Why 'Cortana Gate' is very bad for business

[k0de]

This analogy really doesn't make sense because Apple's business model is not the same as MS's business model. No two companies have the same set of strengths and weaknesses. Why would MS ignore their own strengths and weaknesses when making strategic decisions?

MS is indeed working to make Cortana as good as they possibly can. Their point is a completely valid one--if they can make the Cortana experience great on windows or tablets, then they can pull more people to Windows Phone. So how do you make the windows/tablet experience as good as possible if Cortana is not reading anything from a user's smartphone?

Excellent thread here. After reading valid points mentioned. I have change my Thoughts. Perhaps this decision will be good for MSFT after all.

 

[FinancialP]

Siri is powered by Bing, this means that every time an iPhone user uses Siri to perform a search it goes through Bing's engine to do it. Most smartphone users don't change their default search engine, so the fact the Apple set Siri, iOS7 & 8 to Bing as well as the next OSX to Bing is going to help increase Bing's market share. MSFT doesn't need Cortana on Apple because essentially the majority of Apple users are already using Bing.

MSFT is no slouch, Google is lucky that MSFT isn't being as fickle and unprofessional as them. MSFT controls over 80% of the tech world's patents. If MSFT wanted to trade blows with Google, Google would leave with the biggest battle scars. Google also relies on the hundreds of millions of Windows PC's that MSFT allows Chrome and Gmail apps to be on. MSFT has the leverage here not Google.

Smh you have a love/hate thing going on Microsoft. I can't help you with that.

It's easy to tell you hate Google as well. I can't help you with that either and this thread isn't about them.

Use Siri and Bing is nothing at all and can't be compared to Cortana. So yeah I don't see your point.

Just using Bing doesn't translate into the needed data that Cortana use studies can use.

 

[Sir William Wiener]

This analogy really doesn't make sense because Apple's business model is not the same as MS's business model. No two companies have the same set of strengths and weaknesses. Why would MS ignore their own strengths and weaknesses when making strategic decisions?

MS is indeed working to make Cortana as good as they possibly can. Their point is a completely valid one--if they can make the Cortana experience great on windows or tablets, then they can pull more people to Windows Phone. So how do you make the windows/tablet experience as good as possible if Cortana is not reading anything from a user's smartphone?

Of course Microsoft and Apple aren't identical companies but in this sector of the tech world Apple and Microsoft are more similar than Microsoft is to Google with Android.

 

[anon(8555314)]

I know and I'm just saying that if that dreadful day were to come then it would mean WP is dead forever and MSFT retreats to being a services and apps provider to the iOS and Android duopoly. I'm just against the other sentiment that porting it to iOS and Android is a good strategy for growing WP, when it's not. Cortana going to iOS and Android would be MSFT scuttling their ship, which of course is only an end game course of action.

No, it is not an end game course of action. It is a strategy to make Windows Phone gain market share by showing windows users how awesome Cortana is.

 

[Chregu]

Oh well please enlighten us then genius whom we owe our ears too!

He's condescending, rude, doesn't add anything to the discussion and only writes two sentences. Don't even bother with him.

 

[Sir William Wiener]

The Cortana vs Siri name means nothing to MSFT, what matters to them is that they're both avenues of users using Bing to perform mobile searches. Whether you use Siri on your iPhone or Cortana on your WP you're using the Bing engine and that's MSFT's ultimate goal, Bing has massive potential for being a cash cow for MSFT. MSFT and Apple have essentially formed a loose "enemy of my enemy" alliance against Google for a plethora of different reasons.

And I'm sorry to break to you that MSFT is more than Windows Phone and doesn't need to bow down to Google when Google wouldn't even have Android if MSFT denied them rights to use certain patents.

 

[Sir William Wiener]

No, it is not an end game course of action. It is a strategy to make Windows Phone gain market share by showing windows users how awesome Cortana is.

No I'm saying Cortana on iOS and Android is an end game strategy, Cortana on Windows 8 and Xbox make perfect sense as they're essential pieces of the MSFT ecosystem.

 

[anon(8555314)]

I dont think anyone has a clue what strategy is over at Microsoft. We are backing this and that fully 100%...fast forward two months and its gone. This and that will be fixed immediately...fast forward three years and zilch again. They have no one at the top laying it all down and telling everyone to get on board because this is where we are going come hell or high water. Instead this department is over here selling oranges, while this one over there is trying to burn down all the orange trees to make room for a new employ parking lot, and in the mean time the fifth floor has just announced an all green company and banning cars. We could get five monkeys and put them in charge and see a better organized plan and a clearer vision with less bull****.

