Apple's Lawsuit Win & Microsoft's Bizarre 'Scroogled' Campaign

The focus of today’s tech news is definitely the release of the Xbox One. Now that both consoles have hit the market (the PS4 was released last Friday), it will be interesting to see who does better, especially over the Christmas period. The PS4 has already been having some negative feedback, with several users complaining about the blue light of death, with the device not connecting to the TV, leaving the screen blank. This aside, I’d like to mention some other news items that caught my eye, amongst all the talk of consoles.

In a bizarre reversal of manufacturing trends, Foxconn (which is the Taiwanese company that manufacturers the majority of Apple’s devices), announced that they are building a manufacturing plant in the U.S. This plant, which will be in Pennsylvania, will be largely robotic, but is estimated to bring 500 jobs to the area. Foxconn announced that they wanted another plant in the U.S. because of the large domestic demand for Apple’s products. Will this be a growing trend? Can the decrease in transportation costs make up for the higher cost of labour?

More good news for Apple, they were just awarded $290 million in their ongoing patent battle with Samsung. This brings Samsung’s total to about $900 million in payments to Apple, which is less than the original $1.05 billion settlement, but still an enormous amount money.

And in the strangest attack on the competition, Microsoft has launched a website telling you to avoid getting “scroogled.” This is meant to focus on the amount of data that Google collects from users and general privacy concerns when it comes to Google. They say they launched the campaign “on behalf of consumers” and that you should “try Bing for an honest search”. If this isn’t baffling enough, there is even a store, where they sell things like t-shirts that say “Keep Calm While We Steal Your Data”, complete with the Google logo. I’m confused as to how Microsoft thinks this a good idea at all. Maybe they should focus on finding a CEO who will help them develop new and innovative products that compete in the marketplace without attacking the competition. Good to see that the competition between the four tech giants is alive and well...