Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Convinced That Windows 10 Will Be Its Smartphone Breakthrough
jfruh (300774) writes At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, handset manufacturers are making all the right noises about support for Windows 10, which will run on both ARM- and Intel-based phones and provide an experience very much like the desktop. But much of the same buzz surrounded Windows 8 and Windows 7 Phone. In fact, Microsoft has tried and repeatedly failed to take the mobile space by storm.
They will have more luck if they use a axe.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
They can join BlackBerry in the "any day now, we'll be on top!" movement.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
More than enough reasons to keep Win 10 off my desktop
Company convinced of their own success, at least in their own marketing materials. News at 11.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Next Year: We have a completely new api and are going to make the old one irrelevant yet again
Apple is just ... Apple.
Apple: the 800 Lb niche player...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Universal apps are what might make or break Windows phone 10.
The OS really is good. It is light, intuitive, and bug free. With no apps and a requirement for developers to write to 2 different operating systems with niche market shares hurt both.
http://saveie6.com/
there are a lot of companies that like sticking it to Microsoft.
Gee, I wonder why.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
"... and provide an experience very much like the desktop"
Which is exactly what people don't want.
Microsoft should finally pull their collective head out of their backside and stop making everything into a PC with Windows. A phone isn't a PC, it isn't used in the same way, so a "desktop experience" is very counterproductive on a phone.
One would think that they have learned something already ...
It too me a day or so to remove the crap from Windows 8.1 to make it look like an actual desktop.
So windows 10 will, what, be just as broken as the desktop was in Windows 8.1? Or it will try to suck less and be less like a tablet experience?
At this point, I'm forced to conclude (from a week or so of running my new Windows 8.1 machine) that most of the decisions Microsoft has been making indicate they no longer know how to write a UI for a desktop, and they're entirely focused on writing only stuff for tablets.
They keep betting they're going to be successful on the phone Real Soon Now ... and they're so busy playing catch up they might need to worry someone is going to come out with the next new thing before they can put out a copy of what everyone else has had for years.
So the same experience on a Windows 10 phone as a desktop? That's based on giving you a crappy experience on the desktop.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I can see a new hilarity meme - "This is the year of the windows phone!", to go along side of "This is the year of the Linux Desktop", or "The year of Net Neutrality"..... wait, we got that one!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It is actually kind of sad if you know their history.
Back in the day they were competing with Palm, and had Windows CE and Pocket PC 2000. When PocketPC 2002 came out my employer switched over from Palm and I got to rewrite a bunch of tools. They did pretty good for a while with Mobile 2003, and Windows Mobile 5. It knocked Palm down several notches in the mobile market, with Palm losing value and getting bought out in 2005.
The fun thing about that era is that there were phones with PDAs in them, you can go back to "Pocket PC Phone Edition" for that. Each version of Windows Mobile supported running in phones, but they never took off.
The iPod was getting some power and some apps, but I loved that with a single CF card I could have my entire music library on my device; the Axim x51v used the same audio chipset as the iPod of the era coupled with better playback software where you could mix and such. It also offered all kinds of apps making the device useful for the other common tasks of the time like calendar, email, and web over both wifi and bluetooth.
Again you could get phones running WM5 and WM6 with all their apps, and in late 2006 they had 51% of the market. Blackberry had 37%, Palm was 9%, and Symbian at 9%.
Then came the iPhone. At the time I didn't really see the reason for the hype, when it came to processor power, memory, and even 3D graphics the iPhone was less powerful than my Windows 6 phone.
As the numbers came back, iOS rose and WM feel by the same percent; the other companies were flat in market share. By early 2007 Windows Mobile drooped to 42% and iOS was at 11%. By 2008, WM had 29% and iOS 19% and Android had entered at 2%. By 2010 Windows Mobile devices had dropped to 7% market share, Blackberry had dropped to 25%, Palm to 3%, and Symbian at 2%.
