful apps onlee?

Mort Walker wrote: It is a weak argument and I'll tell you why. Apple doesn't create an OS image partition on the disk of a Mac. That is left up to you, if you want, or you can put it on an external disk I thought Fruit Co philosophy was to ensure users don't have to worry about that stuff?! So now having to do an extra chore is considered a better thing suddenly. . The OS image is provided on a USB stick or you can download the OS, or take your Mac to an Apple store where they will install an OS image for free. Or you can just do it yourself without needing to frantically hunt for USB keys, stores or high-speed internet... This USB stick won't be used like one to dump files on and carry it in your purse or pocket. It is, IMVHO, a better option over partitioning your disk from the beginning and if you should have physical failure of the disk (we are talking recovery partitions on SSDs here, not winchester style HDDs so that point is moot) and don't have a back up, your options aren't limited.

Sorry but you are trying to shoehorn your reasoning just to satisfy a OS X is better than Windoze requirement.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 08 Feb 2013 22:43

Yogi_G wrote:Just wondering what would happen if we were to let one of those google or continental self drive cars loose on Indians roads. I think the software on these cars is tightly bound to western lane based rules and schemes and would terrible fail in even say Mexico.

I don't see full fledged self-driving cars happening anytime soon in the mass market (assisted driving, yes). The reason is simple: If your self-driving car hit a pedestrian while you are not driving (but behind the wheel), who gets sued? You? The manufacturer? Your car?

There are legal challenges which have to be addressed. And one cannot say that self driving car == aircraft auto-pilot onlee either since aircraft operate in totally different traffic environments which are highly monitored and controlled (a cycle rickshaw wont come floating in front of an aircraft in the sky, for one).

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 08 Feb 2013 22:45

So not providing a USB stick with an OS image is a good idea?

Whatever...enjoy your Surface since it won't be around too long.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 08 Feb 2013 22:52

No it just turns out from customer experience statistics (as the Surface team mentioned in one of their AMAs) to be a better option to do a recovery partition on a SSD especially considering it doesn't affect free disk space as badly as alleged and risk of disk failure is less than the risk of losing one's USB key. You can still create your recovery USB key - that's your choice.

Mortullah, don't get blinded by hatred for a specific product or company that you get blindsided by it.

Evaluation has to be done on merit & facts not on pre-conceived bias. That's why I like Anand mian's reviews over the years but give much less credence to Engadget and TheVerge

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 08 Feb 2013 23:09

What do mujs here think of ouya the game console by the motorma who used to work for ign ? The box looks smaller than a coke can and the controller looks nice too.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 08 Feb 2013 23:17

Anujan wrote:What do mujs here think of ouya the game console by the motorma who used to work for ign ? The box looks smaller than a coke can and the controller looks nice too.

Definitely get it when it retails for $99.- Dont get it now - its kinda unstable and it doesn't come with the nice aluminium look as shown in the pictures. BTW Yves Behar who designed the console's pretty looks is a major paki - most likely his design input was limited to yelling "this is crap. go change it till I am happy" at hapless designers under him who actually do the work.

In fact, Chacha's glasses main designer worked under him in her past life - I bet she was happy to ditch and run to Chacha where conditions are much better.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 08 Feb 2013 23:24

Chacha has designers?

doesn't look like it

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 08 Feb 2013 23:35

They do....earlier they used to get locked in a cage, now apparently they are being let out for fresh air once in a while.

Even fat ol' Mickey has become design centric so Chacha has to get on with the times too, no?Anyways that motorhama is an industrial designer, not a UI designer. Apparently she went over to the Motor Oil building to give their injineers gyaan about importance of good radios - I wonder how well that went.....

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 08 Feb 2013 23:44

Raja Bose wrote:Mortullah, don't get blinded by hatred for a specific product or company that you get blindsided by it. Evaluation has to be done on merit & facts not on pre-conceived bias. That's why I like Anand mian's reviews over the years but give much less credence to Engadget and TheVerge

I don't hate and use whatever works best. I use Windows 7 and XP daily along with CentOS (linux) and OS X. On mobile devices, I prefer Android.
For me, and many others, the Surface simply doesn't do what I need it to. Not a laptop and not a tablet replacement.

