Microsoft To Kill The Lumia Brand In Favor of a New Surface Phone, Says Report (thenextweb.com) 177
It's no secret the Lumia brand is struggling to gain any significant market share these days. Earlier this year, it was reported that Microsoft's Windows Phone OS dropped below 1 percent mark share, all but confirming the death of Windows Phone. A new report suggests that, despite the irrelevance of Windows Phone, Microsoft will not be giving up on its mobile OS. Instead, the company plans to drop the Lumia brand by the end of the year and replace it with a brand new Surface Phone in an effort to breathe new life into its flagging smartphone business. The Next Web reports: There is some credibility to the claims. Microsoft's Lumia lineup has shrunk to just four models, and there's nothing to indicate it's working on a successor. In the U.S., where Microsoft has struggled to shift Lumia phones, it has removed the link to buy them from its website. On the retail side, stores have started removing units from display, and are trying to shift remaining stock by offering steep discounts. Further evidence comes from two since-deleted tweets from Laura Butler, engineering director at Microsoft, who posted "Surface iPhone ;-)" on September 6, and "Surface Phone not NOT confirmed. :-)" on September 7, in reply to questions posed by other Twitter users. Microsoft is expected to hold an event in October, where it's believed it will announce a new Surface all-in-one. As Ars Technica pointed out, this could be when Microsoft announces its new Surface Phone, just in time for Christmas.
Burning cash (Score:4, Insightful)
So they buy a company for the knowledge and name, they fire the knowledge last year and now they kill the nake... well, when you have too much cash, it's easy to burn it !
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Microsoft still thinks it's 2001 where if you throw enough money into a market, no matter how saturated it is, then you can suddenly have decent mindshare. So, they went and sunk $20+ billion into windows phone and got nothing in return.
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My gripe with the platform has always been the quality and selection of apps. I personally LOVE the phone interface. It's so slick and feels so great to use. I've had major issues with every single major app I've ever tried to use.
It sadly doesn't matter how great the platform itself is if there are so few apps, and those that there are are terrible.
It's now become a story of too-little, too-late. They're simply never going to make WinPhone successful...
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Yep, I used one for a week because I was between phones and I really liked the interface but the lack of certain apps made it not work for me. Android, for all its flaws, at least mostly works and has all the apps I want to use.
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It sadly doesn't matter how great the platform itself is if there are so few apps, and those that there are are terrible.
Until Microsoft makes their mobile OS capable of running Android apps, their phones will never take off. The Lumia 950 XL is certainly in the same league as the Note 5 so if their interface really was better I would certainly consider a windows phone upgrade to my Note 4 if it can run any Android app along with Windows ones.
But Windows will never make up the gap in mobile apps for iOS and Android, so taking advantage of one of these being open source is the only option I see.
Project Astoria (Score:2)
They actually did this... briefly. The same Linux subsystem that enables the whole "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows" think in the 1607 release of Win10 was also being used to run Android apps, natively, on early Win10 Mobile builds. It was called "Project Astoria" if you want to read more about it.
Sadly, MS then quietly (but *very* thoroughly) killed off the project. No build released any time recently includes Project Astoria anymore, or will let you install it, or will run it if you hack it into the OS. They sh
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As soon as the name is burned because everyone noticed that it's MS now that's calling the shots, they have to move on and buy another company to burn.
Re:Burning cash (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's Windows Phone OS dropped below 1 percent mark share
Actually Windows Phone OS has 23% market share [netmarketshare.com], only it's running on desktops not phones.
Linux (Score:2)
they fire the knowledge last year
Well, at least, some of the earliest casualties in the "Knowledge" part - those who worked on the Linux effort with Maemo/Meego - have since then founded Jolla and had some relative success in making a good full-blown GNU/Linux OS for phones with Sailfish OS.
(Happy user of a Jolla1 phone, looking forward for an official port to Fairphone2 including the Android Apps support bit).
Re: Burning cash (Score:2)
Google made money on Motorola by selling its parts. Even if you value the patents at zero they came out ahead
Great (Score:2, Funny)
Because it was the *name* that's the problem with their phones, so this will totally fix that.
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I actually like the Lumia name and it would sway my decision in its favor >_
Windows phones aren't that bad either if you aren't a teenager who needs all the latest apps, or a hacker hackity hacking roots away.
