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Microsoft Gearing Up To Release a Smartwatch of Its Own
SmartAboutThings writes The smartwatch market is still in its nascent form, but with Apple releasing its AppleWatch in early 2015, things are going to change. And Microsoft wants to make sure it's not late to the party, as it has been so many times in the past. That's why it plans on releasing its own smartwatch, which would be the first new category under CEO Nadella. The device could get launched with two specific features that could make it stand apart from other similar devices — much better battery life and cross-platform support for iOS and Android users. A release before this year's holiday season is in the cards, with no details on the pricing nor availability. (Also at Reuters and The Inquirer.)
Microsoft supports Outlook on Android and IOS. OneDrive works on IOS, Android, Windows and OS/X
Skype works on just about all platforms.
I guess Microsoft being number 3 in the mobile space makes them support more platforms.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Anyone remember Apple in the early-1990s? Coming down off a high of realizing they could charge $6000 for a computer, the company felt invincible and practically started chasing every Next Big Thing that came along. It didn't make a difference whether they had any background in it, whether anyone in their market wanted it, or whether it really was going to be the Next Big Thing - if someone said it was, they were on it!
By the mid-90s it was clear the company was in utter disarray. Teams throughout the company were chasing products as mundane as X.400 servers while at the same time offering the ridiculously designed PowerTalk that, for all purposes, rendered the server useless. Meanwhile no one could be bothered to work on anything as dull as the OS, which became a ridiculous collection of warts on bags. Copeland was the most obvious symptom of this problem, not the end result.
And then came Jobs. First he fires most everyone while personally interviewing new hires. Almost all ongoing projects were cancelled outright, even ones that maybe shouldn't have. Lots of utter trash, like OpenDoc and CyberDog, were thankfully killed, although people still lament HyperCard to this day. In any event, within ONE YEAR the iMac was introduced and by 2000 the Mac lineup was completely overhauled and greatly simplified. THEN they did iPod.
I believe the lesson to be learned here is that any company, no matter how large, can only do so many *new* things well. That number appears to be somewhere around two. You can continue improving existing lines, but radical change requires the entire employee base to pull in the same direction, and maintaining cohesion at that level on too many projects is simply not going to work.
So...
It is really a good time for MS to be doing a watch? The phone and tablet efforts are still completely up in the air. I don't run a multi-billion dollar company (and I'm very happy to say that) but it seems pretty clear that jumping into yet another product category while *every one* of their other categories needs major work seems extreme unwise to me. Hell, Windows 8 is universally detested. That needs to be addressed first.
You're wrong. Out of all software giants, Microsoft invests the most into research and emerging technologies. Marketing of these technologies is poor tbh, but still doesn't make Microsoft not innovative.
http://research.microsoft.com/
I've heard that Microsoft phones are pretty popular in europe.
It sort of worked. But it was too much of a pain but it worked when I tried. Eventually I stopped updating the data and carried around long obsolete phone numbers, addresses etc for a long time. It had super good battery life. Lasted 12 years or so. Then I went back to a simple Casio GShock.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact