Is Microsoft taking the mickey out of us? Are we being mocked?

[Chregu]

The sky is falling!!! Microsoft hates windows phone, I need a curb to jump off of...../sarcasm

Talk about drama queens , some of you guys need to worry about more important things in life, this coming from someone who is obsessed with technology, but lets not get all emo people

I've been using Microsoft phones for 12 years now. Even though I often felt like Microsoft isn't taking its customer serious and Microsoft often pulled the strangest stunts I kept on buying Microsoft phones.

Of course I get a little emotional now that I think that Microsoft really went too far and I'll buy a phone from another platform because of it.

 

[Shobin Drogan]

I can't believe how much anger is in this post for a calender app. LOL

 

[Great deal]

I can't believe how much anger is in this post for a calender app. LOL

Its not the calendar app on its own, its a string of failures culminating with this particular failure that has tipped the seesaw over. We have all waited patiently, swallowed the pain and stuck with MS. Its just that its such a basic error that makes it soo soo frustrating. Also its not just a"n app" its actually quite serious. Picture that you run an IT department. You have given Lumia phones to your sales department, they are on the road meeting clients. Clients arrange a time to speak with you and you pull out your phone to add it..it fails, you look incompetent and lose said client, ok its a touch extreme but not beyond the realms of possibility. Or your in charge of purchasing the IT systems for your business. You are answerable to the CTO/Stakeholders and your reputation/job is on the line, you fight and push to get WP - you convince them to go with this and then this happens....how 'confident' would you/they be in the system?

 

[Hermes Negruzzi]

Honestly I think the main problem is the leader of the project (Joe). In order for a human to be successful, his head must be pretty damn good these days, same goes for everything. As long as the brain is messed up, the whole body is messed up. Microsoft's apps are so bad, I can't believe it.
Also, let's be real here, the progress of WP is ridiculously slow, I mean... It's been a couple of years so far and nothing major happened, there are simple and essential stuff that everyone needs and they don't do them and most would require a couple days of coding. I don't know what to say about the future, but if they keep this pace it's going to be a shipwreck in the next couple of years.
Sure, there are lots of small OEMs joining Microsoft, but for them to sell their phones, the OS must be great, and so far it's not really great. A change in leadership would do wonders.
Also they should fire the whole XBox dev team, Music/Video/Games are so slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow it's frustrating and IE, well... IE sucks! They don't support a lot of cool stuff going nowadays on the internet and the fact that we can't change the default browser to one with another engine (i.e. Chrome) or the music/video player to a better one it feels like we're back on the communism days.
We need more options to choose from since Microsoft is not able to fulfill our demands.
They want to be the next big thing and they can't even make they're few customers happy.
I hope one day Satya reads these flaming comments because they are the only things that matter nowadays.
That's my 2 cents.

 

[Pete]

That scenario isn't terribly realistic. Apps crashing won't make a salesman look incompetent - failing to find one of several ways of recording that information would do though. People are generally used to apps crashing from time to time.

Mistakes happen. For all of the risk assessment/testing/retesting that a core app goes through, it just takes one person to copy/paste the wrong deployment file or tick the wrong tick box for something untoward to happen. Labelling the entire Microsoft corporation or department as incompetent as a result is inappropriate and short-sighted. Failures in the computing world happens - Facebook goes down, Twitter goes down, Office 356 hosted Exchange systems go down (now that's a real business losing situation). It happens - read the right tech websites and you'll get stories of something failing every week.

It's life.

A few years ago, the IT department where I used to work (about 150 people) were made redundant and the services were outsourced. The outsourcing company were risk-averse, so did as little as humanly possible in order to limit risk of things breaking. The result was a stable system - the downside was that there was no evolution, no improvements made, the whole system just stagnated.

In order to move forwards, changes have to happen, and that brings the risk of a few things breaking, a few mistakes. If I wanted stability, I'd buy a WinMo 6.5 and never update it or add apps.

But no, I'd rather live thanks very much.

 

[Chregu]

In order to move forwards, changes have to happen, and that brings the risk of a few things breaking, a few mistakes. If I wanted stability, I'd buy a WinMo 6.5 and never update it or add apps.

But no, I'd rather live thanks very much.

