Here’s an unexpected Independence Day gift for Apple.

Axel Springer AG, one of Europe’s largest newspaper publishers, with 10,000 employees and more than 150 papers in 30 countries, including its flagship Die Welt, announced on Friday that it is switching its entire operation from PCs to Macs.

In a YouTube video, posted below the fold, CEO Mathias Döpfner lists four reasons for the change:

• Most of the company’s layout work was already being done on Macs
• Macs are more user friendly than other computers
• Apple creates the most elegant computers
• Macs are cheaper to buy and easier to maintain than they were in the past

The changeover will take five years and when complete, according to Döpfner, will make Axel Springer (SPR.F) Apple’s (AAPL) second largest corporate customer, after Google (GOOG).

Via Heise Online.

This one is for Bill Gates.

He was 27 when I first met him. It was 1983 and he was in New York hustling a new laptop (the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100) that came with Microsoft software in ROM. I remember him rocking back and forth, as if to contain his impatience, when asked if there was an UNDO key.

In those days, before Microsoft became a software colossus, he or Steve Ballmer would stop by my office every once in a while to talk about their plans for the company. Later I would see another side of him through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But the Bill Gates I remember best is the one I spent two uncomfortable hours with in 1995, in the early days of his antitrust problems. We were in his Redmond office with Dave Jackson, then Time Magazine’s San Francisco bureau chief, conducting what was supposed to be the final interview for a Time cover story (Master of the Universe).

It was not going well. And it reached a low point when, in my memory, the chairman of Microsoft called me a communist. Later, reading the transcript, I realized he didn’t really say that — although he was pretty feisty. To my editors’ credit, they printed the juiciest parts of the interview — including a brief mention of Apple (AAPL) — as a sidebar to the cover.

In honor of Gates’ last days at Microsoft (MSFT), it’s pasted below:

INTERVIEW
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt, David S. Jackson
[Redmond, Wash., June 5, 1995]

Bill Gates displayed his well-known combativeness last month when TIME questioned him about Microsoft’s controversial business practices. These are excerpts from a two-hour interview with TIME technology editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt and San Francisco bureau chief David S. Jackson

TIME: Are you betting the company on Windows 95?

Gates: I don’t know what “bet the company” means. We’re a company with $4 billion in the bank. I don’t think we’ll disappear. We’re not like Time Warner, with $15 billion in debt. But if you had to take one thing in the next year and say what will our biggest impact on the PC industry be, it would clearly be Windows 95. Windows 95 is a very, very big deal.

TIME: Have you won over all the easy computer customers? Is it going to be harder now to convert the nonusers?

Gates: Well, 20 years ago, when we started, we talked about a computer on every desk and in every home. Now, if you take that to its extreme and say 100% of the people, clearly we’ll never get there. There’ll always be some people who choose not to participate, just like some people don’t use the phone or watch TV.

I see it as a continuum. That is, as more multimedia titles come out, as more information is online, as we make these things easier to use, we start to draw in more and more people. Now, once you get in for one application, the hurdle to learn a second one is fairly low. My dad wanted to do his taxes automatically. Then I got him doing word processing and now electronic mail because everybody in our family is connected.

TIME: Do you spend much time on the Internet?

Gates: Well, I spend a few hours a week just seeing the new stuff that’s out there. If you count E-mail, I’m on the Internet all day, every day.

TIME: We’d like to ask you about some of the charges that have come out in court.

Gates: This is old, old stuff.

TIME: We’d like to have it on the record, if you wouldn’t mind.

Gates: Are you, like, a historical publication or a newsmagazine?

TIME: Just last January, according to Apple, you threatened to stop developing for the Macintosh. Is this true?

Gates: We at no time, in any way, have ever threatened to stop developing for the Macintosh. I don’t even understand what it would mean. It’s the most bizarre thing in the world. What would we get out of that? It’s a big revenue source. It’s a profitable business.

TIME: Borland [another Microsoft competitor] charges that you used vaporware [the preannouncement of a nonexistent product] to screw up the development of Turbo BASIC. Which you did, right?

