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What Microsoft Must Do To Save Its Mobile Business
GMGruman writes "Microsoft has tossed out its mobile management team (without admitting to doing so), but is that enough to make Microsoft matter in mobile? InfoWorld's Galen Gruman argues that a lot more is needed than a management change if Microsoft hopes to have a future in the emerging mobile world. In his blog, he lays out a tough five-point prescription for Microsoft to get back in the game. For starters, Microsoft has to get out of its well-established cultural mindset that it's OK to ship crap that it might fix later on."
I think maybe the best answer here is to just surrender. "Mobile? It's not our thing. We wanted it to be our thing - we tried. But we're not good at it." While they're at it maybe they should get out of search and online ads too.
I'm symbolset and the lack of Windows Phone 7 was my idea.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For starters, Microsoft has to get out of its well-established cultural mindset that it's OK to ship crap that it might fix later on."
That is pure bullshit. It works for literally everyone else, including Apple. Or is all the stuff in iPhone OS 4.0 that Steve said wasn't included because it would make the iPhone suck not sufficient evidence for you? How about all the functionality in Android 2.1 that seems mandatory? This story is (-1, Troll).
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's never been ok to ship crap and fix it later. During the period that MS was doing so, its competition was shipping crapper products, releasing slower, and selling for more money. By any reasonable definition, they were the only game in town. Windows and Office had time to mature into the powerhouses they became.
What will they have to ship?
The problem is a political one, not technical: Most Phone manufacturers don't thrust microsoft.
If you look at the past, every company that has made a partnership with microsoft has suffered
the consequences and were crushed by the big software giant.
Someday Microsoft might just decide to start manufacturing (sub-contracting) their own microsoft
smartphones and all the companies relying on a microsoft mobile OS will be doomed.
I can't help but feel Microsoft has been wedged out of the mobile market by competitors that are specialized at doing everything better then they do.
Wanna be a cool kid with a pretty phone?
Apple has you covered.
Need something uber business savvy but easy enough for a monkey in a suit to use?
Get a blackberry
Want a phone that doesn't hold you down?
Get an Android phone
Want a phone that runs on POS hardware and can barely handle anything?
Oh crap, umm...no.
What they do have, however, is excellent proprietary stuff like ActiveSync that's integrated into all these other cell phones. If I was them, I would focus on developing technology like that. Let the mobile market work for you, not the other way around.
The Kin is an interesting attempt to wrangle the teenybopper market but I think they've already fallen to the iphone.
I think the answer is to focus the Windows Phone as a serious mobile computing device for business. A lot of supermarkets for example use Windows Mobile for their handheld stocktaking computers. I'm pretty sure the Apple Shop uses them too. They certainly don't use iPhones to bill your credit card for purchases anyway. In that regard, Windows Mobile 7 is a step in the wrong direction, because the custom built corporate mobile app isn't compatible with the idea of a centralised app store run by which ever Steve is in charge of the company in question.
Invest in Apple?
NOT!!! Jee wiz. Microsoft finally failing? Time to bring out my specialized Ubuntu Mobile phone and telling everyone about it, mabye getting contracts similar to Apple's Iphone but without the sales exclusivity.
The reason microsoft succeeded was because they wrote a great application called Word. In it's time it was truly great compared to the competition (word perfect for example). Other than being comprehensive and less clunky than open office it's not such a remarkable product anymore. But if you are bussiness or Govt you have to have a copy of it. It's the standard and you always get some document that the emulators don't open correctly, so you have to use it no matter what processor you prefer.
Windows I think rode on the coat-tails of this. Windows mac was a superior product up through version 5 but it was not fully compatible with the Windows version. As a result, windows OS became the preferred operating system for providing compatibility of word documents. This choice was cemented by the fact that windows ran on cheaper computers. But I think it was Word that was pulling the buggy, not the OS.
Ironically, Word 6 made the Mac and PC versions more interoperable by removing the advanced features from the mac product. But by then the product offered an integrated environment on the PC with outlook and server systems. So it still was better to use the PC than the Mac version for business.
If you were starting over today, the huge standardization on word probably would not happen.
This is the boat MS is in now with mobile computing. Word is behind the curve on being a first rate mobile product. If they don't get something better out there people may start to standardize on something else once the reasons become compelling enough.
