Yet an example where Windows (10) Mobile is left out. I think we might have to get used to two monoliths in this market.
The thing people need to realize is that Microsoft has been around for 40 years. They're in this for the long haul. Until Microsoft quits, it is not game over.
If I were google. I would be very stressed , Nadella's Microsoft is not ordinary company and it is attacking google in every front.
Google's biggest mistake was their hesitate to beat windows on desktop(I would say recent news about chrome/android desktop version is related to their analysis from Microsoft approach). We all know it does not matter where goes computing. Desktop will be there ! even for 10 % of users (developers). but desktop will not dead (there is no way , absolutely ).And until desktop is alive , Microsoft is like snake with venom , ready to attack.
I am betting on Microsoft ( despite being linux guy ). Microsoft coming back and they compete vigorously , because they have resource , they will win !
I dunno. Since a couple of years, a lot went wrong for them
- Websearch (Bing usage must be abysmal)
- Webmail
- Mobile (I have lost track how many approaches failed over the years)
- Web-tech (IE, Silverlight, all the other proprietary extensions)
- Media sales (They had something for the Zune thingy, right?)
- Web ads
- Languages. Java is still around, JS likewise. The whole .NET ecosystem is kind of holding out, but nowhere exploding.
- Social web
I have a hard time believing their inclusion of SSH in 2015 is making a difference. The whole lot of younger coders I know are either on Mac, on Linux or on ChromeOS. No one wants to do Windows. Powershell is nice, but why learn it if you also work on Unix?
The ordinary user or enterprise desktop is their mainstay and I don't see that evaporating fast. Surface is making some inroads into the corporate tablet/laptop (laplet?) market. And their productivity suite seems healthy despite the design choices.
But that's it. Apple is eating the smartwatch market, the phone high-end, the tablet high-end, the ultrabook market. Android is slurping up the low-end to high-end phone market. Online productivity suites means Google. Search is Google. Media sales is Amazon/iTunes. Social web is Facebook/Twitter. New languages and frameworks come out of OSS or Google or Mozilla.
> Websearch (Bing usage must be abysmal)
Nope. In fact Bing usage is really good. 1 in 5 people are searching on Bing (maybe even more if you factor in the multiple companies that use Bing though I'm not sure Yahoo does anymore). http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/16/technology/bing-usage/
> Webmail
Office 365 is KILLING it and as part of that ecosystem they have Outlook on the web. I'm not sure what's going wrong for them here. Do you have any data?
> Mobile
Fair. Unfortunately, in my opinion.
> Web-tech
Their new browser in Windows 10 is actually really, really good. Silverlight is still one of the best options for streaming video but Microsoft is embracing the web like crazy! They worked on TypeScript, they have a new version Visual Studio that's built on web technologies, you can make universal Windows apps with web technology, their .Net framework constantly works with the latest developments in web tech.
Microsoft is hugely in on Web Tech. Have you seen how well their Word, Excel, OneNote, etc work in a web browser? Pretty damn well.
> Media sales
What does this mean? There is XBox for gaming and music, there is groove for music in general, they have the Surface; are you referring to ONLY MP3 players? Even Apple is quitting that game.
> Web ads
Fair. No idea what their statistics are on this.
> Languages. Java is still around, JS likewise. The whole .NET ecosystem is kind of holding out, but nowhere exploding.
You can develop Java in Visual Studio. You can developer practically anything in Visual Studio now, even Objective-C to a degree (well, soon). The .Net platform is simply amazing and when the open sourcing is finished and they start offering their binaries for download there is no reason why it can't get bigger.
Java isn't exactly exploding either. Not sure what this criticism is really trying to convey.
> Social web
Google also sucks at this. Apple too. Everyone but a few players suck at this. Microsoft actually has a decent social presence if you consider XBox Live but beyond that I don't think they have much of anything.
> Apple is eating the smartwatch market, the phone high-end, the tablet high-end, the ultrabook market. Android is slurping up the low-end to high-end phone market. Online productivity suites means Google. Search is Google. Media sales is Amazon/iTunes. Social web is Facebook/Twitter. New languages and frameworks come out of OSS or Google or Mozilla.
About half of this I disagree with but, even so, you act like it's a "well Google and Apple are winning so...Microsoft, just give up guys".
I don't understand the point of your criticisms.
Regarding social web it is also highly dishonest to compare Xbox Live with Facebook or Twitter, which are deeply ingrained cultural phenomena.
