Microsoft's Windows Phone Platform Is Dead (windows10update.com)

Ammalgam writes: Tom Warren at the Verge today gave voice to what a lot of other technology analysts and today definitively declared that Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is dead. This largely based on the abysmal adoption numbers released in Microsoft's most recent earnings report. Mr. Warren articulates the obvious by stating: "With Lumia sales on the decline and Microsoft's plan to not produce a large amount of handsets, it's clear we're witnessing the end of Windows Phone. Rumors suggest Microsoft is developing a Surface Phone, but it has to make it to the market first. Windows Phone has long been in decline and its app situation is only getting worse. With a lack of hardware, lack of sales, and less than 2 percent market share, it's time to call it: Windows Phone is dead. "

Now this news should not be surprising to anyone who has watched the slow decline of Windows Phone. Last December, in an article on Windows10update.com, Onuora Amobi also wrote off the platform. In this case, his analysis was based on the nonconformity of the Microsoft user interface to Apple and Android's widely adopted aesthetic appeal. He wrote "I believe Windows Phone is dead. Kaput. Finished. Over. Done. ... Windows 10 is successful in part because it's a return to Windows 7 in many ways and that's what made the consumers happy. One of the definitions of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result". This is exactly what Microsoft is doing and it's insane. Over 90% of Microsoft's desired audience like the look and feel of iPhones and Android devices. They do – it's not good or bad – it just is what it is. They spend their money on those two user interfaces."

Comments

Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know The Verge?...That's a fucking iVerge!

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Isca]

I wish I had mod points to vote this up. The Verge may be right, but they are totally apple fanboys who jump at any opportunity to make fun of the competition.

Microsoft may be able to jumpin at some point though with the bump in surface sales. If they rebranded as surface phone and launched a surface phone that's tied to a plan that is much like Google Fi they could potentially build a market for themselves. Especially if they used the hooks they have in the retail world at best buys and microsoft kiosks to push that. Then they could potentially build market share from there by offering the phones on other carriers once there's a buzz. This especially becomes true if they ever get android apps working on the windows phone which they are supposedly close to having available. .

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[bondsbw]

Which is it, the apps or the UI?

I, anecdotally, do NOT like the iOS UI. Its widgets are hidden away in a drawer, apps' most useful functions tend to be at the top of the screen instead of within thumb reach, and I can't even choose where on my homescreen I want to place an icon. Android UI is generally better and it provides more flexibility, although I wish it were more flexible out-of-the-box and didn't require rooting to do some of the truly nice things. Windows Mobile UI is a mix, where its widgets (tiles) aren't quite as useful but the tradeoff of better resource management makes that acceptable.

Again, just my opinion, but the UI is absolutely NOT the weak point for Microsoft. Apps are. That should improve if more well-known app vendors port to universal Windows 10 apps, since they would only need to tweak the desktop/tablet UI a bit for phones. MS needs to be much more proactive on getting app developers on board.

Microsoft has strength in its future ecosystem where apps will run on Xbox, phone, desktop, tablet, tables, HoloLens, IoT, and so on. IF they get that going, it could blow all the others away. Of course that's future and not today, so this strength is only hypothetical and as of this moment they don't get many points here.

I don't think the Windows phone platform is dead. I think the WP7/8 iterations are dead. 10 has some great potential, but MS needs more innovation in hardware as well as software or that platform will never get to its fullest potential.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[NatasRevol]

Yes, Tom Warren, founder of WinRumors.com is an Apple shill.

No wonder you posted anonymously.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Penguinisto]

There are fanboys of any platform that are always eager to make fun of competitors to their Chosen Idol.... so what exactly was your point there? Can't be due to any sneering by any top dog... currently it's a near-duopoly in the smartphone OS world, and fortunately neither major participant is run by a monopolistic player of dirty pool.

Microsoft used to have 2-3rd place in North America at best, back before the iPhone and Android came out (#1 was BlackberryOS, #2 was PalmOS). Microsoft *could* have taken advantage of a decent position back then, but they, like Nokia, Palm, and BB, were blindsided by the advent of first the iPhone, then Android.

Microsoft compounded its error in judgement by dumping time and money into 'Pink', thinking that a Sidekick inspired hardwired-keyboard phone style was eventually going to win out over the rapidly growing Apple/Android phones, who in turn were moving in the opposite direction (that is, Microsoft's competitors were busy as hell trying to cut down the number of hardware buttons, while Microsoft was busy adding more). In the end, the long-delayed Kin phone had no chance.

To try and make up for the fuckups, They send ol' Elop over to take over a now-ailing Nokia, then slowly drag Nokia into Microsoft's fold. Problem is, they did it about 5 years too late, long after Nokia fell into massive decline. They should have taken over that platform before it caught fire, to borrow Elop's analogy.

When Microsoft finally got its shit together, it was too little, too late. With a near-deserted app store, a widely-panned mobile UI, and a near-saturated market, Microsoft is in no position to do jack shit in this market... and I think the sooner Nadella gets the memo and pulls out of that mess, the better.

