Microsoft Wants to Embed Windows Phone into Every Android Device | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Wants to Embed Windows Phone into Every Android Device

digitaltrends.com

32 pointscodelion45 comments

How is more choice bad for consumers? There are phones I currently wouldn't touch that I would consider using if I could put any mobile OS I wanted onto them. We should applaud HTC if they choose to make phones that aren't locked to one OS. If MS wants to provide a struggling HTC with incentives to do just that, so much the better.

Wastes storage space.

That's exactly why Microsoft doesn't make it easy /easier for dual boot Windows /Linux machines. They want you to have more space available. Isn't that great?

;-)

I don't understand the downvotes here. On a device with 16gb of storage, 2gb or so for another OS that you may or may not be able to get back is significant - especially since things like "usable capacity" are rarely disclosed at the point of sale.

Three words: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Microsoft will push for better interoperability between the two OSes, however MS will notably utilize proprietary features (disk access protocols or some-such) and encourage handset manufacturers to utilize and rely on these proprietary interfaces.

What's the problem with this? More features are better, right?

Wrong. When it comes to Microsoft, they will happily and quickly change proprietary communications protocols and file formats so that competitors -- AHEM, partners -- cannot keep up with these changes. At some point in the future, MS will ignore requests for technical specifications on the changes made and the partner's features will languish into obsolescence.

Features built on top of this integration between the two OSes will be half-baked and second-rate compared to the native Windows Phone experience, and they will be frequently incomplete or unstable.

MS will be using this opportunity to influence the direction of Android (and its derivatives), and they will be pushing it directly into the ground. Integration between the two OSes will break and Android will be left out in the cold.

Eighteen words: better or worse than Google using their deep pockets to make free alternatives until there aren't alternatives?

Microsoft can't stop the success of other platforms as we've seen repeatedly in the 8000 years since that catchphrase hit the intertube forum messages. Interoperability will happen eventually regardless of whether MS initiates it or the EU demands it, because one day someone's going to be pissed off they're expected to "re-buy" half their apps and forget everything else just because they bought a new phone.

Judging by Google's tracking record, worse, much much worse.

Google Chrome vs. Microsoft's IE6, Android vs WinMo 6/6.5, Gmail vs. 2004-2009 Hotmail. I'd rather put up with Google's decent-but-free alternatives than Microsoft's we-are-the-leader-so-we-will-stagnate-until-the-EU-demands-it-which-could-be-6-years-maybe-more.

This cannot be stressed more. Microsoft's business practices have not changed, nor has their mission, this is just another ploy to lock consumers into their ecosystem....

Wouldn't you say that all the competitors are following in Microsoft's footsteps?

It isn't like Apple and Google are not also trying to lock you into their platforms.

Apple, yes. Google... not that much, for now at least. You can still decide not to use their appstore or their applications at all when you run Android.

Eh, Apple and Google have a pretty good thing going right now. I'm not sure if we need microsoft to come in and potentially rain on everyone's parade.

I know "competition is good", but microsoft isn't very good at competition.

Apple definitely is. They used the same strategy by switching to x86 and making it easy to run Windows on a Mac.

Google is a bit different, since they have a distributed platform that you can use on literally, any OS. They definitely want people on their platform, but so far they haven't taken any steps to 'lock' people in (I mean, they renewed their contract with Mozilla, they open-sourced Chromium/Chromium OS, Android, etc...).

I suspect most people are in Google's ecosystem simply because it's better. And until Google say, makes Chrome and Google services run only on Chromebooks and Motorola phones, I'd say they haven't behaved the same as Apple and Microsoft.

I find this interesting, does platform lock-in have to mean that you've bought a technical platform (OS)? Google locks you in by having your data on their services. The new 'lock-in' is cloud storage and cloud based apps. I think the big money isn't from directly locking in consumers, but rather locking in enterprise. That's where Microsoft also made a ton of its money.

If it ships with an open or unlockable bootloader, you can put anything you like on it. This means pretty much any nexus phone, HTC phone or Samsung phone is good to go.

I've tried both Firefox os and Ubuntu touch on my galaxy nexus. I've also tried regular Ubuntu and Debian on my Asus transformer tablet.

That was much easier and cleaner and proper than it was getting my iPhone boot android, which relied exclusively on hacks, and eventually bricked it during a failed factory reset.

If they unlock bootloaders, awesome. If they force me to buy Windows to get an Android phone, I'll go elsewhere.