Moving forward is good. But did the update do anything except breaking the app?

I guess if there were regular feature updates people would care much less. But this was after weeks an update that might make the app a little faster or correct a few bugs nobody notices, I really think it could be tested before it's released. A few days more or less won't matter.

Also, if everything else were fine in the WP world I guess people would have barely noticed.

 

[Pete]

Moving forward is good. But did the update do anything except breaking the app?

Let me repeat myself here. That build of the app was more than likely not intended to hit the Windows Phone store. Human error is the acceptable risk or progress. That's the point I was attempting to make.

 

[Ebuka Allison]

Let me repeat myself here. That build of the app was more than likely not intended to hit the Windows Phone store. Human error is the acceptable risk or progress. That's the point I was attempting to make.

Hence the point everyone else is trying to make. It's a symptom of a greater carelessness. As Daniel Rubino points out on the homepage, Microsoft is turning allies into enemies with this and the Xbox music debacle.

 

[a5cent]

Deleted . Mistakenly posted from phone

 

[jlzimmerman]

Windows Phone market share: Crash and burn | BGR

Maybe they can see the writing on the wall and don't care any longer.

It's from BGR. Enough said....

 

[engineermoore]

It's from BGR. Enough said....

And iit ignores the data from every other country where windows phone has made big gains. You can make anything look true if you only choose data which backs up your story.

 

[jlzimmerman]

Also, let's be real here, the progress of WP is ridiculously slow, I mean... It's been a couple of years so far and nothing major happened, there are simple and essential stuff that everyone needs and they don't do them and most would require a couple days of coding. I don't know what to say about the future, but if they keep this pace it's going to be a shipwreck in the next couple of years.

Yet Apple releases one phone a year with the same boring interface and they are Gods.

But yeah, I disagree with you. MS has been on a steam roll lately, making changes across their entire ecosystem. And compared to Android and especially Apple, MS has made copious amount of changes and updates. And speaking of Apple, what real changes have they done in the past two years? And yeah, their stuff "just works," but when you create something only to work with your own ecosystem, it's not that difficult. Most of MS's products and services are built to work across multiple platforms. iWork for Windows or Android? Nope. FaceTime? Nope. Find My Friends? Nope.

With MS's list of things being 10x greater than both Android and Apple, I understand that it takes a little longer. MS offers over 30 IT and Professional services alone.

They have been making great strides even with the recent inconveniences of app breaks. I remember the same thing when I was with Android.

 

[fiveaces01]

I think most everyone here chose WP over all the other mobile phones out there because we truly liked the OS and all the possibilities it seemed to represent. I loved the fact that MS found a way to implement the old "early enthusiasts" program with the preview for developers and I have learned a lot from building and publishing an app in the store with all the resources that MS has made available to us for little or no cost. That being said, after reading seeing all the objections written here and at other Forums I can't help but feel that MS is not listening to our concerns about apps that aren't available don't work and some of them MS has no one to blame but their own employees. The Music App is SO obviously important to those of us that chose Windows for a phone that it should be a very high priority to their efforts. So should any other native apps and that is where all the outrage here is coming from...not one mistake in particular but a whole series of them.

 

[Dietrich Cleijne]

I haven't got a clue what all this blabbering, ranting and raving is all about, but i have no issues wat so ever with my Lumia.
Let me point out to you that lots of you are using the Developer Preview, which is not the official release, it's a test candidate.
You shouldn't download and install Beta software if you don't wish to participate in the improvement proces, because that is what the DP is all about, nothing more, nothing less.

My Lumia is still waiting for the official update, and it's working like advertised, it's a damn good machine.

 

[Pete]

DP isn't beta software, neither is it a test candidate. It's an early release of the final version so that app developers can test their apps in the real world.

 

[a5cent]

There are no officially announced devices in the pipeline, and when we look at the current set-up it does really look bad.

<snipped>
As long as there is no real high-end device announced I really don't believe that Microsoft cares much about Windows Phone. Rumors on the main page that consist of "somebody said something will be great" don't really change that.

The point being made was that MS is still investing in WP devices. Having new WP devices in the pipeline proves that. We can be sure of this despite the lack of official announcements. You've just likely missed all the product numbers recently showing up on AdDuplex.

