It takes a special kind of vision to turn a half-trillion dollar company that earns $2B a month profits into the Microsoft you see before you today. It takes the sort of drive to expand into new markets by buying up valuable mindspace visionary companies and fold them into your current offerrings in a way that drives the new levels of shareholder value they have achieved. The company has a long road ahead, and a great deal to overcome to become what we hope of it. Microsoft will need a great many more victories like this one to find their place in history.
Apparently, Microsoft is so worried about the lack of developer interest they're offerring substantial incentives to iPhone developers to port their apps. The original source is here. Apparently these incentives are taking the form of prepaid commissions.
Not that it matters. This one is over already, and the product isn't even shipped. Here's the Engadget piece:
The dev that allegedly contacted PocketGamer.biz about the offer turned it down, saying the financial compensation was "substantial" but ultimately not enough for the amount of work he'd have to put into it -- so this might just be a question of how badly Microsoft wants to come roaring out of the gate with a great catalog of apps.
I wonder how many billions they're willing to dump down this hole. I hope we get to find out.
I suspect they started with the price-point "Free with Contract" and delivered as much as they could cutting whatever corners they had to cut to get there.
Kin One - the cheapest of the two - launched at $50 with contract, not "Free with Contract". And the contract required an expensive data plan. The fact that they targeted it at the youth market, and told everybody so, isn't helping. The last think teens want is stuff that's targeted for them. Duh. To paint the current price as the planned price is disingenuous on your part - it's discounted now because it didn't take off and it's better to give the initial production run away than feed them to a chipper. Maybe in a couple weeks they'll pay you to take them.
If you think Kin isn't hurting the Windows Phone 7 brand you're confused. Kin is Windows Phone 7 lite. Kin's complete and utter implosion in the market is a leading indicator of how Windows Phone 7 is going to do once it's released. It's fail. It's epic fail. It's a head-on trainwreck in slow motion with trial lawyers on one train and BP executives on the other - it has us rooting for Newton's laws of motion. It's delicious. The only thing better would be if the Kins start to spontaneously combust.
Just scanning all this informed and insightful slashdot opinion makes me happy. As Windows Phone 7 is revealed I can only hope that it meets - and even possibly exceeds our expectations. I love this thread so much. The next six months are going to be priceless.
For sure if the marketing efforts keep up with recent history we can look forward to some legendary videos that are in hindsight even better than on release day.
MS should sit on Windows Phone 7 until they can make it feature complete.
If you wait until it's perfect you'll never ship product. Ship it now and improve it later. It's the One Microsoft Way. They can't afford to wait: they needed to launch this platform two years ago. If they had shipped then it would be "fixed" by now.
Seriously - they're doing great. Let's not give them any more help, ok?
It matters a lot to the people who have used prior devices built on WinCE. People have a pretty strong consensus about that.
It's obvious that the thing is going to launch with no ISV apps to speak of - it's a clean break from prior WinMo so prior apps don't work at all. If you want to make apps for it they have to be completely recoded with Silverlight, and not full Silverlight either, but the mobile one so existing Silverlight apps don't work either. With so much critical mobile functionality broken out the gate, bread-and-butter apps like navi aren't going to work (without a working compass, you can't orient the map). No copy/paste, no multitasking... if it lines up with the Kin it'll ship with no instant messaging app. Cloud backing for auto-uploading huge pictures on cloud services to run out your 3G data plan... that's great.
I am so looking forward to this. It's lining up to be one of the most fabulous IT disasters of all time. We're going to be talking about this one long after Vista is forgotten.
It was Microsoft's marketing department that made this link, not me. If it doesn't leverage the comarketing efforts in the way they desired that's not my fault. It's theirs.
Very good - you found the source of the quote. Now read it. Follow the citation links. It doesn't say what you think it says. Here, I'll give you another snippet:
Microsoft said that the underlying fundamentals of Kin and Windows Phone 7 will be held together by similar core technologies. Both Kin and Windows Phone 7 run the same Silverlight platform. Microsoft has stated that over the long-term, Windows Phone 7 would be merged with Kin.
They are like enough for the similarities to be meaningful. Microsoft is going to be able to use the runaway success of the Kin as a springboard for their Windows Phone 7 launch. The result should be epic.
