The best part, Nokia gets shafted in all of this. Nokia got dragged along in this clown show and we lose out on getting great hardware. Not to mention the software side of things that drowned as Nokia got torpedoed. Here's hoping they can rise from the ashes again. Maybe their spin off services like here maps are a sign of life.
Edit: Maybe I speak from a position of ignorance about the industry. But I also remember thinking how greatly awesome it would have been if I could run Android on the new Lumia hardware. I also remember the fact that Nokia was worth 30 bn before the new ceo, ex microsoft employee, came in and within years it was left worth 9 bn; pop culture facts I suppose.
Nokia didn't get shafted. They got $7.2 billion USD for the phone unit that was losing money at an incredible rate in 2013. They used that money to buy Alcatel-Lucent and now they're a major force in networks.
I honestly believe Nokia would have been bankrupt by now if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out. And if Nokia hadn't adopted Windows Phone, they wouldn't have had Ballmer's ear to convince him to sign on such a bad deal. Elop deserves more recognition for this manoeuvre than he gets.
I don't think anyone ever called it a Microsoft bailout. And the people who lost their jobs, both at Microsoft and Nokia back then, wouldn't consider this such a rewarding, positive thing.
Speaking as former employee, I see the board as the ones where the blame actually lies.
They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
Has anybody told the story of what happened at Nokia?
I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering.
Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?
My view on that is that Nokia has always been a hardware company with a weak software culture. They weren't able to write software of the complexity required to compete with iOS, so they acquired Symbian first (yes they did that after iPhone was already in the market) and Qt later. Neither avenue produced something that could compete on the market fast enough, so the board hired Elop to fix it with Windows Mobile.
It's common. Look at Samsung with Tizen, or basically any pre-Android/iOS mobile manufacturer. The skills needed to make software and hardware are very different. Apple is one of the few companies in the world that successfully built combined teams.
You can't blame Microsoft for Nokia, Nokia screwed themselves over. They never considered the importance off software, hardware was always number one for Nokia. Even when the iPhone came out they laughed and didn't change tack.
They had all the money, all the opportunity, and they thought if they keep pumping out the same stuff, people will stay with them.
> They never considered the importance off software, hardware was always number one for Nokia.
Oh, but they pretended to. Just like Samsung today.
Top management really needs to have people with deep and true understanding about software.
And perhaps top management needs also someone with a good sense about design. Many of them seem think they're Steve Jobs... Their failing tends to always be very consumer oriented (meaning they're not makers, maybe they're just using nicely designed products) and shallow understanding of the problem and especially possibility / innovation space.
Samsung, our new Nokia. I wonder if next chapters play out likewise.
Nokia was seem like an old generation mobile manufacturer after Google released Android to the world, computing was then staggering that both Apple and Samsung are competing and own countless patented and fabrication is quite a profitable for their survival. Most consumers will go either Samsung or iPhone.
Everybody who knew about smartphones at the time knew about them. A couple people on HN who aren't in that group doesn't mean 'nobody knew about them'.
I had an iPhone 4 at one point and the existing Nokia devices were still able to compete, thanks to Opera also on the browser side. In fact I remember switching back from the 4 due to missing features and several annoyances.
Yeah I know, I also had the N8 among other models (but I had switched back to the E72).
Some things were better about the iPhone, notably the UX, browsing and the app ecosystem which was starting to pick up (but was nowhere near what we have today).
Some thing were worse, and this is where many people seem to have developed selective memory issues. In particular the E72 didn't drop calls if one held it wrong, had a battery life at least double that of the iPhone and was less than half its price.
The N8 had a great camera and free offline maps. With Opera mobile it had a pretty damn good browsing experience. It was far from a complete dud.
The N9 could compete toe to toe with the 4S also on the UX, but by then it was too late. Nokia didn't have the foresight and guts to kill Symbian and bet the company on Maemo/Meego while they still had the possibility to build an ecosystem around it.
Apple invested all their effort into the iPhone and incrementally turned it from a good browsing device albeit average smartphone into a superb mobile computer while Nokia was starting and restarting four projects to compete with it.
Yeah, Opera mobile and mini, arguably the most innovative mobile browsers ever invented. I had a Sony Ericsson P1i and was enjoying the mobile web thanks to Opera just fine.
Safari was impressive back then for sure, but feature-wise it's pretty bad even today.
I dont understand why no one else has picked up on the crazy good camera components yet. I had 1040(the 42 megapixel monster) and I have to say being able to take great looking pictures improved my quality of life. I was able to enjoy a hobby anywhere at anytime and document life in a much more candid 'real' way.
In 2011 I worked for a cell phone store, and a Nokia sales rep came in to demo a new phone. His one quote that cracked me up "We'll never win over the niche of people who want iPhones."