You are asking MS to announce a high end device now. At the same time, I read almost every day how MS announces things too early, because people are too impatient to wait for an announced product for more than a week. We can't have it both ways.

I agree that the current line up is weak. I'm just willing to give MS some slack. We don't know what the situation was inside Nokia just before the purchase.

 

[Ebuka Allison]

I haven't got a clue what all this blabbering, ranting and raving is all about, but i have no issues wat so ever with my Lumia.
Let me point out to you that lots of you are using the Developer Preview, which is not the official release, it's a test candidate.
You shouldn't download and install Beta software if you don't wish to participate in the improvement proces, because that is what the DP is all about, nothing more, nothing less.

My Lumia is still waiting for the official update, and it's working like advertised, it's a damn good machine.

This simply isn't true. It is not true and it is not true. WP 8.1 is done and dusted and the team is working on GDR1 now.

 

[a5cent]

This simply isn't true. It is not true and it is not true. WP 8.1 is done and dusted and the team is working on GDR1 now.

Correct. What is also true, is that WP8.1 can be done and dusted, and still exhibit very flaky behaviour, because none of the devices with the dev preview have firmware to match.

There are still a ton of people who don't get that... some are just completely baffled by the fact that an older version of WP8.1 can exist on the 630 and work great, while newer versions of WP8.1 don't yet work as well on preview devices.

My point is, that while WP8.1 was finished long ago, that doesn't mean we can expect things to work as well as a complete and final software package would. In other words, despite the preview not being a beta, it might help a lot of people's sanity if they thought of it as such regardless.

On a side note: I'd be willing to bet that all the recent updates to WP8.1 didn't really improve the OS at all, but were rather just focused on getting the new OS to play better with the various older firmware versions on our devices.

 

[AngrySprintUser]

As an ex iOS user, there was plenty of issues when their updates would role out as well, and lots of patches to fix them constantly. Just appears some people are viewing MS through a microscope while iOS users can be fed dog sh** and think it's filet mignon.

 

[Chregu]

The point being made was that MS is still investing in WP devices. Having new WP devices in the pipeline proves that. We can be sure of this despite the lack of official announcements. You've just likely missed all the product numbers recently showing up on AdDuplex.

I have read about them, but as long as we don't know what's behind these numbers I don't care much. Once upon a time Nokia had an entire spectrum of different devices, the 520, the 620, the 720, the 820, the 920 and a little later the 1020. Now we have the 630, soon the 930 and the somewhat older 1520. That means behind none of these numbers has to be a high-end device, Microsoft might just return to the old portfolio.

You are asking MS to announce a high end device now. At the same time, I read almost every day how MS announces things too early, because people are too impatient to wait for an announced product for more than a week. We can't have it both ways.

I certainly don't want them to announce a high-end device. They are just releasing a phone priced as a high-end device at this moment, it wouldn't make any sense to announce another one right now. What they could have done is giving the 930 a lower number and sell it for a little bit more than the similar built Xperia Z1 (the 930 has a higher screen resolution and twice the memory, that's it). Then they would have had room for a real high-end device.

Also it is true that I think it's questionable to announce a phone that much in advance, most of all because the 930 features mostly off-the-shelf components and it's being sold for months under a different name.

I agree that the current line up is weak. I'm just willing to give MS some slack. We don't know what the situation was inside Nokia just before the purchase.

Well, the current rumors are that there will be a high-end device announced in fall. If previous releases are anything to go by, it will take a few more months until this phone will hit stores. I'm not really excited about rumors like "3D gestures", for what I've seen in these tech videos, it provides no advantage to just hitting the screen. In addition the last 3D phone from Amazon was pretty disappointing. Also, instead of a implementing possibly gimmicky 3D function they would rather work on making the core experience better. All of that leaves me not really excited.

Please don't get me wrong though, I want Microsoft to succeed, I think Windows Phone is great. And maybe there will be this incredible phone everybody is dreaming about. Just based on all the years I've been using Microsoft phones and Microsoft products in general, I can't really believe that. However, when I'll buy an iPhone 6 or an Android device based on this frustration in fall, that doesn't mean at all I won't be buying a Windows Phone device again.