I own a Lumia 925, my wife owns a Lumia 640, and we use a Lumia 520 as our home line. I realize that Windows has a small share of the mobile phone market in the US but everybody that I've ever met that owns a Windows phone is pretty happy with their purchase -- I am. Apple phones are too expensive for my budget, and I tried helping a family member with his Android device and quickly realized I had made the right decision buying a Windows phone. I'm looking forward to see how the new OS (Windows 10) works on my devices.
I was a fan of the original Windows Phone 7 and since then used WP for years (until work requirements caused me to switch mostly to other platforms).
I've been trying the Windows 10 betas on a fairly high-end Lumia (1520), and I just can't understand what Microsoft is doing. The entire system has apparently been rewritten using the "Universal" APIs (the same thing as Windows RT/10 basically).
That must have sounded great on paper, but the reality is baffling. Everything that was working great in WP8 has been replaced with half-assed implementations that feel more like second-rate Android OEM apps.
Worse, there don't seem to be any new features in Windows 10 Mobile that could offset the pain of the UI downgrade... Except that weird new mode where you can connect your phone to a keyboard, mouse and display and use Windows Universal apps that way. Is there a single Windows Phone user that asked for that?!
I loved Windows Phone 7 because it was a holistically designed system that made perfect sense on a phone. All that seems to be gone in Windows 10 Mobile, replaced by Microsoft's traditional "Windows everywhere!" platform strategy bloopers.
WP8 was also a rewrite, for exactly the same reasons. It wasn't great, but if it was kept stable for long enough then maybe partners would eventually come back to build that ecosystem.
I guess the reason for this constant rewrite-itis is that Microsoft is still really, really strong on the corporate desktop side, and they desperately need some way to leverage that on mobile. Otherwise they are just too far behind to avoid being yet another OEM.
As you said, it probably looked good on paper. They do have deep pockets however, and probably afford both one and two more rewrites and still compete. They've done it before.
> Is there a single Windows Phone user that asked for that?!
Sounds like a wonderful feature to me.
One of the things that annoys me about Windows Phone currently is that it won't play with bluetooth keyboards (like the android phone I use as my backup device does). Sometimes when travelling it is useful to be able to rattle off some messages longer than are convenient to write with the on-screen keyboard without needing to have my tablet or laptop with me (OK so I need to be carrying the little bluetooth keyboard with me, but that takes less room when folded away than the laptop or tablet).
Using it as a mini PC is going further, but in a way that I might also find useful. Hopefully in going further they have not neglected the simpler use case on their way past though...
> I've been trying the Windows 10 betas on a fairly high-end Lumia (1520), and I just can't understand what Microsoft is doing. The entire system has apparently been rewritten using the "Universal" APIs (the same thing as Windows RT/10 basically).
It's worth noting that Windows Phone 10 (or whatever the current name is) is not being released alongside desktop Windows 10. It'll be released at least a few months later, so I would expect a lot more polish and cohesiveness moving forward.
The simple problem at Microsoft and at most large organizations is that stock options and bonuses are paid out for new features, not fixing existing bugs.
Annual Commitments. There are tons of half complete projects and tooling pieces that are finished enough to check off the annual commitment objective. I constantly got nagged for tweaking and improving a backend system shim layer for transporting test data between systems instead of adding new check mark mission complete items to my list.
I'm not sure what it like under the current review system but I very much perceived this to be an issue when I was there. I'd even seen large top level objectives altered purely because it was too far along in the year when they were proposed and making those changes would have impacted another groups ability to make their commitments. Some groups in microsoft are great but there are some systemic problems over there.
This is the only part of Windows 10 Mobile that Microsoft is doing right. Practically all Windows Phone 8 devices -- even the 89 euro ultra-cheapies like Lumia 520 -- can be upgraded to 10 without rooting or any other special tricks.
Currently it requires you to install a "Windows Insider" app, but the final version will presumably be available as a regular OTA upgrade just like 8.x updates.
You can't on WP7 or older devices because of kernel incompatibilities. But pretty much everything that can run WP8 can be upgraded to the official WP10 beta through OTA.
What's the use case? Where do you have a display, keyboard and mouse but no computer attached and no laptop at hand?
I never have this problem where I'd want to blow up my phone onto a bigger screen (with full mouse-based editing capabilities). But I guess it might be more common than I imagine.
When I look at what I was doing with a computer in 1993, and what I mostly want to do with a computer today, it should be really easy to do with a phone.
It's kind of weird to me that my phone is so massively powerful but gets used only for a bit of web-browsing and light game playing.
But does that mean you should do everything on your phone?
The 1993 computer probably cost at least 2000 USD. Today, you can get a phone, a laptop, a desktop computer, a tablet and a smartwatch for less than that. That's five devices with different form factors!
Is there really a group of users whose single device is a phone and they want to connect that to PC-style peripherals?
I am currently recommending Lumias for a specific user group - non-technical users that need WhatsApp, maps and light browsing, and are on a tight budget.
A cheap Windows phone outperforms a cheap Android phone significantly (and is apparently much easier to learn the UI for that user group), and these users cannot afford an iPhone.
They lose out on the Android ecosystem and the Apple experience, but I currently believe they're the best choice at that price point (100 dollars or so). Of course, those things vary, if a new Android version is significantly better on low-end hardware I'll probably go back to recommending them (mostly because all apps in my country are Android-first).
If you go straight to China there are some "acceptable" Android phones for the sub-$50 price point. However when you compare that to the Nokia Lumia 635 which is $30-40 (often with $10 carrier discount, $50 unlocked) you get an incredible phone for almost no money at all.
I actually held one at a Microsoft store the other day, and the thing is extremely responsive and feels very premium. It is lacking a few things people just take for granted like a front facing camera, but regardless it is a huge bargain if you're shopping in the low end market.
I won't be giving up my $500 phone tomorrow, but respect where it is due to some of the Lumia phones.
With such cheap Windows phones, I wonder if there's still a possibility that Microsoft can use them to make real revenue on services, or if offering those same services on the other mobile platforms is enough.
What again, in a Services, Services, Services Microsoft, is the point of a third-place mobile platform?
Android phones have been a nightmare for me from a support point of view and for certain user groups Windows phones can – is my hypothesis – be a much, much more enjoyable experience.
My dad has some Samsung Galaxy (probably a couple generations old at this point) and doesn’t like it and doesn’t use it much beyond actually making phone calls (he even hates writing text messages). My mom has the simplest of the simple Nokia Lumias (also a generation or two old now) and she uses it all the time for all sorts of things. Browsing the web, communicating via SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, reading email, making phone calls, taking photos (and sending those to people with exactly the messenging app she wants to use). She is able to achieve all this without ever needing help and the phone never gives her the feeling that she is not in control.
Sure, part of that may be differing attitudes of my parents towards technology (my mom has certainly a slightly greater ability to get used to and comfortable with newfangled tech), but I do think Windows phone is very friendly towards people. It’s very sparse, but if it does what you need to do then that’s a plus and it helps you feel in control.
I have a similar experience with family members buying Android phones. For a long time I was the go-to guy for support issues, mostly Android related. Most of the time, it's simply because they didn't find it intuitive enough (I cannot say Android at least on the Samsung devices) is very user friendly.
After a long struggle I got most of them over to iOS and now the less-computer-literate appears to figure out their own issues. I'd reckon the experience would be similar with Windows phones, as I've heard good things about it in terms of user friendliness.
