Making Money Software

Here’s that big funding round for Boxee I told you about last fall: The Web video software company has raised another $16.5 million. Previous investors General Catalyst, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures are all back, joined by new money from Softbank and Israel’s Pitango.

Boxee, which makes software that makes it easier to get video from the Web to your TV, is a buzzy company in a buzzy industry. But I wrote about Boxee’s efforts to raise $10 million to $15 million back in November. What took so long?

My hunch is that in between then and now, the startup had to figure out if it really wanted to raise more money, or sell out to a big fish. For a long time, I figured the company was eventually headed for option B, and that a cable giant like Comcast or a box-maker like Cisco would be the buyer.

And that could still happen! But now the stakes have gotten a lot higher: Boxee has now raised $28.5 million, so in order to please its investors it’s going to need a significant payout.

Which means it really will have to build a real revenue stream, which it doesn’t have yet, and won’t have until it has a significant audience. As I wrote a few months ago:

Boxee’s real plan is both clear and a bit undefined: It wants to get its software on as many devices as possible–not just the Boxee Box but everything from Sony’s TVs to Microsoft’s Xbox 360s to Samsung’s Blu-ray players. And then it wants to build some kind of business based on advertising, consumer payments or both.

So Boxee isn’t trying to make money by licensing its software to hardware companies, any more than Netflix or Pandora is when they get their apps installed on different gadgets. It’s giving D-Link, the company that’s actually making the Boxee Box, its software for free. And it will do the same for other hardware companies.

Here’s a quick interview I conducted last fall with sleep-deprived CEO Avner Ronen, going over the same territory, back in November. Note that Ronen’s plans to bring Hulu Plus to the Boxee Box have yet to pan out. What’s up with that? “As you know these things take time,” he said via email yesterday. “But we are on it.”

How is Elop going to address this by
using Windows OS? He has to do more than just charge more, he has
to produce better product at competitive prices, which keep getting
lower. Elop will have to license the Widows OS, which is an
expense, one that he would bear to nowhere near the same extent if
he used Android. I feel he mistakenly looks at this as Google
commoditizing the Android platform, in lieu of the more reasonable
perspective of Google commoditizing the entire portable computer
space.

Well, the answer has arrived. Microsoft is buying Xx% of Nokia for paying Nokia over $1 billion to product Windows Phone 7 hardware.
Nearly all of this money is undoubtedly going into R&D and
marketing. Nokia and Microsoft (their new defacto owners) invariably see
Google as the pre-eminent trheat and are pulling out all of the stops
to nullify said threat. This also answers the question of how Elop, the
Nokia CEO will be able to deal with the reduced margins of having to
buy OS licenses while competing with vendors who get Android for free –
Microsoft is not only footing the bill, but investing in the business
as well. You see, the drop in Nokia’s share price is highly unwarranted
and their is visible synergy in this deal. Nokia gets to remove the
costs of OS R&D from its line times, sunk costs that have apparently
had negative incremental returns as they have had their asses handed to
them by Apple and most definitely Google – who knocked them off of
their number one market share perch in just over a year.

Microsoft gets the economic benefits of an existing hardware platform
that happens to have the number one marketshare metric in the world,
and gets it for just over a billion dollars. This is a win-win
situation. The question is,  will it win againt Google. Both companies
will still fail if they don’t execute on Google-time, who has compressed
development cycle years into months – literally!

From the Bloomberg article linked above:

Shrinking Margins (yeah, you’ve hear thist from me often enough)

Espoo, Finland-based Nokia needs to cut
costs to keep operating margins from narrowing further, after they
shrank to 4.9 percent last year from 19 percent a decade earlier. For
2011 and 2012, Nokia may cut its budget for research and development in
devices and services by about a third from last year’s spending of about
3 billion euros, said Sami Sarkamies, a Helsinki-based analyst with
Nordea Bank.

Microsoft spokeswoman Melissa Havel
declined to comment on the specifics of the agreement. Laurie Armstrong,
a spokeswoman for Nokia, said the final contract hasn’t been signed and
the company will share further details when they are complete.

Nokia’s royalty payments will help
Redmond, Washington- based Microsoft make a profit on the accord even
after the payments to Nokia, one person said. Some of the payment to
Nokia would be made before the company starts selling the phones,
meaning Microsoft bears some upfront cost in the partnership.

…

Microsoft shareholders want the company
to salvage its mobile-software business while also reining in costs. The
company doesn’t break out results for its mobile-software unit, and
instead groups them with the profitable Xbox video-game business, making it difficult to evaluate the financial performance of phone software.

Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer
has come under pressure from investors and his own board to improve
sales of mobile software after the company lost market share to Google
and Apple. Microsoft stock has declined 7.8 percent so far this year.

The agreement for the more than
billion-dollar payment was part of a campaign by Microsoft to keep Nokia
from choosing Google’s Android operating system, one of the people
said. Nokia also opted for Microsoft because Windows Phone software,
which is newer than Android and has a smaller number of handsets for
sale, gives Nokia a better chance to stand out, one of the people said.

The agreement also has Microsoft paying Nokia for the right to use its patent portfolio, one of the people said.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will use
Nokia’s Navteq mapping products for functions such as geolocation
services and selling local advertising and coupons tied to a user’s
position. If successful, that also could generate additional revenue for
Nokia, which will share in the sales. The two companies will also
divide revenue from services like search and advertising, Microsoft
President Andy Lees said last month.

I’ve been warning my subscribers about margin compression in this
space, and its about to get much uglier – to the extreme benefit of
consumers of personal and enterprise tech. Previous (and prescient)
posts from last year on this topic…

• Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Ultra-Mobile Computing Wars Just Yet
• After Getting a Glimpse of the New Windows Phone 7 Functionality, RIMM is Looking More Like a Short Play
• As
  I Warned in June, DO NOT DISCOUNT Microsoft in This Mobile Computing
  War! Their Marketing Campaign is PURE GENIUS! and it Appears as if
  the Phone Ain’t Bad Either
• Apple on the Margin
• How
  Google is Looking to Cut Apple’s Margin and How the
  Sell Side of Wall Street Will Enable This Without
  Sheeple Investor’s Having a Clue

Monetizing the Mobile Computing Race

We have a pretty firm idea of who is in the pole position as of now,
but that position is both risky and volatile, not to mention medium to
long term in nature – see Navigating BoomBustBlog Subscription Material To Find The Google Valuation Drilldown.

A more risk averse strategy is to go long on the component vendors
who supply those battling for pole position. Last week we released the
document Long candidate #1 – Hardware: The Mobile Computing Wars
to subscribers that outlined who our number one pick was after an
initial scan. This is not necessarily the absolute final say on the
matter since we have yet to perform a full forensic analysis, but the
company does look good in comparison to over 120 peers. Non-subscribers
should reference The Potential Equity Investments Most Likely To Prosper From the Google/Apple/Microsoft Mobile Computing Battle.

I am releasing the draft of the full shortlist of prospective long
candidates as of now (17 pages, 5 companies) to subscribers. Please be
aware that is a draft document and work in progress, but it is quite
informative nonetheless.  See Mobile Computing Vendor Long List Note WIP. Those who wish to subscribe should click here.

Click here to read up on all of Reggie Middleton’s Mobile Computing War opinion, analysis, and research.

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