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Microsoft To Kill The Lumia Brand In Favor of a New Surface Phone, Says Report (thenextweb.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the fresh-coat-of-paint dept.

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.

110 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Burning cash by denisbergeron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 !
    1. Re:Burning cash by negRo_slim · · Score: 2

      Everything they've done is baffling. I've bought two, mostly since they were so damn cheap considering the hardware you got and with Win10p it's a really nice, compelling experience. But it seems just as they have something interesting they are ready to kill it off.

      --
      On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
    2. Re:Burning cash by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Microsoft still thinks it's 2001 where if you throw enough money into a market, no matter how saturated it is, then you can suddenly have decent mindshare. So, they went and sunk $20+ billion into windows phone and got nothing in return.

    3. Re:Burning cash by rwven · · Score: 2

      My gripe with the platform has always been the quality and selection of apps. I personally LOVE the phone interface. It's so slick and feels so great to use. I've had major issues with every single major app I've ever tried to use.

      It sadly doesn't matter how great the platform itself is if there are so few apps, and those that there are are terrible.

      It's now become a story of too-little, too-late. They're simply never going to make WinPhone successful...

    4. Re:Burning cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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 !

      Maybe you didn't know this, but it's well known in financial circles that large corporate mergers and acquisitions rarely end up well in the long run. Often times the purchase fails to deliver the promised results and falls well short of expectations. In such cases, the costs tend to be underestimated and the benefits overestimated. Every once in a while a purchase turns out to be the perfect fit, but that is the exception and not the rule. Consider the record of recent years. There was the disastrous purchase of autonomy by HP, which ended requiring a corporate breakup and spinoff to mitigate the damage. Then there was the Google purchase of Motorola, ostensibly for the handset business, which went nowhere, but also for a patent portfolio that turned out to be much less useful than some imagined it would be. Before that there was the disastrous merger of Time/Warner and AOL which left behind a much diminished Time/Warner and a burnt out shell of AOL. Microsoft needs to maintain a beach head in the mobile business, as a first class platform, if only to support the Windows ecosystem and Azure cloud business. It could have been worse, they could have overpaid for Yahoo back when some were pushing for Microsoft to save them. Fortunately, Microsoft ended up not buying when Jerry Yang tried to play hardball and a much diminished Yahoo was recently sold piecemeal with much of the business ending up with Verizon. In the end, just about the only thing that Yahoo had that was worth anything was the stake in Chinese Internet bellwether Alibaba. So, Microsoft didn't exactly hit a home run with the Nokia purchase, but compared to other buyouts in recent times it's far from the worst outcomes, at least so far.

    5. Re:Burning cash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's now become a story of too-little, too-late. They're simply never going to make WinPhone successful.

      Maybe so and that's a shame. As you've said, and I agree, the Windows Phone UI with the sliding, resizing and active tiles was interesting, smooth and a real pleasure to use. In many ways it's vastly superior to the static arrays of skeuomorphic icons still being offered on iPhone and Android phones. If anyone out there hasn't experienced the Windows phone UI, it's definitely worth a try. Microsoft deserves some credit for really innovating with the Windows Phone UI. So if you have a chance to grab a handset or two at firesale prices while they run down the stock you should definitely take it. As the grandparent said, it's a shame about the apps, but hopefully something will be salvaged with a surface phone. If I were in charge of Windows Phone at Microsoft, I would identify key apps that need to be covered on the platform, assign them to in house teams for development and then release them for FREE in the windows app store. That would further promote the Windows Phone platform and rachet up the pressure on iPhone and higher end Android phones because Americans are working long hours for stagnant wages. Most of them cannot really afford to pay $400+ for the iPhone and with carriers ditching subsidies, there is definitely some iPhone sticker shock going on right now. That could create an opportunity for a shrewd Microsoft to move in and take market share, especially with cost conscious consumers looking for something better than what's available on the low-end of the Android market and business customers looking for something that plays well with Excel and other Microsoft business software offerings.

    6. Re:Burning cash by Opportunist · · Score: 1

      As soon as the name is burned because everyone noticed that it's MS now that's calling the shots, they have to move on and buy another company to burn.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    7. Re:Burning cash by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Microsoft's Windows Phone OS dropped below 1 percent mark share

      Actually Windows Phone OS has 23% market share, only it's running on desktops not phones.

    8. Re:Burning cash by clampolo · · Score: 1

      You are right. One of my coworkers had one and I was skeptical since it was Microsoft. But it turned out to be a really cool phone. That said, the market is now completely tilted towards Android and Apple. Even having a slightly better phone is not enough for them to gain any market share. The only way to gain in this environment is to be VASTLY better than everything else or VASTLY different. For me that means that they have to try and do something radically different than everyone else. They need to try and completely redefine what a mobile phone is. What's the worst that can happen? The phone will flop like all their other attempts. But it is their only chance at relevance.

