Technology

ItalyAutorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato, roughly equivalent to this AmericaFTC, has fined Apple and Samsung a total of $15 million for the companies& practice of forcing updates on consumers that may slow or break their devices. The amount may be a drop in the bucket, but ita signal that governments won&t always let this type of behavior fly.

The &unfair commercial practices& are described by the AGCM as follows:

The two companies have induced consumers & by insistently proposing to proceed with the download and also because of the significant information asymmetry of consumers vis-a-vis the producers & to install software updates that are not adequately supported by their devices, without adequately informing them, nor providing them an effective way to recover the full functionality of their devices.

Sounds about right!

In case you don&t remember, essentially Apple was pushing updates to iPhones last year that caused performance issues with older phones. Everyone took this as part of the usual conspiracy theory that Apple slows phones to get you to upgrade, but it turns out to have been more like a lack of testing before they shipped.

Samsung, for its part, was pushing Android Mashmallow updates to a number of its devices, but failed to consider that it would cause serious issues in Galaxy Note 4s — issues it then would charge to repair.

The issue here wasn&t the bad updates exactly, but the fact that consumers were pressured into accepting them, at cost to themselves. It would be one thing if the updates were simply made available and these issues addressed as they came up, but both companies &insistently suggested& that the updates be installed despite the problems.

In addition to this, Apple was found to have ¬ adequately informed consumers about some essential characteristics of lithium batteries, such as their average duration and deterioration factors, nor about the correct procedures to maintain, verify and replace batteries in order to preserve full functionality of devices.& That would be when Apple revealed to iPhone 6 owners that their batteries were not functioning correctly and that they&d have to pay for a replacement if they wanted full functionality. This information, the AGCM, suggests, ought to have been made plain from the beginning.

Samsung gets €5 million in fines and Apple gets €10 million. Those may not affect either companybottom line, but they are the maximum possible fines, so itsymbolic as well. If a dozen other countries were to come to the same conclusion, the fines would really start to add up. Apple has already made some amends, but if it fell afoul of the law it still has to pay the price.

AT-T has begun beta testing a streaming device that seems to be something of its own Roku competitor, according to a statement made byJohn Donovan,CEO of AT-T Communications, during the companythird quarter earnings call. The device, first scooped a year ago by Varietyis an Android TV-based set-top box which integrates other streaming apps and ships with a voice remote, according to anFCC filing.

While AT-T didn&t comment on Varietyreport at the time, it did later confirm the device on an earnings call earlier this year.

The box was then described as a way for customers to watch DirecTV Now or other streaming services from their home. The plan at the time was to have the device launched by the end of 2018, the company had said.

The word today is that timeframe has shifted.

Donovan said the service was in &beta testing& now, but added that AT-T planned to &roll out trials in the first half of next year.&

The thin client-based service & as this product was referred to as by the exec & would be the next step in transitioning traditional pay TV customers to the streaming service, DirecTV Now.

It could also be used to target cord cutters in search of a more traditional TV experience, by offering access to streaming TV without requiring the installation of a satellite dish.

&This will be a more measured roll out,& Donovan said, of the new thin client-based service. &Like our introduction of WatchTV, we expect this service to be EBITDA positive. And over time, it should lower our acquisition cost of our premium video service. And both of these use the common platform we introduced with DirecTV Now,& he noted.

The devicearrival comes at a time when AT-Tpay TV business is in decline.

The company reported a 346,000 net loss in traditional TV customers (DirecTV and AT-T Uverse) in the quarter. However, it gained 49,000 for its streaming service, DirecTV Now, which has grown to 1.86 million subscribers.

AT-T said it would also begin evaluating its channel lineups, in order to better &align content costs with the price.& That seems to mean that AT-T may also be thinking about breaking up content into even skinnier bundles & somethingHulu says itdoing, as well.

Larry Ellison gave his Oracle Openworld keynote on Monday and of course he took several shots at AWS. In his view, his companycloud products were cheaper, better and faster than AWS, but then what would you expect him to say

He rolled out a slide with all the facts and figures in case you doubted it. He wrapped it up in a neat little marketing package for the world to see. Oracle has an autonomous self-healing database. AWS Nope. That much heright.

Slide: Oracle

He makes claims that his cloud products are faster and cheaper, claims that are hard to substantiate given how hard it is to nail down any vendorcloud prices and speeds. He says they have no disaster recovery, when they do. None of it matters.

This was about showmanship. It was about chest beating and itabout going after the market leader because frankly, the man has little choice. By now, itwell documented that Oracle was late to the cloud. Larry Ellison was never a fan and he made it clear over the years, but today as the world shifts to a cloud model, his company has had to move with it.

It hasn&t been an easy transition. It required substantial investment on the part of the company to build its infrastructure to support a cloud model. It took a big change in the way their sales people sell the product. The cloud is based on a subscription model, and it requires more of a partnership approach with customers. Oracle doesn&t exactly have a reputation for playing nicely.

To make matters worse, Oraclelate start puts it well behind market leader AWS. Hence, Ellison shouting from the rooftops how much better his companysolutions are and how insecure the competitors are. Synergy Research, which follows the cloud market closely, has pegged Amazoncloud market share at around 35 percent. It has Oracle in the single digits in the most recent data from last summer (and the market hasn&t shifted dramatically since it came out with this data).

At the time, Synergy identified the four biggest players as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM with Alibaba coming up fast. Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale says Oracle is falling behind.&We have seen Oracle losing market share over the last few quarters in IaaS, PaaS and managed private cloud,& he said. &In a market that is growing at 50 percent per year, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are all gaining market share, while the share of market leader AWS is holding steady,& he added.

To its credit, the company has seen some gains via its SaaS business. &As Oracle works to convert its huge on-premise software client base to SaaS, Oracle grew its share of enterprise SaaS markets in 2016 and 2017. Its market share then held steady in the first half of 2018,& Dinsdale pointed out.

Yet the company stopped breaking out its cloud revenue last June. As I wroteat the time, that isn&t usually a good sign:

That Oracle chose not to break out cloud revenue this quarter can&t be seen as a good sign. To be fair, we haven&t really seen Google break out their cloud revenue either with one exception in February. But when the guys at the top of the market shout about their growth, and the guys further down don&t, you can draw your own conclusions.

Further Oracle has been quite vocal about protestingthe Pentagon$10 billion JEDI contract, believing that it has been written to favor Amazon over other vendors, a charge the Pentagon has denied. It hasn&t stopped Oracle from filing protests or even bringing their case directly to the president.

At least Ellison might have had some good news yesterday. CNBC reported that the big Amazon Prime outage in July might have been related to a transition away from Oracle databases that Amazon is currently undertaking. (AmazonWernerVogels strongly denied that assertion on Twitter.)

Regardless, Oracle finds itself in an unfamiliar position. After years of domination, it is stuck behind in the pack. When you find yourself in such a position, you need to have a strong bark and Ellison is going after AWS hard. As the clear market leader, he has few other options right now.