No. I don’t really have a position.
Your line of question is trying to force me into a position that I simply don’t have. You’re tilting at windmills
I recently tried to make the switch from WP to Android (hardware quality on my choice of device it the reason for the word ‘tried’ - I am still trying). To my slight surprise, I found that not only are most of my MS apps already available on Android (I was marginally aware of this, but not fully), but MS also has a launcher for Android.
The question arose in my head “Is Microsoft heading toward releasing a Windows-branded Android phone?” - and some cursory googling confirmed other people asking the same question, as well as a couple of abortive projects that also looked like the beginnings of Microsoft creating such a thing, so I started this thread. That is the entirety of my ‘position’.
Anything else I have said in this thread was not in my head when I began, and has only come up as a result of questions and challenges, including yours. That’s the honest truth.
In general I’m in Mangetout’s camp on this whole thing. In my ISV career we were very closely coupled to all things MSFT and I lived a very MS-centric life. So of course I had a succession of Windows Phones. My wife is still using hers today although it’s getting a little raggedy.
In the early days of slightly smart phones and PDAs and clouds and such each of the big 3 hoped to create a walled garden of monopoly profit. So e.g. early Android phones would not connect to Apple’s cloud storage or Microsoft’s email very well. Each vendor tried real hard to ensure their devices played best with their own cloud and they released built-in cripple-ware to half-assedly connect to other clouds.
Various third parties sprung up to bridge those gaps, and each of the vendors came up with appware for the other platforms. Appware which generally was real good at their cloud but not the other guy’s. Simplified example: an Android owner could use one mail app from Google that did GMail great and sucked at MS Exchange/Live, or they could use an app from MSFT that did MS Exchange/Live great but sucked at GMail. There wasn’t an app that did both well & unified.
During the time that all the above was mostly true, many people *did *want (or need) platform loyalty. I was fully invested in the MSFT clouds, PC, laptops, and tablets. That sorta forced me into a WinPhone since the Androids or iPhones of the day would only grudgingly play half-assedly with my existing infrastructure and I wasn’t about to uproot all of it over a phone.
That was then. This is now.
For whatever set of reasons, the Big 3’s attempts at separate walled garden clouds has comprehensively failed. You *can *use the MSFT cloud on an iPhone with GMail. And have a fully unified user experience with just a hitch here and there. I now run an Android phone and use zero Apple or Google cloud services; all my online stuff is Live.com.
In this current and future era, the need for there to be a Windows Phone OS and Windows Phone devices declines a bunch. e.g. Having an Android phone is no longer an *insurmountable *obstacle to setting up Live.com as your cloud provider of choice. IMO the same thing is roughly equally true true for any combo of cloud provider and phone OS provider.
My prediction: Microsoft branded hardware goes away within 5 years. I love the genuine Surface I’m typing on now, but it’s a pimple on their elephant. Microsoft-branded phone OS and the corresponding apps goes away even faster.
So where does Microsoft make their money going forward? Cloud and enterprise services. Desktop OS.
TL;DR: There was a time around 2010 when every OS/cloud vendor thought they needed to have a matching phone. They might have been right then but that’s wrong now.
Agreed. Microsoft doesn’t need “their own” phone any more than Google needs their own desktop operating system. I mean, sure, Chromebooks are a thing. But that’s not because the best way to integrate with the Google experience is within Google’s walled garden, and if you try to use Google search or chrome or gmail or google apps from your MS Windows computer you’re getting a crippled experience.
The whole point of Chrome and gmail and search is that it doesn’t matter if the customer is sitting down at a machine running Windows 10.
For Microsoft, it shouldn’t matter that the customer is using a phone running android. If they can use Office and Azure and all that, then they’re a Microsoft customer. And making Office on android a crippled experience because you’re trying to force customers to your Microsoft Phone is the worst idea ever.
You are your own person, I didn’t force you into anything. Here’s the easiest tilting at windmills you’ll ever see in your life…
…but you don’t have a position. Give me a break.
I hardly know how to respond to this. How is anyone supposed to know what was or wasn’t in your head when the thread began? Is no one allowed to question you based on what you’re actually saying in the thread?
Don’t blame me because you can’t back up the position you took.
Excellent observation. They’re not each in the *same *place, but they are each in a comparable place.
The other facet of modern device wars is social media. Facebook doesn’t have a phone, or an OS. They do sorta have a search facility for content they host. Meantime, end-user Microsft and Apple don’t have a social component while Google has Google+ (for what little that’s worth). MSFT does have a pretty solid social media offering for in-house use in their enterprise customers.
I’m not sure my musings about social media functions as the 4th dimension of the situation is useful or correct.