I think that microsoft is fully capable of producing a first class mobile computing set of tools. Why they haven't is mysterious to me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
it's called ActiveSync. Apple and Google both license it. Google even licenses it for Google Docs sync over the internet and have extended it. Microsoft doesn't need to pour money into R&D and market a phone since they probably make more money by taking a cut of every iphone, ipod touch, ipod and most Android phones sold.
as far as shipping crap, Apple and Google do the same thing. Only reason Apple shipped the iPad during the slowest shopping time of the year is to work out the bugs before the next holiday season and get market share before everyone else. my iphone hasn't been completely stable until 3.1.3. there are reports of Droid phones rebooting for no reason. The Nexus One had all kinds of problems. It took HP 2-3 years of firmware and driver updates to make their Proliant G5 servers stop rebooting due to a bug in the iLO firmware. OS X 10.6 hasn't been out a year and it's almost on service pack 4 where all the updates are larger than the OS that shipped last year. everyone ships crap these days.
the big mistake that Microsoft seems to be making is they have given up the low end of computing. Smartphones and tablets. historically every time a new competitor takes over a market is by getting the low end first and then using that to attack the high end of the market. MS did this with Windows. it was crap compared to other OS's but cleaned house because it was easy to use and deploy. now with Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft is finally shipping a server OS with features that UNIX had in the 1990's. SQL Server is the same way. not as good as Oracle of DB2, but good enough at the right price for a lot of customers.
What is clear is the mobile phone industry does not support the concept of a closed software base on which hardware is hacked to make it work. Two of the major mobile phone OS, Symbian and WebOS were derived from code that was developed to support an integrated PDA device, and is now open so it can be customized to a device. iPhone OS of course is completely open to Apple who can do as they wish to create an completely integrated product.
If Google can gain real traction with Android then there might be a little hope for MS. Even though Android has the advantage of being open to manufacturers, it has the same disadvantage of being at least partly controlled by a company that does not count the end user as the primary customer. Both Google and MS are tried to jumpt start the market for it's products by creating a reference device(the nexus one and kin) but it is not clear that either attempt will work. In the Android case it might become so fragmented that Apps are not going to be compatible across the devices. For MS, there is frankly little reason for a manufacturer to use the mobile product. Such a phone would either directly compete with Blackberry or Android, with little differentiation, and, unlike xBox, the manufacturer will have little incentive to sell the phones for a loss.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The next generation NOKIAs will be Linux+Qt and Symbian+Qt. Why would Nokia need Microsoft with Qt in there pocket?
Martin
PS: Symbain+S60E5 was just a stop gap, never meant to last. And yes that is cheaty.
It't the S60 user interface which NOKIA puts on top of Symbian. UIQ which was used by Sony and Motorola as user interface was a lot better. But that water under the bridge and the next generation Symbian will have Qt as user interface.
My views are only from the perspective of owning a WM phone, but the things that I noticed in my own phone (Motorola MPX220) and the HTC WM phone of my dad is that WM is just too much like a desktop OS. This brings round problems like start-up times in excess of a minute and no alarms when the phone is turned off. It must've been an option to start a development from scratch at the time (and it might even be a development from scratch), but the WM OS behaves too much like a desktop OS to ever be successful in embedded applications. Hacking this around will always lag behind the competitors. Starting from scratch could fix it for them, since they usually manage to heave a huge bucket of money into the marketing machine and haul the product through the ditch. They'll be out of the game for a couple of years then.
!
...does any money change hands? Does slashdot make a coupla bucks, at least? I hope so. If not, can Galen at least arrange for snydeq to take Rob Malda out for dinner and a show every now and then?
How the hell did they ship a phone OS which answers phone calls in your pocket? Touch-screens are not a hard concept, MSFT.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
ActiveSync is used to synchronize with the PC, when synchronizing with a server it's called Exchange... and Google has that for the e-mail, agenda and contacts. The best part of it: It has PUSH functionality and it works great with my WinMo phone. It generally just takes 3 to 5 seconds to see a change in Google Calendar appear on my mobile's screen. Since it's widely used in companies the Exchange server model is one of the few Microsoft products that works (fairly) rock solid...
I think the problem is applications. Every bussines pushed out an iPhone app. Every business is pushing out an Android app. But where are the comparable Windows Mobile apps? If you want the platform to be successful, get bussines to push their services to it.
