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Microsoft To Abandon Windows Phone?
symbolset writes "Microsoft has had some trouble as of late getting adoption of their mobile products. Even Bill Gates has said it was inadequate. Despite rave reviews of Windows Phone in the press it has failed to get double digit share of the smartphone market. Now comes reports from WMPoweruser that WP8 will lose mainstream support in July 2014."
Microsoft is still dealing with the fact that their flagship products throughout the 1990's are almost universally associated with crashes, poor performance, and overhyped marketing. It bit them with the Zune, and now it's biting them with the phones. You know why XBox is so big? It doesn't have the word 'Windows' or 'Microsoft' in its name, and it had (still has?) its own business unit with its own management structure not tied to Windows.
Ridiculous headline title.
And a great example of Betteridge's law of headlines.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Probably longer than Windows phones will, but yes, given that the smartphone market is a ~2 year turnaround business that probably means they're freezing anything new for WP8 nowish, and by this time next year they'll be winding up anything WP8 specific and they'll have WP9 out the door (or 8.1 or whatever it ends up being).
There is sensationalistic journalism, and then there is blatantly misleading journalism. This is the latter.
Assuming /. wants to be taken seriously, someone's wrist should be slapped for this and/or the headline updated.
And all you have to do is trust that Microsoft will not abandon their existing customers.
I'll leave the consideration of that track record as an exercise for the audience.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Pretty much so. They continued with the clunky, sluggish and buggy Symbian for waaay to long.
Uh, no. As someone who actually USED a Symbian phone and wrote code for Symbian phones (for longer that I wanted to), the problem wasn't bugginess. The problem was that it was terrible to write code for. It took C++ and decided to spin it around and around until it made you want to throw up. They had their own notation, for pete's sake. But as far as bugginess goes? Android is FAR buggier and FAR more insecure than even Symbian circa 2006.
Not like this mattered much in regards to the top level story anyway, Nokia's CEO was desperate to push Nokia back into the US market again (they had always been solid in Europe), and figured teaming up with a very US-ish company like Microsoft would give them a market edge (as if they adopted Android, they'd be just another Android blah blah phone manufacturer competing with the rest of them...and Google itself). It turned out to be a bad call...Windows Phone is the latest in a fairly tainted line of mobile OSs and that taint still haunts all of the children of WinCE to this day. Every new regurgitation has something wrong with it that drives its users up the wall. Microsoft just never "got" mobile. And when it was too late, they started paying off bloggers to write good press about their stuff. Instead of doing what Apple and Google did...basically, imitating and building on the successful points and user interaction flow of previous mobile OSs, Microsoft was transfixed on making its users enjoy their own generally jarringly different user experience and flow. They always had to have things work their way, even if their way wasn't very practical. Mobile client OS design isn't easier than desktop client OS design, and there are way too many people at Microsoft that didn't understand this.
That said, if Microsoft decided to drop mobile, their shareholders would be furious. They'd lose a lot of stock value. The press would be terrible, PR damage control would be too much to deal with. They will continue to count on that handful of very headstrong people, typically older people, who have been using Windows for 20 years, refuse to ask anyone else's advice, and just conclude that Windows Phone would be the easiest for them to use. Then they get frustrated and complain about it at me. They may continue to ride that 10% of the market for the next 10 years if they have to, because quitting for them would cost them more than losing cash on it for the next 10 years. Just ask Meg Whitman over at HP about that one.
Even the article says that WP8.Next would have its own cycle......so a WP8.5 or WP9 would still get at least 18 months of support. The summary is just FUD. There was nothing in the article and nothing in their source saying that Microsoft was abandoning Windows Phone as a platform......just that the OS support has a time limit.
As the owner of a Verizon Galaxy Nexus, who bought it believing what you said is true, I can tell you that they are not. At least not on Verizon. I know, shame on me for thinking it would be otherwise, but your statement is still wrong.
if what you said was true, no one would be stuck on a win 7 phone....but there they are.
Redmond is the FUD factory
"If you want updates, buy Nexus." Is there a problem with that rule of thumb, other than that U.S. prepaid carriers tend not to carry Nexus phones?
How are people so lacking in foresight that they can't do the *very* simple math of calculating the significant price difference over time between a "free" phone with an ass-raping contract and buying a phone outright with only the plan and features they need?
18 months sounds like an incredibly stupid length, though, given that most mobile phone carrier contracts are 24 months.
That's true, but my experience has been that they let you upgrade "early" after 21 months. In the U.S., the carrier and vendors want the thought bubble over your head to look like this:
They don't want you to get here (which is where I've been for the last 9 months):
My mod points ran out yesterday, so I can't mod you up.
But, and this is coming from a linux and android fan, Your post is spot on!
FUD sucks no matter where it's coming from, and this (OP and thread) is totall sheit.
Mod Parent Up!
Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. No-one sees motorcycles
They aren't abandoning windows phone. If the story poster had read the story, he would of seen they are stopping support for windows phone 8 in 2014, but considering windows 9 will be coming out fairly soon, that is hardly a problem. Does this guy think that Microsoft has abandoned windows because they stopped support for XP?
Rocket Surgeon.
I can always choose not to use Google, but where do I turn when my own computer OS is data-mining my privacy back to Redmond?
Linux.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Well when they dropped windows mobile they said that windows phone 7 would be the new thing going forward...
Before too long they dropped it, and came out with yet another new incompatible replacement.
Who's to say they won't do the same again?
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