Microsoft: Windows Phone isn't our focus this year!

[TheCudder]

This is my take on why Microsoft isn't pushing mobile at the moment...

I think their reasoning is because Windows 10 Mobile could eventually become an attractive phone OS --- and by eventually, I mean long term, like 5 years or longer. And I don't say that to be funny, but as technology matures, Microsoft's continuum concept will become extremely powerful and with their push of UWP apps, Microsoft has a chance to fill their app store with quality apps --- without even asking companies and developers to do it for Windows Phones. Sure these developers still have to target & design a UI for phone, but it will be the same backend code running on all XBOX, PC, Tablets & HoloLens devices. So if you think about it, it's not a bad plan --- Microsoft could potentially indirectly save Windows Mobile.


Sataya is playing this very well

 

[Kram Sacul]

I must've missed the year when they did focus on Windows Phone.

 

[Kodiak12]

I think some of you are clinging to false hope. I didn't want to believe WM10 was dead but all one needs to do is open their eyes and follow the money (like everything else in life).

It's done. Over. Kaput.

I also believe MS has flooded the market with their last bit of phone inventory they were committed to before somebody of consequence finally pulled the plug on future development. No sense sitting on a warehouse full of crap.

Last December, I chucked my lowly yet coveted 535 and 640 phones. Too many bugs on the software side (what little I could find anyway). Finally went back to my Apple ecosystem and mainstay apps with all their built in maturity and polish which can only be realized over time. Still not fond of the embarrassing iSheep crowd and their undying need to "love" the world's largest corporation but hey... it is what it is.

Truth be told... I have all my MS apps running smoothly on iOS/OSX many of which seem to run better than their Windows counterparts. A virtual copy of Win10 on the mac takes care of what little I need it for.

Interesting times indeed.

 

[Lord Method Man]

Follwing the standard process for killing off a product:

1) Consolidate support around "core" users and give up on broad market use.
- Windows 10 Mobile devices released for WP enthusiasts with little to no marketing for them.

2) Announce that the platform currently isn't a focus.
- Myerson's comments yesterday.

3) Announce the that platform is being discontinued.
- ???

RIP WP, glad I jumped ship before things got as bad as they are now.

 

[LUGJUG]

Originally posted by Lord Method Man
Follwing the standard process for killing off a product:

1) Consolidate support around "core" users and give up on broad market use.
- Windows 10 Mobile devices released for WP enthusiasts with little to no marketing for them.

2) Announce that the platform currently isn't a focus.
- Myerson's comments yesterday.

3) Announce the that platform is being discontinued.
- ???

RIP WP, glad I jumped ship before things got as bad as they are now.

Then why are you here on this forum too continue if you are so happy you jumped ship then sail away on your new platform and stop spreading unneeded negativity that is completely unfounded it is just your take on reality.

 

[Jcmg62]

Windows 10 mobile is most definitely not dead. Microsoft wouldn't be working flat out to bring the likes of HP on board just to kill it. All their saying is that it's not a do or die core priority for them right now. Windows Mobile is here to stay

 

[a5cent]

Not sure if you're saying mobile is different from laptop/PC, but if that is what you're saying, that's not really true. They share quite a bit of the same code.

I think Hazem Khaled's point was that while they didn't specifically say Windows 10 mobile, given that they use the same codebase, they are actually working on both and that's a good thing.

It ultimately comes down to to how much the two OSes must share before you'd consider them to be the same.

The two OSes share the kernel, the CLR, the WinRT APIs, and most importantly, some UWP apps. That's it. However, for most of the UWP apps, most IT professionals would argue that they aren't part of the OS, but rather just bundled with it.

You can also look at it this way:

W10M (32bit) install size ~3GB
W10 (32bit) install size ~9GB

edit: Going only by install size, we'd have to say the two OSes share at most 30%, but since W10M isn't fully contained in W10 it's even much less than that.

