Ffynnonweb

It’s been only 10 days since we’ve released the first version of our table containing all the iPhone tariffs currently offered by mobile phone operators in the UK, either officially or unofficially.

Since then, Vodafone has announced that it will be offering the iPhone from the 14th of January and many of our readers have submitted suggestions to improve the original design.

The first thing that we’ve done is change the way the total cost of ownership is displayed; we’ve swapped it for a clearer “overall price per month approach”.

This is because the previous version did not fully reflect the fact that some contracts were 12 months long whilst others were twice as long and therefore unfairly represented.

Along the same lines, we’ve changed a couple of things about the way we present the 37 odd contracts from six different providers including showing all prices to two decimal points.

We have also changed the price of the iPhone initial outlay models for Vodafone, Three, Virgin Mobile and T-Mobile since you can now buy an iPhone from O2 and unlock it outright without having to wait for these four networks to release their PAYG iPhone versions.

The overall analysis of the iPhone Pay monthly market shows that Orange now has the cheapest deal of the market, as far as price is concerned. You can get 150 minutes & 250 texts for £30 per month.

However, Vodafone doubles the number of minutes and offers unlimited texts for £2.46 extra per month while O2, with its original deal, offers four times the number of minutes for an additional £5 per month.

For those looking for a short contract time – especially handy if you plan to upgrade every year – Tesco is currently unbeatable at £38.50 per month over a year.

Click here for the bigger version of the table.

Tags: UK / United Kingdom, apple, iphone

Thinking of getting an iPhone from a UK mobile phone operator? The above site could well be of interest/value to you then.

IP/09/1941

Brussels, 16 th December 2009

Antitrust: Commission accepts Microsoft commitments to give users browser choice

The European Commission has adopted a decision that renders legally binding commitments offered by Microsoft to boost competition on the web browser market. The commitments address Commission concerns that Microsoft may have tied its web browser Internet Explorer to the Windows PC operating system in breach of EU rules on abuse of a dominant market position (Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union -TFEU). Microsoft commits to offer European users of Windows choice among different web browsers and to allow computer manufacturers and users the possibility to turn Internet Explorer off. Microsoft is also publishing today an undertaking whereby it commits to make far-reaching interoperability disclosures.

Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: “Millions of European consumers will benefit from this decision by having a free choice about which web browser they use. Such choice will not only serve to improve people’s experience of the internet now but also act as an incentive for web browser companies to innovate and offer people better browsers in the future.”

Under the commitments approved by the Commission, Microsoft will make available for five years in the European Economic Area (through the Windows Update mechanism) a ” Choice Screen” enabling users of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 to choose which web browser(s) they want to install in addition to, or instead of, Microsoft’s browser Internet Explorer.

The commitments also provide that computer manufacturers will be able to install competing web browsers, set those as default and turn Internet Explorer off.

Today’s decision follows a Statement of Objections sent to Microsoft by the Commission on 15 January 2009 (see MEMO/09/15 ). The Statement of Objections outlined the Commission’s preliminary view that Microsoft may have infringed Article 82 of the EC Treaty (now Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union) by abusing its dominant position in the market for client PC operating systems through the tying of Internet Explorer to Windows.

The Commission’s preliminary view was that competition was distorted by Microsoft tying Internet Explorer to Windows. This was because it offered Microsoft an artificial distribution advantage not related to the merits of its product on more than 90 per cent of personal computers. Furthermore, the Commission’s preliminary view was that this tying hindered innovation in the market and created artificial incentives for software developers and content providers to design their products or web sites primarily for Internet Explorer.

The approved commitments address these concerns. PC users, by means of the Choice Screen, will have an effective and unbiased choice between Internet Explorer and competing web browsers. This should ensure competition on the merits and allow consumers to benefit from technical developments and innovation both on the web browser market and on related markets, such as web-based applications.

The Commission’s decision is based on Article 9 of Regulation 1/2003 on the implementation of EU antitrust rules. It takes into account the results of the market test launched in October 2009 (see MEMO/09/439 ). This decision, which does not conclude whether there is an infringement, legally binds Microsoft to the commitments it has offered and ends the Commission’s investigation. If Microsoft were to break its commitments, the Commission could impose a fine of up to 10% of Microsoft’s total annual turnover without having to prove any violation of EU antitrust rules.