IMHO, the whole Windows Phone fiasco is prima facie evidence that Microsoft overextended itself. Excepting the still-no-ROI-yet XBox line, they have been patently unable to do anything profitable, let alone successful outside of their existing core competencies: OS, Exchange, Office, Active Directory, and rebranding Logitech peripherals. ...maybe it's time for Microsoft to get back to basics, keep the stuff that actually makes money, dump the rest, then sit down and take a long, hard, vision-related look at where they really need to go in order to thrive (and not decline or remain stale-steady-state) a couple of decades from now?

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google (or Alphabet rather) is likely to overtake Apple's overall net worth soon.

LOL No.

Market cap, maybe.

But Apple has more than $200B in cash, while giving away about $50B a year in dividends & stock repurchases.

Apple's massive cash supply has a major problem that's going to take a lot of "financial engineering" to solve:

LOL.

Only if they want to spend it in America. But guess where they put lots ($10s of B) of capital into their manufacturing process. I'll give you a hint. It's in the Far East.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[phantomfive]

Again, just my opinion, but the UI is absolutely NOT the weak point for Microsoft. Apps are.

I agree with you completely.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[war4peace]

I'd wager that the vision is there, within Microsoft's employee pool, but got hopelessly stuck in mid-management politics and infighting over whose shit smells better.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[jon3k]

The Verge may be right, but they are totally apple fanboys who jump at any opportunity to make fun of the competition.

Doesn't make them wrong. Microsoft Phones aren't "dead" because they were never even "alive". They just "never were".

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[amiga3D]

I don't think the windows phone is dead either. It's on life support and has been since it's inception. Microsoft does have the money to keep it on life support forever if it wishes. They have the money to bleed for years and years until the finally somehow find a way to succeed in the phone market. It's only a matter of whether they have the will. Sony helped the Xbox succeed by repeatedly stabbing themselves in the eye. I suppose microsoft is hoping the same will happen with iOS and Android.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[leathered]

Agreed. The UI is superior to both IOS and Android and really is a joy to use. My employer recently gave me a new Lumia to replace the iPhone 5 they gave me previously. After some initial protests I was really taken by how slick the interface is.

Apps are the problem. My bank doesn't provide one for WP and a number of others I have used regularly are either unavailable or inferior to their IOS and Android counterparts. It also has an image problem and I think it was a mistake to drop the Nokia branding. Microsoft may have good brand recognition but it is far from a trusted brand.

Re: Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lies. I'm on an iPhone 4s currently running iOS9. That is a 4 1/2 year old phone running the latest. While I also have a 2 year old Samsung Galaxy which hasn't received an update in over 8 months.

Funny how you don't discuss androids update problem. The fact that only 1 phone (nexus) gets regular updates. No you swept that under the rug and didn't even mention it because you knew you were lying and trolling for your home team.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[mattventura]

Microsoft has strength in its future ecosystem where apps will run on Xbox, phone, desktop, tablet, tables, HoloLens, IoT, and so on. IF they get that going, it could blow all the others away. Of course that's future and not today, so this strength is only hypothetical and as of this moment they don't get many points here.

No, no, no, just no. The whole "homogenize mobile and desktop" line of thought is what gave us garbage like Windows 8. Targeting all devices means you have to follow the lowest common denominator. That, or implement platform-specific code, which is basically what you'd be doing for any cross-platform program to begin with. Programming aside, an app will often (even unintenionally) be designed around one platform, so even if it "works" on other platforms, it's not a particularly good experience. For example, an app designed for mobile might not have proper keyboard shortcuts on the desktop version, or an app designed for a desktop might involve too much typing to be usable on mobile.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

There are fanboys of any platform that are always eager to make fun of competitors to their Chosen Idol

I've often wondered about the motivation for this kind of behavior...is it simply a form of self-reassurance, or bolstering of one's ego to confirm that a given decision (i.e. Android versus Apple) was the "right" decision? Or is it a way to possibly makeup for thinking that one has, in fact, made the "wrong" decision? What's the motivation to take sides and hoot like bands of rival monkeys at a waterhole??

It's so weird. I own an Android phone, but I don't brag about it. I'm sure an iPhone or Lumia or Brand X would work just as well for me. Conversely, I don't diss people who happen to own a different brand of gadget, vehicle, or clothing than I do. Why would I?

It just all seems so weird to me, like some kind of abstracted dick-waving or patriotism or something. Why would I care what brand of phone someone uses? Why would I care about them knowing or caring about what brand of phone I use?

I don't understand it, I really don't.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Supercabby]

I don't think the windows phone is dead either. It's on life support and has been since it's inception. Microsoft does have the money to keep it on life support forever if it wishes. They have the money to bleed for years and years until the finally somehow find a way to succeed in the phone market. It's only a matter of whether they have the will. Sony helped the Xbox succeed by repeatedly stabbing themselves in the eye. I suppose microsoft is hoping the same will happen with iOS and Android.

