On a 737, awaiting takeoff a month ago, I sat next to a kind gentleman who was also destined for Seattle. About 30 minutes in, I noticed him noticing my Windows Phone as I changed music. He politely inquired: "I see you are using a Windows Phone, why is that?" To which I replied: "Because I'm stupid, or stubborn. I've always used them, this one still works great, I don't care about SnapChat and there's a slim hope for a mythical "Surface Phone" they are supposed to be working on". He then told me he loved his Windows Phone until he lost it on a hike recently.
It turns out he's a Microsoft engineer that was working on the phone project and over the course of a longer conversation I learned that he's working on the "next thing" as well. I told him everything I've heard about the new device and he stated "sometimes, rumors are not wrong" -citing the fact that he can't confirm anything concrete. I asked him point blank about whether or not I should bite the bullet and by a nice Android device as I'd been contemplating. He told me in no uncertain terms that, as a business user, I would be very disappointed in wasting my money" if I did and that I should wait foe what would be released "very soon". He confirmed he's using "something" in his office every day that he wishes he could take out but that has to be kept under wraps for now. We discussed the way they were porting 32-bit software into Apps and much more.
Honestly, I thought I had hit the Windows Phone ****** jackpot. We said our good-byes at the end of the flight and I thanked him for keeping me from wasting my money. So, my 950 XL will have to trudge on a little longer. Surface Phone/Andromeda/Journal/whatever you are called, I await your debut.
I've personally never had any doubt they wanted to develop a dual screened device. I saw their co-presentation of their co-owned patent for graphene OLED screens (co-owned, co-developed with Samsung) back in the balmer days in 2013. Everyone with an ear to the ground knows that when graphene manufacturing is made cheaper that will bring about a new era of mobile devices (and actually much more besides, the amount of new tech graphene will bring is tantamount to a tech revolution)
So having known this for a long time, it is obvious that the major players will want to get into dual screen devices early, long before the screen tech itself comes out. Microsoft is uniquely positioned in that it equally serves the enterprise market - a market than would buy a graphene screen product long before consumers can afford it, and also before the ecosystem is fully fleshed out.
I'm personally in the tablet business. Which is why I stood up and took so much notice when I say that presentation. I've also been closely following all the other studies related to graphene applications - tuneable lasers, massively improved solar panel efficiency , nano-battery and circuitry tech, nano-manufacturing, water filtration, environmental clean-up, hydrogen technology, chemical manufacture and more.
But suffice to say, I think, like with the HoloLens, Microsoft would be wildly stupid to have endured something like being partially replaced in the rise of the smartphone without investing in being first to platform in the next shifts, and the next shifts are all quite predictable. And it's extremely doubtful to me, that they are that stupid, considering they have the HoloLens and have been planning a hybrid OS for five years, something that apple (hybrid OS) is far to stupid to do (they have officially said they won't merge iOS and OSX), but google is.
Indeed I think the ones you should probably be watching for deep signs of conservatism and market stupidity right now is apple. The level of forward thinking and market innovation seems to be incredibly stale under current leadership.
People will say that MSFTs lack of commitment in bailing out on windows mobile was shortsighted - but I disagree. Blackberry nearly bankrupt themselves trying to keep bb10 going, and several seperate OSes has not been the plan since windows 10. They did heavily invest in the balmer days, but it was already too late. And for fans of windows phone 8, and windows 8 - yes it has some touch screen advantages and also some extra stability, but it was also a product the market rejected. There have been some missteps, but despite being a windows 10 mobile user myself, I cannot really fault nadellas reasoning - the market share was poor, the split platform concept is not the vision anyway, and candybar touchscreens will one day become the past anyway. What's important therefor is having an OS that can scale to different input and output, and an ecosystem that can do likewise - something no one has to the degree windows 10 already has, and no one has fully.
Getting those peices in place, for the next reasonably predictable changes in computing is paramount, and more important than chasing the tail end, of the less profitable tail end of the post-adoption smartphone market. Catching the next wave, is more important that the soon dying breaths of the old one.
Whilst people complain about all the mistakes and things that have gone wrong, I myself am also amazed by all the providence and things that are going right.
*Apple refusing the hybridize it's OS, is massive - they clearly had the next best shot at it due to having both a quite scalable mobile OS, and a reasonably established desktop OS. That's something they'll regret later for sure.
*PWA is a surprise blessing - the vast majority of any mobile OS advantage comes in the form of light apps that could easily be served via PWA over 5G. In fact, the only apps that PWA will not be able to cover is high powered, processive intensive apps and games, the sort of which desktop has a massive advantage in. Which really only leaves drawing them over to UWP as an obstacle. The app gap itself, it appears, will entirely resolve itself as an obstacle. Googles massive backing of PWA is also a blessing here.
*Google obviously plans a hybrid OS, the leaked fushia. And they likely back PWA as hard as they do, because of that. But in the early days they seemed more behind getting android apps on fushia. It seems more like now they want to do away with the Linux basis, and android and chrome altogether. Which is why they are so all in on PWA - I suspect they intend to dump their app ecosystems entirely, and sever the past with the Linux base. But that also means that the only thing they really carry to cross the threshold between now and then is branding, services. Ie loyalty and familiarity.
If that android platform is totally burned to the ground, in the transition to hybrid, that provides some market instability Microsoft can capitalize on.
*Partnerships. Microsoft has done excellent work in doing what an underdog should always do - make freinds with others who want to overthrow the king. Amazon, steam, samsung and many others have been meeting with MSFT and making deals. Amazon seems to be making headway in IoT, servers, and would make excellent partners for MSFTs cloud services. Samsung have long wanted to be free of their dependence on google, to the point of being directly antagonistic to them and I suspect would love to get microsoft's OS in on their future graphene devices. Getting steam onside for the VR/AR future was obviously imperative as well, and hopefully some future arrangement can be created for bringing games to UWP, perhaps at least via their streaming services.
*the cloud. Many have much maligned msfts moves in azure, and the intelligent edge as "enterprise" and boring business. What people don't understand is that with IoT, and increased network speeds via faster wifi, faster mobile networks, and faster fibre (which will come, the fibre companies assure me), local speed and local power become less of an issue for latency, and the future is clear, distributed computing. That is to say, google and microsofts investment in cloud based services, cloud based computing are absolutely future consumer platforms. The cloud will not just be for storing data. It'll be for running AI, running tasks and processors, connecting your smart devices - it will be the thing that ties computers, collectively together into something truely controlled by AI. MSFT is doing well to capitalize on enterprise cloud investment, and to build out that cloud into an "intelligent edge" because that absolutely is a part of our future.
Some might see this all as optimism, and perhaps some of it is. I'm a fan after all. But I think in fact this is largely my ability to see beyond the immediate, whats in front of me, the present. Something a lot of people lack the ability to do. Of course, I equally wonder whether tech advancements will last that long, because I see catastrophic problems in the future of the global economy. But not withstanding a new great depression or worse, from where I sit, MSFT has just the right people in charge - people who like me, and unlike apples CEO, can see beyond the present.
This is also how I like to think, some optimism. Not because I think like a consumer, but because of all the companies that could "win the prize" and essentially become the corporate overloads of our future, given the importance of tech, MSFT is the one I distrust the least.
For example, were google in charge of my AI doctor, or apple in charge of the 3d printing of my house, I'm pretty sure I would be living in the sort of dystopia current sold to teenagers as fear pr0n.
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