Gates: No! If you’re accusing me of competition, then yes. You have to decide. Are we optimized to help competitors, or are we optimized to help customers? Should we be open about our plans?

Do you understand what is being said here? The question is, are you allowed to tell people what your products are in advance?

TIME: Isn’t the point that if you’re a small player and you pre-announce a product, it has no effect, but that when a large player preannounces, it can freeze out the competition?

Gates: I’d say that’s pretty nonsensical. Let’s say you take a market, like the cigarette market, and you ban advertising. Who benefits?

TIME: The manufacturer with the largest installed base.

Gates: Installed market share, totally. So let’s have an absolute ban. You may never talk about new products in advance. But people do talk about their plans. You know, it’s this damn free-speech thing. It’s well established that communications is valuable for the efficiency of marketplaces. That’s all procompetitive stuff. This assumes that you like capitalism.

TIME: We don’t live under free, unfettered capitalism. Isn’t that why we have antitrust laws?

Gates: When did antitrust come up in the discussion? Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

TIME: I guess in Judge [Stanley] Sporkin’s mind it does. He’s saying vaporware is an issue.

Gates: You have to laugh. I mean, this is a judge who goes off and intentionally reads a book [a biography critical of Gates called Hard Drive] in advance and asks about some of it. It’s minor. I mean, you’re either here to talk to me about Microsoft or talk to me about that stuff. This lawsuit has nothing to do with Microsoft. Nothing.

TIME: Are we supposed to ignore the fact that there is a complaint that has Microsoft’s name on it?

Gates: There are probably 60 cases with Microsoft’s name on them. There will be at all times. Period.

TIME: Have you given much thought to succession?

Gates: I have a will written that, you know, talks about how the company should be run and who should vote my shares. There’s nobody designated as my successor.

TIME: How long do you plan to run Microsoft?

Gates: Well, I’m 39, and my response to that question has always been that for the next decade I plan on playing pretty much the role I am today.

TIME: You always answer one decade?

Gates: Yeah, that’s as far ahead as I can see.

It’s hard to tell what is more surprising about Radar’s latest Fame-O-Meter results: that Steve Jobs has only now passed Bill Gates in the magazine’s “buzz index,” or that Radar thinks Rupert Murdoch is a “Web 2.0 figure.”

The Fame-O-Meter, according to the magazine’s website, is an “absurdly scientific real-time” measure of the “notoriety and cultural relevance” of public figures based on the number of times they appear in news publications, newswires, blogs and other sources combined with data from such aggregators as Google, Technorati and Yahoo.

“With last week’s announcement of the new iPhone, more gadget geeks than ever have been clicking for Steve Jobs,” writes Hailey Eber, who runs the meter. “Adding to Jobs’ online intrigue is concern over his health.” (link)

Apple’s (AAPL) CEO is still running behind Gates in the magazine’s monthly and weekly buzz indices, but he passed Microsoft’s (MSFT) outgoing chairman in the daily reports over the weekend and by Monday was pulling away, with 83 million hits to Gates’ 70 million. Jobs is comfortably ahead of News Corp.’s (NWS) Murdoch and Google’s (GOOG) Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Radar, originally founded in 2003 and relaunched twice since then, was nominated in May for general excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

It’s classic Microsoft.

On Thursday, two business days before Apple’s (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference, Redmond sent a shot across Cupertino’s bow with a letter to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile partners — with copies to the press.

It’s already been noted that the letter quietly moves Microsoft’s goal post — from its 2008 target of “more than 20 million Windows Mobile licenses” in February to “nearly 20 million” today. (see here)

But what struck me was how relentlessly the document tries to slip the shiv between Steve Jobs’ ribs. It contains only one direct reference to the iPhone, a 3G version of which is expected Monday and will likely set off a flood of headlines as new applications roll out and Apple’s deals with international carriers kick in. Clearly Microsoft is trying to get its jabs in while it can — and, in the process, has set what may be a modern record for passive-aggressive disses per graph. I count 36 in all, but I may have missed a few.

