Microsoft to Cut Jobs, Take $7.6B Nokia Writedown
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I've been trying the Windows 10 betas on a fairly high-end Lumia (1520), and I just can't understand what Microsoft is doing. The entire system has apparently been rewritten using the "Universal" APIs (the same thing as Windows RT/10 basically).
That must have sounded great on paper, but the reality is baffling. Everything that was working great in WP8 has been replaced with half-assed implementations that feel more like second-rate Android OEM apps.
Worse, there don't seem to be any new features in Windows 10 Mobile that could offset the pain of the UI downgrade... Except that weird new mode where you can connect your phone to a keyboard, mouse and display and use Windows Universal apps that way. Is there a single Windows Phone user that asked for that?!
I loved Windows Phone 7 because it was a holistically designed system that made perfect sense on a phone. All that seems to be gone in Windows 10 Mobile, replaced by Microsoft's traditional "Windows everywhere!" platform strategy bloopers.
I guess the reason for this constant rewrite-itis is that Microsoft is still really, really strong on the corporate desktop side, and they desperately need some way to leverage that on mobile. Otherwise they are just too far behind to avoid being yet another OEM.
As you said, it probably looked good on paper. They do have deep pockets however, and probably afford both one and two more rewrites and still compete. They've done it before.
Sounds like a wonderful feature to me.
One of the things that annoys me about Windows Phone currently is that it won't play with bluetooth keyboards (like the android phone I use as my backup device does). Sometimes when travelling it is useful to be able to rattle off some messages longer than are convenient to write with the on-screen keyboard without needing to have my tablet or laptop with me (OK so I need to be carrying the little bluetooth keyboard with me, but that takes less room when folded away than the laptop or tablet).
Using it as a mini PC is going further, but in a way that I might also find useful. Hopefully in going further they have not neglected the simpler use case on their way past though...
It's worth noting that Windows Phone 10 (or whatever the current name is) is not being released alongside desktop Windows 10. It'll be released at least a few months later, so I would expect a lot more polish and cohesiveness moving forward.
I'm not sure what it like under the current review system but I very much perceived this to be an issue when I was there. I'd even seen large top level objectives altered purely because it was too far along in the year when they were proposed and making those changes would have impacted another groups ability to make their commitments. Some groups in microsoft are great but there are some systemic problems over there.
Do I read this to mean that older WP phones that ran WP7, etc., can then be reloaded by the end user to use other WP OSs, such as WP10 ?
That seems surprising to me for some reason. Did you have to root it, or the equivalent of rooting ?
What else could you load on a phone like this ?
Currently it requires you to install a "Windows Insider" app, but the final version will presumably be available as a regular OTA upgrade just like 8.x updates.
I never have this problem where I'd want to blow up my phone onto a bigger screen (with full mouse-based editing capabilities). But I guess it might be more common than I imagine.
It's kind of weird to me that my phone is so massively powerful but gets used only for a bit of web-browsing and light game playing.
It doesn't feel like a 21st century solution.
The 1993 computer probably cost at least 2000 USD. Today, you can get a phone, a laptop, a desktop computer, a tablet and a smartwatch for less than that. That's five devices with different form factors!
Is there really a group of users whose single device is a phone and they want to connect that to PC-style peripherals?
A cheap Windows phone outperforms a cheap Android phone significantly (and is apparently much easier to learn the UI for that user group), and these users cannot afford an iPhone.
They lose out on the Android ecosystem and the Apple experience, but I currently believe they're the best choice at that price point (100 dollars or so). Of course, those things vary, if a new Android version is significantly better on low-end hardware I'll probably go back to recommending them (mostly because all apps in my country are Android-first).
I actually held one at a Microsoft store the other day, and the thing is extremely responsive and feels very premium. It is lacking a few things people just take for granted like a front facing camera, but regardless it is a huge bargain if you're shopping in the low end market.
I won't be giving up my $500 phone tomorrow, but respect where it is due to some of the Lumia phones.
What again, in a Services, Services, Services Microsoft, is the point of a third-place mobile platform?
My dad has some Samsung Galaxy (probably a couple generations old at this point) and doesn’t like it and doesn’t use it much beyond actually making phone calls (he even hates writing text messages). My mom has the simplest of the simple Nokia Lumias (also a generation or two old now) and she uses it all the time for all sorts of things. Browsing the web, communicating via SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, reading email, making phone calls, taking photos (and sending those to people with exactly the messenging app she wants to use). She is able to achieve all this without ever needing help and the phone never gives her the feeling that she is not in control.
