If Microsoft gives away Windows Phone 8, will anyone take it?

In a bid to increase licensees and gain some badly needed market share, Redmond won't charge for its phone OS anymore.

Rumors and speculation have swirled on this for months, but now it's official: Microsoft is giving away Windows Phone for free, at least to a pair of Indian handset makers. If this can drive sales, it might become a worldwide policy, which could be the game-changer Microsoft needs and wants.

The Times of India first reported that Microsoft has waived Windows Phone licensing fees for Lava and Karbonn. Actually, the deal was somewhat telegraphed; last week, Karbonn announced that it was going to ship a dual-boot Android and Windows Phone device in June, and rumors of the deal were floating around at last month's Mobile World Congress.

The Times of India says Microsoft has been negotiating with Indian manufacturers since last year, and that the two manufacturers only agreed to make Windows phones when Microsoft waived the licensing fees.

"Free Windows Phone is part of a strategic partnership. For both Microsoft and us, it is an experiment. Windows Phone still doesn't have lot of appeal in the market but now that it doesn't have any license fee, it becomes easier for us to experiment with it," one unidentified executive told the Times.

If that sounds less than enthusiastic, you have to remember both Lava and Karbonn are already Google Android licensees and the phones that will run WP8 won't exactly be on the same level as the Lumia 928 or 1520. These will be cheap, low-end phones for India's mass market. It's a huge market – over one billion people.

So this can’t really be viewed as a bellwether for the U.S. or other mature markets. No offense to Lava and Karbonn, but they won’t be selling the equivalent to a Galaxy S5 to the kind of buyers Samsung and Apple cater to in the West.

It makes for a good experiment to see if the low-end market can drive demand and increase interest in Windows Phone. After all, IDC puts its market share at just 3.9%.

One thing about a product: if it’s good, you can sell it for a high price. If it’s bad, you can’t give it away. I personally like Windows Phone and I’m only using an iPhone because I felt the Nokia hardware was inferior, with terrible battery life. If that rumored HTC One running WP8 or a Galaxy model running WP8 ever emerge, I’m there.

So let’s see if Microsoft can give away it’s phone OS. It’s not like the company hasn’t given away products before to grab market share. True, it’s never given away an OS, but right now it’s not really selling it, either.

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Twitter: Attack emails drop from 110 million per day to a few thousand

Adopting protocol called DMARC pays big dividends, says Twitter postmaster

There used to be a whopping 110 million attack messages per day spoofing the Twitter domain name as cyber-criminals blasted out fake Twitter e-mail at intended victims to try and fool them into opening dangerous malware-infested links and other scams. But by adopting a messaging authentication protocol called Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), Twitter has seen that number drop to a few thousand.
Lo and behold, it works!
— Twitter postmaster Josh Aberant about DMARC

“Lo and behold, it works,” says Josh Aberant, Twitter’s postmaster in charge of messaging.

DMARC first started about two years ago as a cooperative effort among Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and eBay’s PayPal unit, among others, to combat the scourge of spoofed e-mail that will mimic the domain names of well-known companies.

DMARC works by checking that e-mail truly originated from where it was supposed to. Organizations that support DMARC can monitor for fake e-mail and quarantine or block it. Aberant said Twitter, working with partners Agari and Message Systems, decided to block the bad e-mail that the DMARC protocol identifies.

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Aberant says he was shocked when he first saw monitoring that showed there were 110 million attack messages per day abusing the Twitter name.

By combining what’s called “DomainKeys Identified Mail” and the “Sender Policy Framework” with the “Authentication Failure Reporting Format,” DMARC represents the most comprehensive approach to preventing email abuse and protecting sender brands that the Internet industry has offered to date, according to Alec Peterson, chief technology officer at Message Systems.

Because DMARC is supported by the major Internet e-mail service providers, including Google, YahooMail, AOL and Microsoft, Twitter estimates about 90% of Twitter’s user base globally is covered under the DMARC filtering umbrella. Several Chinese ISPs have implemented DMARC as well. But Aberant would like to see more European telecommunications firms and those in the private sector join the DMARC effort to see the momentum build.

