Nintendo Dominates ’08 in Sales Figure Shocker

I can be sarcastic in a headline, right? No matter, retail research firm NPD released last year’s video game sales data today, revealing–of course–that Nintendo’s Wii console and DS handheld were the big winners.

Perhaps there’s some surprise in knowing the DS was the most popular last-minute holiday item, selling 3.04 million units to the Wii’s 2.15 million units in December. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 came in second place, selling 1.44 million consoles last month. Sony’s PSP handheld sold 1.02 million units in December, besting the Playstation 3′s 726,000 units.

Overall, sales of video games, consoles and related products in 2008 rose 19 percent from the year before. I was going to break out the calculator, do some research, and compile a list of total 2008 console sales, but realized the kind folks at Video Game Sales Wiki already took care of that, so here are the numbers:

Wii: 10,151,000

Nintendo DS: 9,951,100

Xbox 360: 4,735,400

PSP: 3,829,600

Playstation 3: 3,544,900

With everything laid out like this, the 1.2 million unit difference between the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 isn’t so bad, especially when you consider how handily the Wii stomped both of them.

As for games, Wii Play and its bundled Wii Remote was the top seller of 2008 — you’d know this by standing in a GameStop and seeing the employees pitch it to everyone buying a console — with Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit taking silver and bronze respectively. Careful, though, because NPD’s counts the same game separately when released for more than one console. Add Grand Theft Auto IV’s PS3 and Xbox 360 sales together, and it’s actually in second place overall.

NPD Analyst Anita Frazier noted that most of the best-sellers were released long before the holiday season. “Get some high profile releases out in the first and second quarters,” she suggested. Some publishers are taking this advice to heart, with big name titles like Lord of the Rings: Conquest and Halo Wars being saved for the first quarter of 2009.

Frazier also noted that as the economy melted in the fourth quarter, people kept buying games. Add that to the list of unsurprising revelations of 2008.

Apple’s Likely Strategy: What Would Steve Do?

(Steve Jobs unveils “one more thing”–the MacBook Air–at Macworld Expo San Francisco 2008, his final Macworld keynote to date. This was one of dozens of photos I took at the event, and I never dug it out until now–that’s the classic Jobs smile for sure…)

First, a disclaimer, just in case you weren’t sure: I’m not Steve Jobs’s doctor. And I believe that all of us who aren’t responsible for his medical well-being are in no position to have an informed opinion about it–and that to deal in rumor on the topic is just plain rude. (Even the most famous CEO on the planet is entitled to some privacy.) So I’m not going to make any guesses about the present or future of the man’s health. Or say much of anything about it other than that I wish him a full and speedy recovery from the issues that so many people have speculated about in such detail based on so little hard information.

But with Jobs’ announcement yesterday that he plans to go on medical leave until the end of June, one thing is fact, not conjecture: Assuming that Jobs’ leave of absence is no shorter or longer than he expects it to be, Apple will spend slightly under half a year without the day-to-day involvement of its cofounder and CEO. That would be a major deal for any company. For an organization as symbiotic with its leader as this one, it’s extraordinary. (When Bill Gates announced he was abandoning day-to-day involvement in running Microsoft, not for half a year but forever, it was major news; nobody, however, questioned Microsoft’s viability or even expected it to be a very different place without him.)

So what impact will Steve’s temporary removal from his company have on it? His two past extended absences from Apple over the past 33 years can’t tell us too much about the next six months. The one that began in 1985 with his unwilling exodus and lasted until Apple acquired his NeXT startup in 1996 was far too long and traumatic to be comparable, and the one forced by his cancer surgery in 2004 was too short. (That second time, Jobs spent only a month out of commission and a month working part-time before returning to full duty.)

Continue reading this story…

Social Networks: Not Just for Kids Anymore

A study released Wednesday (PDF) by Pew Internet shows social networking adoption among adults is growing at a substantial rate, although the under-18 crowd still makes up two out of every three users. 35 percent of adults are now thought to have social network profiles, up from just 8 percent in 2005.

The figures may be a bit misleading though. Even among the adult population, there is a large disparity. While three out of four 18-24 year olds have a profile, only 7 percent of those over 65 do.