His points are valid, much more than ticking off positives of Microsoft's efforts. There's a reason MS isn't as confident as it was. Redmond is constantly haunted by 2006(AWS), 2007(iPhone), 2008(Chrome) and 2009(Facebook's rise). They seem to be the last to the party...
> Having a good web browser or partially obscure language does not make Microsoft a web company in a sense that Google or Facebook are. That would be a dishonest comparison. Us devs will never forget about IE, though Edge is a good start in repairing a very frayed relationship.
No one said Microsoft was a web company. But yes you devs (including me) will forget about the IE of old because that is no longer the reality. Holding superficial grudges over software that becomes less relevant everyday is pety and counter productive.
Besides, since IE8 Microsoft has ackowledged its issues, has been far more open and more like a partner with the other companies involved in the W3C specifications and they've made fantastic strides (IE 11 is awesome as well; IE 10 isn't that far off).
> Regarding social web it is also highly dishonest to compare Xbox Live with Facebook or Twitter, which are deeply ingrained cultural phenomena.
If you re-read what I wrote I simply said if you counted XBox Live as social then sure they have some social presence but that's it. I never compared it to Facebook or Twitter. So zero dishonesty there.
> His points are valid, much more than ticking off positives of Microsoft's efforts.
You haven't refuted my responses to his points and yet you are saying parent's are valid. I'm not sure if you're simply trying to troll or what but if you feel his points are valid and all of my points, which mostly just corrected incorrect statements from the parent, are not then please present your evidence instead of trying to dismiss.
> There's a reason MS isn't as confident as it was. Redmond is constantly haunted by 2006(AWS), 2007(iPhone), 2008(Chrome) and 2009(Facebook's rise). They seem to be the last to the party...
Azure is second to AWS; I'm sure Google is kicking itself because of that and it's a pretty awesome business. Why would they be haunted by that?
For iPhone yeah Microsoft missed the boat but so did countless others. Microsoft has a new tactic with making all of their software available on all platforms and you know what? It's higher rated than some of the contenders in the same space (for instance Word is higher rated than Pages). They're doing fine with mobile except for their own OS.
I doubt they are "haunted" by Chrome. If anything Mozilla would be considering they were making ground on IE and then Chrome came right in and grabbed many of their users. Microsoft still has plenty of users here and they probably don't care nearly as much as you want to think they do.
Everyone was caught off guard with Facebook. If you'll notice Microsoft hasn't even tried to over take them, unlike Google who tried 3 times in different ways.
I hope their foray in the consumer space proves fruitful. It's a shame they have to compete with the likes of Apple and Google, along with any future Chinese tech company.
The problem is that the average Joe (and that's 90% of people buying phones) doesn't care about security issues and updates. IMO the ship has sailed for Windows Phone. It will remain the third player on mobile, like Linux is on desktop.
If anything Windows 10 is a special snowflake in that it does not have an underlying posix-y kernel, which makes it less likely to get anything cross-platform, even if it does get slightly more prevalent than the other crumbs.
There Windows Phones are the only alternative for those that don't want to get an Android device.
Android also doesn't have a proper POSIX kernel, its Linux version is very customized, for example IPC is out.
What POSIX stuff (it is just CLI and daemons anyway) can you really use for mobile apps?!
It's not about POSIX per se - but among the Linux and Unix derived kernels, most of the things are similar. e.g., files are open with an open() syscall, file sharing semantics are mostly the same -- whereas on Windows, you call the differently-behaving OpenFile, and you can't delete or move an open file.
Porting infrastructure (e.g. flutter) among POSIX-y kernels is much less work than porting to Win.
> There Windows Phones are the only alternative for those that don't want to get an Android device.
I thought Firefox phones were another alternative. Aren't they?
I've tested it with some simple apps, it works as advertised. The Windows device shows up in Android Studio as if it were a KitKat phone.
Since Microsoft has done all that work already, I don't think it makes sense for 3rd party frameworks to bother supporting Windows 10 Mobile separately anymore.
While I've some great apps built on the Windows Universal app platform, there really haven't been anything that I've seen that is a must have or the next explosive app. The larger problem is the hacker community's love for their Macs & Linux. Microsoft should just flood the Bay with Surface Books, that might prove more fruitful than giving devs cash
But actually with Windows ability to run Android & iOS apps, it will be less of a problem I guess (http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8511439/microsoft-windows-...)