"Both KIN and Windows Phone 7 share common OS components, software and services. We will seek to align around a single platform for both products as well as consistent hardware specifications."
Rumor has it they're selling hundreds of the first Windows Phone 7 handsets, the Kin, each month. It's a runaway hit. With all these new choices they might launch that up into the thousands. Watch out Apple and Android, Microsoft is back in the mobile game and they're ready to rumble.
It is a very fine article - do read it. Apparently the compass doesn't work, but it's required on every device. That's going to make it hard to have a credible mapping application. It retains Windows CE at its core. The project leader's biggest hope is to "survive the launch," not amaze us with their brilliance.
This comment from the article was particularly insightful:
by peterpulmonary June 17, 2010 7:12 AM PDT the only reason to allow this type of exposure is to reduce expectations.
Apple's update to detect "HellRTS" more than doubles the size of the XProtect.plist file from 2.4k to 5.1k. There are still a lot of Mac threats it doesn't protect against.
Oh, noes! Now there are TWO automatically detected and prevented pieces of malware written for OS-X. All hope of securing your Mac is lost. Best to go back to Windows where it's safe.
There's going to be lots of these spurious reports. "Any means necessary" to stop iPhone and 'droid. If you can't find anything real make up something credible. If you can't make up something credible, lie. The WiMo folks are up against the wall and they're desperate. They're as friendly as a rat in a can. The sweat from their hopeless efforts is a fragrance to be cherished. Delight in their despair - it's the air of freedom.
If I were betting I would bet that between them they wouldn't move 600,000 units ever, total, even if they gave the phones away - and that's the preorders for the fourth generation iPhone for the first day sight unseen - and only because they ran out of preorder available equipment and demand crashed the servers. Based on the Kin 600,000 units for Windows Mobile Phone 7 ever looks optimistic even spread over the entire lifecycle if it ran a thousand years. Hell, 16,000 units for all the various platforms altogether looks optimistic. Not enough market for developers to be interested unless they're deeply subsidized - and to quote Steve Ballmer: "Developers!" (x60).
I think maybe people are smarter than you think they are. Would you like a Kin phone? You can get it cheap. Apparently in the past month since physical availability not one Amazon user has cared enough to even review the thing, even though you can now buy it for a penny ($349.98 off retail). Even the Microsoft haters don't care enough to log into their Amazon accounts to bash the thing, though you can be sure they will in the next day. Reports are that the platform (both Kin One and Kin Two) have moved an astounding 500 units in that month. Worldwide. That's not even one per store. Hell, that's not even one per member of the team that designed and produced the freaking thing. Just the marketing team probably has more than 500 members and even they can't be persuaded to buy it. The number is not very credible, but it's the only number we'll ever see because there's no way Microsoft is going to tell us the actual scale of their failure, and they can't deny the rumor without giving the number.
At some point in the next year a C?O is going to be troubleshooting his PC by pointing the user-side webcam of his iPhone or 'Droid at the inscrutable error display in an attempt to show exactly how his PC failed him to tech support. That'll happen with hundreds of CIOs, CEOs and CTOs, and then one accidentally freakishly intelligent member of that population will have the epiphany: the desktop sucks because it's using the wrong software, and the phone doesn't because it isn't. He'll fix it, and tell his friends, and they'll tell their friends. And then our long national nightmare will be over.
I'm thinking that Windows Phone 7 is going to be such a gorgeous failure that it will serve as a lesson to others throughout three decades of tech. It's looking like a trainwreck on the scale of a Hilton/Lohan/Spears girl's night out. It's Glitter meets Waterworld meets Uwe Boll, to give a cinematic reference. I'd make a car analogy, but such a disaster in the annals of automotive engineering doesn't come to mind. It's going to be lovely. I wish the Internet had a record button so I could replay this trainwreck over and over in slow motion in my declining years. It will be epic.
Only he has the visionary genius to lead Microsoft through the challenges ahead, to the outcome we so desperately need. Just one more year should do it. Leave the man alone - he's working.
