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Microsoft To Kill The Lumia Brand In Favor of a New Surface Phone, Says Report (thenextweb.com)
It's no secret the Lumia brand is struggling to gain any significant market share these days. Earlier this year, it was reported that Microsoft's Windows Phone OS dropped below 1 percent mark share, all but confirming the death of Windows Phone. A new report suggests that, despite the irrelevance of Windows Phone, Microsoft will not be giving up on its mobile OS. Instead, the company plans to drop the Lumia brand by the end of the year and replace it with a brand new Surface Phone in an effort to breathe new life into its flagging smartphone business. The Next Web reports: There is some credibility to the claims. Microsoft's Lumia lineup has shrunk to just four models, and there's nothing to indicate it's working on a successor. In the U.S., where Microsoft has struggled to shift Lumia phones, it has removed the link to buy them from its website. On the retail side, stores have started removing units from display, and are trying to shift remaining stock by offering steep discounts. Further evidence comes from two since-deleted tweets from Laura Butler, engineering director at Microsoft, who posted "Surface iPhone ;-)" on September 6, and "Surface Phone not NOT confirmed. :-)" on September 7, in reply to questions posed by other Twitter users. Microsoft is expected to hold an event in October, where it's believed it will announce a new Surface all-in-one. As Ars Technica pointed out, this could be when Microsoft announces its new Surface Phone, just in time for Christmas.
So they buy a company for the knowledge and name, they fire the knowledge last year and now they kill the nake... well, when you have too much cash, it's easy to burn it !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
She is so energetic! So amazing. I'm sure she will get Surface Phone right! :) She climbed Kilimanjaro, and ate eyeball soup in Bangkok. Truly inspirational! :-)
Because it was the *name* that's the problem with their phones, so this will totally fix that.
As Ars Technica pointed out, this could be when Microsoft announces its new Surface Phone, just in time for Christmas.
Yeah, this'll work well. December 26 is gonna be even busier than usual.
#DeleteChrome
Still remains the same.
The results will be exactly the same.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Microsoft should run an ad campaign and inform people that Android is actually Linux, therefore it doesn't work well and has massive security holes. Because everyone knows that Linux sucks, just about everyone will switch to the iPhone or Surface Phone.
I can just imagine the board meeting at Microsoft where the geniusses came up with this one:
"Our phone biz is always in the shit, we need a revolutionary fresh idea that will force people to buy Windows phones, so Microsoft can rape their most personal data and sell it".
"I have it! Lets give our phones a different product name!"
"Amazing out-of-the-box win-win thinking! Give that VP another $10 million in preferential stock!"
...the Zune Phone.
I think the only way Microsoft could gain any traction with Windows phones is if they manage to keep compatibility with real Windows apps.
It means a x86 CPU, and there is probably a lot of work to be done to make a usable UI but it might be worth it, at least for now.
Look at Surface tablets. Windows RT was a failure but real Windows tablets are usually considered pretty good, except for the price.
and then sue first user.
It's too bad there is nothing to get this phone OS to work. I am trying one right now and for the basic needs, it does what I would expect. It just lacks too many apps and that would be the only reason I end up going back to Android eventually but one thing I believe this OS does right is continuous updates. I know people got burned on Windows Phone 7 and 8 but since the company has gone to a permanent Windows OS that keeps getting updates I'm assuming this one will keep getting those updates or at least further than the Nexus line currently does. Feel free to tell me I'm wrong.
Note that I would have loved to see BlackBerry remain viable and Jolla make a dent out there so we could get a healthy variety to choose from.
This is the price one pays after decades of screwing everyone over. Hey, at least Gates got rich.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Some free advice: I don't think the name is the problem.
> A visionary company would have tried to break into the market in the earlier 00s, a me-too company would have done it right after iPhone, but no MS is an also-ran company and started only really trying much later.
MS had mobile phones in 2001 and had 42% of the US smartphone market in 2007.
It seems that it is not MS that has lack of vision.