MSFT has decades of s/w experience, yet they couldn't get a phone or tablet right. When a company like Samsung got it figured out very quickly, within a couple of years after the initial Galaxy S release, to get good products out that sell more than 1 million a week.
Now I read that MSFT is about to f|_|ck up XboX as well. It took MSFT several years to get XboX right and with the 360 everything was great and my kids love it, but now....

Always-On DRM, Used Game Restrictions Will Destroy Next Xbox, PlayStation

Bill Gates needs to come back and fire Uncle Fester!

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 08 Feb 2013 23:58

M$ to its credit was a company focused on selling to other businesses. So they care a lot about corp friendly features like management, not changing things too radically, legacy support, MBA giri for deals and such. See the ballmer interview after iPhone was introduced. He was talking from a corp perspective. Completely missed then consumer angle.

They don't know how to relate to the customers directly. Like fruitco brand themselves as premium pixie dust whatever. If i say "apple" what do you think ? If i say microsoft what comes to your mind? That's why they failed on the phone. The technologies were great. Usability wasn't. They were doing great as long as they had to sell only corp phones.

Sammy sells directly to abduls. Their TVs have translucent brown bezels to look good. So they made SG3 all nice and shiny.

Now the question is, can Sammy, chacha etc break into the corp market faster than mickey into the consumer market? Chacha vs fruit is similar question. Can chacha learn design and consumer UX faster than fruit can learn online services?

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Feb 2013 00:23

I understand the corporate sales.

Sammy sells directly as MSFT does with their on-line stores. So what is the difference? I thought Windows 8 phone was suppose to be big for them? Why did they deliberately screw it up after so much investment?

If i say "apple" what do you think ?

OS X good and iOS bad.

If i say microsoft what comes to your mind?

XboX good and Windows meh..I need it since everyone else is using it.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 09 Feb 2013 00:27

Mort Walker wrote:I don't hate and use whatever works best. I use Windows 7 and XP daily along with CentOS (linux) and OS X. On mobile devices, I prefer Android.
For me, and many others, the Surface simply doesn't do what I need it to. Not a laptop and not a tablet replacement.

MSFT has decades of s/w experience, yet they couldn't get a phone or tablet right. When a company like Samsung got it figured out very quickly, within a couple of years after the initial Galaxy S release, to get good products out that sell more than 1 million a week.
Now I read that MSFT is about to f|_|ck up XboX as well. It took MSFT several years to get XboX right and with the 360 everything was great and my kids love it, but now....
Always-On DRM, Used Game Restrictions Will Destroy Next Xbox, PlayStation

Bill Gates needs to come back and fire Uncle Fester!

Well you are entitled to have your own opinions on what works best for you.. for others surface and windows phone may not be that bad.

But when it comes to "firing" Uncle Fester, read about an ex-softie giving this same advice and before that there was the hedge funder einhorn who now is threatening to sue apple. On this issue their opinion does not matter. Our opinion does not matter. Neither those of Arm Chair experts. Even those of analysts or hedge funders who make statements to move the stock(see icahn vs ackman and herbalife)... don't matter.

Microsoft or Google or Apple don't exist to serve them or even their customers, but their shareholders.

So only opinion that matters here is of those who are betting their own money: Single biggest shareholder: Bill Gates. And Bill Gates chose (probably the second biggest shareholder) Steve Ballmer. So they are running their company just the way they want it to run. They are releasing their product to do just what they want those products to do.

