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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."
Not Device Strategy surely?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Eh? last time I checked my Windows 10 Phone (a 640) it had Outlook plus the other office apps, always has.
Why was everyone cheering when Ballmer poked fun of the brand new iPhone in 2007? Lack of vision.
.)
(Now, wait. Wait some more. Wait until the market is taken over by Android. Wait for it . . . Okay. Now . .
Windows Phone 7. Completely incompatible with Windows Mobile 6 and what came before it.
Windows Phone 8. Incompatible with Windows Phone 7 to the extent that you needed to build a new app.
Although the Nokia phone hardware was excellent, from all reports, that does not make up for the fact that it is running a Microsoft OS. The new UI. No apps except for a few high profile ones that Microsoft paid their developers to port. Developers don't want to write for a device that has no users.
To prop up the unpleasant Win Phone UI, Ballmer forced it upon desktop / laptop users with Windows 8. Whoever designed this had no understanding of how computers are used by people who do real work. But the thinking seemed to be if everyone had to learn this new UI on the desktop, then they would all flock to Windows Phone 8! Yea! Oh, wait. Didn't happen. Instead, a revolt against Windows 8. Windows 9 was cancelled. And Windows 10 largely functions like traditional UI's that we've been using for 30+ years.
And then the Surface tablets. At a single stroke, Ballmer pissed off (1) OEMs, (2) Developers Developers, and (3) Customers.
1. OEMs: Microsoft back stabbed them by competing directly against their own OEMs on hardware.
2. Developers Developers: The Surface had no customers. You had to use Microsoft's app store. You had to learn yet another API that Microsoft might lose interest in.
3. Customers: no software. The ARM processor Surface can't run legacy Windows software at all. The Intel Surface can run legacy software, but not using the new UI. There is precious little new software that exploits the new UI.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The problem here is the shareholders are being fanboys first and businessmen a distant distant second.
The evidence is overwhelming that MS Mobile platform just isn't going to happen. They've tried everything they could think of multiple times, and no signs that there is anything more they can realistically do and expect a difference. As such, they need to do what they can to be relevant to the large market that matters rather than staying in denial.
Besides, being in hardware is not that appealing. It's full of low cost competitors and very well known brands with insurmountable brand strength. It can be a decent enough strategy if you don't have any way in on the software front, but if you have strength in the software side, you have a lot more lucrative prospects than the hardware side.
In the desktop era, MS overcame the competition by being able to pit the suppliers of hardware against each other and control the 'good' bits. Apple's success in mobile distracted them from this reality, and Google then out-did microsoft in the 'license to OEMs' game (by being free or near free depending, and banking on ongoing revonue).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sounds like Microsoft shareholder Dana Vance is f-ing clueless and needs to move on, get a new phone and let his company focus on something they might make money on, instead of pouring resources into something that has been shown to be a reliable way to lose money.
As much as I hate bullshit non-answers to relatively direct questions, I've got to hand it to this guy. He can come up with this shit on the spot.
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."
I mean, that's some high-quality, super fluid, eloquent bullshit right there. To come up with that from the top of your head. That's skill.
As an investor, I am sure you learn to read between the lines.
What is probably meant by "What we are going to do is focus that effort on places where we have differentiation" is that MS will work with their big clients to customize their mobile offerings to meet their needs.
Example: https://www.onmsft.com/news/35...
Also, their push toward UWP apps and continuum is a longer term strategy of convergence. Eventually, phones will take over from PCs.... not for at least a few years, but when they do, MS will have been unifying their platforms all that time so will be poised to take advantage.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I do love Windows Mobile, but I finally gave in and got an Android. MS is moving all of their consumer apps over there anyway.
I asked my family if anyone wanted my old Lumia 920 with Windows 10 on it. My sister, despite sever warnings, took me up on the offer. Then, at thanksgiving she is like "I can't get any apps on it..." I was like "I told you...." I have a feeling I will be getting it back at some point. Perhaps an Android is in her xmas future...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
. Eventually, phones will take over from PCs
Phones and tablets have already taken over in large areas. That ship has already sailed, and Microsoft missed it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Microsoft finally found out who bought the Windows Phone and the Microsoft Band that they sold! Yay!
Thanks, Dana!
Do you have ESP?
Which is why it was a bad idea to do all that in the first place.
Now that it has happened, all the shareholder objections about how it wastes money previously spent is chasing sunk cost. Shareholders saying 'stay the course' are being fanatical about a failed goal.
The money is gone and it isn't coming back. Throwing more money at the problem is just making the money pit worse.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What was he going to say? "Look you simpering moron, my predecessor wasted billions of dollars on that very strategy, and it failed utterly. Go buy a Galaxy or iPhone for fuck's sake."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What really killed it:
Hey developers - ya know that really cool language we made called C#? Well use it to develop really cool Silverlight apps that will run natively in any browser or on our phone! Go to it!!! ... 2 years later ...
Woops! Hey now developers... you know how we said to invest all your time and development strategies behind Silverlight? Yeah well now we're going to deprecate it and we're replacing it with C++/Metro/Windows Store. There is no migration path. So, you know, go to it!!!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Also, their push toward UWP apps and continuum is a longer term strategy of convergence. Eventually, phones will take over from PCs....
...and by that logic eventually cars will take over from trucks. For many people a truck (PC) was an overkill and a car (smartphone) suffices. By now almost all such people have made the switch and the remaining laptop/desktop users will never switch, because their needs are different.
To (over)extend the car analogy, you want the interface to cars and trucks to be similar, to facilitate adoption, but it likely will never be identical since their ultimate purpose is different. In that sense Apple got it right: make OSX and iOS similar, but separate. Microsoft instead tried to force the single window mode, which makes so much sense in a small screen device on the desktop with 30+ inch monitors.
Besides, the windows phone UI is ugly as hell. You basically have to be a Microsoft fan to actually want to use it.
I disagree. I wasn't a Microsoft fan when I switched to Windows Phone in late 2012 (hated Windows XP, skipped Vista, was forced to use 7). But the somewhat denser UI allowed me to break out of the tap in, tap in, tap in, back, back, back cycle that I was seemingly stuck in on iOS.
Plus I liked the tiles: resizable, repositionable, and they contained information.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.