Sure, part of that may be differing attitudes of my parents towards technology (my mom has certainly a slightly greater ability to get used to and comfortable with newfangled tech), but I do think Windows phone is very friendly towards people. It’s very sparse, but if it does what you need to do then that’s a plus and it helps you feel in control.
After a long struggle I got most of them over to iOS and now the less-computer-literate appears to figure out their own issues. I'd reckon the experience would be similar with Windows phones, as I've heard good things about it in terms of user friendliness.
Plus, when she lost it after a couple of months, it was only $75 to replace.
The way MS (or someone else!) would get me on board is when I can walk into the office, put my phone on my inductive loading plate, automatically triggering my monitoring to flick on and pairing with my mouse + keyboard, showing me, on the big screen, another (desktop) representation of the OS I use on the phone. I know some companies (and MS with Windows 10) are working towards that as I saw in demos, but it's still clunky and not what you want yet while the phones are fast enough (I often connect the above to my OpenPandora and work straight on it for days on end; most high end phones are a lot more capable than the OpenPandora...).
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/29/microsoft-announces-continu...
I often drop in to a local bar, and tend to be the troubleshooter for older folks with new smartphones. I've helped out on quite a variety of devices, but my heart always sank when I bumped into the guy with a Lumia that his daughter had given him. I can't remember every instance, but I can remember turning him away in frustration with outcomes like "sorry, I've no idea why the browser won't remember your login details".
I ran into many frustrating problems with that device that I didn't find with iOS and Android (even super-cheap Android). I was extremely relieved when he rocked up one day with an iPhone, and very gladly set it up with all the apps he needed.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/29/kantar-september-2014/
Though it sounds like some of those fortunes are turning since the iPhone 6
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/06/iphone-marketshare...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-is-windows-phone-outselling...
I think you're referring to one of the Nokia X devices:
Microsoft made three key mistakes with windows phone after the acquisition. The first was stopping the development of high-end models. No high end model means no evangelists which in turn means price is the only thing you can compete on. The lack of profit in the lumia division is a consequence of chasing after the bottom of the market. I'm convinced windows phone is good enough to win at the high end, but microsoft had to show up first, and they mostly didn't. They made some bone-headed decisions like releasing the high end 930/icon without the one lumia-only feature (glance), while shipping that feature on low end devices.
The second thing they did wrong was messing with the OS itself to make it more android-like (getting rid of hubs and panorama views, introducing hamburger menus, app-ifying the social integration, etc...). Every change made the OS less attractive to people already using it, while doing nothing to convince those who weren't, because those people needed apps which weren't there. Oh, yeah, that's the third and worst thing they did wrong: radically mismanaging the windows app store, both towards the users as towards the developers.
All that being said, I'm probably going back to Android for my next phone, simply because WP keeps lagging further and further behind when it comes to apps. If WP had the same apps as Android I'd probably buy a new Windows Phone.
Remember, Blackberry did the same thing, and it didn't help them at all.
You're comparing 3 widgets to 24 tiles But honestly, i see more information displayed in the android screenshot.
Both images display calendar events and weather
android also displays a couple emails, weather for the next two days
windows also displays part of a facebook post
Is there something specific that live tiles do that you do not belive android is capable of doing? edit: formatting
1. Android widgets are huge, I can fit maybe 4-5 widgets on one page of the Android desktop. More than that, they become so scrunched that you can't get any information out of them. This is compounded by the fact that some widgets only allow a certain size unless you download 3rd-party launchers.
2. Widget design is largely up to the app developer, and a lot of widgets are ugly (subjective) or at least don't match the other widgets you have them grouped with.
3. Widgets try to be interactive, and I can't tell you how frustrated it makes me when I'm scrolling across the desktops to look at widgets and I accidentally cross an item off of a todo list, or scroll through my list of emails instead of continuing on to the next desktop.
To me, the Android (and iPhone) home screens feel lifeless and dead when compared to a Windows Phone. On WP, my live tiles are always flipping around and displaying the latest emails, tweets, facebook posts, news articles, pictures from my camera roll, etc. The Windows Phone start screen displays all of that information to me at a glance, and I can pick and choose what to do next based on the summary that I see on my start screen. On Android, though, I have to actively search for that information by going from app to app.
I think there are ways to solve all of your issues on android, including using a 3rd party home screen; but at the end of the day - these are not products that come down to measured specs against measured specs, these are products we use as an intimate part of our daily lives and as a result are subject to purely subjective factors being a core part of the decision making process.
