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Ballmer: Microsoft Mobile Should Focus On Android Apps Not Universal Apps (theverge.com)
UnknowingFool writes: Former CEO Steve Ballmer had some strong opinions about the direction of Microsoft's mobile strategy. As reported last month, Microsoft's Project Astoria has not been received well and is not going well. The strategy is to help build Windows 10 apps by making universal apps via easy porting from Android. Ballmer questions its effectiveness. "That won't work," he said. Instead he suggested that Windows phones should "run Android apps." This is a dramatic departure from the Microsoft-only focus that Ballmer championed during his tenure as CEO.
I think that your words will be ignored. Sorry Pal, you had a shot at the big chair and blew it. Well, some of us never were given the chance. Enjoy your cash.
I think Microsoft should focus on restoring Nokia to its former glory , apologizing to the people for screwing it and focusing on the crappy operating systems they make.
Considering the level of spying going on in Windows 10, I don't think Redmond has that credibility.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This reminds me of the efforts of the Wine project. As most of you may know, Wine works poorly for a lot of applications. One of the reasons desktop Linux has suffered is not because it's inferior, but because a lot of people rely on various applications only available on Windows. Security issues aside, imagine if Linux users could run any and everything Windows could, seamlessly.
Unless Microsoft does it right, they will fail spectacularly. It will be perceived by the public that Windows mobile is buggier than Android for Android apps (and the public won't know why, and won't care). If they do get it right, then Android users will have one less reason to stay.
Now whether they deserve the market share or not... that's the question. They're in the same place Linux has been for a long time, so maybe it's just karma. :)
That's not quite accurate.
ActiveX wasn't the first plugin support, for starters. NPAPI beat them by a year, and Java applets were capable of most of what people wanted ActiveX for.
IE did have the first CSS support, but it didn't mean much. CSS was more or less unknown until the IE4/NS4 era. Yeah, IE3 had some support for it, but CSS wasn't taken seriously back then.
I notice you don't mention IE had the first implementation of the marquee tag. Why the omission?
And if we're talking firsts, I don't think IE is going to beat Netscape here. Netscape's influence on the early web far outweighed IE's. I'll just drop the word "Javascript" here, as a conversation starter.
Microsoft did lure businesses and customers over by being installed by default on desktops. Microsoft did break compatibility with web standards - that CSS you mention was a half-assed implementation at best. Remember how long it took them to fix their messed up box model calculations? Microsoft did target businesses with ActiveX (because only the insane would allow its use outside the intranet), a feature that no other browser wanted to support even if they could, for the horrible security problems. And I'm assuming you never had to deal with ActiveX applications that only worked on IE6, even years after IE6 was out of date, because of incompatibility problems.
Superior performance and memory usage? Have you met users? They don't care about that. They use what's on the desktop. They click that icon that says "Internet" placed oh so handily on the left side of the screen under the recycle bin, or in large print at the top of the start menu. That's what the whole antitrust lawsuit was all about.
The saving grace of it all is that Microsoft is just so very bad at all things internet-related. If they had kept working on IE instead of sitting on their laurels, Mozilla would never have been able to make a comeback, and Microsoft would be dictating the standards.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Except he isn't. There's only three reasons to support another platform's apps in that way.
One, the apps are the de facto standard and that support is enough to keep people on your platform (think WINE and OS/2 and see how well those platforms are doing).
Two, the apps are part of your old legacy platform and it's a transitional step (DOS support, Apple's repeatedly migrational steps as it switched CPUs, etc). This is by far the most successful approach because it does nothing to diminish your position and gives you the flexibility to change.
Three, the apps are being supported as part of a strategy to spur adoption to your platform (OS/2 could be said to be this in later years) but only as a plan that people start actually writing for your platform. There's plenty of actual examples where this worked (CP/M -> DOS, the various Java cell phones -> Android, Word supporting so many import filters, etc). But it always carries with it the point that people want, at some level, to switch to your platform and you're trying less to lure users as much as lure developers to your platform.
If anything, Project Astoria is trying to be option three because it's the one that doesn't turn MS into just another Android tablet vendor (which is basically the road that Ballmer is choosing with option one). The real good advice would be to ditch the whole idea of interoperating with Android. I don't think MS has any chance really in the tablet space. The high end is taking up by Apple already and the low end is filled with Android devices. The area where MS can shine is the desktop. Everything else is too much of a "me too" that drags down their bottom line.
The real sad truth is the writing on the wall. The desktop as their bottom line isn't the behemoth that'll support the company like they're used to. That means they should diversify (as much as I mocked the XBox when it came out, it's an area where MS was wise to diversify even if in a sane world their actual approach (being constantly in the red and effectively using a monopoly to buy a position in another market) should be illegal). So, if they're going to make a tablet or a phone or whatever, it should a MS Phone and not a Windows Phone.