Every business that has been around as long as Apple and MS has some projects/products that failed completely, or were abandoned or de-emphasized at some point. That is just the nature of things. If you are innovating, you have to take risks, and sometimes that means you try things that don't work. It would be silly to fail to re-evaluate and continue to put resources into an effort that isn't working the way that you had hoped. So it is unfair to hold MS to a standard that failed projects means they don't know what they are doing strategically.

In the technology sector, for every company that hits a home run with an IPO or acquisition, there are 1000 who failed to get passed the angel investor stage. You never hear about most of them, because a lot of them never get passed the business plan or kickstarter stage. When you consider how hard it is to succeed in this sector of the economy, it is really amazing that companies like MS and Apple have remained competitive for decades, because they have had to re-invent themselves many times, and are continuing to do so.

 

[anon(8555314)]

No I'm saying Cortana on iOS and Android is an end game strategy, Cortana on Windows 8 and Xbox make perfect sense as they're essential pieces of the MSFT ecosystem.

You can make that claim 500 times, but that still wouldn't make it true the 501st time you repeated it.

 

[Sir William Wiener]

Every business that has been around as long as Apple and MS has some projects/products that failed completely, or were abandoned or de-emphasized at some point. That is just the nature of things. If you are innovating, you have to take risks, and sometimes that means you try things that don't work. It would be silly to fail to re-evaluate and continue to put resources into an effort that isn't working the way that you had hoped. So it is unfair to hold MS to a standard that failed projects means they don't know what they are doing strategically.

In the technology sector, for every company that hits a home run with an IPO or acquisition, there are 1000 who failed to get passed the angel investor stage. You never hear about most of them, because a lot of them never get passed the business plan or kickstarter stage. When you consider how hard it is to succeed in this sector of the economy, it is really amazing that companies like MS and Apple have remained competitive for decades, because they have had to re-invent themselves many times, and are continuing to do so.

Make no mistake Microsoft as an enter entity is not in any sort of trouble, so far Nadella has been a good CEO because he's maintained and increased revenue & profits and increased the MSFT share price on NASDAQ. In this sense he's great for Microsoft, however his clouds and services philosophy sometimes are at odds with Microsoft hardware. My only fear with Nadella is that he could care less about MSFT hardware so long as his cloud strategy is working and that he'd axe any hardware that he felt didn't fit in with his philosophy.

 

[anon(8555314)]

What you've said Microsoft should do is what they ARE doing. They're only THINKING of iPhone and Android versions of Cortana should Windows Phone not take off. Thinking. Not doing.

That is not what was stated at all. They are asking the questions, "how do we make the Cortana experience on windows/xbox as great as possible so that we can pull more existing customers to become MS smartphone/MS tablet/windows/xbox users? And how do we make that Cortana experience on windows/xbox as good as possible without pulling smartphone info from xbox or windows/non WP user?"

 

[Sir William Wiener]

You can make that claim 500 times, but that still wouldn't make it true the 501st time you repeated it.

You don't have to believe it if you choose not to, but Cortana on iOS and Android would be the Windows Phone death sentence.

 

[T Moore]

Like Seinfeld, this is about nothing.

 

[Sir William Wiener]

The only way Windows Phone will ever see growth is to get more apps over on to the platform at the same exact time they come out on iOS and Android, not months later after the other two have moved on the next trending app/game. The only way they can accomplish this of course is to increase the number of Windows Phone users so the app developers see WP's market as worthwhile as iOS and Android. The only way users will come to WP is if WP continues to be a unique alternative, and with each feature they surrender the less reasons any iOS or Android user has to switch to WP.

 

[anon(8555314)]

Make no mistake Microsoft as an enter entity is not in any sort of trouble, so far Nadella has been a good CEO because he's maintained and increased revenue & profits and increased the MSFT share price on NASDAQ. In this sense he's great for Microsoft, however his clouds and services philosophy sometimes are at odds with Microsoft hardware. My only fear with Nadella is that he could care less about MSFT hardware so long as his cloud strategy is working and that he'd axe any hardware that he felt didn't fit in with his philosophy.

You and a bunch of others on these forums leaped to a conclusion that was completely baseless. There was nothing whatsoever in the communications from MS that would indicate that windows phone is any nearer to being abandoned than it was previously.

