Microsoft exec admits Windows Phone was response to Apple's iPhone - Page 3

Ha, I didn't even know MS had a mobile operating system or a Windows phone.

It may attract more flies than Flyface in the Dick Tracy comics (read POS).

Why is that funny?

Don't be so harsh on yourself as to laugh at your own lack of knowledge.

Agreed. History shows that MS will make it better. Windows and IE both took multiple generations to pass muster.



Android is confronted with some issues and problems. But I wholeheartedly disagree that it isn't professional competition. I use it consistently (along with iOS) and really marvel at why people dismiss it.

This boulder comprised of Apple and Blackberry rolled on our arm, he said.

After first bouncing off Ballmer's head.

If WP does succeed, it will be at the expense of Android. Remember, iOS users tend to be far more loyal than users of other smartphone operating systems. Android has succeeded primarily because it emerged as "everyone else's" answer to the iPhone (while Symbian, BB, WebOS, MeeGo, etc. stalled, faded to oblivion, or failed to gain traction). I think Microsoft is hoping some phone makers become wary of Google's power and its acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

On the table side, everyone is hoping to succeed at the expense of Apple and/or grow the market. I think it will actually be more the latter (as the Kindle Fire has shown), but since Apple peaked at something like 68% of the (albeit small) market, it will be reported as the former. Interestingly, Microsoft is also blazing a different route from Google, positioning Windows 8 ARM, rather than Windows Phone, as their offering. It's a bit different from previous Windows tablet efforts (which had relied on the full blown x86 version of Windows).

I had enough knowledge in 1985 to buy my first mac rather than a machine running MS OS.
And ... never owned a PC. In another 10 years my grandkids will be asking me "PaPa, what's a Windows Phone?"

Unfortunately for Microsoft, cutting off that arm doesn't guarantee survival.
And, either way, that arm is dead forever.

...they'll be admitting that the name of the software, "Windows," was in direct response to the appearance of windows in the first Macintosh OS.

Huh.

Or people who just make stuff up about stuff they've never seen before, and hope no one else has either. Someone here, of course.

Before the release of Windows 3.1, Microsoft had DOS to fall back on. Developers kept on writing DOS software, and Microsoft kept selling DOS software. Developers and office workers stayed with Microsoft despite the lack of a decent graphical user interface. Windows 3.1 itself was essentially an app running on top of DOS. Microsoft was in no hurry to bang out a GUI-based OS. Money was rolling in from DOS sales.

But Microsoft has no OS to fall back on in either the smartphone space or the pad computing space. Yes, Gates and Ballmer have tried to hype Windows Slates. No, neither developers nor consumers actually noticed. Then Microsoft completely killed off Windows Mobile 6.x. There is no upgrade path from WinMob to WP7. No "migration assistant." No automated code translation tool. Windows Phone 7, from the end-user's point of view, is a 1.0 release. It's not an upgrade. It's an unproven, brand-new, incompatible, phone-only OS. With no market share.

You say that "History shows that MS will make it better." Well good for you. You and the rest of the world all know that it took Microsoft 3 hacks at Windows before it worked well enough to use. (I've seen a PC running Windows 2.0. It was hideous.) It took MS several hacks to move beyond Windows XP (Vista / W7.) So the market should, wisely, take a wait-and-see approach to Windows Phone. Wait a year or two to see how it turns out.

So maybe in 2014 the corporate IT departments of the Fortune 500 will have another look at Windows Phone. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft tries to keep Windows Phone alive that long. They way they tried to keep Zune alive years after its actual death on the market. Maybe they should have paid retail sales people $10 per Zune. That's what they're doing with Windows Phone handsets now. They've never had to do that with Windows PCs.

Oh, and by the way, IE still doesn't pass muster. It is successful only because it is the default browser on Windows.

Unfortunately by blazing their own path MS is now years behind iOS and Android. Their chances of success got smaller every year. Right now they have a mountain to climb and the odds are against them.