They can pay or cajole OEMs to build with their OS all they want. The phones are no danger to progress if they sit there on the shelf unbought, and that's where they're headed. The mobile wars aren't over, but Microsoft is not even in the game at all. I don't even know why we're still discussing them. Their numbers are lumped in with "other".
The cool thing is that people are now looking at their reliable, capable, virus-free non-frustrating phones and tablets and asking the question that terrifies Microsoft most: "Why doesn't my laptop work this well?". This answers itself of course. It's written right on the quadcolor flag sticker.
The quote that you refute with "nonsense. Stop being stupid.": " More citizens have been killed by their OWN government, than by foreign invasion"
You're probably wrong here. Lysenkoism killed many, as did some failed Lysenko inspired farming practices under Mao, and Pol Pot killed many too. If you include poor civil management which could have been avoided given the science of the day that caused famine, plague and war, it's an easy case to make. Consider that citizens of captured countries usually are considered citizens of the vassal states and so have some claim to citizenship and it's a slam dunk.
This is off topic and I expect it to be moderated that way - but I didn't want you to to get away with calling BS on well documented history without at least a rebuttal. The US founding fathers knew that the greatest danger to the life, liberty and happiness of the people wasn't a foreign enemy: it was a government run amok. Read up.
The only thing worse than a despot that despises his people and kills them with tyranny and mismanagement is an educated and insightful democratic government that provides a great environment of freedom for the common man, but fails to provide for the common defense and so submits their people to the subjugation, rapine and pillaging of barbarians. See: ancient Greece.
As for my karma points, I'll get them back elsewhere in the thread educating people about Oracle's licensing practices. If you're moderating that's an easy bulletproof "off topic" mod so knock yourself out - I'll add some points to it so a few of you can have a whack.
It's something like 69% by bandwidth. (A statistic I made up just now, as is my right as a traditionally recognized slashdot statistific artist.)
The reason why your Internet seems more populated by porn than this survey is that the Internet is indexed. That the Google search "ameture handcuff oral" returns exactly 0 hits from nasa.gov, ieee.org or acm.org isn't Google's fault, nor NASA's, nor IEEE's nor the ACM's. Well, it is, but only tangentally.
/now would someone please fix the messed up comment submission form in slashcode for the traditional format? This tiny box is really lame.
Oracle is a very complex product and its licensing is appropriately complex. There's a form that your Oracle Guidance Counsellor (OGC) helps you fill out with various metrics like the number of processors and cores, megabytes of RAM, network connections, sizes of datastores and their bandwidth, and related customer metrics. They then use a set of finely honed matrix pricing tools, in the use of which they are meticulously trained, to produce the ideal licensing structure for each use, to maximize customer ROI. In this matrix, customer specific discounts are applied last, and of course the GSA is the Most Favored Customer, and so gets the greatest discount.
The problem lies before that, with the "CDP" metric, or "Customer Depth of Pocket". This one metric scores 94% of the subtotal, and since the US Federal government has deeper pockets than anyone else of course they're going to max the scale here. Naturally this is going to skew the outcome somewhat, but not unfairly so. The GSA's OGC just needs to get back up there and explain it again the way they covered it in the year 3 course in OGC Acadamy. Pricing 328: Value pricing for large government customers.
Google could probably release an exploit like this every day if they wanted to - or ten of them. They index the Internet, and that includes the nasty corners where such things are as common as rude pictures on 4chan. Why should they care? They don't use Windows internally any more.
Well can you blame them? For every one they patch dozens more spring up. It must seem like a hopeless task. Can you imagine the global freakout that would transpire if by some miracle they patched 10,000 bugs on one patch Tuesday, pushing what's essentially a reinstall.iso through Windows update? People would be leaping from windows. The Internet would melt. I'm sure you don't want them to go back to pushing patches every day either.
They'll patch a few once a month just to give the Windows admins something to do, and then after a couple years come out with a new version "Now with enhanced security!" and then we'll repeat the cycle. Again. Don't worry - be happy. It has always been this way. It will always be this way.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a glitch in your sarcasm detector. You should fix that.
How great can they possibly be doing?
It takes a special kind of vision to turn a half-trillion dollar company that earns $2B a month profits into the Microsoft you see before you today. It takes the sort of drive to expand into new markets by buying up valuable mindspace visionary companies and fold them into your current offerrings in a way that drives the new levels of shareholder value they have achieved. The company has a long road ahead, and a great deal to overcome to become what we hope of it. Microsoft will need a great many more victories like this one to find their place in history.
