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Comment by qwerta | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft just become irrelevant :-)

I don't think irrelevant is appropriate. Microsoft has very talented people on board and it keeps introducing novel products (Kinect, WP8,etc) You might like them or not but one has to give credit to try new approaches.

They are not the unstoppable force that they were before but I think that calling them irrelevant is a bit too much.

I have a WP8 phone and love it, but even I can admit that with ~1% marketshare, WP8 is irrelevant. Most people don't own a console, so having a slice of that market doesn't really help either. Having talented people doesn't automatically make people care about your products.

I don't think it's the 1% market share that's their biggest problem. The problem is that Microsoft isn't competitive as an ecosystem. Bing search, Hotmail, whatever Microsoft has for music or maps etc. are not what people are using. Yahoo is doing more to attract and retain ecosystem users.

Or look at it this way: It's not about selling a phone OS. It's about the ecosystem behind the devices.

There are a lot more who use their ecosystem than you think. All of their services work very well together, the Music and Video services have anything I could ever want (seriously, more current TV shows than anywhere else I've seen), the email calendar and other things work together, Skydrive is incredibly useful.

If you don't think Microsoft's ecosystem is competitive, it tells me you haven't tried it.

I didn't even know MS had a video service. A little Googling and I got to "Xbox Video". I thought that was only available via the Windows 8 app (or Xbox) but it looks like any Silverlight-capable browser will work. e.g. http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/TVShow/The-Guild/Season/0/...

The integration with specific sevices is impressive. On one screen, I can see all my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn connections' updates. On another I can see all notifications across all connected services. The lock screen can show how many emails I have waiting in each account, Twitter messages, Facebook messages, texts, missed calls, and voicemails at the same time. The rest of the "ecosystem" would be a lot more liveable if they only had a decent web browser! The browser on this thing is terrible. It doesn't even have a basic password manager, which is really painful on a touchscreen keyboard.

Windows Phone is great... until you run afoul of stupid restrictions.

You probably will never come across them, but one of my cousins got a Lumia, and made the mistake of not lying when registering the phone.

She ran afoul of two things:

1) Marketplace simply does not work if you're a minor

2) Almost nothing works if you set your place of residence to Uruguay.

So I had to create a false account for her, and reset her phone twice, before she had a passable user experience.

It might "work" if you live in the U.S., but I absolutely do not recommend it for small third world countries, and will only recommend Android here.

Btw, I'd add a third caveat:

3) Most software doesn't have "free" alternatives like on Android (absolutely deal-breaking if you don't have access to a credit card, which most Uruguayans don't)

It's sad, because the hardware beats the crap out of Samsung phones, the UX is better, and I love the Camera button. Too bad Nokia chose Windows, I loved my Nokia phones (still use one, an N86).

I would be very happy to be a tenth as irrelevant.

We're talking about Microsoft, the giant of the computing industry for 15-20 years. Their overall influence is a tiny fraction of what it was.

Apple and Google are the major players now. Microsoft is an also-ran.

They still have a lot of influence in business computing - from PCs to servers. Don't be so quick to dismiss Microsoft.

5 years from now most of the currently installed PCs will be gone, and many of them will be replaced by tablets. Will those tablets be running iOS, Android, or Windows?

Again, enterprise. Business. Not consumer.

It doesn't matter if the tablets are running iOS, Android, or Windows. What does and will matter is, which can run Excel, which can run Word, and which can run Eclipse or Visual Studio? Because, besides IE6 apps that will continue to slowly fade, that's what businesses actually care about.

> What does and will matter is, which can run Excel, which can run Word

That's an open question. I would ask instead which ecosystem - Google, Bing/Hotmail/SkyDrive/Azure, Apple, Yahoo, etc. the customer uses as their "home" ecosystem.

Maybe. Until iOS or Android can run the whole of Windows x86 software, Windows will continue to exist and earn shitloads of cash for Microsoft.

As someone else stated here 'you don't work in the enterprise, do you?'

Where money is being spent, Google and Apple are no where to be seen. They're just fighting over the fickle and low margin consumer market.

Famous last words, if you've ever read The Innovator's Dilemma. Google is definitely moving up-margin into Enterprise with a fair degree of success; I'm not sure about Apple, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are too. In tech the companies who are successful in low-margin market segments are predators and the ones in higher-margin market segments are prey.

> Where money is being spent, Google and Apple are no where to be seen. They're just fighting over the fickle and low margin consumer market.

That theory would be more convincing were it not for the fact that Apple makes more money than Microsoft...

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