ponsaelius

Microsoft got rid of Windowsphone to ride the next wave. To jump ahead of the competition. One such wave was AR with Hololens and Windows Mixed Reality.

However the competition, Apple and Google, are entering the wave without any real new hardware. Instead they are leveraging the device people already have – the mobile phone.

Both companies seem to think consumers will use AR via the mobile phone acting as the lens and the interface. Hololens could remain stubbornly tied to the enterprise and maybe gamers. That need not be a bad thing for profit. However it could be that Microsoft ends up being locked out of consumer applications for AR by not having a viable mobile platform.

Moreover if the world is going mobile as the primary personal computing device the pre-requisite for the “next big thing” could be a viable mobile platform.

Microsoft may not care if consumer devices for mobile are not made by them if they run enterprise cloud services. I am not sure if Microsoft can find the next big thing for consumers now they are out of mobile.

As a Windowsphone fan I still have my Lumia 950 in a drawer but my daily driver is currently a Galaxy S6. I would love to use the Lumia but it is now so app free that I would struggle to use it for what I need.

I still take it out, update it, and wish it was more useful. However I recognise a dead platform.

Microsoft doesn't. It is in constant tease mode. They say we are not finished with mobile yet. We haven't abandoned mobile. We want to provide mobile experiences.

It's double talk. If you want to buy a Lumia today then ebay is your best bet not Microsoft. They have killed the entire consumer ecosystem and as markets where they used to have more than 10% share have no stock of new product they are reducing. Users are moving and for all practical purposes a Microsoft mobile is an Android phone with apps.

Yet there is tease from Microsoft. Microsoft need to take their first party devices off death row and just kill them formally. Just announce Microsoft making first party devices is over. Just say the "feature2" branch will fix a new bug or two but the only "feature" will be to change the date in the copyright message.

Put the last consumers out of their misery. Stop them interpreting every time the word "mobile" is mentioned as some kind of hope. Help these people have closure. They deserve at least a good bye Windowsphone party.

Part of selling a product, any product, is trust in the product. At a most basic level that something will do what it says it will do.

On a wider scale brands are valued and charge a premium because of trust. Trust that a product or service will be supported and will continue over a period. Of course there is “end of life” when new products replace it and occasionally a product that just wont sell and makes no sense in continuing. Customers understand that. However the brand trust will get over that.

Suppose now Microsoft comes out with a SurfacePhone. Who now trusts Microsoft with first party mobile devices? They spent $7.2 billion dollars on a first party mobile brand and ditched it. They have rebooted their mobile operating system 3 times since 2010. They have changed their development strategy to UWP which no one uses. They have an app free mobile platform with little to think it changes.

You can even buy your Samsung Galaxy S8 from Microsoft Retail Stores.

If the SurfacePhone is launched at $500, $600 or more then what consumer doesn’t look at that price point and think about spending their money. How does a consumer trust that Microsoft is really interested in Windows on Mobile. So far the evidence is that Microsoft are totally dis-interested. They would like a successful mobile product but in the vast size of Microsoft businesses it's just another thing.

I really dont know the answer to this but it seems to me that Google Maps are the one to beat. It seems to have been like that for years.

So does anyone know why Microsoft's Bing Maps is so far behind the experience of Google Maps?

Earlier this month I changed banks to TSB in the UK. For a number of years it had a reasonable Windows 10 Mobile app which, although it was a wrapper for the website, actually worked pretty well when I tested it a few months ago.

The day I changed I discovered that TSB had dropped Windows 10 Mobile that very week and only Android/IOS was left.

Now Barclays, one of Britain's largest banks, is dropping Windows 10 Mobile support. 

https://mspoweruser.com/barclays-uk-banks-pull-windows-store/

Pretty much the only banks left are RBS / NatWest. To be fair they seem to be actively supporting Windows 10 Mobile. 

This was a marketin the UK that had 10% sales until the Nadella "memo of Windowsphone death". Now it's heading for the fractions of 1% like the US market. Completely unsustainable.

Cortana is a geographically challenged AI. She may help the Master Chief off-world but here on Earth she does weird stuff.

I am in the UK. This means Cortana is officially available on Windowsphone and PC. She is not officially available on Android. To use Cortana you need to grab the apk and sideload it.

If you do sideload the Cortana apk she is American. She recognises only the US regional settings, tells you about US sports and provides US headlines. 