Eveery UI is difficult for first time users. My 60+ years old dad is comfortable using Android. I even had hard time adjusting to Macbook workflow coming from windows laptops.
Yeah, we bought a 635 for my fiance's mom's first smart phone. The home screen has big obvious buttons that are a pretty ideal fit for her level of computer familiarity.
Plus, when she lost it after a couple of months, it was only $75 to replace.
I have some Lumia's (for work) and while I go in really liking them, I end up with a lot of small annoyances. I should really write them down in a blog post, but the endresult is that I pick up my Android (s4 with swappable battery) or iPhone and actually never touch the Lumia's again.
The way MS (or someone else!) would get me on board is when I can walk into the office, put my phone on my inductive loading plate, automatically triggering my monitoring to flick on and pairing with my mouse + keyboard, showing me, on the big screen, another (desktop) representation of the OS I use on the phone. I know some companies (and MS with Windows 10) are working towards that as I saw in demos, but it's still clunky and not what you want yet while the phones are fast enough (I often connect the above to my OpenPandora and work straight on it for days on end; most high end phones are a lot more capable than the OpenPandora...).
No need for the phone to be smart enough if it can just virtualize itself in a host laptop / computer. Not saying this is a good idea, but the phones not being fast enough is not all bad; what I need mostly from my phone is the files and content. The apps I could run locally.
I often drop in to a local bar, and tend to be the troubleshooter for older folks with new smartphones. I've helped out on quite a variety of devices, but my heart always sank when I bumped into the guy with a Lumia that his daughter had given him. I can't remember every instance, but I can remember turning him away in frustration with outcomes like "sorry, I've no idea why the browser won't remember your login details".
I ran into many frustrating problems with that device that I didn't find with iOS and Android (even super-cheap Android). I was extremely relieved when he rocked up one day with an iPhone, and very gladly set it up with all the apps he needed.
I Googled stats to verify this claim and you're right. Last fall, Windows Phone was on par with iPhone sales in some European countries, and in fact beat Apple in Italy (TIL)
The two things are inseparable at this point. So I don't really understand the distinction you're making, it isn't as if people buying a Lumia don't know it will be running Windows Mobile.
No, I would bet most people buy them because it's a Nokia, regardless of the OS. Case in point, my mother who seems to only buy Nokias because they used to be the best brand. I told her to buy an Android phone and she somehow found and bought a Nokia Android phone (I didn't even know they existed). It had some weird Metro skin too so that it looks like a Windows Phone but is actually an Android.
> "I told her to buy an Android phone and she somehow found and bought a Nokia Android phone (I didn't even know they existed). It had some weird Metro skin too so that it looks like a Windows Phone but is actually an Android."
I think you're referring to one of the Nokia X devices:
Maybe in some (northern) parts that still remember the Nokia brand. Otherwise, Android and iOS are the really big players, with Android being number one in Europe followed by a strong iOS. WinPhone, Blackberry, FirefoxOS, JellyOS, etc. are of little interest for the average joe buyer.
I'm getting downvoted? Sounds like a bad thing but I'm not concerned. I'm a Hacker News reader and hardly ever write comments. I'll be fine. Thanks for the heads up...
Our of curiosity, what got you buying MS phones? My sense was that by the time they had a decent phone available, most people were too invested in Android or iOS to readily consider a change. Were you a late adopter of smart phones or did you make the switch at some point?
I was using a galaxy s2 but got frustrated with android (usability and stability issues). My wife bought a lumia 710 to replace an aging blackberry, and I was very impressed with the usability. A bit later, when they did a deal on the lumia 920, i bought it, and over two years later I'm still on the same phone. Very happy with it. I'm waiting for them to release a proper high end phone again to upgrade my 920.
Microsoft made three key mistakes with windows phone after the acquisition. The first was stopping the development of high-end models. No high end model means no evangelists which in turn means price is the only thing you can compete on. The lack of profit in the lumia division is a consequence of chasing after the bottom of the market. I'm convinced windows phone is good enough to win at the high end, but microsoft had to show up first, and they mostly didn't. They made some bone-headed decisions like releasing the high end 930/icon without the one lumia-only feature (glance), while shipping that feature on low end devices.
The second thing they did wrong was messing with the OS itself to make it more android-like (getting rid of hubs and panorama views, introducing hamburger menus, app-ifying the social integration, etc...). Every change made the OS less attractive to people already using it, while doing nothing to convince those who weren't, because those people needed apps which weren't there. Oh, yeah, that's the third and worst thing they did wrong: radically mismanaging the windows app store, both towards the users as towards the developers.
I'm not the original poster, but I bought a Lumia 925 out of pure nerdy curiosity. I'd tried iOS, I'd tried Android and just wanted to see what else was out there. And I have to say it's pretty fine piece of hardware running a pretty great OS.
All that being said, I'm probably going back to Android for my next phone, simply because WP keeps lagging further and further behind when it comes to apps. If WP had the same apps as Android I'd probably buy a new Windows Phone.
Clearly you don't know what are we talking about , Compiling/Uploading your app just exact same way you already did many times for new platform/users is something most dev will do , because it don't have any burden. And as I remember they mentioned 100% compatibility , and they even support most of Google cloud service via Microsoft service's with exactly same API .
Or they could allow installing from apk or third party stores. Though that will help only the more technical users, which doesn't seem to be lumia's target market.
I bought a MS phone because my nexus 4 kept crashing with the latest upgrades. The battery would last max 6 hours, using the camera had a 50% chance of restarting the OS, the touch functionality of the screen would work 50% of the time after reboot, when the battery was under 25%, the phone would act eradically ... etc. As for iphone, too expensive. I got my lumia for 60$ on amazon without contract.
Personally, I switched over to Windows Phone from a Nexus 4 after I bought a generic Windows 8 tablet and started using the live tiles. In my opinion, compared to the iOS and Android "grid of icons", live tiles are just superior in every way. I'm honestly surprised that neither Google nor Apple have copied Microsoft here.
I'm using a brand new LG G4 as my daily driver, and I own two Nexus 7s. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that the Android widgets I can set up on my G4 [1] compare in any way to the live tiles on a Windows Phone [2]. I recognize that this is all subjective, though.
Again, this is all subjective, but I'll try to explain why I prefer live tiles over Android's widgets.
1. Android widgets are huge, I can fit maybe 4-5 widgets on one page of the Android desktop. More than that, they become so scrunched that you can't get any information out of them. This is compounded by the fact that some widgets only allow a certain size unless you download 3rd-party launchers.
2. Widget design is largely up to the app developer, and a lot of widgets are ugly (subjective) or at least don't match the other widgets you have them grouped with.
3. Widgets try to be interactive, and I can't tell you how frustrated it makes me when I'm scrolling across the desktops to look at widgets and I accidentally cross an item off of a todo list, or scroll through my list of emails instead of continuing on to the next desktop.
To me, the Android (and iPhone) home screens feel lifeless and dead when compared to a Windows Phone. On WP, my live tiles are always flipping around and displaying the latest emails, tweets, facebook posts, news articles, pictures from my camera roll, etc. The Windows Phone start screen displays all of that information to me at a glance, and I can pick and choose what to do next based on the summary that I see on my start screen. On Android, though, I have to actively search for that information by going from app to app.
I think there are ways to solve all of your issues on android, including using a 3rd party home screen; but at the end of the day - these are not products that come down to measured specs against measured specs, these are products we use as an intimate part of our daily lives and as a result are subject to purely subjective factors being a core part of the decision making process.
I appreciate your opinion, it has helped me further understand why using subjective reasoning as a driving factor for technology purchases is no longer a sign of the uninformed/uninitiated, and is now instead (rightfully) simply a personal preference.
The UI was what got me hooked. I was coming off of an iPhone and loved the Windows Phone home screen. Once you get hooked on live tiles, its hard to go back.
My first smart phone was an HTC Radar running Windows 7 which was later upgraded to 7.5. My second windows phone is my current phone which is a Lumia 925. I immediately fell in love with this phone because of the camera quality (pictures and videos). My phone is going on three years and it still takes better pictures than most Android and Apple phones except maybe for the newest Apple and/or high end Android devices. I bought my wife a Lumia 520 when they became available and she immediately was able to use it -- now she owns a 640. I never owned an Android or an Apple device but most of my immediate family and close friends own one or the other giving me a chance to compare features. To this day I haven't found a reason to switch. I have tested my phone against high end Android devices and my phone is more responsive and the picture quality is always better to the point where I'm constantly being asked to share my pictures. If I can find a better phone for the same amount of money I spent for my phone ($150.00 refurbished) I will buy it.
Here's my experience: my first smartphone was a Nokia with Windows Phone 7, which I bought when my Nokia N95 was too broken to be used in public. It lasted for around 6 months until it fell off my pocket and cracked, because changing the screen was just as expensive as a new phone.
I was pretty mad at some issues (the camera would hang the phone under certain circumstances, dev tools were painful, Zune as a requirement for sync), so I got myself an Android phone. That one lasted a couple years, until the USB connector broke - since the battery was non-removable, there was no way for me to keep using it.
After having experienced both, I have to say: the experience in Windows Phone feels much smoother than Android. Yes, the development tools are still annoying, but using the phone itself has a nicer "feeling" to it.
I now have the cheapest WP 8 I could find, and so far I'm happy with it. It also seems to be more resistant to drops than its older brother.
I use osmand for free offline maps and navigation anywhere in the world. Should I be doing something different? How does this make Windows Phone special?
I was answering the question of what made me choose a Microsoft phone. Offline maps has always been a strong differentiator of Nokia, now the owner of Navteq. I can't comment on the quality and extension of Open Street Maps. I gather that you are a satisfied user of osmand, so I recommend that you don't do anything different.
Eh, I'm satisfied as to use in the US. The quality of the mapping they have for China is pretty bad... but I kind of figured it wouldn't be great from any other (english-language) provider either. Google Maps is better in some ways, but hard to access and still terrible at things like street addresses.
Anecdote: Friend of sister wanted new phone that could take decent pictures and do Web/FB stuff. Nice man in shop suggested a lower end Lumia. Friend of sister very happy, especially with camera, which indeed produces excellent snaps.
I see quite a few WinPhone screens on my daily round in UK.
I had a WP7 Samsung Omnia awhile ago. WP was an excellent, performant, and snappy to use. It was really nice and everyone that saw it liked it. However, almost no apps (that I needed), app store full of crapware (borderline malware), and slow OS updates eventually led me to Android. No regrets.
Indian Windows phone admirer here. Loved the developer preview program. Frequent updates to the OS made me feel wanted as a user. The transition from WP 8 to WP 8.1 was especially noteworthy. Sadly I lost my Lumia 1320 and switched to a cheaper Android. Would like to go back and try Win 10, but the lack of new devices makes me apprehensive.
I got a 630 to play around with WinRT and C++/CX development.
It is quite quite, specially if one compares the whole development experience with the Android wild west (e.g. NDK experience).
Sadly it has only catched on in countries as alternative to Android, where the majority of the population is not able to afford iPhones even on subsided contracts.
Their decision to provide Android and iOS bridges in WP 10 will eventually backfire in OS/2 style.
I own a Lumia icon and have been really happy with it. The cut on Windows Phone is the amount of apps available. Since they are such a small share of the market, developers aren't keen to build for the platform - even though its completely wide open right now with little if no competition.
If Windows Phone had closer to the amount of apps Android and IOS have in their stores, the phones would be doing much better. Nokia makes a solid handset and the Windows Phone platform is the first not to copy Apple's design.
As for Windows 10 on Windows Phone - I was using the developer preview for a few days and its still really really buggy. It does have tremendous potential though and I'm looking forward to seeing them work out some of the bugs, there are a ton of really cool things coming:
Work phone is a Nokia 710, running WP 7.5 .... a no nonsense simple working phone with great battery life. Informative tiles and a clean UI. I am sure WP8/Cortana would be a great improvement. Dropped it in water a week ago and it is recovering... screen is still drying out.
For personal use I have a Nexus4 and use it for camera/apps (Google Authenticator)/Google ecosystem. I prefer the simplicity of the Nokia/WP7 but for some things the Android is necessary. If Google ever ported their apps and services (Youtube, etc) to a Windows Phone I would switch.. or MS needs to create a nice equivalent.
For a different experience, I received a Lumia 640 as a gift, but I gave it away, as the experience was inferior to Android. I tried liking it for about 2-3 weeks, but eventually I gave up. My wife then tried to use it and gave up as well.
For example I don't like the design of the front-screen with the animated tiles. I find them to be very distracting and I prefer Android's model - static icons plus widgets for whenever I feel the need for some shiny stuff, but widgets don't survive for long. The notifications experience on Android is of course superior. That flat design in Windows Phone has also been annoying as it doesn't give clues on what can be touched. And as far as the experience goes, the new material design in Android kicks ass IMHO. The only serious usability issue it has are the up-front permissions system, but they are fixing that in the next version.
The other issue I had is a lack of control. Microsoft went the Apple way in restricting their phones. So apparently with my Lumia I had to ask permission from my operator in order to do tethering. I've never met an Android phone that disallowed tethering based on the whims of these operators. Google Play is also superior, even to the iTunes Store IMHO, but beyond that, I like how Android lets me install apps from third-party sources if I want it - it's just a configuration change and this Apple-style grandfathering doesn't work so well for Microsoft - their store is filled with shit, malware and trademark infringing apps. I also tried being a good citizen in Microsoft's store and tried reporting a scammy app for trademark infringement - they asked for "papers" to prove I'm the rights holder.
There's also one pet peeve I have with Microsoft - so Windows Phone still doesn't support CalDAV / CardDAV, insisting of course on Microsoft's own proprietary Exchange. You also can't change Bing's search as the default (at least in the version I had). Android doesn't do CalDAV / CardDAV by default, but you've got providers available. And Android also lets you change most things, like the search interface. Great going Microsoft, you've changed a lot.
As for the apps available, there is no contest. Like Google Maps / Waze in combination with Google Now are awesome. Nokia's Here is pretty cool, but lo and behold, they've released it for Android as well. The experience with most popular services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube is inferior on Windows Phone. Even Skype seems to suck less on my Android.
In terms of hardware, the Lumia phones have a good price, but I want phones with good resolution. Couldn't find a high-end phone like the ones made by LG. And for a good price-quality ratio, in Android land you can also go with the Nexus devices, or OnePlus One. You can still find Nexus 5 devices and they've got a better price and better hardware than those Lumia devices.
