Microsoft hopes to bury iPhone, Android
reuters.com
reuters.com
When asked what your plan was for the tablet market (which you haven't missed a generation on yet, but the clock is ticking) you responded simply: "It's called Windows" and laughed. What exactly is the joke here? The absurdity of the idea that Windows could ever fail to dominate a market? Wake the fuck up.
Recently you had a QA on reddit regarding your new browser. Your response to almost every question of the form "Why didn't you include feature X?" was "Our market research shows people don't want feature X, we make what people want." Again you're only lying to yourselves and insulting us along the way. We are your users (at least we could be) and we're telling you what we want. What those answers mean to us is that your product is just never going to do what we want it to. Why do the QA with these people when all you're going to do is marginalize the concerns they express.
I think I know why you keep slipping up here Steve. You're somehow under the mass delusion that things are still going well.
This one less so than the others Vista wasn't a missed generation so much as just not up to snuff. *To be fair this this QA was done in 2 parts first with marketing people then with programmers the prior having much more of this type of response than the latter.
As soon as the inmates aren't running the asylum, Microsoft does much better. The Entertainment and Devices division and MS has pretty much full autonomy, and they come up with a very popular console line and a unique motion gesture system within two generations, they take a chance on the Zune (particularly the second generation UI... although the Zune didn't sell in the end, they put up a good effort). Microsoft Research does great stuff, and is also completely autonomous.
Ray Ozzie was supposed to move Microsoft away from monolithic development, but it requires a full rebuild of Microsoft's structure, which I can only assume Ballmer is stalling.
A lot of Apple enthusiasts like to say "Apple's excellence isn't just Steve Jobs," but I think in the case of Microsoft, one can reasonably say "Microsoft's brokenness is just Steve Ballmer." I think he's almost completely blind to pretty much everything that's happening in his company, and the tech world at large. I'm not really sure what value the board think he adds. I guess something to do with sales and marketing, given his background, but it's not like Microsoft's image is doing all that well either.
One other MS subdivision I forgot to mention that are doing well is Bing. They're doing some great work. I'm not sure who they report to, and what their level of autonomy is.
It seems the mobile division is a couple years behind the server software division.
In fact, I would consider it a miracle.
The mobile division is not just coding for the present and the future, but also the past. If they manage to get half the developer attention that the iPhone gets, I am certain MS will demolish both iPhone and Android because they have a vast developer base to tap into.
If they manage to get the distribution right, control handset variety (or at least require minimum specs; a la PC architecture), tame the carriers and open up to developers just a tad, you will see millions of corporate developers installing the mobile plugins for Visual Studio and cranking out apps.
But I am afraid it's not in MS' nature to motivate developers, but have always relied on market demand and other people's $$$ to make their shenanigans palatable to developers.
If I was in charge, I would assemble a team of 8 - 12 and write a nice .NET/C# cross-compiler/wrapper given to any registered Windows Mobile developer; even remote, hosted cross compiler. Make people write with your tools first, for your primary platform, with the option to target other platforms from the same source. Apple was afraid of this with the 3.3.1 policy: iOS getting wrapped with Win32 API or Android SDK would have been a nightmare for quality on the iOS.
The first tool developer to successfully target top N platforms (for N>2) is gonna rake in cash, 3.3.1 permitting.
It's just unbelievable that Sony is launching phones running Android 1.6 now which can't be updated by Google directly like it can the Nexus One.
Did you buy one of those Sony phones?
Probably not. In fact that major disadvantage of Sony's entrants is incredibly well known, and has heavily worked against them. Which is exactly how the market is supposed to work.
Having said that, it's humorous that Microsoft is now looked to as a good example. For anyone who owned a Windows Mobile device before, there is a long history of Microsoft grunting out a version onto the market, and then abandoning. The amount of support for that Moto Q after it was released was exactly 0, and that wasn't Motorola's fault. Microsoft gets bored quickly.
But more competitors focussed on the customer and not the carrier is a plus in my book. I'm an iOS fan, but I don't want to live in an Apple monoculture.
MS has obviously put a lot of thought and a lot of work in WP7 and it shows.
Whether it will survive in the marketplace is a different matter.
The researcher concludes that when you tell others what you are going to do, that your mind tricks itself into believing that the task has already been achieved, and reduces the incentive to do the hard work to actually achieve it. Thus, when Steve Balmer gushes to the press and says that iPhone is going to get obliterated, it probably reduces the chances of that actually happening.
How many of you has boasted to your friends "I'm working on this cool new software, I'll have a beta in few months to show you", and this was already five years ago and you never did release anything? I have.
The best itches are kept closed until you have something to release. Then you can maybe tap into that other drive, where having users testing and depending on your software keeps you going.
Paul Graham also declared Microsoft dead (http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html) 3.5 years ago. With all reservations made to the meaning of the word "dead" in this fine essay, I can't find the way around some ways in which this is simply wrong. For example, if I want to play a computer game nowadays, I'd better have Windows. The vast majority of games, from indie and experimental through proud little independent companies all the way to established companies - are made for Windows. It's like the only game in town. There's no sign of changing this in sight. Granted, PC game market is a fraction of that of consoles, but in consoles Microsoft established a good foothold too and not giving it up anytime soon.