A clause in the commitments allows the Commission to review the commitments in two years. Microsoft will report regularly to the Commission, starting in six months’ time, on the implementation of the commitments and under certain conditions make adjustments to the Choice Screen upon the Commission’s request.

Interoperability information

In July 2009, Microsoft also made proposals in relation to disclosures of interoperability information that would improve interoperability between third party products and several Microsoft products, including Windows, Windows Server, Office, Exchange, and SharePoint (see MEMO/09/352 ). After intensive discussions with the Commission, Microsoft is today publishing an improved version of the undertaking and related documents (for example a warranty agreement and a patent licence agreement) on its website. The Commission welcomes this initiative to improve interoperability. Even though it remains informal vis-à-vis the Commission, Microsoft’s public undertaking offers assurances to third parties that can be privately enforced. The Commission will carefully monitor the impact of this undertaking on the market and take its findings into account in the pending antitrust investigation regarding interoperability (see MEMO/08/19 ).

See also MEMO/09/558 and MEMO/09/559 .

This is very welcome news for those of us who live in the EU and would like to have a choice of browser from the start.

Where would we be without them? Apple has sold more than 220m iPods since its release in 2001; 300m searches are made via Google every day; 1.7bn people worldwide are now online; Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Photographs: Monica Davey/EPA; Brendan Beirne/Rex Features; AFP/Getty; Achim Sass/Rex Features

The past decade has been the story of three companies, and one increasingly powerful idea. When the decade dawned in 2000, Microsoft was a colossus, with 1999 sales of $19bn and net income of $7.8bn bestriding the online and offline world. It had the best-selling operating system; but in April 2000 it was ordered to split itself into two – an “operating systems” company and an “applications” company – by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who found it guilty of antitrust violations after a trial that revealed much about the company’s vicious, no-holds-barred approach to competition. Jackson’s ruling – which could have created a fascinating pair of companies – was overturned on appeal in 2001 after comments he made during the trial to a reporter, Ken Auletta, were published in a book.

That left Microsoft free to push on further. But the antitrust trial had broken a little of its spirit; from then on it was always looking over its shoulder for the US justice department (and then in front at the European Commission’s antitrust department, which perked up when it saw its transatlantic cousin’s success).

Apple turnover

Apple Computer, meanwhile, was struggling: despite the return of Steve Jobs to its top position in 1997, it was having little impact in sales terms with its computers (which was all it had; the iPod was not released until October 2001). Although the original iMac had been a hit in fashion terms the company was making little headway financially. Its $6bn of sales (up 3%) and $601m profits (up 94%) for fiscal 1999 were at least growth, after three years when it shrank and made horrendous losses (though it still had $3bn in the bank).

But in late 2000, it made a fateful – and game-changing – decision: it bought Soundjam MP, a popular MP3-playing program for the Mac, and the services of its head programmer, Jeff Robbin. Steve Jobs would later insist that his team had seen the future, seen the coming of miniature hard drives able to store gigabytes of data, had positioned Apple to take advantage of it. Either way, the gamble was to pay off.

Meanwhile the internet had everyone excited – though it was still a world reached by dialup. A survey in October 1999 by Continental Research reckoned that 18.6m Britons had internet access, spending an average of 17 minutes a day (8.5 hours per month) online. AOL and Time Warner leapt into what they hoped would be a synergistic $109bn merger, where people would lap up mass-media content via a walled garden internet connection. It turned out to be monumental hubris, one of the greatest destructions of shareholder value ever seen. Why? Because as the decade progressed, and particularly from 2001 onwards – when Wikipedia was set up by Jimmy Wales (below) and Larry Sanger, using the “wiki” software that had come of age – the power of the crowd, and people’s ability to use the internet to their own ends, not those of content generators, became central to the internet experience.

Allied to the growth of the crowd was the rise of Google – which uses the power of the crowd to determine where sites should be placed in its ranking. At the start of the decade Google was a good idea struggling to find a business model. During 2000 it introduced text adverts though they were, it admits, “rather primitive”. Crucially, though, that year it won a contract to become Yahoo’s default search provider. Having ended 1999 serving 7m search queries daily (compared to AltaVista’s 50m), by the end of 2000 it was handling 100m. Nowadays, it makes more than 300m every day – 109bn a year.

