Electric Motors Near Perfect in Reliability - Ford Hybrid Battery Packs

Ford has had not one failure of its electric motors despite 80M miles and 380,000 in the field
The Detroit News reports that Ford's hybrid powertrains and battery packs are nearly perfect despite the its hybrid fleet having racked up 80 million miles in heavy-duty use with taxi cabs in San Francisco. Out of the 42,629,318 battery cells in use – which are the size of a household D-cell battery -- only five cells have failed. That huge number of cells was used to make 190,000 individual battery packs for hybrid vehicles.

Ford currently has 380,000 electric motors in the field packed inside those 190,000 hybrids sold so far and out of that number of electric motors not a single one has failed so far. Despite the fact that the electric motors and battery packs are already achieving very impressive levels of quality, Ford is still working to make things better.

Ford currently has an 88% satisfaction rate for the Fusion Hybrid, which is better than the higher volume Toyota Prius that is the watermark for many hybrids on the market. That figure comes from data collected by research firm RDA Group for Ford.

Bob Taenaka is Ford's hybrid battery technical leader said, "The development of batteries for hybrids is a lot like rocket science." That might sound like a boastful statement, but Taenaka should know considering his last job was at NASA designing batteries for the Galileo spacecraft.

The Detroit News reports that Ford sold 34,000 hybrids in 2010 and that sales overall this year have not grown despite the fact that there are more hybrid and electric vehicles on the market today than ever before. Ford is set to increase the number of hybrids and EVs it builds in 2012.

Dave Sullivan from research firm AutoPacific Inc said, "For many people, hybrids and electric cars are almost like halo cars — they draw more people to the dealership, but not everyone buys them."

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The truth is Apple innovates,RIM invented the smart phone

costs more than a flight from Toronto to Los Angeles. At about 13 times earnings, for a company whose profit has multiplied ninefold over the past four years, Apple is not expensive. And if you adjust the price for the company’s $76-billion (U.S.) cash hoard, the price falls to about 10 times earnings – dirt cheap. At least, statistically speaking.

When you start thinking about it more carefully, however, you can see why the market values the company at only $330-billion (U.S.) or so.

There is, to begin with, the issue of CEO Steve Jobs’s health. But I don’t think that’s as much of a factor as some suggest. Yes, he’s the co-founder and the public face and the acknowledged saviour, but the truth is that he’s surrounded himself with some pretty bright people and seems to delegate well. The company, after all, keeps innovating despite his illness. He’s not the only nerd in the lab.

I think the miserly valuation has more to do with two related points: size and a certain flaw in the business model.

Apple earned $818-million in the third quarter of 2007. Four years later, it announced a profit of $7.31-billion, almost nine times higher. The annualized estimate for earnings is about $26-billion.

To continue compounding profits at that rate would mean coming up with a revolutionary idea (or more than one) that could add billions in earnings to the bottom line. That’s obviously not likely. In fact, just to increase profits by 10 per cent it needs a pretty good idea, once the growth in existing products reaches its natural limit.

Apple is in some ways like Big Pharma – the Pfizers and Mercks of the world – which have gotten so big they can’t consistently grow at above average rates any more.

But I would argue that Apple has another problem. While it consistently amazes consumers with the coolest and most useful computing things, it also has a reliable knack for damaging itself, to a point, every time it comes up with a new gadget.

Apple’s laptop sales grow briskly, but that growth has for years come at the expense of desktops, where sales are growing but obviously not as much as they would have. This is true of every computer maker. More and more people just use portables.

But this cannibalization is happening in other devices too. Apple sold more than 11 million iPods in the third quarter of 2008. It sold only 7.54 million in the third quarter announced yesterday – a drop of 20 per cent over the same period a year ago. In fact, on an annual basis, sales have been falling for a couple of years.
Where did these sales go? To iPhones, largely, but now to iPads as well. You obviously don’t need an iPod Touch if you’re carrying an iPhone around. And by the same token, do you really need one if you’re toting an iPad? Not likely.

But that’s not the only example of redundancy in the lineup. If you use a Mac laptop and buy an iPad, will you buy another laptop when yours has run its useful course? I would guess that many customers won’t. The iPad may be limited in function, but the fact is that most of us only use a fraction of the computing power of a modern laptop. You use it for e-mail, Web browsing, maybe a little word processing, watching shows and music (I’m speaking of consumers mostly, not so much business users). A modern laptop packs a lot more computing power than is required for those functions.

