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New Felix: There is 0 demand for another phone OS.
http://blogs.reuters...icrosoft-edition/

Guy English has already characterized Ballmer’s disastrous reorganization as a straitjacket for the next CEO; adding on a mobile phone business that Microsoft probably should abandon is like attaching an anchor to said straitjacket and tossing the patient into the ocean. It will be that much more difficult for the next CEO to look at Windows Phone rationally.


As Henry Blodget notes, Windows Phone is now going to account for a good quarter of Microsoft’s employees; integrating those two huge and very different cultures is going to take an enormous amount of effort, with no guarantee of success. And as Thompson notes, this acquisition essentially forces Microsoft to double down on its strategy (which has signally failed to date) of competing head-to-head with Android and iOS.

There is really zero consumer demand for an alternative smartphone OS: even the ultrageeks fell well short of raising the $32 million they needed to develop a version of Ubuntu for phones. Microsoft is pretty good at giving big organizations what they want — Windows and Office, the two great powerhouses which have between them accounted for all of Microsoft’s profits over the years. And somewhere, deep inside its institutional memory, it knows that once upon a time it came late to the browser game, entered with a big splash, and ended up demolishing Netscape.

The problem is that this second-mover strategy doesn’t work against Google and Apple. It doesn’t work in search, it doesn’t work in tablets, it doesn’t work in phones. (It has arguably worked in gaming systems, which is something of a Pyrrhic victory, given the way in which games are going mobile.) Nokia is a failing company — if Microsoft hadn’t swept in to save it, it would probably have gone bust pretty quickly — and one of the reasons that it’s failing is that no one wants to buy a Windows phone. And that’s especially true in the fastest-growing market of all.

[...]


He sorta thinks they're doomed. ;-)

He overstates the case a little (Apple wasn't first in smart phones; Elop was only at MS for a couple of years before going to Nokia; etc.), but I think the general tone is right. It's hard to see what Nokia is going to bring to MS that will give them a significant future (50 MP phones? Samsung can do the same thing anytime they want. Little animated boxes on the phone's main screen? Yawn.)

MS still thinks they are entitled to 100% of every market they want to be in. They still haven't recognized yet that the rest of the world learned from the OS Wars and the Word Processor Wars and the Database Wars and the Programming Tool Wars - you don't tie your company's future to MS if you want to survive. That's why their Search and Advertising and TV and Phone and Music Player and Cable TV and Subscription Software and ... efforts have been poorly accepted.

Lots of smart people work at MS, and they can make good stuff on occasion. But they need to change their culture in dealing with their customers and the rest of the world. It may take breaking up the OS / Office / Networking / Database / Game / Online / Phone / etc. groups into separate companies or something to let them all shine. Dunno.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elop#Career

Elop was a director of consulting for Lotus Development Corporation before becoming CIO for Boston Chicken in 1992,[8][9] which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998.[10] In the same year, he joined Macromedia's Web/IT department[9] and worked at the company for seven years,[11] where he held several senior positions, including CEO from January 2005[12] for three months before their acquisition by Adobe Systems was announced in April 2005.[5][13]

He was then president of worldwide field operations at Adobe, tendering his resignation in June 2006 and leaving in December,[14] after which he was the COO of Juniper Networks for exactly one year from January 2007-2008.[9][15]

From January 2008 to September 2010, Elop worked for Microsoft as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team. It was during this time that Microsoft's Business Division released Office 2010.[16]

In September 2010, it was announced that Elop would take Nokia's CEO position, replacing Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, and becoming the first non-Finnish director in Nokia's history. On 11 March 2011 Nokia announced that it had paid Elop a $6 million signing bonus, “compensation for lost income from his prior employer," on top of his $1.4 million annual salary.[17]

On 3 September 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia's Devices and Services division for €3.79 billion ($4.99 billion at the time of the transaction). Elop stepped down as CEO of Nokia and will return to Microsoft as Head of Microsoft's Devices team.[18]


Man, he fell up on to that fast-track, huh?!? If he's the next CEO, it's hard for me to see him making MS into a behemoth again - maybe he'll break the company up and collect a huge windfall in the process. Dunno...

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.
New There's a way.
They turn the problem over to the XBox boys and girls. MS has *never* owned the gaming space - but they are a presence now and the people who ran the XBox division at the start made it happen. However, this solution does require that all the other moving parts (OS, Office, hardware...) would have to kowtow to the ex-XBox people for it to work. Otherwise it won't.

Wade.
Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/
New thats the plan
I did mention that OS and applications should have a chinese wall between them and why but thats not gonna happen
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 58 years. meep
New Lots of people are claiming they'll never buy an XBone
Dunno. I'm not a gamer myself, but they seem to have pissed a lot of people off with the always-connected, Kinect-spying noises (even if they've backtracked on them). Dunno.

Here's hoping the PS4 is a hit for Sony. They need something strong to survive a little longer.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Oh the PS4 will be a great hit...
If not immediately.

The Playstation has always had lackluster roll out sales. Mainly because Sony makes it a biatch to program for until people learn it.

