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Microsoft Bringing Cortana To iOS, Android
An anonymous reader writes: While many big tech companies have their own personal assistant software these days, few of them are available on a broad variety of devices. Microsoft has now announced that it's becoming one of those few: Cortana will be available for iOS and Android devices later this year. It's part of an initiative by the company to ensure Windows 10 plays well with all sorts of devices, even phones made by the other major manufacturers. Microsoft said, "Regardless of the operating systems you choose across your devices – everything important to you should roam across the products you already own – including your phone." This led them to develop a "Phone Companion app," built into Windows 10, that's designed to help sync a user's PC with his phone.
With the amount of potential information mining that could be done with these apps, I'm surprised they aren't all cross-platform.
NSA is cross-platform and very easy to use. You don't even need to sign up for it. Come free with every phone call.
I'm not sure that logic plays through. Frankly, for Microsoft, the real problem is that damned few people really even consider Microsoft mobile products at all. They're a niche player, competing with BlackBerry for who will end up pushed right out of the market.
Imagine you're Microsoft, you're faced with the possibility that you will never, even if you heavily subsidized a mobile Windows product line, be able to make any significant headway into the iOS-Android hegemony. What would you do? If it was me, I'd quietly admit that I'm never going to be able to dominate mobile platforms the way I do desktops and portable computers, and I'd leverage what I had by opening up my software to more platforms.
This isn't even a revolutionary idea for Microsoft. They once owned their own *nix platform; Xenix. Windows NT itself was designed a hardware abstraction layer so it could be ported to multiple hardware platforms. But somewhere along the line Microsoft and the x86 computer manufacturers welded themselves together. I can't say it was a bad decision, as it made Microsoft and Intel absolute shitloads of money for a quarter century, but at the same time it seems to have frozen Microsoft in place. It became a one-trick pony, only able to envision itself in a world of Backoffice apps and OEM licensing. Now it's got to be nimble again, and as it has already effectively ceded a large portion of the computing products out there to Apple and Google, it's got to make the best it can with what it has.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.