I'm an Android user. None of your points are incorrect, but they also all apply to Android:
- Gmail receives preferential treatment
- Google cannot be removed as a search engine (inc. Google Now)
- Android can be restricted from tethering (and operators do do that).
- Google dropped CalDAV support.
None of which are "breaking" issues on Android. In fact I won't leave Android just for Google Maps (w/Waze integration), Google Now, the number of apps on the play store, and future things like Google Car (so I can drive my car's nav system with my phone).
- you can replace the search interface, I'm using Firefox Search or DuckDuckGo interchangeably with Google's Search depending on my mood. If you have them installed, it makes you first pick the default when doing the search gesture. Google Now is not customizable, but then again it's just an app.
> Google cannot be removed as a search engine (inc. Google Now)
The swipe up gesture for search/google now is easily replaced (e.g. just install Firefox and you get asked via intent if you want to use Firefox search instead). The search bar and the swipe from the left gesture can't be removed from the Google Now launcher as far as I know, but it's trivial to replace the launcher itself (just install one and the next time you hit 'home' it'll ask you which launcher you want to use).
Google's is not the only Android distribution. Try Cyanogenmod - I have been running it for years and I therefore have Android without a single byte of Google's binaries on it.
Cyanogemod is an inferior implementation of Android(pure Android as on the Nexus devices). It is very unstable and I am not the only one that has stability issues. It was across the board, not limited to a single device.
While we're trotting out anecdotes, I have heard and experienced only the opposite.
One friend in particular who was given a windows phone by his large, seattle-based employer (ahem) had no end of trouble. The UI was great, but basic functionality was terrible. The thing could never handle SMS--we had to call him constantly, just to let him know what was going on, then we all would sporadically receive 4-5 texts from him that made no sense out of context. It was a nightmare.
Often with devices of small market share, the people who purchase them are the people most likely to be happy with their purchase. That said, I think the WinPhone platform is very good, but suffers by not commanding the influence over app-makers.
It is ironic that my daughter bougth a Lumia 640 in Ohio because you couldn't get them on the west coast. They have sold out in pretty much every location. I expect mostly because Microsoft has not made very many of them to begin with, but they seem to be the most popular phone yet.
I'm sad that there wasn't a way to recapitalize the Nokia phone business and re-release it into the wild.
Lumia 925 user here. I really liked Windows 8.1. I've been trying the Windows 10 phone betas for a few months now, and the pain has been excruciating: lots of busted apps, bugs, battery life issues, missing functionality.
It seems to me Windows 10 Phone is at least several months away from stable.
A coworker just noticed that - my Nokia is about the same weight as his larger Android phone.
In my case, the phone isn't thick enough. I had problems with it slipping out of my pocket (I once went back to the car looking for it to find it on the ground getting rained on), so I added grippy skateboard tape on the back.
If I change phones, I'd do it again. Why not just buy a case? Because to get a grippy case, they're too grippy and will hold onto the cloth in my pocket when taking it out. The skateboard tape is "just right".
Someone ought to produce & sell grip-tape with die-cut patterns in it. Peace-symbol, happy face, Totoro, etc.
The answer is NO to both questions. I don't see what's fascinating about my comment. I live in Tucson AZ and I work in the IT department as an Applications Developer. My department has 30+ employees and I only know of four other people in my department that own Windows Phones.
It's fascinating to me because I've never come across such a fan of Windows Phone. The Windows Phone users I have come across have gotten them through work (at MS or related contractors).
I never considered myself to be a WP fan but I can see how I can be perceived as one. My initial decision to buy a WP was mostly driven by cost (my first phone HTC Radar was free after the rebate) and my current phone is a refurbished Lumia 925 ($150.00). I’m just not the type of person that’s willing to spend $500+ on a phone that has features I will probably never use. Like I said IMO Windows Phones give you the best value per dollar spent – an opinion that apparently is also shared by many of those making comments on this thread.
> I had made the right decision buying a Windows phone
No you didn't. Soon your device and its os will be discontinued, WP is a huge failure and it's over. You don't fire next to 8000 people when your product is a success.
When that happens - if it happens - I will buy a different phone. I feel that my investment has already paid off with the amount of great quality pictures and videos I have accumulated.
This is actually amazing. Between Nokia and aQuantive, Microsoft dumped over $14 billion into two failed acquisitions. I can't recall another company over the last decade that has had a total write-off of that scale (well, maybe the HP-Autonomy thing, but there was likely some fraud involved there).
I have absolutely no idea why they purchased Nokia in the first place -- it was obvious that they were never going to seriously challenge Apple or Google, and Nokia was another obviously sinking ship. It was like if Circuit City had purchased Radio Shack. I have no idea why the board let Ballmer blow billions on an acquisition they knew he wouldn't be around to see through and that didn't fit with the strategic direction of the company 6 months later.
If I were an institutional investor, I would demand a change in board leadership. This kind of stuff is just unacceptable for a public company. I know hindsight is 20/20, but blowing $14 billion on acquisitions that were doomed to begin with is simply inexcusable. You can blame Ballmer for being a terrible CEO, but the blame really rests on the board for allowing him to make really big, really bad decisions.
1. Nokia was pretty much the only real manufacturer of Windows Phone. Did they really have a choice? Microsoft does not seem to be the type to give up on their bets easily, and it sometimes pays off. For instance, as I recall, that's where they started with Xbox and Bing, and both products are doing well now.
2. Even though their relative market share is low, keep in mind the market is huge and so in absolute numbers, they are selling quite a few Lumias. Millions of devices every quarter is a pretty decent number, and something that could be leveraged in various ways. Not a direct comparison, but note that until 2007 Apple ran their entire business on products that had minority market share.
3. Not very familiar with the aQuantive deal - how was it doomed to begin with?
1. Yes, they did have a choice. They had no realistic chance of catching either Apple or Google as an OS provider -- both Apple and Google had more mature products, better consumer brands and the platform lock-in from their app stores. If you're a billion dollar company and you can't be #1 or #2, you shouldn't bother entering the market. What they do have is the world's largest business computing platform, and they could have leveraged it into a BYOD powerhouse by making it easier to integrate Apple and Google products into the Microsoft platform. Selling to businesses is Microsoft's strength, and if they weren't so focused on selling to consumers, they could have done much better.
2. Apple's product strategy is vastly different from Microsoft's. Apple makes most of its profits from he sale of consumer electronics. Microsoft makes all of its profits from the sale of software licenses to large corporations (they make revenue elsewhere, but I don't think any of their consumer products are actually profitable). It's just not a good market for Microsoft because it doesn't fit with how they operate as a company.
3. Microsoft vastly overvalued its online properties and was playing in a space it had no business being in (media and advertising). Microsoft's core business revolves around selling software licenses to large businesses through reseller channels. While the advertising world has some similarities structurally, Microsoft just didn't have the relationships or corporate culture to make it work.
1. That would essentially be walking away from the mobile market, which does not seem to be a real option. Integrating Apple/Android devices with Microsoft would require building apps on others' platforms. This is a decent alternative strategy, but cannot be the only one. MS made their fortune by controlling the platform everyone built apps on during the PC revolution, and they know very well indeed what can happen if you're not the one controlling the platform.
