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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.
Microsoft bought Nokia for their patents. Any other money is just chump change.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The last part of the exection in MS long history of Embrace, Extend, Extuinguish
It is my opinion that Microsoft, as a consumer company, is circling the drain -- at least for IT people.
- They missed the boat on mobile
- Windows 10 telemetry makes Google look like privacy champions (This OS is invasive)
- They are back porting Windows 10 telemetry to Windows 8 and Windows 7 to get even more info from those users
- They are killing the Nokia apps, which are arguably better than anything Microsoft could write. Why? Microsoft suffers from NIH.
I am taking steps to free my family of any Microsoft product. The invasiveness is just too much. Linux works just fine, as there are no IT people in my family save myself, so they need to browse and use Webmail.
Microsoft will survive OK enough in the corporate space, but it won't be too terribly long before they are supplanted by better tech -- and it will be about time. I sill cannot believe, after all these years, that people though Active Directory was better than Novell's NDS. That still boggles the mind.
I'm looking forward to a world where Microsoft is an also ran.
Might have been a change in CEO at Microsoft. But Microsoft lost mobile a long time ago, and its focus now seems to be keeping PC users on Windows. Giving away Windows 10 upgrades was a good ideal. But it also reduces the value of Windows to nothing. The only reason many probably upgrade to Windows 10 is because its free. Plus, it adds some time to older hardware to bring it up to modern software requirements. This get's the upgrade path moving again, but does little to spur PC sales. Will be interesting to see how enterprise handles Win 10 in the next couple years? Will they buy new hardware? Or upgrade older hardware?
I have to be honest, as a consumer I don't mind Win 10 privacy issues and all. But I doubt when I need a new PC I will buy Windows again. Much of what I do on a computer now does not require Windows.
To the victors go the spoils. I know it must hurt for you eurotards to see the pride of your mobile companies bought out and cut to pieces by an all-American firm but that's life, and after your leaders will have signed the TTIP, we will turn your little subcontinent into one big shopping mall. Sucks to be you.
If so they'll probably learn like Google that the most important of those patents are loose change since most of them are "essential" patents that must be licensed under FRAND terms. So it's not as if they've suddenly acquired a big war chest to bully other smartphone manufacturers. They'll probably still be earning more from the software patents they developed in-house. The Nokia purchase was a reactionary move. I won't be surprised if Google just baited them to it.
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."
I actually like Lumia Storyteller. Not because of the story teller feature - but because it opens the images in full resolution. On my Nokia 930, I can zoom in endlessly in storyteller - with the 20MP camera, I can read the numberplate on a car that's little more than a dot in the photo - but in the Windows Photo app, I can hardly zoom in at all.
Considering the camera is about the only reason I am sticking with a Windows Phone... bad move, Microsoft.
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.
I have a problem even with steam. Ebook stores.. you kidding me. What happens when they go bankrupt or get their division bought out. Services end. Otherwise I'd be spending 80 percent of my money on such content. I buy something... I want access to it forever. I want to be able to resell it although it all likelihood I never would being the digital hoarder that I am. I still have the boxes and some of the better manuals from games I bought back in the 90's.
The address to their main campus has for decades been "one Microsoft way". That describes how they do things. Its not "another Nokia way", it's "One Microsoft Way", and their way is to kill off competing products (even if in-house products offer less functionality). I remember several decades ago, they bought a small database application called FoxPro. Foxsoft had it working to address literally a billion rows of information. Microsoft had a competing product that was not as good. They bought Foxsoft, and the very next version of FoxPro had a difficult time accessing 10,000 rows of information (the documentation suggested not to try more than a few hundred). In fairly short order, no one was using the product (there were heavy incentives to switch). Nokia sold the Farm to microsoft, they bent over and got shafted. One microsoft way also includes "one windows phone". It's why no one will play with m$, they don't play fair. Either they take nokias ball and go home, or they rig the game so they always win (or at least they rig it so that no one else can win).
Microsoft is killing off these apps because they don't contain enough spyware and ads to pass their rigorous QA standards.
It's actually a good phone, provided one uses it for the basic office related stuff, and not looking for the latest games or apps. It does miss some key apps, but as an office phone - things like calendar, maps, contacts, messaging, it's good and does the job for things that iPhones or Galaxies are major overkill.
Only thing that needs to be there - universal apps. Right now, one can't run Windows apps on Windows Phone, nor Windows Phone apps on Windows. For instance, I'd like to run Yelp! or Fandango on my Winbook, but can't, since the Mobile store has yet to be merged w/ the Windows store. Once it is, it could be pretty useful.
The only way it suffers is from a lack of apps. For instance, if you want things like Vonage or E*TRADE or a whole slew of apps that are available on either iPhone or Android, that's where Windows Phone falls short, and one is better getting either an iPhone or any of the numerous Android phones.
