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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 !
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!"
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.
Hopefully the "Win RT" phones are history and the Surface Phone is an x86 computer in your pocket.
I wouldn't think so, most people want battery life of a day or so. You won't get that with x86.
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 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.
Two out of three? Ok, I pick "speed" and "low power consumption." Good luck figuring out how to take "energy efficiency" away while giving me the two I picked.