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Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#181

Post by tomaskafka »

dep_b wrote: post #31

This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny better stuff (WPF was pretty cool!) will be deprecated within two years and probably will not get significant developer traction. With a lot of confusing marketing from Microsoft. I don't think even the guru's within Microsoft itself can sum up all the different…

Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier.

On one side, I'm glad that declarative app UIs can now be built on a web, on the other side - come on, Microsoft, we could have skipped a whole jQuery era and be somewhere else with the web now.

And react is still missing a big library of standard, well documented components with accesibility, performance and all the edge cases built in.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#182

Post by distances »

marindez wrote: post #102
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. I remember they were giving Lumia 925's to computer engineering students here years ago if they made and uploaded an app. You can imagine the quality of the apps they were uploading. Most of them were slideshows or just a wall of text. That's not how you incentivise app developers, that's how you inflate your…

Back in the day the number of apps in the store was a major point in the mobile OS wars, though. Google and Nokia were both constantly compared to Apple and told how they need to improve.

And yes, one response was to inflate numbers with random crap. Nokia created a developer tool to convert web pages to native apps -- basically just a webview wrapper with bundled web content. Ovi Store was half full of these "apps".

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#183

Post by mariushn »

Microsoft, please invest instead in https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8/

so that you cut into your competitors cash cows, even if you don't have a profit. Just like Google did to you with Google Docs, cutting into MS Office.

This way, you'd at least have a voice on mobile, instead of fully out.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#184

Post by pjc50 »

jk2323 wrote: post #90
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

It is my understanding that MS has given up on ARM. Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones, which partly solves the "app" problem. They just run a regular windows on the phone.

I've got one in my pocket right now: Asus Zenfone 2. It just runs regular Android. Even has an "Intel Inside" logo on the back.

Windows has never had great dynamic scaling, so trying to run regular apps on a phone would be a nightmare of tiny click targets. Metro apps would scale better, but that was the whole point of UWP.

IMO they've given up slightly too early. They could have written an Android-on-Windows compatibility layer, or various other things, but Microsoft just can't handle a market where they aren't dominant. The only way they could leverage their dominance would be to break Exchange ActiveSync and say "if you want your calendar on your phone, it has to be a Windows phone".

And Intel have pulled back from the low-power area (mobiles, Edison) because they're not competitive there. Maybe the same "can't function when not market leader" problem.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#185

Post by dbmikus »

herbst wrote: post #95
richardwhiuk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is extremely well sunk into the enterprise market, and neither Linux nor Mac are at all focusing sufficiently on it to displace them. Linux isn't user friendly enough, and Mac's support policy is a complete no go for enterprise.

If a Ubuntu in 2017 isn't user friendly I really don't know what that phrase is even supposed to mean.

I just installed the latest version of Linux Mint and the default graphics card driver had a bug that caused my entire system to freeze after a few hours of inactivity.

To be able to replace Apple or Microsoft, not only do you need user friendliness for how the machine works, but you also need to get rid of all the miscellaneous tech and configuration problems that crop up.

As I understand it, Linux laptop sleep/suspend/hibernate is still a big PITA.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#186

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

They've given up on being a mobile OS provider, I think, at least for now. I wonder if the announcement that they got the Win 10 kernel to compile on ARM is more geared at laptops/tablets than phones.

What I haven't seen reported is Win 6.X had a large enterprise/industrial user base that now is going to have to choose between Android and iOS. It's interesting that the size of that existing customer base is small enough, compared to the consumer market, that it's not worth Microsoft's efforts to keep the industrial mobile OS product going.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#187

Post by JamesBarney »

itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

I stopped using the windows for the same reason. I loved that I could buy a performant phone for $50 when my $200 Android feels sluggish. But I hated not having any apps.

Specifically I hated all the shitty apps that had flooded the app store because of their half baked promotions.

All of their promotions incentivized churning out a bunch of shitty apps. Like paying people $100 per app, this created a lot of crap in the app store to wade through to find quality apps.

Instead they should have matched revenue or paid an extra 5 cents per download. Something to incentivize a dev to write one good app instead of 5 throw away apps.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#188

Post by Spooky23 »

itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

They threw about $500k at my employer at the time to hire some Eastern European company to build an app. They ended up stringing something together that got deployed on like 10 phones.

The problem was that a big enterprise customer is clueless about mobile apps, and Microsft’s endemic NIH syndrome made it difficult to work with business systems that aren’t Microsoft platforms.

O365 is a great example... the office platform should be an amazing mobile platform that drives all sorts of interesting things. But as an O365 customer, Microsoft just uses it as a lever to push their MDM product (you cannot configure Office apps without Microsoft stuff).

MDM is a pure commodity play. Microsoft would rather made $4.99 month on Intune than capture business process on their platform, which is worth 10x more.

Meanwhile Apple treats everyone pretty equally, and you can actually get stuff done.

I said this 20 years ago and it is still true today... Microsoft should spin off Office, server and client into different companies. Office could be an exponentially more valuable cash cow without being dragged down by the shitshow of Windows. Windows on client is a legacy product providing solutions to problems that people don’t have. Office is fundamentaly a more valuable platform.

Where I work, PC users spend more time in Outlook any other application. Browser and Word account for about 50% and 25% less time on average. So why are we presenting this UI optimized for computing circa 1997 where people run lots of little apps? Apple got this right by making iOS very low touch.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#189

Post by WorldMaker »

ep103 wrote: post #106
shadowmint wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see. I think the netstandard -> all platforms approach, combined with the aggressive depreciation of old .Net 4.6.x versions is a road map for the future. Maintaining two entire release chains, the 4.x and the .Net core 2.x, is an impossible long term strategy. I would be absolutely astonished if the 4.x line is quietly folded away and depreciated ('unsupported') once the netstandard surface area means the code…

What the heck can replace winforms and wpf apps though? I've seen them promote at least 2 different technologies since the first time I heard WPF was dying, and both of them are dead already, so far as I can tell.

UWP's XAML stack is alive and growing. The cool "Fluent" stuff like acrylic brushes and active focus highlights want you to use UWP XAML, and while shiny things aren't necessarily a reason to pick a dev stack, they do seem signs of health in that dev stack.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#190

Post by mitchty »

ransom1538 wrote: post #77
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

"but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem" Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin. https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-a...

> Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.

Anecdote from a lot of my friends, a lot of use use flashcard type apps to help learn languages and things like memrise etc... Dictionary apps to get word translations and so on.

So I'm going to place that article under: perhaps true in general, but not overly constructive to my group of people.

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