I'm afraid that many technology observers drink too much of some fashionable kool-aid and over-dramatize things. Wherever some company or technology appears that has non-zero chance to potentially displace established company or technology X, they declare it "X killer" or proclaim X dead. I'm afraid I can't fully trust the expertise and reasoning of said people after that.
Maybe Microsoft's hopes to bury iPhone and Android are just that, hopes. But declaring it Microsoft's "last chance", even in mobile segment, is no less wishful thinking.
Try this site: http://www.kongregate.com/
Or, to go with the Kongregate example look at what's hot there: http://www.kongregate.com/games/kupo707/epic-battle-fantasy-... Humour is fine, but this variety gets old after 5 minutes. And this kind of thing is no substitute of the games it is trying to mock, only supplement.
It's not that you cannot play any games on Linux or web. After all, there are fine games like Tux Racer and Quake III and there are really lists like "25 Linux games". But it's like the selection you have is like the menu in prison canteen vs all the world's restraints. Chefs don't come there. All the new and exciting stuff is happening elsewhere.
Listen at: http://5by5.tv/talkshow/10 starting about 55:00
7 may be their magic number.
* The UI is very responsive on pre-release hardware. I've been told that the released version will be faster.
* The keyboard is very nice. One feature that I noticed is that if you hold down the letter key, you get accented versions of that same key. Makes it much easier to type résumé instead of resume. I can't compare it in over-all usability to other smart phones as I haven't lived day in day out with a smart phone.
* The way applications are organized is interesting. Instead of merely having a mongo huge list of apps, apps can also register themselves in app hubs. So applications that manipulate photos will show up under your photos, applications that deal with music show up there, etc. I'm not totally sold on this, but it seems like a good idea.
* Development for WP7 in silverlight is shockingly easy. And silverlight on WP7 runs super fast. Actually runs faster on the device than on my beefy desktop in emulator.
* There isn't yet an easy way to handle deploying WP7 phones in an enterprise, but I was told that this will be addressed later. There was only so much they could do before this launch though.
I'm in the market for a smart phone, and after handling the WP7 phones I am sold. It is better than Android, and in my opinion at least as good as the iPhone.
They have an opportunity to be a wise-elder to the industry, if only they woke up and realized they're no longer the prizefighter, but an elder.
With a move like that they can become a reference platform for mobile adoption; first in big business and government, then academia, and once the quality of their Qt-like API improves the game developers will start using it to push the envelope (remember when DirectX was laughed as full-screen GDI, and game developers still used their own hardware abstraction layers, by-passing Win16/32 for the tried and true power of DOS underneath?)
[Edit:
I must add that they might want to naturalize Symbian refugees. Grab the top 10 ten Symbian app vendors and offer them a migration route to WinMo, next comes J2ME which is effectively dead, thanks to Oracle's unapparent interest in mobile.
Backward compatibility is something MS knows best. Take the refugees before they commit mass seppuku and offer them a new home.
Take over StackOverflow or launch your own mobile Q&A site to centralize mobile development knowledge and keep it under your watch.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphese
My guess is that laying a newspaper out on paper is essentially a 2D packing problem—which is an NP-hard optimization problem. I assume removing unnecessary words from headlines when helpful is a good way to give yourself some wiggle room in terms of what goes where.
It has become a "LET'S BUILD SOMETHING THAT WILL KILL THE <FILL IN THE BLANKS>" instead of "LET"S BUILD SOMETHING THEY WANT". And that's why Google and Apple are innovating and Microsoft is just playing catching up.
Has it ever been different? Not Google and Apple, but Microsoft. Has it ever invented something?
Even Microsoft's first successful product was a version of a language someone else developed many years before they existed.
Google's second most successful product was a web-based mail service, something that existed about 10 years before their version.
Apple's most successful product existed a few decades before they entered the market.
And Apple pretty much invented the personal computer as we know it. Unless Woz is wrong, the Apple I had a very innovative feature: a keyboard.
But I maintain my statement, which has nothing to do with Apple and Google (something I made clear on my first message in this thread). Microsoft has very rarely, if ever, launched a product that created or redefined a category. They are always late movers, but, frequently, end up with the first successful product.
Have they ever made something really innovative?
The WP7 looks pretty good too. I like the integration with my Xbox Live persona. I like that it's not locked down to AT&T. I like that Microsoft aren't looking like they're going to let carriers munge with it. Yet, I'm a Mac user that's fully bought into Google's online products. Will WP7 sync to my Mac? Nope. Chances it plays nicely with Google (or Microsoft even allow Google apps in the store)? Minimal. Likelihood I buy a WP7 just because of that bloody-mindedness? High.
Shouldn't they ground their goals in reality? I too want a warp-drive and teletransporters, but I am not willing to bet my bonuses on impossible things.