Is having the same OS on desktop and mobile the winning strategy?

[msnawe]

Following a very interesting thread about Microsoft strategy for Windows phone, we can conclude that the majority opinion seems to consider that:

Pre Nokia acquisition :
- Microsoft made the best choice at the time to but Nokia over BB. It implies that Nokia feature phones like E91 were better than the bold.

Ditching Maemo and N9
- Microsoft was right to ditch Maemo (now sailfish) because wp7 was better.
- Nokia wp7/wp8 phones at the time of Z30 is believed to have better hardware and better OS than Z30.

- Microsoft is right to continue with W10 strategy of unifying mobile and desktop.

Even though I don't agree with the first 2 statements. Let's leave it, that's the majority opinion. Topic closed.

The 3rd statement deserves to be developed. Apple and Google, current leaders in mobile appear to consider it not essential. There is no plan to make MacOS and iOS converge. Chrome OS doesn't seem to be converging with Android.

Why is it that it doesn't seem important for these 2 leading ecosystem? Is it really going to be that relevant for Windows users? What are the main things that wp8.1 users want to see improved?

How many of these uses cases will be solved by universal apps? Are there other ways it could have been solved?

What features are really missing in w10?

What makes users stick to Android? To ios? Why would universal apps be so convincing rather that good mobile specific apps

Let's enjoy a good constructive thread, less emotional hopefully.

Thanks.

As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[msnawe]

Ok, from reading through business articles, it looks like this strategy is having a majority of sceptics I the general public but a good number of WP users who see a lot of value in it.


As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[jmshub]

There are some serious presumptions here. The first and largest is that Microsoft was looking at buying Blackberry, or that Blackberry would have sold to Microsoft back around the time of the Nokia acquisition. By the time that Microsoft has purchased Nokia, Nokia had discontinued their operating systems to exclusively develop Windows Phone handsets. They had aligned themselves with Microsoft, and they were Windows Phone's only dedicated partner when they sold their handset division to Microsoft.

Comparing Microsoft to Apple and Google is easy as they are competitors in the mobile market, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

Apple, like Microsoft, has had a desktop OS for years, arguably they were one of the most important players in the early days of desktop computing. But in the recent era, they have never been able to crack more than 5-10% of the desktop OS market with OSX. Apple has made more money from their devices than their computers since the heyday of the iPod. Now, over half of Apple's total revenue comes from iPhone. According to an article from Ed Bott at ZDnet in early 2014 ( Apple, Google, Microsoft: Where does the money come from? | ZDNet ), almost 3/4 of their revenue is iPhone and iPad, meaning iOS. iOS is keeping the lights on at Apple.

Google has never done a good job of integrating their products. They build competing products within their divisions and see what catches on. They pursued putting Android on laptops and PCs, but then started up the Chrome OS product, which has done much better in this space. What is important to note here is that Google doesn't really make any money off of Android or Chrome. Their revenue is generated by ad sales. They make money if you view those ads on Android or Chrome, so they have little incentive to really merge the two OSes into one cohesive unit.

Microsoft, until very recently, didn't do hardware at all. They generated all of their revenue from the software. Desktop OS is the one area that MS is still doing well, Windows is 90ish% of that market. So, when developing Windows Phone OS, and building an OS for tablets, it made sense from their point of view, to start with Windows, and push it down into a touch form factor, for smaller screens. Whether or not it is a winning strategy is too early to tell. But a Microsoft OS that is finally largely the same, from large desktop PCs down to phones, means that Microsoft can be more focused on their core product, Windows. Innovations on the PC OS trickle down to Windows Phones and tablets.

 

[msnawe]

Isn't it because of the anticipated erosion in revenues on the desktop that Microsoft feels compelled to compete in mobile and cloud services?

I can certainly understand why Microsoft started by trying to reuse Windows, no matter how prohibitive were the costs (they can afford them still). It's just that canning Maemo when their started working with Nokia meant they deprived themselves of a better mobile foundation which they could use.

It's true that blackberry wasn't really up for sale yet. But integrating Maemo with Microsoft ecosystem would have achieved results more quickly and they would already have gained market share because they could have avoided many reboots and invested time on other services.

Blackberries have made the mistake to stubbornly hold on to their past offerings. Is Microsoft not doing the same mistake?

