Today: Fortune interviews HP CEO and asks about Microsoft relationship, Microsoft says Windows Phone 7 does not store tracking information and Steve Jobs says the issue on iPhone has been misreported, why Google needs mobile, Amazon figures out cloud service outage, Nook gets apps, Wii gets a successor, and Firefox sees 100 million downloads.
Good afternoon.
Fortune has an interesting interview with HP CEO Leo Apotheker, focusing on part on the incongruence of Microsoft’s biggest partner also starting to compete with them in PCs and phones with webOS. “We happen to be the world's largest PC maker and we happen to be the world's largest printer maker,” he said. “And I believe in connectivity not in smartphones; the smartphone is just one use case of connectivity … Customers want choice, which is one of the challenges some of our competition has. People want choice, people are living in the heterogeneous world, and we want to support that, and webOS will support heterogeneity … I can assure you that the relationship between Microsoft and HP is intact and strong.”
Responding to the recent controversy around iPhone/iPad and Android “tracking” users, Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Phone 7 does not store location history. Note the word: It’s not that Windows Phone 7doesn’t track the phone’s location. It’s that it doesn’t store this information. I suspect in the case of Apple’s devices, this is how it was supposed to work there. And that Apple will fix it to be that way. Contrast this with Google’s “do no evil” approach, which is of course to track and store as much as possible.
Speaking of which, Steve Jobs has reportedly told one user that the tracking issue has been misreported (at least in the case of iPhones). “We don't track anyone,” he reportedly wrote. “The info circulating around is false.”
And not coincidentally, The New York Times has a great article about why mobile is so huge for Google: It’s only the second time it’s ever done anything that’s made money.
Amazon says it’s solved the recent outage problem with its cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Barnes & Nobles says its going to add apps to its Nook Color eBook reader. Which makes sense since it’s just a detuned Android tablet.
Nintendo has finally announced some of its plans for its next video game console, the successor to the Wii. Which is to say it’s due in 2012. And it will provide more info in June at E3.
Firefox 4 has had over 100 million downloads, which is impressive. Curiously, this has done nothing to improve Firefox’s overall usage share.
Michael Dell doesn't want to talk about personal computers anymore.