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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

#441

Post by smitherfield »

digi_owl wrote: post #397
burnte wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone…

And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5. Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform. Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.

> Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.

Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#442

Post by nova22033 »

nathantotten wrote: post #121
nova22033 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?

You have to consider this in the context at the time. Yes it would have been expensive, but Microsoft was investing BILLIONS into Windows Phone. Microsoft and partners spent something like $700 million dollars just on marketing for the launch of Windows Phone 7[1,2]. To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish. And I am not saying they should have done…

> the top 25 apps for mobile at the time

This list keeps changing every month. Remember Pokemon Go?

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#443

Post by r00fus »

freehunter wrote: post #377
gwbas1c wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of the Microsoft side of the story is that they tried many times to get into mobile. They had a full-powered smartphone, including apps and a web browser, for many years before the iPhone. I remember going to a store around 2005 or 2006 and deciding, "if I can get slashdot to load, I'm going to buy this phone." I couldn't figure it out! I don't know if I just couldn't figure it out, or the phone was misconf…

>they tried many times to get into mobile Tried? When the iPhone came out, Windows Mobile had already existed for 7 years and had 40%+ of the smartphone market. I'd say that's a little more than "tried".

Just a reminder: the "smartphone market" was a pitifully small creature when compared to the behemoth that iOS and Android service today... I wonder why that is?

It's a painful reminder that Microsoft doesn't do "blue ocean" strategies very well. They need someone to compete against and dominate over and coopt the marketshare.

All their successes involve "parleying" a beachhead on someone else's turf (VisiCalc/Lotus123 -> MS Excel) into dominance or buying outright the dev team (Delphi -> VB 4/5/Studio).

Microsoft wanted to "evolve" the PC into a mobile device, but they could never create something from scratch that didn't smell like Windows.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#444

Post by Sephr »

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…

There's an obvious incentive they haven't tried: guaranteeing a lower app store margin like 1-2% instead of the 30% cut that Microsoft currently takes.

Google and Apple have already convinced a sufficient number of users users that their app stores are essential, so they can continue to charge whatever they like.

Microsoft didn't have the same luxury, so they needed to change this. They never made the change and it's too late now, but I think if they did this a few years ago they would be in a better position.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#445

Post by chefkoch »

notatoad wrote: post #403
dabockster wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Active Directory. I mean, I haven't found another platform yet that allows a sysadmin to control 10,000+ computers at the OS level simultaneously via one checkbox. Clear area for disruption here. But it's IT stuff, so no one wants to touch it because it's not a cool selfie app.

Sysadmins aren't big fans of disruption either. You could build the greatest active-directory replacement in the world and no IT department would touch it with a ten foot pole because it isn't what they're used to.

> Sysadmins aren't big fans of disruption either. You could build the greatest active-directory replacement in the world and no IT department would touch it with a ten foot pole because it isn't what they're used to.

It's all fun and games untill 2000 users cannot log into their machines because your new shiny active directory replacement didn't work.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#446

Post by khedoros1 »

thanatropism wrote: post #404
untog wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a semi-contradiction in your post that I think speaks to some of the issues MS had: "It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported " "half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android" As someone who played around with WP7 when it first came out, I'd argu…

My wife had several Windows Phones in succession. Her use of a phone is very practical: contacts, texting, weather information. All of this was available at a glance in a much much better way than either Android or the iPhone have. It was a better business UI. It was harder to use if you had many apps. But seriously, having a phone open to the equivalent of Windows 3.1's Program Manager (which is what Android and iPh…

The iPhone opens to something like the Program Manager (but with little numbers showing which apps have active notifications).

Android opens to something like a Desktop, with some combination of Widget apps and/or app shortcuts. Mine is configured to show a clock, mini calendar, and weather. Incoming e-mails, SMSes, or other messages are visible in the notification bar. I could configure it to show me little previews of messages, but I chose not to.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#447

Post by maxxxxx »

cjsuk wrote: post #250
narrator wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.

Yes. They also rewrite stuff half way through and tell you it's the same project just to piss you off. Windows Workflow and Windows Communication Foundation for example. I'm really disinclined to invest in any of their technology because my headspace is finite and I want to deliver business value, not change the unworn carpets once a year.

Same here. I can't even imagine how 3rd party tool developers feel. Let's say you have a grid component. In the last few years you had to do a Winforms and several XAML versions( WPF, WinRT, Silverlight and now UWP). The XAML look superficially the same but all have their set of weird limitations and bugs. I am definitely done with Windows desktop.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#448

Post by chungy »

digi_owl wrote: post #397
burnte wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone…

And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5. Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform. Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.

I assume the iphone was "more fancy featurephone" due to the lack of 3rd party apps?

I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by the fact they had an email client and a (relative to the time) high-resolution screen to read and write emails on.

It was a different market in 2007. The idea that a successful smartphone required an app ecosystem was unheard of.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#449

Post by maxxxxx »

WorldMaker wrote: post #431
je42 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OMG. MFC ? You mean Microsoft Foundation Classes ? mmh. that stuff is still supported ? eventhough there was/is all the .NET crazyness. That's actually pretty good of MS. I guess the main question is: how do you in advance if you got a MFC-like library from MS with 20+ year support vs a library like Sliverlight where they drop support and let you alone with a migration to a different platform ?

As someone that worked on migrations to Silverlight and then to UWP, I still don't understand why these are seen as such big deals. The APIs were more similar than they were different and XAML is still XAML. (The only big loss from Silverlight was being able to browser-host it, but even then that was probably worth losing for the greater good to avoid terrible plugin websites.) The only thing they really dropped was…

You couldn't just port from WPF to Silverlight. They took away tons of features. WinRT was even worse. No idea about UWP but I don't care anymore.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#450

Post by kpxxx »

shanev wrote: post #123
phkahler wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you say that without knowing 1) what the app is and 2) what tools it was built with? There's also the problem of ongoing maintenance on multiple platforms. In the best case, it was written with a dual platform toolkit (iOS and Android) and MS adds a 3rd platform to that toolkit to make it easy to port and maintain all three. Even if that were all true, it's won't be for every developer and you'll still have p…

1) http://www.drumkit.co 2) Built in Objective-C with a custom audio engine in C++. Audio latency on Android was horrible at that time, MS was probably worse. It would have been a terrible app on those platforms if I did port it. This was before cross-platform toolkits existed. It needed to be a native app with low level access audio to hardware. I wasn't going to make an app where you tap a drum and wait 100ms to he…

> MS was probably worse.

Not that this counters anything you said nor that relevant to this topic, but as a nerd I am genuinely curious if this was true. I used to write lowlat audio stuff for iOS so I was well aware of the situation Android vs iOS (and because of my large interest in audio Android in general always makes me puke in my mouth a little -- like it is one of those neat little hidden indicators that while Apple is a hardware company, Google is fundamentally an ad company -- they really don't give a shit other than prioritizing ad delivery).

Anyway, Windows itself obviously has solid low-lat audio services, was it really that bad in the mobile stuff?

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