I appreciate your opinion, it has helped me further understand why using subjective reasoning as a driving factor for technology purchases is no longer a sign of the uninformed/uninitiated, and is now instead (rightfully) simply a personal preference.
- Coherent UI
- Useful "home" screen.
- Cheap
I usually describe it as the nice UI and design from Apple with the cost of an Android.
I was pretty mad at some issues (the camera would hang the phone under certain circumstances, dev tools were painful, Zune as a requirement for sync), so I got myself an Android phone. That one lasted a couple years, until the USB connector broke - since the battery was non-removable, there was no way for me to keep using it.
After having experienced both, I have to say: the experience in Windows Phone feels much smoother than Android. Yes, the development tools are still annoying, but using the phone itself has a nicer "feeling" to it.
I now have the cheapest WP 8 I could find, and so far I'm happy with it. It also seems to be more resistant to drops than its older brother.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.here.app.m...
I see quite a few WinPhone screens on my daily round in UK.
It is quite quite, specially if one compares the whole development experience with the Android wild west (e.g. NDK experience).
Sadly it has only catched on in countries as alternative to Android, where the majority of the population is not able to afford iPhones even on subsided contracts.
Their decision to provide Android and iOS bridges in WP 10 will eventually backfire in OS/2 style.
If Windows Phone had closer to the amount of apps Android and IOS have in their stores, the phones would be doing much better. Nokia makes a solid handset and the Windows Phone platform is the first not to copy Apple's design.
As for Windows 10 on Windows Phone - I was using the developer preview for a few days and its still really really buggy. It does have tremendous potential though and I'm looking forward to seeing them work out some of the bugs, there are a ton of really cool things coming:
For personal use I have a Nexus4 and use it for camera/apps (Google Authenticator)/Google ecosystem. I prefer the simplicity of the Nokia/WP7 but for some things the Android is necessary. If Google ever ported their apps and services (Youtube, etc) to a Windows Phone I would switch.. or MS needs to create a nice equivalent.
For example I don't like the design of the front-screen with the animated tiles. I find them to be very distracting and I prefer Android's model - static icons plus widgets for whenever I feel the need for some shiny stuff, but widgets don't survive for long. The notifications experience on Android is of course superior. That flat design in Windows Phone has also been annoying as it doesn't give clues on what can be touched. And as far as the experience goes, the new material design in Android kicks ass IMHO. The only serious usability issue it has are the up-front permissions system, but they are fixing that in the next version.
The other issue I had is a lack of control. Microsoft went the Apple way in restricting their phones. So apparently with my Lumia I had to ask permission from my operator in order to do tethering. I've never met an Android phone that disallowed tethering based on the whims of these operators. Google Play is also superior, even to the iTunes Store IMHO, but beyond that, I like how Android lets me install apps from third-party sources if I want it - it's just a configuration change and this Apple-style grandfathering doesn't work so well for Microsoft - their store is filled with shit, malware and trademark infringing apps. I also tried being a good citizen in Microsoft's store and tried reporting a scammy app for trademark infringement - they asked for "papers" to prove I'm the rights holder.
There's also one pet peeve I have with Microsoft - so Windows Phone still doesn't support CalDAV / CardDAV, insisting of course on Microsoft's own proprietary Exchange. You also can't change Bing's search as the default (at least in the version I had). Android doesn't do CalDAV / CardDAV by default, but you've got providers available. And Android also lets you change most things, like the search interface. Great going Microsoft, you've changed a lot.
As for the apps available, there is no contest. Like Google Maps / Waze in combination with Google Now are awesome. Nokia's Here is pretty cool, but lo and behold, they've released it for Android as well. The experience with most popular services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube is inferior on Windows Phone. Even Skype seems to suck less on my Android.
In terms of hardware, the Lumia phones have a good price, but I want phones with good resolution. Couldn't find a high-end phone like the ones made by LG. And for a good price-quality ratio, in Android land you can also go with the Nexus devices, or OnePlus One. You can still find Nexus 5 devices and they've got a better price and better hardware than those Lumia devices.
- Gmail receives preferential treatment
- Google cannot be removed as a search engine (inc. Google Now)
- Android can be restricted from tethering (and operators do do that).
- Google dropped CalDAV support.
None of which are "breaking" issues on Android. In fact I won't leave Android just for Google Maps (w/Waze integration), Google Now, the number of apps on the play store, and future things like Google Car (so I can drive my car's nav system with my phone).