It was obvious to anyone with eyes and fingers that iPhones were far superior to what Nokia was creating. Some random features I remember him showing: you could plug a mouse into the phone and it would vibrate during walking directions. They probably realized they couldn't make a better product, so they tried to make a differentiated one with some things that people don't care about.
The fascinating thing is that Nokia knew. They knew right from the beginning. This "different phones for different niches" was just a desperate marketing spiel to save face.
This is a letter a finnish journalist sent to Nokia in 2008. He was blown away by the iPhone! The letter was circulated internally and different managers called him to explain Nokias strategy. He meets up with the bosses and the following ensues:
----------------
The manager started to brief me on the backgrounds of Nokia's strategy. The idea was that people are different, and therefore, they need different kinds of telephones.
I became agitated: "The kind of person who wants to use a bad telephone does not exist!", I said.
THIS SPARKED AN argument. I explained in different ways how dreadful my new telephone was, and the manager spoke in its defence.
All of a sudden he went silent. He looked directly in my eyes and said: "This conversation is in confidence, isn't it?"
I assured him that it was.
He continued:
"I agree completely with everything that you wrote in your letter and with what you have said now."
I was astounded.
"I agree completely with you and I want to apologise on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you."
----------------
5 Years later (2013) he meets the manager again. He tells a story so disarmingly cute Apple should print it as advertising:
----------------
He told me that when the iPhones came out in the United States in the summer of 2007, the situation was followed at Nokia with keen interest. A large number of iPhones were immediately delivered to Nokia's head offices in Espoo by courier.
The manager took his own iPhone home that same evening. He studied it so enthusiastically that it caught the interest of his four-year-old daughter.
As an experiment, he gave the telephone to his daughter, and she learned to use it immediately.
In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question:
"Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?"
It was at that was the moment that the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.
Sure, but their hardware was always great and their software could have been Android.
Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? In the early days of Android, they were the go-to vendor for a close-to-stock Android experience. That could have been Nokia.
Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
> Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware?
I'm looking at HTC - what I see is a company that did great with Android for a short while, then got chewed up as Apple and Samsung ran away with the high end of the market while the Chinese manufacturers gobbled up the bottom end. All the "Nokia should've gone with Android!" comments I see around the internet never try to explain how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola).
> Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
> how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola)
Back in the day Nokia had good hardware, a 40% marketshare, brand recognition, a loyal customer base and a wide distribution network. Certainly noone knows what Android could have done for them, but theoretically they were at a better position to take advantage of it than HTC/Sony/Motorola.
I don't know about HTC Androids, but I've had about 3 Motorola phones and they've been both expensive and low quality. That's not a winning combination, irregardless of what your competition does.
For example I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 1st gen. A phone that when I bought it, I had to replace it in warranty because the color temperature of the screen was uneven and extremely annoying. And I paid at the time the price for a high end phone and got a subpar camera, a screen that doesn't have the contrast of other phones in its generation and a design that feels cheap and bulky. Well, at least it has stock Android on it.
I got basically fooled in buying it, thinking it is a Nexus.
And I could say similar things about Sony. And about LG for that matter. For instance LG had big hits in LG G3 and in Nexus 4 & 5. My wife wanted an LG G5, but apparently it gets overheated, with the customer rep telling us they've had multiple returns. So she went with the Galaxy S7 Edge, because it was the safe choice.
Here's the big problem: if we are talking about exceptional hardware, none of these companies produce good products consistently. Do you know who does that? Apple and Samsung. And back in the day Nokia as well.
Well, since 2010 I've only had two smartphones, both HTC, and in fact the first still works flawlessly (it's just too slow for me with its 768 MB RAM, especially as I use a lot of apps - a coworker of mine who bought it at the same time in 2010 still uses it daily though).
My friends and relatives with Samsung phones have had around 4 of them since that time because they always break.
HTC got started on Windows Mobile phones, and I'd argue that's where a good portion of their initial popularity carried over from. Their HTC Sense Android skinning was basically an Android port of TouchFlo 3D from Windows Mobile.
>Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware?
Lose money on their phone business?
>Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
Not so sure about it. Even the best VR headset would be a niche product for the next 5 years at least. At best it can get to Wii kind of success for HTC, but that's not sustainable. And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
You could say this about basically anything for any company. The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
Sure you can. Nokia was pretty entrenched in the phone business in 2007. Sony has very diverse revenue sources, yet most of them have dwindled due to competition.
Maemo was the 2nd-worst piece of crap anyone ever ran on a phone (just losing out to OpenMoko). It was a disaster. At the time it was competing against BlackBerry OS, that ran rings around it.
Edit: and by the time Maemo was actually running on a _phone_ it was head-to-head against iOS and WebOS. I think you could actually make a good case for WebOS being the greatest ever, but compared to those two Maemo was awful.
What specific concerns did you have with Maemo? Both the N900 and N9 combined "real Linux" with a handful of mass-market apps like Skype and maps, with the N900 having both a hardware keyboard and touchscreen.