What Microsoft had in the 00s were those weird keyboard and button/toggle encumbered phones that followed and straddled the fence between old cell phone and the 90s pdas like a palm pilot more than being a true smartphone. That's why windows mobile peaked in 2007 (release of iPhone 1) and then abrubtly declined.
This was the classic mistake of listening to your current installed base and if the majority of the slashdot crowd at the time had anything to say about it, we'd be still stuck on those type of phones.
The thing is, by ditching the physical keyboard, while there were definite downsides, turned the phone from some stupid gadget for on-the-go office workers to a musthave capable of much more people people want (netflix, games, something resembling a real fucking browser and not a neutered kiddie one etc). By losing the toggles and most physical buttons, smartphones just became a lot more intuitive for the average idiot.
No, what MS had in the 00s were geek PDAs with phone functionality.
It's what they have always done and it worked many times. MS Windows was a cheap and nasty workstation OS after all - nowhere near the first but "good enough" and "cheap enough". Same with MS Word and all the rest. It's not going to work every time but it's what they do. They are reactive and not active and sadly see no reason to change.
If they did more than follow we'd probably be on some advanced platform instead of something that looks like Enlightenment from 1998 only not as good. MS had an awesome thing with Xenix and if they had built on that instead of a bastard child of a cut down CP/M clone and a cut down VMS clone they would have had something much better much earlier for a lot less expenditure and we wouldn't be nose deep in a malware swamp.
I wouldn't mind you redundant, just one dimensional.
MIcrosoft, like many large companies, gets some things right and others wrong. Part of the art to being that kind of company is (a) understanding who exactly you're appealing to (could be more that one group), and (b) ensuring the products targeting (a) are self consistent and sensible.
Personally, I'm appreciating their Office for Mac suite and the recent tilt towards OSS. However I've been Windows free (at home) since before XP.
Microsoft gobbling up well known brands only to trash them makes me never want to buy a microsoft product.
that's what killed 'em. Both Google and Apple kick the rank and file salesmen a spiff in exchange for moving one of their phones. For some reason (anti-trust fears?) Microsoft didn't do that. So their phones were relegated to the deepest, darkest reaches of any store they were sold at.
I think their plan was folks would gravitate to their phones because they already knew 'em from learning Windows 8. But even ignoring the fact that Win8 was a mess people hate PCs and love phones. You don't need to get them to like their PCs. They're stuck with them because of work. And you don't need to make them feel comfortable with their phones. They love the damn things so much their put up with any amount of crap for them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What killed the losephone was windows anal probe 10, M$ watching you masturbate. Having a perve pry up your backside was never going to be cool or fun or desirable, and you can not sell phones based upon that branding. M$ were morons and are destroying themselves and based upon windows 10, trying to force you to pay for your privacy to be invade (forget the settings bullshit, they have already wiped out those settings on past compulsory upgrades and will keep doing that at random in the future, hoping you wont notice), good riddance.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
m$ plz no...
You do realize that BlackBerry (RIM to us ex-employees) tried to do what you are suggesting? The BlackBerry smartphones could handle different office documents and I worked on a device (the "BlackBerry Presenter") which could display them on a monitor or projector.
The problem was, and I suspect anybody else will fall into this rabbit hole if they work on this type of device, is that RIM got sucked into dealing with Office Apps and the data surrounding it and forgot to focus on what customers really want - web enabled applications.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
You're not entirely wrong, there is no COMPELLING reason for the AVERAGE user to switch, no "killer app" in either case. There are certainly benefits to Linux, and presumably also to Windows phone, but no "must have" for most users. (Except"for"the huge one I'll describe below.) I strongly prefer Linux, but I'm not the average user.
That said:
> Both operating systems are at the low end of the single digits in usage share
Windows phone hasn't even managed "low single digits", it's at less than 1%.
One reason Windows had much larger market share on desktops than Linux is that Unix/Linux was designed for the client-server network OS model and expanded from there, while Microsoft DOS/Windows specialized in the desktop, the local disk-based OS rather than network based. There os a resaon it was orginally named Disk Operating System, for Personal Computers - it was specialized for that new role. Microsoft continued to specialize in that role, while Linux is used in 99% of supercomputers, in 4MB routers, and everything in between.
