Microsoft rumored to launch smartwatch this holiday season, beating Apple Watch to market

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Comments

  • Reply 61 of 88

    A Microsoft watch?  My prayers have been answered :D 

  • Reply 62 of 88
    pscooter63pscooter63 Posts: 1,081member
    zoetmb wrote: »

    How do you know what Microsoft's attempt is? ... the fact remains that we simply don't know.   

    Actually, we can infer quite a bit. MS has a history of announcing products purely as a pre-emptive FUD strike, to try to depress demand for a competitor's product, even while their own "response" is still vaporware.

    You see, you TRUST MS to be truthful here. They lost my trust over a decade ago.
  • Reply 63 of 88
    geekmeegeekmee Posts: 646member
    Sounds like "Innovate! innovate! Innovate" to me!.... Or maybe it was Imitate! Imitate! Imitate!!
  • Reply 64 of 88
    anomeanome Posts: 1,544member
    I can't get the image out of my head ... a Micky Mouse watch only with Ballmer and his arms swinging round ... It's like a nightmare!
    I kind of want that now. Either as a GIF, or as a screen-saver for the Apple Watch when it ships.

    jungmark wrote: »
    I heard it comes with a keyboard and stylus. And to charge the battery, you'll need to dance.
    And when the battery's low it can shout "Dance, Monkeyboy! Dance!"

    dasanman69 wrote: »
    Don't you all think that these days you MUST do HW and SW to compete?

    How did that work out for Palm, Nokia, and BB? 1 out of 4 companies that went HW and SW has succeeded. A 25% success rate isn't good. The market would never sustain 5+ OSs.
    It's kind of interesting that for years, people were saying Apple should get out of hardware and license Mac OS to other manufacturers. (That's when they weren't proposing they should get out of the OS business, and just sell Windows PCs.) A business model that has been successful for exactly one company, and then mostly because of dodgy licensing deals with chip manufacturers. (Remember what happened to NeXT and Be after they stopped selling hardware?

    The problem is that now, even that one company that succeeded in selling an OS for other people's hardware is now having difficulty making that work for them. So they're trying to emulate both Apple and Google at the same time as trying to keep their software business alive.
    dsd wrote: »
    If it doesn't have a kickstand, I'm not getting it.
    Well, exactly. Without a kickstand, it's just useless.
    amoradala wrote: »
    Apple wait until they are ready to launch before announcing a product.
    Everyone else likes to announce that they are 'thinking' about developing a product.

    Some people walk it - some people talk it.
    It's funnier, though, when there's a rumour Apple is developing a product, and everyone else hurriedly rushes to market with what they think will be a competitor, only to be completely wrong when the Apple version appears. If it appears.

    Then we get the second wave where they try to emulate Apple's version as much as possible without violating any patents.
    applesway wrote: »
    Hopefully they've included the "Start" menu and the full Office productivity suite
    I think they'll have to. There's no way the Office division will let them ship it without Office.
  • Reply 65 of 88
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by PScooter63 View Post





    Actually, we can infer quite a bit. MS has a history of announcing products purely as a pre-emptive FUD strike, to try to depress demand for a competitor's product, even while their own "response" is still vaporware.

     

    Ah yes, remember Steve "We Call Them Slates" Ballmer's preemptive strike on the iPad with the HP Slate?  Good times!  So, whatever happened to that HP Slate anyway?  LOL!

  • Reply 66 of 88
    evilutionevilution Posts: 1,399member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by AppleInsider View Post

    Microsoft rumored to launch smartwatch this holiday season, beating Apple Watch to market.

    When has "beating Apple to market" ever achieved anything apart from selling a bunch of products to customers who don't know any better. Customers who then resent the company for overselling a piece of crap, forcing the customer to then spend more money to buy the correct Apple product.

  • Reply 67 of 88
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,822member
    redhotfuzz wrote: »
    Ah yes, remember Steve "We Call Them Slates" Ballmer's preemptive strike on the iPad with the HP Slate?  Good times!  So, whatever happened to that HP Slate anyway?  LOL!

    Used as roofing material?
  • Reply 68 of 88
    foggyhillfoggyhill Posts: 4,767member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by RadarTheKat View Post

     

    AP Newswire - 12 November 2014

    Yesterday Microsoft demonstrated their new XWatch with integrated joystick crown at an event in New York that was simulcast in San Francisco and other cities around the world.  Unfortunately for the beleaguered tech company, event invitations for some locations did not adjust for time zone differences, leaving the San Francisco audience getting to their seats hours after the event took place while audiences in Tokyo and Melbourne, Australia were seated a full 13 and 15 hours ahead of the event start time, respectively.  While the Aussies went home in frustration for a few hours of sleep before returning at the appropriate event time, the Japanese all remained patiently seated and enthusiastic about the new watch.


     

    If only they had a watch with world time on it to help coordinate all of this... Maybe they should have shipped a Timex with the invitations.

  • Reply 69 of 88
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    anome wrote: »
    I kind of want that now. Either as a GIF, or as a screen-saver for the Apple Watch when it ships.
    And when the battery's low it can shout "Dance, Monkeyboy! Dance!"
    It's kind of interesting that for years, people were saying Apple should get out of hardware and license Mac OS to other manufacturers. (That's when they weren't proposing they should get out of the OS business, and just sell Windows PCs.) A business model that has been successful for exactly one company, and then mostly because of dodgy licensing deals with chip manufacturers. (Remember what happened to NeXT and Be after they stopped selling hardware?

    The problem is that now, even that one company that succeeded in selling an OS for other people's hardware is now having difficulty making that work for them. So they're trying to emulate both Apple and Google at the same time as trying to keep their software business alive.