Can't touch anything, touch targets are all too small, so you are forced to use the stylus. Visually it looks like the love child of BeOS and KDE. can't tell from a static screenshot but everything was unbelievably slow.
Yes, that appears to be from the N8xx. The N800 was contemporaneous with the iPhone so I don't feel this is an unfair comparison. It shows how Nokia had the notion of touchscreen UIs completely wrong.
I still insist it's an unfair comparison because the linux tablets were a minor sideshow to the symbian phones. Then of course it's a fair comparison in that symbian wasn't great either, but at least they didn't just minimally repurpose a desktop UI.
Did you ever try syncing contacts with a Maemo? Because if you think going into redpill mode and configuring a command line sync so you can get your address book syncing with anything represents anything than a steam mound of UX shit, you are either actually insane, or so out of touch with what any normal human might think of as a reasonable experience that you might as well be.
The chief feature I miss on Android is the ability to user rsync to syncrhonise its content with my PC in a reasonable way. I can rsync to the phone -- but none of the apps are allowed to read the directory thus synced.
Maybe IOs is more forgiving. But how would a terminal emulator help?
Sounds wonderful reat if you enjoy GPRS latency and typing code with soft keyboards. I'd also assume that working with local peripherals work great with that setup?
You're insane. Maemo was fantastic, and completely blew everything away that was out at the time the N900 was released. iOS was awful at the time, and in its nth generation of being awful. WebOS wasn't bad at all, but I'm not seeing the vast difference between it and Maemo that you see (with no explanation), and I was running both.
My main memory of Maemo (I ran an N900 for close to a year, my first smartphone after a couple of Motorola feature phones) is that the features I would have needed to get a decent user experience were never completed by Nokia. There was never a proper app store, the navigation app was close to useless, it didn't integrate well with Nokia's desktop software, etc. And then they just abandoned it.
As for the OS itself, I just remember being surprised at how what seemed (naively) to me to be a lot of RAM for a small device just wasn't enough. Hardly a fault that was unique to Maemo, though. So much bloatware today...
Nokia sold their Here mapping division to a German automobile conglomerate. They have a big presence in the network infrastructure market. I think they recently dipped their toes back into the consumer market by acquiring Withings, a wearable products company.
I'm amazed MS have dont this with before a genuine attempt at phone that docks and becomes your PVC.
Microsoft are so well placed to create and distribute what is bound to become a popular from factor. This would work on so many levels. The light-weight basic consumer that doesn't need a gaming/ or other high power rig at home. Developing countries where people can't afford a laptop and high-end phone could now get a phone plus a screen/keyboard at home. And the biggest sell is at the enterprise level. Companies could issue phones only and have a heap of docking stations. It wouldn't suit everyone but many would.
Time to re-visit Ubuntu Touch and see how they are getting along I guess.
The idea of an x86 PC/phone is essentially dead because of Intel.
"Intel’s plans to discontinue its Atom chips for phones and some tablets may not have killed the dream of a Microsoft Surface phone—just the piece of it that made it so enticing.
In the wake of a restructuring that relegated the PC to just another connected device, Intel confirmed Friday that it has cancelled its upcoming SoFIA and Broxton chips. That leaves Intel with just one Atom chip, Apollo Lake, which it had slated for convertible tablets.
...fans of the platform have long hoped for a phone that could run native Win32 legacy apps as well as the new UWP platform that Microsoft has made a central platform of Windows 10. The assumption was that this would require a phone running on an Intel Atom processor. Intel’s decision eliminates that option."
Pity, I would've bought one without hesitation. In theory, one could have a ARM-based Chromebook/phone or WinRT/phone but there's not enough software out there for ChromeOS or UWP to make it attractive.
>Microsoft are so well placed to create and distribute what is bound to become a popular from factor.
There already is a popular form factor that companies issue, and folks in developing countries purchase (in addition to us on HN): the smartphone.
If you're not intensely inputting typed data, there's no need for a keyboard. And if you are, then likely your company issues/reimburses-for a device with a keyboard.
But otherwise, this is why smartphones are ubiquitous. Many more people are content consumers than content creators.
And for those who want a bigger screen, a tablet works just fine. Assuming both your phone and tablet have the same OS, most things should be automatically synced between the two.
I have often wondered why MS hasn't been able to grab a significant chunk of the smartphone market by courting enterprise. Most people don't care about all the apps that are available to Android and Apple on their work phones and you would think being able to run the same operating system across all of your companies PCs and smartphones would be a major draw.
Just because it runs Windows doesn't mean it runs great on it. A lot of enterprise apps are archaic (over 10+ years), desktop only and used by only a few hundred to a few thousand users. There's very little incentive to remake a desktop app into a mobile app so using the desktop version on a Windows phone doesn't make sense.
It hasn't helped that so few of their phones are available on Verizon, which is the largest carrier enterprises predominantly use in the US. I haven't ever seen a large business talk about switching their carrier to get a specific phone, though I guess it happens sometimes, somewhere.