I love my windows phone, a few more apps would be nice but overall my network is connected.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[unencode200x]

RTFA. I haven't checked sources, but it to expand, the article claims that even though Apple has a lot of cash, they have a lot of debt too ($53 billion USD). Apple took the debt to fund their stock buybacks/dividends and to avoid taxes (2.1% vs. lots of taxes).

If Apple brought their cash back to the US and paid their debts that would at least half their cash position. So they're not in bad shape by any means, but it's not as look as it sounds on the face of it.

Also, iPhone accounts for 2/3's of their revenue according to the article. If that's the case, Apple has said they expect a ~14 percent drop in iPhone sales this quarter. That's a big deal. It actually puts them pretty close to where Microsoft is at.

Alphabet, on the other hand, went and hired some wall street people, reigned in spending, reorganized and made some smart moves. They're on the rise.

The most valuable company thing I'm not sure about, I guess it depends how you measure it. Market cap does tend to be what the media and others are talking about when they say "the most valuable company in the world," but we all know there is a lot more to it than that. For example, market cap only represents outstanding stocks and is really all over the place.

Re: Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[hazee]

If developer support was their priority, then they got it unbelievably wrong! I've spent most of my career working with various ms technologies, so was naturally curious about trying out the windows phone dev tools. Only they've managed to cripple them, to the extent that I still can't. Case in point - the emulator. Turns out it requires hyper v, not available for win 7... That's "cutting off nose to spite face" idiotic. No emulator on win 7, no corporate apps (we've only recently migrated to 7 at work, not about to do so again for a years yet). Contrast this with android - dev tools, Inc emulator, even run on XP. OK, maybe I can try it out on my home machine (if I hold my nose and swallow win 10) right? Actually, no - turns out you need slat support, which my (otherwise perfectly fine) CPU doesn't support. And no, I'm not about to buy a new machine (with a worse screen) just so I can try out win phone development (and discover that it's probably not worth the effort). So it's android device for me. I can get dev tools. Now. And they work with my current hardware and OS. How ms managed to screw this up so badly, I really can't comprehend.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[ComputerGeek01]

I've often wondered about the motivation for this kind of behavior...is it simply a form of self-reassurance, or bolstering of one's ego to confirm that a given decision (i.e. Android versus Apple) was the "right" decision? Or is it a way to possibly makeup for thinking that one has, in fact, made the "wrong" decision? What's the motivation to take sides and hoot like bands of rival monkeys at a waterhole??

I can't speak for any underlying psychobabble cause; but for some of us it feels more like an expression of our values. For example, I have an iPhone 6 and I support a few dozen of them at my job. I hate these things with the passion of a thousand hells specifically because the business model revolves around sweeping all of the blatantly obvious problems under the rug. The troubleshooting steps for any error you might ever come across for any application on this platform are as follows: 1.) Restart the phone. 2.) Reinstall the application. 3.) Format the phone and reinstall the application 4.) RMA the phone. That's it. If none of those steps work, you will be abandoned by any technical support team out there specifically because they all know that the cause will be some underlying edge case bug that Apple refuses to address or even acknowledge. You want log files? F-U, Apple fanboys don't need no stinkin log files so they don't exist despite Unix being one of the pioneers of this concept. You want an error code? Nope, can't help you there, they don't exist; you're lucky if you're told that a problem occurred at all. You want to roll back to a previous version of a software package where this problem didn't exist? Nope, never going to happen not even diagnostically because I guess no one who ever wrote code for the Apple platform has ever made a mistake.

As for the animosity toward Apple fanboys? I suppose that it stems from a feeling that they are the ones that are propagating this culture of "There is no problem as long as you ignore the problem until you buy your next device.". It's a bit infuriating to be told by one of them that "You have to stop pretending that you can fix everything.".

Re: Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[guruevi]

Any large company with large amounts of your average sales/tech/support does this. I've seen it in Radio Shack (manager retreats), shoe chains, Microsoft (parties with oysters and champagne). It's part training and part is retention, making sure they don't have to expend too much on training their monkeys due to turnover while maintaining the smallest edge on their competitions hourly rates.

There is an entire market for corporate shit like this with motivational speakers on one end and party planners at the cost of an expensive wedding at the other side. Apple gives even their cheapest "geniuses" all the newest Apple gear with regular permanent giveaways - it's a great way of getting them used to the product without taking them out for retraining and it helps with loyalty and word of mouth marketing and they just write it off as a tax break.

The people that actually matter in those organizations don't have that. The core engineers I have interacted with at Apple, Microsoft etc are all relatively level headed. They also don't get retained with a free iPad every so often.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[LinuxIsGarbage]

The Verge may be right, but they are totally apple fanboys who jump at any opportunity to make fun of the competition.

I would agree, but Windows Phone is not now nor ever was competition for Apple. The company that is competition for Apple's bread and butter market however, is a totally different story:

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-g...

