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Microsoft Is Surprisingly Comfortable With Its New Place In a Mobile, Apple, and Android World (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The company that once held a mock funeral for the iPhone -- complete with dedicated "iPhone trashcans" -- now has a very different attitude about the company of Jobs. The Microsoft whose old CEO Steve Ballmer in 2007 famously predicted the iPhone had "no chance; no chance at all" of getting market share, now readily accepts and embraces a world where the iPhone and Android dominate personal computing. Microsoft talked a lot here at its Build 2017 developer conference about extending Windows experiences over to iOS and Android devices. And it's not just about fortifying Windows. Microsoft says it not only wants to connect with those foreign operating systems, but by bringing over functionality from Windows 10 (along with content) it hopes to "make those other devices better," as one Microsoft rep said in a press briefing yesterday. The developers here at Build cheered when Microsoft announced XAML Standard 1.0, which provides a single markup language to make user interfaces that work on Windows, iOS, and Android. In one demo, the company demonstrated how an enterprise sales app could be extended to an iOS device so someone could continue capturing a potential client's data on a mobile device. Windows not only sent over the client data that had already been captured, but also the business-app shell that had captured it.
Inter-operative user data collection and sharing. I'm so excited.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Seriously this is just PR fluff not front page stuff, Slashdot doesn't care what MS's mood ring says.
What surprised me was that they brazenly used the term "embrace" in the bought and paid for shill piece. Given the history of negativity associated with Microsoft's embrace, they should have sprung for a thesaurus and used a synonym. But... since when Microsoft has been clueful?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft are marketing idiots founded on a hackers dream now owned by the US Gov to help bring to light dissidents of all ilk.
It has been clear since MS has been using its Cortana management software to control and manage services, notifications, and hooks into contacts/mail/messages/etc on devices from different vendors running different operating systems that they wish to manage everything through their own platform, making users go through them to get things done.
Twinstiq, game news
They had their chance in the 90's to play nice but they decided to be assholes for 20 years, and now everyone hates them. There's no coming back from that, ever.
They've reached a kind of equilibrium, where all their corporate infighting has finally paralyzed them.
After two decades of talk about Linux on the desktop without any serious adoption of Linux by desktop users, Microsoft should be comfortable. The facts speak for themselves that the 2% market share of Linux is not and will never be a threat to Microsoft. There is no threat to their primary business.
Because I have no choice in the matter. Same as for Microsoft.
Everyone had a good laugh when a Microsoft Zune showed up in the "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2" movie. Not sure if the color was the infamous Zune Brown.
They may be comfortable with Android and iOS dominating the mobile world, but that's probably because they think they can get people to run Microsoft apps on their Android phones. They certainly seem pretty desperate to do that. I don't personally foresee great demand for "Windows Experience" Android phones, but stranger things have happened.
there are no chairs left to throw....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There are dumpster-loads, tanker-trailer, cruise ship loads of money to be made in these industries. They and others can be insanely profitable and yet not be dominant players. Just to be perceived as indispensable will make them rich, rich, rich. And if they are, in fact, ubiquitous, then well, the money will flow like a river.
Get over it, these companies and their products are just too intertwined in our lives to be anything but obscenely profitable. If that offends you, you know what to do.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If I were raking in billions in BS patent royalties from my competitors.
why write native apps for this when I can just use SalesForce or if I don't like their platform fees knock together my own web based CRM from angular/bootstrap and let it scale down to mobile?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They have no choice. It is either that, or else acknowledge that, without a de facto monopoly, they can't compete. Consider yourself, once again, middle-fingered, Microsoft.
"I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And MAGAs are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to find the toilet in the back of the trailer." -- Microsoft
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Expect any app produced using MS tools to miss useful functionality out. For instance on iOS, I suspect they will fail to fully support Autolayout, Dynamic Type and Accessibility at a minimum. The gap will only grow larger with time.
The apps will also be extremely slow as they load ridiculously large run-time libraries for c# and other MS techs that are larded down with tens of thousands of useless and un-used classes.
This will make MS cross-platform apps useless in the consumer market but probably viable in the corporate market where companies can push low-quality internally developed apps on employees.
"Microsoft says it not only wants to connect with those foreign operating systems, but by bringing over functionality from Windows 10 (along with content) it hopes to "make those other devices better,""
No, please... please don't "bring over 'functionality' from Win10... no, please, those foreign OS's are working *just fine*, they don't neeed WinFunc... (ie. code written by Sir Nose).
If in 15 years they can't improve the "functionality" of such core tools as the Services.exe or Performance monitor, and they keep fucking rearranging the goddamn interface *with every release*... causing UNTOLD HOURS of wasted time while poor sodding workers around the globe have to relearn basic tasks again and again... Then there's little they can "make better" on other systems.
Gawd help us.
WinCE was released in November 16, 1996 ... and yet they STILL couldn't do what Android did in 6 years: 2+ Billion devices.
So is MS finally comfortable with being a FAILURE in the mobile space?
Because that's all they have ever been, and ever will be.
Memo to MS: Keep your crappy Windows software off mobiles phones -- because you don't know what the fuck you are doing.
Microsoft is the one tech power that can keep Silicon Valley in check. Silicon Valley, as you may know, is becoming ever more corrupt and drunk with power. Alphabet is called alphabet because of the alphabet federal agencies which built it. Pay attention! Soros has moles inside the company whose only purpose is to sabotage forward-thinking products the same way globalists cripple the U.S. so China can get ahead. Why the hell else would they buy Nokia's phone division and immediately destroy it like a child?
Embrace Extend Extinguish
"iPhone and Android" do NOT dominate personal computing. Just Android. iPhone still has very little market share. When will people get this through their heads? iPhone is still basically a niche market. Thankfully, it's all about Linux now, primarily powered by Android.
>Microsoft Is Surprisingly Comfortable With Its New Place...
Well that's right, Microsoft IS surprised. We are not.
And MS must get comfortable where it can... therefore it is satisfied with itself.
This is like a schoolyard bully who grows up and realizes he's done bad, but somewhere along the line he forgave himself and now wants to associate with us.
But if given the chance, will bully again.
You ARE unclean. You read a sneaky ad for Microsoft.
Take a shower. There is, however, no cure for the brain damage.
Yesterday's Slashdot Microsoft ad: Why Doesn't Harvard Want To Talk About Its Mystery Microsoft Azure Project?
Funny, MS is following open source yet again. Qt has had functionality for iOS and Android for years now, and with QML it's possible to target multiple devices all over - from Android to iOS to Windows to Linux to Mac - all with a combined code-base and UI framework.