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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.
"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.
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.
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 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
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.