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Microsoft's Nadella Says Company Will Make More Phones, But They Won't Look Like Today's Devices (zdnet.com)
As he told the Make Me Smart podcast, Microsoft is looking for something far more transformative, like an entirely new category of smartphone that's so original and appealing that OEMs won't be able to resist tagging along. From a report: "At this point we're making sure that all of our software is available on iOS and Android and it's first class and we're looking for what's the next change in form and function," he said when asked whether Microsoft would make another phone. Nadella doesn't discuss what form these mobile devices could take, though Microsoft does have some candidates, like its HoloLens augmented reality (AR) headgear. No doubt he's keeping close tabs on Google's early progress with its Tango phone AR experiments.
That's been their MO for several decades. Someone comes out with a hot product, they copy it, pour gobs of money on marketing it, take losses for the first few years, but eventually take over the market. Unfortunately for them, that MO usually worked because they were able to leverage their Windows monopoly to help the product gain acceptance (Office, Internet Explorer, disk compression, disk encryption, etc). The Xbox is one of their few successes at this independent of Windows, Zune probably the most notable failure.
It would've been a lot easier for them if they'd actually thought ahead to what the future might bring, instead of copying others. Back in the 1990s they managed to displace Palm as the market leader for PDA OSes (by copying Palm but promising to make their OS share the Windows API). By the late 1990s it was obvious to most everyone that PDAs and phones would converge. All Microsoft had to do was add phone support to WinCE (which became Windows Mobile). But a few WinCE PDA companies tried to add phone functionality to their PDAs, and got no help from Microsoft. Their products were panned by reviewers for failing to work consistently as a phone, which is kinda important since phones are historically very reliable. The new smartphone market instead ended up being taken over by Blackberry (in North America) and Nokia (in Europe) who added PDA capability to their phones. And Microsoft has been trying to play catch-up ever since.
They'll keep wasting billions on personal computers... and get no where. That ship has sailed, and the Apple ][ and Commodore 64 own the personal computer market. But M$ will toss endless amounts of money after it in a vain hope to gain traction, much like they keep pouring money into MS BASIC to no end.
Microsoft wasn't pushing the DOS-based PC, they were selling DOS to IBM, who used their dominance in the business computing market to push it and Microsoft rode their coat tails.
They'll keep wasting billions on GUI desktops... and get no where. That ship has sailed, and the Macintosh and IBM's OS/2 own the GUI desktop market. But M$ will toss endless amounts of money after it in a vain hope to gain traction, much like they keep pouring money into DOS to no end.
Windows 3 had a dominant market position before OS/2 shipped. The Mac had an advantage, but Microsoft could sell Windows as a DOS upgrade to a huge installed base, whereas switching to a Mac required buying a new machine. As long as DOS (specifically, DOS-running PC clones) were controlling the business computing market, they were able to leverage one monopoly to gain another.
They'll keep wasting billions on word processing... and get no where. That ship has sailed, and Wordperfect owns the word processing market. But M$ will toss endless amounts of money after it in a vain hope to gain traction, much like they keep pouring money into Windows to no end.
Word for DOS didn't get much traction and Microsoft changed APIs at the last minute to break the Wordperfect port to Windows, giving them a first-mover advantage. Once again, leveraging one monopoly to gain another.
They'll keep wasting billions on video game consoles... and get no where. That ship has sailed, and Nintendo and Sony own the video game console market. But M$ will toss endless amounts of money after it in a vain hope to gain traction, much like they keep pouring money into the Zune to no end.
With this one you have a point, except that the network effects for consoles are a lot less than with smartphones. People expect (or, at least, expected) that a new console would come with new games, so not being able to run legacy apps wasn't a problem. Even then, Microsoft was only able to do this because they used almost the same APIs as Windows and so made it easy to port Windows games (of which there were a lot) to the XBox. They were also able to throw a few billion at getting the market share. In contrast, people now expect to be able to run their existing Smartphone apps on their new phone, or at least to get the equivalent version. Not only are there not many Windows Phone apps, far fewer new ones are being written.
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"Success" only in the sense that it wasn't an outright failure. Xbox never "took over the market" like Microsoft's more Windows-centric conquests. The Playstation 2 massively outsold the original Xbox, which only just edged out the GameCube. The Playstation 3 was neck and neck with the Xbox 360, both of which got outsold by the Wii. The Xbox One has lost decisively to the Playstation 4 and has been outsold by the Wii U.