Let's think about what was shown in that 22 sec demo.....Could it be that some functions are not meant to split into two screens? Maybe that map app needs extra coding to be used in a two screen format. From what I understand is that Microsoft has asked android developers to use their 'common sense' when developing apps that could benefit from the use of both screens. Again this device is still in development (i.e. the developers' workshop sponsored by Microsoft is being held this week). If people don't like a product/brand that's fine, but let's not use a 22 sec poorly executed demo as the defining moment for a product in development.
Do you imagine that the demo presenter on stage was just winging it? You don't imagine that his attempt to spread a specific app across both panels was planned out in advance? You think he picked the wrong app?
No, it just wasn't working properly. There could be many reasons for that, and clearly he expected it to work. But when your demo crashes, and you don't even understand why and don't have a backup, and you're demonstrating to developers you expect to support your platform, that's significant, this far into the "shipping soon" period.
The fact that the Verge didn't really care about it makes it clear that Microsoft isn't storming into the tablet market with some awesome, refined new product category that will immediately let users pick between Win 10 and Android apps and dive into this Courier wet dream without a price tag.
It's Essential-ly vaporware bullshit with great product management graphics, just like the whole Windows 10 presentation deck itself, showing how apps were going to scale from Windows Phones right up to $10,000 PC whiteboards. Sugar howling in a vortex of hot air -- call it cotton candy but don't try to build a blanket out of it to keep warm.
I love the last sentence!
Sugar howling in a vortex of hot air -- call it cotton candy but don't try to build a blanket out of it to keep warm.
Apple already forged into the uncharted territory of facial recognition for the masses, so everyone knows it's possible and practical. It's scary Microsoft hasn't mastered it after years to get it right, though. But that's just like Apple to make technology work so well that people forget the complexity.
MS had face recognition since the release of Kinect for X360 in 2010, and it worked extremely well. After that, they had Windows Hello in the Surface Pro 4 since 2017, and every Surface device have it. Apple came later, and acquire PrimeSense, the same company MS use to build Kinect, to develop FaceID. And as today, the only devices with FaceID are iPhones and iPads. So it looks like MS has "mastered" facial recognition for many years. But maybe you didn't knew.
Not so sure they’ve mastered it. FaceID is smart enough to recognise you if you grow a beard or wear spectacles one day and contact lenses the next. Microsoft’s version requires their “improve recognition” function which requires you to take a second version of yourself with specs – or a beard.
If the MS system was as smart as Apple’s then they wouldn’t need “improve recognition”.
Yes, Apple has some elements, like the one you mentioned, that are better that Windows Hello. But that doesn't means that Windows Hello is bad or unreliable. Still better than other similar face recognition systems. At the same time, Windows Hello same things better than FaceID, like for example, support for FIDO2. Again, IMO, both systems are excellent, but again to my original point, MS was the one who start it all.
The sad thing is, FaceID did not fail and worked as it's supposed to. It's just like Huawei to mock the company who invented the iPhone and push their iKnockoffs as "better iPhones".
Windows surface running Android?! lol Microsoft needs to quit hardware already.
I don't think MS will quit the hardware business, considering it's was close to $2B last quarter.
Quarterly revenues, of course that was the peak of the year. Surface revenues have hovered around $1-1.5B each quarter for the last decade.
However, revenues are not profits and $2b in hardware revenues globally is not actually very performant for a company valued at $1T.
The "beleaguered" Apple of 1995 brought in $3 billion in quarterly revenues from sales of Macs.
Microsoft has rarely made any comments on the profitability of Surface. And while its revenues haven't ever really grown into a significant business, it is maintaining revenues with a product mix that is going downhill, with volumes being maintained with cheaper versions. That's the opposite of what Apple has been doing with iPhones and iPads. That's not sustainable.
Microsoft makes money elsewhere and can perpetuate a business that isn't making money (or is not making enough to justify the talent and resources spent on maintaining it--opportunity costs are some of the most expensive factors in tech). But at some point, Microsoft will have to decide how valuable it is to be busy making tablets and notebooks that sell to a tiny fraction of the market but cost a lot of money to develop, refresh and support, when it could simply delegate that effort to hardware partners and focus on the things it is good at and can make money on.
