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Microsoft Killing Off Nokia's Windows Phone Apps
jfruh writes: As Nokia's smartphone division becomes more fully absorbed into Microsoft, the company is cleaning house and ending some apps and services that Nokia had developed specifically for Windows Phone. Lumia Storyteller, Lumia Beamer, Photobeamer, and Lumia Refocus are photo and video apps that integrate with online services, and those services will be shutting down on October 30. Microsoft says its to better commit resources to work on the mobile version of Windows 10, which is coming soon, but not all the features of the canceled services will appear in the new OS.
In Windows 7 and 8 you can actually prevent the functionality from being installed by blocking the "updates". In Windows 10 you cannot do that, and you can't turn it all the way off.
If it weren't for that, I would have upgraded to Win10 already
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Microsoft bought Nokia for their patents. Any other money is just chump change.
The patents were not included in the deal. Microsoft didn't actually buy Nokia, they bought Nokia's handset business. The patents remained with Nokia.
" those services will be shutting down on October 30... not all the features of the canceled services will appear in the new OS."
Another of the many, many times when Microsoft believes it can do anything, and customers don't matter.
This Slashdot comment explains Microsoft's control over Firefox and Mozilla Foundation. That control may explain why the user interfaces of Thunderbird and SeaMonkey have been damaged in recent versions.
Yahoo is badly managed. From that story "Marissa Mayer's second-in-command 'leaves with $109m' on being fired from Yahoo after just 15 months". An incompetent executive got $109,000,000 for leaving a short job.
Microsoft has a history of being amazingly badly managed. Quotes: Steve Ballmer is "Monkey Boy" and, from a May 12, 2012 story"Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."
Nokia had the best hardware in the world but a terrible outdated OS. Then Microsoft came and killed the best hardware and replaced the OS with an even worse one.
Even if you turn off all of the phone home settings in Windows 10, it still sends information to Microsoft. It's not fully known what kind of information this is, but it's suspected that it's three things (based on Microsoft's EULA)
- How you configure your UI elements (taskbar and start menu pinning) and when and how often you click on them.
- If you use IE or Edge to search with a non-Microsoft owned search engine, your search terms are sent to Bing; that includes private search engines such as duckduckgo. (This alone is huge; it's meant to improve bing, but it basically exposes your every intent online to Microsoft.)
- Information about what wifi access points you use (turning the setting for this off only disables password sharing.)
You can't filter this at the network level within the machine either, as the kernel sends this information and ignores proxy, hosts file, and firewall settings to get the information out if it fails while using the user settings. If you want to block this information from being sent, then you need to do something like configure a firewall setting in your router.