Yeah, I should have mentioned but that's what I meant by "genuine attempt". They never really pushed this. These things dont typically happen organically. Even the first iPhone sales were pretty average.
I actually bought a cheap Lumia to test this release out but on release they decided to drop my phone (which they already announced as compatible) from the upgrade so I never got to try it out.
I've used it to Miracast things to my TV (via the Xbox One), and nearly gave a PowerPoint presentation from it once. That's where I see it being most real world useful is for last minute presentations where I already have easy access to my .pptx files on my phone and can Miracast directly to some TV or projector.
It's also the interesting thing here too about how Continuum is in competition with the UWP that enables it: in my case all my devices run Windows 10 and have access to all the same apps. With roaming and cloud services I can just pull up that app on any other device and switch devices freely. I rarely need to Continuum cast to some other device within my home because that app and that data is already accessible there...
So I could see saving the day with a last minute PowerPoint presentation somewhere where the only laptop I thought to bring was my phone, but that is mostly it. If there were coffee shops or hot desk spaces or hotel rooms with Miracast-capable screens and bluetooth keyboards scattered around the country you could see it being even handier for things like random Word document writing on the go for the traveler that doesn't want to bring a laptop everywhere...
So I've liked it for what I've used it for and I can think of scenarios where I would use it more, but I find day to day I don't use it much.
Yeah, wife and I watch netflix / youtube in edge on continuum all the time on my lumia 950 (great combo with t-mobile binge/on). It really works well as wireless pc mouse / remote with the wireless display adapter from bed (seemless, 1-touch, no issues for me). I don't use it for actual computing since I have surface / macbook for that.
If your connected to a docking station for monitor access then you don't need to worry about battery life. Other than that windows does not really take much power in laptop mode. Smartphones have surpassed low end laptops for a while in CPU / RAM. It's just not an x86 CPU.
If you mean the normal smartphone 2-3days standby + 6 hours use then that's a non issue with a standard desktop OS (Win, OS X, Linux). The problem in making a laptop OS usable with a smartphone form factor.
If you want 18+ hours watching YouTube then nobody does that in a cellphone form factor.
I'm skeptical, as my current iPhone 5S can't manage 2 full days without charging, usually in wifi range, and very little video. Mail, calendar, iMessage, light web, probably less than 20 minutes talk per day on average.
Granted, it's 2 years old (or so), but I have to believe that Apple developed iOS with an eye towards optimizing battery life rather than adapting the UI of OSX.
Yes Lumia 950, 950XL support Continuum today. No, they aren't x64 phones and don't support x64 apps. They aren't restricted to the app store, you could sideload UWP apps if you had them. UWP apps these days are "full windows apps" for all intents and purposes these days. There may not be as many UWP apps right now as there are the long legacy of Win32 apps and the deep wells of Android and iOS apps, but there are some very good UWP apps out there, some of which are very useful in Continuum.
"Let's take phones first. Right now, we're selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they'll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace, and, let's see."
It's off-putting how he mentions "business won't like this". Like, they're the only market that matters. This aligns pretty well with my negative experiences with Microsoft products. It's an all businessmen/sales mentality.
Maybe it was hard for them to see that consumer hardware/software would become the predominant force in modern tech.
It should have been obvious from RIM's early success in the consumer market, for which they didn't try for or really support, that smartphones were well on their way to being a major consumer product.
Microsoft themselves used the strategy of Windows at home and at school to sell to Windows to businesses (and vice-versa).
I assume you foresaw what would happen, bought Apple stock and you're posting this from your yacht. Because it was very reasonable to say that in 2007, and he even included a "let's see" at the end.
What would one expect? For him to cower in fear and start crying? It took many iterations for the iPhone to catch up and many screw-ups from competitors, Nokia in particular.
I did wonder that to myself as I stood in the rain yesterday trying to compose an email on a damp screen with the phone typing garbage due to conflicting inputs.
Touch screens are great for consumption and lousy for creation. Even this comment required eleven corrections to the swiped words. Twelve.
Honestly, when iPhone first came out it was pretty much a toy. No apps? Even dumbphones could run J2ME stuff!
It's only when iPhones got the App Store that things got serious.
But anyone who didn't see the danger of that "toy" running actual apps, or didn't see the need to revamp their user interface to beat, ended up losing.
By "reacted the way they did" you mean "bought all of them as they hit the shelves"?
Apple captured 20% of the smartphone market the first quarter the iPhone was released, outselling Nokia, Palm, and Motorola combined.
Nobody was seemingly all that upset they couldn't play yet another crappy J2ME version of "snake" that took 45 seconds to load. Roughly 0% of consumers knew what the hell J2ME even was. They did, however, see a cell phone with an actual web browser instead of some low-res, Javascriptless WAP disappointment. Not to mention a YouTube client and a decent camera plus photo app.
iPhone was great before apps. The full featured touch browser was a revelation. You could look up anything, from anywhere. I still spend 70% of my time in the iPhone browser, not in apps.
