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

What about Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps?

[fgrieu]

Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps where supposed to run on Windows 10 Mobile. Do they remain relevant? Have they ever been?

I thought it was the same codebase?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's the same codebase, then no special work is needed for Windows 10 Mobile, it gets carried forward by work on Windows 10.

If it's the same codebase, then there is no "apps shortage", every Metro app written since Windows 8 should work just fine. That was the point of Metro, no?

If it's *not* the same codebase, then it should be called "Windows Phone".

Great, so you fucked up our UI for nothing?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Make phone with shitty UI.
2. Make you bread and butter funtion and look like the hated phone UI. To make people like the phone.
4. Stop making phone.
5. ?
6. Profit.

Re:Great, so you fucked up our UI for nothing?

[TheRaven64]

I'd disagree with step 1. Windows Phone had a pretty good UI (though using the same UI on laptop / desktop devices without touchscreens was horrible, and using a Frankenstein mix of that and the traditional Windows UI was even worse). The problem with Windows Mobile was always the lack of third-party apps, not the core functionality.

I'm still floored

[grasshoppa]

MS was handed a built in majority in the mobile market by way of their market penetration in business desktop and productivity software, and they apparently did everything they could to piss it away. The *moment* they saw what RIM was up to with the blackberry, they should have been thinking to themselves, "We could be doing that so much better, and providing a much better experience".

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.

Re:I'm still floored

[Rob Y.]

To be fair, they saw mobile. What they didn't see was Open Source mobile. According to the standard Microsoft playbook

  1. Microsoft would be in mobile - because they 'have' to be in everything, tech wise. But their offerings would have limited appeal - mostly to business execs.
  2. iOS would come out and redefine mobile
  3. Microsoft would observe iOS and see what it takes to be successful.
  4. Microsoft would make a system that works like iOS and sell it to OEM's at low enough prices that they would be the only viable alternative to iOS.

Google short-circuited that plan at step 4, and Android became what Windows mobile would've been. In fact Android's weakness (being Open Source, it was allowed to diverge enough from the 'standard' to make timely upgrades near impossible) was also it's biggest strength (allowing OEM's to attempt to differentiate themselves led to healthy competition and a great deal of innovation). Would there be hundreds of Windows Phone manufacturers, if all those phones had to be essentially the same on the inside? I don't know. Of course, now many of us would like Android phones to be as stock as possible - having witnessed the downside. But in any case, the alternative to iOS has been established, and Microsoft is at least smart enough to understand that now.

Re:"Apps"?

[110010001000]

What are you talking about? Even if you were being honest and never ever used apps you would make up about 0.00001% of smartphone users.

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.

Re:A burn Nokia

[Kiuas]

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.

You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10. The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.

The company panicked, and the investors panicked and saw the management as incapable of recovering from this tailspin. Elop was hired to turn the course, but instead of pushing Meego out asap they went with windows phones which sealed the fate of the company.

But the general point is this: Nokia had dug their own grave way before Elop. They didn't see the paradigm shift to smartphones early enough. I know that Nokia had its first prototypes of a touch screen operated smartphones in the works slightly after the turn of the century but the project was canned as too clunky/expensive. They weren't ready to compere with the iPhone, and they falsely assumed that they could maintain their market foothold with regular 'dumb' phones until they could switch from Symbian to Meego/something else but they did not expect the rapid pace of expansion of Apple into the market, or the rate at which dumb phones would lose relevance in the advanced economies especially.

Source: I know people that used to work for Nokia way back in its prime, as well as having studied the downfall of the company as part of my business administration studies here in Finland,

Re:A burn Nokia

[Uecker]

You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10.

This agrees with what I wrote. I think these number are what caused the panic reaction. But measuring percentage changes with a growing total is just a meaningless thing to do. Let's say you sell 50 items and one year and 90 next year. Somebody else realized this is a profitable business and sells 10 item (after selling 0 before). Then your market share dropped from 100% to 90% despite this being a very successful business.

The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.

This true except that Nokia still was highly profitable and the largest vendor. This would have been an excellent position to introduce Meego. Although earlier would have been better, I disagree with the statement that it would have been too late.

The company panicked, and the investors panicked and saw the management as incapable of recovering from this tailspin. Elop was hired to turn the course, but instead of pushing Meego out asap they went with windows phones which sealed the fate of the company.

Here I agree.

But the general point is this: Nokia had dug their own grave way before Elop.