So when some analysts argue that Apple is cheap at 10 times earnings, I’m not sold, and I don’t think you should be either. It needs to create and sell blockbuster gadgets to really move the earnings needle, and it also needs to compensate for the cannibalization of its existing sales. If anyone can do it, you’d think Apple could. But at $330-billion, it’s tough. And furthermore, what will those products be?

The truth is Apple innovates, it doesn’t invent. RIM invented the smart phone. Sony invented the portable music player. Apple just did a better job at making and selling them (so far, anyway – don’t count out RIM just yet).

So if history is any guide, the inventory of potential products is in the marketplace already. Where is this blockbuster product that Apple will latch on to, improve and make billions from? It’s not obvious, at least to me.

 

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smartphones Review: Microsoft thinks it can get that audience with Windows Phone 7

Here's another way Microsoft hopes it can compete in the hyper competitive smartphone race - price.

While today's smartphones are certainly much more affordable than they were just a few years ago, there's still a huge segment of the population that walk into a mobile phone store and want to walk out with a new phone, without a big immediate impact on their wallet.

 

 

So a $250 Verizon Thunderbolt is out of the question. So too are the myriad smartphones priced at what has become the industry standard of $200. But bring that price tag down to $99.99, and then you're talking about a whole new audience.

Microsoft thinks it can get that audience with Windows Phone 7.

As quoted by the company's official press site, Windows Phone division president Andrew Lees said at a recent event, "If you look even at the price of smartphones, a year ago all smartphones cost over $400 when they left their hardware manufacturer. Today, they're down to about $200, and next year, a smartphone that can run something like Windows Phone 7 will actually be down to $100 to $150."

Interestingly, the software giant has previously said it hopes to offer Windows Phone apps that are more expensive than the standard $1-$2 fare found on the iTunes App Store and Android Market.

So perhaps Microsoft wants to pull in consumers with low hardware prices and then lure them into buying more expensive apps - a higher-margin sector where it can rake in more profit.

It also helps that Microsoft's partnership with Nokia will kick in at the end of this year. Nokia has managed to reach huge economies of scale, allowing it to manufacture devices at a more cost-effective rate than most other companies.

And that is key if Microsoft plans to emerge in areas where Nokia still has a dominant presence - in under-developed countries where people use their phones as their only means of electronic communication. If it's possible to overlay Windows Phone 7 in those already-dominated-by-Nokia parts of the world, it could lead to cheaper costs to other markets as well.

Regardless, offering a more affordable smartphone solution is certainly a keen strategy to compete against Android and iOS phones, which may not be so quick to drop in price otherwise, so this may work.

 

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The Biggest Problem with Google, Facebook, and Microsoft

This morning I read an interview with former Googler Douglas Edwards on the Wall Street Journal site about his new book, "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59." Edwards said something about his former employer that hit the bull's-eye about what's wrong with Google (and many other companies).

Google's problem? It's too damned rational.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Bill Snyder on why the feds should investigate Google. | For a humorous take on the tech industry's shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely's Notes from the Underground newsletter and follow Cringely on Twitter. ]

In a response to a question about whether the G-twins Sergey Brin and Larry Page really take privacy seriously or just pay lip service to it, Edwards's reply really struck me:

Google doesn't have enough irrational people working there, and the rest of the world doesn't have enough rational people occupying it. So, Google needs more irrational people, I think, so that they'll better understand how people react to things like targeting ads in Gmail.

In the minds of Sergey and Larry, there was no privacy issue with Gmail because all the messages were scanned by machines, not humans -- case closed, end of story, let's move on to even geekier topics. Only it wasn't:

I talk in the book about this moment I had with Sergey, where I was handling customer service and I said, "We need to talk about the privacy issue around Gmail," and he just stood right in front of me and he looked at me and he said, "There is no privacy issue." Because in his mind, there was no privacy issue. The facts were that Google was not reading email, Google was not targeting email. So the facts said there was no privacy issue. He didn't understand that people's perception was reality. Reality was reality.

