Microsoft to Cut 2,850 More Jobs in Exit from Phone Business
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Edit: Maybe I speak from a position of ignorance about the industry. But I also remember thinking how greatly awesome it would have been if I could run Android on the new Lumia hardware. I also remember the fact that Nokia was worth 30 bn before the new ceo, ex microsoft employee, came in and within years it was left worth 9 bn; pop culture facts I suppose.
Look at HTC. What do they do besides great hardware? In the early days of Android, they were the go-to vendor for a close-to-stock Android experience. That could have been Nokia.
Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
I'm looking at HTC - what I see is a company that did great with Android for a short while, then got chewed up as Apple and Samsung ran away with the high end of the market while the Chinese manufacturers gobbled up the bottom end. All the "Nokia should've gone with Android!" comments I see around the internet never try to explain how they think Nokia would've fared any better than HTC (or Sony, or Motorola).
> Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
You and I see HTC's future very differently. The Vive is the thread they're hanging by, and as soon as Valve doesn't need them anymore, it's going to be over (http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/07/can-we-stop-pretend...)
That's not exactly a high bar regarding what we're talking about...
For example I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 1st gen. A phone that when I bought it, I had to replace it in warranty because the color temperature of the screen was uneven and extremely annoying. And I paid at the time the price for a high end phone and got a subpar camera, a screen that doesn't have the contrast of other phones in its generation and a design that feels cheap and bulky. Well, at least it has stock Android on it. I got basically fooled in buying it, thinking it is a Nexus.
And I could say similar things about Sony. And about LG for that matter. For instance LG had big hits in LG G3 and in Nexus 4 & 5. My wife wanted an LG G5, but apparently it gets overheated, with the customer rep telling us they've had multiple returns. So she went with the Galaxy S7 Edge, because it was the safe choice.
Here's the big problem: if we are talking about exceptional hardware, none of these companies produce good products consistently. Do you know who does that? Apple and Samsung. And back in the day Nokia as well.
My friends and relatives with Samsung phones have had around 4 of them since that time because they always break.
Back in the day Nokia had good hardware, a 40% marketshare, brand recognition, a loyal customer base and a wide distribution network. Certainly noone knows what Android could have done for them, but theoretically they were at a better position to take advantage of it than HTC/Sony/Motorola.
They cripple said hardware with awful software.
Was it? They had some nice models for the early smartphone era, and nice camera/lenses, but aside from that?
Plus, Nokia was king of featurephones, with tons of crappy, low margin models...
Lose money on their phone business?
>Now HTC is making the best VR headset and has a fairly bright future.
Not so sure about it. Even the best VR headset would be a niche product for the next 5 years at least. At best it can get to Wii kind of success for HTC, but that's not sustainable. And when the big players (Apple, Samsung) and the Chinese commoditizers come into VR, what will HTC have?
You could say this about basically anything for any company. The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
Nope, you can't say it for entrenched companies (and companies with diverse revenue sources).
You can't say it for Apple, you can't say it for Facebook, you can't say it for GM, you can't say for Samsung, ...
The threat of competition is always there. How about you give some examples of what HTC could be doing where the threat of competition doesn't exist.
Do a lot of people think this? After using a bunch of Android devices for 4 or 5 years, HTC is my "never again."
Edit: and by the time Maemo was actually running on a _phone_ it was head-to-head against iOS and WebOS. I think you could actually make a good case for WebOS being the greatest ever, but compared to those two Maemo was awful.
Can't touch anything, touch targets are all too small, so you are forced to use the stylus. Visually it looks like the love child of BeOS and KDE. can't tell from a static screenshot but everything was unbelievably slow.
That looks decent.
Maemo was shit compared to a Palm Pilot.
On the other hand, having an ACTUAL Linux command line with ACTUAL root and an ACTUAL keyboard was worth gold, and still sorely missed today.
Maybe IOs is more forgiving. But how would a terminal emulator help?