Clearly the problem is that MS can't or won't bleed money into a Phone or a Media Player or just about anything for years just to get a position in the market. That's actually a good thing from a free market perspective--they should earn a position from their products, not thrash about and burn money until they can drive enough of a wedge into the market to become profitable. Clearly the issue, though, is that only things like software have the sort of margins that MS wants. Perhaps ads and with Windows 10 they've got a chance. But there's plenty of people who are going mostly or wholly cell phone.
tl;dr (I guess) - Ballmer would only be right if people actually wanted MS Mobile in the first place. Since that's basically not true, no, he's just wrong. And that's why it's good for MS that his legacy ideas of what MS should be aren't running MS. It's just not clear what MS will be and people like Ballmer will probably be convinced that if MS becomes another IBM that it's evidence of company mismanagement and not merely the natural evolution of a lot of companies in a free market as a result of technological progress.
Android apps are really Java apps
True for most apps, not always true for some of the fanciest games. I actually don't think putting together a compatibility layer that would enable the vast vast majority of Android apps to work would be a terrible technical problem.
No matter what though there will always be the occasional app that does not work and it will probably be a constant source of frustration for some users.
Android also has a lot of well Androidisms, around how notifications are delivered to the user, switching between 'activities' is handled what apps get broadcast messages and so fourth. Unless Microsoft mostly clones the Android UI the workflow will be different inside a lot of apps. Android apps don't operate in a vacuum quite the way typical desktop applications do. For example you encounter a certain media type your android app might send a message to something else to handle it, what that something else is, it does not know and when you are done the Android operating systems UI is depended upon to provide the 'back button' to get the previous activity, or to return you there otherwise.
It would be like running Windows apps in Wine on Linux or OSX, where there is always some oddities around file pickers, windows controls, associations, cut paste interop, etc. It mostly works, and you can figure out what you need to do but it does not always feel right. The only difference is it will be even more pronounce on a phone.
Nobody switches to Linux so they can run Windows apps on WINE. WINE lets them keep that one app they need so they can switch platforms for other reasons. I don't think you attract anyone to your platform by being the 'next best place to run their favorite apps'. So on that score Ballmer is wrong. Microsoft's entire mobile strategy is wrong. They need to admit they made some bad calls on their first gen smart device platform (Windows CE + Windows Phone -lt 6 ) and were simply to late to the party in the 'app' era. If they do anything they should focus on producing Apps for the other platforms. Give business users what they really want, full Exchange/Outlook support with all the manageability, some sort of Sharepoint application viewer, etc. That is where their bread is buttered. Microsoft should focus on being the top shelf app vendor, for their mobile play IMHO.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
and they'll chew CPU because system calls won't be native
I disagree. WINE does basically the same thing: it translates Win32 system and library calls to Linux equivalents, and programs running under WINE, when they work correctly (meaning all the calls they do are fully implemented and done correctly) reportedly run at full speed, sometimes even faster than on Windows itself. Remember, you're not talking about emulation here, you're talking about ABI translation. And since Android apps are (usually) Java-based, they have to be decoded from bytecode anyway, no matter the platform.
because they'll use extra RAM hosting Windows plus an emulated Android environment
Yes, that could be a problem; it's not emulated as I said before, but you do need a translation layer there (since WinPhone apps don't use Java AFAIK) which will take up more RAM. WinPhones I think are usually lacking RAM too, compared to Android phones, so this could be a problem.
and probably the GUI will be slightly off
This will probably be a big problem; they just won't integrate well with WinPhone. People have complained about PC-based Java applications this way for ages, that they look out-of-place no matter what platform they're running on. The same happens with WINE applications: they don't normally look or work like the regular Linux applications. The same will probably happen with any Android apps, unless MS does a really good job figuring out how to mitigate this.
That will make Windows phones appear inferior. Windows phones would have to offer something else that users really wanted (like AD integration) to make people put up with poorer app performance.
Well, they are inferior. Even if you're of the opinion that the OS is better (which I disagree with: I think it's butt-ugly and I absolutely hate the whole live tile thing, though I'll admit that their devices do seem speedier than Android phones which seem to need a lot of horsepower to have a responsive UI, but I'd rather have a laggy UI than suffer with the ugly abomination that is Microsoft's latest UI), no computing platform is of much use unless it has the applications you want or need. No one should know this better than Microsoft themselves: it's the whole reason Windows has been so dominant for so long. It's not because of their crappy OS, it's the availability of applications which keeps people tied to the platform. Well this whole dynamic is what's biting them in the ass now: they missed out on being early enough to the party (unlike with Win95) and building dominance, so other platforms have become the popular ones, and they're left out. If people can't easily install and run their favorite popular apps, the platform is simply a non-starter. Everyone has their own favorite apps; for me, if a phone won't run Tinder, for instance, there's no way I'm going to waste my time with it.