But Google was still a minnow in revenue terms; for 2000 its revenues were just $19m, but its costs were $34m – a loss of $17m. It moved narrowly into profit in 2001 ($86m revenues, $10.9m profit) but only truly motored in 2003 with the introduction of Google Mail, when it worked out how to generate ads against any text. That meant it could offer ads on any website, not just against searches, and its revenues – and profits – burgeoned.

Then, in the middle of the decade, came broadband. Imperfect, frustrating, but such a relief compared to dialup that we stampeded online: Britons now spend roughly 120 hours every month using the net.

And what are we doing? The decade saw an explosion in content generation by people who had previously had little opportunity to. Website building (such as the now defunct GeoCities), forums, and then blogs gave people a medium they’d never had before. Wikipedia benefited as people lent it their expertise: “crowdsourcing” became more and more powerful, breaking through to the public consciousness when the grainy pictures from the London bombings in July 2005 told the story the normal media couldn’t.

Hello, everyone

As the decade wore on, that creative outpouring migrated to the new “social networks” such as MySpace and Facebook, where longer blogposts were replaced by bite-sized remarks; this reached its apotheosis with Twitter, limiting remarks to text-message length. Google and Microsoft’s (struggling, but reborn) web search integrated Twitter feeds; and so the thoughts of the crowd became available to itself. AOL and Time Warner, meanwhile, were left in the cold, unable to compete for content creation with millions of individuals, and unable to corral them in high-profit internet walled gardens. This month the merger was in effect dissolved: AOL was refloated, valued at $2.4bn; Time Warner, at $35bn. Where did the other $72bn go? It vanished into the crowd.

But another form of silent crowd also emerged in the decade: botnets – hundreds or thousands of compromised Windows machines, used for sending spam, hosting phishing sites, and attacking specific sites. Windows XP’s general lack of security meant botnets were the first instance of “cloud computing“, available for hire by the hour by miscreants and spam artists. Botnets are the surest sign of the failure of the decade to cope with the downside of a crowd – that nobody takes responsibility. (It will be interesting to see whether Google’s Chrome OS can roll back the tide of malware.)

Apple went from strength to strength as the iPod gave individuals the power to choose the soundtrack to their lives. Its annus mirabilis began in Christmas 2003, when the popularity of the new iPod mini saw 733,000 sold in a quarter – nearly as many as in the previous two years. The iPod and the new iTunes Store drove Apple’s reputation. It followed it in 2007 with the long-rumoured iPhone (and sibling non-phone iPod touch), cannibalising its own successful product while reaching into a new market. (It also sold more computers than ever before.) It ended its fiscal 2009 in September with revenues totalling $36.54bn – each quarter bigger than the whole of 2000 – and profits of $5.72bn. Dell, the premier PC maker at the start of the decade, scrabbled around, lost in a commoditised battle. Apple could now buy it outright using just the cash it has in the bank.

Cloudy forecast

But Microsoft has seen its profits eroded. Though 2009 revenues were $58bn, and net income $14bn, it has looked under threat as the internet has become a greater part of our lives. If you have storage and computing in the “cloud” (as Amazon and Google offer), and if open source programs such as OpenOffice can do many of the jobs that Microsoft Office can, why upgrade? Google in particular is undermining Microsoft by offering what it does, but for less: first, with Google Mail, which offered 1GByte of storage for free, when Hotmail and Yahoo charged for more than 10MB. Then with its online word processing and spreadsheets. Then with its Android phone OS, undercutting Windows Mobile. And next with Chrome OS, undercutting Windows on notebooks. Most recently, Google has started offering DNS lookup services, something nobody would trust to Microsoft. Which is in itself telling as the decade ends: Google, though dominant in a technology we rely on, doesn’t worry us as Microsoft did – and still does.

But, as Nick Carr has observed, Google has realised that its future is on the internet, where it makes its money (through advertising and other services); thus every effort it makes is to get more people online. Microsoft’s aim was to get a computer on every desk. The internet wasn’t part of it. The question for the next decade, as the crowd discovers itself, is whether Microsoft will vanish in the cloud – or if it will manage to redefine and reinvent its reason for existing. In retrospect, Thomas Jackson’s suggestion of a split may have been a good one.