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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

Great move by Microsoft.

This is an acquisition that arguably puts Microsoft mobile capabilities above that of Google's, and closest to Apple's. They're getting industry veterans with great design talent. They're getting a Lumia product that has the best build quality of any non-Apple smart phone. They're acquiring proven channels to access global markets. Both Nokia and Microsoft have been floundering in the mobile space recently; neither have had any real explosive successes. Together they might make some really compelling offerings.

I'm not a fan of their mobile OS, but I am a huge fan of Nokia's latest smartphones, and if Nokia design's talent can figure out how to introduce a better UI, I'd seriously consider getting The Windows Phone as my next smartphone.

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This is an acquisition that arguably puts Microsoft mobile capabilities above that of Google's, and closest to Apple's.

To have this loltastic sentence at the top of hn makes me wonder if MS or some PR has a bunch of shill accounts they roll out for occasions like this. Seriously? As the other reply said, they were already together. And losing. Badly. And hated, broadly.

And the reason the windows phone sucks so badly is that MS tied the PC and phone UIs together into a "push-me pull-you" (Windows 8 everywhere) that can't succeed at either task. And so to escape MS will have to back out of their deal entirely, go back to designing phones and PC OSes separately, and given MS' ingrown bureaucratic insanity there that seems less than likely.

Grafting a few more limbs onto a failing Frankenstein will ... create a bigger failing Frankenstein.

I take it you have never used a Windows Phone. The Lumia's Nokia make are well designed and high quality, WP8 isn't that bad at all and will undoubtedly get better in the future. Everyone I've met with a WP device (Which is a lot, a fair percentage of my coursemates own one) is happy with it.

And so to escape MS will have to back out of their deal entirely, go back to designing phones and PC OSes separately, and given MS' ingrown bureaucratic insanity there that seems less than likely.

Why would they ever want to go back to designing them separately? How would that benefit anyone in any way? In case you hadn't noticed phones are computers now, integration is the future.

"not that bad" doesnt mean it's good when compared with the competition , "not that bad" is not enough today. A mobile OS must be excellent , not good , to compete. That's the problem of WP Os, it is just "not that bad"

I think WP8 is excellent, I meant that it is not as bad as he seems to think it is. Its also not all doom and gloom for WP, my employee (a large multinational company, thousands of employees) is switching all its employee phones from Blackberry to WP8. Even if its consumer market isn't that big you have to remember that a lot of the business world runs on Microsoft's software and it all ties together very nicely with Windows Phone.

The only way that Windows Phone ties to Microsoft's enterprise offerings better than iPhone is the name. Literally everything else can be done on iOS, often better.

At three times the price. You don't need any additional software to manage them (if you use System center that is) and it "just works" (tm). When your company runs on Microsoft it makes sense to go with Microsoft.

Is the iPhone version of Office better than the Windows Phone version? At least the WP version doesn't require Office 365.

I bought a Lumia 800 as my first smartphone and I'm not quite happy with it.

- It lost at least 60% of its value in less than a year (price for a new one dropped by that much)

- MS wants me to pay them if I want to build an app to use on my own phone

- And after I've paid them I can only put three apps that aren't published on there. If I publish them in the app store and would like to use them myself I have to buy my own apps. So basically just give them money.

- No significant software updates

All in all, it's a good dumb phone, but it's not a great smartphone.

Well you got screwed then. I just bought an 820 SIM free for £179 (Can buy three for the price of an iPhone 4S here). Buy a new car, lose WAAAY more than that in 6 months. Only Apple devices hold their value and I don't understand that as the market is saturated with them.

You don't have to pay them to build for your own device. Just register it as a development device and you can push your own stuff to it. I just did this with WP8 and it's fine.

Not published an app yet so can't comment.

No significant software updates (compared to Android that is). That's a good thing. The platform is pretty stable and consistent across all vendors. It's a shit trying to push an app to 5 different versions of Android.

The only PITA is to do WP8 apps, you have to use Windows 8 which I really don't like. It's bearable with Start8 though.

