Why Windows SmartPhone 8 Launch Can Lead To BlackBerry’s Death | Hacker News Reader

Why Windows SmartPhone 8 Launch Can Lead To BlackBerry’s Death

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13 pointspettermark26 comments

I've owned a couple of BlackBerry and each new one was a worse experience than its predecessor. I was pretty happy with my Bold 9000, by that time it was convenient, fast and very good at email and texts (what I do mostly).

Then others caught up. The newer BlackBerry had a crappy keyboard and they weren't very good at playing MP3 and there were very few applications.

At some point I gave up and I switched to the Lumia 700. My only regret is that I didn't switch earlier.

Except for the lack of keyboard and S/MIME support, it has got everything I want and offers it with a great interface. It's very good with emails, excellent with Exchange integration (and free!) and has a decent application offer (although not up to par with the iPhone, but I don't really care, all the ones I need are there).

I've been extremely impressed by Microsoft and this pivot. I knew the heart of Windows CE was very good (very solid real time Operating System), but all Windows PocketPC and phones I had sucked a lot and were awful to use because of the interface and the crappy hardware.

I don't see how BlackBerry can survive this.

> I knew the heart of Windows CE was very good (very solid real time Operating System)

That's been scrapped for Windows Phone 8 though. It is NT-based.

Indeed.

Without wanting to gush too much, but NT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's orders of magnitude better than anything else on the market without a doubt for any application.

The bit people have the "hate problem" with is the Win32 subsystem that is chucked on top of it.

I've got many years of experience working with the NT kernel world (filesystem layer especially) and I can't upvote you enough. There aren't that many OS that have a working, unified, cache, a good hardware abstraction layer or the possibility to run any subsystem.

My only regret is that Microsoft didn't open the subsystem API enough. I submit they want to keep some freedom in this area.

I believe Windows NT is wonderful as well. But it wasn't designed as a real-time OS, whereas CE was; hence the comments that CE was "scrapped" for NT in Windows Phone 8.

The lack of real-time handling probably won't have much impact on the phone platform, since users (the primary interface consumers of the OS) don't operate anywhere near "real-time" anyway.

It's not a lot of work to make Windows NT real-time. Back in the time of NT 4.0 there was a modified kernel that was hard real-time (as far as I can remember).

This is true. I think most of the RT stuff i.e. GSM/3G stuff is offloaded onto dedicated devices.

I'm sure it will. WP has superior features to BlackBerry OS (esp Facebook, twitter integration, messaging) and the devices are cheaper than comparable Blackberry, Android and iOS devices. Market share is also finally growing.

It's a killer platform already - they just need to sort out the marketing and get through all the Android/iOS fanboy FUD out there against it.

Globally, WP isn't large enough yet to register on Statcounters global metrics, but:

* In NA, 1.0% to 0.97% drop from May to June: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-na-monthly-201106-20120...

* In Europe, 1.23% to 1.36% rise from May to June: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-eu-monthly-201106-20120...

Stats from Netmarketstats shows a much larger global decline, so I think we can conclude that WP is barely growing it's overall marketshare. I expect the WP8 announcement (rather, the WP7.8 announcement) will lead to reduced sales until WP8 is released (hopefully) later this year.

As for Android/iOS fanboy FUD, what exactly would you be referring to?

Statcounter is a horse shit merchant. It's a bad choice for measuring market share statistics for anything. Let's take a look at this specific case and why it's wrong:

1. A lot of WP devices announce themselves as IE desktop rather than mobile.

2. People in the EU still primarily use them for messaging, email only. I rarely see people "on the web" on their mobile devices.

3. Apps requests do not necessarily count in the statistics and the majority of the time people spend is in apps (WP has native FB, ebay, Twitter apps etc). WP has decent native apps for pretty much everything.

The only thing that matters statistically are sales and retention which are numbers that are not uniformly available for any platform.

Re: fanboy FUD is the inevitable "Windows Phone sucks" mantra from people who have never even set eyes on a device.

So your basis for "marketing share growing" is a Comscore report based on a survey in the United States? The only way you would know how many WP are sold is you work on certain parts of WP at Microsoft. I know someone who does, and, although no specific numbers were given, he gives off the impression that WP growth has not been good, and that the Lumia launch was, to put it nicely, disappointing.

And the inevitable "<insert mobile platform here> sucks" mantra comes from fanboys from every platform, including WP. Care to explain why that FUD hasn't influenced the growth of iOS and Android?

Market share is also finally growing.

I've been hearing the opposite. Where are you reading this?

http://www.businessinsider.com/finally-microsoft-has-stopped...

Inevitably, they put the reverse spin on it because it's trendy...

Also, you've got to call bullshit on the stats as the widely deployed Nokia Series 30/40 phones are still the most ubiquitous worldwide

Interesting. If MS starts making any real headway in the market I think that's really going to shake up the native app businesses. People are suffering enough already writing Android and iOS apps. A third platform is probably going to drive a lot of people to the web.

Spot on. WP has good web integration as well i.e you can pin web sites to the start screen so there's a good opportunity there to bridge the gap.

Growing 0.1% from last quarter is hardly "growing" or any indication about a bright future ahead of it. What happens if next quarter they are down again since I assume even fewer people will want to buy Nokia's Lumia now that they know it won't be upgraded to WP8?

99% of people don't know or care. At least in the UK, we're buying tonnes of them. 3 months ago, iPhones everywhere in our office. Now all I see is "sent from my windows phone" all over emails :)

I know 5 people who've binned iPhones for Lumia 710/800 handsets on contract renewal citing that the iPhone is clunky.

(I will say I got rid of my Lumia 710 recently and replaced with a basic phone but that's not really because the OS or the device suck).

I think at this point that a Fischer Price SmartPhone could lead to BlackBerry's death.

My companys history of company phones looks like that:

Bosch/Siemens

Nokia

BlackBerry

I somehow have the feeling they'll go down :(

I love my bold. I never had a phone with such a strong battery. I know you can't do much with it compared to todays smartphones but it's perfect enough for work.

Some decent points there, but misses one key point. The rise of the Bring Your Own Device in the enterprise.

A lot of companies seem to be experimenting with this as an alternative to another round of phone purchases, so the era of the company purchased phone may be coming to an end. All you need is a phone with a good ActiveSync implementation for Exchange integration and you are good to go. Employee like it as they only have to carry one device, Companies like it as it saves them money. It's a rare win/win for both sides.

While I'm sure Windows Phone will work well in this environment, it doesn't help much unless consumers start buying the phones in the first place.

This is what we're doing. WP works very well in this environment already and the handsets are dirt cheap.

That was horribly written, but it made some decent points.

Let's hope that Microsoft will not call it Windows SmartPhone 8

To summarize, a dead-end OS's last best hope is stealing market share from another dead-end OS. Welcome to technologyland.

Microsoft's latest trial, again portrayed as a killer platform. Come on guys, Microsoft's ambition is good but their track record proves that they can't compete on mobile .

If Windows8 fails, I hope Ms gives up mobile totally and behaves the IBM/Oracle way, i.e. sucking the cash out of their client base to the full limit.

Which mobile track record are you referring to? They had early success with Windows Mobile but fell behind the pack.

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