For all of me, it can't happen fast enough.
I guess the market will decide ultimately.
Truer words were never writ.
Apparently, Microsoft is so worried about the lack of developer interest they're offerring substantial incentives to iPhone developers to port their apps. The original source is here. Apparently these incentives are taking the form of prepaid commissions.
Not that it matters. This one is over already, and the product isn't even shipped. Here's the Engadget piece:
The dev that allegedly contacted PocketGamer.biz about the offer turned it down, saying the financial compensation was "substantial" but ultimately not enough for the amount of work he'd have to put into it -- so this might just be a question of how badly Microsoft wants to come roaring out of the gate with a great catalog of apps.
I wonder how many billions they're willing to dump down this hole. I hope we get to find out.
I took the trouble to write up some reference material for you about a month ago. You should read it.
Prior performance is no guarantee of future results, but that's where the smart money bets.
I suspect they started with the price-point "Free with Contract" and delivered as much as they could cutting whatever corners they had to cut to get there.
Kin One - the cheapest of the two - launched at $50 with contract, not "Free with Contract". And the contract required an expensive data plan. The fact that they targeted it at the youth market, and told everybody so, isn't helping. The last think teens want is stuff that's targeted for them. Duh. To paint the current price as the planned price is disingenuous on your part - it's discounted now because it didn't take off and it's better to give the initial production run away than feed them to a chipper. Maybe in a couple weeks they'll pay you to take them.
If you think Kin isn't hurting the Windows Phone 7 brand you're confused. Kin is Windows Phone 7 lite. Kin's complete and utter implosion in the market is a leading indicator of how Windows Phone 7 is going to do once it's released. It's fail. It's epic fail. It's a head-on trainwreck in slow motion with trial lawyers on one train and BP executives on the other - it has us rooting for Newton's laws of motion. It's delicious. The only thing better would be if the Kins start to spontaneously combust.
Just scanning all this informed and insightful slashdot opinion makes me happy. As Windows Phone 7 is revealed I can only hope that it meets - and even possibly exceeds our expectations. I love this thread so much. The next six months are going to be priceless.
For sure if the marketing efforts keep up with recent history we can look forward to some legendary videos that are in hindsight even better than on release day.
MS should sit on Windows Phone 7 until they can make it feature complete.
If you wait until it's perfect you'll never ship product. Ship it now and improve it later. It's the One Microsoft Way. They can't afford to wait: they needed to launch this platform two years ago. If they had shipped then it would be "fixed" by now.
Seriously - they're doing great. Let's not give them any more help, ok?
And of course good DRM will make sure people don't reflash their Droid X to the new Windows Phone 7 software without paying the license fee.
It matters a lot to the people who have used prior devices built on WinCE. People have a pretty strong consensus about that.
It's obvious that the thing is going to launch with no ISV apps to speak of - it's a clean break from prior WinMo so prior apps don't work at all. If you want to make apps for it they have to be completely recoded with Silverlight, and not full Silverlight either, but the mobile one so existing Silverlight apps don't work either. With so much critical mobile functionality broken out the gate, bread-and-butter apps like navi aren't going to work (without a working compass, you can't orient the map). No copy/paste, no multitasking... if it lines up with the Kin it'll ship with no instant messaging app. Cloud backing for auto-uploading huge pictures on cloud services to run out your 3G data plan... that's great.
I am so looking forward to this. It's lining up to be one of the most fabulous IT disasters of all time. We're going to be talking about this one long after Vista is forgotten.
It was Microsoft's marketing department that made this link, not me. If it doesn't leverage the comarketing efforts in the way they desired that's not my fault. It's theirs.
It's too late to undo it. They are linked.
Very good - you found the source of the quote. Now read it. Follow the citation links. It doesn't say what you think it says. Here, I'll give you another snippet:
Microsoft said that the underlying fundamentals of Kin and Windows Phone 7 will be held together by similar core technologies. Both Kin and Windows Phone 7 run the same Silverlight platform. Microsoft has stated that over the long-term, Windows Phone 7 would be merged with Kin.
