Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs," he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories.
These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry.
What Intel investors really worry about is that the largest internet companies will start making their own chips. This week, Amazon.com Inc., the biggest cloud-computing company, announced its first in-house server processor. The Graviton is made by TSMC, and it supports a new version of an Amazon cloud service that's more than 40 percent cheaper than a similar offering powered by Intel chips, the company said.
The iPhone’s popularity with consumers was illogical to rivals such as RIM, Nokia Corp. andMotorolaInc.The phone’s battery lasted less than eight hours, it operated on an older, slower second-generation network, and, as Mr. Lazaridis predicted, music, video and other downloads strained AT&T’s network. RIM now faced an adversary it didn’t understand.
Condensed and adapted from the forthcoming book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” to be released Tuesday.
This from the Wall St. Journal.
The Inside Story of How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry
Research In Motion’s Jim Balsillie, left, and Mike Lazaridis in 2006. Photo: Norm Betts/Bloomberg News
ByJacquie McNish and
Sean Silcoff
Mike Lazaridis was home on his treadmill when he saw the televised report about Apple Inc.’s newest product. Research In Motion’s founder soon forgot about exercise that day in January 2007. There was Steve Jobs on a San Francisco stage waving a small glass object, downloading music, videos and maps from the Internet onto a device he called the iPhone.
“How did they do that?” Mr. Lazaridis wondered. His curiosity turned to disbelief when Stanley Sigman, the chief executive of Cingular Wireless joined Mr. Jobs to announce a multiyear contract with Apple to sell iPhones. What was Cingular’s parent AT&T Inc.thinking? “It’s going to collapse the network,” Mr. Lazaridis thought.
The next day Mr. Lazaridis grabbed his co-CEO Jim Balsillie at the office and pulled him in front of a computer.
“Jim, I want you to watch this,” he said, pointing to a webcast of the iPhone unveiling. “They put a full Web browser on that thing. The carriers aren’t letting us put a full browser on our products.”
Mr. Balsillie’s first thought was RIM was losing AT&T as a customer. “Apple’s got a better deal,” Mr. Balsillie said. “We were never allowed that. The U.S. market is going to be tougher.”
“These guys are really, really good,” Mr. Lazaridis replied. “This is different.”
“It’s OK—we’ll be fine,” Mr. Balsillie responded.
RIM’s chiefs didn’t give much additional thought to Apple’s iPhone for months. “It wasn’t a threat to RIM’s core business,” says Mr. Lazaridis’s top lieutenant, Larry Conlee. “It wasn’t secure. It had rapid battery drain and a lousy [digital] keyboard.”
If the iPhone gained traction, RIM’s senior executives believed, it would be with consumers who cared more about YouTube and other Internet escapes than efficiency and security. RIM’s core business customers valued BlackBerry’s secure and efficient communication systems. Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.”
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Photo: Flatiron Books
The iPhone’s popularity with consumers was illogical to rivals such as RIM, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.The phone’s battery lasted less than eight hours, it operated on an older, slower second-generation network, and, as Mr. Lazaridis predicted, music, video and other downloads strained AT&T’s network. RIM now faced an adversary it didn’t understand.
“By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer. To Mr. Yach and other senior RIM executives, Apple changed the competitive landscape by shifting the raison d’être of smartphones from something that was functional to a product that was beautiful.
“I learned that beauty matters....RIM was caught incredulous that people wanted to buy this thing,” Mr. Yach says
Drag a photo onto the box and it will search for other pictures with your camera's serial number
If you lose your phone or your computer, there’s a fair chance you’ll get it back if you’re using some kind of tracking software. As we have seen before, Apple’s Find my iPhone service has rescued more than one lost phone. But what about your other gadgets?
If your camera is stolen, you now have at least a chance of finding it thanks to the Stolen Camera Finder by Matt Burns. It works by searching the web for photos bearing the serial number of your camera. This number is embedded in the EXIF data of every photograph you take.
Using the tool is easy. Just visit the site and drag a photo from your camera onto the waiting box. The tool searches its database for your camera and if it finds it, you can then go see the pictures. This may — hopefully — give you some clues as to where it is now. You’ll need to use a JPG image (RAW doesn’t work) and some cameras don’t write their serial number into the metadata.
The data comes from Flickr, and also from data crawled from the web. Matt has also written a browser extension for Google Chrome which will check the serial number of photos on every page you visit and add it to the database.
I tried the tool with a photo from my camera, and nothing showed up. I have a ton of photos online, on both on Flickr and here at Wired.com, so I was expecting something. I guess that the service will increase in value as time passes and the database grows. Still, the service is free, and if nothing else it lets you view a whole lot of information about your photos in the drop-down list.
Way back in 2007, when Sun Microsystems was still a stand-alone business and Android a mere glimmer in Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) eye, Sun had a problem with the way Android built on the Java software platform.
The problem was fragmentation: Android doesn't run bog-standard Java code, but instead translates programs written for that platform into its own format, which is then executed by the Dalvik virtual machine that is the cold, robotic heart of any Android gadget. At the time, Google waved away the objections like Obi-Wan waving his droids through a storm trooper checkpoint: Android is part of the solution to Java fragmentation, not the problem -- Sun should love Google for replacing Java with its own far-reaching standard. Sun never made any official stink about it again, even though Google's reaction smelled like the insides of a dead tauntaun.
Until now, that is. Sun parent Oracle(Nasdaq: ORCL) is now suing Google for patent infringement, claiming that: "In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property." Oracle is looking for treble damages ("triple" in legalese, not the other half of "treble and bass") and wants to stop Google from shipping, selling, or promoting Android. That would certainly hurt Google.
This lawsuit was a bit of a shock to me, because I assumed that Google had made the problem go away by some sort of proactive action. But the legal complaint states in no uncertain terms that Google lacks the licenses required to use Java in this way.
This case echoes of a long-running action Sun carried out against Microsoft(Nasdaq: MSFT) last decade over strikingly similar problems. Mr. Softy ended up paying $1 billion in damages for that one, and Oracle would probably love a settlement of that scale again.
I'm guessing here, but it would make sense for Google to settle this affair quickly and quietly -- pay up a license fee for the right to use and modify the Java platform and then go on with business as usual. There is an alternative development framework available for Android programmers, based on the much more bare-metal C/C++ programming language. Going to that model exclusively would require hordes of Android developers to learn a new and arguably more difficult language. That would be a serious roadblock in the race to outgrow the Apple(Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone store in application quantity.
Java has been released under an open-source license after all -- excluding the mobile version. Oracle's stock is falling harder than Google's today. Are investors worried that Oracle alienates its own worldwide developer base here by raising thorny and nearly forgotten licensing issues? Discuss in the comments box below.
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