I can hardly be accused of being a MSFT fanboy (more like an Android/Google fanboy), but I think a lot of people here are underestimating WinMo and Nokia’s line of WinMo phones. Sure, they don’t have much in the way of market share yet, but ISTM that MSFT is on the right track with Win8 and integrating the UI into being cross-platform and cross-input. (Regardless of the typical gripes from those averse to changes of any kind.)
Once Win8 deployment is near its peak, and the whole touchscreen/tablet/hybrid market is in full swing, they seem to be well positioned to leverage that whole ecosystem and take advantage of the synergies. Particularly in the business space, where their experience and expertise – but mostly, market penetration – make it much harder for Apple and Google to compete.
Personally, there’s very little chance I would ever buy Nokia/WinMo phone, but if I couldn’t have an Android phone for whatever reason, I would much rather go that route than resort to taking a bite of the Apple. Maybe it’s just my own prejudice against Apple, but if WinMo phones start taking more market share, my prediction is that it will come mostly at Apple’s expense. I see much the same thing potentially happening concurrently in the tablet/laptop space.
IMO the two missteps that doom the Surface are 1) they should never have bothered with RT - just launch Pro or launch Pro before RT and (related) 2) they did a terrible job telling people what differentiated the Surface from the iPad. It clicks, was what most people got from the ad campaign. Whoop-de-frickin-do I actually find my Surface better to travel with than my laptop because it’s light and small and I can do actual work on it - full Office, good RDP client, etc. I take my iPad on non-business travel. I doubt even 1 in 10 people know what the Surface is (was) good for - lightweight business travel.
The Surface ‘click’ ads were just a lame attempt to be Apple - mimicking the hip, bouncy colourful non-informativeness of the iPod ads - except… Apple doesn’t do that for its more functional (iOS) products.
I hate to be pedantic because I like the rest of your post, but WinMo is dead, dead, dead.
It’s Windows Phone. WP7/WP8. WinPhone if you’re nasty. Windows Mobile is well dead and forgotten. None of its poison remains.
WP may never beat iOS or Android, but it doesn’t necessarily need to. The mobile world is big enough for a three-horse race. Blackberry is imploding, and their newest products are mediocre at best and disastrous at worst. They are only limping along by selling things to people who refuse to buy anything that isn’t a Blackberry – and those last users are getting upset when they realize that they didn’t really buy a Blackberry.
Windows Phone is doing solid in some smaller / developing markets, which counts for something.
It’s also pretty fantastic to use, which counts for something.
Thank you. You expressed this much better than I could have. MS’ philosophy seems to be: 1. If competitor has product A and competitor is successful, we must have product A as well, even if we have no purpose for it (MS stores, tablet OS) 2. If our product is giving an error, hide it in the next version of the product (automatic restart on BSOD, new Xbox 360s don’t have a red ring). To their defense, other companies have made astoundingly stupid decisions as well - see HP buying Palm, which this may well turn out to be.
Hmm I didn’t know H2G2 had such witty insights. I’d appreciate it more if I had noticed them.
I would put the Surface RT under that category as well.
I’d love to, but I think Surface RT borders on defective. Marketing and timing were part of the issue, but the new app ecosystem is STILL extremely weak. And the RT taking away the Pro’s pen input was a massive bummer.
Actually, that’s not quite true (well, it is for consumer devices). Windows Mobile/CE is still alive and well in the handheld market - for mobile/rugged computing platforms.
Windows Phone has a shot still and I suppose buying Nokia gives them the best shot at realizing the opportunity.
There’s a massive market opportunity in the entry-level which Apple doesn’t want and Android hasn’t succeeded in. Nokia has the experience and connections to those markets and has a pretty strong beachhead with the current iteration of the low end WP8 Lumia devices. WP8 is a great starter phone OS, it’s much easier to use than Android and can be had much cheaper than iOS. This is the biggest benefit to buying Nokia, access to the developing market.
Nokia is making amazing devices at all price points, on par with or better than anything Apple or Samsung has made. And they are innovating FAST and diversely. This pace, design skill and robustness is pure Nokia and now MS has something that can really differentiate their devices.
Buying Nokia insures that they won’t go Android and it earns them more money per device since Nokia has clearly won the battle for the WP8 OEM space. Basically, MS has prevented Nokia from becoming their version of Google’s Samsung problem.
The biggest question is the OS. Microsoft is moving way too slow and they aren’t innovating the software half as fast as Nokia is on hardware. Hopefully dumping Ballmer and restructuring can help MS get out of it’s own way, but we’ll see. I like my Lumia 925 a lot, but I’m starting to get frustrated with the poor marriage it has with my Windows 8 PC. That was the promise all along, and it’s what got me excited to have a WP7. I wanted MS’s 3-screens idea to work, that’s what I want. Let my Xbox, PC and WP play together seamlessly (without stupid Live/Pass service requirements) and you’ve got me hooked. So far MS has failed miserably with their ecosystem.
Say what you want about Zune, it at least was a great music management system and it was the best sync client in the market bar none when they killed it. Win8 has a LONG ways to go to get back to that. I don’t know why MS isn’t trying to sell WP8 directly to Windows owners, this should be a easy whitespace play but instead they are trying to make WP8 it’s own thing (while revamping Windows into touch) and it’s floundering.
ETA: I think we need a SDMB support group for Windows Phone owners, looks like we have a few.
Microsoft has a very, very important reason to be going into the tablet OS market. The future of the ubiquitous PC is up in the air. They are worried to death that they are going to be the next IBM, becoming essentially irrelevant as people move to different hardware.
