Text messages on Windows PCs

Hi Paul,

I was just reading your article “The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants” and had originally drafted this as a comment, but it was kind of too off-topic and too ranty. In any event, I hope you see this, as I’m in the throes of helping my partner upgrade away from her 2013 Macbook Pro. I would love to get her back on the MS side of the world, and she is really intrigued by the HP Spectre X360 (ash and copper – she loves the look). I’d also like her to take a look at a Surface Laptop, which here in Canada are only $50 adrift of the similarly equipped HPs – both are in the $1600 range with an 8/256 configuration, and are still less than the heart-stopping price of $1800 for the Macbook Pro 13″.

The only thing stopping her? iMessage. She’s on the laptop all day, working and not. She runs her own company. iMessage has become incredibly important to her workflow. And if she has no comparable program (I believe her when she says she isn’t married to Apple), she can’t make the switch. It’s inefficient for her to switch back and forth between a phone and a computer, and I can see that.

Is there anything even close on the horizon? Yeah, I’ve got cortana set up on my phone and laptop – and it’s flakey. There was a time under the Windows 8.x days (8.0 I think!) where I had this working perfectly with my Lumia. Now… it’s all gone. I have the Samsung thing, but that just virtualizes the whole phone. As an app, I have to hand it to iMessage – it’s simple, familiar, and gets the job done.

The heart wants what the heart wants. But for a technology company that is so concerned about productivity, MS needs to remember that they have to not just support phones because that’s where people are for some apps – they need to support ALL platforms with ALL apps so that if I’m using my computer, I don’t have to take my hands off the keyboard. Honestly, the more she talks about how she relies on it, the more I hate it every time I get a ping on my phone while I’m at the computer…