Windows Phone is dead: reports

[DA-LION-619]

But they have been having some serious problems with it & they're "keeping mum" :

http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-pulls-impressive-135-billion-revenue-surface-line

 

[FiestaST]

Clickbait.

Big time #fail

 

[Roman4604]

Then load Ubuntu up on it. You're customizing wrong

That represents another level of complexity and risk, especially if your main purpose is to run Win MS Office.

 

[BCR]

That said, I do expect Google to be more Windows friendly during the course of this year and bring their apps over.

I agree & this is why :

Microsoft and Google drop patent battles and agree to work together
http://betanews.com/2015/10/01/microsoft-and-google-drop-patent-battles-and-agree-to-work-together/

In a joint statement, the two companies said:

Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues. As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility. Separately, Google and Microsoft have agreed to collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers.

Keep might one day make it to Win 10.

 

[purpleonlineadmin]

Ahhh ok..... so because he worked at MS its therefore MS's fault?

@backstreetboy clearly regurgitating popular opinion from media and just has never done his research nor verified the timelines. Nokia's problems had started long before Elops appointment in 2010, a little history on Symbians problems would be a start!

 

[BCR]

http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-pulls-impressive-135-billion-revenue-surface-line

At the expense of irate customers ; if you listen to the latest Windows Weekly on TWIT.tv, Paul T. mentions that many are being returned. I don't have an article to back that up, but he has insider knowledge & direct contacts at MS so should know much more than us, and many others on this.

 

[backstreetboy]

That represents another level of complexity and risk, especially if your main purpose is to run Win MS Office.

:wtf: why would you want to do that though? MS office is available on Android (phone + tablet) comparable to the UWP ones. Personally I prefer Google docs because it's much simpler, faster and the collaboration is unmatched.

 

[purpleonlineadmin]

The Universal apps in Win 10 are really good, as you get the develop the single app for your phone, Xbox and desktop. It's been embraced quite a bit recently by Netflix and other companies, but it still needs a year or so for apps to be updated to become a competitor against IOS and Android.

Yup! Goes back to my point that Microsoft now has 3 platforms to tap into, the problem even with this knowledge, they are not doing anything to tell devs "Guys you had a problem with our strictly Windows Phone user base and complained about lack of users, now we have 110 million desktop users, a few million Xbox users and at least over 4million Windows 10 Mobile users, have fun"...

That's all there was to it! This seems to be too difficult to even do

 

[Arthur]

At the expense of irate customers ; if you listen to the latest Windows Weekly on TWIT.tv, Paul T. mentions that many are being returned. I don't have an article to back that up, but he has insider knowledge & direct contacts at MS so should know much more than us, and many others on this.

It's a storm on a teacup. Paul Thurrott is going on and on and on about this - far more than the real issue warrants. The issue is a small number of systems that seem to have an problem with sleep/standby, and it's not unique to Surface. In any case, even Thurrott says the SB/SP4 are beautiful machines and he's sure a firmware update will soon solve the sleep/standby issue (which could be related to a Skylake chipset bug).

I have a Surface Pro 4. No issues whatsoever. Standby/sleep work exactky as advertised. Awesome, awesome machine.

 

[whatwhat]

Yup! Goes back to my point that Microsoft now has 3 platforms to tap into, the problem even with this knowledge, they are not doing anything to tell devs "Guys you had a problem with our strictly Windows Phone user base and complained about lack of users, now we have 110 million desktop users, a few million Xbox users and at least over 4million Windows 10 Mobile users, have fun"...

That's all there was to it! This seems to be too difficult to even do

Microsoft is unfortunately ahead of the curve by 3-5 years with things, and they are terrible at getting their vision out there.

Back in the Zune days they had a ZunePass, where for a few $ a month you could stream any of the songs in the library for free. And every month you could pick 5 or 10 songs to permanently keep. People hated the idea, everyone wants to own their music and who in their right mind wants to own it.

Fast forward till today and things have changed a lot.