In the late nineties, people began switching back to client-server, and a few years ago most purchasers switched from desktops to handhelds. Those are the "must haves", the killer apps for that caused people to switch from Windows to Linux - Linux machines fit in your pocket, and people want that. Linux is better at making stuff available on the internet, and people want that.
Linux wasn't used a lot on the desktop, and Ford didn't sell many buggy whips. People DID leave Windows, and they didn't take it's 80 pound hardware with them.
"eyeball soup" - what a clever name for jism.
I have trouble understanding why MS even want to try to get back into the smartphone market at this stage, except wounded pride. Investors demanding growth, pissed that they have seen their stock stagnate compared to Apple?
They have failed utterly to execute on any strategy they had, they looked indecisive and uncommitted. It's such a huge bag of fail.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
Windows has been Spyware since Windows 98. This is when the DOJ worked out a deal with MS about their Monopoly.
Let the Windows Phone OS install on any (Qualcomm/ARM) phone. Basically decouple the OS from the hardware and force Apple and Google to match them at it. MS has years of experience in that; Apple & Google do not.
Windows is for profit and thus hurling money into advertising, and funding massive amounts of illegal anti-competitive activity are very profitable.
Linux is not for profit, and there corrupt contracts or EULAs, is no big spend on advertising, and no years of illegal and criminal underhand deviousness, and without data-slurping, no backhanded subsidising of bloatware filled laptops, or bribing software providers not to support the competition.
If Joe public and his boss understood the extent to which they are being stiffed, things might be different.
As my aged grandmother used to say "the adverts speak very highly of it, dear" (which, as usual, and was her intentional sarcastic implication, suggests that no one else does, unless bribed).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Seems a sort of redundant thing to do to a rotting corpse.
Windows got on PC's because it got popular before anything else existed, and then once it was the most popular it used proprietary protocols, formats as well as illegal activity to choke out any competition and set its monopoly as far into stone as possible. People live with it because they either know nothing else or have just accepted failure as "normal" on their PC's
Its only just starting to lose the stranglehold.
With phones, MS was late to the market, after there were not one but TWO well established alternatives. NO one except the most die-hard MS supporter or the most completely clueless person is going to touch windows phones with a ten foot pole.
Microsoft has the dead parrot sketch on repeat. Oh well at least the faster they burn their capital, the faster it gets into the economy where it can be useful.
Does Microsoft really think the name was the reason nobody bought their phones? They can change as many brands they want, but their OS and ecosystem will still suck.
Don't care much about Lumia, but don't try googling Laura Butler if you're at work. You've been warned.
I had a Windows 7.5 phone and it was actually compelling at first. Less than half of what a iPhone at the time costs. Ran smoother and worked flawlessly. Trouble is that it had virtually no apps and what few there was never got updated. Then my model was left behind when Windows 8 came out so I got like a 7.8 update which was absolutely worthless. Microsoft can reinvent the name all they want, but their phones are dead and no good developer is going to waste time and money on such a small user base.
I agree I think Microsoft figured Windows ran on so many PC's that it would be natural for users to want that experience on their phone. But as with Microsoft comes a inability to see the difference in how people use smartphones vs their bigger devices. This one size fits all OS is terrible at working well in all size devices. Besides the other factors of no large apps store, a seriously bad Windows 8 experience, and Windows 10 being less small screen friendly. Bottom line it's too late to ever think Windows phone's will gain significant market share. No carrier has even given much space to a Windows phone in my experience. The better ideal for Microsoft is maybe create their own prepaid line of phones that are non carrier updated.
Hopefully developers are starting to wise up. Microsoft can't compete if they cant stabilise their f*king platform. Each iteration you basically dump the app you had and rewrite massive chunks of it. What a waste of time and an annoyance.
Android took off because, well homebrew. Apple took off because they were first and didn't re-invent the bloody wheel every iteration.
Microsoft died because they're incapable. They had a genuine shot with Astoria (android), then canned it. A lot of developers looking to bring their apps to MS phone fucked off elsewhere that day. A lot of them won't bother coming back. And as it's the apps that make the device, if the same happens with surface phone then it's also going to shrink into irrelevance.
