Microsoft may have its groove back but it's binned 'Groove' Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's new book says the company has its groove back, yet the company has also decided to kill off the Zune-zombie by sending music subscription service "Groove" to its doom. Less than a week after shipping an update to Groove's Android client, Redmond has taken Groove for that long drive in the country …
They never took it seriously, for instance refusing to develop clients for iPad (while, as a company, trying to force people to develop for a one-size-fits-all appstore).
The UX for managing your own music was always half-arsed, and even though they pushed paid content it was hard to compete with Spotify or even Pandora.
It's a shame to see MS fail, again, at a consumer service... but a reminder not to get too attached to anything they do that's not enterprise focused.
I left Windows Phone once they decided to port to other platforms ahead of their userbase and took my xBox Music subscription to Android. Huawei Mate 7 refused to play nice with what became Groove in horrid Microsoft blue color. It wasn't a disaster, just niggles like streamed tracks stopping at exactly between 2:20 and 2:30 and it endlessly wiping connection to offline downloads so you had to do it all again. Microsoft support response after 2 attempts was ultimately suggesting I could cancel my account, so I did. Then you get the sorry to see you go emails that lead to absolutely nowhere but their dumbass forum to give feedback so is anyone really surprised this all died.
Now on Apple Music and on Android fine but Win 8 or 10 on any internet connected tabs like Browse it jams perpetually on 20% of CPU or displays endless load blank pages. Well at least Apple have tried to be helpful but can't fix it but I wonder if all these services are built on the same core system that just pushes dumbass top 40 USA stuff it assumes I am remotely into and just resold and branded at the front end aka Rovi data et all?
Agreed, I looked at 'Groove' for the first time today, I still cannot see its point, everyone I know who wants some form of music device has one and it is not this 'thing'. So after stifling a few yawns I wondered (and not for the first time) how the %^&*() to recovers its wasted disk space.
...only the blinded fanboys (yes MS has plenty) think otherwise.
MS have no interest in Pay Once, Play Forever.
Year on year pay us and pay, pay, pay again and only on business orientated software.
No matter how much you bitch, they have no interest in people that bout Office 2003 and MIGHT upgrade to 2020.
They have no interest in small / no margin consumer.
The have no interest in competing with Google / Apple, except for enterprise (Office / Cloud)
My guess for the spying was not to see what you were doing, it was to see what you were NOT doing. You have an old version of office. We have 99% of people that have only opened Groove once, they never use a Winphone, they don't use Edge as their [primary browser.
Kill them all, either by instant death, or a slow lingering abandonware.
MS = Enterprise
Apple = Prosumer / Consumer
Google = Consumer....and everything MS does that they want to crush.
And here was me thinking Groove was that thing they bought from Ray Ozzie back in the day and tried to shoehorn into all their collaboration products (actually Wikipedia suggests it's still in use on the backend of OneDrive). I'd never even heard of this music service.
If it'd been ten years earlier, they probably would've called it Music.NET.
> And here was me thinking Groove was that thing they bought from Ray Ozzie back in the day
I really liked Groove. MS bought it claiming they would incorporate it into Office - which was half a lie. The technology may have been incorporated but the functionality wasn't. A symptom of the "but your new 'junior' product competes ever so slightly with Office and SharePoint and therefore we will crush it" desire to stifle any signs of innovation emerging from within the ranks of MS.
Every company I go to, I see them struggling to organise themselves around Office using painful, convoluted procedures that Groove could handle easily.
<sigh>
MS seems obsessive about bringing all usage of its systems inhouse, I guess because stock markets demand company growth. I launched Firefox, a couple of months ago, and up popped a box telling me that Edge is safer that Firefox. It may well be, but that sort of nagging is simply intrusive and offputting.
It should concentrate on its core products and making them better. It should listen harder to what customers want, too, and not mix things up just to keep the product fresh. I keep finding places where it seems to have reduced functionality, such as the internet time which, for some reason, sometimes fails, but there is no easy way to manually refresh...why not for crying out loud?
Stop trying to control us and just provide what we need and want.
Sorry for the rant - I got carried away
I think a big part of Microsoft's problem in the consumer market is they never get in on the ground floor anymore. Zune, and hence Groove, were a far too late attempt to take market share when Apple had already dominated the market with the iPod/iTunes combo (i think we were onto generation 5 iPod when Zune launched?) and shortly before everyone bought smart phones.
With Windows mobile they only really started taking it seriously once iOS and Android were in ascendance, and by then both development houses and users had already invested heavily in either or both ecosystems. Ignoring the whole Windows RT vs Windows x86 confusion, I think few in the industry or market wanted a third platform.
xBox is maybe the exception to this, where they joined the market late but at the time no had clear dominance and I think users were more used to there being multiple gaming platforms.
@adam payne
You want to uninstall Grove [sic] and all the other crap on Win 10? Easy. It's called a Linux installation DVD. Gets rid of all the crap on Win 10. Gets rid of the crap that is Win 10. Gives you entirely new, entirely different crap.
In fact, you may find you prefer the flavour of the Linux crap over the Microsoft crap. It's cheaper. It doesn't phone home to blab about everything you get up to. It probably still won't do what you want, but it won't do it in a different, novel, interesting way. Best of all, you get the orgasmic satisfaction of giving Microsoft the finger.
I switched from Groove to Spotify about 6 months ago.
To be fair, Groove has a much nicer client. Better UI, cleaner text, more info on bands, faster load time, etc.
Spotify, of the other hand, *still* doesn't look into a directory of my choosing and let me play my own music files stored there (so, err, no, I won't be removing the Groove client just yet).
And Spotify *still* insists that I play everything on shuffle by default.
Spotify is 'usable', but not much better than that.
<sigh>
But Groove insisted that my household of 4 pay for four licenses to get 4 accounts.
Spotify gives me four accounts for the price of 1.5
It's not like Microsoft wasn't told. People have been asking - loudly - for household pricing for years.
A neat bundle with Office 365 home, using the same four accounts, clearly required too much cooperation between duelling departments to ever get off the ground.
Not your finest hour, Microsoft!
At first it sounded like you weren't paying for Spotify since you said "shuffle everything" but then mentioned price. I also do the four account thing which is awesome. But I can and do point Spotify to my local music. Also the only thing it wants me to shuffle play is if I just go to a specific artist and don't select an album.
Can't see Spotify as just 'usable' and they are making constant updates probably cause they know that people get soooo terrified of a big change.
Microsoft had an excellent ecosystem, apps, and set of products with Zune. With Groove they had nearly as good an ecosystem and app, just no standalone products, but who does anymore. But in between those they had some horrible mess on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. It was so bad you had to wonder how the company that came up with Zune could have created such a train wreck. I would've been embarrassed to release something like what that was as a college programming project.
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