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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
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
Because I have no choice in the matter. Same as for Microsoft.
Since when do you speak for Slashdot? I find the post interesting and relevant. That doesn't mean I'll run Windows 10 though.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
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
I say make them sit in the comfy chair!!
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Only paranoid nerds hate them. The rest of us couldn't care less.
Seriously this is just PR fluff not front page stuff, Slashdot doesn't care what MS's mood ring says.
Yes they do. Microsoft stories generate craploads of traffic for slashdot all the time because despite people like you saying that you don't care you'll still go and read it, then go into the comments and post about it. They get you EVERY SINGLE TIME.
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?
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.
Yes, there is: it's called "mobile devices". More and more people are just giving up on desktop/laptop computers (or keeping them and never upgrading or replacing them) and using mobile devices for their home usage.
It's kinda sad because mobile devices are so limited in what they can do, and can't be programmed (you have to load apps from the walled-garden app store), but owning and maintaining a Windows computer is such a chore and an expense (calling Geek Squad to make a personal visit every time you have a problem gets expensive quickly) that it makes perfect sense why people would want an appliance for internet usage. Even MS is trying to go this way with Windows 10 S, which can only run apps from the Windows app store, but I think it's very unlikely this will turn out well for them because people have abandoned Windows for the Apple/Android devices because it has a poor reputation for viruses etc., and another such device named "Windows" from Microsoft isn't going to convince them that it's different this time.
What better way to prop up the desktop business than by embracing the largest mobile platforms?
I know it sounds like buzzword compliance, but if they can create mobile/desktop synergy that improves the user experience it could keep desktop OS in good shape for years to come.
I also think this is also aimed a lot at Google. It wouldn't surprise me if some of this enthusiasm for iOS wasn't the result of a back room deal that guaranteed MacOS relevance within the Office world as well as further guaranteeing access to ActiveSync and O365 for iOS. IMHO, a lot of the iPhone's continued acceptance is tied to the generally excellent ActiveSync support it has.
If it worked less well the next time MS decided to enhance Exchange and especially O365, those expensive iOS devices would get a lot less popular with a lot of people.
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.
Office/Backoffice and the Stockholm Syndrome.
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.
Re-route your encryption elsewhere buddy!
"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.
"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.