As much as people like to dump on Windows Phone, or Blackberry, the shrinking of the smartphone market to only 2 major players is a bad thing. More competition is good in trying to keep all vendors on their feet, and there are certainly things WP and BB do better than iOS or Android.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Penguinisto]

You want log files? F-U, Apple fanboys don't need no stinkin log files so they don't exist despite Unix being one of the pioneers of this concept. You want an error code? Nope, can't help you there, they don't exist; you're lucky if you're told that a problem occurred at all.

Huh? What are you talking about?

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[Dutch Gun]

Microsoft gradually chipped away at it and eventually supplanted PalmOS as #1 for the simple reason that Palm wouldn't allow PalmOS on other hardware. Anyone else who wanted to make their own PDA had to invest in making their own OS (Nokia) or use Microsoft's offering. (This is the same mistake Apple made in the PC market, thus relegating them to a 5% market share today.)

And yet, this same strategy seems to have worked brilliantly for the iPhone, or at the very least, doesn't seem to have hurt Apple at all. Any theories as to why this would supposedly be a disadvantage in one case but not in another? Personally, I'm not sure that licensing an OS to third-parties is a huge factor in success given the top two players have wildly diverging strategies in this regard. And remember, Android isn't a big money-maker for Google like the iPhone is for Apple.

But in an idiotic move, Microsoft insisted on tying it together with their desktop OS monopoly by forcing it to use the Win32 API and UI paradigm. (A Start button on a phone? Really?) Nobody wants to use the Windows desktop UI on a 4-inch screen.

And hilariously, Microsoft made the exact same mistake in reverse with Windows 8.1 by forcing users to use a ridiculous mobile / touch interface on a desktop PC.

IMHO that will go down in history as Ballmer's biggest blunder - missing the PDA and cell phone convergence.

Oh, and don't forget the convergence of digital cameras with phones as well. I'd imagine the bottom dropped out of the low-end stand-alone digital camera market, since nearly everyone has a camera on their phone these days.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[rtb61]

Right at this moment of time Apple has one huge, really huge marketing advantage of M$. Apple is selling privacy and looking after the privacy of others is cool and sells well. M$ are selling the opposite and complete loss of privacy and that is an impossible sell and the longer they keep it going the worse it will get. From young to old, at a social level, invasion of privacy is loathed, pervert a core word for offensive behaviour, secretly perving on someone, being a perv is considered quite foul, check the related words http://www.urbandictionary.com..., it could not be worse.

Apple are on a winner and they know it and they will keep pushing it and pushing it and end users will start associating M$ with those related words. They make a huge blunder not to come straight out of the gate with Windows SE and Windows free anal probe version, stealing that choice was really uncool and it will cost them and Apple will make the most of it. Especially with the desk top making the shift to the big screen and tablets for more typical home users.

Re:Article paid by Apple to boo over it.

[ArmoredDragon]

Umm...Why would I be Satya? If you read my post history, I'm a pretty big critic of Windows Phone. It's biggest problem is that it's just not relevant...to anybody...And that starts with its UI. A few years back, somebody at Microsoft created this blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thinku...

It's a well written post, with a few wonderful examples of why information overload is bad. Even with their UI talent knowing information overload is a real problem, they go and create a UI that looks like this:

http://in4mactiondotcom2.files...

Now look at Android's stock UI, which has these variations depending on OEM:

http://images.techhive.com/ima...

Assumes it ever lived

[mccalli]

Shame - I actually liked the fact it was doing something different and wasn't an iOS clone. Had a chance to play with one very briefly when a friend bought it, and I thought it worked quite well.

I'm an Apple ecosystem person at the moment, but I'm definitely in for seeing alternatives and I'm also not on the Win10 hate train - I quite like it, and it would be nice to see some of its features well integrated into a mobile platform as well.

Re:Assumes it ever lived

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Windows Phone is a very solid interface, maybe even the best one, assuming you only have a few apps. The real problem was it only had a few apps. It was embarrassing how few options there were.

The hardware was solid for the cheaper phones. If you wanted sub $100 phone, especially a couple years ago, the Lumia series was the way to go.

And Android is effectively a monoculture too, everybody just gets their apps from Google Play, the same as if it was the Apple store.

Really, the absolute lack of apps was what kept Windows Phone from being some kind of cult phenom. Too bad, I basically like the idea of a phone that I can use as a Windows computer.

Re:Assumes it ever lived

[plover]

While I agree that emulating the parts of the iOS ecosystem that we all hate (the walled garden, and the over-dependence on for-rent services) was their biggest mistake, I just don't have the same loathing for Microsoft as I do for Apple. Apple innovated the walled garden model, and got millions of fanbois to promote it. Apple is like an abusive spouse, constantly telling their users they're too damn stupid to own anything as cool as their gear; and yet those people are grateful. Apple is straight up evil.

