Serves 'em right
Microsoft, that is, not the poor sods looking for new jobs.
Microsoft has revealed how badly its Windows phone business has crashed via paperwork filed with America's financial regulator, the SEC. Nokia was shipping 7.3 million Lumias per quarter when the deal to acquire its phone unit was announced in September 2013. Nokia was shipping over 90 per cent of Windows Phones sold. But in …
ridiculously bad management by MS. WinPho looked like it had a viable future whilst nokia still existed separately. WinPho 8 on nokia hardware really wasn't that bad of a combination. If microsoft had only kept the nokia name, released the phones they had in development with winpho8 on them (until 10 was ready) then there probably would have been a future for that division.
More of the same might have worked. Instead they decided to screw it up every way possible.
> WinPho looked like it had a viable future whilst nokia still existed separately.
No it didn't. Nokia's phone division made a loss in every quarter that it made WP in spite of a $billion a year from MS. The agreement made by Elop was ending and so no more $billions from MS. Nokia was dumping WP and already released Nokia-X Android phones.
It is a shame. I had a Nokia Lumia 800 which I loved, and a Lumia 1020 which was an improvement in every way. Then Microsoft killed Win8, lost Here Maps and when upgrade time came around they simply didn't have a viable phone for me.
Gone are the days of the sublime Lumia 928, now they have.. what?
I bought a Huawei P9 instead.
Sad really, I've had a few win phones over the years and it is actually a very good product. The mismanagement and continual screwing over of people developing for the platform has been mind-boggling. Seems they have finally got the development side reasonably coherent now but it's 5 years too late and the platform is dead.
If I were a Microsoft stockholder, then I would be quite interested in the rationale behind this extravagant waste of shareholder value.
Why did you piss away so much money for a dud product line???
Isn't this just another example of manglement getting itself into superfluous areas outside their core expertise?
Microsoft's manglement must believe that it can burn through shareholder value like shit runs through a goose. I thank $DEITY I am not a shareholder in Microsoft.
I used to have shares in Microsoft. It has paid a steadily-increasing dividend since 2004 and the share price has gone up since then, with a dip for 2008. We will never be able to tell what impact the Windows Phone and the Surface RT had on the company's share price.
Now that those two products are essentially dead, and people are grudgingly starting to accept Windows 10 - accept, not love - it will be interesting to see if the company continues to be a sound investment.
Microsoft lost their way after Windows 2003 / XP. In fact Windows 2000 was probably their zenith for a functional O/S the rest is a horrible mix of spaghetti code and now just unwanted apps and spyware. Windows 10 Mobile is quote a functional phone O/S but again tied up with a whole lot of spyware and totally useless apps. missing a fundamental sat-nav (when Microsoft had AutoRoute back in the early 1990's). Just as well for MS that Linux is hopelessly fragmented, Android fragmented and full of spyware / adverts, Apple overpriced and locked in proprietary junk. Personally I'm disillusioned with the lot and the terrible thing it has done to our humanity. Computers were once tools that served us, now we are slaves to the insidious shit that is going into everything whether useful or not.
I loved 2000 Pro and Server. No poncey bells and whistles. Did what it said on the tin. Like NT but better, rock solid stability - which in an industrial control system is vital - best of all worlds. Still not an RTOS but it's Windows, you can't have it all ways. For the rest there's Linux.
Microsoft lost their way after Windows 2003 / XP. In fact Windows 2000 was probably their zenith for a functional O/S the rest is a horrible mix of spaghetti code and now just unwanted apps and spyware. Windows 10 Mobile is quote a functional phone O/S but again tied up with a whole lot of spyware and totally useless apps. missing a fundamental sat-nav (when Microsoft had AutoRoute back in the early 1990's. Just as well for MS that Linux is hopelessly fragmented, Android fragmented and full of spyware / adverts, Apple overpriced and locked in proprietary junk. Personally I'm disillusioned with the lot and the terrible thing it has done to our humanity. Computers were once tools that served us, now we are slaves to this shit.
Microsft have been terribly poor stewards of the business, and I feel for the few remaining ex-colleagues who have seen it through to the end of the road and lost their jobs.
In roughly two years MS took a world class business (14 years number 1) and completely destroyed it.
Yes, yes, market share was low for WinPho, but pre-acquisition Nokia had dragged it to a *measurable* market share. Properly lead and managed, that could have been built up.
MS first decision post purchase was to get rid of the sales and marketing people - after that it was game over.
With hindsight this whole transaction looks like Nokia saying, "give us $5 billlion and we'll leave the market for a two year holiday."
(New Nokia Androids available in about six months...)
I am pretty confused as to how Windows phone tanked so badly. It seemed the logical platform for business phones after Blackberry imploded. I saw quite a few companies using Lumia's and had a couple myself through my employer. They were cheaper models but I was impressed by what was delivered at the £100 price point.