To be honest I've owned iPhones, Android handsets (Samsung, HTC) and the only thing I don't want to throw across the room due to stupid problems has been WP8.

It costs like $19 to register an account on the WP dev centre (or free if you are a student), that's less than Apple and Google charge. For that you get Visual Studio and Blend all set up to develop with and can publish apps to the store.

Yeah, it used to be much more than that. It is $19 a year though.

    less than Apple and Google charge

What your parent wants to do, "build an app to use on my own phone", is free on Android.

It's free to build an app and deploy it on your own Windows Phone(s) too - you only have to pay if you want to distribute it through the Windows Store.

It just changed some days ago

Since there, you CAN'T deploy a personal app in your wp8 because you need to unlock it first and to do that you need to have a developer account.

That is to be expected from a first generation device unfortunately. Windows Phone 7 was Microsoft toe-dipping into the mobile space with the Metro UI to see if it could be viable.

While WP 7 was a huge success in this regard, the hardware / platform wasn't designed with a long roadmap set for its future, as in order to advance Windows Phone to WP8, the hardware specs of all of the WP7-generation devices was to be abandoned.

I just upgraded from my HTC WP7 device to a Nokia Lumia 1020, and the phone is amazing. I use Android on my tablet, but I prefer Windows Phone on my phone. FYI, the camera on the Lumia 1020 is as amazing as all the reviews say it is.

1) Somebody already told you this, only iDevices hold the value, everything else would value peanuts after a couple of months. 2) This happens with Apple too. 3) I don't have that problem, did you check that? Maybe is a problem in your end. 4) My 1 years old LG android 2.3 got stuck with that version for good. On the other hand, WP8 doesn't even have a year.

I had been used 4 platform (ios, android, BB and WP7 & 8) And my Lumia 920 is my all time favorite smartphone and it is a pleasure to develop for it in comparison with Android and iOS. So I guess is a matter of taste

> I take it you have never used a Windows Phone.

I have. In fact, it's a perfectly good phone - works well, makes and receives calls with good quality, does not experience loss-of-signal too frequently and both browsing and e-mail work as expected.

But that is the feature set of a featurephone. Coincidence or not, former featurephone users are the only demographic where Windows Phone is growing.

"It doesn't suck" is not competitive these days. Certainly, there are iOS and Android and Blackberry devices that do suck, but there are plenty others that don't.

And here we go with the shill comments...

If someone doesn't agree with you it doesn't mean they are a shill.

This isn't Slashdot!

> If someone doesn't agree with you it doesn't mean they are a shill.

Maybe, but sometimes this is the simplest explanation to a well-timed explosion of PR-like, blatantly untrue, astroturfish and "loltastic" statements.

Nokia is a failure in the smartphone business, only out-failed by Blackberry at the moment. Microsoft has been a has been in that sector since the arrival of the first iPhone. If anyone seriously believes two bricks float better than one, it's time to change the meds.

Perhaps people are motivated by the news and wish to defend their knowledge investments?

It's not a failure, nor is it a success. Yet.

People were saying this a decade ago about the Xbox remember.

Microsoft only decided to compete just over two years ago and they're entering a very competitive market. It takes time to get traction on these things and they're doing it, just slowly. The potential to grow exponentially is still there.

As for the declaration of failure, are you really qualified to judge what a failure is or are you spouting the echoes of all the tech news journalists who like getting hits from slating Microsoft (which will never become unfashionable)?

> People were saying this a decade ago about the Xbox remember.

The Xbox was a failure.

The Xbox 360 was better executed than the more ambitious PS3. It succeeded while the PS3 did not do so well, yet the PS3 is far from being a failure.

> Microsoft only decided to compete just over two years ago

You are ignoring the decade+ behind WindowsCE and Windows Mobile. Microsoft has always been a player in this market.

The 360 is only "not a failure" because the rest of MS had been keeping the XBox division's life support going for 5 years (their worst years being the 2 immediately following the 360's release). While they're no longer bleeding cash, the XBox division is still not a net-gain for Microsoft.

http://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-xbox-division-h...