Even enterprise features may not be enough. The days of corporate phones are disappearing. Instead employees are increasingly wanting to use their personal phones to connect to corporate email and calendars services which means corporate IT departments need to support iOS and Android devices.

The Metro UI also is a disadvantage as it prevents phone manufacturers from customizing the interface. An Htc Android phone looks different to a Samsung Android phone and they both looks different to a Motorola Android phone. That gives consumers a reason to buy one over the other. In contrast, all Windows phones look alike, just like all Windows PC look the same and we've seen what that means. The only real way to differentiate from the competition is price which kills profits.

I hope Windows is successful. Android needs some competition.

That just is not true.

philip

The days of being able to communicate with different networking pieces is not over. Google is basically a front man for the ad industry. Far more insidious than Microsoft has ever been.

You don't want the basic UI and OS to be different from Samsung to HTC to company x. If required Microsoft can always design and farm out manufacturing the phones. You certainly don't want a free for all with telecommunications as to what works with what device.

Microsoft has many things going for it. It has some depth in research, excellent server capabilities, infrastructure for connection media, a good games' platform that can be extended. Samsung, HTC, and the rest have very little depth in software design which is what matters. Google is all over the map and is basically a henchman for ads. It won't be long before Microsoft will be back and the two main platforms in mobile devices will be from Apple and Microsoft.

philip

i find it hilarious that many pundits continually exhort Apple to "compete" with other companies nipping at their heels, when quite clearly it's the opposite, as evidenced by this article and just the fact that Google came up with Android.

Steve was about shattering paradigms to create new markets. Period. Whether this continues without him will be anybody's guess. Perhaps Scott Forstall can pick up the mantle. One can hope.

Anyone else who hope to follow is just lapping up leftovers from the table.

As much as Windows Phone might have going for it, I feel it biggest stumbling block is that it seems too abstract. People are visual and often stumble if something is hard to visualise. If they could somehow address that, then it may have a bigger chance. The iPhone and too some extent Android succeed because the whole experience is very visual.

didn't Balmer diss the iPhone by saying it would flop? The guy is a total hack that should be fired.

Unless companies can differentiate their products if gives consumers very little reason to choose between them apart from by price and then they don't make any money. Just look at the PC market. They all look the same so there is virtually no profit for manufacturers. The only company that can really make money is Apple which is also the only company that has really differentiated their computers.

yeah. the images display sure are.

LOL. Microsoft will continue to fail with the horrible Windows Phone until they are forced to throw in the towel. Billions in share holders value will be destroyed on the failure. I love watching this train wreck...couldn't happen to a better company than Microsoft.

So many responses here seem to follow this flow:

1. All Microsoft has ever done is slavishly copy Apple.
2. All Microsoft products suck.

Can you see any logical inconsistencies in these two points?

Time will tell if Windows Phone 7 will succeed. Technical excellence doesn't necessarily equate to market success.

What do you think is so horrible about it? I'm quite fond of it. If they are guilty of any "copying" Apple with WP7 it's in refining particular features instead of simply adding everything they can think of without consideration of the system resources or how well these work for the user. Android OS, all its forking forks and the plethora of UIs from vendors can't say the same thing. While WP7 may not succeed it's not because it's not a competent and modern mobile OS.

Personally, I think there is still a chance for WP7 to gain traction because MS can sit on and improve their OS for many years without a profit and because Android is so irrevocably fractured that the Skeksis worship it. You can look at the Xbox 260 to see MS' ability to persevere despite losing billions and the history of the PC market to see how an early leader in marketshare can be hurt if they can't find a way to make it profitable. So far Samsung and MS seem to be the only ones making any decent money off Android.

I switched from the iphone several months ago for a HTC Titan. I am loving WP7. I thought the smaller app store would be a killer but it has most of the key apps and seems to be growing at a good pace.

I've never understood the laughing at that comment. The iPhone sold plenty when it cost that much, but didn't really take off until the price was down to a couple hundred dollars.

But still, that doesn't mean that Microsoft doesn't copy or their products don't suck.

