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.

Comments

I agree

[Gumbercules!!]

As an ex-Windows Phone user, I said many times I would have stayed on the platform if I could (reliably and safely) run Android Apps (I'm aware of the work over at XDADevs to make this happen but I don't want to have to get my app APKs from Russia - I want them from the Play Store). I actually quite liked the OS of Windows Phone - it was quite powerful, smooth and frankly, feature rich (mainly because it had to be, because there were no damn apps for it). If I could have Android apps - and they worked well and safely (you know... for Android) I'd call that best of both worlds and come back.

Re: I agree

[DarkOx]

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.

Re: I agree

[Grishnakh]

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.

too late Steveo

[deodiaus2]

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.

Re:too late Steveo

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that your words will be ignored. Sorry Pal, you had a shot at the big chair and threw it. Well, some of us never were given the chance. Enjoy your cash.

Fixed that for you

Steve Ballmer's ideas are quite valuable.

[bistromath007]

MS should really consider keeping him on as a consultant. They could pay him hundreds of millions of dollars a year to talk about anything that crosses his mind, and they'd turn a huge profit so long as they do the exact opposite of whatever he says.

Re:Microsoft-only vs. running Android apps

[spauldo]

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.

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