Microsoft just copied everything Apple did, stupidly hoping they'd stumble upon some magical formula for success. But it always seemed like somewhere deep inside Microsoft there was a tension caused by really talented people who knew the whole Apple idea was evil, and were trying to do the right thing. So I can't hate them as much.

Re:Assumes it ever lived

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 from a user experience might not be too bad, but it's the aggressive data collection that really has people hating Windows 10. Not only bad defaults, but often downright impossible to turn off even when you think you have. Combine that with extremely aggressive attempts to get Win 7/8 users to upgrade. If those things weren't there, I doubt the same level of hate would be.

Re:Assumes it ever lived

[unixisc]

Their Windows 8 strategy was what killed them. B'cos the first Windows 8 phone that I got - a Lumia 520 - totally transformed my attitude towards instant messaging. Previously, I'd just avoid doing it at all - typing on a numeric keypad was out of the question. But Lumia's typing experience was so fluent & smooth that it totally switched me over right away. At the time, neither iOS nor Android's keyboards were that great.

Had Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 8 years ago, when Android & Apple too were just starting, they'd have been fine. Unfortunately, the things they did copy from Apple - like the Walled Garden - was counterproductive, while in the meantime, the Windows Store is a wasteland w/ no constraints on what apps show up in which country. Like if I'm in the US and looking for something like RetailMeNot, I won't get that, since that app has not been ported to Windows Phone, but I'll either get nothing (as in the case here), or I'll get something that's valid only in Cameroon. Having a flag for all apps indicating which geographies an app is valid in is helpful. While some, like Whatsapp or Twitter may be universal, some others, like Zomato, wouldn't be valid in the US.

If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[LichtSpektren]

Recent news suggests that Microsoft is about to cram their current Windows 10 phones full of bloatware in order to make up for their horrible market share decline. TripAdvisor is going to be the first ad implemented: http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Sucks for those WP fans that tried to be loyal and support their chosen platform, but Microsoft ain't never gonna change from their old ways.

Re:If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[gstoddart]

When the bloated shitware OEMs have been putting on machines becomes the bloated shitware shipped by Microsoft ... it's basically a sign that Microsoft is doing such a bad job at getting people to care they have to essentially resort to affiliate programs and paid product placement.

I'm afraid Microsoft has lost the plot so badly they will never be able to recover ... because for those many of us who simply don't want or need Office, and have noticed that while Apple adds stuff like movie editing software Microsoft is removing Solitaire ... there's not much beyond the OS to run other people's software on that MS brings to the table.

Except for notepad, Windows Explorer, and Calculator ... there's not a damned piece of Microsoft software which adds value to my home machine.

If the once biggest software company is reduced to adware, they'd jumped the shark so badly as to be doomed. Because they'll have almost stopped being relevant.

Re:If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[LichtSpektren]

Google is the company that can be least trusted. They are the only company which has the primary business model of collecting as much information from you as possible and selling it to the highest bidder.

Apple, BB and Microsoft collect info too, but at least it's not the basis of their business model.

Google and Apple don't sell your info. Google's cash cow is the fact that they exclusively hold certain information about their customers, and they leverage it by allowing targeted advertisements--they would lose their broker status by giving out all that customer info (that's why they very carefully anonymize advertisements on their products, so they don't let their customers spill the beans to anybody else BUT Google.) Apple's cash cow is customer loyalty and huge margins on their premium devices, so they would be foolish to squander their customer loyalty by selling their info out

Re:If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[grimmjeeper]

Google didn't put all of the bloatware on your phone. Verizon did. And if you're even remotely tech savvy, you can disable most of it pretty easily.

Re:If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[hey!]

Well, this is a good point, but the real issue with Google's business model isn't collecting data your data per se -- it's that you don't get to find out what they do with it. If it were transparent it would be a simple and reasonable economic transaction: I get services from you and you get to use my information, and if I don't like how you use it I can go elsewhere for those services.

All the arguments for the optimality and acceptability of a market economy are based on the assumption that parties to transactions have perfect -- or at least good enough -- information about conditions related to that transaction. But an entirely self-interested party (as corporations are) will if given the opportunity hide information related to a transaction when it is favorable to them. This is one of the reasons we pay more for healthcare than other countries, because our system is rigged so that you can't figure out how much a medical service costs. This starts with the largely bogus Hospital price lists (called a chargemaster), which pretty much guarantees that self-insurance is not a viable option. But if you have insurance, nobody is ever quite sure how much of what is covered by that insurance. In theory you pay your copay and that's it, but insurance companies routinely dispute bills (which is why providers make you agree to pay out of pocket), I am convinced sometimes speculating that you will pay some of the amount they ask for.

People use "free market" to mean "unregulated", but in fact a free market that operates the way people assume a free market should requires regulation, particularly of information. I'd like the law to say Google has to give me an accounting of all the ways they've made money off my information, so I can decide whether the const in consequences to me is worth the value of their services.