N900 was released in 2009.
iOS was leaps and bounds better even at 2007 in the original iPhone introduction. Heck, even Android was better than Maemo in 2009.
Well, that pretty much disqualifies any further point.
As for the OS itself, I just remember being surprised at how what seemed (naively) to me to be a lot of RAM for a small device just wasn't enough. Hardly a fault that was unique to Maemo, though. So much bloatware today...
It was obvious to anyone with eyes and fingers that iPhones were far superior to what Nokia was creating. Some random features I remember him showing: you could plug a mouse into the phone and it would vibrate during walking directions. They probably realized they couldn't make a better product, so they tried to make a differentiated one with some things that people don't care about.
http://www.hs.fi/kuukausiliite/a1381288411564?jako=8ca7cf121...
This is a letter a finnish journalist sent to Nokia in 2008. He was blown away by the iPhone! The letter was circulated internally and different managers called him to explain Nokias strategy. He meets up with the bosses and the following ensues:
----------------
The manager started to brief me on the backgrounds of Nokia's strategy. The idea was that people are different, and therefore, they need different kinds of telephones. I became agitated: "The kind of person who wants to use a bad telephone does not exist!", I said. THIS SPARKED AN argument. I explained in different ways how dreadful my new telephone was, and the manager spoke in its defence. All of a sudden he went silent. He looked directly in my eyes and said: "This conversation is in confidence, isn't it?"
I assured him that it was.
He continued:
"I agree completely with everything that you wrote in your letter and with what you have said now."
I was astounded.
"I agree completely with you and I want to apologise on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you."
----------------
5 Years later (2013) he meets the manager again. He tells a story so disarmingly cute Apple should print it as advertising:
----------------
He told me that when the iPhones came out in the United States in the summer of 2007, the situation was followed at Nokia with keen interest. A large number of iPhones were immediately delivered to Nokia's head offices in Espoo by courier.
The manager took his own iPhone home that same evening. He studied it so enthusiastically that it caught the interest of his four-year-old daughter. As an experiment, he gave the telephone to his daughter, and she learned to use it immediately.
In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question:
"Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?"
It was at that was the moment that the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.
Meanwhile they were drowning the market with S60 and S40 phones what ultimately nobody wanted.
They had all the money, all the opportunity, and they thought if they keep pumping out the same stuff, people will stay with them.
And even that wasn't anything to write home about -- though they did experiment with nicer cameras...
I had the N82 candybar model with a great camera and real xeon flash.
That said, Nokia had indeed some exceptional (for their era) devices, namely the Nokia Communicator.
The Finnish tech industry is still filled to the brim with ex-Nokia folk who simply do not understand what was better about the iPhone. Even today.
Some things were better about the iPhone, notably the UX, browsing and the app ecosystem which was starting to pick up (but was nowhere near what we have today).
Some thing were worse, and this is where many people seem to have developed selective memory issues. In particular the E72 didn't drop calls if one held it wrong, had a battery life at least double that of the iPhone and was less than half its price.
The N8 had a great camera and free offline maps. With Opera mobile it had a pretty damn good browsing experience. It was far from a complete dud.
The N9 could compete toe to toe with the 4S also on the UX, but by then it was too late. Nokia didn't have the foresight and guts to kill Symbian and bet the company on Maemo/Meego while they still had the possibility to build an ecosystem around it.
Apple invested all their effort into the iPhone and incrementally turned it from a good browsing device albeit average smartphone into a superb mobile computer while Nokia was starting and restarting four projects to compete with it.
Thanks to Opera? Mobile Safari on the first iPhone was the first browser that actually made sense and showed the web as you should.
Safari was impressive back then for sure, but feature-wise it's pretty bad even today.
I think Asphalt was the game chosen to demo it.
Had chosen something else most likely OpenGL ES would never had taken off, given how lousy it was supported across mobiles back then.
Oh, but they pretended to. Just like Samsung today.
