Microsoft Exec Says Windows 10 Mobile is No Longer a 'Focus' (engadget.com)

From a report: Microsoft's Joe Belfiore informed Twitter users that new features and hardware for Windows 10 Mobile "aren't the focus" any more. There will be fixes and security patches, of course, but you shouldn't expect more than that. As for why the platform has been all but dropped? The executive boils it down to one main reason: the difficulty of getting developers to write apps. Microsoft tried paying companies to produce apps and even wrote them itself when creators couldn't or wouldn't get involved, but the number of users was "too low for most companies to invest." Why build an app for a relatively small bunch of Windows phone owners when there are many more Android and iOS users? Belfiore himself switched to Android for the "app/[hardware] diversity." It's a bit more complicated than that, of course. You can point to a few other factors in Windows' fate on phones, such as slowness in responding to Apple and Google as well as an inconsistent hardware strategy (you could rarely count on getting a timely sequel to a handset you liked). Whatever the reason, it's safe to say that Microsoft isn't just acknowledging that Android and iOS hold a clear lead -- it's quashing any hopes for a comeback, at least for the foreseeable future.

Comments

A burn Nokia

[DrYak]

Instead, they let RIM eat their lunch, then Apple, then Google. All the while kinda half-assing multiple doomed attempts in what is reminiscent of a shakespearean tragedy.

And managed to burn Nokia in the process (who were in a very strong position before Stephan Elop and Microsoft happened to them).

Re:A burn Nokia

[Uecker]

You remember incorrectly. I followed this story very closely at that time. Nokia was not only - by far - the largest smartphone vendor, it also was the fastest growing smartphone vendor in absolute number (different analysts published numbers). The smartphone unit was also extremely profitable (the numbers are also public). Nokia also had an new mobile platform in the pipeline (Meego) as a replacement for their older Symbian smartphone OS with several phones nearly finished (only the N9 was then sold which got stellar reviews and some prestigious awards.) They had a convincing plan to transition developers from Symbian to Meego via Qt. They had some initial set of working apps for Meego including third party apps. And all this at a time where Android was still small. .

It is also true that they had no significant presence in the US. They also lost market share in smartphones. (Despite growing fastest in absolute numbers. This may happen if the overall market grows rapidly and new players enter the market.) For some reasons (some say large investors from the US pressured them), they hired Stephen Elop. Stephen Elop cancelled Meego, declared Symbian obsolete already before a replacement was ready, and switched to Windows Phone which alienated their workforce and customers. Sales immediately collapsed. (Who would by a phone with a OS the vendor himself has declared obsolete?) Only the N9 was brought to market and it sold well in the few markets it was released in (no major market). Windows Phone never cathched on and smartphone unit never recovered. Samsung came and filled the void. Later the smartphone unit was sold to Microsoft.

They needed to focus on X86 on ARM

[Deathlizard]

The best thing MS could've done to save the platform is to focus on running x86 on ARM. At least at that point, phones like the HP Elite x3 would have made sense.

Unfortunately, with HP pulling the plug on the x3 and no real focus on the ARM platform other than as a novelty as well as Intel threatening lawsuits over x86 emulation over ARM, The windows phone market (as well as Windows on ARM for the most part) is all but officially dead.

Re:"Apps"?

[Kjella]

I doubt that. There have to be a decent percentage of people who just use a phone for work only.

You seem to assume apps are just for fun and games. Even our very traditional organization with very limited work needs have added the time tracking and travel expense system as an app (in addition to the desktop version), from what I understand it's quite popular because you can use it for all off-site meetings and stuff and you can fill out your travel expenses as you go. Pay a taxi bill, go to your expense form and type in amount, take a photo of the reciept and done. As opposed to having a stack to process when you get back to the office. Heck, if the last leg is a fixed price like the bus/train from the airport you can be done before you even get home.

Re:Development

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Microsoft-stack developer, I never got started on this path. I still, to this day, have WinCE/WinMo/WinEH programs that I have to maintain.

WinCE is still supported until 2020. But development for it got a LOT more difficult under Windows 10, and then EVEN MORE difficult with the 1703 (Creators Update) version of Windows 10. Development for that old-ass platform requires VS2008 (VS2010 broke compatibility with a lot of tools). VS2008 uses ActiveSync/WMDC to deploy code to a test device. (And I have to use a test device because device emulators lack real-world features like barcode imagers and such.) But WMDC support was dropped in 2012.

So when Win10 came out, it broke compatibility with the WMDC application up to and including the version you can download and install from the web... but not the version that had a hotfix to make it work with Windows 8.0 that installs automatically through Windows Update when you plug in a WMDC-able device. The fix was to make sure you NEVER installed WMDC manually, but instead, allowed it to install automatically when you plug in a device.

Oh, but it gets better... When the Creators Update (Win10 r.1703) came out, they made svchost.exe stop hosting things together by default, since, in theory, this makes services more stable and less prone to being taken down by a service in the same host instance. But this broke the services that WMDC uses to communicate with devices through USB. WcesComm and RapiMgr use a common mutex for some reason, which ensures that they either MUST be running under the same svchost.exe instance, or else the late-comer (whichever one starts last) will crash. So to make these work under 1703, you have to add a registry flag to tell SCM to NOT separate them into separate instances of svchost.exe. This makes these processes crashy AF, so you then have to set the "if it crashes more than twice" option to "just restart the stupid POS" in the service properties.

I have yet to be "forced" to adopt any of these newer platforms or frameworks. I have yet to ship even one project with any XAML code. I never touched Silverlight, WP7, WP8, or "Metro". I've dabbled a bit with UWP. (Good job mischaracterizing all of these things completely, though. It's great that you confuse languages, frameworks, platforms, and UI guidelines as all the same thing.) In the near future, I'll probably be "forced" to develop replacements for these WinCE/WinMo/WinEH apps for Android and/or iOS. I'll be using Xamarin, because, honestly, C# is a damned fine language and I just don't want to be bothered writing multiple different apps in multiple different languages, and with a different language on the back-end, too. There's just no good reason to adopt Java or Swift when you already use C# and Xamarin is available.

And in case you didn't notice, Xamarin is the next step in UWP. It will remove the "W".