Microsoft needs to stop treating developers like they can re-write their apps every year.
"Embrace, Extend and Extinquish" do you not understand?
This is what Microsoft does (and many other monopolies do). This is all they do. They will not stop until you're dead..(or they have all of your current and future income and all of your children's current and future income, and all their children's current and future income... you get the idea)
I imagine that will go against Microsoft in more ways than one.
I know there are tricks - setting up a CardDAV server and using the iCloud account option to sync with it - but a W10M phone should be able to locally sync with a W10 PC out of the box.
I think it's fair to say the Lumia brand is already dead.
There is some credibility to the claims. Microsoft's Lumia lineup has shrunk to just four models, and there's nothing to indicate it's working on a successor.
This is a shame. At a previous job, the company provided me with a Lumia. Very nice interface, and it's seamless integration with corporate e-mail and calendar was nice. I was also doing development for that platform, and it was nice to work with. Not perfect, but really, really good, if I look at things objectively.
This is yet another case of a company killing a promising platform and/or not making it work in the market. Lack of penetration on the market wasn't so much a problem with the product, but marketing and timing.
And for a company with such deep pockets as Microsoft, it makes no sense NOT to undersell it and be on the red in order to penetrate the market. Sometimes to make a win you have to go really low margin for a while (a-la Amazon.)
If the entire goal of every single business cycle is to increase your margins or minimize your risks, you are going lose, specially in something so challenging as tech.
they fire the knowledge last year
Well, at least, some of the earliest casualties in the "Knowledge" part - those who worked on the Linux effort with Maemo/Meego - have since then founded Jolla and had some relative success in making a good full-blown GNU/Linux OS for phones with Sailfish OS.
(Happy user of a Jolla1 phone, looking forward for an official port to Fairphone2 including the Android Apps support bit).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yet again.
Yes, Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that's about the time their market share started to fall. They are struggling to GIVE AWAY Windows. Worldwide device shipments for 2015, per Gartner:
Android Linux 54.16%
iOS/OS X 12.37%
Windows 11.79%
Other (mostly *nix) 21.66%
The massive decline of Windows matches with the decline of the old-fashioned desktop, 90% of which run Windows. Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior may have assisted in locking out competitors in that segment, as did Apple's choice not to compete by selling their OS, other than bundled with their hardware. Any advantage from the illegal behavior could not, however, overcome the flexibility of Linux vs the single-purpose design of Windows, which works well only on a disk-based full sized desktop.
Now you know why they're deprecating Win32 in favor of UWP moving forward, because they want their phones, tablets, and consoles to leverage all the dev work put into Windows desktop apps
Twinstiq, game news
Why would you buy a Microsoft phone over an iOS or Android device? Until Microsoft has a good answer for that question, it won't matter what they call the phone.
My wife works for a very large bank on an interaction design team. She recently bought a Windows 10 phone to get comfortable with the interface. Her boss asked "Why did you do that? Hardly any of our customers are Windows phone users - so we won't be working on that platform much longer."
If you can't get one of the worlds biggest banks to work on an app for that platform, the platform is doomed.
If you own a viable brand, hide it now! This means that Microsoft will be shopping for another product line to acquire and install their crapware.
Native always gives a better user experience. I can't tell you how many responsive websites simply don't look right on tablets or are not optimized for the benefits of tablets.
Native apps are typically faster and easier to use - that's why most people want native apps.
> Both Google and Apple kick the rank and file salesmen a spiff in exchange for moving one of their phones
Citation required, because that sounds pretty unbelievable--especially considering that most Apple phones are bought at an Apple store (from an employee paid hourly & not on commission) or online.
Yes, Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. And that's about the time their market share started to fall.
You think that their market share started to fall back in the early to mid '90's? That's when they really started the anti-competitive behaviour, with the OS wars against OS/2, the DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run and then the browser wars once MS realized that the Internet was real and people weren't going to sign up to MSN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
...Any advantage from the illegal behavior could not, however, overcome the flexibility of Linux vs the single-purpose design of Windows, which works well only on a disk-based full sized desktop.