We have now moved to iPhones which most colleagues are happy with (apart from 16GB memory) but surely not everyone can afford to do this? The other alternative is Android but surely MS was a better phone OS for businesses?
As a Cisco guy I was getting worried by how holistic MS's approach seemed - desktop/tablet/phone/cloud services - and dropping the phones seems to cripple this strategy.
They just took too long to get there in a competitive market.
Windows 10 mobile is a great mobile operating system now. The problem is Windows 7 mobile, Windows 8 mobile both weren't. It took to Windows 8.1 mobile before it was really ready for enterprise use and Microsoft upset too many customers with unfilled promises along the way...
> I am pretty confused as to how Windows phone tanked so badly. ... They were cheaper models but I was impressed by what was delivered at the £100 price point.
Exactly. They were selling them below cost because no one would pay enough for them to make a profit. Eventually the losses mount up sufficiently for Nokia to dump the products and try something else (Nokia-X), especially as the agreement runs out.
Nokia's handset business was in trouble when MS bought it. Relatively "high" volumes, but they were low or no margin phones meaning it wasn't close to breaking even. Failure to deliver a high end phone for 2014.
MS then appointed Nadella and went with the cloud strategy (rather than Balmer's devices and services), so the acquisition made no sense strategically.
Then MS realised it needed to fix the Windows on desktop Win8 mess before anything else, so all the momentum of WP8.1 OS was lost as WIndows 10 was focused on everything but mobile.
Even then MS let the Ex Nokia team go ahead with a "race to the bottom" portfolio of ever lower spec Lumia's during early 2015.
In the end - no products, no mobile OS and now no people.
OK - it was me, I'm the one who liked it.
The devices I've had (625 & 930) have been rock solid and been good workhorses - pretty much the only times they've had a reboot were when they physically ran out of juice... and an excellent third choice when the first two are istyle over isubstance or landfill in waiting.
I'm in a genuine quandary over what to get when my 930 needs to be put out to pasture. I genuinely hate iOS and Android equally - to the point where I'm feeling the appeal for a brick-phone and a tethered tablet.
A few things we need to remember before we bury this whole thread in anti-MS bullcrap:
1) Nokia was already failing before the takeover. They were a powerhouse for pre-smartphones. They failed miserably to translate that dominance into the post-2007 marketplace and were in deep trouble, relying on a fairly big subsidy from Microsoft to stay afloat. They were not well set up to transition toward a commodity market, and that's where non-Apple phones are headed, rapidly.
2) WP is actually a good product. No, really. I don't know anyone who was actually unhappy with it, and I do know a fair few people who have used it - the Lumia is a really nice bit of kit and lots of people like them. The lack of apps is a problem, but the actual OS was probably the best operating system MS have ever put together. Their awful market share meant that the WP team really tried pretty hard when most MS teams can get away with phoning it in because the vast bulk of people will continue to use Windows even if it sucks.
3) Android would have murdered WP regardless of anything MS did. It is not realistically possible to compete with Android at this stage, since phone manufacturers making pennies on the dollar in profit margin are going to stick with a free OS and will pick the already-dominant option. Win Phone was late to the party, and was trying to play by proprietary rules when Google had decided to kill that whole market off; by the time MS adjusted strategy to increase market share it was too late.
4) The phone-becomes-a-PC thing was always an absolute hail Mary in response to point 3, and it's Intel who killed that. Whether WP would still be worth pumping money into if they hadn't, who knows; the ability to plug in a monitor, KB and mouse and just convert directly into a desktop was certainly something that a lot of people were very interested in. If they had been able to bring in the entire x86 Wintel ecosystem then the lack of apps would cease to be an issue too.
".....2) WP is actually a good product. No, really....."
The underlying OS may well be rock solid, neatly integrated etc etc.
BUT I absolutely HATE TIles; especially ones that change for no apparent reason. What was that? Did I just miss something? Why did it change? How much battery and bandwidth is it gulping down?
I have no idea if the size of the tile relates to the utility of the app, is it the most recent? is it a favourite app I use a lot? I have no idea. The WIN10 GUI is distracting non intuitive and gets more like an adventure game as you ferret around trying to find the settings to customise the damn thing to suit how I want it to look.
Well said.
I was doing some work for a gentleman over the weekend, and he had Win8.1 installed on his laptop. He told me he hated the UI as it is totally nonintuitive for him.
Installed Classic Shell, and he was happy to get rid of the tiles.
Will ping said gentleman tonight and see how things goes with him.
Having just updated my 640 XL to Windows Phone 10 I have to admit it's really rather good. Don't know what it was like before all the revisions it went through to get to where it is today from where it was almost a year ago though.
I like the tiles, but I'm the sort of person that also liked the full screen Windows 8 start screen too...