Also, Ballmer may not be able to please "anal-ysts" or hedgefunders.. but most of the time no one can(except Amazon), not Zuckerbeg, not Cook, not Dell... no one. Because influencing the stock with their nonsense is their trick, and when its time to short one have to do this:

Speaking of surface, it is not meant to sell displays,memory,soc,battery etc etc as in the case of Samsung. (Samsung have "Ativ" tablets and phones... are you going to buy those ?)
Surface is not meant to sell at almost cost price as in the case of Amazon.
Surface is like Nexus which is meant to force OEM to sell phones without crap.
Surface is meant to raise ASP and compete with Air.
Surface is meant to make money. (unlike Fire or some Nexus phones)

Lastly, Windows 8 is meant to sell as many devices with winrt.. that will help attract apps to platform (Windows Phones and RT).

Even if it is a HUGE failure and does not sell as much as Windows 7.. lets say half of 600 million. That is still 300 million people who can download apps. Developers need that to develop apps for such platform. These apps can easily be ported to Windows Phone and i guess in future Durango.

That is their strategy.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 09 Feb 2013 00:27

when a I said phone I meant the earlier phone effort and not the latest one.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 09 Feb 2013 00:32

anmol wrote: Microsoft or Google or Apple don't exist to serve them or even their customers, but their shareholders.

So only opinion that matters here is of those who are betting their own money: Single biggest shareholder: Bill Gates
And Bill Gates chose (probably the second biggest shareholder): Steve Ballmer.

I hope people who run these company dont think that way--and I am not saying for Kumbaya reasons. You can have a company without public shareholders (most privately held companies and early stage startups) but try having a company without customers. Companies set up solely to benefit shareholders are setting themselves up for disruption. How much has takla made for his shareholders recently? He has the best experience of any big online retail store. And is waiting to disrupt all companies run for the benefit of shareholders and not customers.

Thinking along these lines is one of the main reasons why companies go along the path of "Screw the customers as much as you can, extract every penny from them" attitude and finally the bottom falls out from under them. Great examples include such luminaries like Enron and Blockbuster.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Feb 2013 00:46

Mort Walker wrote:When a company like Samsung got it figured out very quickly, within a couple of years after the initial Galaxy S release, to get good products out that sell more than 1 million a week.

Actually if there had been no Chacha with Android Samsung wouldn't be where it is today in mobile. In fact I am not sure if they figured 'it' out - how successful they are with Tizen will prove or disprove that assertion. Comparing Mickey with Samsung overall is plain silly becoz Samsung is primarily a HW vendor while Mickey is primarily a platform vendor. Mickey does not make its money off the same stuff Samsung does. Samsung is also one of Mickey's OEMs in multiple device categories. One can compare Mickey with Chacha (in certain aspects) in this regard. Mickey historically has primarily been a PC software company so I am not surprised they didn't get mobile 1st and even now they are seeking to leverage their dominance in PC & entertainment to muscle in on others' turf. Whether they succeed is an open question.

However, the comparison of Mickey with Samsung is valid if it comes down to Mickey's vertical offerings. Since Mickey's offerings are only a few months old its too early to compare except for XBox which is dominant in its market. In Samsung's case it took them multiple years to get it right just like it took Mickey multiple years to get XBox right. In fact for any other company which does vertically integrated CE offerings except Fruit Co., that's the way it works. After the Mahdi left for his unearthly abode, I suspect it will be like that for Fruit Co. too.

Problem with the corp market is it is entrenched and largely sales force driven. So in order to break that strangle hold either one has to have the glamour (which Fruit Co does) or a huge sales force (which Mickey does). If Chacha wants to break into corporate, they will have to shed the culture of putting out products with a beta tag & no solid sales service and after sales support - that makes IT managers nervous. Chacha has a real opportunity with Google Docs and in fact had a very solid head start but now it has become more of a race after they failed to capitalize on it decisively in the last 2-3 years. Given the Motor Oil acquisition, I predict Chacha will also start learning how to sell HW products to consumers - that is an entirely different ballgame in terms of product management than pushing consumer services online. Mickey has some experience there given its history with boxed SW (which had to be frozen well in time for floppies and CDs to be churned out) and some HW like its peripherals, XBox and Kinect but it still has to learn the tricks of trade which made Fruit Co successful.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Feb 2013 00:48

