Thurrott Daily: November 4

Here’s what else is happening today.

11/4/2015 11:11:43 AM

Halo 5: Guardians makes $400 million in first week

Well, it’s official: “Halo 5: Guardians” has had the biggest launch of any Halo title yet, with $400 million in revenues in its first week.

One week after launching worldwide, “Halo 5: Guardians” has made history as the biggest Halo launch and fastest-selling Xbox One exclusive game to date, with more than $400 million in global sales of “Halo 5: Guardians” games and hardware, pushing the franchise to over $5 billion lifetime. With the highest week one attach rate for a Microsoft first-party title on Xbox One, the game was the most played of any game on Xbox One, as well as the most played on Xbox Live.

That’s nice. But it’s also ‘s well below some notable launches of the past. “Destiny,” for example, made $500 million in just one day a year ago, and “Call of Duty: Black Ops II” did the same in 2012. “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” earned that same $400 in one day back in 2011.

But you know what? Whatever. Microsoft needs a huge Xbox One e game launch, and with Halo being exclusive to this console, this sales rate is in fact huge.

Meet Loop, the team at Microsoft behind Arrow, changing the way they work to make a big impact

This is an interesting article at Microsoft.com about the group that makes the Arrow app launcher for Android.

In a mail to the company in 2014, Nadella challenged the company to make “Microsoft the best place for smart, curious, ambitious people to do their best work.” For those in Loop, a subset of Team SIX that formed in April, their startup-inspired approach is their answer to this challenge.

The Loop team is small but representative of the cultural shift happening within Microsoft. As Nadella wrote in 2014, “Culture change starts with one individual at a time,” and Ripsher and the rest of the Loop team are betting that by changing their culture, it will lead to a much larger transformation.

Google knifes its biggest partner in the back

As you may realize, Google has a similar relationship with Android-based device makers to Microsoft with PC makers. That is, yes, they get the platform out to the world, but they also saddle these devices with non-sanctioned crap. With Windows, that crap is literally crap, called crapware. With Android devices, it’s crapware, but also, according to Google, security issues. And that leads to some interesting interactions, including this Google report about the security vulnerabilities that Samsung adds to Android with its terrible software.

Recently, Project Zero researched a popular Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. We discovered and reported 11 high-impact security issues as a result.

there are a number of weak points in the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. Over the course of a week, we found a total of 11 issues with a serious security impact. Several issues were found in device drivers and image processing, and there were also some logic issues in the device that were high impact and easy-to-exploit.

The majority of these issues were fixed on the device we tested via an OTA update within 90 days, though three lower-severity issues remain unfixed. It is promising that the highest severity issues were fixed and updated on-device in a reasonable time frame.

And you thought Windows had issues. Speaking of which…

Now Samsung is failing at smart phones because of the Innovator’s Dilemma

Citing a Bloomberg article about Samsung’s quarterly results, Recode says that Samsung is suffering from a problem that we saw in the PC market too:

Premium smartphone sales are falling off a cliff … There is absolutely nothing [Samsung] can do to fix the downturn in its premium handsets. No amount of innovation will save them, because the “good enough” mindset has settled into Android land.

Interestingly, this condition has not hit Apple in both the PC and smart phone markets. I have no explanation for that, but Recode does:

It is a rare occasion where the the Innovator’s Dilemma theory did not hold to the entire category of players, but only to those who were modular. Apple is immune to disruption for the primary reason that it is not modular. If Apple ran Android, or if Apple licensed iOS to other partners, then all the dynamics mentioned above would apply to it, and the company would not be able to sell in volume iPhones costing over a certain price.

That’s interesting. And it of course explains why Microsoft now makes both phones and PCs too.

But Recode’s Ben Bajarin really hits the drama pay dirt with this line:

I’ll make a prediction. Samsung will be out of the smartphone business within five years.

Very interesting reading.