Did you see Windows 8?
It was specifically for tablets and was otherwise designed to make life wretched for desktop users.
Nokia should have doubled down on dumb phones and concentrated on making the most reliable, robust, phone call making devices on the market. Large clear proper number buttons, extra loud ringers and speakers for older people, great battery life, maybe integrate with companies who will help older people in an emergency etc. There are loads of people out there who want a really simple mobile phone to make calls but have no interest in social media or apps. Many of them would happily pay a premium for something like that really well executed and Nokia is a recognized brand in this segment of the market. There just is not enough room in the smart phone space for a third, minority OS. Most people who can afford one get an iPhone and if not you can get a cheap Android phone that has similar functionality at a lower price. I just can't see why you would buy a Windows phone.
>> which works *well* only on ...
Microsoft wished Windows 8 was a tablet OS. The point of a tablet rather than a desktop is that a tablet is convenient to pick up and do something real quick, rather than walking upstairs to the PC and powering it on. A tablet should be lightweight and it should turn on in milliseconds, not boot like a desktop. Windows 8 took 8,000% longer to turn on than Android, and required 1,500% more disk space. It was/is a desktop OS, with crappy "tablet" UI plastered on the front.
no, it's not the name that was the isue, it's the compatibility. Unfortunately, since a few years, every windows phone is compatible to every other one. This is a really bad situation for MS, so they decided to upgrade to a new and incompatible platform.
And so were Blackberries. That's what "smart phones" were back then. Apple changed the paradigm by removing the stylus and the keyboard and Microsoft just couldn't catch up--it was too big of a shock for their system. However, prior to 2007, they really were the cutting edge of smart phone technology. Blackberries were very popular as well, but the Windows Mobile phones could do so much more. Palm was pretty much done at this point, as their OS and app interfaces couldn't adequately handle the multitasking required for networking. Microsoft had the field pretty much to themselves at the time. The biggest problem with Windows Mobile was fragmentation. Some phones had touch screens. Some did not. Most didn't have enough memory to run well, so it crashed a lot (as Windows so often did back in those days). IE mobile was horrible, but there were third party browsers. I really liked having a computer in my pocket, and I think that Microsoft could have easily been the leader in smartphone technology had Apple not changed the way we interacted with smart phones.
> the local disk-based OS rather than network based. There os a resaon it was orginally named Disk Operating System, for Personal Computers - it was specialized for that new role.
First of all the Personal Computer (IBM's) was _not_ a 'new role'. Personal computers had been around for several years, eg the Apple II since 1978 but other before that. 'DOS' wasn't a 'new role' either, CP/M was a DOS (the main part of it was called BDOS) and that was since the mid 70s. In fact MS-DOS 1 was a clone of CP/M, just 5 years later.
'DOS' wasn't an alternative to network based (though there were networked computers at the time), it was an alternative to _cassette_tape_ based. The original IBM 5150 PC had a cassette port and ROM BASIC (I have one here), as did the Apple II, Commodore Pet, BBC, and many others. They only used 'DOS' when they had a disk drive.
Networks did come later, but not from Microsoft until much later, and even then it was bought-in.
Except people never really liked using Windows on their PCs. The experience for most is neutral at best and irritating at worst.
>Personal computers had been around for several years, eg the Apple II since 1978
DOS was released in 1980, two years after the Apple II. Today, the PC is about 38 years old. In 1980, the PC was about two years old. I call that "new".
> No, what MS had in the 00s were geek PDAs with phone functionality.
Which is all that everyone else had until later when touch screens were actually able to be manufactured.
Windows is for profit and thus hurling money into advertising, and funding massive amounts of illegal anti-competitive activity are very profitable.
Their anti-competitive behavior was a result of bundling a web browser with their operating system, a practice we know as commonplace today. Virtually every single consumer operating system ships with a web browser.
Linux is not for profit, and there corrupt contracts or EULAs, is no big spend on advertising, and no years of illegal and criminal underhand deviousness
Who's behavior are you suggesting was "criminal"?
or bribing software providers not to support the competition.