2. Agreed, Apple's product strategy is very different. I was just making the point that minority marketshare is not the show-stopper many think it is. Note that Microsoft has been making decent profits in various non-software license businesses for the past few years, including consumer electronics (XBox, Surface Pro), Azure and recently, even Bing. Their revenue streams are a lot more diverse than people give credit for.
> They had no realistic chance of catching either Apple or Google as an OS provider -- both Apple and Google had more mature products, better consumer brands and the platform lock-in from their app stores.
With the possible exception of platform lock-in, all of that applies to everything Microsoft became a leader in too. Why would there be no realistic chance?
1. Apple and Google are (and were at the time of the Nokia acquisition) larger companies than Microsoft. Microsoft's usual tactics are to throw their weight around, which they can't do when they're the smallest dog in the fight. What's worse, mobile represents a huge amount of revenue for both companies, so they have both the incentive and the ability to outspend Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't have a lower cost base (if anything, it's the opposite) so they have no basis for a sustainable advantage. Mobile was never a huge revenue number for Microsoft, so they always have the option of walking away.
2. Apple and Google also have the vast majority of the market covered from a value proposition standpoint. Apple goes after the high-margin top end, and Google uses an arms-dealer model to go after the middle and low end. What value proposition does Microsoft have that is substantially different? If you can't differentiate your product, and you have the disadvantage of being smaller in a market with strong network effects, you have no basis for a sustainable advantage.
3. The market had already started to mature by the time Microsoft bought Nokia. While you can get in early in a growth market and out-grow the competition, it's an uphill battle if you're as late as Microsoft was. Your competition will still outpace your gains even if you outspend them by a significant margin.
4. Building a niche product (i.e. if you can't be #1 or #2) can still be a profitable strategy, but it is a bad idea for a company like Microsoft. If nothing else, it's a distraction from their core moneymaking activities. Their first instinct would be to leverage their existing platforms to build user share, which would be a negative thing for Microsoft's existing platforms by creating opportunity for competitors as Microsoft's users search for alternatives (see Office on iPad). And because Microsoft has a decentralized power structure, there's not much they can do to prevent this. They're better off not playing in the mobile space at all than aiming to be a niche #3 -- let a smaller, more focused player with a lower cost base take on that role.
At some point, Microsoft will realize that mobile is a game they will never win. While they would be in a much better strategic position if they had a strong mobile presence, wishing that will happen won't make it so. IMO their optimal move is to get in bed with both Apple and Google and make BYOD really awesome if your company uses Microsoft as a back office. Apple would do it because they have little to no presence in the enterprise tech space, and Google would have to do it because otherwise Apple would become the de-facto standard in corporate mobile phones. That position leaves Microsoft with other options and leverage over the industry, which they currently don't have sitting at the bottom and looking up saying "me too!" It's also very hard to do any of this if you're in direct competition with Apple and Google on the OS/handset side.
Yes; with Excel there was a realistic chance because PCs were an exploding market at the time, and network effects (speaking in a business sense) were far weaker due to the fact that PCs weren't able to communicate. The market also took a lot longer to mature than the smartphone market did. Microsoft has always taken a "fast follower" approach to emerging product categories, but this time they were just too slow. I'm not saying they never had a chance, but the writing had been on the wall for a long time when they made the Nokia acquisition.
Also, Microsoft was a very different company in the 80s. They were a scrappy startup that had to prove themselves, and didn't have any legacy products, cost structures or business models dragging them down.
I'm not saying it's impossible for a company to be successful in the smartphone space as a solid #3, just that it's a bad idea for Microsoft to try to be that company. It's too far from their core competencies, and it clouds the strategy for their cash cow products.
IMO the majority of the value of Microsoft as a company at this point is their enterprise sales network. The relationships they have there are essentially a machine that lets them print money year after year. Consumer electronics (like cell phones) don't let them take advantage of their most valuable asset.
Instead of trying to chip away market share from Apple and Google, Microsoft should be going for the jugular against IBM and Oracle in the enterprise space by getting Microsoft enterprise applications on every phone, tablet and browser they can. Because that's the part of the company that makes money, and what they've done over the last 10 years is essentially try to leverage their high-margin enterprise software business to create a low-margin consumer electronics division. It's insane, and while I understand the need for products like Surface to create a baseline for quality with their OEM partners, it also doesn't make sense to sacrifice your profitable businesses to try to make those other products a success.
Yeah, I'm not saying network effects were non-existent... but it's hard to change your document format and lock your competitors out if every software update has to be shipped physically on a floppy disk. The world is different now; platform network effects are much stronger because the platforms can adapt themselves on the fly to competitive pressures.
Excel won if for no other reason than Lotus losing their ability to write new, working software after their first version. While Apple is having problems in that area, Microsoft nowadays seems to be as challenged or more, and I gather Google still does this very well.
Little bit of a tangent here: Is Bing doing well? We all agree that XBox is a huge success, but given that Bing just gave away its display advertising to AOL all to gain trivial market share, and is still paying users $5/month to use Bing, you have to wonder if Bing is really successful or just held up.
I actually don't "hate" Bing. I find their answers to questions directly in results slightly better than Google's version of the same. But I still use Google as they have more historical search data to utilise so results remain more accurate (and will almost indefinitely). Bing also seems to choke on technical queries and special characters more often.
Bing is powering Yahoo, Bing/Cortana and Siri. With Windows 10 having baked in Cortana, Bing will a lot more footprint. Bing is the farthest thing from failure, they are making money as of now, the whole sinking money into bing and xbox is really really old news.
That depends on Windows 10 being a huge success, and they are kind of fucking it up. Aside from the interface still apparently missing the point, I don't think a lot of people appreciated the ad/nag showing up in their system tray. I will put off getting W10 for at least a year for that alone.
No one is going to beat google , until they manage to put their own search engine on peoples home page and replace Google.Until that day comes , Everybody know google is almost unbeatable ( does not matter how much you push , google will not defeat , because their income resource is somewhere else ).Microsoft realized that very soon , that because they created their own search engine.and abandoning Bing is almost will end up Microsoft's death.Every body know google wants everything , And they will come after Windows(Microsoft last line defense) with their ChromeOS or specialized version of Android(which will be cloud based).
> No one is going to beat google , until they manage to put their own search engine on peoples home page and replace Google
IE is still very popular and defaults to Bing. Firefox is very popular and now defaults to Yahoo or Yandex or Baidu depending on the country you're in...
> does not matter how much you push , google will not defeat, because their income resource is somewhere else
The majority of their revenue is advertising, and the majority of the advertising revenue comes from search ads, so search is exactly where their revenue is coming from.
> and abandoning Bing is almost will end up Microsoft's death
>IE is still very popular and defaults to Bing. Firefox is very popular and now defaults to Yahoo or Yandex or Baidu depending on the country you're in...
That's not true . (maybe IE is more popular in some corner of the world , or among some users but) We all know in search engine market share , google is ruler and leader, without even a serious competitor. (recently maybe bing become a little more viable).
Does not matter you (as company) put yahoo or anything else in your browser default homepage , most people will use/switch to google.
Need for search engine will be increase with Internet and population growth.And I think this will end up with Google's exponential growth in compare with Apple or Microsoft linear growth.
> The majority of their revenue is advertising, and the majority of the advertising revenue comes from search ads, so search is exactly where their revenue is coming from.