Just a quick example, when I tried a lumia 640xl, there was a moment when the phone rebooted 3 times to deliver incremental updates. I forgot Windows desktop still does that. On a mobile it's the sort of things that remind that WP still has a foot in the 90s. There is no modern OS doing that in 2015. My linux PC hasn't rebooted in months.







As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[elindalyne]

You keep bringing up stuff that never took off... Please stop.

Microsoft was never going to use a Linux based distro for it's Mobile OS. It's absolutely useless conjecture

 

[jmshub]

Blackberries have made the mistake to stubbornly hold on to their past offerings. Is Microsoft not doing the same mistake?

Absolutely not. Microsoft is showing clearly that they are not chaining themselves to the past.The Microsoft of old would not be doing Office apps for Android and iOS. Certainly, the fact that they aren't the dominant personal computing platform forced them to play this hand, but Microsoft now competes in a world that is cross-compatible.

We won't know for probably years whether Microsoft's experiment to make Windows work on a smartphone will save Windows Phone, or not. But I'm sorry, I don't see any way that Microsoft could be in a better position today if they had poured money into Blackberry.

 

[msnawe]

How many Microsoft engineers have been working on wp6, + wp7 + wp8 + wp8.1, wp10? For how many years?

How many BB engineers have been working on bb10.1 +10.2 + 10.3? For how many years? How long did it take them to port their core apps to Android?

The velocity of execution clearly shows what scope have best returns / cost ratios. Now it's done.

Anyway most people believe it was a worthy investment. So let's forget about meego or bb10. I am really hoping for you that universal apps will work. I am really skeptical it was worth it and I am yet to read a compelling use case for it.



As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[EasilyTheBest]

Universal Apps is the only option Microsoft had to hopefully get app developers to make apps for Microsoft's ecosystem...
A developer will now see that instead of there being say 90 million possible customers (Windows Phone) earlier this year, he know sees a few months later theres possibly 200+ million customers.
Next year when Windows 10 is on every Xbox One and another perhaps 100 million Windows 10 desktop, laptop, tablet customers plus the Windows 10 Phone customers you will obviously see theres a much bigger incentive to make Windows Apps...
A few years from now if all goes to plan you will have ppl wondering why when they bought an app on their PC they can't download it for free on their Iphone while their mates with Windows Phones can...
Same goes for Xbox. A simple game on your phone you can download onto you X1 while their PS4 friends can't.

 

[elindalyne]

Dude. Just stop. BB10 was bought by BB back in 2010...

After it had already started it's decline and after MSFT had already released WP7.

 

[msnawe]

So for example, if I buy an app that finds the best restaurants near me, I will want to have it also on my Xbox and PC? If I buy a PC software to allows me to do video editing, I will want to use it on my phone?

The use cases of unified apps that are not Microsoft apps already aren't that many. Many of these common cases translate well into cloud services.

The main need for mobile apps will more likely require porting from Android. If that happens, you will end up eventually with Android user experience. You might as well just get an Android phone.


As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[EasilyTheBest]

If you had the same restaurant app on your phone and pc that could be helpful. You could find the restaurant at home on your 50" tv pc, nice big screen to browse. You could favourite the restaurant then once your out of the house a few days later ready for a meal you could pull I up on your phone with Here Maps giving directions.
I do lots of video editing. You could do all the main heavy stuff at home then do sum simple cleaning up on your phone. When your back at him you can render what you edited earlier.
I really think your way too negative.

If you had the same restaurant app on your phone and pc that could be helpful. You could find the restaurant at home on your 50" tv pc, nice big screen to browse. You could favourite the restaurant then once your out of the house a few days later ready for a meal you could pull I up on your phone with Here Maps giving directions.
I do lots of video editing. You could do all the main heavy stuff at home then do sum simple cleaning up on your phone. When your back at him you can render what you edited earlier.
I really think your way too negative.

 

[EasilyTheBest]

You are way to negative. Use your imagination..

 

[msnawe]

I think I am realistic.

Most people would wait to be home to complete video editing for the advanced users. For casual video editing, it's already available on all phones.

I think most people got into the habit of either a cloud based bookmarking feature or share by mail or clip to Evernote.

Everything I find on my PC that I want to retrieve goes on Evernote. I can find it instantly and it can the link. All smartphones already have integration between browser and other apps like maps.

Most people have already adopted these simple habits and universal apps are now not so relevant. I think they would have been a killer feature if Microsoft did deliver it in 2007. Not anymore.

I think I am being realistic.