Surface is like Nexus which is meant to force OEM to sell phones without crap.
Surface is meant to raise ASP and compete with Air.
Surface is meant to make money. (unlike Fire or some Nexus phones)

Bloatware is not an issue since Windows 7 came along, most people are looking at price including corporations. Some OEM may have a Win8 Surface type device for $500 late this year and it will sell like hotcakes.
Neither the Surface or Windows 8 phones will sell and MSFT will right it off as a loss. Yes, you are right the companies are beholden to their shareholders who will then kill off both of them as seen with other products. MSFT makes money from corporate sales and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 09 Feb 2013 00:49

Anujan wrote:
anmol wrote: Microsoft or Google or Apple don't exist to serve them or even their customers, but their shareholders.

So only opinion that matters here is of those who are betting their own money: Single biggest shareholder: Bill Gates
And Bill Gates chose (probably the second biggest shareholder): Steve Ballmer.
I hope people who run these company dont think that way--and I am not saying for Kumbaya reasons. You can have a company without public shareholders (most privately held companies and early stage startups) but try having a company without customers. Companies set up solely to benefit shareholders are setting themselves up for disruption. How much has takla made for his shareholders recently? He has the best experience of any big online retail store. And is waiting to disrupt all companies run for the benefit of shareholders and not customers.

Thinking along these lines is one of the main reasons why companies go along the path of "Screw the customers as much as you can, extract every penny from them" attitude and finally the bottom falls out from under them. Great examples include such luminaries like Enron and Blockbuster.

That is the truth, for them the most important people are those who are betting their own money with the company.

>How much has takla made for his shareholders recently?

His shareholders are himself and Bill Gaters who are not traders who seek to seek stock price move. They care about regular dividends.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 09 Feb 2013 00:54

Mort Walker wrote:
Surface is like Nexus which is meant to force OEM to sell phones without crap.
Surface is meant to raise ASP and compete with Air.
Surface is meant to make money. (unlike Fire or some Nexus phones)
Bloatware is not an issue since Windows 7 came along, most people are looking at price including corporations. Some OEM may have a Win8 Surface type device for $500 late this year and it will sell like hotcakes.
Neither the Surface or Windows 8 phones will sell and MSFT will right it off as a loss. Yes, you are right the companies are beholden to their shareholders who will then kill off both of them as seen with other products. MSFT makes money from corporate sales and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Using this logic, Amazon should be making more money than Microsoft.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Feb 2013 00:55

Anujan wrote:How much has takla made for his shareholders recently?

For me, quite a bit.

Takla is the next Mahdi - he has the drive, vision and the focus to ignore all chattering muddle-heads and do what he thinks fit whether its right and wrong. Problem is for any run-of-the-mill CEO of a publicly traded company, it is a fine balancing act between pleasing customers and pleasing shareholders. You cannot tell shareholders to eff off and you certainly cant tell customers to eff off. Doing either will put the existence of the company in jeopardy.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Feb 2013 00:57

anmol wrote: Using this logic, Amazon should be making more money than Microsoft.

Little birdie told me that Amazon as a company makes less money than revenue from Microsoft Visio.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Feb 2013 01:15

Raja Bose wrote:
anmol wrote: Using this logic, Amazon should be making more money than Microsoft.
Little birdie told me that Amazon as a company makes less money than revenue from Microsoft Visio.

The analogy should be Google then followed by Apple, not Amazon. MSFT can cut their losses by dumping the Surface and Windows phone and let the OEMs do that.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 09 Feb 2013 01:22

Takla is like Mahdi in more ways than one. Including self delusion department. He once claimed that he wrote down 10 things he wanted to do on paper and selling books was most practical step 1 so he started doing it.