Again, I don't think MS will let go a $2B business. Yes, Apple made a lot more than MS, but is impressive how MS has grow when it has to compete with devices from HP, Dell and Lenovo. At the same time, if Apple still maintain macOS Server, FileMaker Server and iWorks apps, that, as you said, are "not actually very performant for a company valued at $1T", why would MS drop the $2B Surface business? I suppose they are doing something right to get to $2B, don't you think?
Screwed up Microsoft launches used to be a given back when sweatyboy used to run around screaming like a wet banshee.
He's found his true calling as an NBA owner. To paraphrase the old joke, changing his focus from running Microsoft to running the Clippers improved both organizations.
Apple's "Face ID demo failure" was *not* a failure of the technology. It worked exactly as it should have. The Duo failure was a failure of the tech to do what it was supposed to be doing. Not the same at all.
...Microsoft already has a mobile OS - the old Windows Phone - and a "hybrid" OS in Windows 10/Windows RT. Why on earth are they building an Android-based anything?
Free code. Much labor already done by others. The magical “investor” lure of spending little to make a lot. Fads. Linux is still making progress by this alone.
Maybe even Microsoft’s internal culture acknowledging that there’s an inevitable dead end for the miserable Windows architecture. Maybe there’s a long play of trying to slowly convert Windows into a Unix-standards-compatible hybrid, and one day just killing off the old APIs entirely (probably once there’s a full virtual Windows emulator running in there to maintain the almost perpetual backwards compatibility that keeps Microsoft Windows going).
I happen to have helped a lot of people become millionaires and I've being taken care of pretty well, thanks.
????? Well, isn’t that nice for you and your millionaire friends. ?????
I did upvote your comment ending with that great cotton candy metaphor, though. Maybe your editorials would be better if that comment was the length model for your editorials, and if they stuck to facts and critiques, instead of so much verbose defensiveness of Apple. It makes you seem... overly attached.
Verbosity is not a crime on its own. I’m verbose myself. I also ranted against the weirdly pro-Microsoft tech media back when I was writing articles for the BeOS community. However, the defensiveness CAN become tedious and predictable. And it also just looks... weird.
"Microsofts profit is spread across a larger number of products and they are used to living off a smaller profit margin." Nonsense. Microsoft grew so huge because its profit margins were insane compared to anything with a physical component. Large upfront expense to build the software (OS, mail server, MS Office suite, etc) but it costs you a TINY amount of money to sell an additional copy. This is why the company was able to throw BILLIONS of dollars into their efforts to be relevant in the mobile space. This site has details of the financials of the company from 2005 through 2019: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/financial-statements For 2019 Revenue was just shy of US$126b with COGS of not quite US$43b. Gross margins of around 66% handily beat Apple. Net margin of 33% is still killer.
"Real innovation has been lacking from Apple in HW for some time in the notebook area." Yeah, adding the Touch Bar and moving to a USB-C port standard shows absolutely no experimentation with what a laptop might be able to do. As opposed to all those innovations constantly springing from the other laptop manufacturers - the only one that springs to mind is that absurd laptop with two extra screens that fold out (which is useful to some people, I'm sure, but that model didn't appeal to a large number of customers like the Apple laptops do).
"The next version of the desktop OS for the PC will likely be Linux based. Windows has made massive improvements over the years and is highly stable today, but moving to Linux eliminates any OS stability advantage Apple has today." Oh, my. Linux on the desktop, you say? Bullwinkle has a catchphrase to cover that. More seriously, if it does happen it will take more than a decade to implement. MS has been supporting Linux development for... what, three years? Still a long way to go. And the customer base is conservative, so figure another decade or more before they can stop supporting the Windows NT kernel. So, 20 years from now, MAYBE, MS will have changed to a supposedly more stable OS than present day macOS. I don't see that as an advantage.
"It is clear that trying to shove a new OS into the phone market would be wasteful and not gain much in return for Microsoft, but leveraging an OS that dominates is a way back into the market." So... Linux kernel for the desktop and server OS would be Microsoft "leveraging an OS that dominates" (its own) for the purpose of reinforcing its existing products? On the surface, the idea that MS should embrace Android looks like a good one, but... what happened to Blackberry (RIM)? MS has to show that its developer tools can be used to create solutions that will work well in the new environment, which seems to be progressing well enough, but if the deployment environment is flaky, will a market form? This demo failure is unlikely to sway existing Windows developers, although it may keep some in the fold who were thinking about becoming iOS developers instead.