Re:If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[DogDude]

I don't know if coming with a TripAdvisor app is the same as "cram ... full of bloatware". Both your statement and this article seem a bit hyperbolic.

Re:If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[Stormwatch]

I often hear it's usually wiser to buy phones from independent stores or straight from the manufacturer for that reason. Also, paying upfront instead of "subsidized" (in installments) is ultimately cheaper, and you have more options.

Re:If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me

[Stormwatch]

It's a shitty file manager, but I suppose it's better than having no file manager.

Help!

[pruedz]

I can't find the "news" in the headline!

Not just Windows Phone

[danbob999]

Blackberry is dead too.

MS is not abandoning the platform

[The-Ixian]

MS has already stated that they will continue to develop and support Windows Phone OS. This article is just fear mongering. The platform is not going anywhere.

They really have no other choice anyway. It would be foolish to give up on the platform because it can be used for IoT and tablets as well and it is also allows them to be more agile if things ever change. Not that I see them changing in the short term, but who knows, the pendulum may swing back into MS's favor in time and if it does, they will have the OS and infrastructure ready for it.

Anyway, I will continue to use a Windows Phone because I like the interface. The lack of apps is not a concern for me.

In addition, the fact that Windows Phone OS has such a low market share helps ensure its security as well since most malicious software and exploits will be developed for Android and iOS.

Re:MS is not abandoning the platform

[LichtSpektren]

MS has already stated that they will continue to develop and support Windows Phone OS. This article is just fear mongering. The platform is not going anywhere.

They really have no other choice anyway. It would be foolish to give up on the platform because it can be used for IoT and tablets as well and it is also allows them to be more agile if things ever change. Not that I see them changing in the short term, but who knows, the pendulum may swing back into MS's favor in time and if it does, they will have the OS and infrastructure ready for it.

Anyway, I will continue to use a Windows Phone because I like the interface. The lack of apps is not a concern for me.

In addition, the fact that Windows Phone OS has such a low market share helps ensure its security as well since most malicious software and exploits will be developed for Android and iOS.

I bet you loved Windows RT too.

Re:MS is not abandoning the platform

[Chris Mattern]

MS has already stated that they will continue to develop and support Windows Phone OS.

And just like the Zune, they'll continue to do so right up until the day they cancel it.

Re:MS is not abandoning the platform

[spire3661]

The point is you have to ask for permission to get your app to run, either from MS directly, or you have to set up a complicated infrastructure (which requires calling home to mommy to set up). You cant run ARBITRARY code on RT devices, which is the only relevant point.

Re:Who wants what they do on your PC

[ichthus]

Now who can argue with that? I think we're all indebted to Anonymous Coward for clearly stating what needed to be said. I'm particularly glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic ESL gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.

Re:Slashdot is Dead

[jobsagoodun]

Netcraft confirms it!! (but only for 1 DNS lookup) http://uptime.netcraft.com/per...

They are the best in some aspects

[Zorpheus]

So it would be sad if they go. It is beating Android on battery life and also has many OS functions that I only find in custom Android roms. For example you can switch off notification sounds and messages individually per app. Also the standard email application in Android is a joke compared to Windows phone email. And it has built-in offline maps that are used in apps too.
The lack of a few apps is a problem if you need these.

Re:They are the best in some aspects

[poisonborz]

Sorry but all your said features are already there (I can only speak for Android here): you can mute individual apps since 4.4, and while the default mail client usually sucks (note that chances from vendor to vendor) GMail is most often preinstalled and it's superb. Also, if you have a big enough development community, software differences are non-existent - devs will almost always come up with a similar, if not better solution.

Re:They are the best in some aspects

[vux984]

GMail is most often preinstalled and it's superb.

No, the GMail app is an unmitigated piece of crap. Last time I used it, I still couldn't even turn off "conversation" threading.

My wife's got a lumia, and she like it. Her biggest complaint is that all the fun cases she wants aren't made for it.

I don't care for the Apple style store lock in, but in terms of UI and built in features its pretty good. Apps not being made for it an issue as well, again due to marketshare.

If MS wants the platform to succeed at this point, I think they'll need to pull a blackberry and support android apps. But the overhead of supporting them while trying to remain a windows platform may lead to performance and battery life issues, not to mention UI consistency and other greif that will reflect poorly on the phone.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't, really.

There is no good platform to root for here. Apple could be great, but they're control freaks to a fault. While Android is ultimately supported by an advertising and data vacuuming company. (And everybody here already knows this... so I don't know why I even mention it.)

Not dead.

[meeotch]

Clearly, it's just resting.

(NetCraft confirms it!)

Windows Phone?

[ledow]

Was it ever alive?

I sit next to a box of Lumia's that someone bought for the school I work for before I started. They were only ever used as... well... phones. Nobody ever even tried to log in and use apps on them. And when I started two years ago, they'd not been used in over a year. Recently they were given to me as they'd been "sitting in a box" in someone's office collecting dust, and had been replaced with bog-standard dial-only phones.

