Nadella talks Microsoft's mobile ambitions, Windows 10 strategy, HoloLens
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So to me it's very important to think of our operating system
more broadly than some old definition of an operating system.
From iOS. From Android. From windows devices. Everyone needs the same web services.
I also like this quote:
The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are
users. And in our case the truth is we have users on desktop.
Seems like a smart strategy to me.
I'm pretty wary of Windows 10 Mobile (is that the right nomenclature?) but Windows Phone 8.1 is fantastic and I think probably the best user experience available on mobile. It is certainly at least comparable to iOS and Android. I most recently came from Android, switching from a Galaxy S3 to a Nokia Icon, and the Windows Phone is much more of a pleasure to use, in my experience.
My only real substantive complaint is that there aren't enough official apps (e.g. no Snapchat) and the ones that do exist are often obviously the ignored stepchild for the developer. I can see how the ideal of Continuum would be nice, but on the other hand, I suspect they're going to mess up a good thing.
If you haven't used Windows on mobile since the garbage that was Windows Mobile, or the halfway-there Windows Phone 7, then it's worth looking at again. But that's also part of Microsoft's problems: they fumbled so often on mobile and people haven't forgotten.
Isn't that the approach that got Microsoft left out from the mobile boom, even though they were present in the market continuously?
Between 1995 and 2007, Microsoft had a competitor in every race in mobile:
- Clamshell + keyboard mobile devices à la Psion (Windows CE, "Handheld PC" [1])
- Stylus-driven PDAs à la Palm (Palm-size PC [2], Pocket PC [3])
- Stylus-driven smartphones à la Symbian (Pocket PC 2002 [4])
These products were about the success of Microsoft and its strategy, rather than building successful mobile devices that users want. And it didn't work: competitors eventually came out with devices that were desirable on their own, not just as Outlook terminals.
The success of iOS and Android forced Microsoft to reset their mobile platform into a product-oriented design that became Windows Phone 7. For the first time, Microsoft was offering a mobile OS that stood on its own rather than as a piece in Microsoft's chess game of technology stacks.
That didn't work either, but at least the product was good. Now Microsoft is throwing away the holistic approach of Windows Phone and reverting their mobile efforts back into the earlier strategy-driven "chess piece" mode. I don't see how that will help anything, but I guess it sounds good in Microsoft board room PowerPoints.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_PC [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm-size_PC [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC_2002
I hardly saw a Palm on sale.
Double down on windows phone, despite all the metrics saying its a failure?
Create more crippled RT devices that no one wants?
Create an entirely new mobile OS which is open source for 3rd party vendors like android's successful model?
The current approach ('If we make great phones, they will come...') has failed.
The new 'services on everything' approach is certainly risky; if you don't own the platform, you risk being turfed by the owner if you get too big / too popular... but it seems plausible. I know a lot of people who use onenote and office on their devices. Being ubiquitous is the key, not having some technically sophisticated devices that get no consumer uptake.
It's easy to critique, but tangibly what you suggest as a proactive alternative for them?
Satella acknowledges that the Windows Phone model hasn't worked, but seems to believe that reverting to Microsoft's old 2000-era model would eventually make it a success.
I guess, if I were suddenly appointed as circus leader in Redmond, I would just pull the plug on Windows 10 Mobile since it's been fatally wounded by the recent announcements anyway. The phone hardware division bought from Nokia has been entirely written down as a loss, so maybe I'd give them a year to build something that makes sense for their customers -- maybe an Office-centric Android device.
I'd probably try to peddle the ex-Nokia division to some large company that still wants to make phones for strategic reasons. There's one in Microsoft's home city actually. Maybe Amazon could reboot their Fire Phone using the Lumia brand, distribution reach and the Finnish hardware competence that still remains?
People keep misinterpreting the Nokia layoffs as giving up on phones. What actually happened was that the phone department was rolled into the Windows department. Windows Phone is dead, but Windows Mobile has replaced it as a transition into just Windows, the platform-agnostic, cloud-based, Cortana-driven operating system. The future Internet will not be phone-based. Phones will be a convenient form-factor for the near future, but they are just nodes in the cloud.