- on Android you can have providers, I'm using this for CalDAV, which works well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...
- you can replace the search interface, I'm using Firefox Search or DuckDuckGo interchangeably with Google's Search depending on my mood. If you have them installed, it makes you first pick the default when doing the search gesture. Google Now is not customizable, but then again it's just an app.
The swipe up gesture for search/google now is easily replaced (e.g. just install Firefox and you get asked via intent if you want to use Firefox search instead). The search bar and the swipe from the left gesture can't be removed from the Google Now launcher as far as I know, but it's trivial to replace the launcher itself (just install one and the next time you hit 'home' it'll ask you which launcher you want to use).
My Galaxy S4 on AT&T did not allow me to turn on tethering until I switched to a plan which included it.
One friend in particular who was given a windows phone by his large, seattle-based employer (ahem) had no end of trouble. The UI was great, but basic functionality was terrible. The thing could never handle SMS--we had to call him constantly, just to let him know what was going on, then we all would sporadically receive 4-5 texts from him that made no sense out of context. It was a nightmare.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview-supported...
I'll probably be shopping for a new phone if it's not...
I'm sad that there wasn't a way to recapitalize the Nokia phone business and re-release it into the wild.
It seems to me Windows 10 Phone is at least several months away from stable.
In my case, the phone isn't thick enough. I had problems with it slipping out of my pocket (I once went back to the car looking for it to find it on the ground getting rained on), so I added grippy skateboard tape on the back.
If I change phones, I'd do it again. Why not just buy a case? Because to get a grippy case, they're too grippy and will hold onto the cloth in my pocket when taking it out. The skateboard tape is "just right".
Someone ought to produce & sell grip-tape with die-cut patterns in it. Peace-symbol, happy face, Totoro, etc.
Nothing bad to say. No regrets.
No you didn't. Soon your device and its os will be discontinued, WP is a huge failure and it's over. You don't fire next to 8000 people when your product is a success.
Wow, well there it is--looks like the rumor is true. So the Nokia deal was basically a complete flop?
I have absolutely no idea why they purchased Nokia in the first place -- it was obvious that they were never going to seriously challenge Apple or Google, and Nokia was another obviously sinking ship. It was like if Circuit City had purchased Radio Shack. I have no idea why the board let Ballmer blow billions on an acquisition they knew he wouldn't be around to see through and that didn't fit with the strategic direction of the company 6 months later.
If I were an institutional investor, I would demand a change in board leadership. This kind of stuff is just unacceptable for a public company. I know hindsight is 20/20, but blowing $14 billion on acquisitions that were doomed to begin with is simply inexcusable. You can blame Ballmer for being a terrible CEO, but the blame really rests on the board for allowing him to make really big, really bad decisions.
2. Even though their relative market share is low, keep in mind the market is huge and so in absolute numbers, they are selling quite a few Lumias. Millions of devices every quarter is a pretty decent number, and something that could be leveraged in various ways. Not a direct comparison, but note that until 2007 Apple ran their entire business on products that had minority market share.
3. Not very familiar with the aQuantive deal - how was it doomed to begin with?
2. Apple's product strategy is vastly different from Microsoft's. Apple makes most of its profits from he sale of consumer electronics. Microsoft makes all of its profits from the sale of software licenses to large corporations (they make revenue elsewhere, but I don't think any of their consumer products are actually profitable). It's just not a good market for Microsoft because it doesn't fit with how they operate as a company.
3. Microsoft vastly overvalued its online properties and was playing in a space it had no business being in (media and advertising). Microsoft's core business revolves around selling software licenses to large businesses through reseller channels. While the advertising world has some similarities structurally, Microsoft just didn't have the relationships or corporate culture to make it work.
2. Agreed, Apple's product strategy is very different. I was just making the point that minority marketshare is not the show-stopper many think it is. Note that Microsoft has been making decent profits in various non-software license businesses for the past few years, including consumer electronics (XBox, Surface Pro), Azure and recently, even Bing. Their revenue streams are a lot more diverse than people give credit for.
3. This sounds reasonable, and gels with the detailed comment above from calbear81: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9852898
With the possible exception of platform lock-in, all of that applies to everything Microsoft became a leader in too. Why would there be no realistic chance?