My tech had one when he first started here - but he was 19 and naive. Within days of seeing what a real phone did (and not crashing his on-screen keyboard like his one did all the time), he changed his contracts.

The only other one I've ever seen was a teacher's at a previous school - who knew nothing about them and bought it because it "had Skype". She never managed to collect her email or anything else reliably and so never used anything that it could do.

That's out of literally HUNDREDS of adults that I know who come to me with all their tech problems, all the new-starters whose phones I set up with our email etc., all the parents and kids that I see every day about anything even vaguely technical. I must touch several hundred different phones a year, and the majority are almost 50:50 iPhone and Samsung, with the rest being cheap knock-offs and less common brands.

But Windows phones? Honestly? I've touched more Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices in the last year. And to be honest, they probably worked better and did more.

(Funniest thing ever was trying to get a WPA key into a WIndows phone where the on screen keyboard crashes, and then trying to modify the key so it didn't use the numbers that you couldn't get to, then finally getting it online and finding out that the "Update" button not only would never fix the problem, but also that it never actually did anything... it would download for over an hour, reboot, and be exactly the same... this was THREE MONTHS after the tech discovered that it was sucking up all his data trying to download the update and his phone company just wrote off the data charges the second he mentioned "Windows phone" because they were so accustomed to it).

Re:Windows Phone?

[ledow]

Not a case of can't figure them out.

Can't be arsed to use them because of the problems they have (so not perfectly useable at all). Simple shit, like joining to Exchange accounts, is actually not as easy as you think. So they got used as "just phones" until the contracts were up, and then put aside for real "just phones".

And they were in my office to get sold off because they were of no use. Literally, they were junk. Unfortunately, the school budget is so huge that nobody had the time or inclination to bother to trade them in. They don't even figure on our radar.

We were offered £20 a unit on them, second hand. It's not even worth the time to document, charge, wipe, box and send at that price (and the price sort of reflects how good the devices are and how sought after).

It took me 25 minutes to Bluetooth a photo off one of them. Fuck knows what they claimed to support but that's usually a 10-second job and it turned into a farce of epic proportions.

Kind of my point. We had them and they were just junk, so we put them aside and bought something that could actually do the job. It was more a case of "old shite that we had no end of problems with, consigned to the bin, never touched again, and it wasn't even worth the effort to deal with them at EOL".

I like my Windows Phone

[Tinsoldier314]

Not ashamed to admit it. I loved my giant yellow Lumia 1520 and the HTC One isn't so either. I find the Metro UI (whatever it's called these days) to be really pleasant to use. In a way I like being the black sheep of mobile users, my phone solves the problems I need it to solve handily and looks good doing it and it doesn't look like the phones of everyone else.

Plenty of iOS devices have gone through our household and I resent how there's still a lingering dependency on them because of old iTunes libraries requiring them. I resent the iTunes interface and how poorly designed it is; a miscarriage on a dinner plate is more appealing than that shitty software. It feels like the whole paradigm is a way to fuck over people.

Android strikes me as a mass consumer oriented product which is probably why it's been so successful. Conformal and uninspiring in every way.

It'd be a shame if the whole Windows Phone platform just died off. I've always told everyone good things about it.

Re:I like my Windows Phone

[DoofusOfDeath]

a miscarriage on a dinner plate is more appealing than that shitty software.

I hereby ban you from ever using figurative imagery in the future.

2% market share is PLENTY to keep it alive.

[BitZtream]

Do you have any idea how much money just 2% of the US mobile market is?

2% of the US market is still 6.5 million subscribers.

If you sell a new one every 2 years at $400/each, thats still almost 3 billion dollars a year in revenue. Drop it to $200/phone and its still 1.3b. In ONLY America. Then theres the rest of the world.

Just because some moron at some shitty magazine makes an ignorant statement doesn't make it news for nerds any more than Donald Trump talking about tech is news for nerds.

As far as every number indicates, the business is profitable. Its not an iPhone, but it still makes money. Killing it would be stupid. Selling it might be more profitable, but killing it would just be utterly stupid.

Did this guy work at GM when they decided to stop selling the only 2 profitable brands they had as well? Idiot.

Re:2% market share is PLENTY to keep it alive.

[thoromyr]

Apparently the AC's here have more of a clue about Microsoft's problems here than you do:

1) revenue is not profit. You also have to consider marketing costs, production costs, R&D costs, maintenance costs...

2) Microsoft has been losing money, not rolling in it, from their mobile ventures

3) the US is not the rest of the word, your extrapolation fails.

(I'd have modded someone else up instead of restating the obvious, but as I already commented in the story I can't and currently only two non-AC posts with neither pulling it together.)

Bullshit

[DogDude]

This guy is an idiot. The platform is mature, and arguably, the best out there. Everybody I know who uses one likes theirs, as well. MS isn't going to walk away from this because of current fashion trends.