But if one just uses it for work and not looking for fancy apps, it's quite adequate. Like my work requires me to sync a calendar w/ the maps and also have my files on the drive. Right now, I use Android, since Windows 10 Mobile ain't out, but Windows Phone would have whatever I need - Calendar, Bing Maps, OneDrive... I would just need a hotmail account in common w/ these, and I'd be off to the races. On such a phone, I wouldn't need the latest games (even though Microsoft tries to toss in Xbox games), and it would be adequate for this purpose. However, it wouldn't be my only phone, unless I were a technophobe
Microsoft is also ending/has ended the few important cloud-based services that support Nokia's S40-based devices. As of mid-2015, S40 still had almost double Windows Phone's global mobile user marketshare (according to StatCounter), so Microsoft's sunsetting of S40 services has a bigger global impact.
Both S40 and Windows Phone are in decline, though S40's bigger share is declining somewhat faster. Regardless, it's probably not good business strategy to upset over 4% of the world's mobile device users (S40) with premature termination of the few Microsoft/ex-Nokia services they do use. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is really not doing anything to help S40 users get to Windows Phone even if they wanted to go there. It's a major lost opportunity. For example, Microsoft could have: (1) held onto the Ovi Store (instead of outsourcing it to Opera where it's even more moribund); (2) provided a reasonable set of core, basic Microsoft services for S40 (notably Skype Chat, OneDrive with basic document viewing, and a basic Outlook.com client); (3) provided an S40 on-device application that keeps basic phone settings (contacts, calendar, bookmarks/favorites, text messages, etc.) synced across devices to smooth the path to Windows Phone; and/or (4) provided an S40 emulator for Windows Phone so that users could migrate as much or as little as they wanted. None of that would have cost very much to do or been hard to do, but as far as I know Microsoft took none of those steps. Consequently S40 device users are not switching to Windows Phone when they get new devices. It appears that, among S40 device users who are in the market for a new device, more of them are choosing new (or newer) S40 devices than are choosing Windows Phone devices! Google is winning most of them, though, primarily with Android One devices.
Of all the companies that should understand this phenomenon, you'd think Microsoft would. Don't orphan users! Give them realistic options to continue doing business with you, and they very well might! And if a 2.3% global marketshare business makes sense (Windows Phone), then keep shipping one or two S40 devices every year to hang onto as much of that ~4% marketshare as possible for as long as possible, with the sensible/inexpensive transition offerings I described. There is an ongoing market for a relatively simple mobile device with a truly long battery life and a more pocketable form factor, the segment of the market that Nokia dominated with S40. There's nothing wrong with that, and Microsoft should keep at it. (Microsoft is sort of doing that -- they still have a couple S40 devices on sale -- but they're not executing well.)
Those of us who bought into Wince 4.0 and wince 5.0 have long known that as soon as MS gets bored with a version of something, they leave users in the lurch, and move on. Apple not doing this was one of the reasons the iPhone was a major success, and CM for Android users is a guarantee it wont happen (provided your phone is CM capable).
It is fair to say MS relies on the user being gullible and ill informed. This is hardly new to the computer industry.
In the early days of mainframes, every new product was completely incompatible with old products, and had no applications. This was eventually fixed by System/360.
In the early days of minicomputers, nothing was compatible with anything. New machines came out with no OS and no apps. DEC came along with PDP8, PDP11 and DEC10 families - compatibility maintained over 20 years, and the also-rans were history.
Intel managed the 8086-pentium progression pretty well, as has MS with mainstream Windows. and the also-rans are history.
Get the picture? Clearly MS are losing the plot with mobile, and have forgot what made them big (leaving aside bully-boy tactics and illegal exploitation of their monopoly, etc)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Microsoft has hidden its apparent takeover of Mozilla Foundation by pretending that there is a "Yahoo search".
Yahoo search may not use Bing as a back-end, but Yahoo is its own entity. Microsoft is not pretending there is a Yahoo search to "take over". Yahoo is trying to make money by funneling Firefox through their re-branded version of Bing Search.
Microsoft doesn't have to hide or pretend. They could have just paid Mozilla to use Bing Search directly -- they get more money that way because Yahoo isn't a middleman. *Nobody* cares about the distinction except Yahoo and Microsoft.
Yahoo paid Mozilla Foundation to trick users into using Microsoft's Bing search engine.
Ridiculous. Yahoo paid the Mozilla Foundation so that they would get their users (not trick their users, get their users) to use Yahoo Search (which, yes, is a re-branded Bing Search) in order to get advertising money.
So, Microsoft paid Yahoo.
Backwards. Yahoo is leasing Microsoft's technology; Microsoft is not paying for Yahoo to use Microsoft's technology. http://searchengineland.com/mi...
I think you're forgetting that the last time Yahoo was regarded as a decent search engine was before Google was a household name.
This said, Yahoo is displaying at least 51% of their ads as Bing ads, so in that sense Microsoft is paying Yahoo to display their ads (using money Microsoft gets from selling advertising to other companies), and Yahoo wouldn't bother doing this if their ad sales didn't exceed what they're paying Microsoft.
Why else would Mozilla Foundation damage the UI of its own product?
This is so far removed from the rest of your sentence that I don't even know where you went wrong. What does paying to change the search default have to do with the UI of anything other than search? Especially Thunderbird, which you mentioned in your previous sentence.