And Microsoft had a good reason for RT, too. They did not anticipate that Intel would ever stop focusing on faster processors and actually engage in low-power mobile devices. So they had to design for ARM, too. The major problem with RT is that they failed to make it a business OS.
This sort of thing makes me think they had a good reason for the Microsoft Store, too. They definitely have a good reason for their app store–they don’t want low powered tablet devices to have to waste power running antivirus software.
Lately, Microsoft’s problem seems to be execution. They have good ideas, but they can’t actually make them work. It’s kinda sad, really. They may actually kill themselves by innovating because they don’t have the ability to pull off the financial side.
As for my opinion of the OP’s question: I agree with the stock market. Good for Nokia, not so good (but not bad) for Microsoft. Producing their own hardware would be one way for them to get back in the game, but their history seems to indicate that they are just as likely to fumble it.
Wonder whether Microsoft will employ smarter marketing strategies than did Nokia, which recently released a niche smartphone with a good camera (the 1020), but decided to further restrict its sales by only licensing it to AT&T, a company not renowned for its cellphone service.
This is what explains what they were doing with the XBox. From the very beginning the XBox has been intended to take advantage of the coming Grand Living Room Convergence. All your various household media devices will collapse into a single box that handles cable/internet/gaming/music etc. And the XBox (in all its iterations) was intended to make sure that Microsoft had control over that box.
That’s why the newest XBox is the XBox One. This is supposed to be the generation where the convergence actually happens and that’s how the XBox One was rolled out.
Only the market has passed them by. There will never be a Grand Living Room Convergence. Instead people have an assortment of parallel ways to access content: smart phones, tablets, laptops, mp3 players. The future lies in how all these different devices interact seamlessly with each other, not in a single do-everything box. Which is why XBox One is fucked and Microsoft is buying Nokia.
Wall Street’s take: MS went down quickly, losing most of the gain it got when Ballmer announced he’s quitting. Nokia went up.
At one point MS’s value was down $13B, more than the $7B it’s paying for the chunk of Nokia. One can assume that people think that this deal means MS will continue to make bad decisions.
Any company that puts out this re-org memo is in serious trouble.
The marketing people are in charge. Tech innovation is a marginal concern. In the mobile business, that’s the kiss of death.
MSFT is not in serious trouble and won’t be for probably decades, their cash on hand and quarterly profitability are simply too high to take such claims seriously.
I’ve been a tech investor basically my entire investing life. I made enough money off of holding Apple for example over the past 18 years it would make some people sick to know what the cost basis was for some of my Apple shares that I’ve sold in the past 2-3 years (I started harvesting profits on Apple around 36 months ago in small amounts as I’m old enough, have held long enough that I wanted actual cash–not because I foresaw Apple’s share decrease.) I have also held IBM and MSFT for a long time, I’ve pared my IBM stock substantially because really digging into their business I think IBM is a shitty company at it score these days and not a great investment for shareholders. MSFT for a long time I felt whatever their public failures in stuff people care about, all the super profitable stuff no one talks about on blogs and message boards made it a very strong company with a strong track record of earnings and actually giving those earnings back to investors with a consistent dividend.
But I’m leaning towards exiting my position in MSFT as well, I feel that while they could just abandon most of their consumer goals (including WP) and still be a profitable Oracle or SAP type behind-the-scenes tech company MSFT is too committed to trying to be a consumer products and consumer software company and will continue to squander shareholder value on things like Nokia purchases.
That being said, what I’ve always said about MSFT purchases is they have the cash to do stuff like this and it really doesn’t hurt anything for them–especially when buying a Finnish company with cash “trapped” overseas because of U.S. tax laws. I do really like WP8, but I’m doubtful of its ability to get enough of a toe-hold in the market to become profitable on any meaningful scale. I’ve said for a long time I support MSFT spending money on acquisitions because they have the cash to do so, and the right purchase could bring significant revenue into MSFT by expanding out of its traditional business lines. I also think it is sad people miss Ballmer’s biggest achievement at Microsoft. There are pie charts out there showing MSFT’s revenue and profitability from different business segments prior to Ballmer and now at the end of Ballmer’s tenure. He has moved MSFT from being a company desperately dependent on the money it makes from Windows OS to a company with a “tripod” of strong revenue bases: Windows, Office & Business Services, and Server and Tools (they’ve recently reorganized so I don’t know what categories they all fall in now, but the last one of those covers all their enterprise server software products like the SQL Server RDBMS and things like the Visual Studio IDE for developers of Windows applications.)
If MSFT basically just said “goodbye” to the consumer space and focused on being a “behind the scenes” tech company I’d probably not be considering selling my stake in the company. But these continual consumer blunders hurt public perception of the company which absolutely affects the share price (which has basically been flat over a decade) and I think it has created a bad management spiral at MSFT where everyone is desperate to produce a consumer products “hit” and it takes focus away from what could become the real core of both MSFT’s cash generation (which it already is) and it’s actual “soul” as a company.
Microsoft is a strange company and one I would never buy the stock of. They could essentially admit they are what they are, spend money only to improve their existing products and expand in things very very related to what they do now, and probably be a profitable investment over the long term if they just threw off all profit as dividends. Instead, them seem to want to shovel that profit money into a furnace constantly, and instead of improving their current products they try to turn them into something else and essentially encourage people to switch/not buy. How can you invest in a company like that ? People might be down on a microsoft that said “The desktop & server will always be relevant for some people, so we are going to concentrate on making Windows faster & more stable, and making office work great for all platforms”. But they could make big money for a long time.
As far as smartphones, I think microsoft is screwed. There is no organic reason why there must be third smartphone platform, and indeed, many markets collapse into two competing titans and a bunch of tiny tiny also rans. And their product is in no way good enough to displace android or apple.
