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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.

38 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 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.

  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 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.
    2. 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

    3. 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.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. 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!
  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 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.

  4. 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!"

  5. 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 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

    2. 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
    3. 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?

    4. 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?
  6. 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 gtall · · Score: 3, Funny

      Fired Ballmer.

  7. Hey Microsoft by Solandri · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  8. 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.

  9. 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
  10. 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?
  11. 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.

  12. 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
  13. 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.

  14. 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.