Here's one good reason why I don't want any piece of "Microsoft software" to be embedded in Android phones:

Microsoft Thinks DRM Can Solve the Privacy Problem:

> "Under the model imagined by Mundie (a senior advisor to the CEO at Microsoft), applications and services that wanted to make use of sensitive data, such as a person’s genome sequence or current location, would have to register with authorities."

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520226/microsoft-thinks...

Microsoft still has a lot of this "let's be dicks to make more money" culture inside the company, and until that changes, I want nothing to do with them anymore, and the fact that there are starting to be some serious alternatives to Windows now that are becoming increasingly more mature, makes me happy. I'd like it to remain that way, instead of having Microsoft crawl back to its former power.

You may think "Google does some bad stuff, too", but so far I've seen absolutely no evidence that Microsoft is better in any way than Google, and it's usually worse. So if that's the "choice" that's being offered (ironically by forcing themselves into our phones), then I want none of it. It's like saying Romney was a "choice" to Obama. Sure it was - an even worse one.

What I'd like to see more of is more open source operating systems becoming successful in the mobile world, like Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish or even Firefox OS.

I really hope Ubuntu touch takes off. For one, it's completely open-source (Sailfish has proprietary bits). And it looks like it's coming along nicely, from the looks of it they've got the nicest UI (and I'm acquiring a Galaxy Nexus this weekend to load Ubuntu onto).

Yes, I'm all for this, if it means better standardization of hardware.

I had an HTC HD2 back in the day that could multi-boot between Android and WP7, and it was extremely fun to tool around multiple OSs.

Openness of operating systems is only half the story. We need good hardware that allows us choice as well. Nexus devices seem like the one to pick these days, if WP and Android live together on more phones, maybe we will get more? Maybe that's a naive conclusion to reach, though.

Open letter to the CEO of HTC

Hello,

I am very excited that you plan to offer more choice to me as a consumer, but ...

... why stop at two mobile OSes?

Why not also load WebOS, Blackberry OS, and every other failed, also-ran mobile OS that ever existed?

That way, if you ship smartphones with 256 GB of flash, when all is said and done, I will still be left with 3 KB to store a few contacts of mine.

Sincerely, Yours truly, Joe Average Consumer

At a time when Lumia 520 and Lumia 925 have been selling like hot cakes ( don't know about 1020, but it has excellent reviews so far ) in many regions and WP is slowly, slowly gaining some market share, the article seems to underestimate WP a lot.

I disagree. Even though it seems most people hate WP8, or Microsoft, or whatever gets your panties in a bunch about it, I would love to get one of these. I really like WP8, and have had up to the 920, but there are just some apps that I need right now that don't have even 3rd party equivalents, so I am forced to use Android (its not bad, but I still would prefer WP8 with the same apps)

I would buy this in a heartbeat. I have an HTC One anyway, so if its just an HTC One with both, i am right at home.

If I had the option of a good, dual-booting phone, I would take it.

If I could then quickly switch to the other OS within a virtual machine to run an app or access some data, even better.

There's a lot of crud behind why it's a bad idea rather than actual reasoning.

The Lumia windows phones actually don't look that bad, and I've heard from people they're pretty slick.

However, it's not just a phone you're buying and wanting, it's an ecosystem. You want email, music, video, apps, and everything in between, to sync seamlessly with all your devices. I don't want Microsoft's ecosystem, and more and more people don't these days.

As far as dual booting windows, I would probably try it once, and never try again.

I think this is the point; I don't know many people who care at all what OS the phone is running. They buy Lumia because it was a good deal but don't really notice what is running on it. They start complaining when it's hard to put their music/movies on it; when they cannot play the games their friends are playing or when they cannot use certain apps. My wife has a Lumia and is complaining how it is far more annoying to transfer music/movies/pics to it than Android / iOS which currently is the reason she doesn't really use it despite it being decent smartphone.

I see some changes as well when it comes to apps and games; in 'the olden days' when you wanted to create software you picked some eco system and was kind of bound to it if you wanted to have a half decent user experience. Like you had to pick DOS or Win or Unix or Mac OS (before that even options like Amiga/Atari); cross platform stuff hardly existed and if it did it was horrible. Now, especially for games, it is possible to reuse almost all code on all platforms, so launches of apps/games are simply across platforms. So why would you care about what OS you are running? It's not like the interfaces are vastly different...

