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Satya Nadella: 'We Clearly Missed the Mobile Phone' (mashable.com)
At the Wall Street Journal's WSJD Live conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted that Microsoft has largely failed in making a dent in the mobile hardware business. Nadella, who took over the command of Microsoft from Steve Ballmer in February 2014, however added that the company is now focused on doing well in new categories and also building new categories. He said:We clearly missed the mobile phone, there's no question. Our goal now is to make sure we grow new categories. We have devices which are phones today but the place where we are focused on, given where the market is, is what is the unique thing that our phone can do. We have a phone that in fact can replace your PC, the same way we have a tablet that can replace your laptop. Those are the categories that we want to go create. If anything, the lesson learned for us, was thinking of PC as the hub for all things for all time to come. It was perhaps one for the bigger mistakes we made.
Sent from my Windows phone.
Making the deal with the bosses to force the sheep to follow along (schools here in Germany are a good example).
That's what Microsoft was always good at. Wine and dine the decision makers. The ones who, lastly, don't have to put up with their crap, since it's their secretary who does it for them.
"the lesson learned for us, was thinking of PC as the hub for all things for all time to come. It was perhaps one for the bigger mistakes we made."
Apparently, according to IBM, they should give up and make Macs instead.
"We have a phone that in fact can replace your PC"
No. You don't. Because that isn't possible to do. The fact that this guy even said that means he is clueless about mobile. He needs to be replaced.
Microsoft misses because they don't engage developers - they said (Balmer famously said) it was all about developers but they really actually don't give a shit as long as the big corps still pay their licence fees. See XNA, see engagement over mobile, seeing the pathetic attempts at outreach with their bizspark programme. They do not care about providing an innovative, interesting and exciting platform for software developers to work on. It's a shame because I like Windows Phone as a platform but without spending a lot more money on developer engagement and support it was always going to fail.
The only thing I hope is that now that Nadella actually said those words, they're going to stop trying to turn their operating systems into an iOS or Android clone. Saying they're done with Windows Phone unburdens them from having to try to revive Windows Store and the Universal Apps model. I am very skeptical about whether they'd do this, but they could also (shock! horror!) completely separate PC mode and tablet mode, and make Windows behave more like a desktop OS when run on PC hardware. Just doing that one change would probably convert the last Windows 7 holdouts.
That said, this is a very expensive "oops." What I see doing engineering work for Windows shops is the need to monetize everything else -- Azure is being pushed extremely hard, and this is where Microsoft is going to make all their money in the future. All new features are Azure-first these days and backported to the packaged products. What's probably going to happen is that they're going to make it so cumbersome to run on-premises Windows Server and other Microsoft products that most companies will just throw their hands up and move everything they own to Azure. After that, they're locked in permanently and Microsoft will enter its new phase as the 21st Century IBM. Just like IBM collecting monthly mainframe revenue, they'll collect monthly fees from Azure customers, who will be even more dependent on Microsoft than they are now.
The other super-smart thing they've done is realize that the OS wars are over. You can run Linux in Azure as a first-class citizen. They do this to compete with AWS, but they also know that being OS-agnostic long term allows them to keep collecting revenue perpetually. I just hope they redeploy the Windows Phone people who are still there to new projects instead of throwing another few thousand techies onto the unemployment pyre.
Many people say its the lack of apps. I think that was their own fault for dumping and rebooting the platform a million times thinking they just had to get that sauce perfect and and the world would love them. They've been drinking to much of their own koolaid.
I think the lack of apps is simply what finally put them out of their misery though. I'm not convinced any significant amount of people actually wanted Windows on their phone in the first place.
Is admitting you have a problem. While I assume they've known this internally for a while, it's nice to see the public acknowledgement.
MSFT is doing some... surprisingly... competent things with Surface and other PCs, it will be interesting to see if the magical "new devices category" is something that they can take the Surface competence into.
(Did I just use "Microsoft" and "Competence" in the same sentence? And not preceded with "in-"? Shiver....)
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
It is childish and unprofessional to call it spyware. The proper grown up name for it is Windows 10.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
By about 10 Yeats at least! Think about Blackberries and Palms! Then we had the iPhones and the Androids on 2008 and you were still sleeping! You are waking up too late and missed the school bus!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
No. You don't. Because that isn't possible to do.