This short passage speaks volumes about what always seems to go wrong at big companies like Google (Apple, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Facebook -- take your pick), which I've mentioned a few times before in this space. They live inside their own realities, separate from the rest of ours. They lose all perspective. They become like cults with their own language, culture, and moral precepts; sometimes they even have their own food.

Last week I wrote about Google's painful attempts to explain to mere mortals the complex machinations of how Google+ works. You can tell Google is really trying to make it simple enough for us single-celled irrational non-Googlers to grok. But the Googlers can't do it; they don't know how. Even Google Translate can't make the leap between Googlespeak and human.

Facebook is no better, as anyone who's ever tried to parse its endless online FAQs can verify. If I hear one more Facebooker talk about "the social graph," I may commit seppuku. Do you know anyone who isn't a) a Facebook employee or b) trying to be a social media guru who uses phrases like "the social graph"? Normal humans don't talk like that. But Facebookers do, and that's a problem.

The Googlers couldn't imagine a world where people might want to keep the identities of their most frequently contacted friends private. They don't do that at Googleplex, so why would anyone else want to? Thus, we had the Buzz privacy debacle. Zuckerberg and company think sharing is "the new social norm" because most of the people who work there are in their 20s and have no private lives; why should anyone else want one? Dozens of privacy kerfuffles later, Facebook seems to finally be learning that lesson. (Maybe.)

As for Microsoft, it must put something in the water supply in Redmond that makes everyone believe Windows is the One True and Righteous Way. That's the only rational explanation I can come up with.
What do these companies have in common? They were all founded and run by engineers. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- without engineers we'd all still be living in trees and eating bugs. But in my experience, engineers tend to divide the world into two camps: other engineers and everyone else. And the second camp doesn't matter because they refuse to read instruction manuals.

That's the attitude Google, Facebook, and so on bring to the table. They know that the world is mostly made up of non-engineers, and they have to accommodate them -- but they don't like it very much, and they often don't do a good job of it. That's where these companies fall down.

Steve Jobs, by contrast, is not an engineer. That's a key reason why Apple products are so much more accessible to the irrational bug-eating masses.



One more thing about Googler Edwards, just because it's funny. He also did an interview with Fast Company about his book, where he explains why Google's first (failed) attempt at social networks, Orkut, was wildly popular in Finland when it first launched:

Orkut [the Google engineer who built Orkut] is Turkish, so we had no idea when we launched it that in Finland evidently that same word means "multiple sexual climaxes." When people saw a product called Orkut, they thought it was a dating service or sex site, and it took off quickly. As soon as they saw what it actually was, interest cooled somewhat.

I'm now going to create a social network called MultipleSexualClimaxes.com. If the blog suddenly disappears one day, you'll know it's because I've become insanely rich.
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Android has caught fire with developers and consumers, as the OS

SAN FRANCISCO-Up until six months ago, Rich Miner, a partner in Google's semi-autonomous venture fund, recommended that its software investments develop for Apple's iOS first, he said Tuesday.

Speaking at the MobileBeat conference here, Miner, who co-founded the Android Inc. startup that was later acquired by Google, said that his job at Google Ventures is to make money for Google via investments. Although the fund invests about $100 million annually, it isn't a strategic one - which means that Google Ventures isn't required to pursue the company's objectives, but just to make money.

And that meant promoting the competition.

"Easily toward the end of last year, I was still recommending to most of the companies we were funding in the mobile space that they first focus on iOS for the first launch of their application," Miner said. "There were just that many more handsets out there and a more developed and mature ecosystem. That has clearly flipped."
Since that time, Android has caught fire with developers and consumers, as the OS is now on one of every three U.S. smartphones. At the same time, platforms like RIM have plunged, leaving an opportunity for the new platforms.

Miner later added that he began pushing Android as a development platform within the last six months.
Miner also announced a pair of investments: in Astrid, a to-do task management application, as well as Crittercism, a back-end support platform for startups applications that can accumulate millions of users in days. Crittercism provides a framework and a buffer between the user base reporting bugs, feature requests, and feedback, and the small developer team, he said. He declined to disclose the amount of the investment.
Google Ventures has invested in everything from automotive technologies to green tech to pure Internet technology, Miner said.