I am sure world domination is no 10

Take AWS for example. Little birdie told me takla wanted to sell/outsource part of their IT operations so decreed that they should move to service oriented architecture so the teams aren't tightly coupled. He could easily then sell and outsource pieces without worrying they are tightly coupled. The end product made by unwashed abduls was a collection of services on which amazon ran. Later takla realized if the collection of services were good enough to run amzn they are good enough to run any other website. He has capacity because peak utilization during holidays is much less than average utilization: he could sell cloud services after he saw the end product. To his credit he did see that. And that's how a bookseller became worlds no 1 cloud services provider. Ahead of chacha, M$, HP and IBM (I am sure anmol mian will now paste a graph that M$ is worlds no 1 cloud services provider

)

But If you ask takla, he will claim it was No 2 in his list.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 09 Feb 2013 01:53

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/17/forres ... -momentum/

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 09 Feb 2013 03:31

Raja Bose wrote: For me, quite a bit. Takla is the next Mahdi

I agree with this assessment as a consumer of all the gizmos out there. In terms of a vertically integrated online internet company, I think it is Amazon followed by fruit followed by chacha (their main income is from ads - none of the products are monetized) followed by M$ and FB in some order.
Wonder why Amazon hasn't turned profitable yet.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 09 Feb 2013 03:52

Raja Bose wrote:
anmol wrote: Using this logic, Amazon should be making more money than Microsoft.
Little birdie told me that Amazon as a company makes less money than revenue from Microsoft Visio.

Amzn revenue is ~60B USD and MSFT revenue is ~73B in USD (United states dollars) or about 10 trillion AMD (anmol mian dollars). Amzn last year made a few million in profits. They make less profits than most companies and have the highest p/e in S&P if I recall correctly.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Feb 2013 06:10

Mort Walker wrote:MSFT can cut their losses by dumping the Surface and Windows phone and let the OEMs do that.

Mickey makes Windows phone devices?

Mortullah what are joo smoking today, hain ji?

All sorts of inarticulate statements coming out of you today (like comparing Sammy with Mickey). When people talk of how much money Surface needs to make in each quarter etc. they need to remember that Mickey doesn't make money hand-over-fist from hardware sales - they may go there later on but right now it is not about targeting huge profit growth from direct selling of HW. There is a reason why they did Surface and they have a lot more to lose by dumping it than they did by dumping Kin or Zune or SpotWatch or any of those side projects. Surface is as important for Mickey as XBox was a few years ago when they wanted to break into the gaming console market.

Anujan wrote:
Raja Bose wrote: Little birdie told me that Amazon as a company makes less money than ~~revenue~~EBIT from Microsoft Visio.
Amzn revenue is ~60B USD and MSFT revenue is ~73B in USD (United states dollars) or about 10 trillion AMD (anmol mian dollars). Amzn last year made a few million in profits. They make less profits than most companies and have the highest p/e in S&P if I recall correctly.

I meant EBIT, not revenue. My bad. Amazon P/E is on the level of Paki high command but it makes for good trading.

I think Takla Co is the biggest threat to Chacha rather than Sammy, Fruit Co., or Mickey. These other 3 are in different core businesses (in case of Sammy and Mickey multiple businesses) which are not in Chacha's realm. Takla Co OTOH is directly in that realm. FB I am unsure about - 1st they have to prove they stopped wearing diapers. FB's main threat seems to be the data they are withholding from Chacha's borgs rather than anything useful they are themselves doing with the data.

hanumadu · Post by **hanumadu** » 09 Feb 2013 06:17

Amazon's margins are less. The kind of stuff they sell have low margins and amazon sells it lower than most to attract customers. They are also still spending on capex.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Feb 2013 06:51

RB,

Sorry. They should dump support for GB

since they are the ones who didn't release the 920 on all carriers - and most importantly didn't allow them to sell it unlocked on the MS store. If YellG can let chacha sell the Nexus 4 on the play store....

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Feb 2013 06:55

hanumadu wrote:Amazon's margins are less. The kind of stuff they sell have low margins and amazon sells it lower than most to attract customers. They are also still spending on capex.