> SQL Server is the same way. not as good as Oracle of DB2, but good enough at the right price for a lot of customers.
This idea depends on a whole host of false assumptions that are certainly not true now and may never have been.
It depends on the idea that Microsoft is always cheap and Oracle is always expensive. Neither is
necessarily true and probably have never been. A lot of this depends on ignorance of the actual
products and how they are priced and dependent on taking naieve observations from Microsoft's
non-entrprise products and applying them to their RDBMS.
Microsoft is really only cheap for the consumer buying some bundle from an OEM like Dell.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Don't forget Symbian, with almost half of smartphone sales and also licensing quite a bit of MS tech. But I guess MS would be prefer to have a bit more...leverage.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I think Windows Phone 7 OS UI (or lack of it) is really nice. There isn't much UI to it. It is very basic and minimalistic. When they introduced in March, I did not like it that much. Now playing with the emulator, I think it is very good and stable to work with. I agree with the article on removing the name Windows from it. This is not Windows OS
Seriously, what does he know about running large software corporations? Read his LinkedIn profile. He's a writer, not a manager of large product division in a huge company.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/galen-gruman/0/37/599
Sorry about the mess.
I've a Nokia N900
I looked for a store in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I could try a Nokia N900 before buying one. Neither T-Mobile, Best Buy, nor RadioShack had one. I guess the closest thing for a U.S. geek is a Motorola Droid on Verizon Wireless or any of several HTC phones on T-Mobile.
Microsoft and Intel seem to be similar in that neither company is any good at making "consumer-grade" products.
OK, I admit, Microsoft's keyboards, mice, and Xbox are fairly consumer friendly, but that's about it.
Intel did take a crack at the consumer market for a while with USB microscopes and that stupid Intel Reader device. The verdict from those experiments was, nice try - stick with making chips and software development tools and others will build products using your stuff.
I see Microsoft slowly evolving into that - developing software and services that others use to build end-user products, similar to Intel.
-ted
The problem with Windows Mobile is that MS has tried to leverage the Windows philosophy to mobile when it wasn't appropriate. They purposely made the OS be more Windows like even though the codebase has no relation to the Windows NT codebase. Yet at the same time it was sufficiently different from Windows desktop to frustrate users. While touch is available to WM phones, they didn't design the OS to use a different UI instead relying on the desktop UI with a few tweaks. In that aspect they just switched a mouse for a stylus and called it done.
They got away with it for a while because there wasn't much competition for them because they were really the only game in town for corporate users. Then RIM came along. But they weren't worried. But MS didn't think about for consumers as much.
Apple didn't bother to compete with MS in the corporate smart phone arena; they were making a consumer smart phone which was an under-served area. Apple when designing a smart phone realized that a consumer has different needs than a corporate user. They designed the UI and OS to be different.
Also in terms of hardware, MS has followed the same philosophy. They just make the software and other companies use it on their hardware. Problem for MS is some of their hardware partners put out crap. While Windows Mobile isn't the most stable OS out there, some of their partners exacerbate problems with their shoddy hardware. Apple doesn't have this problem because they control the whole stack. I'm not saying that MS should do that but they should do a better job of working with their partners to make sure Windows 7 isn't sabotaged by the hardware.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Slow, unresponsive, shittastic. An utter embarrassment. A wank-stain on the face of technology. Windows Mobile products make the users want to kill themselves as opposed to iPhones which only make the people who build them suicidal; in use the iPhone is actually quite enjoyable.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Microsoft is quietly getting rid of its old mobile business because it's replacing it with Silverlight. Windows 7 has a mobile edition that will evolve into whatever supports Silverlight. Which means that Microsoft's mobile business will use the same developer base as its desktop and server .Net business. And with things like MonoTouch, its mobile business will include the iPhone, just as Microsoft has always been one of the biggest developers for Mac desktops.
Silverlight puts .Net everywhere. The rest of Microsoft's mobile and desktop business is defined by that overall strategy.
--
make install -not war
Seriously, is that not the way that msft has conquered every market in the last ten years, or more?
Msft is very clever in leveraging it's monopoly in one technology, to almost force you to buy other msft technologies. For example, outlook will not really work right without exchange. You can not view certain websites without having the right version of msie, which in turn requires you to have to have the right version of windows.