    9. Re: Burning cash by AuMatar · · Score: 1

      Google made money on Motorola by selling its parts. Even if you value the patents at zero they came out ahead

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    10. Re:Burning cash by red+crab · · Score: 1

      Yeah but in Android (or any software in development) you have the consolation of seeing new bugs with every new release. It sucks to remain stuck on same old bugs for more than an year.

    11. Re:Burning cash by b0bby · · Score: 1

      Yep, I used one for a week because I was between phones and I really liked the interface but the lack of certain apps made it not work for me. Android, for all its flaws, at least mostly works and has all the apps I want to use.

    12. Re:Burning cash by ranton · · Score: 1

      It sadly doesn't matter how great the platform itself is if there are so few apps, and those that there are are terrible.

      Until Microsoft makes their mobile OS capable of running Android apps, their phones will never take off. The Lumia 950 XL is certainly in the same league as the Note 5 so if their interface really was better I would certainly consider a windows phone upgrade to my Note 4 if it can run any Android app along with Windows ones.

      But Windows will never make up the gap in mobile apps for iOS and Android, so taking advantage of one of these being open source is the only option I see.

      --
      -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
    13. Re:Burning cash by sydbarrett74 · · Score: 1

      And they will similarly fail with the Windows 10 app store strategy. In trying to emulate Apple and Google, they fail to realise that Microsoft providing a me-too Windows App Store experience doesn't provide any incentive for users to choose them over the Android and iOS apps they're already using. MS's app store is demonstrably inferior to the one offered by A and G. MS still hasn't learned the lesson that for most consumers, it's the apps, stupid! They really couldn't care less about the underlying OS as long as Pokemon Go! (or whatever other app du jour) is available on it.

      --
      'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
  2. Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Because it was the *name* that's the problem with their phones, so this will totally fix that.

    1. Re: Great by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      I actually like the Lumia name and it would sway my decision in its favor >_

      Windows phones aren't that bad either if you aren't a teenager who needs all the latest apps, or a hacker hackity hacking roots away.

      And the Zune was freaking awesome. And Windows Vista was just too smart for the users.

      Although on the surface, it looks like a nice phone....

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    2. Re: Great by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

      Translation: they're poorly supported devices that no one writes apps for.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    3. Re: Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      <burn>just like desktop linux</burn>

      Seriously though there are a bunch of similarities, obviously comparisons like this make it difficult for those who froth at the mouth at the very mention of "microsoft" to keep their composure but I'll but make the point anyway. Both operating systems are at the low end of the single digits in usage share and both are quite good as actual operating systems. The key problem is a lack of application support and this comes from a lack of disruptive innovation. Desktop Linux/Windows Phone offer nothing to the end user where they say "I would eschew application compatibility and go to the effort of changing all my programs or workflow for that feature!" like they did when the iPhone disrupted the smartphone industry. Nobody wants to switch to an also-ran that spends time either flinging crap at the wall to see what sticks or hurriedly copying the incumbents to desperately try to keep feature parity. Both Microsoft with Windows Phone and the Linux community with the hundreds of desktop distros have been flogging the dead horse for way too long and are still supremely confused about why they are failing. The simple reason is: lack of disruptive innovation. Both desktop linux and windows phone suffer the same ailment. No more blaming the user, no more blaming the competition, just shut up and innovate. Make something cool that users want, not more and more me too garbage. Surface Phone is likely to be as much an uninspiring reboot as Gnome3 or systemd.

      And yes, to appease the Linux fanboys I'll actively point out that on mobile, embedded and server Linux is doing fantastically. And to appease the MS fanboys Windows is doing great on desktop and the XBox is doing great in the console game.

      I await the adenoidal-sounding response of the pedant or defensive fanboy who just cannot let this slide...and if we're honest it's probably going to be a linux one.

    4. Re: Great by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 5, Informative

      Windows phones aren't that bad either if you aren't a teenager who needs all the latest apps, or a hacker hackity hacking roots away.

      I have a windows phone sitting in a drawer that I bought as a backup phone because it was super cheap. Anyways here's why I think it sucks:

      Flat UI is totally shit. Many people think flat UI just means a clean, easily scalable interface, but that's false. Flat UI means you can't offer any hints of three dimensional depth. So no gradients, no shadows, no overlapping objects. This means that skeumorph is basically impossible. Too much skeumorph (i.e. the heavily bitmapped crap Apple recently did away with that scales like shit and ages worse) is bad, but no skeumorph at all is worse. The purpose of skeumorph is to make UI elements look recognizable as everyday objects you deal with in the real world so that you can intuitively determine what they're supposed to do. Windows phone (and windows 10) just discarded this concept entirely. And also since you have no depth, the only way you can distinguish objects is make them have sharply contrasting colors, which contributes to an ugly fisher-price look.