1. Apple and Google are (and were at the time of the Nokia acquisition) larger companies than Microsoft. Microsoft's usual tactics are to throw their weight around, which they can't do when they're the smallest dog in the fight. What's worse, mobile represents a huge amount of revenue for both companies, so they have both the incentive and the ability to outspend Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't have a lower cost base (if anything, it's the opposite) so they have no basis for a sustainable advantage. Mobile was never a huge revenue number for Microsoft, so they always have the option of walking away.
2. Apple and Google also have the vast majority of the market covered from a value proposition standpoint. Apple goes after the high-margin top end, and Google uses an arms-dealer model to go after the middle and low end. What value proposition does Microsoft have that is substantially different? If you can't differentiate your product, and you have the disadvantage of being smaller in a market with strong network effects, you have no basis for a sustainable advantage.
3. The market had already started to mature by the time Microsoft bought Nokia. While you can get in early in a growth market and out-grow the competition, it's an uphill battle if you're as late as Microsoft was. Your competition will still outpace your gains even if you outspend them by a significant margin.
4. Building a niche product (i.e. if you can't be #1 or #2) can still be a profitable strategy, but it is a bad idea for a company like Microsoft. If nothing else, it's a distraction from their core moneymaking activities. Their first instinct would be to leverage their existing platforms to build user share, which would be a negative thing for Microsoft's existing platforms by creating opportunity for competitors as Microsoft's users search for alternatives (see Office on iPad). And because Microsoft has a decentralized power structure, there's not much they can do to prevent this. They're better off not playing in the mobile space at all than aiming to be a niche #3 -- let a smaller, more focused player with a lower cost base take on that role.
At some point, Microsoft will realize that mobile is a game they will never win. While they would be in a much better strategic position if they had a strong mobile presence, wishing that will happen won't make it so. IMO their optimal move is to get in bed with both Apple and Google and make BYOD really awesome if your company uses Microsoft as a back office. Apple would do it because they have little to no presence in the enterprise tech space, and Google would have to do it because otherwise Apple would become the de-facto standard in corporate mobile phones. That position leaves Microsoft with other options and leverage over the industry, which they currently don't have sitting at the bottom and looking up saying "me too!" It's also very hard to do any of this if you're in direct competition with Apple and Google on the OS/handset side.
As I see it, you seem to be trying to prove that things that actually happened were impossible, but no one noticed.
Also, Microsoft was a very different company in the 80s. They were a scrappy startup that had to prove themselves, and didn't have any legacy products, cost structures or business models dragging them down.
I'm not saying it's impossible for a company to be successful in the smartphone space as a solid #3, just that it's a bad idea for Microsoft to try to be that company. It's too far from their core competencies, and it clouds the strategy for their cash cow products.
IMO the majority of the value of Microsoft as a company at this point is their enterprise sales network. The relationships they have there are essentially a machine that lets them print money year after year. Consumer electronics (like cell phones) don't let them take advantage of their most valuable asset.
Instead of trying to chip away market share from Apple and Google, Microsoft should be going for the jugular against IBM and Oracle in the enterprise space by getting Microsoft enterprise applications on every phone, tablet and browser they can. Because that's the part of the company that makes money, and what they've done over the last 10 years is essentially try to leverage their high-margin enterprise software business to create a low-margin consumer electronics division. It's insane, and while I understand the need for products like Surface to create a baseline for quality with their OEM partners, it also doesn't make sense to sacrifice your profitable businesses to try to make those other products a success.
But Excel's huge win was developing the ability to save a spreadsheet in Lotus format so your coworkers could open it.
I actually don't "hate" Bing. I find their answers to questions directly in results slightly better than Google's version of the same. But I still use Google as they have more historical search data to utilise so results remain more accurate (and will almost indefinitely). Bing also seems to choke on technical queries and special characters more often.
Do we? Aren't people constantly speculating about them spinning it off because it's a loser?
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-11-07-huge-xbox-l...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/xbox-one-has-raked-400-million-loss...
(Candy Crush isn't helping much, either.)
http://thevarguy.com/business-technology-solution-sales/0707...
IE is still very popular and defaults to Bing. Firefox is very popular and now defaults to Yahoo or Yandex or Baidu depending on the country you're in...
> does not matter how much you push , google will not defeat, because their income resource is somewhere else
The majority of their revenue is advertising, and the majority of the advertising revenue comes from search ads, so search is exactly where their revenue is coming from.
> and abandoning Bing is almost will end up Microsoft's death
huh? I don't see how that could possibly be true.