 

[ToxicBunny]

:wtf: why would you want to do that though? MS office is available on Android (phone + tablet) comparable to the UWP ones. Personally I prefer Google docs because it's much simpler, faster and the collaboration is unmatched.

Because Office and its integration into the Enterprise is leaps and bounds better on a Windows Mobile than it will ever be on Android.

 

[Roman4604]

:wtf: why would you want to do that though? MS office is available on Android (phone + tablet) comparable to the UWP ones.

I'm referring to running a desktop version of MS Office, using a full size keyboard, mouse and monitor. Maybe you can get close with Ubuntu Phone [experimental for my S5] and something like LibreOffice, but don't think you can mirror the experience natively with just Android or iOS.

 

[sajunky]

At the expense of irate customers ; if you listen to the latest Windows Weekly on TWIT.tv, Paul T. mentions that many are being returned. I don't have an article to back that up, but he has insider knowledge & direct contacts at MS so should know much more than us, and many others on this.

Established brands decided to hold production due to the Skylake chipset bug. It is still unknown whether it can be fixed by firmware update without penalty of higher power consumption. By example Gigabyte decided to delay some Aorus models (see other thread about), other brands have very limited offers. 'Emerging' brands always come with the policy of offering the latest hardware without extensive in-house testing. It is on the expense of the customer, no question about. Problem is that Microsoft is not only one of these 'emerging' brands, but also the most expensive one!

 

[Skerminkel]

Because if you're dropping serious hardware into a mobile device like 3GB of RAM, where do you draw the line?

Not following

 

[butters89]

Quite sad actually..... it really is a fantastic OS

 

[DA-LION-619]

Not following

Why drop 10k on a flag phone just to be a phone, with the hardware it should be able to do more and that's what Continuum is about.

 

[The_Librarian]

There were dead because M$FT convinced them that their platform was the future.

You may want to actually go and research a bit of the history of Nokia and what happened to the company. Its downfall was not Microsofts fault at all but their own.

I concur with the Bunny.

Nokia failed to adapt to a changing market, just like RIM...

Technological markets are fluid, and very hard to predict. If you take a wrong turn, you lose out.

Noteworthy examples :

- Xerox's PARC with the first GUI
- IBM's OS/2 (backwards compatibility with Windows 3.1 and DOS was part of what killed it off)
- RIM (Blackberry) resting on their laurels and failing to adapt
- Vodacom and MTN relying on SMS for revenue until Whatsapp killed that.

And there's more, but these are just to get you started.

 

[RetroPedro]

Microsoft's ultimate vision is to have the same platform on all devices. They're riding on the back of 200 million Windows 10 installations. There are currently just a handful Windows 10 Mobile phones, excluding the Lumia's running the developer preview. Will be interesting to see what happens this year when it becomes mainstream. Windows 10 on my laptops, PC, phone and pad, including Cortana, OneDrive and Office 2016 is part of my everyday life - I'm not only seeing the vision, I'm living it right now, and so millions of people will also light up this year. Universal apps make great sense, especially in corporate environments. I'm don't have a laptop, PC and phone, just have differently sized devices that are utilized in the their specific environments, and it's also seamless. If you have that in your head, you have it in a nutshell

 

[Thor]

It's microsoft what do you expect

 

[CataclysmZA]

Microsoft continually drives the dagger deeper into the heart of Windows Phone, because the new strategy is to have their stuff everywhere else first and to have really expensive "hero" devices that no-one can really afford yet. Both the 950 and the 950XL are stepping stones to the Surface Phone, and I'm not sure why Microsoft didn't just go with that instead of exhausting all the designs that were still in the pipeline before the mass layoffs in the mobile division.

As much as I wanted them to make Windows Phone the best platform possible for everything Microsoft and Windows when they first came out with the Lumia 800, I don't think they have quite the same direction or drive that the original team had, staying slightly terrified while the Elop wrecking ball was tearing Nokia down into bite-sized chunks for Microsoft to later buy.

Windows Phone 10 is decent. But just like Edge, it lacks a lot of the functionality found on other platforms, and killing off the Android bridge, leaving them without any mobile payment system, for example, further drove people away to other devices.