There's plenty of time for everyone to catch up to Microsoft, but I think everyone should be paying attention to what they're doing. Remember when the iPod was the most important thing that Apple had? Microsoft is betting that its future as a company is not dependent on building a better Zune. It's about thinking about where the iPhone is going, not where the iPhone is.
And when you saw the demo of HoloLens today, to me it's part of my mobility strategy. When the person was using Autodesk and Maya on the desktop and just moved to a 3D model and interacted, they weren't using their phone.
If anything, one big mistake we made in our past was to think of the PC as the hub for everything for all time to come. And today, of course, the high volume device is the six-inch phone. I acknowledge that. But to think that that's what the future is for all time to come would be to make the same mistake we made in the past without even having the share position of the past. So that would be madness.
Interesting as well is the next paragraph which is basically 'desktop is not dead, though desktop pcs/laptop are not always the most appropriate form factor and this is what we are going to do about it'
So when I think about our Windows Phone, I want it to stand for something like Continuum. When I say, wow, that's an interesting approach where you can have a phone and that same phone, because of our universal platform with Continuum, and can, in fact, be a desktop. That is not something any other phone operating system or device can do. And that's what I want our devices and device innovation to stand for.
Ambitious.
The Surface is nice and all but for those of us that use a PC on a desktop for 95% of the day it isn't an optimal choice.
Apple once the steward of ergonomic keyboards now has nothing that could match either Microsoft or Logitech offerings.
I love the direction Microsoft is going. I almost feel like this is a new company totally different from the Microsoft of the past. But I seriously disagree with this we are Windows mantra. Having two different operating systems one for desktop another for mobile is a no brainier. To date my favorite Windows is still 7. Frankly I don't see the point of WinRT in the desktop.
I think Windows Phone will never be able to compete with Android/iOS. But a good restart would be to make Windows Phone less restrictive (side loading) and to make the SDK compatible with Windows 7.
That being said, yes please make the windows phone less restrictive :) I've developed for Android, iOS and WinPhone and the WinPhone with C# and VS is by far the friendliest, but absolutely hobbled for practical use by their insistence on going via the store. My clients are businesses, not joe public! Businesses want a single, easy to control deployment to all their devices via powershell or similar. They want to be able to test an app in a UAT deployment to test devices, not effectively require it to be in production before they can see something outside of the developers machine.
Which is sad, because at least in relation to Android, WinRT and the set of available languages is much more sane.
Microsoft is even able to provide a better Android development experience for NDK users than Google itself!
I disagree.
A "one" Windows strategy where you can write for the desktop and automatically have a Phone, XBox etc app is incredibly compelling. It's going to mean developers will have this massive market. And it's a market that is far, far more lucrative. Why write an iOS app that you will sell for dollars when you could write one Windows app that sells for $30 on the desktop, $20 on HoloLens, $10 on tablet and $3 on Mobile. And having a truly intelligent cloud behind it ie. not just a dumb key/value store or Hadoop stack but rather deep analytics as a service e.g. predictive modelling etc will make Windows apps far more compelling.
You can really see where Satya is taking Microsoft and it's pretty damn exciting. And I would never bet against them especially in the cloud/analytics space right now.
They have no plays in the key future markets of identity/social, app data/behavior, web content consumption or advertising, online retail or media distribution.
They sell windows licenses and enterprise services
And with that they have a lot of great stuff, but strategically they have nothing at all in the consumer space other than Xbox. Hololens, the Surface, some car-plane-phone thing or more MSR vision videos are not going to swoop in and change the game. They have no foundation to build on in the consumer market, and seem to act like they don't even notice.
The takeaway from Satya is "Look, we don't have to win everywhere, broadly. It's okay to focus on a few great scenarios sometimes."
This is a smart way to set expectations with investors while encouraging more nimble thinking inside the company.
And I think this attitude will pay dividends - the we must win at everything ideology means you spread yourself too thin in key, highly profitable areas that are worth having a stake in. When Steve Jobs said for Apple to win, Microsoft doesn't need to lose it led their most focused, eventually most profitable period in their history.
Isn't "BYOD" a growing phenomenon in the workplace? I think Microsoft chasing mobile is them trying to defend enterprise from Apple/Android handsets.
Microsoft thought they had to defend the enterprise from iPads, too. Nope, they just needed to make PowerPoint run great on the damn things.
