Pearl Harbour is indisputably one of the greatest attrocities the world has ever seen and it stands for all right-minded souls as proof that, however much time might pass, you should never trust Michael Bay. Meanwhile the events the film depicts were popular justification among the WWII generation for taking a similarly ‘cautious’ attitude towards the Japanese.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the richest of them all?
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index released this week, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has just edged past Mexican mogul Carlos Slim, who’s lost more than a few pounds since Mexico’s government passed a bill that could quash America Movil’s market dominance.
Who’d have thought that the news that would rock the world this week would be of a 71-year-old man deciding to retire from his job? But it did and the telecoms industry seems to have adopted some of the fiery, argumentative, and sometimes hypocritical, qualities of the famous Glaswegian.
Don’t take this the wrong way but the Informer is sure some of the regular readers of AWIW are familiar with Peter Molyneux. As a youngster the Informer whiled away many hours himself on games such as Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black & White and Fable, all of which were brainchildren of Molyneux.
It was an overwhelmingly numbery week this week, as Q1 financials deluged the Informer’s inbox. Over the weekend the mainstream press were all aflutter about the fact that Apple was going to report a drop in quarterly profits. This duly happened, but fluctuations are relative and when your profits are plummeting all the way to $9.5bn for the quarter, it’s hardly a catastrophe.
The Informer has been in this industry a long time. He’s pretty jaded and sometimes feels like he’s seen it all. That was until this week however, when Samsung – the Korean handset maker that sells the most phones of any company in the whole world – admitted that its Taiwanese arm had paid a bunch of local students to post scathing reviews about rival HTC’s devices online.
This week the people of Britain bid farewell (or at least goodbye) to a woman who divided the nation in death as much as she did in life. Ex-Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, was a strong proponent of free market economics – support the big guys and the devil take the hindmost.
As a teenager and young man the Informer scoffed when he heard the old folks reassuring one another that ‘life begins at 40’. Clearly it was an attempt to sugar the reality that the best years had passed and it was downhill from here on in. Now, with 40 approaching at a gallop, the Informer feels more inclined to see wisdom in the statement.
The Informer’s not the only one getting old, as the mobile phone turned 40 this week with the anniversary of the first cellular phone call.
The Informer got a software update for his Nexus this week and the resulting tweaks to the interface led him accidentally to the data usage display. He was somewhat surprised to find that the second most data-hungry app on his phone was Google+, a service he has never used. Over a ten-day period Google+ huffed back 5.54MB of data over the mobile network, all of it in the background. This might not sound like much but it’s all relative; roughly one per cent of the monthly allowance, Google+ usage outstrips Facebook by some margin and leaves Gmail in the dust. And it’s worth repeating: This app has never been used.
With Spring just a few days away, it’s a time for new starts, and new starts have been quite the theme this week. While the world’s press has been extensively covering the Catholic Church’s quest for a new leader, with similar fervour the telecoms industry has been monitoring the change of leadership at Android.
It’s been a big news week for German incumbent operator Deutsche Telekom, not least with the announcement that CEO René Obermann is going Dutch at the end of the year. Obermann, the Pep Guardiola of the telecoms world, is off to ply his trade in the Netherlands, at Dutch cable operator Ziggo. We already knew Obermann’s time at DT was coming to an end, with the firm announcing last December that he would leave at the close of 2013.
When the Informer switched on his PC this morning and fired up his web browser he was greeted by the message “We’re sorry but this application has crashed. Would you like to restart?” No amount of clicking would achieve the desired result so he tried an alternative browser. Same deal. Perhaps the computer felt like many of the MWC attendees after four days of pounding the floors of the Fira Gran Via: crashed – unable to restart.
The UK LTE spectrum auction concluded this week, with much of the focus on the fact that—as a revenue generating exercise—it was a bit of a flop. Chancellor George Osborne had been hoping for £3.5bn for his purse; what he actually got was £2.34bn.
It was hardly surprising; during the auction UK LTE pioneer EE cut its prices and 3UK announced that it wouldn’t be pricing its new network services at a premium to existing offers. Clearly UK operators are wary of the investments required for LTE and a little more realistic about returns on those investments than they were when they spent ten times the amount on WCDMA spectrum just before the bubble burst.
This week the The Informer’s phone has been ringing off the hook with event invitations, gossip and briefing opportunities for Mobile World Congress; he’s been fielding more phone calls than Findus.
At midnight tonight the world’s biggest party will kick off, as more than one billion Chinese people take to the streets to celebrate the Chinese New Year. 2013 is the year of the water snake which is a totem that symbolises wisdom. It’s also the year that Telecoms.com tapped into the industry’s wisdom for its first annual industry survey and gathered almost 2,000 responses.
What was striking about the results is just how much the responses from operator personnel (600 individuals from 260 separate opcos) matched those of their peers across the wider industry, even when looking at contentious issues like roaming and regulation. Does this mean the industry has aligned in the face of threat from external players? After all, the snake is an adaptable creature renowned for its ability to sneak into other environments.
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