February 2012

Microsoft lodged a formal complaint with the European Union's competition regulator against Google's Motorola Mobility, saying the company's aggressive enforcement of patent rights against rivals breaks competition rules.

The complaint follows a similar step by Apple against Motorola last week. Motorola is in the process of being taken over by Google for $12.5 billion, the biggest acquisition in the Californian company's history. Apple and Microsoft have been hit by legal cases in Europe and the United States, with Motorola claiming that the companies' products are using key patents it owns without permission. Apple and Microsoft, meanwhile, argue that Motorola is overcharging for the use of these patents, which cover technologies necessary to connect wirelessly to the Internet or stream video online.

Late last year, President Obama nominated Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai to fill two vacancies on the five-person Federal Communications Commission. Both nominations are hung up in the Senate for reasons that have nothing to do with the nominees themselves. They are pawns in a couple of fights with the FCC by some Senate Republicans. However, both nominees have strong credentials for the FCC jobs, according to FCC watchers.

While many developed countries have adjusted their laws and regulations to address cloud computing, the wide differences in those rules make it difficult for companies to invest in the technology, according to a new study by the Business Software Alliance.

Cloud computing provides resources, software and data over networks. Such systems may feature servers in one country and customers in another, making it difficult to regulate and protect them. The 24 countries surveyed in the report account for about 80 percent of the world's information and communications technology, but some countries have done better than others. Japan, Australia, the United States, and some European countries top the rankings, while some otherwise tech-savvy countries like India, China and Brazil are near the bottom, the group found. In the United States, for example, there are many up-to-date laws covering issues like cybercrime. Inconsistencies in state laws and court rulings on privacy, data breaches, and copyright issues still need to be remedied, the report concluded. More regulation is not needed to help the world take advantage of a global technology like cloud computing, said BSA President Robert Holleyman. Rather, the patchwork of laws needs to be "harmonized" so that companies can develop cloud computing.

The iPhone has been, by many measures, one of the most successful products in business history. Nearly 200 million iPhones have been sold in four and a half years, 37 million of them in the last three months of 2011. Apple's market cap has soared from $104 billion in June 2007, when the first iPhone was sold, to $480 billion today. Less visible in such soaring statistics, is the impact on the mobile carriers.

Even with the heavy subsidies phone companies must pay to Apple and some five years after its introduction, the iPhone may well be the best thing going for the mobile industry. According to Hudson Square Research, iPhone users have a net present value -- a measure of cash flows over a product's lifetime -- that is twice as high as subscribers using the old, clamshell feature phones. The smartphone, as conceived by Apple, seems designed to generate carrier fees. Unlike the standard feature phones, which are primarily used for phone calls and text messages, iPhone users also pay for wireless data connections. That's all true for other smartphones too, of course. But more than any other device, the iPhone is responsible for inspiring all those categories of fees -- voice, texting, data -- as well as the class system of data usage. By influencing the look and operability of other Google Android and other smartphones, the iPhone had a broader impact on the wireless industry as a whole.