"Apple is less of an aspirational product to own that it used to be. They are still great and up there, but now people think of buying the new Samsung... gadgets also." I am working on the assumption that anyone who has the purchasing power to afford these devices has a temperament that makes them unlikely to put up with crap for long. The number of people on the bleeding edge of technology or who are early adopters is a small percentage of the overall market. Mature, well-designed products sell by the ton - and if the maturation process can be performed within closed doors so that the wider public doesn't get the idea that you don't know what you're doing, so much the better.
"[Microsoft] can also afford to play the long game if they want to stay in the market..." Which they have been doing for how many years now? Let's be charitable and ignore WinCE - call it thirteen years, give or take.
"The next frontier will be glasses and Microsoft, with its Halo Lens line up will be in this market." Maybe the next frontier will be something else? Something like audio, which requires a fraction of the processing power, and which people are already used to pairing with their phones? Or maybe other wearable tech, like, say, a watch? Say, doesn't Apple already ship good headphones and watches?
"Microsoft will be a dominant player in cloud and quantum computing" MS is doing well in cloud computing; Azure is apparently pulling in twice the revenue of Google's cloud and half the revenue of AWS. They are and will be a successful player in this space, but probably not dominant. Quantum computing I know nothing about.
"...from a financial standpoint Apple has all their company's stock price and profit hinged on 1 product. iPhone." Apple is a large conglomerate that has diversified income streams, like all the other companies you mentioned. Yes, iPhone devices make up a significant percentage of their revenue, but what about Windows for Microsoft in years gone by? What about search advertising for Google? ALL of the companies you mentioned are large enough that they can afford a few years of missteps in a single area of their business.
"1 major misstep by Apple will tank the stock." I'm sorry, how long have you been watching Apple? In the past two decades, even a faint whiff of bad news has been enough to tank the stock. But it's always rebounded pretty quickly because the company brings in so much money that it cannot effectively spend it all.
The article's premise still stands: MS is trying to launch a significant new initiative, had an embarrassing public failure, and the world collectively yawned. It doesn't mean the company is dead, but Microsoft have a very heavy workload ahead of them to regain widespread interest in their products.
Quantum computing will flunk, it will eternally be ready in say 30 years, like fusion. Even at a fundamental level it is not sure its possible and if it is it will not be a general purpose computer, but a very specific 1 function only co-processor (like fpu units in the old days). Further miniaturization will make huge strides in chip performance and fpga ‘processors’ will certainly make huge progress which will make future computers morph its hardware to be maximal functional for its software (so when the OS switches in a new program task it makes a special purpose ‘processor set’ tailor made for the algorithm to run with incredible speed ...)
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Sugar howling in a vortex of hot air -- call it cotton candy but don't try to build a blanket out of it to keep warm.
thanks DED for another great editorial!
Maybe even Microsoft’s internal culture acknowledging that there’s an inevitable dead end for the miserable Windows architecture. Maybe there’s a long play of trying to slowly convert Windows into a Unix-standards-compatible hybrid, and one day just killing off the old APIs entirely (probably once there’s a full virtual Windows emulator running in there to maintain the almost perpetual backwards compatibility that keeps Microsoft Windows going).
(I gave you your second up vote, BTW)
????? Well, isn’t that nice for you and your millionaire friends. ?????
I did upvote your comment ending with that great cotton candy metaphor, though. Maybe your editorials would be better if that comment was the length model for your editorials, and if they stuck to facts and critiques, instead of so much verbose defensiveness of Apple. It makes you seem... overly attached.
Verbosity is not a crime on its own. I’m verbose myself. I also ranted against the weirdly pro-Microsoft tech media back when I was writing articles for the BeOS community. However, the defensiveness CAN become tedious and predictable. And it also just looks... weird.
Even at a fundamental level it is not sure its possible and if it is it will not be a general purpose computer, but a very specific 1 function only co-processor (like fpu units in the old days).
Further miniaturization will make huge strides in chip performance and fpga ‘processors’ will certainly make huge progress which will make future computers morph its hardware to be maximal functional for its software (so when the OS switches in a new program task it makes a special purpose ‘processor set’ tailor made for the algorithm to run with incredible speed ...)