Re: Are Win7 users not upgrading because of Win8/10's tiles?
Oddly ms seem to have mostly given up on phones and tablets, so I don't know why they are still trying.
A couple of reasons. The first is that Microsoft never, ever listen to customers, and never see the world from the customer's perspective. So although there's no real market pull for Windows phones, they think that if they keep on, eventually world + dog will cave in and buy them. I don't agree, but as a customer of Microsoft they're hardly going to credit my opinion.
The second reason is that (notwithstanding the huge writedowns on the failed Nokia phones acquisition), they'd have further writedowns on all of the investments in phone software and IP. That wouldn't land well with investors, nor would the immediate realisation that Microsoft is handcuffed to the desktop. Without a cloud offer, nothing to pitch for in IoT, no mobile presence, nothing in ad-serving and tracking (remember the huge and failed AQuantive acquisition?) where are they going? It'd kill their share price, and the value of the obscenely overpaid executives share options.
And even in desktop and related areas, they've done nothing to add real user value - other than a series of f***ed up UI changes, Microsoft haven't written much new code for years, so all the crap bits of Server, Office and Windows are still there. They wasted their money and time buying Minecraft, in a doomed bid to get down and groovy with the kids. And meanwhile people like AWS own the cloud, Google own ad-serving, Google and Apple divide the phone market between them, and the IoT will be exploited by somebody not called Microsoft.
As an investment case, Microsoft only has value to a patent troll, but for the execs to extract their pound of flesh they need to avoid the world realising that, and that's why they are still trying with phones.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