With W10M being roughly a third of the size of W10, I think it's absolutely true to say "the two aren't the same". If you want more proof you might also consider the state of W10, which runs reliably on almost any hardware released during the last decade, while MS can't get W10M to run on 20 clearly defined hardware configurations released during the last two years. The two OSes also have very different release schedules that are separated by multiple months.

All of that points to them not being the same!

All we can truthfully say is that they share some common components. Suggesting that is comparable to being "the same" means we bought into MS' marketing rather than caring about technical accuracy. However, I'll admit that for most users technical accuracy may not be that important. On a site like this I think it should be though.

 

[Rugish Dapeca]

I think what may end up happening is Microsoft will cut way back (if not entirely) from making any new mobile hardware and focus on the unified software across all the platforms. They will open the door for more OEMs to make new phones that will run W10M, such as HP for example. I think they will stick with producing a few phones over the next few years as they get more OEMs on-board. Then they can let them have the hardware side and Microsoft can once again focus on the software.

I know this seems strange, considering Nokia was doing the hardware work before Microsoft bought them. But if there are more phones from different manufacturers in the near future, then I'm content with Microsoft not pushing new phones themselves. Now we just have to wait and see how well HP will advertise their Elite X3. I think things will get better, but not overnight.

 

[jdballard]

It ultimately comes down to to how much the two OSes must share before you'd consider them to be the same.

The two OSes share the kernel, the CLR, the WinRT APIs, and most importantly, some UWP apps. That's it. However, for most of the UWP apps, most IT professionals would argue that they aren't part of the OS, but rather just bundled with it.

I agree. I actually think that's the brilliance with Windows 10 mobile: the separation of everything. It's a big part of the reason MS can push out updates with less interference from the carrier. The core OS and phone stuff is nicely segmented away. (The other reason is that the carriers probably don't care as much with as small number of phones out there.) I still think it's odd to see my phone app get updated...

You can also look at it this way:

W10M (32bit) install size ~3GB
W10 (32bit) install size ~9GB

edit: Going only by install size, we'd have to say the two OSes share at most 30%, but since W10M isn't fully contained in W10 it's even much less than that.

With W10M being roughly a third of the size of W10, I think it's absolutely true to say "the two aren't the same". If you want more proof you might also consider the state of W10, which runs reliably on almost any hardware released during the last decade, while MS can't get W10M to run on 20 clearly defined hardware configurations released during the last two years. The two OSes also have very different release schedules that are separated by multiple months.

All of that points to them not being the same!

Yes and no. Of course it doesn't run as well on the various phone configurations. I'm sure the original Windows code is littered with shims for a multitude of specific hardware devices and configurations and phone is too new for that. If it survives give it a few years and the phone code will start having the same sorts of shims.

All we can truthfully say is that they share some common components. Suggesting that is comparable to being "the same" means we bought into MS' marketing rather than caring about technical accuracy. However, I'll admit that for most users technical accuracy may not be that important. On a site like this I think it should be though.

I would say that for the purposes of this thread ("does it matter that MS isn't focused on WP at build this year?") and the comment I replied to that they are the same. Mostly because from the app and developer perspective it doesn't matter since they generally use the same APIs and CLR (as you pointed out), with some variation accounting for things unique to phones.

All that said, of course, technically there are going to be some differences between "big" Windows and "phone" Windows.

 

[Robinsonmac]

Don't you miss the Windows Mobile platform or the interface etc.?

I just switched to a GS7 & I have all MS services I used on my ICON plus I have a Windows launcher to get rid of the hideous rows of Icons. Been banging the drum about this lately but I am amazed by how I have not skipped a beat by the switch & after watching the 1st 2 days of build it very clear their are & should be flooding Android & IOS with all their products & services where 98.4% of their customers are......