The broader point is that people are bringing their work home and to the extent that Microsoft makes the best productivity tools, they'll never lose "consumer." They get that for free.
When consumer trends change, maybe they'll catch one. Maybe Sony will. Maybe Samsung. But that's really not the front line battle anymore.
I'm sure Microsoft has made more money off me in the past five years than Google/Facebook/Apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
If anything, their biggest problem is, like, where to spend the money.
Also, MS has some big plays in identity, app data etc and even media distribution right? Correct me if I am wrong, but while they are not dominant or 'winning', Azure Storage, AD and App Insights are pretty good services and heavily used - if not directly by the average consumer, probably indirectly being used by the services that consumer uses.
Here is a video showing a third person view of the FOV; it is a bit unfair when objects are really close, because they are at the small end of the frustum pyramid, watch to the end in the immersive environment part to get full picture of how small the FOV is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syFRdNs68s4
Blog post detailing the FOV measurement that went into making the video: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1223
That being said, they did release a video recently that was a little more realistic of what you might get day one showing the limited FOV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKpKlh1-en0
To me it just reminds me of Kinect and Molyneux's Milo demo. The Minecraft demo on the table they gave for example was very misleading, because when the camera guy got close to the table, he could still get the whole thing in the shot. Standing by the table you would only actually be able to see tiny slices at a time.
Some outlets have called it out as a big issue--The Verge ( http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8527645/microsoft-hololens-... ), and Tested are two I've seen. I still think it is cool and it is the best that has been broadly publically demoed (Magic Leap has only been shown to a select few, and not in any kind of portable form; and at least some of their embodiments in their patents show only around 30 degree diagonal), but all the footage is misleading about FOV and most of it completely fakes occlusion. Google was guilty of the same with at least one of their big videos around a day in the life of Google Glass.
They also shouldn't be in advertising, media distribution, or social. The only company making any money in social, is Facebook. There is very little money in that market, and it's going to remain that way; social is a horrible business.
Media distribution is also a terrible business. Just ask Netflix: ~200 PE ratio, temporarily floating extreme bubble stock, with a whopping $266 million in net income after 20 years in business. They're the king of their segment and that's all they can earn. Pandora and Spotify also have horrible businesses, that have done nothing but bleed large amounts of red ink for a decade. Media distribution primarily profits the content owners, not the distributor. Microsoft should stay very far away from it.
Since when does it make any sense, at all, to try to do everything? It's a horrible business approach, and guarantees mediocrity. Trying to do all of those things is what hurt Microsoft from ~2000-2014.
I'm not sure what the consumer aspects of hololens are but from what I hear (from pre release developers external to MS) it has lots of potential in the professional AR space. The FOV is not a thing but having accurate positioning and 'good enough' AR is. Think of construction engineers using hololens onsite for displaying most of their data.
They have recently released a social meetup app called Tossup..... It's only available for iOS and Android though! ;-}
Building a truly intelligent cloud e.g. analytics as a service that makes AWS/iCloud look like toys and focusing on reinventing day to day home and office workflows is their strength, the future and still poorly serviced.
Their acquisition of Sunrise and Wunderlist shows they have the sense to recognise their weaknesses and acquihire if need be.
Microsoft will find that making a universal desktop-to-phone OS is in practical terms not doable. It is a car-boat-plane.
I like the idea of running mobile apps on my desktop and my Windows tablet.
I think we see the DNA of Courier in the Surface line. Of course it's not all that the demos for Courier were, but it's a step in the right direction and I hope we see a lot more evolution in that regard.
> PCs are on track to become a < 200M unit/year business
I think they're well aware of that, which is why Azure and their other services are a huge part of their plans for the future. Microsoft isn't just Windows anymore.
> Microsoft will find that making a universal desktop-to-phone OS is in practical terms not doable
They seem to be doing an alright job so far. I think it's ambitious and currently imperfect, but I also think they can pull it off in time.
He wants Microsoft to focus on a mobile-first world, but the world isn't mobile first, and a cloud service approach for Microsoft is equally as worthless unless you're talking about enterprise environments. I mean who does he intend MS market to otherwise? And when you're talking enterprise, you're talking about not just an ecosystem, but a culture, of people who do not want their data handled by third-parties, even if that third-party is the platform owner itself. Amazon and Google dominate cloud space. Microsoft doesn't compete in any meaningful way here. And Azure? Please.
