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Microsoft CMO Confirms Development of 'Spiritual Equivalent' of Surface Phone (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: We all know what Microsoft wants to do with Windows 10. It's supposedly the last monolithic release of Windows and the ultimate plan is to unite hardware from different device categories under a single, universal ecosystem. That includes smartphones, which is an area where Microsoft has historically struggled hard to compete. The release of a premium "Surface Phone" of some sort, however, could prove to be a game changer. Microsoft is aggressively pushing Windows 10 upgrades, and makes no bones about it, all in an effort to get developers on board to build universal Windows 10 cross-platform apps and spur mobile development. In that respect, Microsoft needs to finally make an impact in the handset space and Windows 10 Mobile is the company's one shot to do just that. And it appears that Microsoft is working on what could be essentially a true Surface Phone, or at least something very similar. In a recent interview, Mary Jo Foley pushed Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela on the prospect of a Surface Phone and he confirmed the company is working on a "breakthrough" phone that is the "spiritual equivalent" of their very successful line of Surface branded products. Capossela has been with Microsoft for over two decades. He used to write speeches for Bill Gates and is intimately familiar with Microsoft's many products and strategies.
"Windows 10" is the "OS X" of Redmond. OS X was released in 2001, still has the same name, but has evolved quite a bit. It also means "Ten" in Latin.
Windows 10 is going to incrementally alienate every single desktop user, which is the business user, which is where Microsoft makes most of its money. Headless virtual machines on keyboardless commodity hardware are not going to be administered by tablet, and the stupid tablet interface is really just going to piss people off.
Well, that sounds terrible. Maybe they should have gone with Roman numbers instead of those Arabic ones, given the world today.
I don't remember anyone saying, "The iPhone is a gamechanger" when it was released. People said, "this is really cool" or for some, "this is really lame." They focused on the features of the phone, and how it felt. They didn't need to tell people it was a gamechanger, because that was fairly obvious right at the start.
Hypothesis: if you have to tell people your product is a "game changer," then it probably isn't.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm actually getting a Surface. (A used Surface Pro 2, but still specifically a Surface - I found a use case where Windows compatibility in a super-portable machine with a touchscreen is actually quite useful).
Microsoft is blatantly trying to be Apple, but they actually seem to be doing a better job of it than the modern Apple is. All their devices are reportedly solidly-built and well-specced (either high-end overall, or good specs for the price... yes, their high-end stuff is expensive, but at least it's actually high-end). The Surface Pros are quite popular with artists because they have really good pen digitizers, and work with full-bore art software. They make reasonable compromises - the battery life is as long as it can be while keeping a reasonable size, the performance is as good as it can be while keeping battery life usable. Even the Xbox One is okay. I'm never going to buy one, but I can see that it's good at what it's trying to be, and about half of what it's trying to be is good for some users.
Meanwhile, Apple is making phones too thin for the battery to last a full day, then making an ugly, misshapen battery case to fix it. Making pens that charge off a fixed port, and snap with a harsh enough glance. Making screen sizes that don't evenly scale from their old ones, while having no good way for applications to scale to unexpected sizes. Introducing a variety of models with no clear hierarchy of performance or size or cost. Pointless cosmetic customization, but one-size-fits-all capabilities.
I actually would like to see a straight-up laptop from Microsoft. Not a convertible, not an ultrabook, a laptop - because the other competitors in that market are doing a pretty pitiful job of it. Something like the old Macbook Pros (before they got anorexia-obsessed) mixed with the old ThinkPads - a solidly-built machine, easy to maintain and upgrade, with usable base specs and plenty of customization so you can get what you actually need. (I wouldn't automatically buy such a thing, but I *do* think Microsoft would probably do better than any company currently doing so).
It wasn't that long ago when Windows Mobile was the dominant OS in the smartphone arena. To boot, MS and hardware makers did a pretty good job. The HTC Wizard comes to mind, with a week's battery life. It might be laughable by our standards now, since it only puttered at EDGE speeds, and didn't have the latest rev of BlueTooth, not to mention the use of MiniSD cards... but for the time, it was a very nice phone.
Microsoft dropped the ball when the iPhone came out. The biggest problem is that Windows Mobile was designed around a stylus, while iOS and Android were designed for finger gestures. The shift in the UI expectations left MS in the dust, just because all their device apps were not "finger friendly". MS was encumbered with an existing solution, and having to either figure out how to retrofit the latest UI style, or to just toss everything out and start anew.
MS did a good job with starting anew, and they have a competitive device.