Over the five years, or so, it seems that msft is more of a litigation company than anything else.
Msft has always made products that are mediocre at best. But, msft can get people to buy those products anyway by leveraging their monopoly, bribing officials, controlling much of the media, astro-turfing, and so on.
Msft does not need a good product to win, just a good team of lawyers, a good PR firm, some well placed political contributions, and some to leverage their monopoly in other products.
What Microsoft must do to save their mobile buisiness: Simple, in Microsoft Fasion, Download the Android ASOP Standard Source. Recomplie with every reference to Android replaced by Windows 8 Mobile. When anyone complains just wait until they sue. The judgement will be much less than the profit. rinse, Repeat. Ohh wait that was Win 3.x err Win95.. err Sorry Win2k ohh wait no Excel, oh nm must have been defrag.. oh dang I must have meant Internet Explorer... well, you get the idea...
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Gosh, Windows Mobile is the dogs bollocks? Pity that nobody is going to find out because absolutely nobody buys WM phones. Check the sale statistics. EVERYONE does better. Even linux has a larger share (especially if you realize Android is based on it).
So either you are wrong or everyone else is. Somehow I think you are.
Really, if you go and defend a badly selling product, come up with counters as to why it sells so badly other then the defence "I bought it, so it must be great because else I must have been a real idiot for buying it".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It seems to me that Microsoft ought to try to follow IBM's path. They should accept the world that they live in -- a world with multiple vendors, and open standards -- and be the guys who own lots of really key assets, and who are really good at making things work well together.
First, they should accept Android and build a stack on top of that OS, rather than trying to push their own system. They have to be hard nosed enough to accept reality, and the reality is that a second rate locked down proprietary phone OS ain't going to win.
They should produce a value added stack that sits on top of android and that's targeted really squarely at corporate customers -- it should include sync and access to office docs, active directory integration, an incredible exchange client, etc. Pretty much everyone with a good job would buy that, because almost everyone lives in a microsoft universe at work. There should be apps that let you control your SQL server from your phone, that let you monitor servers, etc.
All of this stuff should be extensible and scriptable by anyone who wants to write code. They should be all about open scripting and glue between components.
On the consumer side it will be harder and more competitive, but they should probably be pushing a tight desktop integration stack there as well. They need to tie the desktop and the phone together using the cloud as glue. You should get your songs, your photos, your docs, your apps. You should be able to pull up your desktop via RDP and do anything you want, and there should be separate phone friendly GUIs to do the most useful things.
Almost none of the really awesome stuff we'll be able to do with these phones has been built yet. Microsoft is in an incredibly good position to build out huge chunks of it, because they're the guys who know the most about so much of what we want to reach back and talk to. They still own the legacy world, and that's a huge, huge advantage.
But it's like they're thining in 1993 terms, and they need to control the OS, and they're going to fight that pointless battle that they can't win anyway. They have to accept the new world -- an open platform that everyone shares -- and they have to leverage all of their assets to thrive in it.
I never would have thought I'd be in this place. I love linux. I want computers to be open. And now I really want Microsoft to stand up and push back against the closed Apple iPad model. I want them to come out really hard, and push something more open, and I want them to run ads explaining why Apple's way is a bad idea. And instead they just seem to be floundering.
nly reason Apple shipped the iPad during the slowest shopping time of the year is to work out the bugs before the next holiday season and get market share before everyone else.
There's also the possibility that they've got some other big product release coming up before the end of the year and didn't want their products competing for attention.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
when you get to be the size of MS and Intel the way things are done is you take an existing product, dumb it down so it won't compete with higher margin products, run it through a few dozen MBA's and ship. no one would dare say lets build it from scratch and do a complete reboot. MS seems to have done it with WinMO 7 though. Intel seems to want to sell Xeons and their dumbed down Xeons otherwise known as Core i3, i5, i7 and Atom. To create something fresh like Arm with a new instruction set would mean setting up a new assembly line which is too much of a financial risk and not worth risking your job security
ActiveSync is used to synchronize with the PC, when synchronizing with a server it's called Exchange...
