The United States Dept. of Justice wants Google to give up the keys to Android — Should Microsoft give the "Surface Phone" another try?

[Windows Central]

Microsoft has utterly given up on its mobile aspirations, but maybe the right regulatory ruling could (and should) bring it back to the party.

The United States Dept. of Justice wants Google to give up the keys to Android — Should Microsoft give the "Surface Phone" another try? : Read more

 

[ShinyProton]

Seriously?
Windows Phone is long dead and already decomposed. Leave it there.

Microsoft totally lost its mobile market presence - for both consumers and developers. Furthermore, it's not even able to make a decent Android phone that would appeal the mass and support it properly.

No. Just no.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

I would love this, but I don't think MS has the culture to do this any longer. To be sure: I would love to be wrong on that. I hope I'm wrong. I want a vibrant MS.

Microsoft has demonstrated with the loss of Panay as merely the capstone example of their abandonment of end-user touchpoints and concern for great EUX (end user experience). This excellent article includes others: like the effective abandonment of Android versions of their apps and the end of Windows Phone and Duo. Other recent and key examples: their mismanagement of the Xbox ecosystem, the lack of innovation in Windows, the termination of multiple PC-based hardware initiatives, the lack of advancement in all apps (with the possible exception of Teams, but even those changes are mostly back-end and not user-facing). Hell, Excel still has a single combined undo across all open worksheets and no dark mode, Outlook is stalled pending a move to some deflated, knee-capped web-app.

I think what Microsoft has become is based on Nadella's vision for a company that provides back-end services and infrastructure to other companies. He views that as high-margin and low-risk and he does cloud services well. He tried to add holographic computing, but that was too close to a direct user touchpoint, and so it failed. His hope with AI is that MS can just function as a background provider of the capabilities, no direct user connection (and we can already see how Copilot is failing compared with others, even if its underlying AI is better). Nadella seems incapable of driving success and greatness among his lieutenants in any other areas. In fact, he seems to snuff any bright spots that do arise, hence Panay's flight for his own sanity.

Microsoft needed someone like Nadella with his Azure background and strong cloud focus to move Office into the modern era and grow MS' IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) platform. But that is all running well. What MS now needs is a leader to rebuild their end-user experience side w/o breaking the good that Nadella has done on cloud and IaaS. Absent that, unless the government blows up Google to save MS (and as much as I dislike Google, their fall should not be due to governmental meddling), MS is going to see its ability to push its core cloud and IaaS offerings suffer against Google who can better bundle a full stack experience including end-user applications and features on dedicated hardware.

The tragic irony is that MS still has good relationships with hardware partners. It was (and for some may still be) the gold standard in treating third-party developers extremely well. It has some of the best development tools on the planet. These are all strengths, strategic assets, that MS is wasting, pissing them away. Worse, absent constant nurturing, those golden-egg laying geese weaken and wither on the vine. (pardon the horribly mixed metaphor).

So sad to see MS slowly poison everything outside of Nadella's Azure line. He did what he was hired to do: focus on and grow their cloud strengths, but he seems to lack the vision to recognize that even the cloud relies on end-user touchpoints to remain a growth engine over the long, long term. MS is no danger in the next 3-5 years. But after that, if they don't right their EUX (internally and through fostering those external software and hardware partnerships), I think they are likely to grow more slowly than the other tech companies and eventually fade from relevance as they fall not down, but behind the more rapid growth of others. It's not enough to run a good business. You must also innovate faster and delight your customers more than the competition.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

Seriously?
Windows Phone is long dead and already decomposed. Leave it there.

Microsoft totally lost its mobile market presence - for both consumers and developers. Furthermore, it's not even able to make a decent Android phone that would appeal the mass and support it properly.

No. Just no.

I have no argument with your summary statements -- you are indisputably correct on where things stand as of now. But that doesn't mean Microsoft can't learn from what it did wrong, make changes, and be better. In the world before Windows Phone, Microsoft's successes frequently came from failed launches followed by perseverance and iterations, with each new version fixing the problems with the prior version until they got it right (e.g., Excel taking over from Lotus 1-2-3, Word taking over from WordPerfect, taking over GUI leadership from Mac, Outlook taking over Novell Groupware, Windows Mobile coming from behind Palm to mobile dominance, IE dethroning the seemingly unstoppable Netscape, Xbox 360 trouncing PS3). That was how MS beat all its larger competitors to achieve its various dominant positions, approaching each of those as the smaller upstart.

That approach will work in any area where MS has:

1. The resources to keep iterating until it gets it right
2. Strengths it can leverage to have a novel advantage in a new product area

For mobile, MS has the money to pursue a mobile presence. Three obvious strengths it has that no one else can bring to mobile: MS has the Office install base, IT departments across many enterprises, and Xbox gamers using Gamepass or interested in boosting their Gamerscore (though all of these are fading in importance by the month as MS fails to support them). Further, MS has arguably the best AI backend to produce the most capable mobile device or toolset (whether on top of Android or their own). Therefore, MS has the foundation and resources to prosper in mobile IF IT CHOOSES TO FIGHT FOR THIS SPACE.