      This is why, in my opinion, Material Design is by far the best smartphone design language by a mile: It remains simplistic while still retaining light skeumorph, scalability, and you can use practically any color palette you want.

      And speak of colors, on windows phone, when you need to find an app that you don't have pinned, it's easily the worst experience of any smartphone OS. Why? Because you have to scroll down a big long list of names with icons that mostly look identical. In many cases, when recently got a new app and haven't used it for say, a week, you might not remember the exact name, but you might remember what its icon looked like, especially if you're a visual learner. However on windows phone, that won't help you a whole lot. The whole fucking UI is one big doldrum.

      Oh but wait, the common windows phone fan argument is that static icons look bland, and that windows phones tiles are innovative and unparalleled...except they're none of the above. Let's do a little comparing and contrasting of Android widgets:
      - Android widgets can update in real-time.
      - WP "live" tiles can only update once every 30 minutes by default, and the shortest interval is every 15 minutes unless you create a website that constantly pushes new data to it (i.e. it can't be done locally by an app) and even then the shortest interval is one minute.
      - Android widgets, like a calendar widget, can be configured in practically any dimension. This means they can become a big vertical list, which means something like a calendar widget can show multiple events in succession.
      - WP tiles have limited dimension and by design only show one object at a time, and flip at an interval that you can't control, so you can easily miss something, like say you could have an appointment shortly but it's showing the next event after that. This also can become annoying to people who might have forgotten what app the tile is for.
      - Android widgets are fully interactive. This means that, like a calendar widget for example, can be scrolled, and you can tap the calendar event to directly open that event in the app. Some widgets obviate the need to open the app at all, take for example Google's "what's this song?" widget.
      - WP tiles don't do anything other than flip, and tapping them just opens the app. That's it, they can't do anything else. If you want to navigate to a specific email, voicemail, text, calendar event, etc, tapping that event while its showing on the tile doesn't open that item, it just opens the app.

      Another major annoyance with windows phone is it's downright awful at multitasking. Try for example, to browse a webpage while your maps app downloads offline data. Oh wait, you can't. As soon as you switch to the browser, the download stops. In Windows Phone, Microsoft's philosophy is that paint shouldn't dry unless you sit there and watch it dr

    5. Re: Great by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

      Desktop Linux has a helluva lot more applications that run specifically for its platform than Windows 10 mobile. I have s Windows 10 tablet, and not only is the interface awful, stock Windows software may run on it, but the experience is terrible to the point of being unusable in many cases, and there's a fraction of the mobile apps compared to Android and iOS.

      You're pale defence of Windows mobile is just whataboutery.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    6. Re: Great by HBI · · Score: 2

      I learned something from a post here. It used to happen a lot, but not so often anymore. Thanks.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
    7. Re: Great by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      Well, a brown brick named Zune. Be honest. I mean, even if some Linux geek in his mom's basement came up with a product, it would not suck THAT hard.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    8. Re: Great by davester666 · · Score: 3, Funny

      What did you learn? That Microsoft has no idea how to do UI? Where have you been for the past 25 years?

      Or just specifically how MS fucked up Window 10 for Phone. Or is it Windows Phone 10? Have they finally joined phone/tablet/computer to all use the same marketing name yet? They should have stuck with WinCE, because that name truly labelled their OS accurately. wince. it's what Windows makes you do.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    9. Re: Great by stealth_finger · · Score: 1

      Windows phones aren't that bad either if you aren't a teenager who needs all the latest apps, or a hacker hackity hacking roots away.

      I have a windows phone sitting in a drawer that I bought as a backup phone because it was super cheap. Anyways here's why I think it sucks:

      ...

      Nailed it.

      --
      Wanna buy a shirt?
      https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
    10. Re: Great by Gussington · · Score: 1

      Oh but wait, the common windows phone fan argument is that

      Wait what, someone somewhere is actually a fan of WP?
      I have a friend who is an MS partner. He's pro MS everything because he has to be, yet even he traded his phone for Android.

    11. Re: Great by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Zune had all the earmarks of being designed by a committee.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    12. Re: Great by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Vista wasn't bad if you jumped through its hoops.

      Vista was okay in the end. Getting there was awful. Being forced to be an early adopter, it was kinda fun to tell the people that forced me to implement it that they needed to buy new printers and scanners because Vista didn't have drivers for them. Fortunately, there were minutes taken, and my dire warnings about Vista were all down in a way they couldn't blame me unless they went back and committed a crime.