Why? Again, they where highly profitable before Elop and already working on Meego. In my opinion, it is clear that they would just have to continue with this strategy and they would have been fine.

They didn't see the paradigm shift to smartphones early enough. I know that Nokia had its first prototypes of a touch screen operated smartphones in the works slightly after the turn of the century but the project was canned as too clunky/expensive. They weren't ready to compere with the iPhone, and they falsely assumed that they could maintain their market foothold with regular 'dumb' phones until they could switch from Symbian to Meego/something else but they did not expect the rapid pace of expansion of Apple into the market, or the rate at which dumb phones would lose relevance in the advanced economies especially.

I don't understand this. Symbian phones were not dump phones. Also when Nokia collapsed, it was Samsung and Android filling the void - not Apple. Meego was much better than Android. So why do you think it would have failed?

Source: I know people that used to work for Nokia way back in its prime, as well as having studied the downfall of the company as part of my business administration studies here in Finland,

Re:"Apps"?

[UnknowingFool]

The issue is that your work requirements are not everyone's work requirements. For example: email and calls. Yes. But I travel sometimes for work which means: At least a browser to book hotels, flights, rental cars. It means cab hailing apps sometimes. It also means a VPN app so I can get access to the company network when I'm on the road.

Now here's where apps help: Airline apps to check-in, book, upgrade, gate information. Hotel apps to check-in/check out, request service, get directions. Car rental apps to avoid the lines. I can do 100% of all those things with a browser and phone calls. It's much faster and more convenient to use apps.

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.

Yeah that really sucks...

[shaitand]

Imagine how much sympathy we all have for Microsoft having to face a target market completely locked in by one or two competitors.

I just switched after ~7 years of Windows Phone

[PhrostyMcByte]

I had Windows 7, 8, and 10 phones -- the Samsung Focus, Lumia 920, and Lumia 950.

7, 8, and 8.1 were great. Excellent UI -- better than Android or iPhone in my opinion. Very usable, clean, and never laggy. It could easily run smooth on hardware Android would choke on.

10 has been a horrible experience. For the two years I had my Lumia 950, I had constant problems. A patch would fix one thing and break another. Bluetooth never worked reliably. It somtimes became slow --- slow like Android was slow -- for seemingly no reason at all until a reboot. About a year into the phone, a patch came out that made GPS sporadically stop working until rebooting the phone -- which only exacerbated the Bluetooth issues, as the phone would often not reconnect to my car after a reboot.

I now have an LG V30 that I picked up a few days ago. It is one of the few headphones not only keeping the headphone jack, but doubling down on it by making it super high quality -- I want to vote with my wallet. I'm not happy to be using Android, but I am *extremely* happy to not be using Windows 10 Mobile.

I can only imagine the massive costs Microsoft eat as a result of their mobile lineup. 7 was an all new shell. 8 dumped that shell for a new one, and also brought in the NT kernel. And finally 10 dumped the mobile shell to make the same code shared between desktop and mobile. That was a huge amount of churn.

Re:What about Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app

[Rob Y.]

Whether Microsoft likes it or not, the future of Windows is Win32 apps. That's what forces people to keep using it, and almost nobody who has written an extensive Win32 app is going to rewrite it as a Metro app - though some will rewrite their apps as web apps, Android apps or iOS apps. The app store may someday be chock full of Win32 apps if their ChromeOS competitor ever takes off.

Microsoft has moved on - and their current focus seems to be to attempt to usurp Android, and 'own' it without having to own it. I don't expect great success there either - but if they're allowed to keep extorting patent fees from Android OEM's, they may be able to trade those for a bit of the OEM's souls... ...or maybe they'll just continue to shift their focus to the cloud - which after all, they can actually charge for.

Re:They did it to themselves

[TheRaven64]

Microsoft is in an unfortunate position because the thing that they don't like about their platform is the thing everyone else does. A load of the old Win32 APIs are horrible designs for security and make it very difficult to impose sensible sandboxing policies post-hoc. If you want to make a secure Windows system, then the best thing to do is throw a load of that away and move to a more modern set of APIs that are designed with security in mind from the start. There's only one problem with this: most people who run Windows do so because they like their Win32 apps and want to keep using them.

Re:Development

[mcrbids]

As a developer myself, I watched the clusterfu#! of Microsoft launching, then dropping, platform after platform... And every time they did that, I thanked myself for not investing in the previous platform!

Want to guess how much that made me want to invest in their next platform?

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".