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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

#491

Post by dozzie »

criddell wrote: post #427
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 ?

Maybe there's a cautionary tale about being an early adopter here. I don't know if I would start a new project with MFC, but it was a fantastic decision in 1996. In a way, I think it's harder to pick technologies today for large projects. It seems like if something isn't new and growing steadily, it's stale and fading fast. What are the tools and frameworks with a long, healthy middle age ahead of them? I'm learning…

Erlang, for instance? Picking up a new shiny thing and complaining that it's not something with a proven track of backward compatibility is not a rational thing to do.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#492

Post by ghthor »

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…

The best thing a new phone platform could do is essentially create an App building framework like React Native that allows developers to build apps targeting the new platform and the existing platforms at the same time(maybe not as a first class citizen initially, but those platform devs and fill in the blanks). That's about the only way that, as an engineer, I"m going to give a shit about developing for your app platform. If I care, and I make cool apps, then the user base size doesn't matter, I'll still target it because it makes my life better as a developer.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#493

Post by xorcist »

chungy wrote: post #448
digi_owl wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't confuse the lack of modern mobile apps with any mobile apps. There was a thriving ecosystem around mobile apps at the time. Not only Windows Mobile and Blackberry but Symbian too, which I believe was the largest, and Treo.

There were many companies living on this stuff. Mobile data was still very expensive, which didn't change for a few more years, and touchscreens were small and crappy. So the market was mostly business logic and CRM apps because they were the ones that could afford it.

That changed when mobile data and big screens became cheap enough for consumers, but I think Apple was as confused about that as everyone else given the state of early iPhones.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#494

Post by pjc50 »

digi_owl wrote: post #408
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.

I wonder if that is what RH is gunning for by backing the likes of systemd and polkit. Especially as they get more and more attention from the military-industrial complex.

polkit is so obviously a system intended to replace Group Policy. But people have been doing this for decades and still not achieved widespread switchover from AD. You still have to piece it together yourself.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#495

Post by askvictor »

enos_feedler wrote: post #485

I think a big question now is will Microsoft build a smartphone product on top of Android? This will help them capture existing app ecosystem and enable them to provide "the best of Microsoft" for enterprise mobile customers. The cloud market is so important and it just seems strategically weak to not have a phone platform to connect with that. Google Cloud has Google Play Services and there is lots of opportunity th…

What Google has done with iOS and even Android (particularly with Samsung's play to break dependency on Google) might be where MS is heading. Google has decoupled their apps/services from the OS, and provided a consistent 'Google-y' UX (or working towards that anyway) across all of the platforms. MS seems to be in the way there, with Edge being released for both mobile platforms.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#496

Post by c3534l »

skc wrote: post #484

So that's Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft that failed with phones. I think it's safe to say we will never see a viable third option in mobile. Might as well start thinking of the next great paradigm shift but even there it's hard to see anyone out maneuvering Apple and Google.

Those are like the poster children of tech industry network effects. Apple was first, Google decoupled the OS from the hardware, and Windows came in two years after Google without the goodwill Google has. Amazon and Facebook are the same story. Too late, not hip enough to catch on with the cool kids.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#497

Post by ClassyJacket »

jasonlotito wrote: post #435
philliphaydon wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t matter. Subsequent iPhones are launched globally. Microsoft does not launch subsequent products globally. The surface takes many many months to reach many parts of Asia. Surface studio is only in a hand full of countries. Surface laptop is only in a handful of countries. Surface book is almost non existent. The only thing Microsoft makes that it launches well is the Xbox.

> It doesn’t matter. Yeah, I remember this argument. It depends on whether it benefits Apple or not. For example, when Apple moved off of Google for it's mapping, people were saying that this was just the first iteration, the first version of Maps, when it clearly wasn't, and that the fact that it lost features and information that were there before, people were okay with it because it was Apple's first map software…

It's not hard to see why Apple launching one iPhone in America only, a full decade ago, doesn't matter when the next nine iPhones came out everywhere.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#498

Post by tonyedgecombe »

narrator wrote: post #244
dtx1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. 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 and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally h…

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.

I'm not sure it requires a rewrite, the old stuff still works. The trouble is the constant churn is draining, I've pretty much abandoned the platform because of it. We keep hearing about new JavaScript frameworks but we had exactly the same from MS: win32 => MFC => WTL => VB => WFC => Winforms => WPF => Metro => UWP, no doubt there is something else just around the corner.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#499

Post by garganzol »

hirsin wrote: post #430
WorldMaker wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot distribute .APPX You can distribute .APPX. You can't distribute an unsigned .APPX and guarantee users can use it, but you haven't been able to do that with .EXE in years either. > I cannot run .APPX. Double clicking an .APPX installs it. > I cannot run .EXE. You can include Win32 .EXEs in .APPX packages now. There's a bunch of tools to support just that scenario called the "Desktop Bridge". > I cannot run…

Launch from Layout is an installation method that allows you to take loose files (an unpacked appx zip) and tell the OS 'treat this as an installed app'. You can do this with a couple WinRT APIs, Device Portal, or WinAppDeployCmd which comes with the SDK. I own dev mode for Windows 10, and can confirm that these issues have been always solved and recently received more improvements, although the documentation may be…

>a couple of WinRT APIs, WinAppDeployCmd

Any hints or sample for Launch from Layout? Yes, I read the docs. This question haunts me for 4 years and I still have no answer. Please please please.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#500

Post by ClassyJacket »

dc443 wrote: post #472
pjmlp wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it a few more OS releases and Android will be the only one supporting GL.

Would Apple really drop OpenGL? They are smarter than that... They could do it, though. They could.

They might not remove it any time soon, but they could easily never update it.
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