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Windows Phone Free-Fall May Force Microsoft To Push Harder On Windows 10 (pcworld.com)
tripleevenfall quotes a report from PCWorld: Microsoft sold a minuscule 2.3 million Lumia phones last quarter, down from 8.6 million a year ago. Phone revenue declines will only "steepen" during the current quarter, chief financial officer Amy Hood warned during a conference call. That's dragged down Microsoft's results as a company, too. As the company's mobile device strategy continues to disintegrate, Microsoft may feel compelled to push harder on Windows 10 adoption and paid services to prove it can survive without a viable smartphone. CEO Satya Nadella's strategy is simple enough: grow Microsoft's revenues by convincing customers to adopt its paid subscription services.
When Windows Phone was newer, Microsoft paid everyone to write apps for it. As such, people were giving it tons of half-hearted lipservice calling it the "legitimate 3rd platform" to the exclusion of anything else (that didn't have as big of a bank account behind it).
Now that they've stopped the payouts, and still keep changing the APIs, support is dropping and a lot of that lipservice is starting to fade away.
Indeed.
Sometimes I just cannot believe it's decided to let me wait while it renders a huge number of thumbnail images instead of letting me actually do stuff. Context switches just browsing into another directory are also difficult to believe are a good idea. Incredible indeed. They managed to make it far worse than the earlier version.
Strange, I have one sitting right in front of me, and it seems to still be alive. A few hours ago, I was sitting next to my son at dinner, and he was showing me his Android. I used to have an Android, but I much prefer the Windows OS. He said, "But you can't get App A on Windows!" I opened up the Windows phone store, and downloaded App A. "Oh, but you can't get App B!" I went back to the Windows store, got App B.
Obviously there are far more apps for Android than there are for Windows. Some would say I was just lucky. I'd say I don't need the junky apps that mostly fill the Android store. In all the years I had an Android phone, I never found as good a weather app as the one that came built into my Windows phone. I prefer the navigation apps I have on Windows to the ones I had on my Android phone (although I hear that app maker has jumped ship). It's much easier to set the alarm on my Windows phone (the Android phone was always over-shooting). And in general I find my Windows phone easier to use.
I am _not_ an Ms shill, and I never moved from Win7 to Win8 on my desktop (nor have I found any compelling reason yet to move to Win10). And for programming, Linux is far superior. But Android is, IMNSHO, a piece of junk.
I realize that barring some miracle, the Windows phone will probably be dead some day. But it isn't yet.