They could eventually surpass other versions of Android and become the goto android implementation.
I never understood why they didn't go that route - after all Android is open source. What am I missing?
Also, Windows Phone was an amazing OS in its own right but failed largely because they couldn’t solve apps. It is impossibly hard to compete against Apple or Samsung in this space, especially when the OEMs didn’t want to play ball.
(Samsung, HTC and LG made a few Windows phones that they didn’t invest a lot of time on. They were most likely an expensive relationship maintenance activity to retain a partnership with MS. I believe this happened because MS imposed really strict guidelines for their OS experience right out the gate that didn’t really benefit anyone but Microsoft (OEMs make money on preinstalled apps, for example; that wasn’t allowed.) It was much easier for them to just pump more money on making great Android devices than trying to make Windows Phone great again)
Microsoft’s Office leverage is gone. If they try to use it as a hammer in defense of their platform, their market share will drop. Their only option now is to try to increase the platform buy-in again.
Given your experience, do you see GAS overtaking VBA, and if so, in which fields? (Finance?) What industries were the companies you helped switch over working in?
I ask because I'm while I'm roughly intermediate with VBA, I'm not sure if I should continue pursuing VBA or invest in something that might be more valuable in the future.
Isn't it just JavaScript + a library?
It also has the same problem that VBA has in that the code resides local to the object consuming it (spreadsheet, doc, etc), so you can’t version control it like you would for a normal application).
VBA even has the advantage of being able to load .NET libraries, which is huge given that you can let the .NET VM do the heavy lifting and use VBA to lay results out onto your sheet or Word doc.
In the early days Sheets wasn’t as good; but I would say it is better than Excel if you’re willing to spend a few million to port your complex macros.
Slides still blows though.
Edit: Industry largely is irrelevant; most big companies have custom software running their main production line (be that software, telecom or manufacturing). MS Office / Google Apps have a sweet spot in back-office functions. Google Apps allows a lot more automation (and most of the kids coming out of school know basic programming these days). No; it’s not as good as custom version-controlled software, but it’s a hell of a lot better than e-mailing .xlsx files back and forth. You can more or less treat a Google sheet as a lambda function, which is pretty neat.
Word and Excel are gargantuan pieces of software. VBA aside (which is used very very heavily, and Google’s Scripting Framework doesn’t compare given that everything is executed on their servers), there are some really niche features deep inside of Word that people at big companies use daily.
Also, Sheets is slow as hell compared to Excel, even on small time spreadsheets. Not going to work on the trading floor.
Then there is the whole “kind of sort of works offline” bit that really diminishes the value of using Google Docs. Docs basically doesn’t work on low bandwidth connections, which is a daily reality for a lot of business people that travel. That’s the main reason why I prefer Office; it is a lot easier to work on talks and blog posts offline with it.
There is a third way, assuming the Android license allows for it:
Microsoft concedes they can't replace the OS layer
Microsoft forks Android
Microsoft focuses on the next battle that could be won: making Cortana/whatever the default digital assistant in their build.
For fun, let's then assume Google tries to block this.
Microsoft sues Google for "bundling" and uses their own case where they were forced to unbundle the web browser as precedent.
(I say this as someone who likes his iPhone but hates Siri.)
Android market share is !85% (worldwide, it is less in the US). When Microsoft was going through the monopoly cases their market share was ~90-93%. Not actually that far off the same metric.
The thing is that Google is being very careful to not commit the same mistakes there. Though I'd say they're pretty close (and the EU seems to agree, generally, warning them a few times over similar behaviors)
iOS marketshare is a funny thing - it makes ~$30 billion a year in revenue - 3 times that of the Android marketplace - but has less than 1/5th of the users.
MS never gave access, hence never allowed forks of Windows to happen.
How much more can Google do than give away the entire OS for free? They have ZERO commitments by monopoly law to usurp their default apps in their distribution of Android
They don't have to do that. They can make deals with OEMs to make Cortana the default.
(Serious question. I know nothing about app stores and/or mobile operating systems)
This would allow windows phones to run android apps from within Windows (though several obstacles remains, since the play store and other google services are proprietary)
Rumored this worked so well that Microsoft canned it in favor of UWP, because if windows could run android apps there would basically not be any need for UWP. As a result Microsoft changed focus and gave us WSL on the desktop instead.
The above could very well / likely be made up but I like that explanation.
There is also the thing that Android apps without Google Play Services often feel like zombies of themselves. The easiest way to see that is comparing Amazon's FireOS to Android: which apps aren't even available, which ones are, but fail in strange ways, etc.
It doesn't matter if the platform it's running on is "Microsoft Android" or something else - Google still controls the store
Amazon, for example, has all its apps in a separate store because it doesn't like to play Google's games (the Amazon shopping app is not in the Play store because they don't want Google getting a slice of their profits).
A similar strategy could theoretically work for MS.
I suppose that Play Store has the same rules as the Apple App store. That is, you can have your own checkout and payment system as long as you sell things that are not for content that you consume in the application. This is why Uber and Amazon and other shopping apps do not have to share the profits, but for example Audible does not sell books through their iOS app and microsoft actually pays 30% to apple (now probably 15) for any Office subscription people get when getting it from the app.
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.mSh...
It is perfectly reasonable for Amazon to not want to give a 30% cut on books to Apple. I wish there would be some exception for this kind of content in the stores.
It wasn't totally canned though, it became the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
They can't include Google's proprietary software in their fork, since part of the agreement for distributing that software includes a clause where you agree not to fork Android.
Even if Microsoft created their own location service for Android, changed their own apps, and made their own app store, they'd have to convince other app developers to support it, since Google has spent the last few years convincing everyone to build their apps on proprietary libraries and services. Essentially, they end up in the same boat as Windows Phone: Having a platform without apps, and not a strong incentive for developers to modify their apps to support it.
That's not to say it's impossible. Microsoft has been doing a lot of mobile development lately, and if you were trying to build a case for losing the Google Play store Office, Skype, and other business apps are a good place to start.
The pessimistic part of me thinks that BYOD is so prevalent these day that a pure "business phone" locked into the Microsoft ecosystem just wouldn't work. Maybe five years ago it would have appealed to enterprises wanting to roll out a fleet of employee devices but now a phone needs to be as appealing to the consumer as the business.
Good that it's open source, so they forked it, and is now known as LineageOS.
As a developer I already have to support both Google's flavor of Android and Amazon's flavor of Android, with their own separate implementations of IAP, push notifications, etc.
I'd have to support MSFT's implementations too and you'd have to convince me (and the people who pay me) that it's worth bothering to do.
Of course, they've also sold Office on Mac forever.
In case either one gets separated from the other as the front page drifts by.
You answered your own question here:
> after all Android is open source.