All good points. You have to understand that, around here, folks see only thorns on roses from parts not called Cupertino, whereas even farts from Apple come up roses. Objectivity is a scarce commodity. To be fair, this is the case on most sites.

Another good point.

Hack? That might be a bit much. But he is the exemplar of what happens when a salesman gets to run a technology company at the wrong time.

If it works for you, then that is all that matters.

No logical inconsistency at all. If Microsoft does a bad job of copying, both statements could be true.

I'm not going to argue that the above statements are true (Kinect, for example, does not copy Apple, nor does it suck), but your statement is clearly false.

You know I've thought a long time about this. I think Microsoft had to kill Courier because they knew they couldn't get the software ( and hardware ) working in time to be competitive. Part of the alure of Couier was that it was intelligent and intuitive and did far more than iOS at the time.

The only problem was that it was 98% vapor. The entire presentation we all saw was at the same level of one of those "technogy of the FUTURE!" demos.

There may have been some real design documentation on it somewhere , and some piecemeal rudimentary componenets, but what Courier imples would be a foundation change in OS, ui design etc. Microsoft simply wasn't ready. Look how long it has taken them to do what they have done.
I'm guessing they took what good research they really had on this and moved it to Windows 8. Maybe Courier will see the light of day some day. i thought it was actually pretty clever.

Sort of like the Star Trek transporter.

After reading Steve Jobs biography where it talks about making UI simple, and leaving out things like creating playlists on ipods because it will always be better to do on a pc, I find WP7 to be one of the best examples of a company outside Apple implementing Apples seeing principles.

There's obviously a big difference in the general style of WP7 and IOS, but if you look at everything else MS has learned a lot. E.g.

- Number of buttons. Wp7 has swipe gestures rather than a tab strip. The panorama screens are also easy to visualise, tabs on IOS arnt actually tabs any more, there just buttons that update a panel.

- 1 screen on apps rather than 8. The alphabetical jump list means all apps are very quick to get to even when you have 60, rather than remembering which page folder combination its on.

- Zune on the PC couldn't get much simpler

- Jump lists where you press a decent size button to bring up the alphabet and then click the letter you want is a really simple idea.

- The whole is just feels like it uses gestures a lot more.

IOS is still great but I think when people are putting wp7 down they should actually think about how many of the principle ideas are actualy more apple than Microsoft.

Yeah, but you never hear the Fandroids say that. It's always "Apple needs competition," like they give a flying fart what Apple does...

When have you ever known them to do otherwise?

ms has begged, borrowed or stolen pretty much everything from the get go. Starting with DOS. You can argue the BASIC compiler, but that already existed on other platforms, it was just a rewrite for their (ms) platform.

This is what people who despise Apple can't or refuse to understand. Even if for some reason you dislike APple products, once can't deny that Apple has pushed forward the entire industry and without them, everything else, whether it be windows phone or android, etc, would be much worse than it is now. They forced everyone to up their game and therefore everybody wins, especially consumers. And now this is an admittal right from the horses mouth, contrary to the 'LOL WINDOWS PHONE 7 WOULD HAVE COME OUT ANYWAY' bullshit that people spew.

No one denies Apple deserves a lot of credit...but Apple doesn't deserve ALL of the credit.

Keyword being All.

Also...I try not to deal in ifs I deal with where tech was at a time. And at the time of the iPhone launch tech had just gotten to the point where an iPhone was possible...so advances in mobile Tech were most likely 2 or 3 years out...maybe less if one of the many concepts from around the iPhone announcement were released sometime soon.

What I'm shocked at is that no one picked up the BenQ BlackBox concept phone and made that a reality...even today it looks beautiful.

Those who tend to buy Apple products not because we are necessarily loyal to the company, but because when new iPhones or iPads are released, they are at the leading edge in technological advance. It is no surprise or secret that most other companies, such as Windows, are scrambling to keep up and maintain any form of a competitive edge. Like a previous person posted, it would be news if Windows denied the fact that they came out with the Windows phone in response to the iPhone.