What Is Important in the Financial World (4/5/2013)

A day after Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) announced its “Home” smartphone product, reviews about the both the phone and its effect on the future of the social network are widely mixed. A Forbes article reads:

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, described Home as a set of apps running on Google‘s Android operating system which is exactly what it is.

Home is not ground breaking, it’s not particularly innovative, it’s merely an implementation of a user interface for Facebook on Android but that didn’t stop Zuckerberg from cranking up the hype.

According to Business Insider:

Facebook just unveiled Home, a new app which more or less takes over the user experience on phones running Google’s Android operating system.

The whole point of Android is to get people to use Google’s services, like Gmail and Google Web search. Home basically kills that.

The debate will not even begin to be settled until Facebook releases sales figures.

Microsoft Doomed?

Research firm Gartner has forecast that fast-moving trends in computing and operating systems will ruin Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) within five years. The Guardian reports:

Microsoft faces a slide into irrelevance in the next four years unless it can make progress in the smartphone and tablet markets, because the PC market will continue shrinking, warns the research group Gartner.

It says a huge and disruptive shift is underway, in which more and more people will use a tablet as their main computing device, researchers say.

That will also see shipments of Android devices dwarf those of Windows PCs and phones by 2017. Microsoft-powered device shipments will almost be at parity with those of Apple iPhones and iPads – the latter a situation not seen since the 1980s.

Samsung’s Bottom Line

Samsung demonstrated once again why it is the consumer electronics and smartphone company most feared by its competitors. Its sales and earnings pick up speed with each new quarter, and it has become the clear leader worldwide in both total cellphone sales and more sophisticated handsets. The launch of the new Galaxy 4S should increase its dominance in the latter category. The Telegraph reports:

The world’s largest maker of smartphones, memory chips and televisions estimated on Friday that operating income rose 53pc to around 8.7 trillion won (£5.1bn) in the three months to the end of March, as sales grew 15pc from a year earlier to 52 trillion won.

The preliminary result is better than the 8.3 trillion won forecast by analysts, although it marks the end of five straight quarters of record profit.

Analysts predicted that Samsung’s earnings would hit a new high in the current quarter when its latest smartphone, the Galaxy S4, hits the market.