One area where Miner encouraged pitches from startups was in enterprise applications for iOS and the Android platform. "I still see a lot of people walking around with RIM phones," he said. "It's a high-end opportunity. Neither Apple nor Google are focused on enterprise as much. He also pointed to lifestyle apps that could be created, knowing when a user entered a restaurant and encouraging him or her to lean toward healthy menu choices.

"The feature phone is to RIM as the smartphone is to... what?" Miner added.

 

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Review Next-gen iPhone – Will it be a “4S” or a “5″?

A mockup of what the iPhone 5 could look like

I received a tweet this week with a question from a person known on twitter as @weskos:

What are your thoughts on whether the (probable) Fall iPhone will be called 4S or 5? Which is more likely, and why?

You raise a very interesting question. 4S or 5? It’s an inquiry that many people are probably asking, and for good reason. There are strong arguments to back either outcome, with supporting rumors and leaks in favor of each.

Personally, I’ve been struggling to know what to call the as-yet-unreleased next-gen iPhone. Some days I go with 4S, and other days I go with 5. And sometimes I simply can’t decide, which is why I’ve referred to the iPhone 4′s big brother as the “iPhone 4S/5″ on more than one occasion. (I suppose you can add the ambiguous “iPhone 4′s big brother” to that list as well).

Though, after I took some time to think it over, I believe I’ve figured out a way to distinguish the two hypothetical devices. It all depends on how much Apple changes the phone from the fourth generation to the fifth.

If the rumors about a thinner, lighter device sporting a larger screen, faster processors and an upgraded camera are true, you can bet that those features will be packed into a nice iPhone 5 box. Though, if the design and screen size are basically the same, it’s safe to assume we will see an iPhone 4S hitting store shelves.

So, I think the real question is not what the device will be called, but whether Apple is going to put out a phone “revolutionary” enough for a new number, or one just good enough for an S added onto the end.
I’m going to offer up my optimistic answer (guess) – we will see an iPhone 5, not a 4S. There are a few reasons why I have come to this conclusion. One of them is, of course, I want a cool new phone, not a repeat of last year’s model. Though, another contributing factor in my decision-making process is iOS 5. It’s clear that in developing the latest version of iOS, Apple really listened to what their customers wanted – WiFi Sync, Notifications Center, iCloud, etc…

It only takes a moment of browsing the web to come across the droves of mockups, spoofs, and rumors about a new, improved iPhone 5 with a bigger screen, slimmer body and better specs. It’s what the customers want, and it’s what I think they’ll get.

Not to mention, it’ll keep the iPhone competitive. There are tons of new smartphones coming out with great specs. If Apple comes out with a 4S… well, let’s face it, they’ll sell a whole hell of a lot. But not as many as if they come out with an iPhone 5. And a 4S will just mean more catching up to do with the next one, and I think we’re all tired of Apple playing catch up.

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HP high-capacity flagship mobile tablet

HP is already planning a new version of its flagship mobile tablet.

The computer manufacturer is working on introducing a high-capacity, 64 GB model, to keep the appeal fresh after launching the 16 GB and 32 GB versions of the device last Friday.

 

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 The 64 GB model will be white, according to Precentral.net, and will also feature a slightly better processor, clocking in at 1.5 GHz compared to the 1. GHz processor that comes with the recently-released tablets.

The very first tablet powered by what is a brand new version of webOS has a lot of ground to cover.

HP, which acquired webOS when it bought out the software's developer Palm, has been slower than a lot of people expected when it comes to making use of that acquisition. It was seen as the perfect opportunity for HP to enter the smartphone market, with which it has very little experience.

But instead, the company has decided to go with a tablet first, smartphones later. For a company that is used to making computers, that makes sense.

But even in the tablet world, just as with smartphones, HP's going to have a very uphill battle. The emerging market is still dominated by the iPad, and when it comes to competitors chipping away at Apple's lead, Android already has plenty.

But webOS is kind of a wild card since no one has any experience with new new HP-optimized version of the mobile platform.

"What makes HP TouchPad a compelling alternative to competing products is webOS. The platform's unmatched features and flexibility will continue to differentiate HP products from the rest of the market for both personal and professional use. This is only the beginning of what HP's scale can do with webOS," HP said in a statement.

The company appears to be planning all sorts of models, with rumors of a smaller 7-inch Touchpad as well as a 4G-capable version circulating the Web as well.

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