Judge for yourself. I’ve pasted a copy of the letter, with numbers and bold emphasis added, below:

- - - - -

Letter from Andy Lees

To Our Windows Mobile Partners:

Earlier this year, I joined an amazing group of people and partners like you who work every day towards a vision of putting a ‘smartphone in every pocket.’ To reach this vision, together we’ve created an (1) open platform that provides freedom — the (2) freedom for people across the globe to get the type of handset they want (3) on the network they want, the (4) flexibility for our hardware and mobile operator partners to build on the platform, and the (5) opportunity for developers to create applications on our platform for virtually any need.

It’s now my honor and privilege to announce a milestone that our partnership has accomplished. This fiscal year we will sell (6) nearly 20 million Windows Mobile smartphone licenses, making Windows Mobile one of the most widely used smartphone software platforms in the world. We also sold more in the previous four quarters than RIM, and (7) in the last quarter our year-over-year unit growth alone was greater than sales of Apple’s iPhone.

To our (8) 50 handset makers building phones with our software, thank you. With your help, we give Windows Mobile customers (9) nearly 150 different phone choices — from phones with (10) full keyboards to brilliant touch screens to (11) convenient flip phones — with (12) rich email, picture and music experiences. You’ve delivered Windows Mobile phones with features like (13) GPS, (14) 3+ megapixel cameras, and (15) voice activation — features that (16) other operating systems have been slow to deliver.

To our (17) 160 mobile operator partners around the world providing voice and data service for our mutual customers, thank you. Because of you, Windows Mobile customers can send (18) instant messages to their families or (19) update their calendars in countries from (20) Brazil to (21) Belgium, (22) India to (23) Italy. We’re proud that we’ve been able to work with you to deliver more than (24) 40 different phones that run at 3G speeds, at (25) prices that meet a range of customer needs — something (26) not all smartphones can claim. We believe the power of smartphones should not be constrained by (27) price, (28) geography, or any (29) other boundary.

To all our developer partners who continue to innovate and bring new experiences to people and businesses every day, thank you. It is because of you that our Windows Mobile customers have the (30) richest application catalog to choose from — (31) over 18,000 applications to help pursue their hobbies, navigate life and work more efficiently. We’re happy to offer some of these applications through the Windows Mobile Owners Circle and provide you the (32) flexibility to deliver them to your customers in whatever way makes sense.

Today, more and more (33) competitors are jumping into the smartphone market or announcing (34) upgrades, with (35) features we delivered to customers years ago. Overall, we all benefit from the increased attention on everything that a smartphone can do and the difference it can make in people’s lives. But ultimately, it is your commitment to Windows Mobile that’s helped shape our success. Our shared desire to help people do more with their phone (36) the way they choose, and our ongoing focus to deliver experiences that delight our mutual customers forms the foundation of our continued success together.

I look forward to continuing this adventure with you.

Andy Lees
Sr. Vice President
Mobile Communications Business
Microsoft Corporation

- - -

As the Fake Steve Jobs puts it, quoting the Fake Katie Cotton, “this kind of stuff just makes the Borg look desperate.”

After drifting inexplicably in February, March and April — actually losing market share in two out of three months just when Macintosh sales seemed to be on fire — Mac OS X recovered smartly in the Net Applications survey issued overnight Sunday.

Apple’s (AAPL) share of the operating system market grew 5.69% in May to hit a record 7.80%, while Windows in all its flavors dropped half a point to 91.17%. That’s a record low for Microsoft (MSFT), which nonetheless still runs on 9 out of 10 computers on the Internet, as Net Applications measures it (more on its methodology below).