Like kids, adults are using social networks for personal use more than business use. However, some seperate their personal and business profiles over several networks, the report indicates.

Half have profiles on MySpace, and 22 percent on Facebook. Professional networking site LinkedIn is used by 6 percent.

A Map to the Stars’ Tweets

Beloved sitcom stars. Sports legends. A meaningful percentage of the crew of the Starship Enterprise. The next president of the United States. They’ve all been known to spend time shooting the breeze on Twitter–okay, some more than others–and you can spend quality time with them.

View Tweetstars slideshow

Tweetstars: A Guide to Celebrities on Twitter

It’s rude to buttonhole a famous person in public and demand chit-chat from him or her. It’s also arguably gauche to friend one on Facebook unless he or she is, in fact, your friend. But famous people on Twitter? They’re there to be followed, and if you send an @reply their way, they just might respond. Here’s a decidedly incomplete look at noted personages from outside the tech world who tweet; feel free to follow any or all of ‘em–some have tens of thousands of Twitterpals already, but a few could probably use the companionship. (Hey, I know I could: I’m @harrymccracken.)

Disclaimer: I think these are all the real accounts of the folks in common, but I’ve never laid eyes on any of them at the keyboard…

Google Feels the Squeeze, Shuts Down Services

Google is so fabulously successful, and invests its vast resources in new projects so energetically, that it was tempting to assume it could cheerfully ignore the state of the U.S. economy. Well, no. In a series of blog posts tonight, the company announced a series of cutbacks to services it operates. Taken individually, they’re not a huge whoop, but it’s startling to see them all come down at once.

Here’s the damage:

Dodgeball, a Twitter-like service that Google bought in 2005 before there was a Twitter, will fold;

Google Catalog Search, which put the contents of printed catalogs–hey, they still exist?–online, is going bye-bye;

Google Mashup Editor, which is still in private beta, won’t ever emerge from it--the more powerful Google App Engine will supplant it;

Google Notebook, a service which Google once promoted pretty heavily, will cease development, thereby continuing to exist for current users in a sort of suspended animation;

Google Video will stop accepting new uploads, thereby becoming a pure video search engine (which makes perfect sense given that Google owns YouTube, the mother of all video upload services);

Jaiku, yet another Twitter-like service acquired by Google, is being ported to Google’s App Engine platform, whereupon it will depend on volunteer developers for further evolution.

No word on how many Googlers are affected by this downscaling of ambition, but two Google Blog posts report that the company is laying off a hundred recruiters and eliminating engineering jobs in Texas, Norway, and Sweden (while hoping to retain the engineers in those positions).

Naturally, some folks are wondering if additional Google shoes are soon to drop–like, say, the discontinuation of its GrandCentral phone service. (I sure hope not–I’m using it and finding it valuable, and GrandCentral, back when it was signing up new users, did so on the premise that it was offering them a phone number “for life.”)

All this news is sad for anyone who liked the services in question, and sadder still for the Google employees who worked on them. But the cuts sound logical: They affect offerings that were redundant, irrelevant, and/or not very successful. And I don’t think I’m being entirely Pollyannish to think that it’s a smart, healthy move to Google to give up on some efforts that are unlikely to be hugely popular in order to focus on those that are already hits or have the potential to become ones.

I’d sure rather have a Google that does somewhat fewer things and does them as well as possible, anyhow…

Apple Strongarms Wired to Remove Hackintosh Video

Apple has a history of hypersensitivity toward the media. It once sued Think Secret, a now defunct Apple rumor Web site, because Think Secret published information about upcoming hardware and software products (for the record, that hardly counted as trade secrets). Now, Apple’s lawyers have sent Wired a cease and desist order for posting a video tutorial on hacking netbooks to run Mac OS X. In response, Wired has pulled the video.

I’m all for the freedom to tinker, and my first inclination was to think  “Apple’s off attacking the press again.” However, after watching the Wired video–which is still available at Gizmodo as I write this–I have to take Apple’s side on this one, for one specific reason. The video tells viewers, in detail, where they can download illegal copies of OS X (while recommending that they purchase OS X legally) to be installed on non-Apple netbooks. The piracy advice was a big no-no; otherwise, it was a very interesting video.

