Microsoft's magic hurts: Nadella signals 'tough choices' on the way There’s nothing like sweetening the bad news medicine, and that’s what Microsoft’s tried with its latest internal staff memo. It wasn't until the penultimate para of Satya Nadella’s saccharine, 20-paragraph ramble about magical things that Microsoft's CEO delivered the bad-tasting medicine. “Tough choices” are coming in …
Although I don't own one, and have no particular driver to do so, I have used a WinPho on a couple of occasions and found it perfectly acceptable. I assume that Win10 will be agreeable to some extent too.
I assume the MS will work harder on the third party manufacturers to push it in the Google model, rather than attempting to be a halfway house between Apple's "We do it all" to Google's "We do the software*"
* I know about Nexuseseseseses. I have one.
>>> Although I don't own one, and have no particular driver to do so, I have used a WinPho on a couple of occasions and found it perfectly acceptable.
I'm on my third Windows Phone now (bought the 2nd as I wanted winpho 8, bought the 3rd as I wanted dual sim) and I have to admit they are pretty good. I'll knock Microsoft with the best of them - especially when discussing Win 8, WPF, Silverlight and the mess they have made of desktop development - but the phone is a bit of a gem. I just get the cheap ones and the bang for your buck is very good.
That's 1/128th which seems a bit harsh given the figures in the OA (I've rounded off).
Lumia: 8 million
Non-Lumia Microsoft: 24 million
Total Winphone: 32 million
Android: 255 million
By my arithmetic that says Winphone about 12.5% of Android.
I have no skin in this game, I'm hanging on to my old Blackberry, but a friend of a friend is very happy with her new Lumia (which takes very nice photos - I was surprised).
> Lumia: 8 million
> Non-Lumia Microsoft: 24 million
> Total Winphone: 32 million
"""Microsoft's sales are lagging even those of Windows Phone partners: 8.6 million Lumias (Nokia) moved versus 24.7 million non-Lumias sold."""
No, there were not 32 million Windows Phones sold. The 24.7 million is the total smart phones, of all OS, sold by Microsoft WP partners. I was said that Nokia sold more than 90% of all WP and this is likely to have continued. So total Winphone is more like 9.4million.
> but a friend of a friend is very happy with her new Lumia (which takes very nice photos - I was surprised).
Why were you surprised? Lumias are known for their cameras, they often purchased ahead of other contenders because of the cameras, optical image stabilisation, 41 megapixel units, RAW formats etc.
I will mourn the loss of 'Nokia' WinPhones, it is hard to believe someone won't make a WinPhone with Nokia written on it, designed to their core principles, great camera, tough as hell and good to look at, most of the time.
Perhaps Nokia, come on guys, buy it cheap and make it great again.
Perhaps all Nokia needed was an injection of better guidance and direction to break out of the hole they were in and then they could have made phones worth having once more? With MS now finding their magic sauce was no better, I trust that Nokia will once more climb back to producing phones worth having and I will be able to replace my ageing Nokia hardware. I can only hope, as the current market place appears to have nothing to meet my needs.
The chunk of Nokia that Microsoft bought included the Nokia brand - until some time next year, and Nokia not manufacturing or distributing smart phones. Nokia are designing Android phones, and are seeking manufacturing and distribution partners ready for next year.
"Picking up" but a long way from the radical impact they need to have to get profitable. Trouble is, the market is incredibly competitive, apps are the differentiator between smartphone operating systems and app developers aren't seeing the value in developing a third version of their apps for a platform with under 10% market share. So MS have to discount heavily to shift the product and in the process lose all their margins.
WinPho is becoming the betamax of smartphones.
A myth if you consider that better == what people wanted, in the case of VHS, a recording time appropriate to the sport of choice for many adaptors, and greater access to rental videos through some fairly adroit market agreements for releases. OK the second is not technically better, but the first is definitely a feature that sold.
>WinPho is becoming the betamax of smartphones.
The Edsel of smartphones, surely?
So MS crashes out of the phone market, the Nokia brand reverts to Nokia, Nokia rehires some percentage of the devs who were put through the MS meatgrinder, and after all the smoke has cleared MS has wasted $$$$$$ for absolutely nothing.
No wonder Elop is out.
MS should just give up on mobile and turn itself into an enterprise and R&D company.
MS shouldn't give up on Mobile but instead remember their name--MicroSOFT! Forget trying to build hardware and start building the best mobile apps. The OEMS couldn't care less about MSs Mobile OS, that's why MS had to buy its own OEM, otherwise know as Nokia.
I thought Windows Phone was actually picking up market share?
Where? If it is, it's not enough to matter. The costs of standing still are high, especially in the consumer market.