You have selective memory. They did in fact lower the price, but they were literally selling them as fast as they could make them at the time. They sold over a million in the first three months, and ran out of the 4GB model entirely in that period.
Six years ago Microsoft held a funeral for the iPhone, saying that they would have 80% market share and iPhone would have 2%. The main problem is arrogance.
When Bill Gates was at the helm he skated a fine line of legalities in order to build a sustained monopoly. The ecosystem continued to evolve as his priorities shifted away from Microsoft and none of his replacements were able to adapt as dynamically as Bill did.
Ballmer is the pinnacle example of this arrogance without evidence attitude. It's like the ghost of corporate Bill Gates will guide and give luck no matter how stupid the decision they make.
It's sad because Microsoft could've evolved gracefully into a behemoth larger than Apple and Google, if only there had been an ounce of humility after Bill Gates left.
> It's sad because Microsoft could've evolved gracefully into a behemoth larger than Apple and Google
Why is it sad? It's enough that MS monopoly still plagues the desktop. I'd say it's good they didn't manage to bring the same sickening monopolistic lock-in to mobile. That said, current big participants have lot's of their own problems.
Yep. Android is also becoming "another Windows" in a sense. For instance, good luck finding drivers with blobs for anything except Bionic, if open drivers aren't available.
I don't run Linux as my main desktop OS for the same reason - drivers.
It seems like you lose either way.
I don't feel locked in at all with Windows though. Never have. With Apple, I feel locked into their hardware. With Microsoft? What am I locked into exactly?
I'm using Linux as my desktop system (including for gaming) and drivers situation feels OK. Unless you use some really weird hardware, Linux drivers aren't usually a problem. Especially with Intel being pretty open and AMD opening things up (GPU wise), it's getting even better.
There is a parallel universe where Windows 8 was the beginning of Windows as a flavor of Linux and the attempt to create a new ecosystem with Windows 10 never manifested as Microsoft became a new creature.
It's sad that a company with numerous intelligent and talented people fails repeatedly. It's a waste of their efforts.
As it stands Microsoft has basically become a staple commodity. Like proctor & gamble peddling soap products Microsoft peddles products for small/medium corporations. Xbox is the only thing keeping a foothold in the consumer space anymore. But they continue to make predictable money at it.
Despite the way it seems living in San Francisco, Apple's market share on desktop is under 10% (via browsing statistics). And Linux and Chrome OS have nearly an order of magnitude less market share.
Windows is still, for all intents and purposes, completely dominant.
Yeah and half of all humans on the planet will own a smart phone within the next 5 years. That's an order of magnitude more than will ever own a desktop/laptop. 1/3 or so will be iOS devices, around 1.5 billion and will represent 90% of all profit available. iOS commands a huge lead in enterprise sales, 75-80% in the US market.
Apple skated to where the puck was going, not where it already was. Microsoft was too busy servicing the cash cow (and fomenting internal politics) to allow any disruptions. They had already lost the next great battle the day the iPhone was released.
Google's Android only survived because they pulled the mother of all pivots the day of the iPhone announcement and immediately poured all their efforts into copying iOS. (Remember: Android started life as a Blackberry clone!) None of this is controversial - the original Android team members have confirmed it in multiple interviews over the years.
What Microsoft is doing now is extremely smart. They know they lost the mobile war and are moving on to the next battlefield: Cloud services. They're milking Windows on the desktop as they make the transition but it's just a smoke screen to buy time. Open sourcing technology, supporting Linux, etc are all moves designed to get them customers for Azure. They'll now happily sell you SQL Server for Linux licenses, or a subscription for Office on iPad.
Well, if we're talking about the long game, let's continue following that puck :)
As smartphones become more and more popular, they reach further and further down towards groups of people who can't afford iOS devices (unless you're counting second hand devices). I don't really see Apple's % of the market ever going up.
As the market matures and the hardware reaches "good enough" levels, the overwhelming majority of smartphones used will be the equivalent of the "beige boxes" of old (from the PC world). On top of that, the app competition is becoming so cutthroat that app prices will probably continue to go down (per app).
So, long story short: Apple will probably never enjoy a bigger share of the smartphone market than it did in the past and most of the competition will be around hardware and software with razor thin margins.
Meanwhile, more and more people from developing countries will start working in companies which use overwhelmingly... Windows desktops and associated software.
They will also use and pay for various services, some of which, as you noted, will be hosted on... Azure.
Microsoft's main cash cows will never dry up. Companies want/are willing/are able to pay for software.
I think that the longer term threat for Microsoft is Amazon, not Apple.
If you're working on any cloud software backend, windows is probably your third choice for development environment, and I see it really unlikely to change.