That depends entirely on what you plan to do with it. There absolutely are some people who can replace a PC with a smartphone or a tablet because the smartphone/tablet competently does everything they did with the PC. While it isn't true for me personally I have family members that have ditched the PC completely because their tablet does everything they needed from a PC and it's easier to use for them. Even for me a smartphone has replaced a lot of what I used to do primarily on a PC.
The fact that this guy even said that means he is clueless about mobile. He needs to be replaced.
"Clueless"? Ummm... no. Far be it from me to defend Microsoft or their CEO but clueless is not a word I'd use in regards to them. I'm pretty sure he has more of a clue about the mobile market than you do.
Which had no commercial impact, though, as soon as your monopoly was big enough, which came pretty quick (and not only by legal means, as we know today). Since then, you can stuff everything you want down users' throats who have nowhere else to go because the applications they need don't run on other platforms.
I still haven't completely given up hope, though, that this will change one day.
Yes, when phones come with 24" screens!
Stop FUCKING AROUND with stupid shit like phones.
Make your OS not suck, Stop trying to make the server OS into a desktop.
And make your other software work better and faster
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They've been making mobile operating systems since the days of the PDA, but they weren't considered successful, even in the odd years they where leading the category.
One problem is they every couple of years they would revamp it, losing compatibility with the old software.
Yeah.
This one time I was downloading and running random executables from some shady sites. Suddenly my computer started acting strange, slowing down, rebooting at random, using up all of my bandwidth, grinding the hard drive, changing my browser settings (from Pale Moon to some Internet Explorer knock-off), displaying pop-ups and ads, etc.
Stupid me! I ended up with a Windows 10 infestation and despite running some anti-Windows 10s like SUPERAntiWindows10 and Win10Bot: Search & Destroy, I ended up having to reformat the drive to get rid of it.
Let this be a lesson. Never run executables from unknown and untrusted sources. You may get a Windows 10 infection.
They completely failed despite trying for many years. I'm not talking about what they've done post iPhone and iPad; they were making Windows XP based tablets and Windows CE based phones back in the early 00s and similar products even earlier. Nobody wanted to use them. I hate Apple's arrogance and elitism but they did succeed at something that Microsoft failed.
That's why I'm pretty skeptical about their ability to build "new categories." It seems much more likely they'll fuck around with some tech and produce something that completely misses the point, and then Apple, Google, or some new upstart will come along and do it correctly
We have a phone UI that can replace your desktop UI.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Microsoft didn't "[miss] the mobile phone," they shit on the mobile phone market with their usual bullshit. Turns out that when the quality of your product matters, you need to put out a high quality software platform that offers more than concessions for users and developers.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Microsoft was one of the earliest smartphone manufacturers, and together with Symbian, one of the two biggest. They didn't miss it, they screwed it up, with their usual mix of greed, attempts at monopoly, and bad software. The difference is that this time, it backfired, and people never again trusted them.
All you have to say is "we missed it?" Come on Microsoft it's not like you can write off all those billions of dollars invested and say you missed it. Oh you mean you fucked up your execution? That I'll believe more. You had a strategy, remember Windows CE and it's derivatives which morphed into Windows Mobile? Yeah you remember those, platforms without real developer tools and you couldn't debug on? Those platforms that made any effort painful and then you'd pull support for them. Yeah I remember those days. Then you told everybody that you had fixed it. Some came back but most went off on to this IOS and Android thingy, they had tools and a lot better support from their respective houses. They didn't tie you to cumbersome APIs where you tried to tie Win32 to everything. They flourished, you died. So you didn't miss it, you just couldn't execute.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Microsoft now seems to think that it is 'open'.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Edlin. And let's not forget that disaster of a specification LIM (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft) Expanded Memory specification. (I don't mean Extended memory, but Expanded memory. Back in the day. This was useful, in some sense of the word, for exactly one thing: Lotus-123)
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
My friend works as a developer within Microsoft and he just texted me saying he and his coworkers have all received a memo from the CEO using a metaphor of being on a 'burning platform' and asking if anyone knows of another company that can buy Microsoft and then after spending more billions of dollars just close the whole thing down out of frustration.
Any ideas?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The Turks seem to do pretty well after the Armenian genocide, they're ready to start another one on the Kurds. The Germans, on the other hand, are now so full of guilt that they are infesting Europe with muslim emigrants to be able to feel dood. "Gutmench" (good human in German) has become an insult in the rest of Europe.
and get back in the game.
They are unifying all their platforms on a common kernel with universal app frameworks.