Also, MS should not just scrap things and start over when it realizes it's doing something wrong, but merely iterate in small steps of continual improvement: shave off the rough patches and expand on the parts people like so that it doesn't alienate the early adopters with each generation (e.g., the way they kept shooting themselves in the foot by starting over from Windows Phone 7 -> 8 -> 10).

MS lost this space because it threw in the towel rather than doubling down and fixing its prior mistakes via iteration. MS has also NEVER leveraged their strengths properly, which is key to any success like this. Basic corporate strategy training teaches using SWOT analysis -- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to develop a plan. Instead of using that, MS threw some crap against the wall, saw it didn't stick and, per Nadella's "Hit Refresh," shrugged and walked away.

DO NOT HIT REFRESH. ITERATE.

 

[ShinyProton]

I have no argument with your summary statements -- you are indisputably correct on where things stand as of now. But that doesn't mean Microsoft can't learn from what it did wrong, make changes, and be better. In the world before Windows Phone, Microsoft's successes frequently came from failed launches followed by perseverance and iterations, with each new version fixing the problems with the prior version until they got it right (e.g., Excel taking over from Lotus 1-2-3, Word taking over from WordPerfect, taking over GUI leadership from Mac, Outlook taking over Novell Groupware, Windows Mobile coming from behind Palm to mobile dominance, IE dethroning the seemingly unstoppable Netscape, Xbox 360 trouncing PS3). That was how MS beat all its larger competitors to achieve its various dominant positions, approaching each of those as the smaller upstart.

That approach will work in any area where MS has:

1. The resources to keep iterating until it gets it right
2. Strengths it can leverage to have a novel advantage in a new product area

For mobile, MS has the money to pursue a mobile presence. Three obvious strengths it has that no one else can bring to mobile: MS has the Office install base, IT departments across many enterprises, and Xbox gamers using Gamepass or interested in boosting their Gamerscore (though all of these are fading in importance by the month as MS fails to support them). Further, MS has arguably the best AI backend to produce the most capable mobile device or toolset (whether on top of Android or their own). Therefore, MS has the foundation and resources to prosper in mobile IF IT CHOOSES TO FIGHT FOR THIS SPACE.

Also, MS should not just scrap things and start over when it realizes it's doing something wrong, but merely iterate in small steps of continual improvement: shave off the rough patches and expand on the parts people like so that it doesn't alienate the early adopters with each generation (e.g., the way they kept shooting themselves in the foot by starting over from Windows Phone 7 -> 8 -> 10).

MS lost this space because it threw in the towel rather than doubling down and fixing its prior mistakes via iteration. MS has also NEVER leveraged their strengths properly, which is key to any success like this. Basic corporate strategy training teaches using SWOT analysis -- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to develop a plan. Instead of using that, MS threw some crap against the wall, saw it didn't stick and, per Nadella's "Hit Refresh," shrugged and walked away.

DO NOT HIT REFRESH. ITERATE.

I will NOT happen.

Microsoft destroyed every consumer ecosystem they had. Windows is only alive because of the corporate world and, to a lesser extent, the gaming. The operating system that ruled the world is almost not relevant anymore.

Microsoft is almost an exclusively cloud computing company nowadays.

Consumers are gone. They are mobile. With them, developers jumped ship long ago. The Windows Store is a pathetic confirmation of this trend that started almost a decade ago. And it will not change.
Windows and Office are the last remnants of the glorious era. And both are facing a slow death toward the irrelevancy path. And Microsoft does not really care.

So, forget about a consumer ecosystem return in the Microsoft realm. Neither Microsoft nor consumers want it.

 

[GraniteStateColin]

I will NOT happen.

Microsoft destroyed every consumer ecosystem they had. Windows is only alive because of the corporate world and, to a lesser extent, the gaming. The operating system that ruled the world is almost not relevant anymore.

Microsoft is almost an exclusively cloud computing company nowadays.

Consumers are gone. They are mobile. With them, developers jumped ship long ago. The Windows Store is a pathetic confirmation of this trend that started almost a decade ago. And it will not change.
Windows and Office are the last remnants of the glorious era. And both are facing a slow death toward the irrelevancy path. And Microsoft does not really care.

So, forget about a consumer ecosystem return in the Microsoft realm. Neither Microsoft nor consumers want it.

I agree with most of that. I disagree that no one wants it. I want it. More important, and the reason I want it: it's in Microsoft's strategic interest to want it, even if their current leadership disagrees. They are objectively wrong. With their current path, they are setting themselves on a glide path to irrelevancy, which squeezes margins and hurts shareholders. Nothing that will happen this year or next, but if all a company has is a service with no brand value, then it will eventually become a commodity, and a commodity has negligible value beyond its book value (no goodwill or brand value on top of that, which is where most of the profits lie). That's a horrible place for any tech company to end up and it will shred their market cap.