And the Zune was freaking awesome. And Windows Vista was just too smart for the users.
Although on the surface, it looks like a nice phone....
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Well, a brown brick named Zune. Be honest. I mean, even if some Linux geek in his mom's basement came up with a product, it would not suck THAT hard.
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Vista wasn't bad if you jumped through its hoops.
Vista was okay in the end. Getting there was awful. Being forced to be an early adopter, it was kinda fun to tell the people that forced me to implement it that they needed to buy new printers and scanners because Vista didn't have drivers for them. Fortunately, there were minutes taken, and my dire warnings about Vista were all down in a way they couldn't blame me unless they went back and committed a crime.
Seven was so much better that it gets crap today,
7 was a nicely workable OS. It wasn't perfect, none is, but it functioned almost as well as XP, with
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Vista had some very silly bugs, and a lot of software would not run on it *effortlessly*, but it would run. Setting the application Compatibility Layer option would fix most things, and either running as Admin or making whatever folder the moronic thing was trying to write to writable would fix the rest.
They did change the driver model, but even then, I only ran into one piece of hardware (between early 2006 betas and when the Win7 public beta arrived) that I couldn't convince to work, and it only barely wo
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Vista had several big problems.
First, there was the "ready for Vista" program that lied, so many people wound up buying computers that were allegedly ready for Vista but couldn't run the interface.
Second, there was the driver issue, Vista required new drivers, and they were more of a pain to develop. It took a while for peripheral vendors to catch up.
Third, Vista introduced some badly needed security features that made it a real pain to run lots of older software that ignored Microsoft's security gu
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Translation: they're poorly supported devices that no one writes apps for.
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Desktop Linux has a helluva lot more applications that run specifically for its platform than Windows 10 mobile. I have s Windows 10 tablet, and not only is the interface awful, stock Windows software may run on it, but the experience is terrible to the point of being unusable in many cases, and there's a fraction of the mobile apps compared to Android and iOS.
You're pale defence of Windows mobile is just whataboutery.
Not wrong, though Windows not even single digits (Score:2)
You're not entirely wrong, there is no COMPELLING reason for the AVERAGE user to switch, no "killer app" in either case. There are certainly benefits to Linux, and presumably also to Windows phone, but no "must have" for most users. (Except"for"the huge one I'll describe below.) I strongly prefer Linux, but I'm not the average user.
That said:
> Both operating systems are at the low end of the single digits in usage share
Windows phone hasn't even managed "low single digits", it's at less than 1%.
One reaso
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Windows is for profit and thus hurling money into advertising, and funding massive amounts of illegal anti-competitive activity are very profitable.
Linux is not for profit, and there corrupt contracts or EULAs, is no big spend on advertising, and no years of illegal and criminal underhand deviousness, and without data-slurping, no backhanded subsidising of bloatware filled laptops, or bribing software providers not to support the competition.
If Joe public an
Not that profitable, Windows has 12% market share (Score:2)
Yes, Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that's about the time their market share started to fall. They are struggling to GIVE AWAY Windows. Worldwide device shipments for 2015, per Gartner:
Android Linux 54.16%
iOS/OS X 12.37%
Windows 11.79%
Other (mostly *nix) 21.66%
The massive decline of Windows matches with the decline of the old-fashioned desktop, 90% of which run Windows. Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior may have assisted in locking ou
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Yes, Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that's about the time their market share started to fall.
You think that their market share started to fall back in the early to mid '90's? That's when they really started the anti-competitive behaviour, with the OS wars against OS/2, the DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run and then the browser wars once MS realized that the Internet was real and people weren't going to sign up to MSN.
They wished. 8,000% slower with 1,500% more requir (Score:2)
>> which works *well* only on ...
Microsoft wished Windows 8 was a tablet OS. The point of a tablet rather than a desktop is that a tablet is convenient to pick up and do something real quick, rather than walking upstairs to the PC and powering it on. A tablet should be lightweight and it should turn on in milliseconds, not boot like a desktop. Windows 8 took 8,000% longer to turn on than Android, and required 1,500% more disk space. It was/is a desktop OS, with crappy "tablet" UI plastered on the f
Two years old product category is "new" imho (Score:2)
>Personal computers had been around for several years, eg the Apple II since 1978
DOS was released in 1980, two years after the Apple II. Today, the PC is about 38 years old. In 1980, the PC was about two years old. I call that "new".
