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Microsoft Reportedly Seeks To Put Windows Phone On Android Devices
quantr draws your attention to a Bloomberg report that Microsoft has reached out to HTC to see if the company would be interested in adding Windows as a second OS to its Android handsets. From the Bloomberg story: "Its willingness to add Windows as a second operating system underscores the lengths to which Microsoft will go to get manufacturers to carry its software. HTC, the first company to make both Windows and Android phones, hasn’t unveiled a new Windows-based handset since June and has no current plans to release any more, said one person. Microsoft, with 3.7 percent of the market, is finding it necessary to make concessions after agreeing to acquire Nokia Oyj’s handset unit, which competes with other smartphone makers.
[Microsoft operating systems head Terry] Myerson was planning to visit Asia this month and meet with senior executives at Taoyuan, Taiwan-based HTC to discuss his proposal, one of the people said."
Android on Lumia, that'd be an offering.
To be able to have the choice of OS on your device is a good thing, maybe you like the S3 but like windows OS. or you like the nokia lumia hardware but prefer andoid. Now its never going to be allowed to happen with iphone/iOS but choice of OS on other devices can only be a good thing
Microsoft has played games with numbers to pump its supposed Windows market share many many times. For instance, if you're a big corporation and you buy 10,000 machines with Vista installed, but backlevel them to XP, Microsoft counted those as Vista sales. This "dual boot" bullshit is almost certainly the same nonsense. HTC has a bigger market share by itself than all the Windows Phone devices in aggregate (I believe). Anyway, it's the #3 smartphone vendor behind Apple and Samsung. It's also in really dire trouble financially, or at least so the news-sphere seems to indicate. So, they're hurting for cash and might be willing to accept some cash to load Windows on their Android phones as dual boot. Practically nobody will use Windows, but Microsoft will be able to claim those dual boot handset sales as "Windows sales" and fake the numbers to make it look like Win Phone is growing in marketshare.
Oh, if only the license terms for Android FORBID dual booting, and allowing the user to make such a choice.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft/
IBM has contacted Apple to see if they want to put MVS on the iPhone, complete with a punched card interface.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
My memory is fuzzy on this, but I believe Microsoft took Toshiba to court and made them stop dual booting Linux on their laptops about 20 years ago. At the time Toshiba owned a Linux distribution so they prevented Toshiba from shipping their own code.
This is the same Microsoft that is extorting everyone over unnamed Android patent infringements.
Why would you want to work with them? Every company that works with them ends up dead or wounded.
HTC has had trouble getting traction against Samsung despite offering compelling hardware. Offering a dual-boot phone might give them a competitive advantage with some subset of buyers... although I'm guessing it'd be a fairly small number.
#DeleteChrome
So instead of OEMS only caring about Windows, designing hardware only tested for Windows, only supporting Windows, signing Windows in the hardware boot device,and even including Windows where someone has to manually go into the bios and install a second bootloader to run Linux has now changed to carriers only caring about linux, designing phones just for linux/Android, only supporting Linux, and even signing linux to run Android on top, now has to listen to an angry MS who feels its soo unfair that no one will even stock their products on the shelf nor care and are begging just for the opportunity to dual boot! ... No cost too as well according to NEOwin!
Wow. Couldnt happen to a nicer company. It is amazing how fast this happened. Windows CE was gearing up for a monopoly and beating blackberry just a few years ago to. ... well this?
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"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
if you are going to run Windows Phone, you damn well better accept that MS and the NSA will have full access to everything on your phone and will set it to record all your conversations.
this used to be tinfoil hat area but now it's a probability.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I'm trying here...so I'll give you partial credit. You're definitely begging the question, but it is important to acknowledge that other companies make similar mistakes as M$ (though they are not as bad).
Apple's design flaws are just as annoying as any other design flaw.
The question is, what about Apple's process allowed them to do right what M$ did wrong?
