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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.
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
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.
Microsoft is the largest software company in the world. It takes adding the market cap of the #2 through #7 largest software companies to match Microsoft (as of May 2016). They are smaller than the largest computer hardware company (Apple) and the largest computer services company (Alphabet) but they are certainly at the same order of magnitude of these companies.
Being the third largest company by market cap in the world is not something you have to come back from.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Translation: Microsoft is the smallest kid of the Big Players, and no longer has the influence it once had.
Microsoft's dominance now rests on Office/Backoffice. It's desktop dominance is a battle won, to be sure, but one whose returns are faltering.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If I were raking in billions in BS patent royalties from my competitors.
"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.