Re: Great (Score:5, Informative)
Windows phones aren't that bad either if you aren't a teenager who needs all the latest apps, or a hacker hackity hacking roots away.
I have a windows phone sitting in a drawer that I bought as a backup phone because it was super cheap. Anyways here's why I think it sucks:
Flat UI is totally shit. Many people think flat UI just means a clean, easily scalable interface, but that's false. Flat UI means you can't offer any hints of three dimensional depth. So no gradients, no shadows, no overlapping objects. This means that skeumorph is basically impossible. Too much skeumorph (i.e. the heavily bitmapped crap Apple recently did away with that scales like shit and ages worse) is bad, but no skeumorph at all is worse. The purpose of skeumorph is to make UI elements look recognizable as everyday objects you deal with in the real world so that you can intuitively determine what they're supposed to do. Windows phone (and windows 10) just discarded this concept entirely. And also since you have no depth, the only way you can distinguish objects is make them have sharply contrasting colors, which contributes to an ugly fisher-price look.
This is why, in my opinion, Material Design is by far the best smartphone design language by a mile: It remains simplistic while still retaining light skeumorph, scalability, and you can use practically any color palette you want.
And speak of colors, on windows phone, when you need to find an app that you don't have pinned, it's easily the worst experience of any smartphone OS. Why? Because you have to scroll down a big long list of names with icons that mostly look identical. In many cases, when recently got a new app and haven't used it for say, a week, you might not remember the exact name, but you might remember what its icon looked like, especially if you're a visual learner. However on windows phone, that won't help you a whole lot. The whole fucking UI is one big doldrum.
Oh but wait, the common windows phone fan argument is that static icons look bland, and that windows phones tiles are innovative and unparalleled...except they're none of the above. Let's do a little comparing and contrasting of Android widgets:
- Android widgets can update in real-time.
- WP "live" tiles can only update once every 30 minutes by default, and the shortest interval is every 15 minutes unless you create a website that constantly pushes new data to it (i.e. it can't be done locally by an app) and even then the shortest interval is one minute.
- Android widgets, like a calendar widget, can be configured in practically any dimension. This means they can become a big vertical list, which means something like a calendar widget can show multiple events in succession.
- WP tiles have limited dimension and by design only show one object at a time, and flip at an interval that you can't control, so you can easily miss something, like say you could have an appointment shortly but it's showing the next event after that. This also can become annoying to people who might have forgotten what app the tile is for.
- Android widgets are fully interactive. This means that, like a calendar widget for example, can be scrolled, and you can tap the calendar event to directly open that event in the app. Some widgets obviate the need to open the app at all, take for example Google's "what's this song?" widget.
- WP tiles don't do anything other than flip, and tapping them just opens the app. That's it, they can't do anything else. If you want to navigate to a specific email, voicemail, text, calendar event, etc, tapping that event while its showing on the tile doesn't open that item, it just opens the app.
Another major annoyance with windows phone is it's downright awful at multitasking. Try for example, to browse a webpage while your maps app downloads offline data. Oh wait, you can't. As soon as you switch to the browser, the download stops. In Windows Phone, Microsoft's philosophy is that paint shouldn't dry unless you sit there and watch it dr
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What did you learn? That Microsoft has no idea how to do UI? Where have you been for the past 25 years?
Or just specifically how MS fucked up Window 10 for Phone. Or is it Windows Phone 10? Have they finally joined phone/tablet/computer to all use the same marketing name yet? They should have stuck with WinCE, because that name truly labelled their OS accurately. wince. it's what Windows makes you do.
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Windows phones aren't that bad either if you aren't a teenager who needs all the latest apps, or a hacker hackity hacking roots away.
I have a windows phone sitting in a drawer that I bought as a backup phone because it was super cheap. Anyways here's why I think it sucks:
...
Nailed it.
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Oh but wait, the common windows phone fan argument is that
Wait what, someone somewhere is actually a fan of WP?
I have a friend who is an MS partner. He's pro MS everything because he has to be, yet even he traded his phone for Android.