The iPhone’s OS market share, whch Net Applications measures separately from OS X, has temporarily leveled off, according to the report, reflecting the shortage of product as Apple cleared inventory in May and customers held off purchases in anticipation of the new 3G model. In an IDC report issued Friday, the iPhone actually lost share in the smartphone market, falling from 26.7% in the last quarter of 2007 to 19.2% in the first quarter of 2008. RIM (RIMM), meanwhile, gained share in the same period, growing from 35.1% to 44.5% on the strength of new, consumer-oriented BlackBerries. (see here)

The discrepancy between IDC’s and NetApplication’s numbers can be explained to some extent by the nature of the two surveys. IDC’s quarterly reports are sales counts, based on surveys of retail outlets. Net Applications, by contrast, collects data from the browsers of visitors — some 160 million per month — to its customers websites. As such, its findings are probably better described as a snapshot of installed base taken from a less-than-random sample. But the results are useful for indicating trends, and tend to correspond well to domestic market share as measured by more traditional methods.

To see Net Application’s June 1 report, click here. The results are summarized in the table below:

Subscribers: to see the chart, click here.

“Developers,” a VP at Electronic Arts once told me, explaining why there were so many me-too Windows applications, “will walk through the desert in their socks to get to an installed base.”

True enough. But it doesn’t quite explain the results of a survey issued last week by Evans Data Corp. The headline was that most developers are still not targeting Windows Vista when they write new apps. Only 8% of the 380 developers surveyed were writing for Vista; 49% were still targeting Windows XP.

That makes sense, given that XP still enjoys a 73% market share, compared with less than 15% for Vista, according the latest NetApplications report (link).

What is harder to justify, using the desert-and-socks rule, is the sharply increased interest in non-Windows platforms. The press release didn’t mention it, but Evans Data CEO John Andrews did in an interview with Computerworld’s Heather Havenstein:

“Open source alternatives like Linux continue to take on interest,” he [said]. “As well, MacOS is also acquiring significant interest among North American developers. Although unlikely to displace Windows volume, MacOS experienced 50 percent growth as a primary development platform and 380 percent growth as a targeted platform during the period.” (link)

We’ve asked Evans Data to clarify this quote, because in this form it’s not particularly helpful. The 380% figure sounds suspiciously like a misquote, given that the size of the survey group was also 380. And that 50% increase is unanchored; it could mean 1 more developer writing for Mac or 100.

But any increase in Mac and Linux development is surprising — and encouraging — given that Microsoft (MSFT) still owns more than 91% of desktops, Apple’s (AAPL) OS runs on 7.38% and Linux still hasn’t cracked the 1% mark.

Could programmers be developing an interest in something beyond the size of the installed base?

Apple has no numbers to compare with the 140 million copies of Vista that Bill Gates says Microsoft (MSFT) has sold since the latest version of Windows started shipping in late 2006. (link)

Literally, no numbers. The last time Apple (AAPL) released a Leopard sales figure was Oct. 30, 2007, when the company said that it had sold more than 2 million copies of Leopard in one long weekend (see here). Apple reported $170 million revenue from Leopard sales in the December ‘07 quarter, but that represents fewer than 1.3 million copies. Apple also sold 2.32 million Macs that quarter, more than 2/3 of which probably had Leopard pre-installed.

Even so, the two operating systems aren’t even playing in the same ballpark when it comes to raw sales.

Of course, Vista was greeted with brickbats and Leopard with raves, but Gates didn’t dwell on that in Tokyo Wednesday, where he gave his Japanese partners an update on how Vista is doing. “That’s a very rapid sales rate,” he said.

Not necessarily.

“The most significant number,” says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, “is Apple’s upgrade penetration vs. Microsoft’s. Apple estimated that about 19% of the OS X user base was on Leopard by the end of its launch quarter. By my math, Vista is used by about 12%-14% of the Windows user base more than a year after its retail launch.”

Michael Mace at Rubicon Consulting, a small research firm based in Los Gatos, Calif., has done anybody interested in the iPhone two favors: 1) He published a first-rate piece of research on the impact of the device on its owners and Apple’s (AAPL) competitors, and 2) He has made his results easily — and freely — available on the Web.

The key findings — based on interviews with 460 randomly selected iPhone users in the United States — are summarized in a dozen Quick Facts and ten Implications, both available here. Some of the bullet points:

• iPhone owners tend to be young and well heeled; 15% are students
• 75% were already Apple customers; getting beyond the early adopters could be a challenge
• 28% say they use the iPhone to replace a notebook computer
• AT&T (T) is doing well by the deal — to the tune of $2 billion extra revenue a year

The full 35-page white paper — with color charts — can be downloaded as a PDF from the same Rubicon site. It’s easy reading and worth your time.