Top management really needs to have people with deep and true understanding about software.
And perhaps top management needs also someone with a good sense about design. Many of them seem think they're Steve Jobs... Their failing tends to always be very consumer oriented (meaning they're not makers, maybe they're just using nicely designed products) and shallow understanding of the problem and especially possibility / innovation space.
Samsung, our new Nokia. I wonder if next chapters play out likewise.
I honestly believe Nokia would have been bankrupt by now if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out. And if Nokia hadn't adopted Windows Phone, they wouldn't have had Ballmer's ear to convince him to sign on such a bad deal. Elop deserves more recognition for this manoeuvre than he gets.
They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering.
Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?
However the had so many reboots that scared the developers away.
On one side they went
J2ME -> Symbian C++ / Java -> Symbian C++ with PIPS -> Symbian C++ / Qt -> Symbian is now open source -> Sorry use .NET instead
On the other side the Maemo was Gtk+, but then the team decided to move to C++ and port it to Qt.
These actions angered everyone that was trying to earn their money targeting Nokia devices.
Ah and don't get me started on Symbian C++ with its quirks copied from Win16 days and Palm OS.
The Apple without Steve Jobs wasn't that great and it still remains to be seen how they will do now.
After all, for how long can they keep selling new iPhones and Macs only?
Of course, they have the bank full and can afford to make a few errors for the time being.
The Register has a few good stories on it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/21/nokia_hildon_the_gre...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/09/symbian_developers_m...
As you might imagine not everyone wants to disclose what went wrong on public forums.
Microsoft are so well placed to create and distribute what is bound to become a popular from factor. This would work on so many levels. The light-weight basic consumer that doesn't need a gaming/ or other high power rig at home. Developing countries where people can't afford a laptop and high-end phone could now get a phone plus a screen/keyboard at home. And the biggest sell is at the enterprise level. Companies could issue phones only and have a heap of docking stations. It wouldn't suit everyone but many would.
Time to re-visit Ubuntu Touch and see how they are getting along I guess.
There already is a popular form factor that companies issue, and folks in developing countries purchase (in addition to us on HN): the smartphone.
If you're not intensely inputting typed data, there's no need for a keyboard. And if you are, then likely your company issues/reimburses-for a device with a keyboard.
But otherwise, this is why smartphones are ubiquitous. Many more people are content consumers than content creators.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8513519/microsoft-windows-...
Phone batteries generally aren't.
If you want 18+ hours watching YouTube then nobody does that in a cellphone form factor.
Granted, it's 2 years old (or so), but I have to believe that Apple developed iOS with an eye towards optimizing battery life rather than adapting the UI of OSX.
I actually bought a cheap Lumia to test this release out but on release they decided to drop my phone (which they already announced as compatible) from the upgrade so I never got to try it out.
Did anyone give it a go? Like/not?
Yeah, wife and I watch netflix / youtube in edge on continuum all the time on my lumia 950 (great combo with t-mobile binge/on). It really works well as wireless pc mouse / remote with the wireless display adapter from bed (seemless, 1-touch, no issues for me). I don't use it for actual computing since I have surface / macbook for that.
It's also the interesting thing here too about how Continuum is in competition with the UWP that enables it: in my case all my devices run Windows 10 and have access to all the same apps. With roaming and cloud services I can just pull up that app on any other device and switch devices freely. I rarely need to Continuum cast to some other device within my home because that app and that data is already accessible there...
So I could see saving the day with a last minute PowerPoint presentation somewhere where the only laptop I thought to bring was my phone, but that is mostly it. If there were coffee shops or hot desk spaces or hotel rooms with Miracast-capable screens and bluetooth keyboards scattered around the country you could see it being even handier for things like random Word document writing on the go for the traveler that doesn't want to bring a laptop everywhere...
So I've liked it for what I've used it for and I can think of scenarios where I would use it more, but I find day to day I don't use it much.