As others have pointed out, Apple is the exact opposite of M$: a successful and popular company. There is no debate on that point worth having.
So what about Apple kept them from screwing up as bad as M$?
> Was it Steve Job's megolomania combined with good design choices and lucky market conditions? Any CEO can pound their fist and force their way, but just by law of averages, when JOb's did it, it had marginally better results in the end product, perhaps?
> Is the answer in the engineering department? like where they actually write the software...,did they quietly refuse to do things like Internet Explorer tried to do in the 90s?
> Lack of the government contracts forcing them to innovate at Apple? See, M$ only exists b/c IBM needed a lackey to put stripped down PC boxes on every government office desk...M$ was the operating system....credit Gates for profiting by leveraging his govt contracts into forcing users to use his product...but...that didnt' really encourage R&D. Apple had to fight to survive
Thank you Dave Raggett
Desperation, I think.
The king of "You must sell windows with every device, you may not offer other options" is now begging, with its tail between its legs, to an "other option" on a device.
"No thanks".
The problem with having a dual boot phone is that phones typically have limited storage space. If you want to dual boot a PC with Linux and Windows, you can stick in another hard drive to add a terabyte or two more storage. Phones, on the other hand, only have a small amount of space. My phone (a Droid Bionic) has 16GB of storage. It's a bit old, though. Newer phones come with at least 32GB of storage. Of this, some is allocated for the OS.
If you want to have two operating systems on the same phone you have two options:
1) Have the user storage area (for apps, photos, videos, etc) be smaller. Some people will buy your phone because "it runs Windows AND Android" but word will quickly spread about the fact that this means you can't install as many apps or take as many photos as a normal Android only phone (or Windows only phone for that matter).
2) Add more memory to the phone. This will allow you to compensate for the second operating system, but it will also raise the price of the phone. Users will need to decide whether the increased cost is really worth it.
Yes, you can use MicroSD cards to increase the space, but that's an added cost to the user. Telling the user that they just bought this more expensive dual-boot phone and now they need to buy another card to get the same user-storage space as that person who bought the cheaper single-OS phone is a losing proposition.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Why would MS have any interest in a dual booting phone? I find it more likely that MS is begging HTC to still make Windows phones and are trying to make this more attractive by suspending demand for the mandatory 17 Windows buttons or whatever they usually demand to certify the hardware.
That way HTC can use exactly the same hardware for both their Android and Windows version, thereby reducing their development costs.
MS probably have to sweetening the deal by making their OS free for HTC to use too.
It is difficult to understand why any phone company would still want to make windows phones now that MS now are competing directly against them with their own large ex-Nokia production line. Yes, for sure, MS is no longer a software only company.
Nokia already sold their Windows phones with a hefty loss, so now MS either have to raise prices as to not out-compete other Windows phone makers (not going to happen), or compete for market share by dumping prices, thereby out-competing other Windows phone makers like HTC, or dump prices and compensate anyone desperate enough to still make Windows phones.
As someone who has owned both Windows Phone and Android, bad idea for HTC. Yeah, WP looks cool, but that is about where it stops. I can customize the hell out of my Android, different launchers, different lockers, different dialers, different SMS apps, different search applications, etc. I can make my Android look and act like WP, I can make my Android look and act like iOS, I can make my Android look and act like Ubuntu Touch, I can even install a complete linux distribution inside my Android phone. There really isn't a whole lot you can do on a WP. Change a few tiles around, change their color, but that is about it. The apps suck for WP, I tried looking for a different web browser and you are pretty much stuck with IE or some other browser based off of IE. My work uses google talk/hangouts. I tried searching for that, there were two or three apps that supported this eBuddy and IM+. I don't use social media so the Twitter and Facebook integration in WP is useless to me. Don't want to use Bing as the default search provider? You are going to have to install a custom WP Rom for that. I can get my Android to do everything I want it to do, but I can't get my WP to do anything close.