Next, for the 90% of people that don't need tons of computing power, they replace your PC / Laptop / Phone with one device in a phone form factor.
When you are at a desk and need a keyboard and mouse you dock and voila you are good to go. Heck, using a mechanism similar to the Surface Book, the base / dock could contain a discrete GPU etc. to even enable people to do CAD / Video work.
The bonus for people using this type of setup is that there is no more having to sync multiple profiles, data, preferences, etc. across multiple devices. You carry it with you in your pocket and back up to Azure and you're done.
As someone else mentioned in the thread, the big stumbling block is the availability of apps for the mobile portion of this end run. They need to develop stuff in house or pay the popular 3rd party app developers to get it done. I liked Windows phone but the lack of support by developers killed it for me.
M$ main problem was that they were coming out with new incompatible updates to the OS all of the time while simultaneously slow to support new hardware features. Another problem was that they where extorting their developers early on forcing them to but new SDKs with newer versions and making things hard to port.
A lot of us had PDAs back in the 1990s. A lot of us also had cell phones. It didn't take a genius to figure out that having one device which worked as both a cell phone and PDA would be really nice, if for nothing but to reduce the amount of clanking going on in your pocket. So it was pretty obvious by the mid-1990s that cell phones and PDAs were going to converge. The only question was if PDAs would get phone capability added on, or if cell phones would get PDA (computing) capability added on.
The late 1990s is when this convergence began. Nokia (a phone manufacturer) was first out of the blocks, which cemented their dominance of the early smartphone market. Palm came out with the Kyocera 6035 and Treo in 2001/2002. The smartphone-ish Blackberry didn't show up until 2003.
Microsoft was right in the thick of this. Since 1996, They'd been competing with PalmOS with WinCE (which became Pocket PC which became Windows Mobile which became Windows Phone). They had enough foresight to add software hooks for phone support to Pocket PC 2000, but never put much effort into the hardware side. For some reason they never took this PDA-phone convergence seriously. Apparently they were too busy thinking up with new names for their mobile OS than to work on phone hardware integration. I remember when the Jornada 928 came to market just in time to compete with the Palm Treo in 2002, reviews panned it calling the phone functionality buggy and unreliable. For all the evils of the old Bell Telephone monopoly, one thing they got right was "It Just Works". Your electricity could be out after a storm, but your landline phone would still work. That's what people were used to and expected. An unreliable phone was dead before it even hit the market.
So Microsoft wasn't late to the market. They were right there at the beginning of the smartphone market and had ample opportunity to dominate it. They just blew it. I suspect someone high up in their management chain, maybe even Gates himself, didn't believe this phone-PDA convergence was going to happen.
Microsoft had to choose between compatibility or nimble and compact.
When they competed purely on nimbleness, their mobile apps were not be sufficiently compatible with Windows desktop software to make anyone choose them over competitors, who were cheaper and more nimble.
When they competed purely on compatibility, then the device was expensive, bloated, and had short battery life because it had to copy too much of the desktop to be compatible.
When they tried the middle ground, they sucked enough at both of these factors to not be compelling to consumers.
They cannot compete with smaller companies on price, features, battery life etc. because they are big bureaucratic behemoth.
Table-ized A.I.
Microsoft had the chance to make a decent phone with Windows Phone 6.1, but they nlew it because they had a shitty api and a bad build system for the OS creating headache for many vendors.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
But that's the thing, Microsoft's solution doesn't even do that; because their Windows Phone (now Windows 10 Mobile) devices run on ARM, they can't run legacy x86 Windows apps, and people can't even recompile those for ARM even if they wanted to and in the cases where there'd be no issues because Microsoft won't let you distribute and install non-'Metro' (or whatever exactly they're calling it now; UWP, I think?) code on ARM-based versions of Windows. The only stuff you can run using Continuum is Windows Store non-legacy apps, which are actually a far smaller set of applications than those available on the Google Play Store or iOS App Store. Hell, my old Nokia N9, the product left in a ditch as Nokia jumped foolishly on the Windows Phone bandwagon, has a more vibrant developer community with a better selection of applications than Windows Phone managed for quite a while, so leaning on the new-apps side of the strategy wasn't ever going to be a winning play for Microsoft.
Microsoft's mobile offerings floundered for many reasons, and no small part of it was how they completely failed to take advantage of their entrenched positioning in the desktop market.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
... or only comments?
At least spell it properly, it is "Gutmensch".
And it doesn't really have the meaning you claim, it never really had any non-insulting meaning in German.
I also find the migrant issue rather weird to associate with guilt, (almost?) all countries have signed (e.g. UN) contracts around the treatment of refugees.
Maybe it's just that some people in Germany still believe you should at least to some degree honour contracts and promises you made even when it becomes inconvenient.
Besides, Germany had the Aussiedler/Spätaussiedler (4.5 millon) and the re-integration of half of the country before and the world didn't go under because of it.
Those scaremongers especially in countries like Hungary really suffer from a complete lack of perspective.
But I guess the future is pretty certain to tell us if Germany was wrong. Will any of those complaining and spreading fear change their tune if the future shows that Germany will do just fine? I'm afraid like with terrorism, no amount of proof will change their minds.
However, coming back to the guilt thing, I think there might be maybe 3 understandings that are sufficiently more widespread to indeed make Germany different that might be consequence of past experience:
1) "the law says so" isn't a good excuse for doing something wrong. Using that phrase to justify something is likely to end with uncomfortable follow-up questions.
2) that following whoever shouts the loudest, especially the loudest hateful things, is not particularly likely to end well.
3) that "it would never happen to us/we would never do that because our country is so great" is just nationalist bullshit.
Meanwhile in other countries, people are still shocked when they find out that back in that time it wasn't just German ideology but that their own country engaged in castration, science experiments and all kinds of other things on "undesireable" people of all kinds. Seems to me like it's especially countries like Sweden that are so stuck in guilt (or is it denial?) that many people don't even know about what was going on in their own country.
Microsoft's non-commitment to it's hardware and software keeps tarnishing the brand. If they are not willing to commit
There's one more - the Windows NT on RISC platform. It was actually a pretty promising concept, and had Microsoft executed on it properly, we would probably still have Silicon Graphics and DEC workstations running today Windows 7 (or 8 or 10). And there wouldn't have been an Intel monopoly either - there would have been enough semiconductor fabs and vendors willing to make MIPS and Alpha chips for the platform, so that we'd have had a healthy choice of workstations from which to choose.
The new Microsoft Ear is an exciting add-on to popular phone that might be lacking a headphone jack. Just plug it in or get the Deluxe Elephant Ear case (in genuine immitation rogue elephant hide leather) and now you have a place to plug in your head phones!
Giants die slowly. But I see their Win10 "strategy" as a good accelerator of that end.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What 6 million? Ah, you mean that "holocash" childrens tale.
You do know, that the official numbers in Auschwitz are gone down from 4 million, to 1,5 million and now to mere "thousands of people died here".
The first OFFICIAL plaque that was on display at the Auschwitz camp from 1948 until 1989. Also, no talk about jews there.
"Four million people suffered and died here at the hands of the nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945"
The second is the OFFICIAL plaque from 1989 until some years ago.
"For ewer let this place be a cry of despair and warning to humanity where the nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children mainly jews from various countries of europe."
Lhe latest OFFICIAL plaque in Auschwitz talks about "thousand of peoples who lost their lives here"
Go to Auschwitz and see for your self, if you do not believe. ...
So The number has come down from 4 million to mere thousands, but the official number of 6 million still lives on? Interesting
If Microsoft CEO Bill Gates hadn't acted to suppress the development of the TRON platform, they would have been first to market even before Apple. While purporting to support the TRON consortium MS acted on Capitol Hill to have TRON denied access to the US market. ''We don't want the Japanese to create a specification that would preclude competition,'' 1989. A similar strategy applied to Sendo a British maker of handsets. Who of course were bilked over and went broke in litigation with Microsoft. So that's TWICE or THREE times if you include Nokia, that the worlds chief software visionary didn't get it.
My next phone will be the surface phone. I am just waiting for it to release.
IMO, the biggest blow to PReP was the cancellation of OS/2 for PowerPC. That would have made a remarkable combination - the unique capabilities of OS/2 running on this new RISC platform. PReP didn't make much sense for Windows NT, which already had the fastest CPU in the Alpha and some pretty good graphics capable CPUs in MIPS, or for Unix, which despite the number of vendors, was mainly a Sun stable. Also, even w/o Apple, had the companies doing PReP computers - Motorola SPG, Umax and Power Computing - put BeOS on their boxes instead of folding when Jobs yanked their MacOS licenses, that would have been another bold foray into a new computing platform. Unfortunately, it was a lost opportunity.