There's certainly a demand for phones with a high-degree of integration in the Windows world. But that doesn't mean the phone has to run Windows. At some point Microsoft will have enough installs of Office for Android and IOS to be able to forecast how much money it can make from subscriptions. My guess is that this will be somewhat more than they're currently making from Windows phone.
If MS wants to innovate, instead of cute animations and a gimmicky UI in most of their products, they can make their software more stable and stop using their paid customers as beta testers. Each version of Office that comes out is a marvel of features and integration, but it's also flakier and flakier than the last. As someone that has to support this stuff I can say that 30-40% of the problems our department deals with is related to Office products malfunctioning. And unfortunately the solution is often a full reinstall because no one can find the root cause or one tiny registry entry that went awry when Office decided to immolate itself. A web search shows that I'm not nearly alone in this, which isn't much comfort.
And listen to your customers for Pete's sake! (whoever Pete is) Stop changing the UI to something worse and worse in every version of Windows! Maybe XP didn't boast the avant garde of user interfaces, but I never heard anyone complain about the cascading menus. At least offer the option to revert to a "classic" interface for those that miss it without needing a 3rd party add-on. (to be fair, it does look like they've listened somewhat in Win 10) One of my myriad pet peeves about Win 8 is the changing of the keyboard shortcuts. Alt+F4 to close a window and F5 to refresh a screen have existed since the dawn of time in Windows and other OSes. Why change it??
Okay, I'm done.
"Each version of Office that comes out is a marvel of features and integration, but it's also flakier and flakier than the last. As someone that has to support this stuff I can say that 30-40% of the problems our department deals with is related to Office products malfunctioning."
You do know there are free, open source alternatives for pretty much all the 'functionality' in Office.
>Ok, tell me one. Libreoffice and Openoffice DO NOT count.. I use them, and donate to the projects, but have to resort to the "real" thing for complex documents.
Seriously, use inkscape to create some jaw-dropping SVG graphics, put them into OpenOffice, save as PDF and show the result to anybody, whatever they use, like InDesign, you name it ... their jaws will drop ... especially when you compare file sizes. Don't come with MS Word, you will be laughed out of the building ....
Define "complex documents" ? Are you holding it right ? ;-)
There I was thinking a document is just a bunch of text with maybe some images and/or tables.
If you have "complex" documents, I'd revisit the use case for having that data and business logic in an Office document. If you choose to continue with Office then be prepared for the awful breakage when a subsequent version completely breaks your documents.
-- If you have "complex" documents, I'd revisit the use case for having that data and business logic in an Office document. --
For business logic I'd recommend a "real" programming language and NOT programming business logic into a spreadsheet. Furthermore, to have a console onto your business logic there are a ton of open source workflow engines from which to choose from.
"...I'd love to get my hands on one of these complex documents that people always mention on these occasions..."
Go and work for the college I used to work for.
Dozens of "official" forms to fill in for every aspect of the job, from interviewing to marking to annual reports. Every form designed by someone who apparently was of the opinion that the only way to make *anything* line up with *anything else* on a piece of paper was to nail it to the spot using as many nested tables as possible. And, just for good measure thought it was fine if the text was occasionally turned round vertically to fit a too-small gap (rather than seeing this as an indication the layout was piss-poor and needed rethinking).
Oh —the hours of fun we used to have, trying to shoe-horn text into those, without half of it mysteriously vanishing, or randomly changing size/colour/font/orientation! And, needless to say, being harangued all the while by management wanting it done 'yesterday'.
@ Phuq Witt
"Go and work for the college I used to work for."
The moment I read that, I understood.
"Oh —the hours of fun we used to have, trying to shoe-horn text into those [forms], without half of it mysteriously vanishing, or randomly changing size/colour/font/orientation! And, needless to say, being harangued all the while by management wanting it done 'yesterday'."
I was a very juniour PHB for a mercifully short period a few jobs and a decade ago. The most useful thing I did I think was to retype all the forms using a rational layout for filling in at the keyboard. Oh I had fun with that one getting people to explain *why* a given form needed to be laid out the way it was.
I got one form down from 4 nested tables to a single table with a few rows which could re-size when you typed. People had just sort of copied ancient printed 3 part sets as best they could in Word 2 or something and the results had been migrated forward by all the Word generations since sometimes via RTF. A particular favourite was the form where someone had plit a column by just drawing a line down the table with the drawing tools. OK for printing and writing on... not so good for typing into. And I got a monochrome small version of the logo approved for the header that cut file sizes down by about half a meg. Bear in mind that some of these forms were filled in and emailed thousands of times a year...
Tramp Icon: Oh, the power. I miss it for about half an hour every other month or so.
I find Libre/Open Office fail to handle many documents I throw at them. I suspect it's more Word doing some crazy method to achieve a particular layout, because if I correct the document in LL/OO, it loads back into Word fine.