Can you install full windows apps on them or are you restricted to the app store.
You can see this clearly reflected in RIM...err...Blackberry's bottom line.
"Intel’s plans to discontinue its Atom chips for phones and some tablets may not have killed the dream of a Microsoft Surface phone—just the piece of it that made it so enticing.
In the wake of a restructuring that relegated the PC to just another connected device, Intel confirmed Friday that it has cancelled its upcoming SoFIA and Broxton chips. That leaves Intel with just one Atom chip, Apollo Lake, which it had slated for convertible tablets.
...fans of the platform have long hoped for a phone that could run native Win32 legacy apps as well as the new UWP platform that Microsoft has made a central platform of Windows 10. The assumption was that this would require a phone running on an Intel Atom processor. Intel’s decision eliminates that option."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-of-...
Pity, I would've bought one without hesitation. In theory, one could have a ARM-based Chromebook/phone or WinRT/phone but there's not enough software out there for ChromeOS or UWP to make it attractive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
"Let's take phones first. Right now, we're selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they'll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace, and, let's see."
Times change.
Honestly, when iPhone first came out it was pretty much a toy. No apps? Even dumbphones could run J2ME stuff!
It's only when iPhones got the App Store that things got serious.
But anyone who didn't see the danger of that "toy" running actual apps, or didn't see the need to revamp their user interface to beat, ended up losing.
Apple captured 20% of the smartphone market the first quarter the iPhone was released, outselling Nokia, Palm, and Motorola combined.
Nobody was seemingly all that upset they couldn't play yet another crappy J2ME version of "snake" that took 45 seconds to load. Roughly 0% of consumers knew what the hell J2ME even was. They did, however, see a cell phone with an actual web browser instead of some low-res, Javascriptless WAP disappointment. Not to mention a YouTube client and a decent camera plus photo app.
Touch screens are great for consumption and lousy for creation. Even this comment required eleven corrections to the swiped words. Twelve.
You have selective memory. They did in fact lower the price, but they were literally selling them as fast as they could make them at the time. They sold over a million in the first three months, and ran out of the 4GB model entirely in that period.
Maybe it was hard for them to see that consumer hardware/software would become the predominant force in modern tech.
Microsoft themselves used the strategy of Windows at home and at school to sell to Windows to businesses (and vice-versa).
What would one expect? For him to cower in fear and start crying? It took many iterations for the iPhone to catch up and many screw-ups from competitors, Nokia in particular.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-iphone-funeral-2010...
It was tasteless and disrespectful at the time and in retrospect it is laughably hubristic.
You can celebrate a good thing without dissing another good thing.
Ballmer is the pinnacle example of this arrogance without evidence attitude. It's like the ghost of corporate Bill Gates will guide and give luck no matter how stupid the decision they make.
It's sad because Microsoft could've evolved gracefully into a behemoth larger than Apple and Google, if only there had been an ounce of humility after Bill Gates left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Windows is still, for all intents and purposes, completely dominant.
I never saw any trace of the success they appear to have in US.
Apple skated to where the puck was going, not where it already was. Microsoft was too busy servicing the cash cow (and fomenting internal politics) to allow any disruptions. They had already lost the next great battle the day the iPhone was released.
Google's Android only survived because they pulled the mother of all pivots the day of the iPhone announcement and immediately poured all their efforts into copying iOS. (Remember: Android started life as a Blackberry clone!) None of this is controversial - the original Android team members have confirmed it in multiple interviews over the years.
What Microsoft is doing now is extremely smart. They know they lost the mobile war and are moving on to the next battlefield: Cloud services. They're milking Windows on the desktop as they make the transition but it's just a smoke screen to buy time. Open sourcing technology, supporting Linux, etc are all moves designed to get them customers for Azure. They'll now happily sell you SQL Server for Linux licenses, or a subscription for Office on iPad.