Re:Bullshit

[DogDude]

But MS is one of the largest companies on the planet. The people running things knows that it's probably just a matter of time, so they're not going to sweat spending some money to keep it alive for now.

I had a Windows phone

[wjcofkc]

It was a slick HTC One8

One of the things I liked about it was the lack but not total absence of in app advertising. For example, I could play Sonic Dash for hours and rarely see an ad. When I came back to Android, I had to watch a full one minute video ad between each level, unless I paid for it. I no longer play that game. I imagine Microsoft must have paid developers a lot for minimal advertising as a failed tactic to advance their platform and that it would have gone away had the had success. All-in-all it had the apps I needed, but I am not as heavy and demanding a user as most, so that's just me.

Enter the home screen interface

While at first I liked that wild and wacky tiled home screen, I recognized right away that the interface would be a major factor in the platforms death (already knew it was dying but I am a very curious nerd so I tried it all the same).

What did I like about the interface? I'll come back to that. First let me say what I think made it platform suicide among but above most others. If you hand any Android phone running any version of Android stock interface or 3rd party to either any other Android users or iPhone users, they will be able to operate it in a matter of seconds if not instantly through intuition. Likewise, if you hand an iPhone to an Android user, they will be able to use it. If you hand a Windows phone to either an Android or iPhone user, the interface will be so foreign and seemingly archaic, they will not want to learn how to use it let alone take to it like a duck to water. So that's that. Back to my love hate situation with the interface.

So as I said at first I liked it. I am a full time geek so it didn't take "too" long to figure out. Over the first few days, I methodically laid out the home screen. At first it seemed very efficient and I perceived clear advantages over other platforms. I was excited. Then I started adding more tiles. It started to become a complex puzzle game, finding the most logical places and sizes for tiles. It got to the point where adding one new tile caused me to rethink the logic and efficiency of the entire I layout. I started to think really hard about anything and everything I felt I needed on the home screen, so one evening I went to town. I spent a good two hours re-arranging everything after adding the rest of what I needed and went to sleep. The number of tiles representing apps was be no means excessive. When I woke up the next day I looked at my home screen and I was absolutely and completely fucking lost.

Nerdy experiment #23,943,284 complete. Back to my Nexus.

Um, yeah, no.

[roc97007]

Full disclosure: I'm not a Microsoft fan. Yes, Windows phone sales have been abysmal. We've known this for.... decades, actually. Whatever Microsoft renames or redesigns the phone, it's never done well. Microsoft doesn't appear to "get it" at a fundamental level.

But, so far, Microsoft continues to pour money into it. And Microsoft still has a lot of money. So realistically, the Windows phone isn't dead until Microsoft says it's dead.

The "windows phone dead" meme, like "the year of linux on the desktop" meme, is one of those wishful-thinking things that may actually be true someday. But not today.

Yeah it's dead, but not because of the UI...

[WilliamGeorge]

Its UI is fine - different, but fine. The problem is platform loyalty and being late to the game. iOS and Android were well established before Windows phones hit the market, and if you are already embedded in either platform with many paid apps and familiarity with it then why change? It wasn't a killer deal on price, which could have swung things potentially, and it was *really* late to the party. I argued at the time that they were too late to even bother entering the phone OS market, and instead should have focused on offering versions of their desktop software on the two existing OS platforms.

The platform didn't have to suck

[WaffleMonster]

What is so sad Microsoft has elected to do this to themselves intentionally. The underlying technology is quite good yet like metro UI in Windows 8 some assholes within Microsoft just had to fuck it up with their crappy shells and politics in a continually failing and hopeless bid to emulate the financial success of the crappy apple walled garden.

One of the reasons I will never use Windows phone aside from crappy 8-bit UI designed by children is it is openly hostile to the end user. Apple style lock down with Google style spying on steroids.

Even trivial features such as local address books are denied to the end user. Nor can WiFi be used without participating in crowd sourced location spying. If you don't capitulate to untenable demands of the vendor you end up with a worthless brick that doesn't even make a good paper weight.

If the platform would have remained open without endless calling home that cannot be disabled. If it allowed for reasonable personalization / widgets / replaceable shells rather than take it or leave it metro crap developers and in-turn users would have been all over it. The people who would have supported it early on all bailed after WM.

Oh?

[Cro Magnon]

Has Netcraft confirmed this?

Re:The usual stuff

[The-Ixian]

Stuff changes.

Apple wasn't always the darling it is today... there was a time when Apple was hemorrhaging money and the company almost didn't survive. Should they have just thrown in the towel?

The thing is, what is true today is not necessarily true tomorrow. Stuff changes and if you are not prepared to take advantage when the time comes then you will lose out.

If MS continues to keep its foot in the door by keeping a scaled back version of its mobile platform running, they will be ready when the time is right. Mobile computing is not going anywhere and it would be foolish for MS, a computing platform company, to completely abandon it. They know this and they have already stated that the platform is not going anywhere.