Actually offering incentives for exclusivity is not "bribing".
If Joe public and his boss understood the extent to which they are being stiffed, things might be different.
For the Windows license cost of their system? I don't think things would be different. If the OEM then has to support Linux then this costs them, it's probably cheaper for them to support Windows than it is for them to support Linux. Indeed we always hear about how Linux admins are more highly paid than Windows ones, which makes sense as Linux is a niche player in the desktop market.
It's easy to just blame Microsoft for all Linux's failings on the desktop but you can't excuse a lack of innovation that easily. Linux has been trivial to install on desktops for the past 10 years, it has been preinstalled on systems at big box stores and online from major vendors (indeed vendors like Dell offer it across their laptop product line) but the public has responded with a "do not want" and this is because it offers nothing of value to the average user while taking away application compatibility. Users that don't want Windows go to OSX because it is well supported in terms of application compatibility and is consistent in the experience it offers. On Linux it is a much more limited software catalog and the experience is a mess, GUI programs can use a vast array of different UI toolkits and don't integrate well with whichever of the dozen or so DEs are available. So people who want UNIX or don't need Windows generally use OSX, hence the reason OSX easily overtook Linux in usage share.
The go-to defences of desktop Linux are always the same: blame Microsoft's anti-competitive browser-bundling of 15-20 years ago and throw in some hyperbole. Ignore the reasons OSX has risen far above desktop Linux in terms of usage share.
When are you going to stop blaming everybody else and realize that desktop Linux needs to offer something to user, be disruptive and innovative because people even preferred Windows ME and Windows Vista to Linux, does that really not tell you it's time to come up with some offering to the users? Or are you just going to keep riding the blame train of everybody else?
They actually did this... briefly. The same Linux subsystem that enables the whole "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows" think in the 1607 release of Win10 was also being used to run Android apps, natively, on early Win10 Mobile builds. It was called "Project Astoria" if you want to read more about it.
Sadly, MS then quietly (but *very* thoroughly) killed off the project. No build released any time recently includes Project Astoria anymore, or will let you install it, or will run it if you hack it into the OS. They shut it down *hard*. They still offer tools for porting Android and iOS apps, but the native runtime is - for now - dead. I bet they could revive it in a hurry if they wanted to, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
The two best explanations that I've heard for why Astoria was killed are that Android's app security model was too different from W10M's (they both use sandbox containers wherein processes are granted access based on the "capabilities" declared in the app's manifest, but the similarities largely stop there), or that they figured it wasn't worth the dev time and install footprint for something that would actually give developers *less* reason to target W10M (just target Android and get two platforms at once). Given Microsoft's godawful history of prioritizing developer time in user-unfriendly ways, the second wouldn't surprise me, but being familiar with the security models of both Android and W10M I have to say the first is pretty plausible. They could have made it work for *most* apps, but it would have been a kludge.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
There's actually a full jailbreak available for all W10M devices right now. Arbitrary code execution as SYSTEM. In theory it can be made to work for kernel too, though I don't think anybody has tried it yet. It's only a couple weeks old. Not a lot of software ported yet but we've got SSH and PowerShell, among other things.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I'm going to suggest that neutral to irritating is the norm for operating systems. I didn't find one I actually liked until I got a Macintosh, and then again when I started using Unix.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Funny, every time Microsoft buys a company (after peeking inside that company's books and product engineering) They take what they want from the product and throw the rest under the Bus.
Does every company they get into bed with (partner with) go insolvent (out of business), purchased or worse within 4 years of that partnership?...sure seems like it.
It has happened before....probably could list 10+ examples and will happen again...but here are a few that come to mind:
NT / OS/2 partnership with IBM...
Nokia (loved the N800 through N900 Linux phones)
Skype (sucked after they bought it)
Visual FoxPro, .dotNet and Forms programming really came alive thanks to Visual FoxPro
And now they want to 100% control your device and force you to work via the cloud...paying your monthly tithe so that your device does not become useless. Of course this is ONLY for Enterprise customers right now (ie. new Windows 10 and Edge)
Why would anyone ever expect them to change...insanity