Using iOS or Android on a tablet + keyboard isn't really the same experience as being able to use all the usual Windows applications if I want to, specially Visual Studio on the go.
However they are just pivoting like IBM did when they lost the PC market.
As smartphones become more and more popular, they reach further and further down towards groups of people who can't afford iOS devices (unless you're counting second hand devices). I don't really see Apple's % of the market ever going up.
As the market matures and the hardware reaches "good enough" levels, the overwhelming majority of smartphones used will be the equivalent of the "beige boxes" of old (from the PC world). On top of that, the app competition is becoming so cutthroat that app prices will probably continue to go down (per app).
So, long story short: Apple will probably never enjoy a bigger share of the smartphone market than it did in the past and most of the competition will be around hardware and software with razor thin margins.
Meanwhile, more and more people from developing countries will start working in companies which use overwhelmingly... Windows desktops and associated software.
They will also use and pay for various services, some of which, as you noted, will be hosted on... Azure.
Microsoft's main cash cows will never dry up. Companies want/are willing/are able to pay for software.
I think that the longer term threat for Microsoft is Amazon, not Apple.
I see office software being commoditized instead. Then even the business guys can move off windows. If only google had some motivation improving docs. Maybe that hits another cultural wall. An engineering driven company can't produce tools for creating beautiful content.
There used to be specialists doing the graphs for various printed materials. Now it's all made by the marketers, consultants or number crunchers themselves. Of course the quality has been so bad ever since that happened, but nobody seems to care. Even designers don't really understand much about graphs.
It's sad that a company with numerous intelligent and talented people fails repeatedly. It's a waste of their efforts.
Why is it sad? It's enough that MS monopoly still plagues the desktop. I'd say it's good they didn't manage to bring the same sickening monopolistic lock-in to mobile. That said, current big participants have lot's of their own problems.
It seems like you lose either way.
I don't feel locked in at all with Windows though. Never have. With Apple, I feel locked into their hardware. With Microsoft? What am I locked into exactly?
(minor edit for clarification)
Windows won't go away but will just become less relevant. I doubt Microsoft even cares if Apple takes 80% marketshare in desktop/laptop PCs... as long as people keep buying Office licenses and using services running on Azure they'll make a ton of money and everyone wins.
The mobile race is over. Apple and Google won, we are way too far along in the hockey stick graph to leave any oxygen for further competitors. The only question left for anyone else is how much money they want to lose before they give up.
On my carrier, Verizon, we have almost no choices. There's iPhone, there's three dozen identical Android phones with different brand names, and a couple two year old Windows Phones. Not a lot of choice in the market now, and certainly not going to get any better if Microsoft exits.
It's sort of amazing how nice it is to use. Super fast startup time, super fast performance, very smooth user experience. Great camera. Not many apps, but that's not a big deal for me.
I truly believe a lot of people would switch if they spent a week on one, but that is never gonna happen.
That's their perennial problem. They had an app market, smartphones, tablets... before the above, but they couldn't figure out how to sell them.
They could have been Apple.
Not really. What we called apps/smartphones/tablets before the iPhone/iPad was not really the same thing.
Microsoft were the first to release Windows as a full on tablet-OS, at least half a decade before before even the iPhone existed. Forget about the iPad. That was at least 10 years later.
Microsoft delivered a full version of Windows XP (which was what was current at the time), capable of running all Windows software. No emulation. No limitations.
The problem was that most Windows software weren't really nice to run on a tablet, so the platform had limited appeal. Besides that you had the hardware issue: A "tablet" at that time was at least as heavy as a laptop.
It was way before its time, and as such, was doomed to fail. But don't come and claim Microsoft foresaw tablets as a platform for limited capability computing for answering emails only and such. That's what Apple delivered.
Microsoft had the right vision, and they were willing to execute. It's a shame it didn't turn out better.
It was sort of like the Internet before the web, it was something only a geek would love. Weighed five pounds, ran hot and you needed a stylus to interact with it.