Nope. It's called "Exchange ActiveSync"
-ActiveSync is a desktop app
-Exchange is a groupware server
-Exchange ActiveSync is a technology (in the iPhone, WinMo, etc)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveSync#Exchange_ActiveSync
Microsoft lucked up, then fucked up. Palm had the market cornered, but their OS didn't scale as well when people were starting to look to their phones for more functionality (the Treo came out a bit too late to save their dominance). Windows CE was an inefficient behemoth with an interface that was not at all tailored to small mobile screens. But, it had the features people wanted at the time and when hardware caught up with it, Windows CE dominated for a while. The familiarity and comfort of their brand was enough to get people using misplaced UI metaphors like start buttons and microscopic icons. Then, for some screwball reason Microsoft decided to effectively stick their mobile development in the backyard shed. They didn't do anything to address the serious bugginess and quirkiness of their support libraries like ActiveSync and the Windows Mobile Device Center app just complicated the desktop/device synchronization problem. If mobile development was a basketball game, I'd call the FBI in to investigate them for point shaving. But, I have to assume that their leadership simply didn't want to deal with it, just as they didn't want to deal with the Internet back in the late 80s.
So, just as they had sat idly by as fortune smiled upon them, they sat idly as their flawed platform drove more competitors into the market and customers away from them. Unlike sappy romantic comedies, you can't piss in your cornflakes, then expect a heartfelt speech will make everything alright by the time the credits roll.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Sorry, but shipping crap that may or may not get fixed later on is how the entire industry works. Enterprises know to NEVER buy a *.0 release of anything, because it's guaranteed to suck.
The biggest problem, in my mind, was creating a business model that required constant upgrades. No longer is it possible to improve or develop a product, since as a developer, you have to replace it completely in three years.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It worked wonders for the Xbox 360, so why not? Especially the not fixing it part.
--- What?
The people they fired (or let step down or whatever) seemed to be intelligent people. Perhaps not fully successful, but brighter than your average Microsoft employee. They should have fired S. Ballmer. What good ideas has he come up with?
Are you kidding me. The article assumes that if MS makes a product as good as iphone or android they will win. The reaility is that Android is FREE for smartphone manufacturers and Apple doesnt make money off the iPhone OS but the hardware. So MS has the arrogance to think that it can still license windows mobile when HP has webOS, Apple makes their own phone, and everyone else can get a superior mobile OS for free. Won't work now like the PC because everyone has to start over and write their applications from scratch anyways with windows mobile 7. And doesnt even do native code. MS YOU LOSE!!!!
Ah, thanks for clearing that up... It's confusing since it's a totally different technology, and the desktop ActiveSync is a buggy piece of shit in my experience... strange that they would re-use that name for a corporate technology.
Windows mobile is a fantastic product. It has been doing things in the mobile world long before iCrap-phones and droid even existed. What they SHOULD have done is fired their marketing team. When is the last time you saw a great ad for a windows mobile product? Gee, I wonder why the product is failing to gain market share. As the old saying goes; "what happens when you don't advertise? Nothing..."
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
MS Mobile is doing much better than most people think because big business buys them in bulk to give crappy phones to there employees. Big Business does not care if you can watch videos, or share pictures, in fact many companies still ban cameras in the work place. Rim Blackberry are known to be good for business, just buy them out, keep a stable boring OS that works for business and sit back and wait for Jobs to die, Google to go the way of Yahoo and Facebook, and become the last guy left standing due to the insane nature of corporate culture and IT Infrastructure being unable to change.
TFA should've been a comment on /. from the last round of this pontificating. It really didn't add much, except to display some of the worst writing skills around. Some winners:
"Palm had a similar marketing pitch but didn't really make it the organizing primciple of its WebOS [21]."
[primciple -> principle]
"Pull the Kin from the market today, and recommend its team look for jobs at a competitor, where they might do you more food (maybe Nokia?)."
[food -> good]
Simple and common mistakes, one easily caught with spellcheck, another with a grammar review - if one had the patience to get that far, the grammar throughout is horrendous.
my iphone hasn't been completely stable until 3.1.3. there are reports of Droid phones rebooting for no reason. The Nexus One had all kinds of problems. It took HP 2-3 years of firmware and driver updates to make their Proliant G5 servers stop rebooting due to a bug in the iLO firmware. OS X 10.6 hasn't been out a year and it's almost on service pack 4 where all the updates are larger than the OS that shipped last year.
that's all pretty much BS, sorry.
we have an iphone and it's completely stable i can't even remember the last time it has needed a reboot. it's more like an appliance that a computer in that respect.
i own a nexus one and have had very, very few problems with it. i follow android news pretty closely and have seen no reports of the droid being unstable.
i've been running OSX 10.6 since shortly after it was released and it's been extremely stable and i've had zero compatibility problems. i just did an uptime on my oldish MBP that i use every day for work and it's been up 69 days.