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W10M is rooted (Score:2)
There's actually a full jailbreak available for all W10M devices right now. Arbitrary code execution as SYSTEM. In theory it can be made to work for kernel too, though I don't think anybody has tried it yet. It's only a couple weeks old. Not a lot of software ported yet but we've got SSH and PowerShell, among other things.
If you want your kids to hate you (Score:4, Funny)
As Ars Technica pointed out, this could be when Microsoft announces its new Surface Phone, just in time for Christmas.
Yeah, this'll work well. December 26 is gonna be even busier than usual.
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If you want your kids to hate you
If this is for the kids it's already a fail, Microsoft will never be cool and obviously you won't have all the apps. Android got the bargain bin market cornered and the hardware alone won't be special enough to sell anything. If they want to get anywhere it needs to hit the business world hard. Hopefully the "Win RT" phones are history and the Surface Phone is an x86 computer in your pocket.
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Hopefully the "Win RT" phones are history and the Surface Phone is an x86 computer in your pocket.
I wouldn't think so, most people want battery life of a day or so. You won't get that with x86.
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The ASUS Zenfone2 has a 64 bit x86 processor, it's not the worst in terms of battery life.
Re:If you want your kids to hate you (Score:4, Informative)
It's a 2 year old processor.
intel killed the roadmap for phone SoCs earlier this year.
So unless MS want to cram a netbook CPU into a phone, it's likely to be an ARM.
Re:If you want your kids to hate you (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel even stated a few years ago that a given CPU can have 2 of 3 things:
- Speed
- Energy efficiency
- Low power consumption
It cannot however have all three of those in the same chip, i.e. a very fast chip cannot scale down based on the demand to meet the needs of mobile devices. The whole x86 architecture is pretty much entirely engineered for speed, and a few months ago Intel finally conceded that they just can't make Atom chips compete with ARM. If there is a "surface phone", then it's not going to run x86 apps locally, unless it's either slow as shit or has shitty battery life.
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Two out of three? Ok, I pick "speed" and "low power consumption." Good luck figuring out how to take "energy efficiency" away while giving me the two I picked.
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So unless MS want to cram a netbook CPU into a phone, it's likely to be an ARM.
OR... maybe they're going to go completely retro - sleek little Windows phones haven't gotten any traction, after all.
Picture this: a cell phone with a desktop processor and a body the size of a Korean War US Army radio phone. How cool would that be? They'd certainly capture the seven-to-thirteen-year-old male demographic.
Someone's even already taken a first stab at the concept [dreamingpoint.com]!
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Hey people star at my car all the time. I'm sure it's envy.
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I wouldn't think so, most people want battery life of a day or so. You won't get that with x86.
People have tried quite hard to decompile performance difference into compiler, ISA and hardware differences and most seem to agree the ISA is by far the least [extremetech.com] significant difference. In fact, at least VIA has been experiementing with a hybrid x86-ARM [extremetech.com] processor translating both to common micro-ops. As I understood it, it's more that Intel has struggled putting together the whole package for a SoC not so much the general purpose CPU. With power so limited having dedicated hardware to do specific things becom
A failed phone business by any other name (Score:2)
And (Score:2)
Oh trhat will make all the difference. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can just imagine the board meeting at Microsoft where the geniusses came up with this one:
"Our phone biz is always in the shit, we need a revolutionary fresh idea that will force people to buy Windows phones, so Microsoft can rape their most personal data and sell it".
"I have it! Lets give our phones a different product name!"
"Amazing out-of-the-box win-win thinking! Give that VP another $10 million in preferential stock!"
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"I have it! Lets give our phones a different product name!"
You mock, yet branding has a huge effect on consumers. This is why companies battle endlessly over names of things rather than the details of what those names represent (e.g. buying the Nokia business but not the name)
One of the easiest ways to cut a failing product line is to distance yourself from the name.
One of the easiest ways to ride on a previous success is polish your iTurd up with a certain letter to capitalise on brand recognition.
The Surface is a huge success compare to Lumina. It only makes sens
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On the other hand, I do not get it why Google has decided to replace its successful Nexus brand name with Pixel. Google Nexus devices are almost like an underground brand, but the level of satisfaction among the consumers and developers who hold the Nexus devices is relatively high, while the "Pixel" name is so far mostly associated with a failed tablet "Pixel C".
