Microsoft having a funeral for iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft having a funeral for iPhone

macenstein.com

18 pointsmahmud16 comments

I don't see this as more than the guys having a bit of fun, after probably a very hectic work schedule. Great to see them celebrating in this way.

Of course, I don't see Microsoft displacing the iPhone at all, but they do have deep pockets.

Agreed. I didn't like the blog's tone, the team has every right to party. However, I found the iPhone funeral interesting, given how it's Android that's eating everyone's lunch.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1434613

The blog did file it under "Apple Fanboyism" and "Microsoft Bashing", so at least they were honest about where they were coming from. I presume that since Android is being touted as an "iPhone Killer", it will have to kill the iPhone first before people want to bury it in turn.

  given how it's Android that's eating everyone's lunch.

Yep, Apple is so losing money with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Interesting, did gartner take the last two into account? iPod touch runs iOS and gets FaceTime, I presume this may come to iPad too.

I was there for this celebration. It was all in good fun. The funeral was such a small portion of the day, it's being way overblown. It was like 15 minutes of an all day carnival. There was games, monster trucks to ride in, live music, and all other kinds of celebratory stuff going on (face painting ftw!). There was an all out party going on.

I'm on the Windows team, but the WinMo7 guys worked their asses off and actually made something pretty friggin cool. They deserved to party.

As for Microsoft's chances in this market, people never thought Microsoft would dominate Sony in video games. I wouldn't count Microsoft out just yet... it'll be interesting to say the least.

I thought Microsoft was burning something like a billion dollars a year in losses in order to in order to be in the video game console market. Is that impression wrong? Has MS made a profit yet in games?

They haven't recouped all the money they'd invested yet (still about $4 billion short), but they are now turning a profit of a few hundred million each quarter

Meaning they stopped digging a deeper hole?

Or that they do continue to dig, only now it's filling up faster then they can dig?

Meaning that in a few years their investment in the games market will have paid off probably. Investments are long-term strategies.

Video games are such a volatile market, I wouldn't say "probably" about much of anything. That's a big chunk of the danger in dropping so much money to try to grab some market share, expecting to make the money back someday. Of course, at the same time, one couldn't expect Microsoft to stay out of such a "convergence" market, so I'm not by any means saying that Xbox has been a mistake, either.

Quick question I realise you probably don't know the answer to - why no Android?

As fas as I can see, Blackberries and iPhones aren't direct competitors to WM7. Microsoft's customers are HTC, Samsung et al, and at the moment the only other company providing an OS to them is Google.

There are other ways to celebrate. MS doesn't exactly get to have fake funerals for devices they haven't even begun to compete with. If MS were a small startup, it'd be cute. As a huge multi-billion dollar company, it's just silly.

Some how I have a feeling this little show is going to come back and bite them.

It does seem a little soon in the war to be declaring Mission Accomplished.

Really??

A reason why I would join Microsoft / Google rather than Apple.

I have found employees of the former two to be much more interactive with outside world, compared to Apple employees.

Also Microsoft, Google and other companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Twitter go to great lengths to make sure that they provide best compensation and benefits to their software engineers, somehow Apple always makes their software engineers look like secondary citizens and i doubt if they even pay well.

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