To Microsoft, regarding Windows (CE/Mobile)
I text in your general direction!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It's a joke; they should just give up the idea. If it ever makes it above 1% it would be a storming success; but no, people would rather pay to have a 10 year-old Windows than the latest Linux one, even for the completely undemanding netbook market.
Fail. Just give up.
Considering how well the company-wide effort to improve security went, I would expect any similar effort to improve the overall quality of MS's software will end up with the same result. MS will release press release after press release touting how much work they're putting into improving their products but not much will really happen. To really get things to change, they'd likely have to fire so many people that are ingrained in their current development mindset that it would frighten a lot of other employees who'd then leave. Either that or they'd have to fire a few select managers and hire some real bastards to shake things up. The effect of that could be just as demoralizing and the talent exodus just as bad.
Something's got to change at MS if they want to get the company back on track. Crappy software doesn't cut it any more. (Like I care what happens to the company. I've been Microsoft-free for years now.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
MIcrosoft has a mobile business??
Really? That might explain those lame windows '95 looking phones with the same price as the iPhone I see in the AT&T store.
Think Deeply.
Microsoft produces a lot of mediocre software that it slowly fixes over a half-dozen or more iterations -- adding more crap along the way. I've never understood this business strategy, but it worked for Windows, so it's now accepted at Redmond. Practically every product from Office to Dynamics is developed this way.
That's called Agile Development; it's a best practice. What's not to understand?
Your new mobile OS needs to run on hardware that oozes quality, fit and finish, and confident capability.
MS is a software company. It stinks at hardware and it stinks at services. It should stick to what it does best.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Qt mobile will support multi touch. Probably the main reason why NOKIA and Apple are in a patent war right now.
... but it uses Android instead of Windows Mobile ;-)
or just allow 3rd parties to provide band aids
So where does that leave the likes of Symantec?
Blue Horse Shoe says "Sell Symantec. All of it. NOW!"
The first step was throwing out Peter Knook and replacing him with Terry Myerson over a year and a half ago, not the recent departures of Robbie Bach and J Allard. That in turn led to more management changeout and a massive reset on what will now be released as Windows Phone 7.
I'd say that items 1-3 of this article are already being done. There will be a limited selection of devices available, all of which are required to adhere to more stringent hardware restrictions regarding things like screen size, processor speed, memory, number of buttons and software restrictions like no MO or OEM takeover of the home screen or other UI components. Something like half the features found in 6.5 will not be present at all in 7 because of a dramatic stripping down of features in exchange for a focus on important user scenarios. This is largely a consequence of focusing on end consumer customers instead of corporate customers for 7. The Windows branding is something I don't know much about (I'm not in marketing), but it seems unlikely this is going away any time soon since Windows is a huge brand recognized by lots of potential customers. As for Kin, it seems clear on the inside that these two groups will not stay separate once WP7 ships. The reorg is right around the corner.
The steaming pile of poo that was Mobile Safari in its earlier versions. I bought an iPhone 3G - you know, iPhone v. 2.0 - and I literally could not browse the web for more than five minutes at a time without Mobile Safari locking up. Sure, they ultimately corrected the problem (mostly - I still have a few problems with it), but still - this was the freaking web browser on a product line that had been out for over a year by the time I bought it, and almost a year and a half before it was finally fixed. And it was almost completely unusable. And I know it wasn't just me, because the web was full of fixes/work-arounds for the problem (which amounted to clearing caches and rebooting the phone).
Microsoft may be the worst at this sort of thing, but Apple is hardly immune to it.
I think Microsoft has its biggest problem both on the desktop as in the mobile area with IE, face it the world is moving towards HTML5 in a fast pace and Microsoft still is 4-5 years behind webkit and firefox and does not catch up. The best they could do is to drop their ie codebase and join the work on Webkit, but that is against their mentality.