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I hope the rebranding means they might finally listen to customers and include an SD slot and removeable battery.
I really want my next phone to be a Google phone so I dont get all the crapware and update delays, but no SD and a built-in battery are both dealbreakers for me.
A real Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the only way Microsoft could gain any traction with Windows phones is if they manage to keep compatibility with real Windows apps.
It means a x86 CPU, and there is probably a lot of work to be done to make a usable UI but it might be worth it, at least for now.
Look at Surface tablets. Windows RT was a failure but real Windows tablets are usually considered pretty good, except for the price.
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It's been tried before - by BlackBerry (Score:4, Interesting)
You do realize that BlackBerry (RIM to us ex-employees) tried to do what you are suggesting? The BlackBerry smartphones could handle different office documents and I worked on a device (the "BlackBerry Presenter") which could display them on a monitor or projector.
The problem was, and I suspect anybody else will fall into this rabbit hole if they work on this type of device, is that RIM got sucked into dealing with Office Apps and the data surrounding it and forgot to focus on what customers really want - web enabled applications.
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I'm thinking a combo of Surface Pro and a Phablet. The Phablet holds enough flash for a decent Windows environment (say, 512GB at least) and can slot into the Surface which provides the larger screen, x64 CPU and additional connectivity for video and USB.
The phablet can run ARM Windows and be a standalone phone device, while slotted into the Surface it provides radios for connectivity and calls during a desktop type computing session.
The trouble is, Microsoft has always refused to make normal Windows instal
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While it's clear that Win RT bombed, it was IMHO a step in the right direction: Make Windows simpler, make it work more like the smartphones and tablets that have been such a sales success since the last decade.
Trouble is: how to deal with the legacy applications (cue the appy app guy). Getting everyone to use the MS store looked to me like a good idea, as long as there was something there worth getting. Yes, other software houses would be annoyed with paying MS a cut of the sale, yes they would be forced t
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RT bombed, because it looked like you could run x86 applications on it, but you actually couldn't, so you had a laptop that would only run Windows Phone apps, which are very few and far between. If this surface phone uses an ARM processor as has been rumored, then it will fail, too. Even if it is an x86 phone, which will be quite interesting, I'm not sure how they will be able to make traditional desktop apps work in a small, phone-sized form factor. That will be the big challenge. If they can pull that off
UWP the way forward (Score:2)
Now you know why they're deprecating Win32 in favor of UWP moving forward, because they want their phones, tablets, and consoles to leverage all the dev work put into Windows desktop apps
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> make an x86/Win10 phone
To usefully run actual x86 software it would need sufficient CPU power and RAM as well as a GPU giving adequate number of pixels with output to a large screen and HDMI or equivalent. Perhaps it would need both an x86-64 _and_ an ARM (for battery life). The result would be:
* have a battery life measured in minutes
* cost more than any other phone on the market
* still not have mobile apps.
Anyway, Intel is not interested:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/30/intel-splits-on-atom-
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nvidia's Denver was engineered to be ISA agnostic. It runs ARM but originally was said to run x86, except that they weren't part of the Intel/AMD cartel licensing the instruction set. (Or something like that).
Re:A real Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem isn't the power consumption of the CPU, it's Microsoft's inability to solve the "hard problem" (Panos Panay's own words) of an OS with control over sleep functions. The Surface Pro 4 has a battery barely 3x the size of flagship phone and yet manages to play video on a screen with 6x the area for 9 hours, and do regular work for 5-6 hours. The problem is that the OS has no control over the drivers, and MS is to fucking lazy to write their own, so a poorly behaving wifi driver (or BT driver, or USB driver, or even internal OS programs like memory management) means the entire system stays awake, burning power nearly as fast as if the machine were playing HD video.
When the SP4 is tuned just right and nothing is screwing up, it will last - in an suspended/active state (instant on/"phone sleep") for about 200 hours. Trim back all those internals and kick every driver out of ring 0 and a (formerly known as) m series x86 could probably be tweaked to provide decent life in a smaller form factor. But MS / Windows is to bloated and riddled with special exceptions to fix. They need to go Apple on the OS and blow it away and restart with a fresh core.