That's not true . (maybe IE is more popular in some corner of the world , or among some users but) We all know in search engine market share , google is ruler and leader, without even a serious competitor. (recently maybe bing become a little more viable). Does not matter you (as company) put yahoo or anything else in your browser default homepage , most people will use/switch to google. Need for search engine will be increase with Internet and population growth.And I think this will end up with Google's exponential growth in compare with Apple or Microsoft linear growth.
> The majority of their revenue is advertising, and the majority of the advertising revenue comes from search ads, so search is exactly where their revenue is coming from.
Yes , exactly , because of that they don't care if they create some "free" OS better than Windows. Like what they did with Android. They just want better IT industry , better OS , better PC. Because with increasing IT users , their revenue will increase.
>huh? I don't see how that could possibly be true.
I see this problem in reverse order , with Microsoft giving up on bing, Google will end up without any serious threat to its income and core market share. And recent years already proved my , Google wants everything , after a while their ChromeOS will be viable replacement for Windows.They will push gaming on Android. and etc etc etc , and after years mayble Microsoft will end up where Companies like Novel are today .
But these are my view , I could be wrong.
Atlas was really all Microsoft wanted since Google had bought DoubleClick and Atlas was at the time one of the few other large ad serving platforms. The ad serving business basically consisted of a way to track campaigns, impressions, clicks, conversions for large media buys for Fortune 500 companies. There was also synergy with the Avenue A | Razorfish business since clients like Nike, Best Buy, Hawaiian Airlines, and MSN would use Atlas to track their large campaigns across the web. The expectation from Microsoft at the time was that they could build a large display network across the internet using data from users that visited MSN or Bing just like Google does with it's search.
AA|RF was a bad fit because Microsoft was not in the advertising agency business so they quickly dumped that to Publicis. I worked at AA|RF in client services for a few years and were growing quickly at the time. We were doing things like multi-channel attribution and tackling view-based conversions years before they became a mainstream topic in the display ad world. A lot of those folks have gone on to lead at other places like Bob Lord, President of AOL, who previously led AA|RF!
DrivePM was a retargeting business that leveraged custom cookie pools that could be created based on both user's ad viewing/clicking behavior and tracked behavior on a client's website. So for example, you could say I wanted to target only people who viewed my ad in the last 2 days and visited my checkout page but did not complete their purchase. I think with investment, this business could have grown to take advantage of the surge in RTB and programmatic buying. One of the most interesting programs they had was a "recyling" product that basically took wasted impressions and resold them to other advertisers to reduce media costs. This involved doing a study to see what the optimal number of impressions was per user and the conversion rate dropoff curve per additional impression. Once you had that number, you would set a rule that said if this user has already seen the maximum number of ads from one advertiser in a given time frame, don't show the ad and instead show an ad from the recycler network.
Hope that helps!
It's a little hard to suggest that for that price tag they didn't have any other options to manufacture devices.
Better analogy would be as if Kmart purchased Sears, which they did back in '04, to pretty much the same outcome.
Sometimes I think terminally ill companies thrash around like this to generate transactional cash flow for friends and family, to help the leadership get jobs elsewhere after the ship finally sinks.
What do you think the rest of the time??
This is exactly what they do. A company doing as badly as these in the 19th century would have been wound down and the remaining assets distributed to stockholders. Today they take on debt, "restructure" endlessly, file for bankruptcy protection (usually more than once) and churn, churn, churn to keep those senior managers employed just a little bit longer. Meanwhile the stockholders, who would have taken a moderate loss under a liquidation scenario, instead get wiped out completely. Directors these days are basically extensions of senior management; they'll approve of pretty much anything the CEO wants to do as long as it's not (a) winding down or (b) an indefensible violation of their legal obligations. M&A is a very popular way to be seen to "do something"; it's a standard act in the CEO's keeping-your-job-for-a-while-longer playbook. In this case, it also allows the next CEO to use the blame the last guy tactic along with the big "one-time" writedown to buy himself some more time.
All standard 21st-century corporate behavior.
Given that, its an open debate if Microsoft is big enough, conglomerated enough, internally disconnected enough, such that success or failure in monopoly Office app licensing has anything to do with console gaming hardware. If they share little more than common ownership and financial structure, then we're back to "Caterpillar and BP are the same because they both have owners/shareholders on the NYSE" argument.
If MS went poof and spun off all its divisions, would there really be much effect on the divisions, other than the losing ones would run out of cash and the winning ones would have way too much cash?