Yes , exactly , because of that they don't care if they create some "free" OS better than Windows. Like what they did with Android. They just want better IT industry , better OS , better PC. Because with increasing IT users , their revenue will increase.
>huh? I don't see how that could possibly be true.
I see this problem in reverse order , with Microsoft giving up on bing, Google will end up without any serious threat to its income and core market share. And recent years already proved my , Google wants everything , after a while their ChromeOS will be viable replacement for Windows.They will push gaming on Android. and etc etc etc , and after years mayble Microsoft will end up where Companies like Novel are today .
Anyone can beat Google as soon as they produce better search results. More than once I have had a device / software switch to another search engine and the difference is really obvious even if the UI is not.
This was exactly my point , Maybe because my English people got me wrong. Google's (as company) lives depend on Google Search. and as soon as better search engine emerge , Google will be defeat badly .
Re: the aQuantive deal, Microsoft was never in a great position to leverage the assets that they purchased (ad serving platform Atlas, digital ad buying and creative agency Avenue A | Razorfish, and DrivePM (performance retargeting platform).
Atlas was really all Microsoft wanted since Google had bought DoubleClick and Atlas was at the time one of the few other large ad serving platforms. The ad serving business basically consisted of a way to track campaigns, impressions, clicks, conversions for large media buys for Fortune 500 companies. There was also synergy with the Avenue A | Razorfish business since clients like Nike, Best Buy, Hawaiian Airlines, and MSN would use Atlas to track their large campaigns across the web. The expectation from Microsoft at the time was that they could build a large display network across the internet using data from users that visited MSN or Bing just like Google does with it's search.
AA|RF was a bad fit because Microsoft was not in the advertising agency business so they quickly dumped that to Publicis. I worked at AA|RF in client services for a few years and were growing quickly at the time. We were doing things like multi-channel attribution and tackling view-based conversions years before they became a mainstream topic in the display ad world. A lot of those folks have gone on to lead at other places like Bob Lord, President of AOL, who previously led AA|RF!
DrivePM was a retargeting business that leveraged custom cookie pools that could be created based on both user's ad viewing/clicking behavior and tracked behavior on a client's website. So for example, you could say I wanted to target only people who viewed my ad in the last 2 days and visited my checkout page but did not complete their purchase. I think with investment, this business could have grown to take advantage of the surge in RTB and programmatic buying. One of the most interesting programs they had was a "recyling" product that basically took wasted impressions and resold them to other advertisers to reduce media costs. This involved doing a study to see what the optimal number of impressions was per user and the conversion rate dropoff curve per additional impression. Once you had that number, you would set a rule that said if this user has already seen the maximum number of ads from one advertiser in a given time frame, don't show the ad and instead show an ad from the recycler network.
"Did they really have a choice?" Well, yes, sunk costs are sunk, and they'd have been better off not wasting another 7 billion. That being said, for a fraction of that money, they could have gone Nexus route, and paid someone to adapt a hero model, that highlighted the best of their operating system.
If Nokia had gone under (or switched to Android in a last-ditch attempt to shore itself up) there would have been 0 manufacturers of Windows Phone hardware left. That would have been the end of it. I guess Microsoft looked at how much they had already invested in Phone, compared that to the bill for Nokia, and decided they weren't ready to pull the plug yet.
With what lead time? The sequence of events would have been:
(1) Nokia dies.
(2) Devices already in the channels are cleared out at deep discounts (only way since there will be no upgrades, support, spare parts etc).
(3) The media proclaims Windows Phone dead since nobody makes devices anymore.
(4) Six months to a year later, the first Microsoft phones come out. Nobody even notices, since the platform has already been declared dead.
"It was like if Circuit City had purchased Radio Shack."
Better analogy would be as if Kmart purchased Sears, which they did back in '04, to pretty much the same outcome.
Sometimes I think terminally ill companies thrash around like this to generate transactional cash flow for friends and family, to help the leadership get jobs elsewhere after the ship finally sinks.
> Sometimes I think terminally ill companies thrash around like this to generate transactional cash flow for friends and family, to help the leadership get jobs elsewhere after the ship finally sinks.
What do you think the rest of the time??
This is exactly what they do. A company doing as badly as these in the 19th century would have been wound down and the remaining assets distributed to stockholders. Today they take on debt, "restructure" endlessly, file for bankruptcy protection (usually more than once) and churn, churn, churn to keep those senior managers employed just a little bit longer. Meanwhile the stockholders, who would have taken a moderate loss under a liquidation scenario, instead get wiped out completely. Directors these days are basically extensions of senior management; they'll approve of pretty much anything the CEO wants to do as long as it's not (a) winding down or (b) an indefensible violation of their legal obligations. M&A is a very popular way to be seen to "do something"; it's a standard act in the CEO's keeping-your-job-for-a-while-longer playbook. In this case, it also allows the next CEO to use the blame the last guy tactic along with the big "one-time" writedown to buy himself some more time.
I don't know that Microsoft, which still continues to have products like Windows and Office that generate lots of money, really falls into this category.
Eventually a company/conglomerate is big enough that sharing a financial structure means little. GE, for example, has locomotive making divisions sharing a finance structure with MRI software divisions. Claiming they really have anything in common is pointless, like saying Caterpillar and BP are the same because they share the NYSE as a common financial structure.
Given that, its an open debate if Microsoft is big enough, conglomerated enough, internally disconnected enough, such that success or failure in monopoly Office app licensing has anything to do with console gaming hardware. If they share little more than common ownership and financial structure, then we're back to "Caterpillar and BP are the same because they both have owners/shareholders on the NYSE" argument.
If MS went poof and spun off all its divisions, would there really be much effect on the divisions, other than the losing ones would run out of cash and the winning ones would have way too much cash?
I guess another bad analogy is GE is just a big mutual fund that 100% owns dozens of completely unrelated large companies. And its a fair claim that MS is the same although obviously much smaller.
All standard 21st century investor behavior. Double or nothing all the way. A CEO trying to quietly wind down a company is unlikely to be given time to do so. Unless they have the backing of an "activist" investor, in which case the unions will scream bloody murder about "vultures" ruining America.
Sears Holdings was basically a hedge fund that happened to own Sears and Kmart. You'd have to admit that prior to the recession it was looking pretty good, having enjoyed a 10x run in their share price.
You're assuming the board knew any better. For all you know, Ballmer fought against it. They could have been screaming at him to get into phones and he found a solution. Full disclosure I revel in the demise of MS.
MS was, and is still, in a very ugly position in regards to mobiles. They sat and watched Apple move in not only on music players, but phones, and later tablets. MS's offerings were all milquetoast desktop and laptop offerings and its migration from its old Windows Mobile product to Windows Phone took forever with the early versions being pretty uncompetitive.
MS saw what Google's relationships with its OEMs was like (reskinning, not doing updates, in-fighting, threats to move to tizen/sailfish, endless compromises, bloatware, etc) and wanted nothing of that. They thought if they had a tried and true phone hardware division with a known brand that they could leapfrog into the market. Well, it didn't happen, even though the Nokia Windows phones were fairly well received, especially if you're price sensitive. They entered the market pretty late and by then both the Android and Apple store were chock-full of apps. That's on top of MS having a stodgy business image that consumers find unappealing. To be fair, MS sells millions of these things per quarter, so they're not exactly failures. They're just a distant third. (8.6 million last quarter according to windowscentral.com).