The techniques they learn make the PS2 live as long as it did, were also applied to the original XBOX.

The PS4 will probably out sell anything XBOX for a long time again.

What is that you say: Nintendo? I dunno the the Wii-U seems to be a flop.
--
greg@gregfolkert.net
PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
"No snowflake in an avalanche eve feels responsible." --Fortune Cookie
New Sony have in some ways succeeded despite themselves.
With the original Playstation, Sony was up against a Sega who was imploding and a Nintendo who were hard to work with. It wasn't a lay-down misère, but it might've been. SCEI was in many ways the opposite of Nintento and developers loved it.

The PS2 was up against the newcomer Microsoft. Sony nearly stumbled a few times because Sony Corporate, having let SCEI create this big success with the PSX, could not resist putting their fingers in the mix this time. I suspect knowing that MS were copying with the Xbox what Sony did with the PSX probably saved them as they knew the playbook.

The PS3 and the Xbox 360 were simply More Of The Same. With Nintendo going out of step and then trying to change the rules with their innovative controller, MS and Sony had a partial duopoly. They might've both been in a lot more trouble if Nintento had released the Wii at roughy the same time as the PS3 and Xbox 360. They would've definitely been in trouble if Nintendo had gone for HD and the next-gen graphics instead of just a mild upgrade.

The PS4 and the XBone are mostly a great big upgrade from their predecessors. I've seen game footage of the PS4 and the graphics engine is quite a lot better than the PS3 and the PS3 is pretty good. Plus MS stumbled badly with the "always on" thing and the Kinect. Sony knew better. That will help their reputation quite a lot.

Wade.
Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/
New I understood that the PS3 almost killed Sony.
They thought that the blue lasers were going to be easier to perfect than they ended up being, so yields were low and costs were high in their BluRay players that were one of the big selling-points of the box. ("Buy this inexpensive game machine and get a free Blu-Ray player!")

The Cell processors were a big risk for them, too.

I think it's great that Sony was willing to push the technology and take risks like that. The hardware behind PS4 and XBone seems to be much more conventional (even if the graphics performance, etc., is much higher than the predecessors).

It'll be interesting to see if they're as popular as the earlier boxes.

I'm tempted to look into one mainly for the mediaplayer aspects (we haven't even downloaded any TV shows yet even though we've got Amazon Prime). We're paying over $200 a month for cable TV and internet and it's tempting to find ways to cut that expense down some... Or maybe a Chromecast dongle, or ... But I'm often on the trailing edge of technology now - the hep cats probably do everything on their phones now, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were canceled 3 months after we bought one. ;-)

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Oh yes. I was going to mention that.
The PS2 was timed nearly perfectly for DVD, but the PS3 was about a year early technologically speaking. They took a bit of a bath and it was a huge gamble, but they've come out of it doing not too bad. I think Sony Corporate learnt to let SCEI just do what they're good at.

Sony and MS have been pretty pro-active in making their gaming network work. I think it helps that download only games have started appearing that are good enough to win significant awards (Journey comes to mind).

I use a PS3 for DVD and BluRay playing as well as the games, but I have a MythTV for DVB, catch-up TV (iView usually) and Youtube. Sony did make a DVR add-on for the PS3 but it seems to have vanished from the market.

Wade.
Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/
New Lots of those people are lying...
...because they'll want the next Halo game.

Or Forza 5, which will be better than GT6 - much like Forza 4 ended up being much better than GT5. Mainly because Turn 10 remembered that racing games are supposed to be games and therefore should have some element of fun.

I may get one, but it will depend on whether the media features are a sufficiently large jump from those on the 360. I don't play many games on my 360, although Netflix and the XBox Music stuff get a lot of action.
Expand Edited by pwhysall Sept. 5, 2013, 10:55:00 AM EDT
     A true Windows phone likely coming: MS is buying Nokia - (Another Scott) - (20)
         It's a smart move, I think. - (pwhysall) - (5)
             Too little too late. - (a6l6e6x) - (4)
                 {{Whew}} ... for a bit there, I feared that - (Ashton)
                 I prefer theirs to itunes -NT - (boxley)
                 Already done - (pwhysall) - (1)
                     Your last point is the most important. - (folkert)
         Felix: There is 0 demand for another phone OS. - (Another Scott) - (8)
             There's a way. - (static) - (7)
                 thats the plan - (boxley)
                 Lots of people are claiming they'll never buy an XBone - (Another Scott) - (5)
                     Oh the PS4 will be a great hit... - (folkert) - (3)
                         Sony have in some ways succeeded despite themselves. - (static) - (2)
                             I understood that the PS3 almost killed Sony. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                                 Oh yes. I was going to mention that. - (static)
                     Lots of those people are lying... - (pwhysall)
         Re: A true Windows phone likely coming: MS is buying Nokia - (Bman) - (2)
             ROFLCOPTER! -NT - (folkert)
             It's p-p-petrified p-p-p-latypus! ... p-p-erhaps? -NT - (Ashton)
         It's been in the works for years - (crazy) - (1)
             Sounds so simple--now - (Ashton)

None of us is as dumb as all of us.
59 ms