I suspect that's because there's "more than one way of doing things" not just in Word but also in the file formats. Done correctly things should be largely unambiguous… The emphasis there is definitely on "should".
I mainly use OO, having had LO crash just one time too many on me. Currently, on Mac OS it is not as fluid as MS Office. I think it gets a lot of things right in the UI but I can sympathise with users who prefer Microsoft's stuff.
Back in the earlier pre-Windows day, I worked for a company that pretended to make a product that would interchange office documents among all the various office products around, while promising complete fidelity to the original structure, fonts and layout. This proved impossible to achieve.
LibreOffice is in the same bind, chasing whatever "innovations" Microsoft adds to its latest shiny new Office. The LibreOffice team deserves extraordinary credit for what they have achieved, and it is no surprise when some Microsoft document isn't exactly compatible with LibreOffice or vice versa. Microsoft always has the upper hand in these sorts of tussles, until customers get pissed off.
THIS. So much, this!
Microsoft: Do One Thing Well.
You are, or can be, good at building software. Stop adding frills, and build the best g*ddamn word, spreadsheet and presentation software in the world. Build software that people *want* to buy, not software that's rigged with incompatible file formats, so they *have* to buy it.
Forget, please, about competing in the phone marketplace. Apple and Android own it and you don't have the experience or the products. You (sort of) still have a chance in the gaming market...only because Sony is as clumsy as they are. But please, just forget about hardware and concentrate on building the best software in the world.
You're welcome.
"""Also exiting the business is ex-Nokia-CEO-turned-executive-vice-president devices group Stephen Elop. He had run the phone hardware division since April 2014.
He joins 18,000 who Nadella has pink-slipped since becoming Microsoft CEO.""
The FCUK he's getting the same compensation as those other low rank guys.
The "he joins" hurts my eyes.
Agreed - I bought a Lumia 930 after loads of different (decent) Android 'phones... it is really very good, nice and clear, works breezily, no clutter, good camera, all the apps I need etc. I have to admit that I like the fact that it says "Nokia" rather than "Microsoft" on it though.
Look it up, I have written many times already, MS will abandon Windows Phone sooner than later. I re-iterate, there will be no Windows Phone 11.
This whole thing happened even though they have increased licensing costs in the data center (Windows Server, anybody?). There is NO MONEY to be made on Windows Mobile^H^H^H^H^H^HPhone, the money is in hardware you do not write off. ROFLMAO
The beginning of the end, spiraling into and under ground.
...the shops dont have any. A "friend" recently went in to a carphone warehouse to acquire a Lumia 930. She has previously had a 925, was due an upgrade and much preferred WinPho over the andriod and iPhones she had had in the past. She was told that they did not have any suitable WinPho handsets in stock at all and ended up walking out with an iPhone 6. She has had it a week now and laments the decision and not insisting on a WinPho.
No wonder the handsets aren't selling. If they have stock it looks like the push is for iPhone. If they dont have stock it looks like the push is for iPhone.
Wow, buying an iPhone 6 under sales pressure when you knew what you wanted, that sales person deserves their commission, especially given the extra cost and the fact that you can have a 930 simply delivered by post the next day I imagine.
If they only make a replacement for a 930 before quitting it all, I guess I will suck it up and replace my 1020 with it.
Higher res, lighter, built-in wireless charging and much faster and still very good photos will help as well as the always-on chip for GPS, speech etc.
Still, no pressure, the 1020 works as well as it did and that was well.
Awww that's not very sporting. 4 downvotes and no one replied explaining why I am probably wrong.
Ok, Windows Phone isnt full fat Windows - and runs on an ARM instruction set instead of x86. And has less CPU grunt.
But the general gist of my point was that there is a huge back catalogue of Windows software, and that's still growing. If they can get some kind of decent x86 emulation on ARM, then that's solved that problem, no?
*prepares for more downvotes*
I think the general gist of the reason why is that the API available to phone apps is not sufficiently close to the API that all those desktop apps were written to. I haven't looked too hard at the modern phone API, so I'm just guessing.
However, it was certainly true for WinCE, despite the fact that CE never ran on devices that were as feeble as the original Windows. Microsoft never really appeared to understand that you had to port more than the branding for it to actually count as a port.
Correct.
It's a very different API, that can only be used for Windows Store apps on Windows Phone 8, Win 8 and Win 10.
You can only write applications using it on Windows 8 (and presumably 10 but nobody uses a beta OS for serious work.)
It was also originally expensive and difficult to get the SDK, and no cross-platform toolkits could target it at all until the last months.
The target market of Windows Phone and TIFKAM users is tiny and zero respectively.
Thus, very few apps.
With the latest news, nobody is likely to make the investment if they haven't already.
Thus, no new apps.
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