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.
The SDK and API restrictions plus cost is pretty much the same as developing for Apple iDevices, but with a benefit you don't have to learn a proprietary language like Swift or bonkers language like Objective-C, that no one else uses. Win Phone needs either HTML/JS or C# which is a doddle to anyone who knows Java and also to the millions who develop already for Windows full fat.
Coming in Windows 10 we have universal app support, allowing easy targeting of any Windows 10 device, and on top of that support in Visual Studio 2015 for Android & iOS (on top of the already existing Xamarin).
All the tools are there and they're dead easy to use, and have become cheap.
The only thing is it's not as simple for script kiddies to knock up the 90% of malware crap (or just plain crap) that fill the Android store ;)
Sadly, Microsoft may have to bite the bullet on the financials and could kill Lumia and even Win Phone, despite it being in many ways a really good product. Yes indeed, the Betamax of the smart phone world.
Could even go as far to say that Symbian was getting there as a decent product, though it was much harder to develop for.
MS have themselves to blame though. They pushed Tojan Elop into Nokia to kill Symbian, generate loads of Windows Phones and deflate the price enough to buy it. Elop may be hated by Nokia employees and fans, and rightly so, but MS sacking him is harsh given it was all of their own creating.
"Microsoft never really appeared to understand that you had to port more than the branding for it to actually count as a port."
Ouch.
But perfectly accurate, as far back as the days of Windows NT on non-x86 hardware. And also, PocketPC and HandheldPC OSes (the WinCE-rebadged ones).
Seems some people in the MS ecosystem haven't realised yet. Why would they...
The "apps" thing does define the problem, though not in the obvious way.
A mobile (smart)phone has long been a fashion item for the mass market.
And the masses make the sales and profit.
They aren't after a really good UI -, a reliable device or even decent call quality.
They want the Apple or Google "apps" their friends have. And by apps, mostly we are actually talking "games".
The Google "Play" Store is mostly about games.
There is a Games tab and an Apps tab. But the apps tab mostly contains......... games.
So if you want to share your scores on the latest dimwitted game you need a Google Phone.
If you want to do that and show you have street cred to go with it you get an iPhone if you can afford the mark-up.
Why would the average Candy Crusher want a good quality phone, when what they need is shiny?
And the masses make the sales and profit.
Actually, that's rarely the case. Volume sales are usually in low-margin markets. This is Microsoft's (but also HTC's, Sony's, and to a lesser extent Samsung's) problem.
Apple has traditionally done very well with low-volume, higher margin sales. The I-phone, and the I-pod before it, is unusual. The Apple eco-system does come with a certain degree of lock-in, which vastly reduces the size of the premium market for everyone else.
Oddly, the games market on Windows Phone is actually very good. The only downside perhaps is the games your friends have for free on Android you might have to pay for on Win Phone. Is that any different from iPhone though?
But a Windows Phone like a Lumia generally is just a different market. A lot of people seem to like it, even those who have an Android or iPhone but have tried a Lumia in a shop or that a friend has, but few can be tempted away from Android/iOS.
Those that aren't interested are the ones obsessed by apps and moan that there aren't any decent apps (which isn't true). The people who buy them are those who want more of a stable and easy to use device to actually use as a phone, text, email, browse, check the weather etc, i.e. do the basics, and have a consistent interface not cluttered or confusing due to being a little different from each other Android device thanks to fragmentation and operator & manufacturer customisations / bloatware, or don't want to spend a fortune on an iPhone. Then there are those who want a cracking phone camera, or something that integrates well into the Microsoft and Office ecosystem, especially for business.
I would (and did) recommend a Lumia to my parents over Android as it's easier to use and more intuitive, plus I wouldn't be having to deal with support calls because they've changed some setting, deleted something they shouldn't have, installed malware or even just installed a Google update that's now killing their phone (as I was getting with my old Samsung). Then there's the classic "not enough space" you get with a lot of Android devices due to the bonkers way some manufacturers partition the things. A Lumia is just less hassle if you don't want to be faffing with it to keep it running sweet.
I moved from a Lumia 930 to an LG G4 purely because the latter has Knights of the Old Republic and an iPlayer app that allows downloads. Even after nearly five years it's still the app gap that's crippling Windows Phone, such is a shame as for me it's the most logical and well thought out of all the mobile OSs.
They stumble into Nokia, drunk on their own self-worth, and rape a perfectly good company.
MSFT should never have entered the hardware biz. Even the Xbox 1 is a botched attempt to design and distribute hardware.
I own the latest Icon, and hate it in general. A very boring and user unfriendly machine. I don't believe Win 8.1 is released yet for my model, which is worse than laughable. The apps that are available are lame and glitchy. The music apps are especially disappointing.
The Pro tablets , releasing Win 10, focusing their Office products towards use on Android machines... this strategy would have been wiser.
You know how in Apple-land, the hipster salespeople are outnumbered by the salivating fanbois? And how it is sometimes difficult to get any attention?
In MS-land, there was no buzz whatsoever, the sales staff significantly outnumbered the few bored browsers and they were all over us trying to be helpful. We left with a free SIM card which I was vaguely thought of putting into my Z10 and activating. Their phones were also incredibly cheap, some around $50 unlocked IIRC.