My guess is that the US market just isn't price sensitive, so a good but cheap phone was largely unappreciated. The two year contract carrier deals hide the price of the phone, so its "easy" to get the hottest iphone or android. I think WP is a lot more popular in the EU where you usually buy your phone outright. Things like the Xiaomi lineup, the Moto G/E, and Android One were very much an attack on MS's focus on the low-end, and I think greatly hurt MS's low-end sales. Without those sales this acquisition wasn't going to pay off.
Yeah, but quality at the low end had to be a trend they saw coming. Apple and Samsung commoditized high-end manufacturing -- you need a lot of expensive equipment to build iPhones and Galaxy phones, but that equipment is a lot less expensive when it's being sold off to make room for newer, more expensive equipment. So low-end manufacturers can buy it and start churning out high quality, low cost phones.
And I don't doubt that Microsoft can be #3 in the phone market; I just don't think it's a worthwhile thing for them to aspire to do as a company. They will be perpetually fighting for market share, and that will tempt them to leverage their other products in ways that forego other potentially more profitable strategies for those other products. The phone market is a distraction for them at this point; and I wouldn't be shocked at all if they spin off the entire consumer electronics division (including Xbox) in the next 5 years.
They paid $7.2 billion for it [1], so it actually looks like a net loss. I guess there might be tax aspects which make it a good idea to take a big writeoff now.
>* Doesn't that pretty much cover all potential customers?*
That may make more sense in comparison with the 2014 strategy, which didn't include all potential customers and specifically avoided the high end and business markets in order to focus on the value-phone buyers in "emerging markets" so as to "connect the next billion people".
I reckon business + value customers are their best bet right now. To compete for high-end customers, they need to plug the app-gap. But yes it does seem odd, they seem to be reducing their work-force but they're being more ambitious.
I'm actually a high-end Windows Phone owner - I love it, but there are a few annoying gaps in apps, not so much the big apps, just the niche apps. Having Win10 universal apps could help if Win10 takes off; if you're going to make a Win10 app, you may as well make it work on mobile too...
That's my point, though. It's very hard to compete year after year in the flagship space. One company that is doing arguably the second best job of making flagship Android phones is HTC, and even they can't make money at it. If the 2nd place flagship maker of the top platform can't make money, how will even the first tier flagship maker of the distant 3rd platform have any room for profit?
Well, OK. But I think that they're not really making a top tier flagship anymore, compared to other more recent competitors. And it looks like maybe they don't want to stay in this business. Still, your point is taken.
Microsoft tried. Samsung didn't really bite (never making more than 1 WP a year or so, basically seeing "we'll make a WP" as a bargaining chip in their real concern: negotiating over patent licensing for their Android devices) because they knew what everyone knew and Nokia's leadership refused to admit: there's just not much demand for Windows Phones, and if you base your entire mobile phone company on Windows Phone, your company will fail.
I read into that that they'll make business Lumias, for value customers not make Lumia but instead make cheap Androids or Ashas and only make Lumia flagships otherwise - basically far fewer Lumias and basic phones. I could be wrong of course.
Nokia remains a separate company and the Microsoft agreement allows Nokia to get back into phones next year, and they intend to do so. (See link below.) The best phone engineers being laid off today will probably be rehired by Nokia. The Microsoft deal turned to be heavily in favor of Nokia. They got 7+ billion dollars, and will continue to make and sell phones, except they will now be Android phones. Essentially Nokia got $7 Billion for staying out of the phone market for a couple of years.
Nokia S30/S40 cheap end candybar phones. Who will continue to make those? Nokia 225 and Nokia 108 quite common round here recently. Low income neighbourhood, UK.
I hope that Microsoft will someday buy Xamarin and give it with Visual Studio Community Edition. This way anyone will be able to publish for Windows Phone, Android and iOS from Visual Studio.
Personally I like my Lumia phone with Windows 8.1 and I look forward to check how Windows 10 will run on this device.
Just received a lumia 635 on amazon, great phone, and my battery anxiety has gone away (almsot 3 days with one charge). I hope windows 10 will work on it.
Xamarin just announced a partnership with Oracle (for an end-to-end mobile (cloud) platform). Seems like a well calculated strategy to keep the power balance in check.
You do not need to use Monodevelop, even on Windows or Mac to write Xamarin apps. Monodevelop is just the most obvious as it's packaged. And agreed, Monodevelop is not very good.
Xamarin Studio is better than MonoDevelop and (at least this is what they claim) free to use for Desktop (Window and Mac) applications http://www.monodevelop.com/download/ :
For Mac and Windows, you can download Xamarin Studio which is a bundle of MonoDevelop along with Xamarin iOS/Android plugins and branding. Note that a Xamarin license is only required if you develop iOS/Android projects, all other project types are free without restrictions.
(Actually to be fair, you'll find the Atom family of tools and related plugins to be not terrible for writing C# code. We can only hope that VSC continues to grow and spread and monodevelop fades away into the 'what were we even thinking when we made this?' it deserves to)
Because you can't use .NET CoreCLR as it is on Android. You will need to modify it in order to be able to compile it for Android. Here is a discussion about an attempt to modify .NET CoreCLR in order to be able to compile it for Android https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/1097
On iOS the situation is even worse you will need to have an AOT compiler for C# in order to be able to ship iOS apps in the Apple Store.
You are making a confusion here. Unity doesn't use Xamarin at all, they have an old license (like really old, since before Xamarin even existed) for Mono for iOS and Android.
Considering there was already so much confusion about the ARM-based Surface vs the x86-based Surface Pro line, I don't think they want to introduce additional confusion by also having the "Surface" name now apply to phones and restart that headache.
Perhaps average consumers don't care about processor architecture, but they do care about what programs will run. Surface RT was "that tablet that kinda has a desktop but can only run Office" versus "that tablet that can run any Windows program from 1995 onwards".
Something not mentioned in this article but in another[0]:
Microsoft added around 25,000 jobs when it bought the mobile department from Nokia. The 8,000 jobs they cut today are on top of the 18,000 they cut last July. Since both were focused "primarily" on the Nokia acquisitions, by my count nearly everyone from that is gone now.
I tried out a Lumia 925 on my last contract. It was a decent phone overall, very solid feeling feeling phone with a good camera and a snappy UI. My biggest complaint is that Internet Explorer mobile is slow and for the longest time did not handle touch events properly (I actually wrote a polyfill for this one: https://github.com/CamHenlin/TouchPolyfill/ .) It's a completely broken web experience compared to Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS which is pretty unacceptable on a "high end" device. Microsoft should port Chromium or Firefox themselves and it would be a pretty fantastic device overall
There are a few third-party browsers like ubrowser that may give somewhat better experience.
I had a lumia 520, and ubrowser gave a better experience than Internet Explorer on that phone.
I wonder how unifying all devices around Windows 10 relates to this number. After all, it makes sense to reduce the workforce when you only have one core, one API and one set of bundled universal apps to maintain and develop.
Though I doubt the 7,800 were all engineering and design.
Not really, they have ~118k employees and are planning to remove about 7800, so about a 7% reduction. For reference Apple has 98k employees, Google 55k, Facebook 10k.
I bought a Lumia 1020 a year ago (mostly to play with the 42MP camera) and it's a great piece of hardware (I'm an Android person for daily / main use).