I see office software being commoditized instead. Then even the business guys can move off windows. If only google had some motivation improving docs. Maybe that hits another cultural wall. An engineering driven company can't produce tools for creating beautiful content.
As an example, at least for graph production, Excel seems to be the common software. It's pretty hard to get decent looking stuff compared to some old fashioned software that were used to create graphs earlier before that.
There used to be specialists doing the graphs for various printed materials. Now it's all made by the marketers, consultants or number crunchers themselves. Of course the quality has been so bad ever since that happened, but nobody seems to care. Even designers don't really understand much about graphs.
Yes, but with the convergence of laptops/tablets with Surface like devices, but actually have a win there.
Using iOS or Android on a tablet + keyboard isn't really the same experience as being able to use all the usual Windows applications if I want to, specially Visual Studio on the go.
However they are just pivoting like IBM did when they lost the PC market.
Regarding ChromeOS I never saw them here in Europe besides occasionall units at big surface stores. And they usually stay there for weeks before they vanish. It is quite easy to check if it is the same one, if they don't lock it.
I never saw any trace of the success they appear to have in US.
That doesn't seem like arrogance to me. "It’s a great way for teams that have worked overtime to create a kick-ass product blow off steam and have a little fun." It's a lighthearted morale booster. What's the big deal?
Taken alone it could be viewed as light hearted. Taken in the context of their past behavior it's another example of arrogance. Look at what Ballmer said about Google and Eric Sshmidt in the early days. Look at their complete mismanagement of mobile. They always believed they could just swoop in and win the market. How else can you explain the many years after iPhone was launched for them to launch a competitive mobile OS. I would call their approach to mobile an embarrassment. How could the worlds largest software company release such crap for so long? How could they go to market with a confusing array of mobile options (looking at you RT)? They thought they could win just because of past performance, and thus had no sense of urgency or humility, and that is why I think this is arrogant.
The parade included an impromptu marching band of Windows Phone team members, roller skaters, a unicycle, costumes, and a few home-made floats, including a hearse for competitors.
You say "is" as though they haven't changed CEO's, undergone a complete organization rehaul, and oriented toward cloud services in the ensuing six years.
Not quite. Terry Myerson was the head of the Windows Phone division at the time of that parade and its subsequent failure in the market and Terry Myerson is now in charge of the entire Windows division, including desktop (i.e. Windows 10) and mobile devices.
That's because the Windows division is in "milk it and wind it down mode". Windows is no longer the favored child so they need some rube to keep the gravy train running as they pivot everyone else to the next big thing.
Windows won't go away but will just become less relevant. I doubt Microsoft even cares if Apple takes 80% marketshare in desktop/laptop PCs... as long as people keep buying Office licenses and using services running on Azure they'll make a ton of money and everyone wins.
The mobile race is over. Apple and Google won, we are way too far along in the hockey stick graph to leave any oxygen for further competitors. The only question left for anyone else is how much money they want to lose before they give up.
This is a very good point. These are the fruits of past coming to bear, it would be interesting to see where Microsoft ends up in a few years with Satya Nadella
You have to do such things to improve moral of your people. There is a good chance we will be saying exact same thing about SolarCity, Tesla, Uber and many others.
It's sad if this happens, because I bought a used two year old Windows Phone, and it's more pleasant to use than any phone on the market today. And given that it gets updates the same day as desktop PCs, and doesn't wait for any manufacturer or carrier approvals, is probably one of the most secure.
On my carrier, Verizon, we have almost no choices. There's iPhone, there's three dozen identical Android phones with different brand names, and a couple two year old Windows Phones. Not a lot of choice in the market now, and certainly not going to get any better if Microsoft exits.
It's sort of amazing how nice it is to use. Super fast startup time, super fast performance, very smooth user experience. Great camera. Not many apps, but that's not a big deal for me.
I truly believe a lot of people would switch if they spent a week on one, but that is never gonna happen.
It takes a lot of research to find the winners. I just bought another brand new Sony Xperia Z3 Compact for 220$ because the newer Z5 Compact doesn't compare well for being double the price.
I don't care about Microsoft, but it's a real shame what happened to Nokia. The phones were rugged, feature packed and were willing to sacrifice form in order to gain function. They had thick, chunky phones just so the battery life would be awesome.
It's a myth that companies can dominate every segment if only they'd execute better. Search, mobile, desktop, social, cloud, enterprise, productivity, streaming, VR, etc - there's no scenario under which Microsoft was going to own all of them, even ignoring the obvious anti-trust issues that would have guaranteed they couldn't be Apple. It's extraordinarily difficult for one company to dominate two major segments in tech.
Besides, Microsoft practically is Apple.
Apple market cap: $571 billion, and heading down, with a business that will continue contracting as they're pushed out of China
Microsoft market cap: $438 billion, and rising again
Azure by itself will end up being more valuable than the iPad and Mac businesses combined (both of which are declining).
