Follow on story to the Lenovo cuts .....

http://liliputing.com/2015/08/lenovo-cuts-jobs-at-motorola-eliminates-team-re...



"Lenovo announced plans last week to eliminate about 3200 jobs, or about 5 percent of its total workforce. But it turns out one division will be particularly hard hit: Motorola.

The Chinese PC maker acquired the Chicago-based phone from Google maker in 2014, but for the most part Motorola’s strategy hasn’t changed much: the company still continues to crank out a series of high-quality, low-cost phones with software that looks a lot like stock Android software.

Now the Chicago Tribune reports Lenovo is planning to layoff about 25 percent of Motorola’s Chicago-based employees, which means eliminating about 500 jobs.

The move isn’t a huge surprise: Lenovo is trying to streamline its operations in order to improve profitability, and the company already had a smartphone division before acquiring Motorola. Some of the Motorola jobs that are being eliminated may be redundant with positions already filled at Lenovo.

But Phandroid notes that some of the cuts include the Motorola software and services team — which means some of the folks losing their jobs are the people behind the Moto Voice, Moto Display, Moto Assist, and other software designed to bring touchless controls, subtle notifications, and other features first introduced on the original Moto X."

This unfortunately makes sense, as Lenovo makes and sells a Whole Lot of phones in China and in India and the Motorola subsidiary in the USA isn't selling near as many phones as it was doing when Lenovo bought it from Google.

Lenovo made the purchase to get the Motorola tech and the counter suit IP and they have that now and have incorporated it into their domestic phone production division already.

I still like my first gen Moto G just dandy, and I will miss Motorola when it goes away.    Go and whack off 25% of the functions of a company and it tends not to recover, if you know what I mean.   In this case, what has already been designed can be produced, but no more clever new models will come out in 2016 because the people that design them are gone.

http://liliputing.com/2015/08/smartphone-market-decline.html

Smartphone growth rate on the decline



"The smartphone industry may be slowing, but it is still growing. New regions have seen a larger influx of sales year-over-year. Areas of Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Africa have shown to be the fastest growing regions in 2015.

The problem country seems to be China. According to Gartner, the country supplying 30 percent of total sales of smartphones worldwide declined for the first time year-over-year by four percent.

Gartner attributes the decline to saturation. There are fewer first-time smartphone buyers in China, while the upgrade rate has not had enough of an effect.

The report also divided out worldwide smartphone sales by operating system. An interesting note is that Android and iOS combined made up 96.8 percent of the entire smartphone market with Windows following far behind at only 2.5 percent of the market and BlackBerry OS at 0.3 percent. The “Other” category maxed out at 0.4 percent."


==========


Americans find that they can upgrade their features considerably by buying a current mid-range phone and they are doing so by the scads and bunches.   Most are not buying first line phones any more as the $600 single bite off contract price puts them off quite a bit.   A sub $300 phone feels a lot better on the short term monthly budget.

If they didn't have that great big giant antenna sticking out of the ass of the Deathstar, then Luke Skywalker wouldn't have anything to grab on to upon free falling out of the reactor orifice.  

So Microsoft thinks you should have one, too.    So here comes your own personal sized relatively large personal antenna to be inserted firmly up your ass to collect all your various signals to be continuously beamed back to the Deathstar's main antenna.

    zowie !!!   That smarts !!!

There are REASONS for everything MS does -- they just don't want to tell you what they are .....

Oldfeller--FSO wrote on 08/20/15 at 09:34:18:



If anything ever happens to your account and you have to reregister, you can sign up with

CoB as a user name.
Correct as you may be, that doesn't mean that you aren't a
Cynical ol' Bas****,,,

Correct as you may be, that doesn't mean....



I'm not picking on you. Living in the fairy tale of
We're number one, LannoThFray, HomoThBrayve,  
That's not reality..

The Chrome Wars have really quieted down a lot.

Microsoft has come out with Win 10 and it is as bulky and as 'not fast' as it ever was, with some new features tossed on top of the old mass to make it more appealing.    

What with all the new features requiring tuning all your settings 10 layers deep all the time Win 10 is potentially MORE fiddlesome than before.   Remember, all the old fiddle functions such as defrag and virus check are still taking place, although you can figure out how to set them up to do such fairly automatically if you take the effort to do so.

As Win 10 settles in, it is showing no great ease of use or nor any speed advantages to Win 7 and Win 8.1.    Cost, apart from being price supported by Microsoft and Intel, is pretty much the same same since actually very little has changed.   Still requires a big processor and a lot of memory compared to Google ChromeOS.

Right now Win 10 is free though, although it is designed at a very deep level to lock you into MS services and MS softwares which are not free.

People are no longer seeing Google as the primary "evil data collector" any more since MS has clearly taken that crown away from Google by greatly out-collecting them on all fronts.   As a privacy violator, Microsoft clearly reigns supreme now.

The EU pundits and open source folks have a new whipping boy to go sue now.