If a journalist published the source code to Mac OS X, that would be a clear violation of trade secrets. Fiddling with hardware? Not so much. Apple has the right to void warranties, and to sue clone makers that violate its software license agreements and profit from it, but stopping the press from reporting on geeky projects is a bridge too far.

I’d like to see the video re-posted with the piracy bit removed, and would hope that Apple would then back off.

Steve Jobs to Take Medical Leave Until June

Just breaking now: Steve Jobs is going on medical leave from Apple until June. In a letter to Apple employees, he wrote the following:

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

Apple COO Tim Cook will take charge of day-to-day affairs until Jobs’ return. This development comes a little over a week after Jobs published a public letter saying that his widely-reported-on weight loss was due to a hormone imbalance that had recently been diagnosed, and which would take him a few months to recover from.

I still don’t like writing about anyone’s personal health–especially in the absence of much in the way of facts. So I can’t think of much to say right now except that I hope Jobs recuperates quickly and completely, and that his company does okay in his absence. And I’d feel good if this latest news doesn’t set off a new flurry of rumor-mongering–although I’m not Pollyannish enough to believe that it won’t.

Opera on the iPhone? Maybe. Someday.

Some of the reports today on Apple’s approval of new browser-related iPhone apps make it sound like the company has opened the floodgates for Safari rivals to make their way onto iPhones. Not true–the new apps all use Safari’s WebKit rendering engine and are therefore piggybacking on Safari rather than trying to replace it. But I happened to have a meeting scheduled today with Christen Krogh, Chief Development Officer at Norway-based browser company Opera, which has talked in the past of the possibility of releasing a real Safari alternative for the iPhone. And so I asked him the obvious: Does today’s new affect the company’s interest in the iPhone?

“We’re absolutely positive we could produce a fantastic version of Opera for any platform, including the iPhone,” Krogh told me. But he said that the company would have to have a compelling reason for doing so–it wouldn’t do so just to prove it could. So I asked him if it did have any compelling reason to want to be on the iPhone. “Right now, it doesn’t matter,” he said, since it still appears that Apple wouldn’t allow a competitive browser into its App Store.

So there you go: We seem to be in a vicious circle in which it’s pointless for Opera (or other companies like Mozilla) to invest any attention or effort in iPhone versions until it’s clear that Apple will permit them to distribute their browsers. And even if Apple does decide to loosen up, it probably won’t release a press release trumpeting that fact.

One way or another, I’d love to see multiple browsers on the iPhone. We know what it’s like when a browser has no viable competition–you get the calcification of Internet Explorer that happened from the late 1990s until Firefox showed up and started the browser wars anew.

Windows 7 Beta Gets its First Patch

It wouldn’t be a Microsoft product without it! Users of Windows 7 Beta who may have not downloaded a patch for an MP3 corruption issue that was available shortly after the products public release are now getting it via Automatic Update. The issue would permanently alter an MP3 file played through Windows 7: the first few seconds of the audio would disappear. However, this would only occur if a user edited the MP3 files metadata, so it didn’t affect a lot of users. Nonetheless, the patch is out (see this Knowledge base article), so the problem should be fixed. Other problems are addressed in this patch, mainly dealing with multimedia issues.

Blockbuster to Offer Movie Downloads

The movie retailer has teamed up with Sonic Solutions to begin offering a sale and rental download program for consumers. Approximately 10,000 movies would be available through the service, and the company is mulling a subscription based plan in the future according to reports.

Blockbuster was locked in a tit-for-tat with Netflix over online movie rentals for quite awhile, before eventually acquiescing due to financial difficulties. However, it has shown life once again and has begun to play on Netflix’s turf.

This follows another announcement from Blockbuster called the MediaPoint player, which was essentially its response to Netflix’s Roku. Of course, its rival is still further ahead in digital distribution, having deals to place its movies on TiVos, Microsoft’s Xbox 360s, and select Blu-ray players.

Blockbuster isn’t planning to be behind for long, also aiming to get its content on consumer electronic devices real soon. No word on pricing or availability yet, though.