      Seven was so much better that it gets crap today,

      7 was a nicely workable OS. It wasn't perfect, none is, but it functioned almost as well as XP, without the security issues. I dumped 10 and went back to 7 for what I still need Windows for today.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    13. Re: Great by iampiti · · Score: 1

      Great post. And worst of all is that they're actually pushing most of this crap on desktop Windows :(. I've assumed I'll have to use some Linux DE to get a decent PC-like UI in the future

    14. Re: Great by cbhacking · · Score: 1

      Vista had some very silly bugs, and a lot of software would not run on it *effortlessly*, but it would run. Setting the application Compatibility Layer option would fix most things, and either running as Admin or making whatever folder the moronic thing was trying to write to writable would fix the rest.

      They did change the driver model, but even then, I only ran into one piece of hardware (between early 2006 betas and when the Win7 public beta arrived) that I couldn't convince to work, and it only barely worked on XP.

      Having run XP as a non0admin, trust me when I say that UAC was a life-saver. For people who actually give a damn about security and like having control over what their computer did, Vista was a pretty great OS. That, plus the Start menu instant search, made it utterly painful to go back to XP.

      With that said... I only ever ran clean installs of Vista, with no OEM crap on them. I saw some of the shit that OEMs would dump on their Vista machines, and I can see where it got its bad reputation. It's not the OS's fault, though; Microsoft can't control what crap OEMs load their machines down with, including stuff that digs deep into the OS and then falls over, taking everything with it. I personally never got a bluescreen post Beta2 (through the RC1 and RC2 builds, and release) except for a few due to NVidia's really shit-tastic drivers (if your video driver crashes *twice* within the space of a few seconds, Windows gives up on recovering it and just bluescreens instead, figuring something is Really Deeply Wrong. They were right, but the stable NVidia driver for my GPU had 40% as much performance and 40% as many features, too).

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
    15. Re: Great by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      Vista had several big problems.

      First, there was the "ready for Vista" program that lied, so many people wound up buying computers that were allegedly ready for Vista but couldn't run the interface.

      Second, there was the driver issue, Vista required new drivers, and they were more of a pain to develop. It took a while for peripheral vendors to catch up.

      Third, Vista introduced some badly needed security features that made it a real pain to run lots of older software that ignored Microsoft's security guidelines. This was going to happen sometime or other, and it happened with Vista. Eventually, software vendors rewrote their software to run with UAC.

      Fourth, there were a lot of bugs that should have been considered show-stoppers when Vista was released or escaped or something.

      After a couple of years, people were generally running Vista on machines that could handle it, the drivers were in place, third-party software was becoming usable with UAC, and Microsoft had fixed a lot of things. It became almost as good as 7 near the end.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  3. If you want your kids to hate you by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by Kjella · · Score: 2

      If you want your kids to hate you

      If this is for the kids it's already a fail, Microsoft will never be cool and obviously you won't have all the apps. Android got the bargain bin market cornered and the hardware alone won't be special enough to sell anything. If they want to get anywhere it needs to hit the business world hard. Hopefully the "Win RT" phones are history and the Surface Phone is an x86 computer in your pocket.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by youngone · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      The ASUS Zenfone2 has a 64 bit x86 processor, it's not the worst in terms of battery life.

    4. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's a 2 year old processor.

      intel killed the roadmap for phone SoCs earlier this year.

      So unless MS want to cram a netbook CPU into a phone, it's likely to be an ARM.

    5. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Intel even stated a few years ago that a given CPU can have 2 of 3 things:

      - Speed
      - Energy efficiency
      - Low power consumption

      It cannot however have all three of those in the same chip, i.e. a very fast chip cannot scale down based on the demand to meet the needs of mobile devices. The whole x86 architecture is pretty much entirely engineered for speed, and a few months ago Intel finally conceded that they just can't make Atom chips compete with ARM. If there is a "surface phone", then it's not going to run x86 apps locally, unless it's either slow as shit or has shitty battery life.

    6. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      So unless MS want to cram a netbook CPU into a phone, it's likely to be an ARM.

      OR... maybe they're going to go completely retro - sleek little Windows phones haven't gotten any traction, after all.

      Picture this: a cell phone with a desktop processor and a body the size of a Korean War US Army radio phone. How cool would that be? They'd certainly capture the seven-to-thirteen-year-old male demographic.

      Someone's even already taken a first stab at the concept!

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    7. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by Kjella · · Score: 1

      I wouldn't think so, most people want battery life of a day or so. You won't get that with x86.

      People have tried quite hard to decompile performance difference into compiler, ISA and hardware differences and most seem to agree the ISA is by far the least significant difference. In fact, at least VIA has been experiementing with a hybrid x86-ARM processor translating both to common micro-ops. As I understood it, it's more that Intel has struggled putting together the whole package for a SoC not so much the general purpose CPU. With power so limited having dedicated hardware to do specific things becomes much more important.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    8. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:If you want your kids to hate you by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      Hey people star at my car all the time. I'm sure it's envy.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
  4. A failed phone business by any other name by JoeyRox · · Score: 1

    Still remains the same.

