WinPhone? PAH! If you want Microsoft's mobe apps, grab an Android Microsoft, still struggling to gain a foothold in the smartphone market, is pressing to have its software bundled on Android devices from major manufacturers, with Samsung as its first partner. We first heard murmurings about Sammy's deal with Microsoft at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, earlier this month. "We'll have …
Because just like bloatware installed on PCs, the OEM is getting compensated in some way. When you're in a commodity market like the PC market is and the Android market is rapidly becoming, the margins are cutthroat so you do stuff like this to lower the price. If you don't like it, choose the models that install only base Android like Nexus, or root it and install your own (the equivalent of wiping the Dell laptop you bought and installing Windows 7 on it yourself)
Perhaps Microsoft is actually planning for it. A pragmatic decision to run its mobile software on Android and run Windows 10 on the desktop would reduce development costs, retain end user mindshare, and let the market decide on the mobile UI. It doesn't really matter at this point whether Winphone is any good, it is a small minority platform for mobile apps with the same problem as BlackBerry. On the other hand, extend, embrace, extinguish...put the effort into doing better than Google services and the old Microsoft is back in the driving seat.
We're trialling O_365 on various devices at work, and allowing people to try BYOD. An issue that's arisen is that OneNote is not formally, and for licensing purposes, part of the MS Office suite. For MS and Apple OSs this wasn't an issue - users could download it and login with their work-supplied username and password, but for Android devices only OneNote insisted on a Microsoft account iD.
For some people this wasn't a problem, but others didn't see why they should have to create an MS account for work's sake; another chance for users' credentials to be hacked and leaked, as one person put it.
Bo*****s if its designed and installed properly then the operating system has little to do with poor integration.
As to integrating MS software it brings back shades of Blackberrys failed attempts to buy into a busy market place.
I would have quite liked the option to have these apps or not providing they can be uninstalled. As it probably made the device a little cheaper since the manufacturer is getting paid to include them, then that's not a bad thing. Lots of companies pay to have their apps installed in the base build wether its phones, tablets, PCs or even some servers. That's just part of life and not a big issue unless there is no way to remove them.
As for the apps being available at all - good on MS I say. Ecosystem tie-in has been getting more rampant recently. Seeing at least one of the big players being more cross-platform is a refreshing change - even more so given who it is and their history! Maybe I'll buy a HUDL2 now?
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