Especially HTML5 will become significant first in the mobile area, and Microsoft cannot expect that people will target both IE7 or Silverlight just for WinMo7 when they can cover the rest of the world with a HTML5 codebase.
Outside of that the biggest problem WinMo has is the enforcement of .Net without native fallbacks, even google admitted that this is not possible and added a native API, so they are stuck with a shoddy browser and neither Opera nor Firefox can deliver decent alternatives, add to that the lack of copy paste, and a market enforcement and you have something which is dead before arrival.
WinMo reminds me more and more at the PSPgo, a company who had a strong foothold somewhere and does simply not get it why people flock to the competition and leave the platform, so they start to copy but do not get it simply...
"Microsoft has to get out of its well-established cultural mindset that it's OK to ship crap that it might fix later on"
It wasn't so long ago that cell phones were just not updateable. If you shipped a phone with software bugs, you got to run a campaign of swapping out sold units and inventory, and suffered the slings and arrows of outraged buyers. I can't think of a phone I've had with a genuine software bug until my first BlackBerry, and that was updateable.
Android in particular is spoiling us for both quality and freshness.
In PC software, it was also not so long ago that if you shipped something buggy, you got to mail out CDs or diskettes of patches, and of course had a patch management system that made it all work. WordPerfect had issues in the 4.x releases that caused these shipments. Sun got so fed up with patches to Solaris that they implemented an early Web-based distrtibution system when Usenet was still the favored way to get large files of anything. Sun cost Fedex a pretty penny by putting an end to worldwide shipments of patches, and good for them.
Today, we tolerate both poor quality software and rapid patch cycles, because we have a relatively ubiquitous infrastructure (the Internet) to support it. Microsoft is not alone in relying on this to cover over a multitude of sins, from kssing/broken features to of course constant security issues. Picking a biggest offender on this area is pointless.
Windows Mobile I haven't had, but it seems that WM is not that much worse than any other phone software when it comes to patches and bugs. Android is struggling with fragmentation, with phones that 'can't' run the latest version. My G1 is way behind, and will not get 2.1 officially, Samsung is currently facing a lot of user outrage over the Behold 2 not getting Android 2.1 as 'promised'. Windows Mobile phones are legendary for the lack of OS upgrades, usually because the new version just needs more than the old phone can deliver, but sometimes because the manufacturer will not license the new version. Hey, it's a jungle out there.
So the admonition that "ship crap that it might fix later on" is bad is just so obvious it defies logic. why say that out loud? However, it IS ok, so far, to promise to upgrade later, and maybe not do so. It seems to be ok to ship crap and fix it, despite the whole issue of making a phone work from day one - see Google and the Nexuis One for an example of apparently poor testing and immediate negastive feedback from users. Not even a phone number to call, and calling the carrier resulted in 'talk to Google' for a response.
It's not so much about shipping crap now, as it is responding to problems and quick resolutions. Kinda sad, but we are in an immediate world, and we are tolerating crap.
Having said that, where do you turn for excellence out-of-the-box? Is Nokia still shipping great phones that work?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A heavily customized Qt - as in, forget source compatibility with desktop apps
Where did you get the idea that a phone app should work on a general purpose computer? Nokia's phone OS doesn't, Java doesn't, Google's Linux-kerneled device doesn't make that promise either. Maybe you are confusing Nokia's tablet device with their phones?
Why is this modded informative when it's wrong?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Plus nokia pissed off their developer base. requiring everything to be signed basically flipped a big "F YOU" to all the devs.
This is simply untrue. I have unsigned apps on my phone right now.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It's basically right..
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I, too, had resigned myself to the fact that the N900 would be a "Newegg-only" type geek product that would never be available in stores in the USA. When I went to Hong Kong last month, though, Nokia stores everywhere were plastered with ads for the N900, and, yes, I got to try one. (They were selling for about US$600+, so cheaper to get from Amazon.com in USA.) The other day I went to Frys Electronics in the south SF Bay area (not the Palo Alto store), and they were selling for $527 (sells for $515 on Amazon).
I haven't travelled to Indiana lately, so I can't help you there; sorry.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
A world without Microsoft wouldn't be so bad a place surely?
After all, before the IBM PC clone became so popular at home people used to use much nicer machines. Amiga, ST, Acorn Archimedes and so on.
I'd argue Linux holds back development of new alternatives to Windows and Mac OSX. What happened to the sort of people who created BeOS?