I guess another bad analogy is GE is just a big mutual fund that 100% owns dozens of completely unrelated large companies. And its a fair claim that MS is the same although obviously much smaller.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/11/17/news/newsmakers/lampert/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lampert
Lampert's earnings in 2004 were estimated to be $1.02 billion
MS saw what Google's relationships with its OEMs was like (reskinning, not doing updates, in-fighting, threats to move to tizen/sailfish, endless compromises, bloatware, etc) and wanted nothing of that. They thought if they had a tried and true phone hardware division with a known brand that they could leapfrog into the market. Well, it didn't happen, even though the Nokia Windows phones were fairly well received, especially if you're price sensitive. They entered the market pretty late and by then both the Android and Apple store were chock-full of apps. That's on top of MS having a stodgy business image that consumers find unappealing. To be fair, MS sells millions of these things per quarter, so they're not exactly failures. They're just a distant third. (8.6 million last quarter according to windowscentral.com).
My guess is that the US market just isn't price sensitive, so a good but cheap phone was largely unappreciated. The two year contract carrier deals hide the price of the phone, so its "easy" to get the hottest iphone or android. I think WP is a lot more popular in the EU where you usually buy your phone outright. Things like the Xiaomi lineup, the Moto G/E, and Android One were very much an attack on MS's focus on the low-end, and I think greatly hurt MS's low-end sales. Without those sales this acquisition wasn't going to pay off.
And I don't doubt that Microsoft can be #3 in the phone market; I just don't think it's a worthwhile thing for them to aspire to do as a company. They will be perpetually fighting for market share, and that will tempt them to leverage their other products in ways that forego other potentially more profitable strategies for those other products. The phone market is a distraction for them at this point; and I wouldn't be shocked at all if they spin off the entire consumer electronics division (including Xbox) in the next 5 years.
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2488599/it-management/m...
Doesn't that pretty much cover all potential customers?
That may make more sense in comparison with the 2014 strategy, which didn't include all potential customers and specifically avoided the high end and business markets in order to focus on the value-phone buyers in "emerging markets" so as to "connect the next billion people".
[2014 - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-23/microsoft-... ]
Focusing on business and flagship phone customers is a change in strategy which puts Microsoft into direct competition with Apple and Samsung.
Good luck with that, now.
I'm actually a high-end Windows Phone owner - I love it, but there are a few annoying gaps in apps, not so much the big apps, just the niche apps. Having Win10 universal apps could help if Win10 takes off; if you're going to make a Win10 app, you may as well make it work on mobile too...
It looks like this part was edited out of the article.
Nokia to make phones again in 2016: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/18/us-nokia-phones-id...
Personally I like my Lumia phone with Windows 8.1 and I look forward to check how Windows 10 will run on this device.
Monodevelop is an awful piece of software.
For Mac and Windows, you can download Xamarin Studio which is a bundle of MonoDevelop along with Xamarin iOS/Android plugins and branding. Note that a Xamarin license is only required if you develop iOS/Android projects, all other project types are free without restrictions.
(Actually to be fair, you'll find the Atom family of tools and related plugins to be not terrible for writing C# code. We can only hope that VSC continues to grow and spread and monodevelop fades away into the 'what were we even thinking when we made this?' it deserves to)
Unity3d has been using Xamarin's .Net to build for Android and iOS (and many other platforms) for years now.
On iOS the situation is even worse you will need to have an AOT compiler for C# in order to be able to ship iOS apps in the Apple Store.
You are making a confusion here. Unity doesn't use Xamarin at all, they have an old license (like really old, since before Xamarin even existed) for Mono for iOS and Android.
What they need is a surface phone. One phone, three variants.
Surface Phone - Low-Mid Range
Surface Pro Phone - High end w/continuum
Surface Pro+ Phone - High end Phablet w/continuum
That would match their naming for the tablet and cause little confusion about what they are in the minds of consumers.
Microsoft added around 25,000 jobs when it bought the mobile department from Nokia. The 8,000 jobs they cut today are on top of the 18,000 they cut last July. Since both were focused "primarily" on the Nokia acquisitions, by my count nearly everyone from that is gone now.
[0]:http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-reportedly-plans-another-...
http://company.nokia.com/en/investors/financial-reports/resu...
Though I doubt the 7,800 were all engineering and design.
Not really, they have ~118k employees and are planning to remove about 7800, so about a 7% reduction. For reference Apple has 98k employees, Google 55k, Facebook 10k.
Still, your main point stands: a 7% reduction is perhaps significant, but probably not "large."