  5. And by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

    The results will be exactly the same.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  6. Oh trhat will make all the difference. by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!"

    1. Re:Oh trhat will make all the difference. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      "I have it! Lets give our phones a different product name!"

      You mock, yet branding has a huge effect on consumers. This is why companies battle endlessly over names of things rather than the details of what those names represent (e.g. buying the Nokia business but not the name)

      One of the easiest ways to cut a failing product line is to distance yourself from the name.
      One of the easiest ways to ride on a previous success is polish your iTurd up with a certain letter to capitalise on brand recognition.

      The Surface is a huge success compare to Lumina. It only makes sense to tie the product lines together with marketing. It will still be a shit phone.

    2. Re:Oh trhat will make all the difference. by guacamole · · Score: 1

      On the other hand, I do not get it why Google has decided to replace its successful Nexus brand name with Pixel. Google Nexus devices are almost like an underground brand, but the level of satisfaction among the consumers and developers who hold the Nexus devices is relatively high, while the "Pixel" name is so far mostly associated with a failed tablet "Pixel C".

    3. Re:Oh trhat will make all the difference. by JustNiz · · Score: 1

      I hope the rebranding means they might finally listen to customers and include an SD slot and removeable battery.
      I really want my next phone to be a Google phone so I dont get all the crapware and update delays, but no SD and a built-in battery are both dealbreakers for me.

  7. A real Windows by GuB-42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:A real Windows by jezwel · · Score: 1
      It seems painstakingly obvious to do this - make an x86/Win10 phone - so there must be significant reasons that MS hasn't gone down this path.
      I can only think that it would:

      * cannibalise sales of other device types, (though a dock would be awesome)
      * reduce/remove the potential to turn Windows OS into a subscription model

      Really wish we knew what the dealbreaker was, I'm sure there's a chipset out there that would meet specs by now.

    2. Re:A real Windows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > make an x86/Win10 phone

      To usefully run actual x86 software it would need sufficient CPU power and RAM as well as a GPU giving adequate number of pixels with output to a large screen and HDMI or equivalent. Perhaps it would need both an x86-64 _and_ an ARM (for battery life). The result would be:

      * have a battery life measured in minutes
      * cost more than any other phone on the market
      * still not have mobile apps.

      Anyway, Intel is not interested:
      http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/30/intel-splits-on-atom-after-the-mobile-relevance-of-x86-whacked-by-apples-ax

    3. Re:A real Windows by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 2

      Mod parent up.

      There's no way they're going to sell Windows Phones as "phones". They'd have to market them as some other kind of desirable all-in-one device.
      They just need to sit on the tech, and wait until people are fed up with the n-th iteration of the iPhone, exploding Samsung Galaxy battery pack... then hit the market afresh.... but don't call it a phone.

      Maybe call it a puck-computer that gives you the full x64-compatible Windows desktop experience in a phone form factor with a massive battery powerful enough to last a day or two on one charge and connectivity options for HDMI displays, and mandatory bluetooth.

      It also has a touch screen and can make phone calls. Just don't call it a phone.

      --
      READY.
      PRINT ""+-0
    4. Re:A real Windows by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

      Why do you need a subscription model when your devices get replaced every two or so years?

    5. Re:A real Windows by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

      nvidia's Denver was engineered to be ISA agnostic. It runs ARM but originally was said to run x86, except that they weren't part of the Intel/AMD cartel licensing the instruction set. (Or something like that).

    6. Re:A real Windows by bazorg · · Score: 1

      While it's clear that Win RT bombed, it was IMHO a step in the right direction: Make Windows simpler, make it work more like the smartphones and tablets that have been such a sales success since the last decade.

      Trouble is: how to deal with the legacy applications (cue the appy app guy). Getting everyone to use the MS store looked to me like a good idea, as long as there was something there worth getting. Yes, other software houses would be annoyed with paying MS a cut of the sale, yes they would be forced to develop according to some sort of valid standard... but that's exactly omitting these things that makes the Win32 ecosystem of the XP era such a PITA and a great environment for malware and bad quality applications

      I thought that in the same way that Apple kept on a solid and worthwhile market share with a few select partners and their own multimedia applications, Microsoft can/could do the same, with Office and a few good games for Windows and Xbox.
      The way RT was made and marketed, it looked like MS was taking things away from the userbase without giving much back. Yes, ARM SOCs and battery life were interesting but not unique; Windows 8 UI was well suited for that device, but hated by the userbase that is happy to experiment with Android, Linux, Mac OS and iOS, but are vocal about everything and anything that MS changes in their core product lines. This relationship status is "it's complicated"

