The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger Is Dead

It's official, AT&T has ended his bid to acquire T-Mobile USA. I had some doubts that the deal would have difficulties going through the Feds approval back in March. The $4B break-up fee might be bad news for AT&T but I'm more concerned about how T-Mobile is going to recover from the deal. I'm pretty sure they have been hemorrhaging subscribers leading to the FCC decision and the announcement won't help bring new users.

Will BlackBerry survive 2012?

Good article here. The answer is no. According to research group Canalys, RIM's share of the smartphone market in the US fell to 9.2% in the third quarter from 24% in the same period last year. You don't recover from this kind of numbers, not unless you have a great plan in the works.

There might be room for another developer environment on top of iOS and Android, but it is not going to be RIM (Microsoft is not going to abandon a market that could grow into a trillion dollars). RIM totally missed the apps boat and doesn't have an attractive value proposition for users and developers. Why would you spend time and money porting your apps on a platform with a declining number of activated users?

Android Market hits 10 billion downloads

Last summer, I discussed the 15 billion downloads from the iTunes App Store, and today, Google confirmed that Android Market hit the 10 billion mark. What are the chances that Android Market overtakes iTunes App Store:

• Android App downloads are growing faster than iOS' (took almost a year for Apple to double download but just over 6 months for Android)
• More Android devices activated every day than iOS'
• Open vs. Closed

but:

• Apple is delivering always innovative and flawless products and other vendors are playing catch up
• Superior user experience across all Apple's products

Big five IT trends

Very good article here. Not that the author is a visionary (he would have been if the article had been published 3 years ago), but he did good job articulating the major IT trends.

If you don't have time here are the big five IT trends:

• Smart Devices and Tablets
• Social Media
• Consumerization of IT
• Cloud Computing
• Big Data

Omnitrol introduces First M2M and RFID platform integrating Google’s JavaScript-V8 Engine

Omnitrol's EASE 4.0 extends the Google Javascript-V8 engine by encapsulating real-time event-processing complexities in M2M and sensor-driven software solutions, enabling Javascript-V8 applications to be deployed in mission-critical environments. EASE 4.0 seamlessly extends Javascript-V8 applications with hot-standby fault tolerance, hot-deployment without downtime, real-time complex event processing, priority queues and in-memory database services -all key requirements in physical-world operations.

HP to Acquire Info Management Software Firm Autonomy

I've been a little perplexed by some of the recent HP moves, but this one makes a lot of sense to me. Any large IT vendor has to provide a complete set of integrated IT management, automation and security software to its customers. The datasets generated by enterprise applications are growing so large that software built by companies like Autonomy, Vertica (acquired earlier this year by HP as well), Greenplum (acquired by EMC) is becoming mission critical.The market for unstructured data is getting bigger, and Oracle is the only one that hasn't made a move yet.

Google to Buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion

Looks like Larry Page didn't waste time since he moved to the CEO position. It is hard to believe that the acquisition was made for Motorola's hardware business. Google wouldn't risk alienating all the smart phone makers (Samsung, HTC) who are using the Android operating system. It seems to me that Google wanted to make sure that no patent lawsuit would stop Android's growth. I see a few dark clouds on the horizon for this acquisition:

• Looking at the problems AT&T is facing with the T-Mobile acquisition, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Feds looking at this transaction very closely and, despite approving other patent acquisitions, investigating the run for patents.
• Set top box, smart phone and tablet manufacturers may ask Google to reconsider the move or get guarantees from Google about the future of their relationships.
• Nearly 20,000 employees to integrate in a software, Silicon Valley culture-driven company. It will be a challenge for both sides to adjust to the new environment.

There is no doubt that there is a huge patent war going on between Google on one side and Apple and Microsoft on the other side. What will happen when they run out of patents to buy?