However, I upgraded to the first Win10 for Mobile preview, an d now it refuses to upgrade to a newer build ("Update was downloaded but could not be opened" - and I've tried 6-7 times).
If I could get something that was hardware-wise as good as the 1020 (or the other high-end Nokia phones) that ran Android 5.1.1, it would almost be my perfect phone.
I wouldn't take this write-down to be any indication of failure. Just a likely business restructure. One year is nothing in the scheme of evaluating a business unit.
I like that you can get parts for these Nokia phones on the cheap and repair them. Also, if you can troubleshoot a browser on any Windows OS, you can troubleshoot a browser on a Windows Nokia.
My view is that these phones are a lot higher on the quality scale than 99 percent of droids and have less engineered fails than iphone.
So Microsoft will now focus on three areas: "personal computing, cloud platforms and business productivity." That leaves Microsoft in the same field as IBM and HP.
That's OK, but it turns into a consulting and customization business. It's not mass market. That's sort of where IBM is now. IBM, which once dominated the personal computer industry, has few if any retail products today.
Yeah, I really wish there was a solution that wasn't 'nuke all flash by default.' If there were a 'nuke all flash with sound by default, except for dedicated video sites (e.g. youtube)' that would be ideal.
To me, this seems like a positive. Microsoft is infamous for acquiring and keeping bloat, and its one of the things that has traditionally knocked them out of the spotlight. With this kind of restructuring, it gives Microsoft a chance to make their business and strategy right - even if its the second or third try doing so.
WP apps languish on the unpoliced MS App Store (with tons of rip-off apps and copyright infringers) abandoned without feature parity (vs other multi-platform apps for a service) sitting at v1.0 for years before being withdrawn from sale.
Nokia and RIM... they sort of loosely remind me of Commodore and Atari from the early-mid PC era. Mobile today is sort of like the late PC era -- we have Apple and IBM in the form of roughly iOS and Google/Android. Interesting how history repeats. I'm sort of wondering if Cyanogen might not be Microsoft to Google's Android.
I disagree. There are already issues with heat and power consumption in the Surface Pro 3 especially with the higher end processors. What's the point of a powerful and power-hungry processor if it's just going to throttle hard when you really try to use it?
If you need a ton of power, you need a workstation not an ultrabook/tablet hybrid. The rumored changes should allow for better battery life, cooler operation, and probably a minimal (if any) impact on performance on tasks that suit the form factor.
What's the point of a powerful and power-hungry processor
I strongly agree. The same amounts to laptops, at least for me.
I have a Macbook Pro, 13", 2.9 GHz Core i7, non-retina. About 99% of the time my laptop is less than 10% utilized. Even when I run VMware/Windows it barely breaks a sweat.
I got the i7 because it was only $100 more once I got the model with 8 GB RAM. Wasted money.
Phones, laptops, tablets --> same thing. Mostly used to consume content, probably less than 10% of users need a high end processor.
As you say, better battery life and cooler operation are the things that should be optimized for, especially with phones and tablets. I concede that a decent minority of users can make a good argument for owning a powerful laptop.
I have a surface 3, its an atom 7x cpu. I was really worried but for my coffee house workflow of editing html/css/js files, doing lots of email and videoconferencing its great. It all depends on how you approach it. I approach mine as a tablet that can do so much more. These days I mostly leave the macbook air home but then again my load is not cpu heavy. I can see some workloads where the M based processor will be a bad choice...
Microsoft is capable of making nice hardware. Some of the phone hardware is excellent. BUT making and selling hardware profitably is a puzzle they have not solved. And making it all make sense w.r.t. their OEMs and overall strategy has been even harder.
Microsoft keyboards and mice are pretty good. In fact, I have occasionally described Microsoft as a pretty good hardware manufacturer with some unfortunate ventures into software ;-)
When has success been defined as just being #1 or making money here at HN? And no, I don't consider raising money from VCs or being sold as making money.
I would argue that this relationship hasn't worked well at all since the late 90s. The customer experience with OEM Windows PCs is horrible, thanks largely to all the crapware those "partners" install to make a couple extra bucks. And their margins are so shitty that those extra bucks are basically the only bucks, so they just keep piling on. Throw in the mobile revolution to give people plausible alternatives and Microsoft's way of doing business is toast. In mobile, there was only one vendor selling devices with Microsoft's OS on it; their market share was negligible and either the product line or the vendor itself was going to go under. No one else was (nor is) interested at all.
That's why they have Surface, Windows Phone/Mobile (and did the Nokia deal), and Signature Edition now. They don't need to do any of that if the OEM partner model were working. It wasn't, and it isn't. Microsoft's decision to go vertical is very sensible. It isn't working because they're too late. One of the basic principles of running a megacorporation is that you shouldn't be in markets where you cannot be #1 or #2. Microsoft is a very distant #3 or #4 in mobile. Instead of trying to break in years after the top players were established, they should have admitted failure and gone off to find the next big thing where they could be #1 or #2. But that kind of courage is very rare in large corporations and certainly no one in the Microsoft leadership team has anything like it. So they'll thrash around for a while until either they hit on the next big thing themselves or, more likely, fail to do so and repeat this process a couple more times before finally going under.
I'm not sure how you can say it didn't work well. Microsoft made a LOT of money because of it. And the things you cite, crapware, etc... that was not due to MS.
Sure things didn't work out so well for end users, but again, Microsoft benefited greatly from this arrangement.
I think Microsoft wants to go vertical because they see how well it worked for Apple. But Microsoft is no Apple. Apple started with hardware and have always focused on hardware. Their software and services exist to drive hardware sales. That's never been Microsoft's strategy. If they want to change, that's great. But my original comment stands. They have been very very successful partnering and not being an OEM.
> And the things you cite, crapware, etc... that was not due to MS. Sure things didn't work out so well for end users, but again, Microsoft benefited greatly from this arrangement.
That kind of misses the point, doesn't it? The consumer perception of what the Windows experience is is degraded by their partners, leading people to see it as shoddy and less reputable than it is. This happens to basically any business that pursues this (the world is full of unscrupulous satellite TV dealers who will falsely represent the channels you're getting so you sign a contract, then tell you to call the company once you're actually locked in, for instance).
Absolutely. But they have to do something, since standing still will allow their competition to eat them alive, and I think that moving into hardware along with their various services is a good move to at least try.
It's probably too early to call it either way; the Xbox division took something like 6-7 years to start posting profit. Surface was (still is?) in the negative, but it's been gaining traction lately and if it isn't already profitable it will be soon.
Surface in particular is a good example of what they should do in hardware: make something that nobody else really does and do a damn good job of it. There are other Windows tablets, but nothing comes close to Surface in terms of build quality and form factor. They tried to differentiate the Xbox One with Kinect, which didn't work, but points to that being their strategy. With Windows Phone though, I'm not really seeing it. The main draw is the OS (which isn't much of a draw because of the low marketshare -> no apps feedback cycle).
> I'd argue that Google is an advertising company. Software, search and phones are just delivery mechanisms for the ads (which brings in the money)
That is exactly like saying "The New York Times is an advertising company. Newspaper and website are just delivery mechanisms for the ads (which brings in the money)"
Software/AI is a Google core-competency, calling it a "mechanism for ads" seems to be under-selling them, especially when a huge chunk of the software they produce has nothing to do with ad-delivery