As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[jmshub]

Obviously, some universal apps will be of limited value. You found both ends of that spectrum with your examples. But, down the middle of the bell curve, there are many apps that would be useful on any type of device. Simple things like Audible, which can easily benefit from coding once and operating on Windows desktops, laptops, tablets, televisions, and phones. This is the real benefit of universal apps, the ability for a developer to create an app that works everywhere that Windows does.

In the end, you are arguing that Microsoft would somehow be better if they had purchased and implemented Blackberry, the only mainstream mobile OS that looks enviously on at Microsoft's mobile share. One of the only things that Windows phone has in it's favor at this point is that it can't cost Microsoft much to develop, most of the costs are already shouldered by developing Windows. If their mobile OS was an entirely different product with no shared underpinnings, the low marketshare would be stake through the heart of their mobile OS platform.

 

[a5cent]

This is the real benefit of universal apps, the ability for a developer to create an app that works everywhere that Windows does.

Exactly! Anyone who can't see beyond the average consumer's horizon won't understand universal apps. Universal apps are about developers and those who finance developers (corporations). IF consumers benefit from universal apps (IMHO that's still a big IF), they will do so only indirectly and in ways that are hard to prove or quantify.

It will be very difficult to point to any specific feature and say it would have come to market later, been less consistent across devices, have been of poorer quality, or would not have arrived at all, were it not universal apps. In most situations we probably won't be able to prove such affirmations, but they will be true in at least some cases.

It is unfortunate for MS, that from a consumers point of view, there just isn't anything which is clearly unique to universal apps. Anything achievable with universal apps can also be achieved in some other way. The difference is only in how those objectives are achieved... subtleties most consumers don't typically care about.

 

[msnawe]

Even as a developer I may not end up using something like universal apps. Maybe I would want my mobile app to be very different than my PC in UX and feature scope.

I may not interact with same hardware, and the contexts are pretty different.

I think the cases where I would want to write a universal app, for which there isn't already a dominant dedicated app, are not that many.


As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[elindalyne]

You might want to read up a little on Universal apps before making assumptions...

Even on devices with wildly different hardware, say a desktop and a phone, you can call the same API to get an image from a camera. And in the case you do want divergent code paths for different devices, you can absolutely do this within your project.

 

[a5cent]

Even as a developer I may not end up using something like universal apps. Maybe I would want my mobile app to be very different than my PC in UX and feature scope.

I may not interact with same hardware, and the contexts are pretty different.

From a consumer's point of view, it's easy to find examples for the types of apps where MS' UWP doesn't seem to be of much benefit. Granted.

However, as you've just shown, it's harder to come up with such examples if you're looking at the issue from a developer's perspective. You've already had to resort to vague generalizations! Give me a concrete example of such a consumer focused app (obviously I'm not interested in discussing military flight simulators or the software that runs the NYSE), and I think in most cases it will be very difficult to provide clear and obvious reasons why a developer should avoid using MS' UWP (which is what you're suggesting).

Sure, we can probably come up with some examples where MS' UWP might not provide any immediate benefits to developers either, but implying that this invalidates the entire approach makes no sense whatsoever.

If you truly want to understand what UWP is good for, you just need to change your focus a little, so as to look at all the types of problems the UWP can be a reasonable solution for! IMHO many of the 1st party apps that ship with W10M and W10 are great examples of that (Groove Music, Outlook Calendar and Mail, etc).

It seems to me you've just mounted huge blinders to ensure you'll only ever see the things UWP can't do or isn't good at. Take 'em off!

 

[msnawe]

Actually your example Google Music, Outlook Calendar and Mail are quite telling. Your best examples of universal apps are the ones for which there is no gap: These apps are already available.

This is exactly the point. This is why universal apps would have been great back in 2007 when Microsoft needed to migrate core apps to WP. Now what is the point of rewriting existing apps to make them universal?

Clearly the onus is on you to point to an example of area not covered already and well suited for universal apps.





As soon as there is a BlackBerry 10 dual SIM, I fully quit Android.

 

[elindalyne]

This is outdated at this point -
Our 10 Favorite Windows 10 Universal Apps for PCs and Phones | PCMag.com

A universal Snapchat app would make people lose their minds... As would any number of popular apps that aren't currently available on the platform.

I don't understand what you are having an issue grasping in regards to universal apps. 1 code base targets multiple devices. A good solution to this is pretty much what devs have wanted forever.

And its not a "this sort of works if I do a ton of extra work", this is something that works in the field right now...