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Why do you need a subscription model when your devices get replaced every two or so years?
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Hence Continuum.
But beyond that, UWP apps are far friendlier on smaller screens. Different screen sizes certainly demand different sizing and presentation of UI elements, but that does not mean you cannot serve different form factors with a common code base. Writing a ground up application for a handset is a much different proposition than doing a marginal amount of coding to make an existing one work on different screen sizes (especially since apps need to do that to work well in windowed or tiled mode a
Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the price one pays after decades of screwing everyone over. Hey, at least Gates got rich.
Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're spot on about Microsoft slowly becoming irrelevant. They haven't done anything innovative in 20+ years.
Microsoft has become IBM. Still around but no one really cares anymore.
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I'd argue that they have never "innovative". Just stole.
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> I'd argue that they have never "innovative".
I would also agree with that assessment.
> Just stole.
I would replace the word stole with the more accurate term bought:
* DriveSpace aka DoubleSpace: Licensed from Vertisoft and then out-right copied Stac Electronics.
* Internet Explorer: Licensed Spyglass Mosaic and renamed it.
* Windows: Copied Apple who copied Xerox.
* Direct3D: Bought Rendermorphics, Ltd and renamed their shitty API RealityLab to Direct3D
Looks like David Wheeler (of readable S Lisp Express [dwheeler.com]
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Apple took PARC design elements and made a much better UI out of them. They paid PARC in Apple stock, which PARC them sold. Microsoft made an agreement with Apple to use their GUI design elements, and made a much worse interface (which they proceeded to improve slowly). When Apple tried suing Microsoft for their GUIs, it turned out Microsoft had a right to almost everything they were using.
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Office 365 and Azure along with their big data analytics are pretty innovative. Well, they are at least making them a lot of money. They are bigger than Google's cloud right now. Microsoft certainly has a lot more customers.
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What has Microsoft ever done that has benefited the human race?
Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. (Score:4, Funny)
Fired Ballmer.
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XmlHttpRequst. Innovative and useful, adopted by everybody in the industry, used in everything. MS invented it so they could make Outlook Web Access and such better, back in the days before Gmail (which would not exist, as we know it, without something like XHR).
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It's an exaggeration, of course, but Microsoft hasn't done much successful innovation over the past 10-15 years..
By 1996, Microsoft had introduced its serious OS (NT) and its mediocre copy of the Macintosh UI. It was actually doing good work with Internet Explorer, which was a quality product back then, and improving Office. Sometime around then, they produced WinCE. They started moving into the tablet and PDA and phone business. Overall, they seemed to be doing pretty well.
Their tablets were expen
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Microsoft still makes a lot of money. So does IBM. Their products are mature and stable, which allows them to make a lot of money, but they aren't setting new standards for the industry like they used to be able to do. No one cared that Microsoft wanted to replace Flash with Silverlight. They just ignored it. They don't have the mindshare dominance that they used to, where they could dictate the terms and the industry complied. That's long gone. They have become a lot less relevant, even though they still m
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Hey Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
This time are they gonna give the salesmen a cut? (Score:2)
I think their plan was folks would gravitate to their phones because they already knew 'em from learning Windows 8. But even ignoring the fact that Win8 was a mess people hate PCs and love phones. You don't need to get the
Calling bullshit. (Score:2)
> Both Google and Apple kick the rank and file salesmen a spiff in exchange for moving one of their phones
Citation required, because that sounds pretty unbelievable--especially considering that most Apple phones are bought at an Apple store (from an employee paid hourly & not on commission) or online.
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Except people never really liked using Windows on their PCs. The experience for most is neutral at best and irritating at worst.
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I'm going to suggest that neutral to irritating is the norm for operating systems. I didn't find one I actually liked until I got a Macintosh, and then again when I started using Unix.
Dumb as bricks (Score:4, Insightful)
I have trouble understanding why MS even want to try to get back into the smartphone market at this stage, except wounded pride. Investors demanding growth, pissed that they have seen their stock stagnate compared to Apple?
They have failed utterly to execute on any strategy they had, they looked indecisive and uncommitted. It's such a huge bag of fail.