Phones running Windows Mobile continued to exist, but that's about it. Three more versions of Windows Mobile, the three editions as Windows Phone, they have never been able to get their market share back anywhere near 2006 levels.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Simple things that all the other platforms has Microsoft lacks. Trying to get a stack trace from an Unhandled exception? Nope can't do that. Want to find out what OS build you are on? Nope can't do that. While little things, the list is endless and annoying for anyone that's been doing mobile for awhile.
The only place I ever see Windows phones is on TV series as glaringly obvious product placement...never seen one in the wild.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
If this thing came out in a parallel universe where the iPod didn’t exist, it would be hailed as a god. No, the problem is the iPod’s head start — its catalog of music, movies, apps and accessories are ridiculously superior to the Zune’s
The Zune was cancelled shortly thereafter. The product finally became good, but it was too late. I smell the same fate for windows phone.
...provide an experience very much like the desktop...
Excellent! I always wanted my phone to BSOD in the middle of an important call!
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You know, after my 360 crapped out for no reason, I swore to never buy another MS product. I got one for free after mail in rebate from Cricket, so I thought I would give it a shot. Had heard good things about Cortana and it was effectively free, so I thought "why not?" Well, the damn thing crashes constantly on about 30% of the websites I go to (internet browsing is my #1 reason for owning a smartphone). If they can't get something as simple as a F&$*^#G web browser to work...well, I stand by my previous oath to never buy another MS product. From here, I won't even take one for free.
Posting from a 9 year old Mac Mini that survived a house fire. Only lost the onboard sound card. Had another older one that was right in the line of fire AND took the full brunt of firehoses and still worked after, losing only the stuff at the bottom of the case.
"Schadenfreude", German for "harm-joy", is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. And that's what I feel when I see Microsoft finally slipping. I surely don't have to list all the shit they've done before, but in this specific case: their trojan horse Stephen Elop destroyed Nokia from the inside. He killed the most successful mobile platform ever (Symbian), and the one that had the most future potential (MeeGo), to push the Windows shit that no one wanted -- all for the benefit of an external party, not the one who had hired him. (how the fuck was he not sued for breach of fiduciary duty yet?)
By all means, Microsoft, keep trying! Keep wasting money on a project without future. I hope I'll live to see you crash and burn at last.
Circumcision is child abuse.
They need to provide what nobody else does. We have the very restrictive, closed iPhone platform that requires a personal blessing from the High Priests of Apple to public on, and the very open but ridiculously vulnerable Android platform that gives away all our personal information to any and every app developer to poop out anything at all.
Clearly, an open platform that takes security seriously at all would be in demand. The difficulty here is that Microsoft hasn't communicated that they're making just that. Instead, it *appears* to the uninformed consumer that they're trying to make what we already have but with a different skin.
This is either a design issue or a marketing issue. Maybe if they put less effort into controlling online conversations and more effort into telling us useful stuff, that could be helped a bit. Remember the Ubuntu phone? Remember what people were excited about regarding it? Notice how it hasn't been achieved due to various business cockblocks, thus leaving the gate wide open for someone bigger to step in? Hint hint.
But what do I know? I'm going off the assumption that when consumers repeat themselves without variation for years on end, they're spelling out in the simplest possible terms what they'd just love to hand over their money to acquire. I could be wrong about that. Do consumers know what they want? We might as well ask if free will exists; that debate will never be settled.
If they make an Atom based phone that is running a full or mostly full version of Windows (not the semi crippled ARM port) as is current rumor, a "Surface Phone" so to speak, then that changes the game a LOT, suddenly app support is a non-issue for a bunch of things, I'm not talking about running full desktop apps on a comparatively tiny screen, but things that are sorely lacking on ARM Winphone like third party VPN clients, corporate asset management agents, in house developed (generally crappy and poorly maintained) apps, etc. Add some sort of dock or remote display capability then you have a laptop replacement for many mobile users.
What will make Windows Phone succeed is the same thing that will make OS X succeed and it mainly boils down to apps.
Microsoft already tried that though - they paid a lot of money to developers in order to bring many of the most popular titles to Windows phone from iOS/Android.
Even with that it will still not enough to track consumers...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley