Wielding Their Windows Phones, Microsoft Shareholders Grill CEO Satya Nadella On Device Strategy (geekwire.com)

At a meeting with shareholders Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked numerous times what the company is doing about Windows Phones, and why do they keep hearing that Microsoft is abandoning smartphone manufacturer business. The stakeholders also asked why the company is seemingly focusing more on Android and iOS rival platforms instead of its own. From a report on GeekWire: Microsoft shareholder Dana Vance, owner of a Windows Phone and a Microsoft Band, said he received an email about the Microsoft Pix app but was surprised to learn that it was available for iPhone and Android but not Windows Phone. Ditto for Microsoft Outlook. He also alluded to reports that Microsoft has put the Band on the back burner. Given this, he asked Nadella to explain the company's vision for its consumer devices. As part of his response, Nadella said Microsoft's Windows camera and mail apps will include the same features as in Microsoft's apps for other platforms. "When we control things silicon-up, that's how we will integrate those experiences," Nadella said. The company will "build devices that are unique and differentiated with our software capability on top of it -- whether it's Surface or Surface Studio or HoloLens or the phone -- and also make our software applications available on Android and iOS and other platforms. That's what I think is needed in order for Microsoft to help you as a user get the most out of our innovation." Another shareholder, who says he uses his Windows Phone "18 hours a day," said he has heard Microsoft is "stepping away from mobile." He asked, "Can you calm me down ... and tell me what your vision is for mobile?" Nadella answered, "We think about mobility broadly. In other words, we think about the mobility of the human being across all of the devices, not just the mobility of a single device. That said, we're not stepping away or back from our focus on our mobile devices," Nadella said. "What we are going to do is focus that effort on places where we have differentiation. If you take Windows Phone, where we are differentiated on Windows Phone is on manageability. It's security, it's Continuum capability -- that is, the ability to have a phone that can act like a PC. So we're going to double-down on those points of differentiation."

Comments

Re: Stick a fork in it

[gl4ss]

there was so many kind of apps you simply couldn't write for windows phone 7 even that it was not funny.

MS/Nokia was dishing out cash and free devices and lunches to everyone, but their dev relations to questions "when will this or that be added to the api" resulted in "you don't need it". which was puzzling since making a decent version of the app depended on having that.

anyways, windows phone sucked big time. easy to develop for but so very much limited and not extensible at all - wp7 was so bad that by 2003 standards it would have been called a feature phone, not a smartphone(no real full multitasking and stuff that used to be the separator between a smartphone and a feature phone back in the day).

wp7 was featurewise equivalent to j2me phones and everything was very, very betaish despite being super simplified.

anyways, it all traces back to ZUNE - all of the crappy decisions and failures MS has done in the past 10 years goes back to the ZUNE. Wp was just a rehash of ZUNE shell, rushed. it's so simplified because thats all they had! and then they tried to cover it as being great because it does nothing.

a smartphone needs to have decent multitasking. win ce had it.

the whole problem was ditching the old stuff and replacing it with new stuff that wasn't ready. sure, one could live with wp. but why bother when there's android.

and being forced to use win8(and now win10) for development isn't exactly a plus either, especially when the dev env doesn't really depend on any win8/10 features.. oh well at least they were giving those license out free nilly willy too.

anyways, windows phone was never relevant in any market. the only place where it was slightly relevant was Finland due to loads of organizations sticking with Nokia's as their organization provided phones - and because nokia and ms were just giving cash to publish stuff.

And Microsoft has just about given up on it as well. It's now just this thing they have.

If you want a real explanation it's simply that MS board consists of idiots. how can so well paid people be idiots? well look at what they have done and bought in the past 10 years and how they have ruined their core product. it would have been better to do absolutely nothing. not buy nokia, not linkedin, not publish win8rt, not publish win8.

they could have bought ARM holdings with the cash they want to pay for linkedin btw. that should put things into perspective how much they overvalued it.