> You are ignoring the decade+ behind WindowsCE and Windows Mobile. Microsoft has always been a player in this market.

It was a very different market that Windows Mobile competed in. A market that emphasized physical keyboards, rather than touchscreens. A market with $200 device subsidies, rather than $400 smartphone subsidies. That market disappeared, and so did Windows Mobile's chances. In fact, every major product from that market is either dead or on life-support. Palm, Blackberry, Symbian.

Today, Windows Phone 8 shares very little code with Windows Mobile 6.5. Maybe some drivers, that's about it. It uses a different kernel, a different UI toolkit, a different API.

Microsoft failed horribly in the PC spreadsheet market, too. But they threw away their original product (Multiplan) and ported Excel to the PC. Laughing at Multiplan's failure would've been irrelevant when discussing the prospects for Excel. The introduction of the GUI disrupted the existing market for DOS spreadsheets.

Similarly, the failure of Windows Mobile 6.5 is irrelevant for the purposes of discussing Windows Phone's prospects. The problem with Windows Phone is that not that Windows Mobile failed -- but that Windows Phone has a low market share.

> It was a very different market that Windows Mobile competed in

It seems you assume Microsoft decided not to compete then. I wonder why they made Windows Mobile then...

> Similarly, the failure of Windows Mobile 6.5 is irrelevant for the purposes of discussing Windows Phone's prospects.

Forgive my lack of faith, but a company that has, consistently and for as long as this market existed, failed to deliver a decent product, even despite the huge mountains of cash spent in developing it, seems a very unlikely competitor now.

A lot of the financial world runs on Excel spreadsheets and VB macros. Its scary, but I wouldn't say they have failed horribly at the spreadsheet market.

If you read my comment, you will see that I was talking about Microsoft's failed spreadsheet, Multiplan. Not Microsoft's successful spreadsheet, Excel.

The simplest way to vet that explanation was to simply click on my profile and see that I've been here for years with a karma count that certainly doesn't trip any shill account alarms.

Indeed and if you look at the accuser's account, it reads like a Slashdot profile :)

I made a direct reply to your comment as well. Sorry if it looks like I am accusing you of being part of a deliberate PR attack on online communities. I still agree, however, with joe_the_user's comment: your claim looks a lot like what an astroturfer would say.

Then maybe you should recalibrate your expectation of what a comment is supposed to say a little bit, as any comment in support of some company's products is going to 'look a lot like what an astroturfer would say'.

Astroturfing is only one of many possible motives for a comment being left. We should not be so quick to jump on that as an explanation for anything which doesn't agree with our notions.

> maybe you should recalibrate your expectation of what a comment is supposed to say

Please refer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6320222 for the reasons I found kyro's comment very PR-like. I expect, and will remain expecting, HN comments to be based on reality.

The only reality that is acceptable on HN is that Google is unstoppable and benevolent to geeks. An optimistic view of their competitors counts as shilling.

I'll always be an Android user, but even I admit the current Windows Phone UI is cleaner, looks better, and is easier to use. I don't have stats, but I can certainly throw my anecdotes in that people I see get them are happy with the UI and OS, although the don't have the level of apps the other platforms have.

Actually, I think M$ just bought themselves a lot of power. Microsoft's achilles heel was always hardware, and Nokia's was software until recently when they started pushing Windows Phone OS.

So the way I see it, M$ just bought a hardware company that already uses M$ software. No brainer.

I agree with you. I used to have a Nokia N900 and that thing was amazing. They abandoned it and switched to a crappy windows based OS which can't do half as many things as the N900 could and also had the potential to. I think they should have continued developing their Maemo OS, it was the best phone OS I ever used.

By potential what do you mean? To me anything that isn't too broken by design has potential and certainly WP8 isn't broken by design. I'm wondering if you are talking about ecosystem-related potential or something more technical.

I agree with another commenter.. Microsoft about a hardware company that already used its own software. No brainer.