 

[noperfectmobile]

All in all microsoft is not really taking care of the customers - imho...
- Waiting for the W10M release for month...
- getting the release, full of bugs
- asking myself when the bugs will be removed
- getting the info that W10M is not the focus for 2016
- asking myself should i wait another year - watching apple and google developing straight forward on their mobile platforms...

OK - microsoft - when your focus is back again on the buggy crappy W10M - there might be no more users with focus on the windows phone platform anymore...

 

[a5cent]

I would say that for the purposes of this thread ("does it matter that MS isn't focused on WP at build this year?") and the comment I replied to that they are the same. Mostly because from the app and developer perspective it doesn't matter since they generally use the same APIs and CLR (as you pointed out), with some variation accounting for things unique to phones.

99% of Windows software is linked against Win32. That is a huge API surface that phones don't support, so I don't think it's valid to say both OSes use the same APIs. Again, they only support some common APIs.

The only people for whom it makes sense to view both OSes as being the same are UWP focused developers. However, devs understand that they are, with that statement, just ignoring all the differences that aren't relevant to them in their role at that time. Typical consumers can't make that distinction, and IMHO this narrative that is pushed by MS' (dev focused) marketing, repeated by WCentral staff and generally accepted by forum members is counterproductive and harmful.

For example, many just can't imagine how MS can be so incompetent that it took them 9 months to distribute an OS to 20 phones that was finished in June of 2015. Obviously MS must be lazy or just entirely uncaring about mobile. That's an entirely reasonable opinion to have for anyone believing the two are actually the same.

That's why I'll occasionally speak out against that view when I stumble across it (although it's a losing battle and in this case spoken by someone who actually does understand the limits of that views correctness).

I'm sorry for going off topic.

 

[Div D]

Don't you miss the Windows Mobile platform or the interface etc.?

No

Div D

Commented via Windows Central for Android

 

[Paolo Ferrazza]

Yeah... They are putting focus on the bots, skype, Office, Windows 10 and Cortana... All of which is on phones too.

What, exactly, is the problem with this?

They expected new phone models announcements at the Build event maybe

 

[Paolo Ferrazza]

The two OSes also have very different release schedules that are separated by multiple months.

Is this still true? Latest build are being released at the same time. Also, do you know what justifies the size difference? I'm really asking since I don't know. I mean in software most of the times what makes a software heavy is what is not considered core or product-defining: let's take videogames for example, 90% of the size is taken by visual assets (videos and 3d models), the same game on a low res phone would weight 1/10 of the PC counterpart while it can be considered the exact same game from a logical point of view (at least from the point of view of this thread). Moreover since the mobile OS has to be delivered over the air to mobile devices it could be much more compressed. I'm just saying, from a technical point of view in software you don't usually judge the differences between two versions of something by the size of the package. So back to the original question: do you know what's the difference of content?

If the difference is given by legacy win32 layers that should be considered the past, then, for this thread purpose, the "the two OS are the same" point holds up very well. It looks like everything they are focusing on right now is UWP related, so if to focus on all these things they are not focusing on mobile, saying that the two OS can be considered the same is correct even if we all know that legacy parts of the OS are not on mobile.

 

[todd miles]

What is not clear to me is the Xamarian (or whatever it's called) coding tool. Is it designed to help Mac/Android developers make W10 apps or is it designed so Windows developers can leverage their wares on Apple/Android stores? I think the hope is that all this cross pollination will help W10 apps and somewhere in the distant future W10m will benefit. But MS did themselves no favor in saying W10m is not a focus. It tells me and consumers that it is a dead end product. And you are certainly not going to get any more carriers to handle W10m phones.

 

[a5cent]

Is this still true? Latest build are being released at the same time.

It shouldn't be true anymore.

The fact that we've seen W10M and W10 developed and released independently of each other proves they aren't technically the same (at least up until very recently). The opposite is not true however. Someone who believes that simultaneously releasing W10M and W10 proves they're the same would have to believe this level of unification was achieved only during the last two months, which is obviously wrong.

