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Microsoft Should Dump Middlemen, Build Own Phones
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company and start making its own phones."
Given that the xbox has done rather well for them, but they'd be entering a market where cool is king. They would have to come up with some seriously strong designs.
Microsoft do not have engineering talent nor software talents to pull something like that off, especially not in management. No matter how good of a phone the grunts make, management will kill its potential. It has happened countless of times before and it will happen again.
Xbox is not a success and while now making modest profits it has lots and lots of investments to recoup before giving any payment on the money spent. Its an utter failure up until today and if nothing ground breaking happens it will keep on being a third rate console.
The only way Microsoft could succeed is to break out a mobile team and totally isolate it from any managment and Microsoft itself. Even when they buy an excellent and complete product like Danger they still manages to wipe it off the planet my mismanagement.
Im also not so sure being a top down shop like Apple is good in the long run. Those kinds of companies tend to stiffen up and become stale and slow pretty fast when given enough market share.
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Nonsense. They're hardly going to build a manufacturing plant. They could (like Apple do) sub-contract to another manufacturer. But, in essence they've already done this with HTC making the bulk of Windows Mobile devices. I guess they could (like Google did) get HTC to build a Microsoft branded phone, but it wouldn't make a whole lot of difference as to what they have today.
I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree.
Microsoft generally makes pretty good hardware and doing the whole package would give them a tight control over the integration.
The downside is you lose the ability to sell the OS to a bigger portion of the market at the outset.
I think as long as they control the hardware requirements and perhaps have an approval process so that they can do some QA on the phones made by 3rd parties that would be a happy medium for them.
Selling your own hardware is not necessary in this segment. The issue with Windows Mobile has never really been the hardware. The HTC HD2 has great hardware, it is the software that sucks. Microsoft needs to fix the software. The problem with Windows Mobile is the typical Microsoft issue. They make a first software version lavishing many resources to enter a market, then when it gets successful they dump the developers overboard (happened to Internet Explorer as well). The Windows Mobile software platform has stagnated for way too long.
Making Windows Mobile a .NET platform is essential, because it is an easy platform to develop for. Many people know how to develop for it, and those who don't learn quickly. C# is an easier to use language than Objective-C. Making the applications run in a sandbox means you are less open to security vulnerabilities and can afford not to waste as much resources reviewing third party apps before adding them to the online store.
Lastly the Windows Mobile UI is pathetically backwards. It was good back in the day, but now it is too clunky.
MS already built a phone. Actually two of them. They were the Kin One and Kin Two and they have failed miserably.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Personally, if I had a choice, I'd gladly take Microsoft's non-viable business model at $18bn profit in the last year more than I'd take any other technology company's as that's over double Apple's profits and nearly triple Google's profits.
Microsoft's got a perfectly viable business model, such that it's still consistently slaughtering the competition in the technology market in terms of profit they make year on year- I think IBM is the next closest at around $12bn and HP 3rd at about $9bn, although I could be wrong, I've not been paying attention to all of them.
The issue is simply that Microsoft is struggling to grow their market even more, not that they don't in fact make fuck loads of profit, and have a metric shit ton of assets and equity. The fact is it can do things like the Kin, the Zune, the XBox, and whether they flop or not is irrelevant when they're still pulling in more profit than any other technology company out there from the profits of their core business. If however one of their adventures does turn out to be a hit then great, they've widened the gap even more, if not, then, well, their lead in terms of profit is still pretty massive and even Apple and Google's resounding successes in comparison over the last decade haven't even come close to closing the gap. Unless Microsoft has a secret oil drilling operation that's going to explode due to poor maintenance in the gulf of Mexico soon then there's not too much that'll change that in the forseeable future. As a company, financially, they're still a behemoth, and are as solid as a rock.
Ms actually make money on each andoird deviCe sold, due to patents. That is a pretty good business model.
Danger was purchased by MS and tasked to build the kin. It wasn't a project that they bought fully featured like google did with android. The Kin was fully developed form concept to launch while the former Danger employees were under microsoft. Engadget has the whole scoop of internal politicking at MS that led the the demise of pink/kin if you want more of the details. BUt win7 phone is a go, they would be really dumb to change directions, yet again and go it alone. They've already made too many changes in plans that have lead them way behind.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Because MS will go out of their way to get you to use Exchange, Sharepoint, Outlook, etc.
Google on the other hand will go out of their way to get you to use the Internet.
But they recently tried doing just that. And it was an epic failure.
Read my blog.