Another week in the world of tech and here are the stories that caught my attention on this week starting 10th October 2016.
- Samsung pull the plug on its flagship Note 7
After all of
its woes, and for the first time a manufacturer has done such a step, Samsung have finally stopped making
and shipping the Note 7. Too many flames in that smoke. This whole incident will cost the company $5B in
real money and likely a more in customer goodwill and brand damage. It is a complete nightmare. After recalls and units still bursting into flames, the Department of Transport officially ban people from flying with the phone, there is no recovery from this, so Samsung are looking to S8 due out in the 1st quarter of 2017. You can be rest assured the likes of Apple, Google, HTC and LG are looking into the quality of their supply chain.
- Twitter is the house on the block no one wants to buy
The last few
weeks had a lot of buzz around the potential buy-out of Twitter by the likes of SalesForce, Google or even
Disney. However, all parties have had a deep look at the in's and out's and opted to walk away, citing
they aren't the right fit.
This is seriously bad news for Twitter, because if those big players are out of the picture, who else is left that thinks they can monetize this medium that fits between the cracks of social media. Stock price depressed upon this news.
- Yahoo fighting for survival on a number of fronts
Yahoo is trying
to close the sale to Verizon, however Verizon are now looking to walk away from the deal due to the huge
data security breach of its user base. If that isn't enough, those people still using @yahoo.com email
accounts, discovered this week that Yahoo pulled the feature to auto-forward emails. This effectively is
locking people into Yahoo and not making it easy for them to migrate off. As you can appreciate this is
infuriating its user base. Yahoo put it back in again at the end of the week, but its excuse was awfully
flimsy to why it pulled the feature in the first place.
Marissa Mayer looks to be blundering here at the very time Yahoo needs a strong and determined CEO. She can still save this so the next couple of weeks is going to be crucial.
- Germany votes to ride the combustion engine by 2030
The home of
the automobile (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche) have voted to stop manufacturing and selling traditional gas
powered engines by 2030. A bold step but their hopes is to speed up the innovation around alternative
fuels. Tesla has already set the bar very high as to what electric cars can do, and Mercedes has declared
they will over take Tesla's innovation in 10 years time.
The reality here is that they looking to have zero-emission engines. Be interesting to see if other countries will follow suit here, but one upside is that we are going into a phase of extremely clean air in our cities.
- Amazon calls bullshit on Oracle's cloud claims
Oracle has
never been shy about its boasts on its own technology. Do you remember the whole 'Unbreakable Linux'
claim 15 years ago, until it was proven it was indeed breakable? Well Larry Ellison is at it again,
claiming that Amazon is 20 years behind Oracle's cloud and up to 24 times slower. Oh dear.
Well Amazon, who usually do not dignify such claims by getting involved, fired back at Larry. Oracle is desperately trying to be relevant in the cloud space and the reality is that they are the ones that are years too late with too little services too late. Gartner noted that Amazon is 10x bigger than its next 14 competitors combined. There is a reason for this - it works and works very well.
- Morgan Stanley updates its yearly 30 top stocks to look for Morgan Stanley released the top stocks that they believe will do best when should the economy slow down a little. We have Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook in there from the world of big tech.
- Netflix will offer
offline viewing by year end
Speaking of
Netflix, it looks like that they can't dodge the disconnected offline world we live in and are going to
finally allow its content to be downloaded to be viewed later. Applaud Netflix for listening to its
paying customers.
This could actually lessen the bandwidth load as people can download quicker in short bursts and then enjoy the content at their leisure in the air for the example.
- The history of the AOL CD This week, we seen the head of
sales leave AOL, reminding us all that AOL still exists (part of Verizon if you recall). You have
to wonder just how hard a job that is, when you have a brand that people associate most with is dial-up
internet access and their infamous CD ROM.
Mental Floss published a fascinating look back at the history of the CD ROM this week.
and finally, this week's audible distraction was provided by Nate Ruess and his, Grand Romantic album released last summer.