By that time, though, it was hard to trust Microsoft. They had screwed so many little companies over the years. On the consumer side, Windows was phoning home all the time. Apple and Google seemed so - nice and innocent, I guess. Of course, they spy on their customers in a way Bill Gates only dreamed of in the 90s, but at least they paid off their competitors instead of just outright stealing their products the way MS did.
This is a warning for any big company. Ignore the new stuff, and you will end up paying. Microsoft were fortunate to have lots of other revenue streams, Nokia and BB were not.
That is why you see Facebook so eager to buy new competing companies before they get huge, they know a lot of young people are not moving to facebook, so they want are going where the new kids are going.
It seems few big companies are able to maintain a culture of continuously trying to reinvent themselves and find the next big thing.
In addition to buying the next big thing (effective but requires $$$) I think intentionally trying to disrupt/reinvent your own products before your competition does is a great way to not miss the next big thing.
I had a Palm phone in 2001. They didn't call it a smartphone back then, but I had Internet and some small apps for weather and news.
It was sort of like the Internet before the web, it was something only a geek would love. Weighed five pounds, ran hot and you needed a stylus to interact with it.
Palm should have owned the smartphone era but they didn't have a vision where it should go. Steve Jobs did, he set standards and didn't ship until they were reached, end of story.
Did you ever use .net compact framework? It was actually decent from a functionality standpoint (especially coming from a J2ME background). While it was way better than what was out there, it was designed for corp usage. It didn't have the design flare required to be a mass consumer product.
I haven't done anything with iOS so I don't know if it's been resolved yet. But for a long time iOS had the advantage of only running on a single device. I believe the iPad had the same aspect ratio and could simply upscale the UI at first too.
Yeah these days it's all fine after they got AutoLayout working, but developers got lulled into "there's just one device size" that threes was a minor panic when they expanded the line (and now with iPad multitasking you need to handle basically any size)
It does now, but we were comparing to platforms that existed when the iPhone came out. Even J2ME was designed to handle variable layouts. AutoLayout wasn't usable until iOS 6
Microsoft were the first to release Windows as a full on tablet-OS, at least half a decade before before even the iPhone existed. Forget about the iPad. That was at least 10 years later.
Microsoft delivered a full version of Windows XP (which was what was current at the time), capable of running all Windows software. No emulation. No limitations.
The problem was that most Windows software weren't really nice to run on a tablet, so the platform had limited appeal. Besides that you had the hardware issue: A "tablet" at that time was at least as heavy as a laptop.
It was way before its time, and as such, was doomed to fail. But don't come and claim Microsoft foresaw tablets as a platform for limited capability computing for answering emails only and such. That's what Apple delivered.
Microsoft had the right vision, and they were willing to execute. It's a shame it didn't turn out better.
Branding them "Windows" phones was the kiss of death.
Almost every adult has had terrible experiences with Windows.
The young view Windows as something their grandparents used.
Calling it anything else would have been better.Even "Electric Candy" phones would have been more attractive than "Windows" phones.
I understand that the phones were reasonably decent.
| Kin was a short-lived mobile phone line from Microsoft designed for users of social networking. Microsoft described the phones' target demographic as men and women between ages 15 and 30.
I actually thought that was a cool idea when it came out but I always did wonder what the purpose was if I wanted to do more. I was pretty focused on getting a Blackberry (shudders) at the time
I really liked my windows phone a lot. Honestly a lot more than my current iPhone 6. But I need to use second factor apps to log into my company's vpn, and those apps aren't on winphones.
If it supports the OATH/IETF RFC standards (and almost all two factor systems do/should), the Authenticator app that comes preinstalled with Windows phone supports it right out of the box. (Your company's VPN administrator just may not realize that.)
The interesting irony recently is that my own company just sent an email encouraging our VPN users to download the (very same) Microsoft Authenticator on iOS and Android as it is now the most reliable cross-platform 2FA app.
I don't think it does (although I'm not 100% certain). We use Duo Mobile[0], which pushes a challenge to the phone, then I have to acknowledge it. It's not the standard "enter the 6 digit code" that Google Mail and most 2 factor systems make use of.
Damn, there's a Windows Phone 7 version too: https://guide.duo.com/windows7-phone -- I swear there wasn't when I was making this transition. Huh, that's a little frustrating. Oh well.
Actually, Nokia Software was awesome. It was their usability and UX that was dog awful. A lot of SW features that are around today have been around for a decade with Nokia. They had a plan, to move over to Meego, which won awards.. but was torpedoed by Elop.
Elop destroyed Nokia, they had the best distribution network and supply chains. Linking up with Elop instantly killed that and destroyed any goodwill they had with operators and carriers who would have continued to back Nokia. Unfortunately carriers are anti-Microsoft...