As for a spiritual successor for the Surface... this gets me wondering... are they going to try for an Intel x86 type of computer running W10 in a smartphone form factor? If they could pull this off running a real x86 version of Windows 10 and all Windows applications, it would be a game-changer.
Of course, other companies tried this, such as Motorola with the Atrix and Atrix 2... but if a phone could be tossed in a stand or have a USB-C cable connected, and it take the role of a desktop machine with an x86 version of W10, Microsoft would be breaking new ground. It would mean that one wouldn't need to have anything other than a keyboard, monitor, and USB-C hub in order to have a functioning desktop.
There is one missing piece of the puzzle, and that is getting a phone to handle heavy GPU tasks. This is easy. Since MS has their own graphics standard, it would be trivial for them to make something like a LAN version of OnLive, and have smartphones and tablets send the DirectX commands over the network to a render box, and the render box send back streaming video. Since 4k res of streaming video is about 10Mbps, a wireless LAN can easily handle this. If one uses a newer graphics protocol like ZPEG which gets even better compression for the same quality, it would be even less.
If Microsoft pulls this off, where the only GPU needed for a device would be for the basic UI... they would have a major breakthrough market that would be in high demand.
IMO they'll keep failing at it too. Their current strategy (same applications run on all hardware) is riding on the idea that people will create desktop universal apps.
It's just not going to happen because, first of all, hardly anybody writes desktop applications anymore. If somebody wants to create an app for desktop users these days, it's almost always a web app that you interact with in your web browser.
Second of all, the few desktop apps that people write can't even be done in a universal app due to API restriction. For example, you couldn't create something like OpenVPN Connect for it because universal apps can't tunnel internet traffic (the best they can do is pass instructions to the built-in Windows VPN client, which won't support any VPN protocol that Microsoft hasn't specifically written for it.) So if they do write a desktop app, it's probably not going to run on anything except Windows for PCs, thus not being "universal".
The problem is that Microsoft has so much money, and has a cash cow making so much money, that they can keep on throwing lots of money on the project until they finally have what they want: a dominant position in smart phones and tablets.
They are really forcing all those tablets/laptop hybrids and phones to their partners, just like they a forcing their partners to adopt cloud versions of the office stack. I know plenty of people working in some MS oriented shop who claim they don't need anything in a phone/tablet as long is it can use MS Office. According to them the future is not in phone apps, but in Office Apps and apps that run on all devices with different views.
I was working for such a company a few weeks ago, and they were making fun of me because I have an iPhone. They were very evangelic and tried to convince me to switch to an MS phone, but first ... they needed to reboot because of some faulty application. But that was the fault of Nokia, not Microsoft. When I told them that Nokia 'is' Microsoft, the answer was just: 'not yet when the phone was made'.
This is an anecdote in one of the many Microsoft only shops. Many of the decision makers in those small/medium sized companies are evangelizing Microsoft products. Microsoft can't do wrong in their eyes, and anything non Microsoft is ignored and when they have to deal with it, they hire external knowledge. The reason I was hired by that one company is to copy data from Postgresql to Access (yeah, that access that should have been aborted before it was released), so they could switch their new customers to the fantastic invention called SharePoint online. These are apparently really competent engineers. They don't know anything about Posgressql, but Access has no secrets for them. They can make .NET applications that moves data from Access to SharePoint. Apparently that's what their team of 'programmers' does all day: making SharePoint apps. Software solutions that already exist are remade with SharePoint as a developing platform. I didn't even knew SharePoint was used for developing applicatoins. I always thought it was just a collaboration website.
Well, it was so easy work, just use and adapt my generic code and let it run, test for consistency and deliver the project right before deadline (2 weeks while I finished in only 1 day, their making fun of me, made me let them pay back...)
Conclusion is that many small and medium sized companies are customers of these kind of MS only shops. Their customers don't have and don't want the expertise in IT, and the MS shops just move MS technology and nobody cares (or even understands) about vendor lock in. Just add some successful evangelizing about MS Phones (and of course say that Android is too fragmented and is full of adware, and claim that iPhones are just to play games) and slowly their market will grow. It doesn't even matter that they lose money year after year in the phone division, their desktop monopoly makes the profitable. When the move to the cloud is successful, they don't even have to care about the very low desktop sales. They get free money from the subscribers. Look at the XBox. It lost money for many years and they are still sold.
No other company as this luxury. They need to make money pretty soon. Microsoft should have been divided in multiple companies back in the nineties, when it was clear that they had a monopoly. They still profit from this 'almost monopoly, but just not enough to get punished'.