Ballmer hails Windows Mobile for Welfare™ Steve Ballmer on Thursday said Microsoft's smartphone strategy for the recession is to be a soup kitchen for the mobile market. That apparently means not adding premium features in Windows Mobile like support for a capacitive touch screen – something he claims would make phones too expensive for phone manufacturers to make. " …
Really?
How many iPhones are in use?
How many Macbook computers are in use?
How many Jaguars, Cadillacs, Lincolns, etc. are in use?
OK, maybe it's not the whole market, but it is the most PROFITABLE part.
Something Steve Jobs knows very well.
And Steve Balmer hasn't a clue...
Normally Redmond seems to love introducing as many distinct (but not actually different) versions of their products as possible. Why not jump on the possibility of having at least three versions of Windows Mobile (Windows Mobile "Basic", W.M. "Touchscreen"and W.M. "Touchscreen 'Premium'"? Sure, each version would just be the same basic OS with drivers/support for the different interfaces, but that seems to be the way they do everything there.
D'you know, all the Apple-haters talk about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, but the Ballmer version as described here takes the biscuit. This is the man that said the iPhone wouldn't sell because it was too expensive, and 17 million iPhone sales later still hasn't figured it out.
So WinMo won't run on decent hardware and that's now a virtue... at least that beats Vista being supposed to run on all sorts of machines that can't handle its bloated requirements, I guess...
Perhaps if their bloaty excuse didn't require such high end silicon to run (well, crawl) on, there'd be enough left in the build cost to have a fancy touch screen? Of course it could just be that they can't figure out how to make WinMo cope with multi touch.
M$ don't get smartphones, they certainly don't get low-end smartphones. Stick to conning people into buying more features they'll never use on their PCs Steve. While you still can.
'Ballmer said the retail outlets will serve as a "showcase" for Microsoft products rather than a direct source of sales like Apple stores.'
So the retail outlets won't be, erm, retail.
Phew, so Steve won't have to worry about sales figures and retail performance cos pissing money away with no tangible measure of the value it's generating is in the plan.
I'm inclined to agree with Alexis - he's a tool.
"But then since Microsoft only provides the software, why not offer phone makers the choice of including the more expensive technology?"
Because they want to make sure that manufacturers default to Windows for their mainstream phones - rather than only for their higher priced ones which may happen if they included such touch technology support.
It may sound somewhat spurious, but I would bet real money that's what they're up to. That plus the fact they've learned that they may finally have learned bloat is bad.
As I paid £50 for my iphone and I think they are even less than that soon.
Mind you my old Palm TX was about $lots but then that was good, unlike the WinMo divices I tried and sent packing...... (only the iPhone finally sent the Palm to the great box of stuff under the desk last week)
And people should listen to Barmey Ballmer why??? After all isn't this the genius(sic) who has laughed at, dismissed and belittled any innovative product not directly sponsored (if not built) by Microshaft over the course of how many years? Only to be proven totally wrong on almost every occasion.
If he had the capacity to know and accept just how wrong he has been, to what degree and how often, there wouldn't be enough chairs in the world to satisfy his rage.
This can only mean that they are shitting their pants over google's open android, and symbian being banded together by nokia and co into a free offering.
That or they are getting ready to drop windows mobile, and replace it with zune os - freezing the development and just doing a windows ME and shoving a new colour on the theme and making it crash more; squeezing as much blood out of Win Mob while they can - without spending any more.
Seriously, i think they are trying to pitch at vendors who use their own in house software for low end phones (like nokia's S30)- overlooking the fact that most of these phones dont need smartphone features. They seem to be overlooking the fact that the main cost in a smartphone is the large screen on which to view the content and the chip to power the bloated OS.
Lots of new smartphones are available now with capacitive touchscreens. For example, LG and Samsung both do devices with screens like that, and they can be got for free on inexpensive contracts. And with the volumes of iPhones being sold, these sorts of screens are only going to drop in price.
Just sounds to me like Ballmer's setting up excuses for why WM6.5, 7 and 8 are all going to be as epic failures as 5 and 6 were / are. What they need to concentrate on is not what type of screen manufacturers would like to support, but on making their GUI workable with fingers, and making the OS not crashy and flaky.
"(But then since Microsoft only provides the software, why not offer phone makers the choice of including more expensive technology?)"
That was my first thought after reading the second paragraph.
How is it that no-one at MS thought of this??
Muppets. I love WM, but appreaciate that it could easily be better... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! *headdesk*
Actually the real money is in Toyota Corolla - cheap and reliable. And for that Nokia, LG and Samsung has pretty tied that up.
But yes, iphone is probably the most lucrative of the smartphone business. This from a WinMo user. I'd have loved to get the iphone; but the non-removable battery thing, not being able to install my own programs without jumping through the jailbreak route and flaky Outlook sync kills my buzz. With minor tweaking and a spare battery the Touch Diamond is pretty good.
A few months down the road I'll probably look longingly at the Pre and the iphone, and get me a Touch Pro2.
"windows (mobile / desktop...) WORKS." But it doesn't really work well, does it. It's not about how many features its got (My dad is bigger than your dad et.c), it's about how well its implemented. Windows mobile is a poor excuse for an OS really. Yes, it's got lots of features, or bloat as everyone else likes to call it, but most of them either don't work as expected, or at all! Do you still need to keep the thing charged so all your data isn't lost? Great feature...
Oh, and good mature closing line - whatever it meant, I'm sure it was very insightful. Hang on, are you Balmer?!
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