But they were together already. This past time Nokia only developed Windows phones and Microsoft paid for the marketing of the Lumia. Nokia had Stephen Elop as CEO, for crying out loud. We already knew Nokia was a part of Microsoft. This is not a move, just a formality; the low price gives you another hint. If the partnership Microsoft-Nokia could have changed their positions in the mobile sector, it would have happened years ago.

Nothing will change as a result of this.

It's more than that. Microsoft is acquiring the Lumia brand. This gives them the ability to bundle both hardware and software to create one simple, cohesive experience. They will no longer be pushing the Nokia Lumia with Windows Phone 8, but The Microsoft Phone. And they can now brag about how they are the smartphone with the best camera. From a marketing perspective, this makes lots of sense.

Lots of that is speculation on what I hope Microsoft does with this, namely adopting Apple's marketing simplicity and control of the user experience.

I wonder if such bundling will be an issue with their existing anti-trust issues?

Microsoft hasn't had real anti-trust issues in a while. Windows 8 did lots of things they wouldn't have gotten away with 15 years ago; nobody's going after them because they don't really wield the monopoly power they once did.

My understanding is that Microsoft, like IBM and ATT before it, was permanently disallowed to do certain things? I understand that nobody is/has gone after them (yet?), but is that just prosecutorial oversight/prioritization issues, or is there actually nothing wrong?

Yes.

For example, Microsoft is permanently enjoined from restricting OEM crapware preloads. OEMs are allowed to preload whatever they wish on top of Windows.

However, it's perfectly fine for Microsoft to bundle an app store -- so long as an OEM is also allowed to load its own app store. (As Lenovo is doing.)

As for Windows RT and Windows Phone, Microsoft can do anything it wants. When the news came out that Windows RT would only allow Internet Explorer and would only allow programs to be loaded through the app store, the EU competition commissioner said in an interview that he saw nothing wrong with it.

That's because the antitrust case defined Microsoft's monopoly to be over x86 operating systems. Windows RT and Windows Phone run on ARM. What's more, Windows RT and Windows Phone do not have anywhere close to a monopoly of the tablet or smartphone markets.

There may be some tying issues, but branding is not a form of tying.

Thanks for the explanation!

Exactly. My first reaction to this news was "wait, didn't this already happen?", before I realized that it didn't quite happen, but the speculation at the time Elop joined Nokia was precisely about an acquisition.

>>Nothing will change as a result of this.

A good guess is that the enthusiasm at e.g. Samsung for making Windows Phones have gone down quite a bit...

Windows Phones seems to be an internal Microsoft thing now, Xbox style.

> the enthusiasm at e.g. Samsung for making Windows Phones have gone down quite a bit...

It's probably part of their IP licensing deal about the secret patent list Android violates. They pay less per Android phone if and only if they build Windows Phone devices.

How would that make any sense? Microsoft would be essentially paying Samsung (by not collecting licensing fees) to just keep 1-2 phones that barely sell / are available in the WP8 ecosystem. For what? Just to say "the biggest smartphone vendor uses our software"? How does that help anything?

Actually I wouldn't totally agree to that. Some things will have to change. Now that Nokia is not a separate entity but a part of microsoft, it will have to fit within the microsoft way of doing things. This could probably mean more restrictions on whatever Nokia would have done as a separate entity.

> This is an acquisition that arguably puts Microsoft mobile capabilities above that of Google's, and closest to Apple's.

Man.. What have you been smoking?

> They're getting industry veterans with great design talent

Who consistently failed to exceed 3% of market share.

> They're acquiring proven channels to access global markets.

Very low-margin markets.

> Both Nokia and Microsoft have been floundering in the mobile space recently; neither have had any real explosive successes. Together they might make some really compelling offerings.

According to your logic, two bricks tied together float better than one.

> According to your logic, two bricks tied together float better than one.

A sail doesn't float and a hull doesn't move, but together they can make great boats

They're already making great boats, but nobody's* buying them.

* For nominal values of 'nobody'.

I think your definition of nobody is very narrow. Wp8 is the second best seller platform in Latinamerica.

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