Overall, didn't get the impression that they are getting any respect and I felt sorry for the salespeople. Kinda.
Keep in mind - whatever MS's flaws, the world is not going to benefit from an Android/Apple duopoly.
"the world is not going to benefit from an Android/Apple duopoly."
Correctamundo.
So is there room for a logical successor to Symbian then? And if so, what might it look like, and would enough people develop enough compelling apps for it (which doesn't necessarily mean Angry Farts etc or even Kindle but might mean Outlook-sync, VNC/RDP, y'know, roadwarrior tools, which some folk might pay a premium price for on a demonstrably premium OS, if such were to exist).
Maybe we should change the P in POSIX so it stands for Phone? That'd work, surely?
> the world is not going to benefit from an Android/Apple duopoly.
Certainly the world has not benefited from a Windows/Apple duopoly. Any 'benefits' went to making Bill the richest man in world with a corresponding cost to all businesses and their customers.
It was Microsoft, via Elop, that helped create the alleged 'Android/Apple duopoly' by killing off Symbian, Maemo/Meego and everything else that Nokia was working on. But even then it is not a duopoly, there are many Android variants that are separate developments: Kindle, CyanogenMod, and many non-Google implementations. That was never allowed for Windows.
"Certainly the world has not benefited from a Windows/Apple duopoly. Any 'benefits' went to making Bill the richest man in world"
Yeah the world's not benefited at all from Bill's charitable foundation, him being the top philanthropist in American with donations of some $28 billion between him and his OH, and dedication to donate 95% of their wealth to charity.
;)
"with a corresponding cost to all businesses and their customers." - a vast amount of businesses and people have made a lot of money out of Microsoft. My career and finances certainly has benefited thanks to Bill (and to some degree Sir Clive and Furber & Wilson).
"with a corresponding cost to all businesses and their customers." - a vast amount of businesses and people have made a lot of money out of Microsoft. My career and finances certainly has benefited thanks to Bill (and to some degree Sir Clive and Furber & Wilson).
Many made millions working for Microsoft or as shareholders. You seemed to have made lots of money off Microsoft _customers_ and _users_ (rather than "out of Microsoft").
However, you do reinforce my point that there is a large cost to businesses that use Microsoft products and their customers, you have been part of that cost.
> Yeah the world's not benefited at all from Bill's charitable foundation, him being the top philanthropist in American with donations of some $28 billion between him and his OH, and dedication to donate 95% of their wealth to charity.
But that is not from generating 'new' money, it has come from the costs applied to businesses and users that are customers of Microsoft.
Microsoft has bungled the sales and marketing of Windows Phone from day one. They dropped support for all Windows Phone 7 handsets, after saying they wouldn't and that included devices that were only a few months old. Updates for the OS were slow and lacking in features and marketing support was functionally non-existent. Microsoft seems to think that people will buy it's phones based on name recognition alone and that's just not going to happen. Right now Windows Phone is in the state it needed to be at at launch, more than 4 years ago. Not only that they keep changing the SDK you need to develop to. Windows Phone 7, 8 and now 10 have different tooling and APIs. Sure, some of the code ported over easy, but only if you were lucky. The result is that what is a fairly new OS overall has to ship with 3 sets of APIs to support all existing apps.
The interface design behind Windows Phone was a great idea, that they've been slowly making worse with each version. Everyone else Microsoft has bungled badly. You hear a lot about "App Support", as if more apps is all that would be needed to make Windows Phone competitive. that's silly, Apps come if you sell enough phones, not before (and constantly changing your platform so that apps need to be constantly rewritten doesn't help). Take it from a previous Windows Phone (and current iOS and Android) developer, apps will only show up if we think they'll sell. I don't develop for Windows Phone (or BlackBerry) anymore because it's not worth my time. You need a compelling product to make those sales and people need to want that product. Microsoft doesn't know how to market hardware and it almost doesn't matter how good their hardware is, they can't seem to move it.
Making phones is not making a lot of money, but strategically it's never been more important. Phones (and even more so, tablets) now are in the same space that games consoles were in the late 90s, when they threatened to displace the desktop PC as the workhorse household computing platform.
And when they saw that threat, Microsoft invented the Xbox, and pumped billions of dollars over a decade or more into subsidising it, to head it off. It succeeded brilliantly. Consoles are now irrelevant to computing.
So if I were in Nadella's place, I'd be looking at selling off the Xbox division. Windows is - always has been, in fact - a superior platform for games. The Xbox is doing OK, but there's no longer any strategic reason to keep it in-house - if a sold-off Xbox division decided to start running Android or something, Microsoft as a whole would not be substantially worse off for it. Keep phones, junk consoles.
Good ol' Joe, he managed to kill a LOT of perfectly valid products/projects (IE4! Zune! WMC! Windows Phone!) but somehow the big fat bald angry beancounter just kept promoting him...
...now he's gone maybe, just maybe, a tougher Nadella will end this mysterious can-do-no-wrong career...?
Can't stand Apple products, their 'lock-in' is a killer too, and Google droid just doesn't work seamlessly enough, work and home PC's running windoze, phones windoze, everything links and works, tried with Apple and Droid and it's shite, emulators that are patchy at best, no 'native' connectivity, no thanks. 3 generations of Lumia's in our home and we're all happy with them.
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