Which is the other difference; I still know people who cannot 'use' anything else than Windows; they just don't 'get' it when they are in front of Mac OS X or Ubuntu. That's why Win8 without start button was such a bad idea; a lot of 'non geeks' just couldn't use it at all after the previous versions since '95. With touch devices all are simple enough for my 93 year old grandfather to use; all of them. Android, iOS, Firefox OS, WP8 etc. They are not the same but so simple they are interchangeable after a few minutes interface wise. Another reason to not care about the OS at all.

Stage 3: Bargaining

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

This article is weirdly convinced that Microsoft is talking about dual-booting WP and Android, but even the source article they cite says that that's pretty unlikely.

Yeah... from the cited article[1]:

"Of course, there’s no official confirmation this type of deal has been discussed, so it must be taken as a rumor for now."

[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/microsoft-wants-windows-...

Instead of effectively dual-booting Android/WPF, Microsoft should add a compatibility layer to WPF to run Android apps.

Not mutually exclusive.

== Microsoft should kill their platform.

If all windows phones ran all android apps, why would anyone write apps for Windows phones? That's especially true for the long tail. A popular a Windows phone OS with Android support may get a Twitter app and a Facebook app, but your bank's app or that public transport one? Forget it.

We have seen that with OS/2 and its Windows compatibility layer, with Mac OS when Apple advocated Java, and in some sense with Linux and Wine (a great effort, but it does give people an excuse for not porting their stuff to Linux.)

I think they would be better of writing a launcher for Android that launches Windows apps. If that gets popular, they could start leveraging that by releasing new features on their hardware first and on the Android layer later. Good idea? I wouldn't know, but the reverse certainly isn't.

That's effectively the same argument as if all smartphones run HTML5 apps, why would anyone write native code?

Only slightly so. The answer to that question is "because they can do more things, better".

A native compatibility layer does (almost) everything the 'real' system does, (almost) equally well. If it doesn't, people will be disappointed with it, and by extension, with your system ("yes, Windows Phone can run Android apps, but some will crash, and that game does only 20 frames per second")

If/when HTML can provide the same experience as native code on a mobile phone, many of what now are apps will move to web-only.

I am using windows phone for more than 3 months now..and I am happy I moved from Andriod to Windows...

What Microsoft should probably be doing instead, is writing some software layer to enable running apps based on a certain popular open-source operating system to run seamlessly on their device alongside native apps. If they did, it wouldn't be the first time MS has written a better Java VM than the official implentation.

What Microsoft is slowly discovering is what their competitors discovered back in the 90s: how hard it is to enter an established market.

Back then Apple was also ahead of the curve for a long time and carved out is own niche market, slowly to see a competitor take the mainstream market share.

No matter how good your solution is, no matter if it is technically superior, like Linux was in most respects compared to 16-bit and pre-nt versions of windows, once an established player appears, the dominant platform already has the key applications and mindshare and because of that gets to keep it.

Thus in Linux-land people made wine to cover their windows compatibility needs. Will Microsoft admit defeat and add an android compatibility layer into windows phone?

I doubt it, but I have no doubt they should.

i'd be happy if i could load "whatever os i want" on my phone. android, windows, firefoxos, or a random linux distro. ;-)

This of course would be the ideal situation for the consumer. Doubt it will happen though.

Microsoft is taking something out of Google's playbook. Google is doing something similar with their Chrome apps on Windows, just that this is a lot crazier and resource intensive.

Except at least Google is making their platform available on every other platform (that allows them in anyway). With Microsoft you know that eventually they're just going to pull out the rug and lock everyone in...

They tried to do this with BeOS back in the day. They forced hitachi and sony to release their BeOS machines with windows as the primary boot and hid the BeOS from usage.

This article is based on rumors that are not even very likely. I'm surprised its voted up so high. I guess when its about bashing MS, the facts don't even matter so much.

Isn't this just point of desperation! MS just needs to learn they wont rule in an android-iphone dominated market ... kinda like blackberry... wait who?

Triple boot to iOS and I'll think about it...

"Revise Windows Phone. Right now, as nice as it looks, there are a lot of reasons to choose Android or iPhone over Windows Phone, but few reasons to choose Windows Phone over Android and iPhone"

Revise what exactly? Windows is perfectly fine for probably 95% of the people. Revising it will not make a difference, but price, branding, apps, deals with Verizon, AT&T etc will make a difference.

The article talks about lots of "reasons" without giving any example.

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