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And everything they touch is horribly flawed because their corporate policy has been Fuck The User for so long, they have no idea how to interact. Everything they make the kick over the fence around Redmond and there is zero support. Their own flagship table, the Surface Pro, can't sleep - not because of userspace issues, but because their own drivers cause the system to to be permanently in high gear. Their own OS doesn't work properly on their flagship device. It's like nobody there even has a SP4 to test
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They are better now, but decades of, "You are stuck with our monopoly, so suck it up," has hurt their reputation and brand.
Kill? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems a sort of redundant thing to do to a rotting corpse.
Windows got on PC's because it got popular before anything else existed, and then once it was the most popular it used proprietary protocols, formats as well as illegal activity to choke out any competition and set its monopoly as far into stone as possible. People live with it because they either know nothing else or have just accepted failure as "normal" on their PC's
Its only just starting to lose the stranglehold.
With phones, MS was late to the market, after there were not one but TWO well established alternatives. NO one except the most die-hard MS supporter or the most completely clueless person is going to touch windows phones with a ten foot pole.
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Perhaps, but you have to find them on your phone, the functionality is often limited compared to the actual web site, and it takes up valuable memory. I prefer using the actual web site to a stripped down app version of the web site whenever possible.
Local sync, please? (Score:2)
I know there are tricks - setting up a CardDAV server and using the iCloud account option to sync with it - but a W10M phone should be able to locally sync with a W10 PC out of the box.
Re: (Score:2)
That works if you need to transfer a handful of contacts, but gets tedious with three dozen.
It's a bit late (Score:2)
A shame (Score:3)
There is some credibility to the claims. Microsoft's Lumia lineup has shrunk to just four models, and there's nothing to indicate it's working on a successor.
This is a shame. At a previous job, the company provided me with a Lumia. Very nice interface, and it's seamless integration with corporate e-mail and calendar was nice. I was also doing development for that platform, and it was nice to work with. Not perfect, but really, really good, if I look at things objectively.
This is yet another case of a company killing a promising platform and/or not making it work in the market. Lack of penetration on the market wasn't so much a problem with the product, but marketing and timing.
And for a company with such deep pockets as Microsoft, it makes no sense NOT to undersell it and be on the red in order to penetrate the market. Sometimes to make a win you have to go really low margin for a while (a-la Amazon.)
If the entire goal of every single business cycle is to increase your margins or minimize your risks, you are going lose, specially in something so challenging as tech.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If all you need are the basics (no apps), want a good quality camera and have a desire to be different than everyone else then Windows Phone isn't a bad alternative.
I am still rocking the Lumia 920 with Windows 10 on it. It's a stylish phone and it does all I need.
Re: (Score:3)
It's what they have always done and it worked many times. MS Windows was a cheap and nasty workstation OS after all - nowhere near the first but "good enough" and "cheap enough". Same with MS Word and all the rest. It's not going to work every time but it's what they do. They are reactive and not active and sadly see no reason to change.
If they did more than follow we'd probably be on some advanced plat
Re: (Score:2)
And so were Blackberries. That's what "smart phones" were back then. Apple changed the paradigm by removing the stylus and the keyboard and Microsoft just couldn't catch up--it was too big of a shock for their system. However, prior to 2007, they really were the cutting edge of smart phone technology. Blackberries were very popular as well, but the Windows Mobile phones could do so much more. Palm was pretty much done at this point, as their OS and app interfaces couldn't adequately handle the multitasking
Re: Former Microsoft Fanboy here (Score:2)
I wouldn't mind you redundant, just one dimensional.
MIcrosoft, like many large companies, gets some things right and others wrong. Part of the art to being that kind of company is (a) understanding who exactly you're appealing to (could be more that one group), and (b) ensuring the products targeting (a) are self consistent and sensible.
Personally, I'm appreciating their Office for Mac suite and the recent tilt towards OSS. However I've been Windows free (at home) since before XP.
Re: (Score:2)
MS should thus leverage the business side and Continuum. Allow employees to hot desk by docking their phone with a full size keyboard, a mouse and external screens - why do cubicle bound workers need a laptop exactly when they have a company supplied phone already? Monitor them 24/7 and enc
Re: (Score:3)
So that is where they all went!
Here in the UK, I have only seen them in PC World.
Re: Best tactic to gain market share for Microsoft (Score:2)
Or maybe just make the most popular Android phones explode in children's hands...