Palm should have owned the smartphone era but they didn't have a vision where it should go. Steve Jobs did, he set standards and didn't ship until they were reached, end of story.
That is why you see Facebook so eager to buy new competing companies before they get huge, they know a lot of young people are not moving to facebook, so they want are going where the new kids are going.
It seems few big companies are able to maintain a culture of continuously trying to reinvent themselves and find the next big thing.
In addition to buying the next big thing (effective but requires $$$) I think intentionally trying to disrupt/reinvent your own products before your competition does is a great way to not miss the next big thing.
Besides, Microsoft practically is Apple.
Apple market cap: $571 billion, and heading down, with a business that will continue contracting as they're pushed out of China
Microsoft market cap: $438 billion, and rising again
Azure by itself will end up being more valuable than the iPad and Mac businesses combined (both of which are declining).
Calling it anything else would have been better.Even "Electric Candy" phones would have been more attractive than "Windows" phones.
I understand that the phones were reasonably decent.
| Kin was a short-lived mobile phone line from Microsoft designed for users of social networking. Microsoft described the phones' target demographic as men and women between ages 15 and 30.
The interesting irony recently is that my own company just sent an email encouraging our VPN users to download the (very same) Microsoft Authenticator on iOS and Android as it is now the most reliable cross-platform 2FA app.
[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/duo-mobile/id422663827?mt=8
Elop destroyed Nokia, they had the best distribution network and supply chains. Linking up with Elop instantly killed that and destroyed any goodwill they had with operators and carriers who would have continued to back Nokia. Unfortunately carriers are anti-Microsoft...
Symbian, their bread and butter, was awful from beginning to end. The burning platform memo from Elop was entirely right.
Microsoft could have been a strong 3 player but they kept rebooting their platform ever 6 months.
Symbian OS was very capable, full of features, but hard for developers to pick up and work with. I remember when the iPhone first came out and Symbian developers couldn't believe how few features it had ("it doesn't even multi-task!") but it did absolutely nail the user interface which is what most people noticed.
As a friend working at Symbian once said to me, "it was like watching a train crash in slow motion"
Microsoft always understood the consequences of Moore's law. Palm killed them early on because Windows Mobile was just too much OS for those early devices. But as hardware improved, Palm was left with a less capable OS and Microsoft was ready. What they weren't ready for was Apple porting their desktop OS to mobile.
Ditto Apple.
:P
That is what makes me angry at them, not whatever they did later with Microsoft.
I remember when we all saw the iPhone. A lot of us knew we were in trouble when the execs kept going on about how only "enterprise customers" need a smartphone, and how it's about selling Microsoft Exchange...
A third party platform will fundamentally need to beat Android so badly on platform features directly that app developers rush to it, users get excited about it. The hype has to be real. Maybe that's HoloLens for Microsoft, maybe it's someone else. But the admittedly incremental benefits Windows Mobile has over Android aren't enough to break that monopoly power. Nothing about Tizen, Ubuntu, Sailfish, etc. gets people talking about the cool amazing future of technology.
My understanding is that most? markets function this way? Perhaps someone has some numbers...
I've played with the Windows Phone at a new retail store and really liked it. I'm almost wondering if they had gone for the retail stores earlier on if the tide might have gone their way just a little bit more.
[1] - http://www.macrumors.com/2016/05/25/microsoft-calls-time-con...
Maybe Microsoft doesn't see a need to try to be a "leading beacon" in the phone hardware space because there isn't interesting innovation to be had there right now.
It does not seem to mean that Microsoft is out of the Phone software business. (It may even mean that they've found new hardware partners they are excited about working with.) A lot of the effort into Windows 10 and the UWP app platform has been to bridge the gaps, merge the teams, and make sure that Microsoft can continue to run the Phone software business even as a "low margin" business unit (even with relatively spare hardware sales), and leverage synergies between phone software work and other semi-related platforms like HoloLens and Xbox.