    There's no magical formula. What works for one company doesn't necessarily mean it'll work for another. MS hasn't decided what kind of company it wants to be yet, and I don't see the new CEO discovering what that is.
  • Reply 70 of 88
    coolfactorcoolfactor Posts: 2,323member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by digitalclips View Post





    You are correct of course, but to be fair, with three decades in business based on basically two things they ripped off; Mac office suite and Mac OS, what else can they do but follow Apple?



    Let me stop you while you are ahead... Microsoft was "contracted" by Apple to create an office suite. Microsoft Excel first launched on the Mac, not on Windows. But in the process of developing that office suite, with privileged early access to the Mac OS, Microsoft took ideas for their own Windows OS. 

  • Reply 71 of 88
    I can't get the image out of my head ... a Micky Mouse watch only with Ballmer and his arms swinging round ... It's like a nightmare!

    I think my appendix just burst
  • Reply 72 of 88
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,822member
    coolfactor wrote: »

    Let me stop you while you are ahead... Microsoft was "contracted" by Apple to create an office suite. Microsoft Excel first launched on the Mac, not on Windows. But in the process of developing that office suite, with privileged early access to the Mac OS, Microsoft took ideas for their own Windows OS. 

    Tell me all about MS's 'own Windows OS'. I only recall the the OS with a GUI they reverse engineered from the Mac. Was there another? Are you referring to 'Interface Manager'?
  • Reply 73 of 88
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,822member
    evilution wrote: »
    When has "beating Apple to market" ever achieved anything apart from selling a bunch of products to customers who don't know any better. Customers who then resent the company for overselling a piece of crap, forcing the customer to then spend more money to buy the correct Apple product.

    Your are right. It has been historically a pretty useless game. Ask Scamsung. :D
  • Reply 74 of 88
    john.bjohn.b Posts: 2,742member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AppleInsider View Post



    Microsoft is said to be planning to bring a smartwatch to the market "within the next few weeks," beginning sales ahead of the lucrative holiday shopping season and also beating the highly anticipated Apple Watch to store shelves.

     

    There are already a bunch of shitty wearables that "beat the Apple Watch to market".  Nobody wants them, and if people think they do then owning one for a week tends to rapidly disabuse them of that notion.  Does Microsoft really want to go down the "Zune Watch" road?  If so, will it have a better marketing campaign than "Because... Cortana"?

  • Reply 75 of 88
    nolamacguynolamacguy Posts: 4,758member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by coolfactor View Post

     



    Let me stop you while you are ahead... Microsoft was "contracted" by Apple to create an office suite. Microsoft Excel first launched on the Mac, not on Windows. But in the process of developing that office suite, with privileged early access to the Mac OS, Microsoft took ideas for their own Windows OS. 




    they didn't just borrow ideas -- as you say they had access to the Mac OS devs and for three years covertly reverse-engineered apple's architecture w/o permission. read about it from the people in the room:

     

    http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt

     

    Quote:

    By the middle of 1983, Microsoft was far enough along to show us working prototypes of their spreadsheet and business graphics programs, Multiplan and Chart (they were also working on a word processor, but they neglected to mention that, since it would compete with MacWrite). I would usually talk with Neil on the phone a couple of times a week. He would sometimes request a feature that I would implement for him, or perhaps complain about the way something was done. But most of the time I would answer his various questions about the intricacies of the still evolving API.



    I gradually began to notice that Neil would often ask questions about implementation details that he didn't really need to know about. In particular, he was really curious about how regions were represented and implemented, and would often detail his theories about them to me, hoping for confirmation.



    Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.


     

    so yeah, thats "ripping off" and "following". contrast this to apple, who got permission and paid to leverage xerox technology concepts from a single office visit, but went much further and invented many new concepts and unique architecture:

     

    http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

     

    Quote:

    As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge; much bigger than the difference between the Mac and Windows. It's not surprising, since Microsoft saw quite a bit of the Macintosh design (API's,sample code, etc.) during the Mac's development from 1981 to 1984; the intention was to help them write applications for the Mac, and it also gave their system designers a template from which to design Windows. In contrast, the Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own architectures. Of course, there were some ex- Xerox people in the Lisa and Mac groups, but the design point for these machines was so different that we didn't leverage our knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think.


  • Reply 76 of 88
    Hopefully it comes in a decimal time version...
  • Reply 77 of 88
    Nice mockups by Aslam.

    He must be a real lionheart.
  • Reply 78 of 88
    amoradala wrote: »
    Apple wait until they are ready to launch before announcing a product.
    Everyone else likes to announce that they are 'thinking' about developing a product.

    Some people walk it - some people talk it.

    Apart that the ?Watch might as well be called vapourware as far as the customer is concerned. No release date, no price, no battery life. All three of those were nailed at the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, six months before it went on sale.
  • Reply 79 of 88
    gtr wrote: »
    I believe the MS brand is the problem here. We have very little details about an MS watch but because it's from MS (and forgetting that this is an Apple centric board) our expectations is that it will suck, and suck well. 

    The day Microsoft releases a product that doesn't suck will be the day that they release a vacuum cleaner...

    Surely that would, too.

    If it didn't suck, then it would suck. If it did suck, then it might suck, too, or it might not suck.

    Either way, it would probably blow.
  • Reply 80 of 88
    boredumb wrote: »
    Yet another revenue generator for Microsoft.
    Not.
    They really need to get out of consumer hardware, they're not good at it because it's not in their DNA.
    I'm pretty sure only "living things" even have DNA...
    anyone see any signs of life over at MS?

    Their DNA has fossilised into DOA.
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