Bill Gates has not forgotten Teledesic

Might we see another broadband LEO constellation?

Proposed Teledesic constellation:
12 planes of 24 LEO satellites
(source)

Teledesic was the first company to plan to offer broadband connectivity using a constellation of low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites. Craig McCaw, who had sold McCaw Cellular to AT&T, founded Teledesic in 1990 and it got a big visibility and credibility boost when Bill Gates made a small ($5 million) investment in the company. 

McCaw and Gates were able to attract capital -- $200 million from a Saudi Prince, $750 million from Motorola, and $100 million from Boeing, which signed on as the prime contractor. When Boeing and Teledesic finished the final design, the constellation had been reduced from the originally planned 840 to 288 satellites. (Later, Motorola replaced Boeing as prime contractor). The FCC approved Teledesic's Ka-band spectrum application in March 1997 and 37 counties submitted supporting proposals for the December 1997 World Radiocommunication Conference. Teledesic hoped to provide "fiber-like" connectivity to an "Internet in the sky," but was unable to deliver and gave up in 2002. 

I don't know what motivated Gates' investment in Teledesic, but today the Gates Foundation is devoted to fighting poverty and providing health care and education in developing nations. Nearly 20 years after the demise of Teledesic, satellite, launch, and communication technology are vastly improved, the entire world is aware of the Internet, we have applications that can utilize "fiber-like" speed and latency and Gates is clearly aware of the value (and downside) of connecting the unconnected.

Bill Gates might be thinking that it is time for another try.

Last September, Microsoft announced that customers of Viasat, Intelsat, and SES would be able to access Azure cloud services. Their focus is on government, enterprise, maritime, and airline applications and the announcement states that "each of the partners brings different strengths, for example, choices between Geostationary (GEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and, in the future, Low Earth Orbit(LEO) satellites" so it seems they are talking with possible LEO partners. (Maybe not with Amazon given its recent challenge to Microsoft's JEDI defense contract).

Earlier this month, the FCC authorized Microsoft to establish a proof-of-concept connection between two ground stations in Washington and DEIMOS-2, a Spanish imaging satellite. If successful, the test will demonstrate satellite connectivity to Microsoft's Azure cloud services as well as the rest of the Internet. They plan to run the demonstrations before, during, and after the Ignite conference, which starts on Sept. 22, and if the demonstration results in significant market interest, they will apply for regular ground-station authority which would put them in direct competition with Amazon's ground-station service. (Microsoft may have a fear of missing out on space).

Terminals with electronically steerable antennas are a critical LEO broadband component. High-end fixed and mobile users will be able to justify relatively expensive terminals, but success in the consumer market will require user-installed, reliable, low-cost terminals. It turns out that Bill Gates was the lead investor in electronically-steerable antenna manufacturer Kymeta at the time of its launch in 2012 and he is now leading a new $85 million investment round in support of a new high-end mobile service using Kymeta's new LEO-ready U8 terminal. The expensive U8 is sold for high-end fixed and mobile applications today, but they will surely be able to produce a low-cost fixed-service terminal in the future.

If the LEO broadband business case turns out to be viable, these are early days and there is room for competitors. The Gates Foundation endowment is nearly $50 billion, Bill Gate's net worth is $115 billion and Microsoft is on a roll. Might we see another broadband LEO constellation? 

Brick and mortar stores -- Apple, Microsoft and Google?

Dell, HP and others now have relatively upscale Chromebooks that approach, and in some features surpass, the high end Google Pixel and Google just announced that Chromebooks will be running Android apps in the future. At first, those apps might not be optimized for the Chromebook form factor, but many will look good in phone or tablet-size windows and I bet we see Chromebook-friendly Android apps in the future.

Given all that, I thought I might like to get one, so I headed over to the closest thing I know of to a Google store -- the Google section of my local Best Buy.

It's a total Fail.

As shown here, all they had was half a dozen low-end machines. That might work for a Chromebook for a school child, but it is not sufficient for someone thinking of spending $700 or more.

But, it gets worse.

There were two, sweet, young sales people wearing Google shirts next to the Chromebooks, so I asked if they had other machines -- perhaps a Pixel -- somewhere else in the store. It turned out they didn't know what I meant by "Google Pixel." I explained what a Google Pixel was and one of them went off to inquire. When she came back, she said they did not have them.

Since I was there, I asked about the six machines they had on display and discovered that they were confused about the difference between memory and storage. None of the machines on display had more than 2GB of memory, but they assured me that that was no problem because you could attach a large external hard drive.

(In the early days of personal computers, there was a joke that the difference between computer store sales people and car sales people was that the car sales folks knew they were lying).

I don't know if these kids were Google or BestBuy employees, but they were wearing Google shirts and that surely cheapens the top-notch "Googler" brand.

If Google hopes to sell and support high-end hardware, they will have to do much better than this, and that will be expensive.

A little while ago, I had been in a shopping mall near my home and dropped in on the Apple and Microsoft stores, which are just a few stores apart.