Amazon sells everything with Prime shipping A-Z from desi namkeen, bulk condoms to sex aids like the fleshlight and liberator all at a low price. I know from experience.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 09 Feb 2013 07:31

What is this fleshlight that keeps popping up on all the threads?

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Feb 2013 07:33

^^^It is a NSFW search. You can Google (or Bing) it at home. Just make sure kids and GHQ/SHQ aren't around.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Feb 2013 07:51

Mort Walker wrote:RB,

Sorry. They should dump support for GB since they are the ones who didn't release the 920 on all carriers - and most importantly didn't allow them to sell it unlocked on the MS store. If YellG can let chacha sell the Nexus 4 on the play store....

They should tear GB a new mush-hole first - here I am on VZW and all I have is HTC 8x available with crappy build quality while shitty ATT wallahs gets to enjoy their shiny Lumia 920

Re. inability of GB to sell it unlocked on Mickey store, I would imagine ATT is more to blame that GB becoz the exclusivity deal with ATT probably dictates that restriction. Only TMo is not paki when it comes to such agreements. So having to choose between launching a network subsidized version or an unlocked version in US but not being allowed to do both, GB would naturally go for the former.

The $300.- price point of the Nexus4 makes me very curious how much Chacha is paying Yell-ji to cover the lost margins becoz the BOM of that phone is not low. It looks like XBox style strat-e-jee on part of Chacha.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 09 Feb 2013 07:57

Mort Walker wrote:^^^It is a NSFW search. You can Google (or Bing) it at home. Just make sure kids and GHQ/SHQ aren't around.

Looks like something I have to bang

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 09 Feb 2013 08:10

The payment from M$ to GB is reversed. Now GB pays M$ which they reported in last quarter earnings. If they don't turn around now, mickey throwing GB under the bus would be complete. The vultures will peck on business like maps and mickey will build a line for making phones too.

AMZN is an interesting company. They are a big threat to chacha : they are in online services. Also they have customer data like buying preferences and cc numbers / addresses which they haven't yet used for ad targetting on the web. Takla data + bing search + fb network has the potential to take on chacha ad networks. Don't know if these three will come together.

FB is trying to clone the internet. Though inside its walled garden. They recently did some interesting things. They forced vine out of fb so if you use vine, you can't share videos with your fb friends. This is an interesting scenario. Who owns your contact info? FB or you? I would argue it is the user. But FB thinks otherwise (for justifiable reason, else anyone can build a social networks and replicate the connections by sucking it out of FB when user clicks okay).

At some point as data moves to the cloud, courts are going to step in and force the ability of the user to extract the data from the services they use. Like for example you should be able to download all your photos from flickr easily. That is the open vs closed hurdle FB has to jump over.

They are an excellent engineering company though.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Feb 2013 08:39

I think net payments is still in GB's favour becoz of their locations business.

Anujan wrote: They are an excellent engineering company though.

I dunno about that. They strongly reek of "let's try to be Chacha" syndrome sometimes in my past encounters with them or maybe its the fumes rising from the marshes nearby which made me feel that way

. One cannot merely try to ape another successful company - each company needs to grow organically based on its own business, conditions prevailing and other factors. That's not saying they don't have engineering excellence in bunches such as their backend infra team (HW and SW).

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 09 Feb 2013 21:04

Surface Pro 128 is sold out on MS Store as of this morning. The Pro 64 is still available. I am surprised the 64 has lasted, but the price point may limit sales.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Feb 2013 22:06

Despite blizzard?! I thought launch event was cancelled in NYC.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 10 Feb 2013 00:48

^^No launch event I heard of. It was planned ahead to be available on 2/9/13 and publicly said so. The 64 is now sold out as of this afternoon.

Lets see how this works out. It took the Nexus 4 nearly 6 weeks to sell about 1 million. They would have sold more if the Play Store worked correctly and had enough stock.