      For now, it looks like Lumia goes to the pile of brands that disappear, and Windows is just Windows 10, on whichever device you might want to use it. In the same way that certain apps won't download from the Google Play store if your device is not compatible, you'll find the same when trying to run apps for Windows 10 mobile that were actually just made for Windows 10 desktop/x64/whatever. It will probably work out well if MS can make their 1st party apps good enough to hold on to some sort of valuable market share (and that's probably got to be xBox & gaming related otherwise iOS and Android gaming will also leapfrog MS in that arena, while everyone is busy comparing Xbox with PS4 and Nintendo). The difference between this time and the 90s is that this market share will be of rent/licence paying customer, not a 90% of a market with a smaller % of people actually spending money. So here's to hoping that the Surface tablets, the xBox with universal appps (aka headless imac), the Surface phone and Surface AIO have something worthwhile to run on them, besides Office and a browser.

      All that is to say that IMHO, running X86 Windows applications on a yet smaller form factor scores a big fat meh from me.

    7. Re:A real Windows by Overzeetop · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problem isn't the power consumption of the CPU, it's Microsoft's inability to solve the "hard problem" (Panos Panay's own words) of an OS with control over sleep functions. The Surface Pro 4 has a battery barely 3x the size of flagship phone and yet manages to play video on a screen with 6x the area for 9 hours, and do regular work for 5-6 hours. The problem is that the OS has no control over the drivers, and MS is to fucking lazy to write their own, so a poorly behaving wifi driver (or BT driver, or USB driver, or even internal OS programs like memory management) means the entire system stays awake, burning power nearly as fast as if the machine were playing HD video.

      When the SP4 is tuned just right and nothing is screwing up, it will last - in an suspended/active state (instant on/"phone sleep") for about 200 hours. Trim back all those internals and kick every driver out of ring 0 and a (formerly known as) m series x86 could probably be tweaked to provide decent life in a smaller form factor. But MS / Windows is to bloated and riddled with special exceptions to fix. They need to go Apple on the OS and blow it away and restart with a fresh core.

      --
      Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
    8. Re:A real Windows by swb · · Score: 1

      I'm thinking a combo of Surface Pro and a Phablet. The Phablet holds enough flash for a decent Windows environment (say, 512GB at least) and can slot into the Surface which provides the larger screen, x64 CPU and additional connectivity for video and USB.

      The phablet can run ARM Windows and be a standalone phone device, while slotted into the Surface it provides radios for connectivity and calls during a desktop type computing session.

      The trouble is, Microsoft has always refused to make normal Windows installable and bootable from USB, even though USB3 would be more than adequate for normal desktop work. The carry-your-OS-around thing would only be truly useful if you could boot any desktop with it.

    9. Re:A real Windows by Wdomburg · · Score: 1

      Hence Continuum.

      But beyond that, UWP apps are far friendlier on smaller screens. Different screen sizes certainly demand different sizing and presentation of UI elements, but that does not mean you cannot serve different form factors with a common code base. Writing a ground up application for a handset is a much different proposition than doing a marginal amount of coding to make an existing one work on different screen sizes (especially since apps need to do that to work well in windowed or tiled mode anyway).

    10. Re:A real Windows by lord_mike · · Score: 1

      RT bombed, because it looked like you could run x86 applications on it, but you actually couldn't, so you had a laptop that would only run Windows Phone apps, which are very few and far between. If this surface phone uses an ARM processor as has been rumored, then it will fail, too. Even if it is an x86 phone, which will be quite interesting, I'm not sure how they will be able to make traditional desktop apps work in a small, phone-sized form factor. That will be the big challenge. If they can pull that off, then they may be onto something. I'm not particularly optimistic.

  8. Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by EzInKy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You're spot on about Microsoft slowly becoming irrelevant. They haven't done anything innovative in 20+ years.

      Microsoft has become IBM. Still around but no one really cares anymore.

    2. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by EzInKy · · Score: 2

      I'd argue that they have never "innovative". Just stole.

      --
      Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    3. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by EzInKy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What has Microsoft ever done that has benefited the human race?

      --
      Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    4. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      That's a lot more than 20 years ago now though.

    5. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by gtall · · Score: 3, Funny

      Fired Ballmer.

    6. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > I'd argue that they have never "innovative".

      I would also agree with that assessment.

      > Just stole.

