Might the DUO be DOA?

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davidewart

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I'm wondering what the rumors are about the release of the Duo.

Given the pandemic; the massive hit to the economy - i.e. personal and corporate budgets; and disruption of global supply lines, I'm wondering:

a) How is this affecting Microsoft's own internal production and marketing processes? And,
b) Is this really the environment for releasing a breaking-the-old-molds, new form factor?

Given all the grief that is going on, does the world really need / will it respond positively to a shiny new expensive bit of technology being released?
 

spicypadthai

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MS painted themselves into a corner. If they believe in the dual-screen concept, then they need to release it ASAP. No matter when it's released, it'll inevitably be panned by the tech media for an underwhelming at best camera and generally being underpowered. But they'll be able to gauge interest, learn from the feedback, and hopefully deliver a more compelling v2. But if they wait past the summer and release it along with or after all the new flagships and probably new foldables, then I think it's DOA and who knows whether MS has the appetite to stay patient after another mobile failure. They could always cancel v1 and wait for v2 but that may be too late.
 

TechFreak1

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MS painted themselves into a corner. If they believe in the dual-screen concept, then they need to release it ASAP. No matter when it's released, it'll inevitably be panned by the tech media for an underwhelming at best camera and generally being underpowered. But they'll be able to gauge interest, learn from the feedback, and hopefully deliver a more compelling v2. But if they wait past the summer and release it along with or after all the new flagships and probably new foldables, then I think it's DOA and who knows whether MS has the appetite to stay patient after another mobile failure. They could always cancel v1 and wait for v2 but that may be too late.

To be honest, they already pigeon holed themselves when they axed the mobile division. Had they not, there would be a rich ecosystem for the DUO to tap into via UWP. Which would have paved the way to Azure driven web connected apps and containers...

But that's ancient history now.

The only thing they can do is expand the ecosystem for dual screen devices and that means putting 10X on laptops as that is the only thing they can do.

Not everyone could have forseen this pandemic but it doesn't take a statistician to do tell you about cyclical patterns in history. There is a philosphical debate or argument (depends on how a person's internal voice reads it) about history but that's beyond the scope of this thread / forum section.

The Surface Duo will be somewhat DOA if it ships with a last gen SOC but otherwise no.

Think about it, Foldable phones are a niche they are not mainstream. If foldable phones were mainstream and a competitor unveiled a similar cheaper product then yes, DOA.

Otherwise another nope.

However, there aren't going to be many queues outside the UK store that I can tell you.

The US?

Well, without being too political there are alot of risk takers out there that's for certain lol....
 

Central Analyst

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To be honest, they already pigeon holed themselves when they axed the mobile division. Had they not, there would be a rich ecosystem for the DUO to tap into via UWP. Which would have paved the way to Azure driven web connected apps and containers...

But that's ancient history now.


They killed mobile because it was a complete failure and an embarrassment. They had 0.2% market share and dropping when they killed it.
They thought they could design one "platform" (UWP) that could run great on phones, tablets, desktops, servers, xBox, Hololens, etc.

There are now a billion devices that can run UWP apps, why don't developers write for that? I'll tell you why, UWP sucks! LOL. I say this as decades long Windows user and developer.

The problem is they designed UWP to run on the lowest common denominator (phones). It was optimized to run well on the touch oriented input, small screen, limited power of phones. It is a terrible "platform" to write complex desktop applications.

Microsoft has had a progression of frameworks / platforms starting after Win32/ C API that developers by and large have eagerly adopted because the latest one was so much better than the previous one.

C++/MFC - huge improvement, object oriented development
C# / .NET / WinForms - huge improvement, C# is nice, .NET is a modern, powerful and consistent API
C# / .NET / WPF - huge improvement, even more C# and .NET features, WPF is a very powerful UI platform

Then things changed...

Windows 8 "Metro" platform (precursor to UWP) - WTF! this is GARBAGE!
Windows 10 UWP - WTF! this is GARBAGE! LOL

WPF is that last framework from Microsoft that is suitable for writing complex desktop applications on Windows. Unfortunately, Microsoft basically abandoned it after about 2012. It is in maintenance mode with no real improvements for 8 years. Instead Microsoft has focused all its attention and encouraged developers to use "Metro", and now UWP. Visual Studio is written in WPF, why doesn't Microsoft use UWP for that? I'll tell you why - UWP Sucks! My company develops custom complex Windows desktop apps for clients. None of our clients have ever mentioned UWP.

I spend my available free time learning iOS / Mac OS and Linux these days instead of bothering with anything new coming from Microsoft.

This is all self-inflicted by Microsoft. They thought the could leverage their desktop dominance to drive their mobile efforts, by forcing the crappy "Metro" UI on users of Windows 8 (and later Windows 10) hoping it would lead to people then buying Windows phones / tablets. The whole gamble backfired spectacularly. Instead of propelling them into dominance in phones / tablets, they have completely failed in phones / tablets and in the process completely ruined desktop development in the process.
 
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