It was the middle of the week, but the Apple store was quite crowded. Customers were talking with sales people, playing around with machines, getting help from Apple "geniuses," etc. Apple runs classes in the stores, offers walk-in customer support and the employees are knowledgeable and helpful. I snapped this picture just before the man in the foreground told me to stop taking pictures:

I walked over to the Microsoft store and found it to be pretty well empty -- the store employees outnumbered the customers. They had a wide range of computers on display -- from both Microsoft and OEMs. They also offered service and classes and the workers were as knowledgeable and friendly as those in the Apple store. There was no pressure and no problem playing around for as long as I wanted to and they were happy to have me take pictures.

I had visited the same Microsoft and Apple stores two days after Christmas in 2014 and, while both were more crowded post Christmas, the Apple store was totally jam packed and the Microsoft store still fairly empty.

I personally don't see much difference between the Microsoft and Apple stores and can't figure out why one is so much more popular than the other, but, I can tell you for sure that Google will have to be creative and spend a lot of money if they want to sell us high end hardware. They will also have to step up customer support. You can sell a $35 Chromecast in a BestBuy store or online, but not a $1,300 Pixel Chromebook.

Microsoft at 40

Microsoft was founded in April 1975, when the personal computing hobby was just beginning, and the Economist has an article on the company evolution to "middle age."

Microsoft began with development tools -- a BASIC interpreter and Pascal and Fortran compilers -- but soon moved on to Windows and later Office. Under Bill Gates, and later Steve Balmer, the company strategy was to "strengthen Windows, to make it ever more crushingly dominant." That strategy worked well during the desktop/laptop/on-premises server era, but it constrained Microsoft -- keeping them from purusing new opportunities on the Internet and mobile devices.

Current CEO Satya Nadella, shown below with Gates and Balmer, has a different strategy -- "just build stuff that people like."

That has led to the porting of Office to other operating systems and the Internet, support of open source and emphasis on their Internet platform, Azure.

The article constrasts Microsoft's middle age slump with Apple (founded in April 1976), which has passed them in profit:

and now accounts for a much larger percent of the US technology sector than Microsoft:

The Economist article is on Microsoft, but the fall from dominance of IBM, as illustrated in the above graph, is even more striking. IBM totally dominated the (smaller) technology market until a disruptive startup, Microsoft, led the revolution that toppled them.

Office for the iPad -- too late? The browser is the next battleground.

Microsoft finally released Office for the iPad, but the iPad is four years old -- this announcement is long overdue. Preliminary reviews say they have done a good job on the touch user interface, but isn't that the last war?

The next war is not over the tablet or phone, but over the browser.

Don't take my word for it. In a 1997 Time interview (by Walter Isaacson) Bill Gates said:

Any operating system without a browser is going to be f****** out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?

In 1998 he sent a memo to Microsoft executives saying:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company...This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I have been using a Chromebook for a week and I use Google Docs quite a bit, and, while I like both, am not ready to give up Windows. But, I bet there are a lot of folks who would abandon Windows if they could run Office in a browser.

What would have happened if Microsoft had released Office for the iPad, say, two years ago? It would have helped iPad sales and hurt Windows tablets for sure, but Windows tablets are not doing well regardless, and Microsoft and Office would have strengthened their dominant position with professional and enterprise users. Maybe they should have rebranded themselves the "software and services company" instead of "devices and services."

Now let's look forward, say, five years. I will have a gigabit Internet connection (well, not if Time Warner has their way) and my Chromebook will be very fast and compatible with HTML6. Will I want to use Office 365 and One Drive or Google Docs 2019 and Google Drive? Which one will my university or an enterprise settle on?

Today, Microsoft has the advantage of having many years of experience with Office and full-featured productivity applications. (Charles Simonyi, who worked on object-oriented programming on computers with bit-mapped displays at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, led the development of Word and Excel at Microsoft). They also have a solid grip on the enterprise.

Microsoft "got" bit mapped displays before Google existed, but Google "got" the Internet before Microsoft did and they have more experience with network infrastructure and applications with their data centers, Google Fiber and Google Docs/Drive. They've also got the chromebook and Chrome. (That being said, both may end up running on Mainframe 2 if that technology prevails).

I don't know which will "win" the browser battle (it may end a tie) and neither do the folks at Google and Microsoft -- and that is good news for us as consumers and citizens.

Microsoft vs Google: Office 365 will be free for K-university education

WDPC machine room

This sounds like a major battle between Google Docs/Plus/Groups/Hangouts and Microsoft for the hearts and minds of students.

The free Office 365 for Education plan includes the online version of Office 2010, called Office Web Apps, instant messaging and conferencing via Lync Online, collaboration capabilities via SharePoint Online, email and calendar via Exchange Online, antivirus and anti-spam protection and individual storage.

For an additional $2.50 per student per month, and $4.50 per faculty/staff per month you get all that plus the full-featured desktop version of Office 2010 Professional Plus and voice mail. For $3 per month per student and $6 per month per faculty/staff, you can add voice communication.

Initial WDPC participating institutions

This "get them while they are young" strategy reminds me of the old days when I worked for IBM. We gave universities an 80% educational discount on computers and went further at times. At UCLA, we built the Western Data Processing Center (WDPC), which had office space for UCLA and IBM employees, and we installed the largest mainframe computers of the time. Universities in the western states could submit jobs remotely -- using high speed paper tape. Students at UCLA and those schools all learned to program and use IBM computers, giving us a competitive advantage over other manufacturers.