      I would replace the word stole with the more accurate term bought:

      * DriveSpace aka DoubleSpace: Licensed from Vertisoft and then out-right copied Stac Electronics.
      * Internet Explorer: Licensed Spyglass Mosaic and renamed it.
      * Windows: Copied Apple who copied Xerox.
      * Direct3D: Bought Rendermorphics, Ltd and renamed their shitty API RealityLab to Direct3D

      Looks like David Wheeler (of readable S Lisp Expressions fame) agrees with us:

      * http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html

    7. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by lord_mike · · Score: 1

      Microsoft still makes a lot of money. So does IBM. Their products are mature and stable, which allows them to make a lot of money, but they aren't setting new standards for the industry like they used to be able to do. No one cared that Microsoft wanted to replace Flash with Silverlight. They just ignored it. They don't have the mindshare dominance that they used to, where they could dictate the terms and the industry complied. That's long gone. They have become a lot less relevant, even though they still make a lot of money selling their old stuff.

    8. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

      Office 365 and Azure along with their big data analytics are pretty innovative. Well, they are at least making them a lot of money. They are bigger than Google's cloud right now. Microsoft certainly has a lot more customers.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
    9. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by iampiti · · Score: 1

      And in the effort to stay relevant they forced a phone UI onto their desktop OS, making me lose interest in their only piece of software I only cared about

    10. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by cbhacking · · Score: 1

      XmlHttpRequst. Innovative and useful, adopted by everybody in the industry, used in everything. MS invented it so they could make Outlook Web Access and such better, back in the days before Gmail (which would not exist, as we know it, without something like XHR).

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
    11. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      It's an exaggeration, of course, but Microsoft hasn't done much successful innovation over the past 10-15 years..

      By 1996, Microsoft had introduced its serious OS (NT) and its mediocre copy of the Macintosh UI. It was actually doing good work with Internet Explorer, which was a quality product back then, and improving Office. Sometime around then, they produced WinCE. They started moving into the tablet and PDA and phone business. Overall, they seemed to be doing pretty well.

      Their tablets were expensive and awkward, extremely useful to a few people and pointless to most. They never caught on. Their PDAs and phones did reasonably well, and in 2007 Microsoft was strong in the smartphone market. They developed Internet Explorer into the very successful IE 6. And, then, they started failing.

      Microsoft then just wandered off and got lost. They'd produced the best browser around, and just sat on it without trying to continually improve it. They never did get a clue as to how tablets could be successful, and like Blackberry had no idea how to stay in the smartphone business. Their attempts to produce a much more advanced OS than XP floundered, and they wound up cutting back their efforts into something that came out as Vista, which had a great many initial problems. They did well in the non-portable game console market, and in some more enterprisey software, but really didn't do much for the typical Windows user. They never did produce something that gave the users much more than XP did (although later OSes were much improved under the hood). After 7, they dropped their highly successful GUI in order to promote their tablet offerings.

      The Surface was innovative, but not all that successful. Part of it was marketing. Not too long after it came out, I walked into a Microsoft store (nice and uncrowded so I could easily poke at everything), and found that my wife, a very intelligent software developer, didn't understand the difference between the Surface and the Surface Pro. The Surface Pro was extremely useful for some people, but not a general success. The Surface was a financial disaster. The much-hyped keyboards were not included in the purchase price, and really weren't that much different from the ones available for Android and the iPad by then. The marketing was thoroughly inept.

      Overall, Microsoft has been steadily making itself less relevant. It sacrificed a lot of popularity on the desktop in order to push its doomed mobile offerings, at a time when fewer and fewer people were needing a Windows machine. I see no reason to think it'll ever be successful in the mobile market. It will continue to dominate the desktop/laptop market for the foreseeable future, while that becomes less relevant, much like IBM kept the mainframe market. Microsoft's going to be around and reasonably successful for a long time, but I don't see that it's likely to dominate like it did earlier.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    12. Re:Microsoft is fighting irrelevance. by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      Apple took PARC design elements and made a much better UI out of them. They paid PARC in Apple stock, which PARC them sold. Microsoft made an agreement with Apple to use their GUI design elements, and made a much worse interface (which they proceeded to improve slowly). When Apple tried suing Microsoft for their GUIs, it turned out Microsoft had a right to almost everything they were using.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  9. Hey Microsoft by Solandri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some free advice: I don't think the name is the problem.

  10. Re:You lost this round, MS, get over it. by dbIII · · Score: 2

    But like Gretsky said, stop skating where the puck is and start trying to figure out where it will be.

    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.

  11. Re: Former Microsoft Fanboy here by BlackSabbath · · Score: 1

    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.

  12. This time are they gonna give the salesmen a cut? by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    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/
  13. Self Damage by rtb61 · · Score: 1, Troll

    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
  14. Re:Best tactic to gain market share for Microsoft by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1
    Ars Technica this week predicted the death of Android on tablets. That leaves iPad and 2-in-1 windows convertibles - contrary to the MS hate on here, I do see a number of Surface machines in my local university library.

