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Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

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Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#61

Post by SlipperySlope »

Microsoft simply could not dictate to the telcos like they did to the PC manufacturers in the 1990s. The telcos decide what phones get sold to consumers. Kin, for example, was killed because no telco wanted it.

Telcos like Android - its free and they can skin it.

Microsoft has been arrogant and toxic to every one of the mobile phone manufactures that partnered with it.

It is ironic that Android, with its free software Linux kernel, is crushing Microsoft worldwide in the most dominating fashion!

If smartphones are true personal computers, then Microsoft is toast.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#62

Post by Spooky23 »

macspoofing wrote: post #18
martinced wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you. The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries. We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that p…

>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.

Microsoft existed in the PDA space to keep Palm from growing.

Lets face it, the secret sauce to smartphones from a technology POV is the web and web services. Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6, and thought that they had put the Internet problem to bed.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#64

Post by macspoofing »

Spooky23 wrote: post #62
macspoofing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.

Microsoft existed in the PDA space to keep Palm from growing. Lets face it, the secret sauce to smartphones from a technology POV is the web and web services. Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6, and thought that they had put the Internet problem to bed.

You can write a book on the number of missteps and missed opportunities Microsoft had in the last 10-15 years. They missed the boat on everything from search, to web-mail, to social networks, to digital music, to smartphones.

>Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6

I remember when that news hit slashdot like it was yesterday. I remember because I got really angry at Microsoft and their idiocy. I actually thought ie6 was a decent browser, but there was no fuckin chance it was going to be-all and end-all of browsers. It was also the day that I really started looking for an alternative. Soon after, I installed Firebird beta and never looked back.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#65

Post by yuhong »

Spooky23 wrote: post #62
macspoofing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.

Microsoft existed in the PDA space to keep Palm from growing. Lets face it, the secret sauce to smartphones from a technology POV is the web and web services. Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6, and thought that they had put the Internet problem to bed.

Disbanded the IE rendering engine team.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#66

Post by kabdib »

jug6ernaut wrote: post #2

No one involved in the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone should be satisfied, it was a complete failure. At the time Windows Mobile pretty much owned the Smart Phone market(unless you consider BB at the time smart phones, they were close to but not just IMO. No where near the freedom as WM). But over Windows Mobiles life time it completely stagnated, but even with that had a large following. With there…

The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen.

MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share.

I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions.

The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible.

Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#67

Post by pablasso »

kabdib wrote: post #66
jug6ernaut wrote: post #2

No one involved in the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone should be satisfied, it was a complete failure. At the time Windows Mobile pretty much owned the Smart Phone market(unless you consider BB at the time smart phones, they were close to but not just IMO. No where near the freedom as WM). But over Windows Mobiles life time it completely stagnated, but even with that had a large following. With there…

The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen. MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share. I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..…

That's really insightful.

The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#68

Post by olefoo »

bunderbunder wrote: post #21
kvb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various fa…

Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination. For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generat…

> collateral damage in an internal power struggle

Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#69

Post by ekianjo »

macspoofing wrote: post #57
ekianjo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PDA market was ridiculously small (I owned one and I hardly knew anyone else who did) and was not growing at the time. PDAs were pricey, and while they could do many of the things that the iPhone did later, most people did not see its value back then. Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

>Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million. What was the size of the smartphone market? I'd guess it wasn't that big either, certainly it isn't anywhere near present-day numbers. And yes, I am differentiating between "smartphone" and "cell phone" market. The former was small, the latter was huge. > Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never ai…

By the way, you may not be aware of this, but RIM had (and still has, somehow), a huge consumer following in certain countries like Indonesia because of the chat applications it provided ahead of the rest. Until not too long ago it was bigger than the iphone and Android phones there (I need to find a link for that, though...)
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