Are you sure about that? He’s not arguing for platform independence, per se. As you’ve pointed out, that’s more or less a reality for everyone now. He’s arguing Google Play could be the rebirth of Microsoft hardware but you’re saying
I’m allowed to ask someone to back up something they said only if it was said in GD? What kind of a discussion would there be here if the response to every inquiry was, “I don’t have to tell you because it’s just my opinion?”
There’s a lot of money in software. There’s not nearly as much money in hardware. What about the iPhone? The hardware is a delivery product for the Apple software. Apple could have been a much more successful company if they licensed their software to all comers. (Sort of a scary thought there.)
In the Android world almost everybody is losing money. It’s a race to just survive. I could see MS jumping in with a partner once the herd thins. But why now?
The only classic product that MS has that phones need is MS-Office. And they’ve only tentatively entered that world.
MS needs a new killer app product that almost all phone users must have. What are the chances of MS doing that? They’ve been playing catchup all over the place: search, voice, cloud, etc.
They need to make a lot of enormous software risks hoping that at least one makes it. The Redmond culture is one of everybody undercutting everyone else. That defeats full-on risk taking.
I’ve said all I can say, and it’s clearly not satisfying you. I’m really sorry that there isn’t any other secret reasoning that I am withholding from the conversation, but there isn’t.
Of course there’s nothing secret about it. You’ve been quite upfront about how uncouth I’ve been for having the audacity to simply ask you what leads you to your opinion and that I forced that opinion upon you.
Do you just want to have the last word? Is that what this is? Is that why you’ve said three times now in your last three posts that you don’t have anything left to say?
Fine, unless or until you post something else that I feel warrants reengaging (“Is Microsoft’s next Xbox a PlayStation?”), you may consider yourself the owner of the last word in this discussion here between us.
Let me try this, since you seem to like picking apart and skipping over nuance in favor of (IMO unwarranted) black/white perspectives. I thought my argument was pretty straightforward, although perhaps obscured by too many words. But I’ve certainly made baffling posts before; let me try it again in short form.
I am sympathetic to the OP’s preference for WinPhone as a piece of tech. I too prefer it to Android.
I am sympathetic to the OP’s idea that there is *some *attractiveness to having a matched set of devices and suppliers from phone to tablet to PC to cloud. A lot of incompatibilities and UI style inconsistencies can be avoided that way. IOW total usability is better with a matched set.
Hardware today is WhoGAS; all that matters is the software.
As attractive as those sympathies are for me and presumably a couple million other people, they are not where the multi-billion-unit smart device market is going collectively. Those sympathies are becoming both less logically well-founded and less marketplace popular every day.
Therefore I predict Microsoft going forward will act in directions contrary to those sympathies.
*If *Microsoft had a large profitable following in the app world, *then *I could imagine them porting their API and UI style to run on Android’s underlying OS to protect that. Which is what I parse the OP’s big idea to be: That MSFT *might *choose to do this since that’s easier=cheaper than them maintaining an entire OS stack.
But that large profitable following doesn’t exist. So IMO MSFT has no motivation within the phone-only world to bother. And IMO the cross-selling value of the WinPhone OS & presentation layer in support of their larger platforms (tablet up to cloud) is already low and declining steadily. So rather than trying to shore up the WinPhone app ecosystem and presentation layer, they’ll abandon it instead.
IMO there are many people who seem to have difficulty arguing for any outcome except their preferred outcome. We certainly see that in political threads and some economic threads. Many people are genuinely baffled by somebody posting something along the lines of “I think X is going to happen. I’d much prefer Y, but the evidence forces me to predict X.”
To such people the only possible attitude is “I want X to happen and therefore I predict X must happen. Here’s why …” Which they usually express the other way: "X will happen.[sub] Because that’s what *I *want and *I *can’t stand to be frustrated or wrong.[/sub]
You want to talk about unwarranted black and white perspectives?
What do you think you’ve just done with this classy piece of projection? Physician, heal thyself.
Your argument was straightforward, it was your nuance that was obscured by too many words. Your short form is almost exactly the same length as your long form, so that’s something you might want to work on. You may say you’re generally in his camp, but Mangetout’s argument was pretty much the opposite of your argument. That’s all I intended to point out. Nuance and sympathy won’t change that. But if you still want to consider him a fellow camper, then by all means have a s’more on me.
Not sure what it really gains them. Android won, just like DOS did before, so it makes sense not to keep trying the win mobile thing.
But MS could just sell their other software like Office in the google store, why be in the hardware business like this? If you’re Apple it’s a different story, people are willing to pay a premium for the walled garden and other differentiators (perceived or not), but with this MS is competing with Samsung for the left overs.
Maybe they can create a higher-end product to cut into the premium profits Apple is getting, maybe.
They clearly blew it by letting two different OS’s beat them at mobile, and now that “good enough for mobile os” will probably chip away at office productivity just like dos+windows did to mainframe+mini before.
I don’t really know what I would do in MS shoes, it’s an interesting problem.