    MS should thus leverage the business side and Continuum. Allow employees to hot desk by docking their phone with a full size keyboard, a mouse and external screens - why do cubicle bound workers need a laptop exactly when they have a company supplied phone already? Monitor them 24/7 and encourage them to take work to their dwelling with a dock for home so they can VPN from home using their existing peripherals.

  15. It's been tried before - by BlackBerry by mykepredko · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:It's been tried before - by BlackBerry by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 1

      Yes, but Blackberry didn't own the killer app - Microsoft office, much less the OS that 90%+ desktop users work on and understand (to varying degrees)

      Windows has more mindshare here.

      --
      READY.
      PRINT ""+-0
  16. Not wrong, though Windows not even single digits by raymorris · · Score: 1

    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.

  17. Re: Best tactic to gain market share for Microsoft by Lije+Baley · · Score: 1

    Or maybe just make the most popular Android phones explode in children's hands...

    --
    Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
  18. Dumb as bricks by j-b0y · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?
    1. Re:Dumb as bricks by Overzeetop · · Score: 2

      And everything they touch is horribly flawed because their corporate policy has been Fuck The User for so long, they have no idea how to interact. Everything they make the kick over the fence around Redmond and there is zero support. Their own flagship table, the Surface Pro, can't sleep - not because of userspace issues, but because their own drivers cause the system to to be permanently in high gear. Their own OS doesn't work properly on their flagship device. It's like nobody there even has a SP4 to test their builds. And their support - well, lets just say I get more prompt and helpful responses from eBay and Aliexpress customer service.

      --
      Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
    2. Re:Dumb as bricks by lord_mike · · Score: 1

      They are better now, but decades of, "You are stuck with our monopoly, so suck it up," has hurt their reputation and brand.

  19. Re:Not wrong, though Windows not even single digit by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1, Insightful
    You are omitting the main reason: CAPITALISM

    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
  20. Kill? by The+Cisco+Kid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  21. Re:Best tactic to gain market share for Microsoft by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 2
    I do see a number of Surface machines in my local university library.

    So that is where they all went!

    Here in the UK, I have only seen them in PC World.

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  22. It had potential at first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  23. Nobody wants to re-write at the rate MS dump stuff by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  24. Local sync, please? by Ihlosi · · Score: 1
    I bought a Lumia 550 a while ago. Nice device, especially for its price. The only reason I'm still using my old dinosaur E6 is the lack of local synchronization options - in fact the only place that W10M will transfer contacts to is the cloud.

    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.

    1. Re: Local sync, please? by Ihlosi · · Score: 1
      You can share single contacts, and the PC received them as .vcf files than can be manually imported into the Windows address book.

      That works if you need to transfer a handful of contacts, but gets tedious with three dozen.

  25. It's a bit late by Gumbercules!! · · Score: 1

    I think it's fair to say the Lumia brand is already dead.

  26. A shame by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 2

    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.

  27. Linux by DrYak · · Score: 1

    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 ]
  28. Consider yourself middle-fingered, Microsoft by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1

    Yet again.

  29. Not that profitable, Windows has 12% market share by raymorris · · Score: 1

    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.

  30. UWP the way forward by HalAtWork · · Score: 1

    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
  31. Doesn't matter what they call it. by zerofoo · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Doesn't matter what they call it. by The-Ixian · · Score: 1

      If all you need are the basics (no apps), want a good quality camera and have a desire to be different than everyone else then Windows Phone isn't a bad alternative.

      I am still rocking the Lumia 920 with Windows 10 on it. It's a stylish phone and it does all I need.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  32. Responsive websites suck - that's why by zerofoo · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Responsive websites suck - that's why by lord_mike · · Score: 1

      Perhaps, but you have to find them on your phone, the functionality is often limited compared to the actual web site, and it takes up valuable memory. I prefer using the actual web site to a stripped down app version of the web site whenever possible.

  33. Calling bullshit. by Brannon · · Score: 1

    > 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.

  34. Re:Not that profitable, Windows has 12% market sha by dryeo · · Score: 1

    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
  35. Shame about Nokia by steve90 · · Score: 1

    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.

  36. They wished. 8,000% slower with 1,500% more requir by raymorris · · Score: 1

    >> 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.

  37. Re:You lost this round, MS, get over it. by lord_mike · · Score: 1

    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.

  38. Re:This time are they gonna give the salesmen a cu by lord_mike · · Score: 1

    Except people never really liked using Windows on their PCs. The experience for most is neutral at best and irritating at worst.

  39. Two years old product category is "new" imho by raymorris · · Score: 1

    >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".

  40. Project Astoria by cbhacking · · Score: 1

    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...
  41. W10M is rooted by cbhacking · · Score: 1

    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...
  42. Re:This time are they gonna give the salesmen a cu by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    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