The reality is that the market share that windows phone has probably isn't sustainable at the current level. I think they know they need to triple it to make it viable long term. I haven't seen one speck of information that would indicate to me that MS is trying to do anything but increase their windows phone market share to a level that is sustainable.

 

[wpmartjr]

Bringen disturbance in your community is definitely a bad thing, true that, but we, the community shouldn't be hating msft. You need to have a little trust in a company this big and maybe this was their way of trying to find out what the community thinks about it (this isn't really a professional way). But the idea isn't really a bad one, bringing full cortana to windows 8 and a more limited one to ios/android. I agree with you guys that they still should make wp8 the main priority but wp isn't making the calls in mobile world so to make their services more attractive things like this need to happen. The attractiveness off other stuf needs to be sacrificed for some matters. And msft weighing to sacrifice this attractiveness for wp isn't really that weird.

 

[Sir William Wiener]

You and a bunch of others on these forums leaped to a conclusion that was completely baseless. There was nothing whatsoever in the communications from MS that would indicate that windows phone is any nearer to being abandoned than it was previously.

The reality is that the market share that windows phone has probably isn't sustainable at the current level. I think they know they need to triple it to make it viable long term. I haven't seen one speck of information that would indicate to me that MS is trying to do anything but increase their windows phone market share to a level that is sustainable.

No I am not saying MSFT is abandoning Windows Phone or giving up hope. I am saying that the strategy to give away Cortana to their much stronger smartphone OS market competition is inadvertent suicide for their platform as Cortana has all the potential to be an exclusive selling point for WP and the MSFT ecosystem. If they surrender this feature to the competition then selling people on the idea of Windows Phone just got harder.

 

[JamesPTao]

You don't have to believe it if you choose not to, but Cortana on iOS and Android would be the Windows Phone death sentence.

Not true. You are looking at the ground and missing the mountains and the rest of the big picture. Office, excell, and such made windows indispensible for business and greatly helped their platform. They are recognizing that this can and must be done to help the future of windows devices. This obviously worked for google. A great deal of people choose android because they want the most Integrared way to use Google's services. If things such as cortana become widely used and a valuable app that people will prefer it will help WP adoption in the future as people seek to get a better Integrated use and experience with windows apps. They are thinking several years out on this and just because we are consumed with the concerns of the moment with WP does t mean we should bash them for forward thinking. Cortana will remain a best experience app under WP when compared to ios/android but people must start using it to see its appeal.

 

[anon(6038817)]

I don't understand the uproar over this. Isn't Microsoft first and foremost a software company? And isn't exclusivity Apple's gimmick?

Except now Apple owns Beats. And Beats has licensed their products to multiple platforms and OEMs. Heck, they even have an Android and Windows Phone app!

But really, if people are going to choose a platform, they're not going to make that decision based on a single app. As amazing as Cortana may be, people aren't going to be flocking to Windows Phone over it.

I think this is all just a tempest in a teapot.
Sent from my Lumia 822 using Tapatalk

 

[Sir William Wiener]

Not true. You are looming at the ground and missing the mountains and the rest of the big picture. Office, excell, and such made windows indispensible for business and greatly helped their platform. They are recognizing that this can and must be done to help the future of windows devices. This obviously worked for google. A great deal of people choose android because they want the most Integrared way to use Google's services. If things such as cortana become widely used and a valuable app that people will prefer it will help WP adoption in the future as people seek to get a better Integrated use and experience with windows apps. They are thinking several years out on this and just because we are consumed with the concerns of the moment with WP does t mean we should bash them for forward thinking. Cortana will remain a best experience app under WP when compared to ios/android but people must start using it to see its appeal.

This only worked for Google because after Blackberry fell off as a result of the iPhone, Android filled a market share vacuum and became the only viable smartphone alternative to the iPhone. Android offered a wide variety of devices at different price points from various OEMs at a time when no one else was. Microsoft had the opportunity to jump in at the same time but blew it and unfortunately fell behind iOS and Android and watched them become titans of the smartphone industry. This was before MSFT had any indication that the PC market was about to peak and decline. MSFT never threw much of their eggs into the smartphone basket back when they should've because they knew they dominated the PC sector, had they known of the PC decline back in 2006/2007 they likely would've invested more than they did in Windows mobile. MSFT made a massive miscalculation back then and now they're playing catchup, because they're in catchup mode they need to woo users by being unique and better than the iOS/Android experience. They can't be unique if they give away selling points like Cortana, which isn't comparable to Office or Skype but rather more comparable to Apple's Siri & iMessage which are exclusive selling points for the Apple ecosystem.