Twitter’s DMARC project, which took several months, involved working with a number of outside companies, the business partners such as Salesforce.com, to achieve a kind of “identity alignment” in messaging using the DMARC protocol, says Aberant.

Making sure DMARC authentication works properly means you have to “get a hold of the right people that manage the mail infrastructure,” he points out. Because Salesforce also happened to be using Message Systems, it was a fairly simple configuration change. But in other instances with business partners, the conversion to DMARC can be somewhat more demanding.

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Are You Too Old to Land a New IT Job?

Age really is just a number. If you're keeping current on new technologies and advancement, and show a willingness to keep learning and growing, there's no reason it should be an impediment to your job search.

Looking for a job or a promotion and worried that your age might be an impediment? Don't be. Age really is just a number, and especially in IT, that number isn't as important as your accomplishments, your adaptability and willingness to learn.

"It's about being able to demonstrate your accomplishments," says author, career search expert and consultant Rick Gillis. "Most IT firms want to know one of two things: Can you make them money or can you save them money? Then they'll want to hire you, regardless of your age," he says.

Nobody would hire a doctor, for example, who isn't using robotics in his practice, says Gillis. Staying current on new technologies, advancements and methodologies can keep your skill sets relevant and will help you avoid becoming one of those 'former masters of the universe' who've faded into obscurity and can barely turn on their computer, he says.

Too Old for IT

Stay Hip and Up on Tech

"You have to be current. That is key, especially in IT," Gillis says. "I find it disturbing when I speak to clients who are older and they aren't spending time studying, staying hip and up-to-date on new technology advances," he says.

"If you've been looking for a job for six months, you have to realize how much has happened in that time -- learn about emerging technology. Know the terminology. Be able to show that you've added to your knowledge and your skills," Gillis says, and be able to demonstrate how that knowledge and your skills have positively impacted previous employers.

As an example, Gillis cites a former client who was struggling to demonstrate his achievements while searching for a job. The client had one specific job for which he wrote nearly 10,000 lines of code for a bank, but couldn't point to a specific outcome, Gillis says.

"I advised him to take a personal inventory, to reach out to his contact and determine how to quantify what he did," Gillis says. "When we talked to his contact, we were told that the code he wrote was used by the bank to fix some significant security flaws with their ATMs that used to require a lengthy, expensive service call and two people to address," Gillis says.

"It turns out, my client saved the bank more than half a million dollars a year on this expense, and while it did take some time and digging to determine how to quantify his efforts, it was worth it," he says.

But adaptability and using relevant skills and knowledge is a two-way street, says Mike Capone, CIO at human capital management solutions firm ADP. Employers should constantly be looking at the knowledge and skills present in their workforce to see how those accomplishments can help further business goals and even to educate newer, younger or less experienced employees, Capone says.

Adaptability Knows No Age Limit
"Age, in and of itself, doesn't matter, but adaptability does," says Capone. "That's not always a skill you're born with, but it can be learned," especially if companies are tapping into their older employees' skills and knowledge to help educate the younger generation, he says.

To that end, Capone says, ADP makes sure to identify and reward good leadership and tap into older, more experienced employees' domain expertise, and linking them up with younger, newer employees.

"With our younger generation of workers, we force rotational assignments every 18 to 24 months to make sure they are gaining the knowledge and experience of some of our more seasoned people," says Capone. "It's like having that veteran player in the locker room, so to speak, but it's a mutually beneficial exercise. The younger folks keep the older workers current and up to date, while the more experienced folks bring a level of maturity to teams," he says.

"Mentoring is a two-way street, and even when I, as the CIO, am paired up with employees who are much younger and lower on the corporate ladder, I learn something every day," Capone says.

Regardless of the age of employees, companies need to think differently about their workforce to better reap the benefits of existing talents, experience, skills and knowledge, Capone says. Building up your talent pool to take advantage of relevant skills doesn't have to mean bringing in outside consultants or new employees; what you need could be right under your nose.

"It's about change management," Capone says. "And how you incorporate that into your day-to-day operations. Whether you're looking at employees who are 20 or 60, technology, business needs and skills change at a much faster rate right now than they did even five years ago.

It's incumbent on the leadership of the company to manage the talent and take advantage of the skills that you have and the competencies within the domain expertise you need to be successful," he says.

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