cross pond high tech

Amazon has introduced a way to pay for cloud infrastructure that undercuts Google – provided you're willing to shell out up front towards at least one year of use.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has changed the way it charges for its Reserved Instance (RI) compute infrastructure on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 customers pay for Reserved Instance infrastructure whether they use it or not, unlike EC2's On Demand Instances.

The charges for Reserved Instances are no longer split into light, medium and heavy usage but instead reflect how much a user is willing to pay up front.

Users can chose to pay no up-front costs, or some or all of the costs up front, and must commit to paying for one or three years of usage. A table produced by the cloud portfolio management company RightScale summarises the available payment options below.

As you can see, the price of a PC has fallen, significantly through the years. And yet, the price of a gaming console has risen. Why is this? Thompson speculates, "Incumbents are driven by their best customers to add more and more features that drive up the price, causing the incumbents’ product to move further and further away from the average customer’s needs."

As the price goes up, it becomes less appealing. One of the great things about Nintendo in the 80s was that it was an affordable computing device. These things are no longer relatively affordable.

ULTRAMOBILE YEAR AHEAD: Gartner has updated its annual device forecasts for PCs, tablets, and mobile phones for the new year. On the whole, the research outfit thinks sales of all of these devices combined will grow by just over 7% in 2014, which would be a re-acceleration in growth compared to the 4% growth achieved between 2012 and 2013. 

Mobile phones, both feature phones and smartphones, will dominate in terms of sales volume, with expected annual sales of almost 1.9 billion. But it will be the "ultramobiles" category, in which Gartner includes tablets, hybrids, and flip-form devices, that will set the pace for growth, with increased sales of nearly 54% during the year. We feel this is a function of growing demand for "phablets," or devices that carry a screen size somewhere between the standard 5-inch smartphone and the 8-inch tablet. Phablet shipments have already skyrocketed in key markets for mobile growth like China and India. PC sales, meanwhile, will continue to be hampered by the mobile movement. Gartner thinks PC sales will decline 7% in 2014. 

ONE BILLION ANDROID DEVICES! If 2013 was the watershed year for Android in terms of market share, then 2014 will be the year Android solidifies its stronghold on the global mobile market. Gartner estimates Android will sell 1.1 billion devices for the year. They also confirm that Android blows past Apple in terms of installed base, with 1.9 billion active Android devices already in use. With slowing growth in mobile uptake in developed markets, expect Android to make massive waves with new, lower-income users in emerging mobile markets, where most new customers are priced out of the premium device market dominated by Apple. (Gartner)

For example, every day more than 1.3 million Android devices are activated — which is way more than the 300,000 babies born daily. Users now spend more time each day surfing the web or on their mobile apps than they do watching television.

There are more than a billion smartphones in use around the world, and age is no barrier — teens, adults and seniors are all well represented among their users.

More than 60% of the apps in the Apple app store have never been downloaded (not even once)

Based on IDC data charted for us by BI Intelligence, Samsung’s market share is getting eaten not only by Apple, representing the high-end smartphone market, but most notably from low-end phone makers in China including Lenovo, Huawei, and Xiaomi, which has come out of nowhere to become the biggest smartphone maker in China and the third-biggest in the world.

For the three months ended in February, Apple had 38.9 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, up from 35 percent for the same period ending in November. Android fell to 51.7 percent over the same period, down from 53.7 percent.

The United States is not the world, but it is a leading market for smartphones. So, it's worth paying attention to these trends.

Apple has been able to eat into Android's lead thanks to increased distribution and lowered pricing. The iPhone wasn't available from Verizon until February 2011, four years after it debuted on AT&T. It later joined Sprint, then some regional carriers, and this year it's going to T-Mobile.

Apple offers the iPhone at a variety of prices on Verizon and AT&T, from $0 to over $400. A free-on-contract iPhone has made it an option for more people.

Android is a great operating system available on a number of excellent phones, some with gigantic screens. It's odd that it's gone flat. It's not just a U.S. phenomenon for Android, either.

MarketWatch estimates that all of those old phones sitting around are worth $34 billion. (That's allphones, not just smartphones.)

For years, people have been predicting the death of Microsoft's Windows dominance. And in the last two years, it's finally happened. The rise of iOS and Android have made Microsoft's operating system significantly less important. 

Luckily for Microsoft, this hasn't meant the death of its business overall. Thanks to the strength of its Office franchise and its Servers and Tools business, Microsoft is still very healthy. 

But, there's no escaping that Windows is what drives the whole company. CEOSteve Ballmer calls Windows, "the heart and soul of Microsoft from WindowsPCs to Windows Servers to Windows Phones and Windows Azure." And that heart is beating a little bit more weakly today than it was in say, 2005. 

This chart from Asymco earlier this year illustrates the decline of Microsoft's Windows monopoly as Apple has risen. There are other illustrations of the same thing here and here.