They could always write iPhone and iPad apps...
I actually agree with you about this in every other case, but Microsoft is a special case. Analysts are already saying that "Failure is not an option." Sigh. I guess we'll have to have one more iteration of this. Here's how it goes:
Normally I'm not one to praise Microsoft's end results, but I'm not stupid. They hire the brightest minds from the best schools with strong foundations in classical IT art as well as contemporary vision and they work them to death because that hazy zone between exhaustion and physical failure is a special point where human brains integrate at miraculous levels. Microsoft has known this for twenty years and organizes its workers accordingly. These folks driven in this way can make an awesome mobile OS, they did, and I'd love to have a copy of the source for that bad boy. These Microsoft developers made a rock solid performant and genuinely innovative phone OS which is the core of Windows Phone 7. It's tiny, boots fast, suspends and resumes instantly, and pinches ergs like they're made of platinum. It has an intuitive touch-centric interface. It works flawlessly with all the latest technologies - hell, it'd make a great HPC OS if these jerks would think out of the box now and then. This was about two years and three reorgs ago. This is the mockup they'll trot out to the major phone vendors hoping to get them to push the platform - short a few apps but you can see the potential because it's beautiful, intuitive, responsive. They built an app store for it, and shopped the mockup around to app developers under NDA. Some of the AC posters here even have it and they're in awe of its incredible flexibility, its power, its potential - and they should be because this bare OS rocks. They float an early 2009 release date to some of their preferred pundits even though it's not finished yet because that's how you feed a flackalyst.
It's a killer mobile OS but it's not a Windows yet. For six months they put some finishing touches on the version they intend to ship - integrating Bing search and Windows Live services into everything, building the Mobile Office apps for it, porting Silverlight, .NET for mobile and a bunch of other stuff. This is leveraging the platform so that it pushes all of the other Microsoft platforms because making products that can be extracted from their internicine application and server dependencies is not the One Microsoft Way. The shipping version then ran like a dog, leaked memory like a seive and crashed every few minutes. So eighteen months ago they rebooted the team and tried again. They got the same result, so nine months ago they reorg the group from higher up and try again. The new group can't get the thing to work right in nine months, so yesterday they reorg the entire entertainment and mobile division to be directly under Steve Ballmer and reboot their efforts yet again. This product was supposed to ship in early 2009. It is not even close to ready. It probably never will be because all of these internicine ties never did work well, are a moving target, and have reached an insurmountable level of complexity for a mobile device which must by definition be the ultimate in computer reliability and stability while remaining cutting edge in a dynamic market. It literally can't be done.
Even today Microsoft executives are shopping around that slick mockup that no end user is ever going to see to their phone partners at the manufacturers and carriers, playing the push/pull game. "You want this. You need this. You're going to want to start planning the marketing around this product right away. This is going to be a slam dunk! And look - it says Microsoft on it everywhere so you know businesses are going to eat it up. [Hushed]It has IE and Outlook." / "Of course, this iPhone killer isn't for everybody - it's exclusive to our special friends. Committed friends l
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hardware no matter how perfect cannot overcome the deficiencies of software poorly done.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The things that separate us from those are market forces. They don't have to give us the cool stuff because our world is populated by the differently abled who will buy the stuff derived from apps Bill Gates built and so pays him royalties. If Microsoft really needed to step up with a solid performant OS, they have a dozen to choose from in the pool of stuff they've developed and licensed, including at least three forms of Unix.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Anecdotes can get you only so far - a colleague curses quite often at his iPhone because it locks up or crashes every now and then.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So are you the kind of guy that would try to jump a river that is 10 m wide? (the long jump record is just below 10m BTW).
There is a point when you have to lick your wounds, count your loses and learn from the experience.
And now I am going to agree in the particular cae of MS: if thet would leave the mobile market they would be done. Really. In a few years down the line they would be acquired as also rans by a company that saw the light.
Mobile devices are forcing web developpers to be more standards compliant, IE no longer will sway web developers about how the web is built (very few sites still insist on being an IE site only, fools, they do so at a prelude to ther demise).
So if MS wants to be part of that they have to be in that market. Otherwise everything may move to th web in terms they would not be dictating, or at least providing inout to.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Anecdotes can get you only so far
actually, it's called empirical evidence.