Google is still taking the "slow evolve" pathway with Android and ChromeOS, having advanced both of them to the point of being capable of a full desktop experience.

Google ChromeOS software is coming across as non-intrusive, quality checked, polished and refined compared to the raw edged, somewhat non-functional early Win 10 that is being pushed out right now.    Win 10 driver support (especially on older machines) absolutely sucks right now.

Google free machine and free software support lasts for 5 years or more, MS only supports the entire Win 10 for 2-4 years as far as "developing new features" goes, according to what is known at this point in time.  Also, their free software that you get with a new purchased unit (Office 365 personal) only lasts for one year.   There is a very clear difference in what you get, and for how long you get it.   And the money you will have to spend on it .....

Chromebooks really do turn on and have you sitting fully functional inside 10 seconds.   MS Cloud Books and laptops take 7 seconds to get you to you first open screen and an additional 3-7 minutes while they digest last night's forced updates.   Then you have to load your browser unless you use Edge all the time (which is quicker to get to and quicker to use) but Edge is only partially functional at this point in time.   To do the full range of tasks you still need to boot IE in the background and that is another load delay which takes place in mid-browse.    The background "update grind" at startup is very noticeable on Win 10 as it slows the machine down and runs the fan up to full speed while it grinds through it.

Given what is known about Win 10 and Microsoft's plans as announced by their bean picker's formal financial presentations to the investors (a fairly consistent information source, more so than the press release people) it seems that Win 10 will be free to those that qualify for the 2-4 years which is the currently planned life of the product.

Win 10 will continue to evolve and pick up additional polish for 2 years, then the replacement "Windows Forever" will start to take over at that point as a true finished product with more fully integrated features but only on a paid subscription basis.    What all requires the paid subscription is still to be determined, of course.

So time-wise "Windows Forever" will be the equivalent of the old Service Pack 2 stage in the overall Windows saga .....

Until then, you are all just Beta Testers who are having your hard drives and emails read, location monitored, keystrokes recorded and you get to pay bandwidth charges to move the upgrades and nightly patches around in the world's largest involuntary P2P torrent that has ever existed.

Also note this brand new rumored tidbit -- MS may be using your machine's idle time to do calculations in the deep background as well -- this is being looked into as we speak.    There is a dollar to be made in providing data calculation services and MS wants that dollar although they lack the big Google data farms to do it on their own servers.   So, they may be tapping your machine for these tasks at a very deep low priority level during idle times at night, etc.  

After all, you accepted the 1,200 page EULA without reading it and MS can do LOTS of new stuff now, you know.

And that's a major difference, Google provides you with server calculation support for free to speed you up and MS uses YOUR MACHINE to provide themselves with upgrade/update pushing and potentially now they may be using your machine for doing other folks data crunching as well.

Its like with ChromeOS, you own your machine and it stays out of your way as much as possible.   With Win 10, it is questionable as to who exactly owns your machine any more.  

Late at night, when the house is all quiet, that tiny little chuckling sound you hear is your hard drive, doing something for somebody else while your machine is supposed to be idle and in sleep mode .....

Microsoft has shown no Windows plan that Big Business is interested in so far.  Since Win 7 officially lasts until 2020 Big Business will insist that MS keep up with Win 7 until then -- and MS had better come up with something good inside that 5 years or by then Chrome for Business will be a fully realized competitor for them to overcome.

But 5 years in this industry is a virtual forever -- entire new technologies will have come into being by then to disrupt all these future plans and future thoughts.


   

Asus has a good thing going with that "India spec'd" Zenphone.  

Since Motorola was cut 25% by Lenovo, I suspect that Zenphone may become the mid price leader over the next year, or until the Chinese units get their world LTE chips all straightened out and then come flooding into the US market.

I think Continuum is coming for Zenphone along with a price supported Intel processor speed bump and a docking module to make it all workable.

If it takes off good, then Asus gets to ride the tiger like they did with that first Chromebox -- they simply won't be able to make them fast enough.

Google Android is getting questioned by pundits and users for lacking a proper base level clear support for multiple windows on large phones, tablets and the relatively few Android laptops that are out there.  

For years now they have been asking for this, no less.

Google attempts to say if you want windowing it is available in ChromeOS and they provide the tools to do windowing inside the last two release kits of Android if you really want to do that, Mr. Device Maker.

Vendors (5 so far) are floating some proprietary windowing versions of Android on their own, but no app guys will write to a one off vendor controlled non-open situation.   And they won't unless Google makes it a standard part of Android.

Windows 10 is coming to phones this fall with full windowing that has been working well for years now.

If Google intends to drop this ball and let Win 10 Mobile come out being more usable than Android, so be it -- Google will lose some market share to a wave of higher cost Win 10 tablet and phone products that WILL DO what people want to do with their larger screen space.

It is past time for Google to start focusing on Android growing up some more, and forget about treading on the feet of ChromeOS.

Android M should have this windowing feature, but it doesn't except as a vague experimental thing at this time.