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Microsoft CMO Confirms Development of 'Spiritual Equivalent' of Surface Phone (hothardware.com)

Posted by timothy on from the open-wide-and-say-ohhhhm dept.

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.

24 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Oh noes by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And I'm sure it'll be another stunning success, just like the last 5 failed phones they tried to force into the market.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    1. Re:Oh noes by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They don't. Their phone division has always been a massive financial liability. Its just that Microsoft is literally obsessed with the thought of getting into phones.
      Any other company acting like their phone division but without their massive safety net would have gone bust 5 times over by now.

    2. Re:Oh noes by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Insightful

      wouldn't a company that knew its ass from a hole in the wall have figured out mobile was important say 15 years ago? WTF?

    3. Re:Oh noes by bondsbw · · Score: 2

      It did. Microsoft debuted Windows Mobile (then called Pocked PC) in 2000. Microsoft was one of the most successful mobile "smart device" companies before 2007.

      Their problems, common to many of their consumer offerings at the time, were built upon complacency and lack of innovation that I believe is the ultimate legacy of Ballmer. He loved his monopolies, and sat on them well past the point of staleness. Good thing for consumers that other companies decided enough was enough and came out with substantially better products.

      I don't fault Microsoft for being mobile focused now, I just fault them for waiting so long.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    4. Re:Oh noes by mlts · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Oh noes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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'.

    6. Re: Oh noes by Dracos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      MS will continue to fail at mobile, but not because of their strategy. They've been failing at mobile since before the iPhone.

      Their mobile failures are just examples of a broader cultural deficiency in Redmond: they don't know how to connect with consumers, and they're too stubborn and full of hubris to realize that. The XBox division succeeded mostly because it was left alone by the top brass (who likely didn't understand a damn thing about it). When MS learns to put aside their preconceptions about buying habits and that consumers don't shop the same way CTO's do, they might have a chance in any consumer market, including mobile.

    7. Re:Oh noes by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      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.

      You are remembering a past that did not exist. WM phones' hardware was shit. I mean, you're completely glossing over the period where WM devices didn't even have nonvolatile storage, aside from space for the OS! Palm never went through that. Nor did the other "smart" phones of the day. That was unique to WinCE of the day. "Sure, we can do it without flash!" No, no you can't, Microsoft. Not when an OS crash can destroy all your files. What a festering piece of shit.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Microsoft need to just get it by JustNiz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No one WANTS a Microsoft-branded anything.
    The only reason anyone still uses Microsoft products is because:
    1) it came preinstalled on your new computer.
    2) Most workplace IT managers only know Windows so automatically force it onto everyone's work computers.

    1. Re:Microsoft need to just get it by fermion · · Score: 2
      They definitely need to work hard to move product. I am not sure how anyone believes the Surface is successful. MS revenue appears to be down, and while Surface sales spike, and increase, as each new Surface is released, sales drop the next quarter or two until a new surface is released.

      Their one successful piece of hardware, the Xbox, seems to go up and down. The XBox success is that it is not windows, and MS does not do a lot to use Xbox to push MS Windows. From a consumer point of view, the MS ecosystem does not offer a lot of advantages. They are corporate and enterpise, and Windows !0 offer great tools for that, but unless corporate is going to buy windows phones, which they have not done in the past, and make workers use them, they are going to be sunk.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    2. Re:Microsoft need to just get it by gman003 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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).

  3. Microsoft is aggressively pushing Windows 10 upgra by hsmith · · Score: 2

    Is that why Windows Mobile 10, or whatever it is now called, got pushed back until 2016? I am sure people will be busting down doors to buy this new phone, maybe they'll break 5% market share in Beruit!

  4. This just in: by Gavagai80 · · Score: 2

    Chief marketing officer thinks his next product is good, and spiritually equivalent to things people like. This is credible because he's spent decades writing speeches for Microsoft saying similar things.

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    This space intentionally left blank
  5. Re:ok...Apple/Jobs is a religion..i get that by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 5, Funny

    "You have found A Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone."

    # wield phone

    "You are now wielding A Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone."

    # turn on phone

    "Nothing happens. The battery appears to be dead."

    # drop phone

    "You can't. The Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone appears to be cursed."

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  6. Re:Microsoft is aggressively pushing Windows 10 up by chipschap · · Score: 2

    But nevertheless Slashdot feels the need to tout it as the Coming Great Thing.

  7. "Spiritual" by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    It's spiritual because you need a lot of faith to use it.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  8. Surface by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There seems to be this narrative that the Surface is successful in the market. It isn't. The only Surface I have seen in the wild is on the NFL sidelines, and Microsoft is paying the NFL for that. There is no way Surfaces are selling widely.

  9. Re:What's the difference from a Lumia? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Lumia represents the last of the Nokia/Elop era, whereas a "Surface Phone" is done in-house?

    x86 compatibility, perhaps. If they cram an Atom into a phone then when docked you've got a desktop PC in your pocket, with the full win32 back catalogue.

  10. game changer by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."
  11. Re:MS CEO said the same thing about Win10 in 2014 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wait a minute...I heard Windows Phone 6 was going to be the game changer. Then WP7...now it's 10? Perhaps they will succeed with Windows Phone 11?

    But I get why they say it will be the spiritual equivalent of surface...the surface machines don't get the bad reviews that the Windows Phones do...so they are hoping the improved marketing speak will work this time.

  12. Re:ok...Apple/Jobs is a religion..i get that by dissy · · Score: 5, Funny

    The LCD is pitch black. Your data cap is likely to be eaten by a grue.

  13. I don't want windows 10 or whatever is next by crbowman · · Score: 2

    I'm tired of coming back to my desktop PC and finding Microsoft has decided to reboot it without asking me, thus losing work. I'm tired of constantly being nagged to upgrade to windows 10. I don't want all information shared with Microsoft. I really wish I could but windows 7 and down grade. I only run Windows because some dev tools for electronic design and some games only run there and I can't get PCIe slots without buying an insanely expensive MAC. I think I'm pretty much end of the line with Microsoft. Disclaimer: I run MacOS X and FreeBSD. I'm not unaware of my options but there are some things for which I want a windows PC or I want Windows to die so I don't need a windows machine but just a PC.

  14. I hate technology by WaffleMonster · · Score: 2

    Used to be excited about "new" technology because it sometimes had a purpose and offered users value and capabilities. Today all anyone can do is fuck with people. Everyone wants to be a spyware or malware vendor and they don't want to do anything useful in return for a paycheck. Much of the consumer crap being churned out today is not only worthless but hostile and even dangerous.

    Why would I want a Windows phone when I'm required to have a MS account, can't use my devices GPS without uploading my location to Microsoft, can't have a local phone book without giving all of my contacts to Microsoft, can't install software not approved by Microsoft, can't use wifi without participating in MS crowd sourced skyhook spying. I'm fed up with the childish games and people constantly justifying their actions by citing who else is doing it too.

    The opportunity cost of so much wasted potential is beyond sad.

  15. Re:The Original Article is Pure Crap by lord_mike · · Score: 2

    I would disagree with you wholeheartedly... I would be potentially very interested in a "surface" phone, and I think a lot of other people would be too... depending on how it eventually worked, of course. It could potentially be a gamechanger or it could be another flop, but Microsoft is at least going outside the box to try and do something different. There is a decent demand for surface tablets. I don't see why there wouldn't be similar demand for a surface phone if it is done correctly.