Lots of feedback both up votes and my own entries. Tabs might come... Not holding out that it will be an RS3 feature though.
If you don't believe me that Ms doesn't focus or stick with an idea long enough then you don't have enough of the history.
Well I heard tabs were a plan. Never know with rumours, MS keeps things more secret that the leak minded, rumour mill might like to think.
So far as 'lack of focus', I'm 39, and have been into computers since the vic20, and also worked in IT, and now also a tech business. There might be areas I lack familiarity, but I think I have a fairly good sense of the big picture.
I know they needed to commercially pivot from windows 7 etc, due to the rise of touch. Which resulted in the mix bag of 8, and eventually the more refined vision of 10. On phones that meant many transitions, while the pivot found the correct direction (and of course said pivot is a bit of herculean effort, coding a one OS, bringing developers to the platform, and leveraging existing market successes into new markets, it takes a long time to bake and produce results, and in the end likely millions of man hours more of coding).
I know that they needed to dump nokia because it was a money burning pit. Even if a founder type CEO had the mind to burn that money for marketshare, his shareholders would have ousted him.
But I cannot bring to mind any great, saleable technologies they have abandoned through lack of effort under Nadella. All I personally can see is a company that needed to radically shift its vision, has done so successfully, now under new leadership, and could have easily ended up being capitalist worm food if it didn't know how to rebalance itself.
What I see is a successful combination of long term vision, and hard market pragmatism. It's not exactly how a founder would run a company, they might take more risks, but its also not as conservative as many companies are run either under such circumstances or when the sailing is good. Nadella seems to present a good mixture of risk and conservation, as a CEO under the circumstances. And as a man who has created a vision, of a future minded MS, than the shareholders clearly believe in, he MUST remain commited to that. To give up on UWP or onecore, or any of the other main ideas now would make developers, shareholders and everyone lose faith. It would be commercial suicide.
I still don't envy the task that lays ahead of the company - making Cortana better than GA, or alexa, fully unifying the platform as much as possible, carefully drawing in developers for the UWP, preparing for, and laying the groundwork for mixed reality, VR and AR, solidifying gaming, and simultaneously drawing in the consumer market piece by piece, chess move by chess move, whilst trying to hold onto its enterprise market by extending things like cognition into that space. (and making hardware).
I think in a way AR/VR is kind of a key piece. It's something dedicated hardware does much better, and its a consumer item that when it rises, and becomes affordable, its rise will be titanic. If MS can hold that in the consumer market, in specialist enterprise fields like medicine, education and engineering, it's place is solid, even if everything else flounders.
The voice thing is also imperative they get into soon. The IoT is already being populated, albeit mainly by gimmick obsessed consumers, but its a market that is bound to grow, and MS cannot afford to be to late to the party with.
I mean its a big company, and it has a solid plan overall, but tis managing a lot of variables, juggling competing priorities, and essentially trying to play like a founder, with some vision, whilst still being held on a stockholders leash.
I'm actually reasonably confident that MS's long term play will unfold as it intends, even if it takes a long time. Perhaps that's a matter of subjective perspective. But I say that more as an admirer of MS current business strategies, than a fan of their products.
I am not sure if MS will win the assistant/IoT race, but I'd like to see that, as a fan of the vision. They are definitely ahead in virtuosity - and that as I mentioned I believe is very important.
Just think of this - the majority of the internet bandwidth these days is used for entertainment. From porn, to movies and TV and games. Those are gigantic industries. Entertainment dominates our technology. VR/AR represents the next phase of all that entertainment. Doing things as small as the NEON design scheme, or as big as the intergration with HoloLens and mixed reality - that's plain smart.
And the arm, and windows s play, seem like guaranteed developer drawcards. Windows tablets are growing, and cheaper LTE enabled devices will cement that. It'll also bring those GPS/chat/phone based apps that will be later needed for re-entry into pocket devices and wearables.
However equally they are well behind the race of IoT, smarthomes, and wearables. I agree with you, in that, as much developer hours have surely done into their work so far, their window for a comeback market take over, however long that takes, might close.
We have to see some of those plans come to market soon (this year or next at the latest)
I guess neither of us, have long to find out what the Redmond giant can bring to the table against its larger more cash ready competitors, google and apple are bringing.
Of course some times if feels like a year is too late - but look at google assistant. As late as that was, its better enough, that it makes up for it. So perhaps make some good moves this year, or make some amazing ones next year, would be a nice sum.
It's not even a matter of the smartphone market, or what people are bringing in desktops. Its about who can gain a lead in the new emerging markets. And there MS is ahead in some areas, and well behind in others. The big vision, hopefully isn't too big!
(And not so secretly wishing QUALCOMM gets its way in court and blocks the iPhone from being imported to the US - that 30 odd percent of apples revenue)
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