To make an extreme example, you might think of W10 and W10M as two projects sharing but a single source code file which defines nothing but the version number, and having absolutely nothing in common beyond that. On a day when both projects create a build which passes their automated testing processes, they might release both builds to the public, thereby creating the impression that these two projects have everything in common and run on the same schedule. That's just obviously a completely false impression. Of course that's not how W10 and W10M are developed, but the impression most people here have is the exact opposite extreme which isn't correct either.

As long as MS doesn't monumentally screw up, those parts of W10M which are unique to itself shouldn't dictate release schedules to the extent they have so far. Going forward, those parts of W10M should hopefully remain rather stable, with innovation and changes focused primarily on those components that both OSes share. As long as that is true, we should no longer witness W10M being held back due to issues specific to W10M (although the occasional carrier might still get in the way of distribution).

Also, do you know what justifies the size difference?
...
Moreover since the mobile OS has to be delivered over the air to mobile devices it could be much more compressed. I'm just saying, from a technical point of view in software you don't usually judge the differences between two versions of something by the size of the package. So back to the original question: do you know what's the difference of content?

I'm not comparing the size difference of distribution packages. I'm comparing the difference in size of the uncompressed OS installations. Compression of the type you're referring to plays no role here.

A big chunk of it is drivers. A lot of it is win32 based software bundled with W10 and two decades worth of an evolving win32 API. There's also a big pileup of win32 based legacy technologies which W10M has no use for.

Very little of it is down to media.

I agree that it's strange to rate commonality between OSes based on installation size. I'm using that only as an "easy to understand" metric so that I can avoid listing the things I mentioned above which are too abstract for most people to relate to. Either way, the exact percentage doesn't matter. Even if the difference was only 10% rather than 300% it still wouldn't be technically correct to call them the same.

On a side note, the notion that software on W10M could afford to scale down resources to occupy but 1/10th of the size of its W10 counterpart is outdated. All W10 UWP apps contain the exact same resources. Continuum (a universal phone app may be requested to display on a 24" monitor) is just one reason.

If the difference is given by legacy win32 layers that should be considered the past, then, for this thread purpose, the "the two OS are the same" point holds up very well.

I very much disagree. Either it's the same or it isn't. There is nothing to be gained, in this thread or in any other thread, by claiming these two OSes are something they are not. The only thing it achieves is the propagation of misinformation, which benefits nobody, not even MS who started the whole thing.

The only time this view makes sense is when two people discuss UWP related software development issues. It doesn't make sense for anyone else, because outside of that developer circle differences do exist that can't be ignored, and desperately trying to ignore it (for whatever reason) confuses more people than it helps.

 

[jdballard]

99% of Windows software is linked against Win32. That is a huge API surface that phones don't support, so I don't think it's valid to say both OSes use the same APIs. Again, they only support some common APIs.

The only people for whom it makes sense to view both OSes as being the same are UWP focused developers. However, devs understand that they are, with that statement, just ignoring all the differences that aren't relevant to them in their role at that time. Typical consumers can't make that distinction, and IMHO this narrative that is pushed by MS' (dev focused) marketing, repeated by WCentral staff and generally accepted by forum members is counterproductive and harmful.

All accurate and I agree, but I'll reiterate my earlier point: in the context of this thread, they are effectively the same because MS is focused on pushing the UWP at build this year, and UWP apps apply to both flavors of Windows. I know MS would love to find a way to flip it so that 99% of apps don't use the Win32 API's, hence project Centennial. Whether that works or not? Time will tell.

For example, many just can't imagine how MS can be so incompetent that it took them 9 months to distribute an OS to 20 phones that was finished in June of 2015. Obviously MS must be lazy or just entirely uncaring about mobile. That's an entirely reasonable opinion to have for anyone believing the two are actually the same.