They are like enough for the similarities to be meaningful. Microsoft is going to be able to use the runaway success of the Kin as a springboard for their Windows Phone 7 launch. The result should be epic.
From the first link:
"Both KIN and Windows Phone 7 share common OS components, software and services. We will seek to align around a single platform for both products as well as consistent hardware specifications."
You can't have it both ways.
Rumor has it they're selling hundreds of the first Windows Phone 7 handsets, the Kin, each month. It's a runaway hit. With all these new choices they might launch that up into the thousands. Watch out Apple and Android, Microsoft is back in the mobile game and they're ready to rumble.
It is a very fine article - do read it. Apparently the compass doesn't work, but it's required on every device. That's going to make it hard to have a credible mapping application. It retains Windows CE at its core. The project leader's biggest hope is to "survive the launch," not amaze us with their brilliance.
This comment from the article was particularly insightful:
by peterpulmonary June 17, 2010 7:12 AM PDT the only reason to allow this type of exposure is to reduce expectations.
Apple's update to detect "HellRTS" more than doubles the size of the XProtect.plist file from 2.4k to 5.1k. There are still a lot of Mac threats it doesn't protect against.
Oh, noes! Now there are TWO automatically detected and prevented pieces of malware written for OS-X. All hope of securing your Mac is lost. Best to go back to Windows where it's safe.
There's going to be lots of these spurious reports. "Any means necessary" to stop iPhone and 'droid. If you can't find anything real make up something credible. If you can't make up something credible, lie. The WiMo folks are up against the wall and they're desperate. They're as friendly as a rat in a can. The sweat from their hopeless efforts is a fragrance to be cherished. Delight in their despair - it's the air of freedom.
If I were betting I would bet that between them they wouldn't move 600,000 units ever, total, even if they gave the phones away - and that's the preorders for the fourth generation iPhone for the first day sight unseen - and only because they ran out of preorder available equipment and demand crashed the servers. Based on the Kin 600,000 units for Windows Mobile Phone 7 ever looks optimistic even spread over the entire lifecycle if it ran a thousand years. Hell, 16,000 units for all the various platforms altogether looks optimistic. Not enough market for developers to be interested unless they're deeply subsidized - and to quote Steve Ballmer: "Developers!" (x60).
You forgot Zombo.com. Everything is possible at zombocom.
I think maybe people are smarter than you think they are. Would you like a Kin phone? You can get it cheap. Apparently in the past month since physical availability not one Amazon user has cared enough to even review the thing, even though you can now buy it for a penny ($349.98 off retail). Even the Microsoft haters don't care enough to log into their Amazon accounts to bash the thing, though you can be sure they will in the next day. Reports are that the platform (both Kin One and Kin Two) have moved an astounding 500 units in that month. Worldwide. That's not even one per store. Hell, that's not even one per member of the team that designed and produced the freaking thing. Just the marketing team probably has more than 500 members and even they can't be persuaded to buy it. The number is not very credible, but it's the only number we'll ever see because there's no way Microsoft is going to tell us the actual scale of their failure, and they can't deny the rumor without giving the number.
At some point in the next year a C?O is going to be troubleshooting his PC by pointing the user-side webcam of his iPhone or 'Droid at the inscrutable error display in an attempt to show exactly how his PC failed him to tech support. That'll happen with hundreds of CIOs, CEOs and CTOs, and then one accidentally freakishly intelligent member of that population will have the epiphany: the desktop sucks because it's using the wrong software, and the phone doesn't because it isn't. He'll fix it, and tell his friends, and they'll tell their friends. And then our long national nightmare will be over.
I'm thinking that Windows Phone 7 is going to be such a gorgeous failure that it will serve as a lesson to others throughout three decades of tech. It's looking like a trainwreck on the scale of a Hilton/Lohan/Spears girl's night out. It's Glitter meets Waterworld meets Uwe Boll, to give a cinematic reference. I'd make a car analogy, but such a disaster in the annals of automotive engineering doesn't come to mind. It's going to be lovely. I wish the Internet had a record button so I could replay this trainwreck over and over in slow motion in my declining years. It will be epic.