However, I upgraded to the first Win10 for Mobile preview, an d now it refuses to upgrade to a newer build ("Update was downloaded but could not be opened" - and I've tried 6-7 times).
If I could get something that was hardware-wise as good as the 1020 (or the other high-end Nokia phones) that ran Android 5.1.1, it would almost be my perfect phone.
I like that you can get parts for these Nokia phones on the cheap and repair them. Also, if you can troubleshoot a browser on any Windows OS, you can troubleshoot a browser on a Windows Nokia.
My view is that these phones are a lot higher on the quality scale than 99 percent of droids and have less engineered fails than iphone.
Anyway Nokia's CEO has made a statement that they are going to start making phones again: http://fortune.com/2015/06/22/nokia-ceo-phones/
The Nokia - Microsoft deal lasts till 2016.
That's OK, but it turns into a consulting and customization business. It's not mass market. That's sort of where IBM is now. IBM, which once dominated the personal computer industry, has few if any retail products today.
If you need a ton of power, you need a workstation not an ultrabook/tablet hybrid. The rumored changes should allow for better battery life, cooler operation, and probably a minimal (if any) impact on performance on tasks that suit the form factor.
I strongly agree. The same amounts to laptops, at least for me.
I have a Macbook Pro, 13", 2.9 GHz Core i7, non-retina. About 99% of the time my laptop is less than 10% utilized. Even when I run VMware/Windows it barely breaks a sweat.
I got the i7 because it was only $100 more once I got the model with 8 GB RAM. Wasted money.
Phones, laptops, tablets --> same thing. Mostly used to consume content, probably less than 10% of users need a high end processor.
As you say, better battery life and cooler operation are the things that should be optimized for, especially with phones and tablets. I concede that a decent minority of users can make a good argument for owning a powerful laptop.
That's why they have Surface, Windows Phone/Mobile (and did the Nokia deal), and Signature Edition now. They don't need to do any of that if the OEM partner model were working. It wasn't, and it isn't. Microsoft's decision to go vertical is very sensible. It isn't working because they're too late. One of the basic principles of running a megacorporation is that you shouldn't be in markets where you cannot be #1 or #2. Microsoft is a very distant #3 or #4 in mobile. Instead of trying to break in years after the top players were established, they should have admitted failure and gone off to find the next big thing where they could be #1 or #2. But that kind of courage is very rare in large corporations and certainly no one in the Microsoft leadership team has anything like it. So they'll thrash around for a while until either they hit on the next big thing themselves or, more likely, fail to do so and repeat this process a couple more times before finally going under.
Sure things didn't work out so well for end users, but again, Microsoft benefited greatly from this arrangement.
I think Microsoft wants to go vertical because they see how well it worked for Apple. But Microsoft is no Apple. Apple started with hardware and have always focused on hardware. Their software and services exist to drive hardware sales. That's never been Microsoft's strategy. If they want to change, that's great. But my original comment stands. They have been very very successful partnering and not being an OEM.
That kind of misses the point, doesn't it? The consumer perception of what the Windows experience is is degraded by their partners, leading people to see it as shoddy and less reputable than it is. This happens to basically any business that pursues this (the world is full of unscrupulous satellite TV dealers who will falsely represent the channels you're getting so you sign a contract, then tell you to call the company once you're actually locked in, for instance).
There are benefits too, for sure.
Now there is a very real risk that end users use closed hardware running Android or iOS, while servers run Linux serving web applications.
It's probably too early to call it either way; the Xbox division took something like 6-7 years to start posting profit. Surface was (still is?) in the negative, but it's been gaining traction lately and if it isn't already profitable it will be soon.
Surface in particular is a good example of what they should do in hardware: make something that nobody else really does and do a damn good job of it. There are other Windows tablets, but nothing comes close to Surface in terms of build quality and form factor. They tried to differentiate the Xbox One with Kinect, which didn't work, but points to that being their strategy. With Windows Phone though, I'm not really seeing it. The main draw is the OS (which isn't much of a draw because of the low marketshare -> no apps feedback cycle).
Looks like they got that covered.
And very few people own a phone made directly by Google or a company owned by Google. Lumia is a Nokia Phone which is owned by Microsoft.
That is exactly like saying "The New York Times is an advertising company. Newspaper and website are just delivery mechanisms for the ads (which brings in the money)"
Software/AI is a Google core-competency, calling it a "mechanism for ads" seems to be under-selling them, especially when a huge chunk of the software they produce has nothing to do with ad-delivery