Slacker’s iPhone Music App Gives Pandora a Run For Its Money

Slacker, the nifty personalized online radio service that’s available on the Web and on a dedicated portable player, is making its way onto phones. Last week at CES, the company released a version that runs on most modern BlackBerry phones, and today brought an iPhone edition. I haven’t tried the BlackBerry one yet, but the iPhone one is good. Good enough that it’s lured me from Pandora, everyone’s favorite iPhone music service, for the moment, at least.

Continue reading this story…

Apple Lets Alternative Browsers Onto the iPhone. Sort of!

The single worst thing about Apple’s capricious iPhone App Store policies has probably been the fact that it’s rejected some applications on the grounds that they compete with Apple’s own offerings–including third-party browsers. Now the company is approving some alternative browsers, including Edge Browser (a browser without space-hogging navigation bars), Incognito (private browsing), Shaking Web (which compensates for shaky hands by adjusting the display), and WebMate:Tabbed Browser (which queues up links in new tabs). The one thing all these apps have in common is that they’re really reskinned versions of Safari, Apple’s own browser. I suspect that it’ll be a long time until Apple allows Firefox or Opera or any other true Safari rival onto the iPhone; I’d love to be proven wrong, though…

Microsoft Office 14 Makes Its Way to the Market

Over at ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley is reporting that Microsoft has begun to hand out an alpha version of Microsoft Office 14 to a few testers. We still don’t know much about the upcoming upgrade, which should ship either late this year or sometime in 2010, other than that it will be accompanied by Microsoft’s first full-blown Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Oh, and Mary Jo says there will be a new version of the suite: Office for Sales. 

Office 14 will be the first update to the suite since the radical interface makeover it got for Office 2007; I’ll be intrigued to see whether Microsoft leaves the new look and feel pretty much as is, or reworks it further. It’s certainly got both huge fans and recalcitrant naysayers…

Microsoft Security Vulnerabilities Pose Worm Threat

Vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing protocol could pose a serious threat to enterprise networks if companies fail to promptly patch their systems, according to reports. Microsoft has released fixes for the holes.

For Microsoft, the days when worms like Blaster and Sasser regularly blackened its eye have passed; the number of major operating system vulnerabilities fell dramatically after it weaved security into its development life cycle. However, two out of the three SMB vulnerabilities that the company disclosed today are critical enough that virus writers could exploit them in a similar fashion.

I don’t expect anything on the scale of Blaster or Sasser to happen even though un-patched enterprise systems will be easy targets. Microsoft has better security procedures in place, and will get the word out to network administrators. Most home users will be using firewall and have anti virus protection; the average user should be well protected.

These defects do not mean that Microsoft is returning to the bad old days of Windows security. It has made a big investment in its security development life cycle, and has top down approval from upper management. In fact, Microsoft invests more into security than most software makers, has a comprehensive patch process, and has firm plans for how future operating systems should handle security.

Microsoft’s problem is all of the legacy code and protocols that it must continue to support – they weigh like an anchor around its neck. While Microsoft introduced the affected protocol SMB 2.0 in 2006, SMB itself dates back circa the early 1990s. It would not at all surprise me if these vulnerabilities have something to do with legacy support (it’s too late in the evening to expect a response from Microsoft).

We attempted to reach several security experts for analysis, but did not receive a response before press time. I will update this story should any contribute their ideas this evening.

Here We Go Again – MicroHoo Search Deal Close?

Harry earlier today passed along the news that former Autodesk chief Carol Bartz is the new CEO of Yahoo. So how long did you think it would take before somebody revives the MicroHoo talk? Apparently about two hours.

Our good friend and colleague Kara Swisher over at AllThingsDigital is reporting that sources withing Microsoft are telling her that a search partnership is very close to being done. In fact, the proposal is all ready to go: all that needs to be done is the presentation to the Yahoo board.

Current talk pegs the signing as soon as January 27, which would be the company’s earnings announcement. What better way to boost your stock price than brag about a new CEO, hopefully decent earnings, and the completion of a deal that your investors have been asking for over a year?

It would also make a good first showing for the new CEO. She’d start out on the right foot and show that she’s in tune with the problems plaguing the beleagured search company.

Let the next round of speculation begin…