So what is Microsoft's goal with mobile? To compete? With who? Google? Apple? What a joke. Microsoft is essentially not even in the market.
What the hell is Nadella trying to do? I mean great job trying to unify Microsoft's brands, but that's all marketing that doesn't add up to anything other than product consistency. They've got nothing new to show other than a culture shift attempt.
That sounds scary (coming from MS).
> I want that to translate into success for our developers. That's what's going to get them to write to the phone.
You know what can translate into success for developers? Supporting Vulkan, instead of pushing unportable DX12.
> Because all of this comes down to how are you going to get developers to come to Windows. If you come to Windows, you are going to be on the phone, too. Even if you want to come to Windows because of HoloLens, you want to come to it because of Xbox, you want to come to the desktop, all those get you to the phone. It's not about let's do head-on competition. That will never work. You have to have a differentiated point of view.
Reduce lock-in, support better cross platform development, and more developers will come to Windows. Lock-in isn't going to fly as something that developers will appreciate these days.
Will it really?
> Reduce lock-in, support better cross platform development, and more developers will come to Windows
This is exactly what they're doing.
I would agree to that when I'll see Vulkan on Xbox and Windows Phone.
The days of the average developer writing directly to a low level 3D graphics API are long over, so this is mostly irrelevant. Even so, the funny thing is it's likely that once Vulkan ships, writing a Vulkan only Windows game will be viable as long as AMD, Nvidia and Intel have decent Vulkan drivers even without Microsoft support. Using Vulkan on Mac might be impossible, as Apple is pushing their own proprietary API, Metal, on Mac OS X.
Not really, and it depends on studios and developers. Firstly, engine developers can't avoid dealing with those APIs. And dealing with multiple increases their burden and is simply a pointless multiplication of effort which could be avoided. Secondly, some studios can afford developing their own engines, so it's not irrelevant even if we aren't talking about commonly licensed engines like Unreal, Cry or Unity.
> the funny thing is it's likely that once Vulkan ships, writing a Vulkan only Windows game will be viable as long as AMD, Nvidia and Intel have decent Vulkan drivers even without Microsoft support.
In the context of the interview, I doubt Vulkan will be available on Xbox and MS mobile devices, unless MS will suddenly rethink their lock-in attitude. In the best case scenario someone will create a Vulkan → DX12 translation layer (similar to ANGLE), since actual APIs aren't that different functionally.
In the context of the interview, I doubt Vulkan will be available on WiiU and 3DS mobile devices , unless Nintendo will suddenly rethink their lock-in attitude.
It just doesn't matter when game engines are available and writing a plugin render APIs is just like CS 101 graphics programming, being done since Atari brought games into homes.
They don't grow magically out of nowhere. To make them available, someone has to develop them for each target platform. And multiplying APIs in the process doesn't come for free.
Succeeding in the games industry means thinking like the Demoscene culture, not FOSS culture. I got to learn that too late.
So I suppose AMD, Apple, and Microsoft should have held off on pushing "unportable" Mantle, Metal, and DX12?
Competition is good, when it exists. But I'm talking about bad cases, where competition is artificially prevented. I.e. sure, on Windows Vulkan and DX12 can compete. But on Xbox and Windows mobile - not really, since MS won't allow Vulkan there. They aren't even part of the Vulkan Khronos group as far as I know.
Nintendo, Sony and Sega never had an OpenGL 100% compliant API.
What Sony had on PS3 was OpenGL ES 1.0 with Nvidias Cg and even that was barely used by game studios.
Being a logo on OpenGL website doesn't mean anything.
"Actions speak louder than words"
Uh, Windows has something like 95% market share in the market where developers care about Vulkan vs DirectX 12. I think Microsoft will have no problem attracting games developers to Windows, considering they're already there.
Ah! You mean the Vulkan support that Apple forgot to talk about at WWDC, while updating their documentation to refer to OpenGL as legacy?
If Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple don't support Vulkan, the APIs is DOA, regardless of what OpenGL fanboys might think of it.
In the age of middleware game engines, the low level APIs are not that relevant any more.
I already answered you. Someone makes those engines, and those who use them would bear the overhead of those who develop them wasting their time on duplicating work.