For those of you who don’t make it all the way to the white paper, three charts struck me as particularly useful.

The first is a bar chart showing what people do with their iPhones — daily, occasionally or never. Checking e-mail jumps out as the No. 1 thing most do every day, but it’s interesting how many fewer actually compose e-mail on the device. And it’s also interesting to see what most iPhone users never or rarely do with the device — like buy music, watch videos or read maps.

One function we wish had been included in the first chart — use the iPhone to make and receive phone calls — is explored in the pie chart below. It turns out, one out of three iPhone owners carry around two phones. The RIM (RIMM) BlackBerry is the most popular second phone — used by nearly one in ten iPhone owners. Mace speculates that that will probably change when the iPhone gets Exchange support. But we wonder how many iPhone owners keep a simple, cheap cell phone with them either because they’re running out their contract with their original carrier or because it just works better as a phone.

The third chart is the one that shows whose ox got gored when Apple entered the smartphone market. The big loser was Motorola (MOT); nearly a quarter of iPhone owners traded up from a Razr. Another big slice comes from RIM, but Mace believes that it’s Microsoft (MSFT) — squeezed between Apple and (GOOG) — that faces the biggest challenge down the road. More on that below the chart.

Here’s why Mace believes Microsoft faces “severe challenges” in the smartphone market:

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile is sandwiched between two big competitors, Google and Apple. Apple is crafting hardware-software systems that deliver a great user experience, while Google is giving away an operating system to the very companies that license Windows Mobile today. It’s possible for Microsoft to try to compete on both fronts, but creating a proprietary device and at the same time selling an operating system to others is extraordinarily difficult (Palm tried to do it and ended up splitting the company in two).

We think Microsoft should probably decide whether it wants to compete in devices (in which case it will need to create its own phones, as it did for music players with the Zune) or compete in operating systems (in which case it will probably have to give away Windows Mobile for free).

Both alternatives are very high-risk, and require business models that are outside Microsoft’s core competencies. The company’s recent purchase of Danger, which designed the TMobile Sidekick, may indicate that it intends to go the device route. (link)

What does Microsoft see in Adobe Flash that Apple doesn’t?

Two weeks after Steve Jobs signaled that Apple (AAPL) would not be building Flash support into the iPhone, Microsoft (MSFT) on Monday took the opposite stance — signing a licensing agreement with Adobe (ADBE) for both Flash Lite and Reader LE in its competing Windows Mobile platform. (link)

This despite the fact that Microsoft is working on a product — Silverlight for Mobile — that is expected to compete directly with Flash Lite.

What’s going on here?

First a bit of background. Flash (short for FutureSplash, one of its early incarnations) is a set of multimedia technologies widely used by advertisers, game companies and Web developers to integrate video and other rich media into Web pages. Flash Lite is a subset of Flash used to deliver multimedia content on many Internet-ready cellphones, but not the iPhone.

Asked at the March 4 shareholders meeting when Apple planned to bring Flash to its mobile Web browsers, Jobs said that the PC version of Flash “performs too slow to be useful,” and that Flash Lite “is not capable of being used with the Web.” (see here and here and here)

That’s not quite right. Adobe points out that there are more than 500 million Flash-equipped mobile handsets shipped worldwide, a number that it expects to grow to 1 billion by 2010. (link)

But not if Jobs can help it.

What does he really have against Flash? According to Daniel Eran Dilger at Roughly Drafted Magazine, it has less to do with performance and everything to do with proprietary standards.

Flash video is encoded using a proprietary codec licensed from On2 and served on the web via a Flash-based controller. … By pushing alternatives to Flash, Apple gets a shot at knocking out the headlights of Verizon and all of the hardware rivals lined up behind Adobe’s Flash Lite, including LG, NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson, all of whom hope to use Flash Lite to provide their Symbian phones with a consistent graphical interface.

Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices.

