I am not sure whether “outing” is the right word here, but I will give it a try. I am not on Facebook, I do not tweet and I read still hardware news. I mean newspapers.
Yesterday I stumbled over an article in the paper issue of the German Süddeutsche Zeitung (issue of 5. May 2014) about the traffic that bots generate on the Internet. The starting point was the “Webdriver Torso”, apparently a software that for purposes of testing video compression automatically generated and uploaded to Youtube 77,000 videos, each 11 seconds long. That was a new video every 20 seconds. Awesome, but not surprising. I suspected similar scenarios when I discovered what modern software can do out of the box.
For professional reasons we maintain several web sites and we post news and events items, as every decent European project web site probably does by now. Our content management and blog based websites are capable of automatically issuing a tweet when a news item is posted. Of course we emit also RSS feeds that are automatically parsed and processed by other sites. Obviously some of our web-sites import RSS feeds from other sites in exchange. So we are also automatically generating traffic.
We can add more advanced Web 2.0 functionality, but what we get is an inflation of Internet traffic, for example, just because I decided to post an article like this. This blog in fact does not tweet each new article. Instead it trusts that you will find the blog and its article through conventional ways; either because you know us and you interested in our work, or because you trust a search engine to find us for you. But I cannot guarantee that someone else will tweet it or write about it or even replicate it somewhere.
The newspaper article cites incapsula.com, a security related web-site, claiming that 2/3 of the total Internet traffic today is not of human origin, but generated by bots. There is room for discussion whether this is an accurate measure, but I personally believe that this kind of traffic is indeed more than 50 per cent.
What I find amusing is that bots read posts and tweets that other bots have generated. And indeed it looks like bots are also chating with each other. On the other hand bots are causing an immense damage to the Internet business model which is still largely based on online advertisement for the benefit of the few that are able and malicious enough to exploit it by programming bots that automatically click on banners and visit sites thus generating the wanted traffic.
But who wants that traffic? I think the online shop owners, whether the big shots like the amazons and ebays or the small start-ups are not delighted to discover that mainly bots are visiting their sites via ad-clicks.
And then there is the traffic; the cry for more bandwidth, for upgrading the network capacity at the edge and in the core. And then there is the net neutrality debate that everyone should have equal access to the Internet and that no packets should be prioritized over others. Not for money; not for any other reason. But hey, wait! Did we actually verify that the one or other outcry against the attempts to put some constraints on the Internet does not come from a bot? After all, on the Internet no one knows that you are a dog, just to cite one of the most famous cartoon symbolising a certain understanding of privacy and anonymity on the Internet.
As far as I am concerned, I would not like to compete with bots when generating content and place it on the Internet, because bot generated content is mostly irrelevant and redundant. Personally, I am not so good in filtering irrelevant and redundant content whether reading my e-mails or viewing content on my favorite web-sites. Neither would I like to pay for an infrastructure that is used by more than 50% by bots that do meaningless things such as dating each other or watching YouTube videos on their own.
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Microsoft and Nokia – the cards have been reshuffled
Photo by Nokia
On Tuesday, 3 September, Microsoft announced that it will buy Nokia’s mobile phone business for 5.44 billion euro. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close during the first quarter of 2014. There is no big danger that it will not be approved.
A lot has already been written about the purchase and its impacts on Nokia and the Finish economy. What I am curious about is why Microsoft spends more than 5 billion euro for this, although Nokia and Microsoft had already been working well together for some time on the Windows phone. Does Microsoft see their chance in boosting their Windows operating system now that both Symbian and BlackBerry OS are basically out of the race, leaving only Android, iOS and Windows as major mobile operating systems for smartphones? Or does Microsoft see advantages of owning both mobile hardware and mobile operating system in one hand, as it has been very successful for Apple? Or do they plan to benefit from the synergies of one operating system for mobile devices, tablets, PCs and game consoles?
Microsoft’s Windows mobile operating system currently has a market share of 3.7%, however showing more than 75 % growth during the second quarter of this year. Nearly 9 million Windows phone devices were shipped in the second quarter (source: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2288020/android-nears-80-percent-market-share-as-ios-plummets). This could support my first guess. Even if there was nearly no growth any more, and if we took an assumption of 50 euro profit per phone, the total profit on Windows smartphones could be more than half a billion euro per quarter. If Microsoft managed to sell 50% of all Windows smartphones (not to forget that also LG, HTC, Huawei, Samsung and others have been selling Windows smartphones), the annual profit could reach more than a billion euro per year. Not bad for a total purchase price of 5.44 billion.
What about owning both mobile hardware and mobile operating system in one hand? It would be too simple to say that this is a safe key to success just because it was a very successful approach for Apple. Time has changed, and the success of Android shows that open systems do have their business advantages. Nevertheless the combined ownership of both hardware and operating system can provide synergies, particularly if the same operating system can be used for different groups of devices. Here Microsoft has an advantage since it includes smartphones, tablets, PCs and game consoles. The latter is a clear value compared to Apple; Apple does not produce game consoles.
Finally I am curious how the European ICT sector will be impacted by this deal on the long run. Though there is no way to stop consolidation, I consider this as a rather bad day for Europe, because Europe loses yet another important asset. After all there are not many European ICT manufacturers left. My hope is that the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) projects will bring a few new European ICT players into the game.
So we may be anxious to see how the race will develop. I personally believe that since Tuesday Microsoft has increased their chances to be successful in the mobile smartphone race. Interesting that the latest development of the share prices suggest a different outcome.