Sadly, all too true. I think people believe it's all magic and unicorn farts when it comes to creating an OS. Never having built an OS, but having built what in the grand scheme of things is some fairly simple software, it's never as easy as it looks. Things that look really hard sometimes are super-easy and things that look easy are really hard.

That's why I'll occasionally speak out against that view when I stumble across it (although it's a losing battle and in this case spoken by someone who actually does understand the limits of that views correctness).

I'm sorry for going off topic.

All good points, and worth raising the point that they technically are different, but yeah, it's a losing battle because as you say, for the average consumer all they hear is the marketing speak. It's like trying to get people to understand it's their fault when they install a fast ring build on their phone and things that worked before break. I've fought that battle and lost. My head still hurts and I finally gave up on that one - at least for now.

 

[a5cent]

What is not clear to me is the Xamarian (or whatever it's called) coding tool. Is it designed to help Mac/Android developers make W10 apps or is it designed so Windows developers can leverage their wares on Apple/Android stores? I think the hope is that all this cross pollination will help W10 apps and somewhere in the distant future W10m will benefit. But MS did themselves no favor in saying W10m is not a focus. It tells me and consumers that it is a dead end product. And you are certainly not going to get any more carriers to handle W10m phones.

Xamarin is not a tool to port apps from one operating system to another.

In it's most extreme and purist form (known as Xamarin.Forms) it allows developers to create an app with a single C# code base that runs on iOS, Android and WM. You can think of this as the truly universal app platform. A single app that runs on multiple form factors and OSes. However, many developers find this approach to be somewhat finicky and not suited to apps that must be lean, mean and fast. The advantages of Xamarin.Forms are bought by sacrificing some runtime performance, often times notably so. Most developers would say Xamarin.Forms is suited to projects where developer productivity (how fast they can crank out apps for multiple platforms and how cheaply they can be maintained) is far more important than app run-time performance.

More typically, Xamarin is used to create an app where all the non-UI components share a single C# code base that runs on iOS Android and WM. In those scenarios developers can still use C# as the language to create the UI, but the APIs their UI layers call differ between platforms. This still performs worse than an approach without Xamarin, but in many scenarios not notably so.

 

[ClixT]

I think some of you are clinging to false hope. I didn't want to believe WM10 was dead but all one needs to do is open their eyes and follow the money (like everything else in life).

It's done. Over. Kaput.

I also believe MS has flooded the market with their last bit of phone inventory they were committed to before somebody of consequence finally pulled the plug on future development. No sense sitting on a warehouse full of crap.

Last December, I chucked my lowly yet coveted 535 and 640 phones. Too many bugs on the software side (what little I could find anyway). Finally went back to my Apple ecosystem and mainstay apps with all their built in maturity and polish which can only be realized over time. Still not fond of the embarrassing iSheep crowd and their undying need to "love" the world's largest corporation but hey... it is what it is.

Truth be told... I have all my MS apps running smoothly on iOS/OSX many of which seem to run better than their Windows counterparts. A virtual copy of Win10 on the mac takes care of what little I need it for.

Interesting times indeed.

I hate to admit it but.. I was. The only reason I got the 950XL is for continuum and the awesome camera... I rarely use continuum now cos it's not as useful yet "to my needs." I just bought an iPhone 6s + and it's my daily phone now.. The iPhone's "camera isn't that bad" plus I have most of the MS apps on my iPhone so I still sort of feel at home.

I'm a Microsoft fan, and will always be, but "the needs are stronger than my wants" as of right now, and to be honest, I'm still on denial that I got a freakin iPhone, the phone I used to bash a lot.. In the end I think people should assess their needs vs wants, and in my case, I the need is stronger.

I still have my 920 and 1020 but I'm thinking of getting a 650 as well, cos damn, that thing is gorgeous. I may also play with the X3 when it comes out and see if the RDP experience with it will be smoother than the 950XL. I'll still be active in WP forums and read WC though, so no sappy goodbyes.