Adobe likes the idea of establishing Flash Lite as a banal yet good enough layer of uninspired user interface technology to act as a glue to bond together the fractured Symbian platform. Cutting a deal to stir Flash Lite into the toxic BREW of Verizon also made for a good press release suggesting wide adoption of Flash Lite.

Add in Adobe’s AIR/Apollo system for developing “rich Internet applications” that depend upon Flash, and you have the makings of a Windows-wannabe strategy, giddy to send the increasingly open, cross platform web back into a proprietary prison with Adobe, not Microsoft, holding the key. (link)

Microsoft, of course, would much prefer that it and not Adobe hold that key. But if it comes down to a question of open technologies versus proprietary, guess where Redmond will take its stand?

Apple, of course, is no stranger to proprietary platforms. It just prefers them to be its own.

One of the advantages Research in Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry has over Apple (AAPL) is the number of third-party developers writing applications for it: 650 as of last summer, according to RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis (link). Except the rogue developers writing unauthorized apps for jailbroken iPhones, there has been only one developer writing native apps for the iPhone: Apple. Everybody else has been making relatively slow, crippled web apps.

All that changed after the iPhone special event on Thursday. Not only did Apple announce that it was giving IT managers everything they’d asked for in an enterprise cellphone — from push e-mail to a kill pill for lost or stolen iPhones (see here) — it released a software developers kit (SDK) that gives third-party programmers the same tools Apple’s inhouse programmers used to write the apps that come with the iPhone.

The message was clear: Apple is going to battle RIM for the hearts and minds of developers, the key element in any successful computing device. As Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster put it in a report to clients this morning: “The platform with the most active developer community will likely win the battle in the mobile computing arena.”

So how are programmers reacting to the new SDK, which was made available as a free download to registered developers? One sign was that Apple’s servers nearly ground to a halt trying to handle the demand. Valleywag’s Jordon Golson reported at 3:20 p.m. Thursday that he could barely get to the info page.

The developers Apple trotted out to demo — EA, Salesforce, AOL, Epocrates, Sega — certainly seemed pleased with what they were able to produce with two weeks lead time (see here). And the consensus among developers polled after the event was that the SDK exceeded expectations. (See, for example, Ephraim Schwartz’s roundup for InfoWorld.)

“The tools look awesome,” wrote John Gruber on Daring Fireball. “Far better and more advanced than what most Mac developers were expecting.”

Gruber believes developers will accept the terms of the business deal the company is offering them — albeit somewhat grudgingly. “Apple’s 30/70 split with developers is steep, but initial reaction from the developers I follow on Twitter seems to be positive. Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba told me via IM, ‘70%? That’s… that’s… livable,’ which seems to sum up the consensus sentiment.”

But “the $99 fee for getting your app listed in the store [per-developer, not per-app] is a no-brainer,” Gruber adds. “This is going to be a gold rush.” (link)

Despite the initial enthusiasm, taking on the BlackBerry in its home turf is not going to be easy. The iPhone may have captured 28% of U.S. smartphone sales last quarter versus RIM’s 41%, as Jobs proudly announced yesterday, but the installed base of BlackBerries in corporations probably approaches 10 million. The only two companies Apple could name that were using the iPhone as an enterprise device were board-of-director buddies Genentech and Disney.

The first obstacle the iPhone faces are the corporate IT departments that would have to support it. IT is heavily invested in RIM across the board, not just for all those BlackBerries, but for the RIM servers that push data to them.

Moreover, the end users Apple is targeting — all those road warriors with little bricks clipped to their belts — have also made an investment of sorts, an investment of time, energy and brainpower training their thumbs on the BlackBerry’s miniature keyboard. Their complaints about the iPhone’s touchscreen echo the contempt PC users raised on DOS had for the original Mac, with its mouse and graphical user interface.

As Piper Jaffray’s Munster points out, Apple lost the OS wars to Microsoft (MSFT) in the 1980s not because it used a mouse, but because it lacked the support of a robust developer community. In the mobile OS wars to come, Steve Jobs seems determined not to make that mistake again.