EPOC was designed for far less capable hardware than even pre-iPhone smartphones. It allowed for a lot of capability on those early Psion devices. But in modern hardware it was too fiddly and too alien (non-standard C++).
Microsoft always understood the consequences of Moore's law. Palm killed them early on because Windows Mobile was just too much OS for those early devices. But as hardware improved, Palm was left with a less capable OS and Microsoft was ready. What they weren't ready for was Apple porting their desktop OS to mobile.
Symbian OS was very capable, full of features, but hard for developers to pick up and work with. I remember when the iPhone first came out and Symbian developers couldn't believe how few features it had ("it doesn't even multi-task!") but it did absolutely nail the user interface which is what most people noticed.
As a friend working at Symbian once said to me, "it was like watching a train crash in slow motion"
In 2006, if you were to make the prediction that Nokia, a company generating 41B in global sales, would be gone in a decade, you'd be downvoted to oblivion.
Gone from the cell phone business, sure, but certainly not gone as a company. Big in telco equipment. After acquiring Alcatel-Lucent, I note that Nokia now has roughly the same amount of employees as Microsoft...
On the other hand, BlackBerry has hung on like there's no tomorrow. It's still around! Why? Who knows. But it's here long past the time that it's been the butt of jokes.
I guess now my Windows Phone SWAG flashlight that I got when working there is now a collectors edition.
I remember when we all saw the iPhone. A lot of us knew we were in trouble when the execs kept going on about how only "enterprise customers" need a smartphone, and how it's about selling Microsoft Exchange...
I really wish the WP7 idea was fully executed, it seemed like they abandoned the Metro idea midway. I feel like Metro (errr... ModernUI?) was a design language that needed and still needs and all or nothing commitment otherwise it ends up looking like Windows 8, a bit childish. The lack of commitment to the design language and awful app adoption really killed it. Disappointing to watch.
Article says Android and iOS have 84% and 15% respectively of the market. It's still hard to sink in the fact of how strong a duopoly the mobile market is. All of WP, Blackberry, Ubuntu, Sailfish, Tizen, and probably more, all share the same 1%!
It's the lack of an app market. Why by hardware that only supports a fraction of the software? Yes, most apps are crap, but for most app developers, anything after Apple and Android are an afterthought.
The chicken and egg problem: Developers won't support your platform unless you have enough users. Users won't buy your platform unless you have enough apps. More than once companies including Microsoft have tried to break this issue by outright buying developers, but the monopoly effect is way too strong.
A third party platform will fundamentally need to beat Android so badly on platform features directly that app developers rush to it, users get excited about it. The hype has to be real. Maybe that's HoloLens for Microsoft, maybe it's someone else. But the admittedly incremental benefits Windows Mobile has over Android aren't enough to break that monopoly power. Nothing about Tizen, Ubuntu, Sailfish, etc. gets people talking about the cool amazing future of technology.
It will have to be a new platform. VR is the likely next candidate. But I don't think we will see widespread adoption until the units are self contained.
I'm a long time Linux and Mac user, but over the past few years I've viewed Microsoft as more of an ally... and a company that has so much potential to do new and awesome things, but they just don't seem to know where to go. They seem to be missing an opportunity to make a pretty great ecosystem with the Xbox, Skype, Windows Phone, and Windows 10.
I've played with the Windows Phone at a new retail store and really liked it. I'm almost wondering if they had gone for the retail stores earlier on if the tide might have gone their way just a little bit more.
They announced it back in May [1], but there was speculation that they were exiting the phone business late last year. I think they still make 2 flagship phones, but they aren't competing with iPhone/iOS or (10,000+ phones)/Android anymore.
In the DNA for Microsoft the company has long felt that it isn't a hardware company and the sole reasons for Microsoft to do hardware are to act as a leading beacon for its hardware partners to follow (Microsoft made mice to help spur the adoption of the mouse wheel and keyboards to spur usage of research in ergonomics; the Surface line explores interesting form factors outside of the "PC norm"). From that standpoint it is unsurprising that Microsoft hasn't seen a need for most/all of the hardware business they bought from Nokia.
Maybe Microsoft doesn't see a need to try to be a "leading beacon" in the phone hardware space because there isn't interesting innovation to be had there right now.
It does not seem to mean that Microsoft is out of the Phone software business. (It may even mean that they've found new hardware partners they are excited about working with.) A lot of the effort into Windows 10 and the UWP app platform has been to bridge the gaps, merge the teams, and make sure that Microsoft can continue to run the Phone software business even as a "low margin" business unit (even with relatively spare hardware sales), and leverage synergies between phone software work and other semi-related platforms like HoloLens and Xbox.
Edit: Maybe I speak from a position of ignorance about the industry. But I also remember thinking how greatly awesome it would have been if I could run Android on the new Lumia hardware. I also remember the fact that Nokia was worth 30 bn before the new ceo, ex microsoft employee, came in and within years it was left worth 9 bn; pop culture facts I suppose.