Only he has the visionary genius to lead Microsoft through the challenges ahead, to the outcome we so desperately need. Just one more year should do it. Leave the man alone - he's working.
They can pay or cajole OEMs to build with their OS all they want. The phones are no danger to progress if they sit there on the shelf unbought, and that's where they're headed. The mobile wars aren't over, but Microsoft is not even in the game at all. I don't even know why we're still discussing them. Their numbers are lumped in with "other".
The cool thing is that people are now looking at their reliable, capable, virus-free non-frustrating phones and tablets and asking the question that terrifies Microsoft most: "Why doesn't my laptop work this well?". This answers itself of course. It's written right on the quadcolor flag sticker.
The quote that you refute with "nonsense. Stop being stupid.": " More citizens have been killed by their OWN government, than by foreign invasion"
You're probably wrong here. Lysenkoism killed many, as did some failed Lysenko inspired farming practices under Mao, and Pol Pot killed many too. If you include poor civil management which could have been avoided given the science of the day that caused famine, plague and war, it's an easy case to make. Consider that citizens of captured countries usually are considered citizens of the vassal states and so have some claim to citizenship and it's a slam dunk.
This is off topic and I expect it to be moderated that way - but I didn't want you to to get away with calling BS on well documented history without at least a rebuttal. The US founding fathers knew that the greatest danger to the life, liberty and happiness of the people wasn't a foreign enemy: it was a government run amok. Read up.
The only thing worse than a despot that despises his people and kills them with tyranny and mismanagement is an educated and insightful democratic government that provides a great environment of freedom for the common man, but fails to provide for the common defense and so submits their people to the subjugation, rapine and pillaging of barbarians. See: ancient Greece.
As for my karma points, I'll get them back elsewhere in the thread educating people about Oracle's licensing practices. If you're moderating that's an easy bulletproof "off topic" mod so knock yourself out - I'll add some points to it so a few of you can have a whack.
It's something like 69% by bandwidth. (A statistic I made up just now, as is my right as a traditionally recognized slashdot statistific artist.)
The reason why your Internet seems more populated by porn than this survey is that the Internet is indexed. That the Google search "ameture handcuff oral" returns exactly 0 hits from nasa.gov, ieee.org or acm.org isn't Google's fault, nor NASA's, nor IEEE's nor the ACM's. Well, it is, but only tangentally.
/now would someone please fix the messed up comment submission form in slashcode for the traditional format? This tiny box is really lame.
It's all proportional.
Oracle is a very complex product and its licensing is appropriately complex. There's a form that your Oracle Guidance Counsellor (OGC) helps you fill out with various metrics like the number of processors and cores, megabytes of RAM, network connections, sizes of datastores and their bandwidth, and related customer metrics. They then use a set of finely honed matrix pricing tools, in the use of which they are meticulously trained, to produce the ideal licensing structure for each use, to maximize customer ROI. In this matrix, customer specific discounts are applied last, and of course the GSA is the Most Favored Customer, and so gets the greatest discount.
The problem lies before that, with the "CDP" metric, or "Customer Depth of Pocket". This one metric scores 94% of the subtotal, and since the US Federal government has deeper pockets than anyone else of course they're going to max the scale here. Naturally this is going to skew the outcome somewhat, but not unfairly so. The GSA's OGC just needs to get back up there and explain it again the way they covered it in the year 3 course in OGC Acadamy. Pricing 328: Value pricing for large government customers.
Google could probably release an exploit like this every day if they wanted to - or ten of them. They index the Internet, and that includes the nasty corners where such things are as common as rude pictures on 4chan. Why should they care? They don't use Windows internally any more.
Well can you blame them? For every one they patch dozens more spring up. It must seem like a hopeless task. Can you imagine the global freakout that would transpire if by some miracle they patched 10,000 bugs on one patch Tuesday, pushing what's essentially a reinstall .iso through Windows update? People would be leaping from windows. The Internet would melt. I'm sure you don't want them to go back to pushing patches every day either.
They'll patch a few once a month just to give the Windows admins something to do, and then after a couple years come out with a new version "Now with enhanced security!" and then we'll repeat the cycle. Again. Don't worry - be happy. It has always been this way. It will always be this way.