Cult of Android wrote about how copycat Xiaomi blatantly ripped off Apple.

The allegations about Xiaomi copying Apple are “sweeping sensationalist statements,” Barra told The Verge. “They have nothing better to talk about.” Barra argued that, “If you have two similarly skilled designers, it makes sense that they would reach the same conclusion.”

Barra regards Mi as “an incredibly innovative company” that is constantly refining its designs.

As for the use of Apple’s Aperture icon in their product image on their website, Barra admitted to copying:

The Aperture logo being used as the Mi 3 camera is just silly. It was just like someone’s stupid mistake. They were cutting corners and they were looking for a good image of a camera lens; it so happened that the Aperture logo was an incredibly beautiful image of a camera lens. It was silly and stupid and they shouldn’t have done it.

John Gruber made a very good point about Comcast customer retention.

Comcast COO Dave Watson:

I know these Retention calls are tough, and I have tremendous admiration for our Retention professionals, who make it easy for customers to choose to stay with Comcast.

Gruber:

That is literally just another way of saying that their job is to make it difficult to leave Comcast. It’s somehow more obnoxious though, that he phrases it so euphemistically.

Brian S Hall of Techpinions dissected the Satya Nadella internal memo.

Nadella’s willingness to act fast, to re-make Microsoft, hack away at the extraneous and transform the company into “the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world” appears to be exactly what the company needs.

But when you gut a $7.2 billion acquisition, which the company only closed on this past April, and fire 18,000 people, then you haven’t leapt from a burning platform, you’ve set the platform ablaze. There is no going back, no do-overs for Mr. Nadella. He is about to set the company on a ten year course, possibly longer, and though Microsoft possesses a rather stunning array of assets, what’s most stunning is the company still has virtually zero response to the iPhone, the iPad and Android. In 2014.

So much for mobile-first and cloud first.

In his “bold ambition” email to employees, only days before this, Nadella stated “first party hardware” would form part of the core Microsoft vision. He said this four times!

• Our cloud OS infrastructure, device OS and first-party hardware will all build around this core focus and enable broad ecosystems.
• Our Windows device OS and first-party hardware will set the bar for productivity experiences.
• Our first-party devices will light up digital work and life.
• We will build first-party hardware to stimulate more demand for the entire Windows ecosystem.

Now, days later, he guts Nokia, kills off the very popular Asha hybrid phone line and halts development of the AOSP-led Nokia X. I suspect Mr. Nadella believes the smartphone wars are lost, despite whatever else the company may tell us. They are no longer worth fighting for.

Nadella went on to emphasise transparency:

My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible.

Hall: “Your own email appears poorly thought out and lacking transparency!”

Second, we are working to integrate the Nokia Devices and Services teams into Microsoft. We will realize the synergies to which we committed when we announced the acquisition last September. The first-party phone portfolio will align to Microsoft’s strategic direction. To win in the higher price tiers, we will focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens Microsoft’s digital work and digital life experiences. In addition, we plan to shift select Nokia X product designs to become Lumia products running Windows. This builds on our success in the affordable smartphone space and aligns with our focus on Windows Universal Apps.

Hall: “We can’t possibly divine what these words mean because Nadella does not know the way forward in mobile. That’s a problem.”

It is one thing to draw up a revolutionary vision for the company, but actions speak louder than words. And Nadella’s action is in contradiction of the grand scheme he talked up.

Gigaom wrote about slowing iPad sales.

Expecting iPad sales growth to mirror that of the iPhone, which is still on a relatively stronger upward direction, is unreasonable for a number of reasons. First: phones are far more a communications necessity than tablets are, at least for now. That’s why 2013 saw nearly one billion smartphones sold with expectations of another 1.2 billion more in 2014. By comparison, last year the tablet market only topped 195.3 million units, per Gartner.

Different upgrade cycles:

Give someone 18 months or so with a phone: They’re ready to upgrade and a carrier is very likely to help them do so with financial incentives. However, tablets in this regard are more like traditional computers: They’re going to last longer for most people. For one thing, they’re typically not subsidized so an iPad buyer is looking at an up-front investment of $499 or so (less for an iPad mini or older iPad, of course). Add a cellular radio and that investment jumps by$130, making the base iPad Air 26 percent more expensive. That’s no small price to pay and it’s one that makes it more likely that a consumer would keep the device just a little longer instead of buying the next shiny tablet that comes along.

Benedict Evans on mobile leverage.

Personal:

First, they are not shared and they are personal. Of those 1.6-1.7 bn PCs, a little over half are consumer devices, and a large proportion of those are shared. The others are owned by companies, and at the very least they’re restricted in what you can do with them for personal uses, and many of them are actually single-purpose devices. So it’s helpful to think about somehow discounting that PC base to reflect actually personal personal computers – by half, or more. Just as there’s a ‘full-time equivalent’, what’s the ‘personal computer equivalent’? It’s not 1.6bn – it’s probably more like half that.

Literacy:

Finally, the step change in ease of use provided by the new generation of operating systems changes what it means for someone to have such a device. A very large proportion of PC users would describe themselves as ‘not computer literate’, or at best getting by following ‘recipes’ within a narrow set of tasks, but far fewer say they’re not phone literate or even smartphone literate (though a curve obviously remains). The usability of this new class of devices of itself multiplies the reach of the internet.

These are very good points on how different the PC and mobile markets are.

Level 3 wrote about Verizon’s accidental admission that it is deliberately constraining capacity from Netflix network providers.

And in fact, Verizon admits as much because they conveniently show one direction across our network with a peak utilization of 34%; almost exactly what I explained in my last blog post. I can confirm once again that all of those thousands of links on the Level 3 network are managed carefully so that the peak utilizations look very similar to those Verizon show for their own network – IN BOTH DIRECTIONS.

That means Verizon is only using 34% of its full capacity, but there is congestion for some reason.

In comparison, other ISPs and content providers only have an average of 44% utilization, with no issues of congestion:

But, here’s the other interesting thing also shown in the Verizon diagram. This congestion only takes place between Verizon and network providers chosen by Netflix. The providers that Netflix does not use do not experience the same problem. Why is that? Could it be that Verizon does not want its customers to actually use the higher-speed services it sells to them? Could it be that Verizon wants to extract a pound of flesh from its competitors, using the monopoly it has over the only connection to its end-users to raise its competitors’ costs?