Tag: microsoft

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TechCruch on the new Lumia phones: “… the best phones no-one buys”

I have to admit I have zero interest in a new Windows phone. It just doesn’t do it for me. The UI looks like a random mess of data competing for my attention. A poorly designed random mess at that. Anyway, that aside, Microsoft announced their new flagship Lumia phones running “Windows 10 Mobile-whatever” and the general consensus in the press seems to be “they look great but who cares because no one is going to buy them”.

A selection of stories:

The point made by cnet is rather interesting. In the US, apparently only AT&T has signed up to carry the new phones, although the deal is not exclusively with AT&T. Which you can only read between the lines as the other major US carriers, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint have all passed on carrying the phone. At least so far. If AT&T turns out to be the only carrier then this, as cnet points out, is an unusual move to launch a new flagship phone with only one carrier. If you were Microsoft you would want at least 2 or 3 of the major carriers to be promoting and selling the phone, but only AT&T is interested. This can’t be good for potential sales.

Anyway, as TechCrunch says, this is the phone OS that no-one buys, even if it is the best version yet, so who cares. Maybe no-one. Have to wait and see if it turns out to be a surprise hit or not. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Or buy one.

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iOS and Mac OS X will not merge, says Tim Cook

Given Microsoft’s focus on a single, combined version of Windows for all devices, desktop, tablets and phones, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, has said in a recent interview that he believes desktop and mobile operating systems should be separate:

We don’t believe in having one operating system for PC and mobile … We think it subtracts from both, and you don’t get the best experience from either. We’re very much focused on two.

… and I have to believe this too. I can understand from a cost reduction point of view that if you’re developing a mobile OS for phones/tablets and also a desktop OS at the same time, the attraction of merging your development efforts to a single product would be attractive to reduce development costs from shared assets, smaller development team, combined testing efforts etc.

The problem with this approach that Cook mentions, is that a mobile device compared to a desktop (or even laptop device) are such radically different user experiences, that any attempt to combine the two to a single common product is going to be a compromise that is going to impact the ability to capitalize on the key features that differentiate a mobile device from a desktop device and vice versa.

I’ve thought this for a while now seeing Microsoft, in my opinion, struggle to find the right balance of common features across device types with Windows 8 and now Windows 10. And yet, haven’t they already been down this path before with Windows Mobile on smart phones back in the early to mid 2000s? Anyone rememeber trying to use the Start menu on a phone in the early 2000s with a stylus? It was a terrible user experience – worked well on the desktop with a mouse, but translated very pooly to a small screen either touch or pen based. But, Microsoft believes they can still get this right. Uhuh. Call us when you’ve got something worth looking at.

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Wired: “Microsoft kisses up to Tim Cook in front of millions”

I was recently looking at the IDC global tablet sales and was surprised to see that sales of Microsoft’s Surface are not yet showing up. I thought I’d read somewhere that the were selling reasonably well, but I guess not enough to show up on the global sales numbers. That means they’re selling less that 1 million units a quarter because LG and Huawei, both selling 1.6 million in 2Q15 take slot 4 and 5 in IDC’s stats, and others (?) are grouped together as 20M, but who knows what’s counted in that category (there’s probably as many as 20M different companies flooding the market with Android tables at this point).

The only Surface sales I could find mentioned was a $888M revenue number that Microsoft announced in it’s last quarterly earnings statement. Given that the Surface price ranges from models around $500 up to $1700 for a full loaded Surface Pro 3 (why wouldn’t you just buy a MacBook Pro for that price?) let’s take an average: $888M at $1000 a unit, well, yeah, that’s 888,000 units a quarter. That’s not too many. Not when Apple are flogging 11M units a quarter and that’s even with their numbers dropping quarter after quarter.

So the Wired article really summed it up for me. I was about to write something witty about why Apple are producing a new tablet with a keyboard and a stylus, something that Jobs said people would never want or need. But 888,000 sales of Surfaces is 888,000 of lost sales to Apple, so, hey, why wouldn’t they produce one of those too.

Choice quote from the Wired article:

For Microsoft, it was a moment of apotheosis. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO last year, the company has pushed Office onto the iPhone as well as the iPad; open sourced its crown jewels of software development so people can build more Microsoft software that runs on Apple gear; and jettisoned its $7.6 billion effort to dominate the smartphone market with Nokia, a Finnish company famous for recent failure.

Kissing Cook’s ring was the next logical step.

 

And here’s the truth of the matter:

If you hadn’t noticed before, the mobile wars are over. For a while there, Microsoft was confident its Windows operating system would capture a sizable portion of the market. But that’s not gonna happen. The company still sells phones and tablets, but relatively few consumers will ever buy them.

 

That’s a harsh reality in a changing, post-PC world.

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Windows 95 launched 20 years ago today

On August 24th 1995 Windows 95 was launched. The minimum required specs were:

  • a 386 cpu (around 25MHz at the time?)
  • 4MB RAM
  • 55MB free disk space

Fast forward to 2015. The minimum specs for Windows 10 are:

  • a 1 GHz cpu
  • 1 GB RAM for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit (really? I find this hard to believe, 4GB probably a realistic minimum, 8GB to be comfortable)
  • 16 GB disk space for 32-bit OS, 20 GB for 64-bit OS

Somehow this is supposed to be better, but I’m not sure exactly how. Running an OS in 4MB? How exactly was that possible?! That seems impossible by today’s standards. And yet, Windows 10 is so much better? Better at needing more resources than any previous Windows version?

If there’s one thing for sure, no-one has danced with such enthusiasm for the launch of a new operating system in the past 20 years since Steve Balmer, doing whatever he was doing here.

And yes, Windows 95, with your blue screens and all, “you made a grown man cry”.

I’ve always wondered what was the intent of using the Stones “Start Me Up” as the theme music for Windows 95. Yes ok, start button, “Start Me Up”, ok, I get it. But didn’t they listen to the rest of the lyrics? Maybe they were thinking crying in happiness, but in reality it was more often crying in despair :-0

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