The reality of Cortana's geographical issues was brought home to me this week.I had ordered some items from the US and the US postal service was sending them to the UK. I was invited by the website to check them and I put the parcel number into Cortana. In the US Cortana apparently tracks parcels. Not in the UK. It sent me to the US Postal Service website. Disappointing I wouldn't be getting alerts on the Lumia 950.

I also was changing bank accounts. The bank wanted me to activate the account via a mobile app. To be fair there were alternatives but this would be the quickest. However no mobile app for Windowsphone. So I swapped my sim into the Android device and was good. Curiously Cortana alerted me to my parcel and said it was tracking it. 

I quickly checked and realised that although Cortana didn't track parcels on my UK Windowsphone or my UK PC the sideloaded Cortana for Android, using the US region, was tracking it. The data had obviously been absorbed in my earlier search but was not working in the UK.

Really Microsoft! Cortana for Android is not global yet and just switch parcel tracking on because sometimes we do order stuff from the US!

Cortana, artificially more intelligent in some markets, needs to go global.

According to this recent article if your phone is not IOS or Android is part of a 0.3% market share. 

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/03/google-android-hits-market-share-record-with-nearly-9-in-every-10-smartphones-using-it.html

This is not Windowsphone. This is Microsoft, Blackberry and everyone else who makes a phone that hasn't got Android or IOS on it. Theoretically Microsoft share of 0.3% could be 0.00001%.

Of course Windows 10 Mobile is just a compiler option on Windows 10 builds with some different libraries. Most serious writers about Microsoft have called time on it's mobile platform, Microsoft employees dont use it, Microsoft executives dont use it, most retailers dont stock it, many carriers can't remember ever selling it. 

Microsoft execs never really talk about phone. They vaguely mutter something about "supporting Lumia" or "mobile devices" or "mobile experiences". 

Full disclosure. I use a Lumia 950 everyday but I am resigned to an almost app free experience. There is some stuff there; a news feed, twitter, facebook and spotify. It's not great. People have spent money and are having a second class mobile experience by staying in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft need to put this thing down. It's wounded. There has been nothing released by them in a year. OEMs are thin on the ground and gaining a huge market share of Windows 10 Mobile wont add up to 1% of the mobile market.

Microsoft should treat it's customers like adults. No doublespeak. The mobile game is done. Kill the platform and move on.  

One of the videos I think tells us a lot about change at Microsoft and their mobile strategy is this little digital life video;

https://youtu.be/x-AbGaKdCbs

Microsoft products are everywhere in this vision. Instant Messaging, phone, maps and location, music, directions etc etc.

The vision was not imaginary because these were working consumer facing products.

As you watch this old looking world you have sense that each product is now done by Apple and Google in an integrated ecosystem whereas Microsoft managed to evolve every item in the list to something that doesn't work as an ecosystem.

Microsoft clearly had a vision of mobile and ecosystems blending together and then made a total mess of all of them.

There is a lot of hype about Cortana in the Microsoft world, it's AI and capabilities.

I wonder how much Cortana is really used on the PC and whether the "Cortana search" is just people typing in the box as a convenience.

I am also in the UK and for many of us outside the USA Cortana features just dont exist. Cortana has never noticed an email from British Airways about my holidays. It hasn't got a clue about railway journeys in the UK, when Yodel or DPD are going to deliver a parcel, or even my local buses that it consistently gets wrong.

It also has problems about timing my trip to work because I dont have a car. Even if I did traffic conditions are an unknown quantity. There is much more but fundamentally it is not a lot of use. 

Where these features are most useful are in mobile. Getting to the right place with map integration etc. However Windows 10 Mobile is not the most popular platform and in the Uk it suffers from mapping inaccuracy and poor knowledge of the locality. That's really strange because "Local Scout", the old Windowsphone "local" solution was pretty good. 

Of course Cortana can't show me electronically stored tickets because it has no apps or knowledge of the local transit. That seems to be changing in the maps app but many times it's just wrong. When I am mobile it cant pop up flght delays because it can't process airline ticket stuff in Europe it seems. I have read up on this and apparently the email sent by the airline has to be in specific format. Well that's not going to happen soon because business jsut doesn't help like that. You have to develop some kind of AI recognition - a little like the skill Cortana is supposed to have.

if you have to use an Android phone for a while then Cortana disappears. Outside the USA Cortana is not even in the Play Store. You are forced to using Google Now which seems to work very well here in the UK. You can sideload Cortana manually here in Britain on your Android devicebut it only accepts US regional settings so it's less useful than the Windowsphone version.

Google just re-branded to the Google Assistant and with the non-existance of a Microsoft mobile device strategy the direction of travel is people using Google Now or Siri as their primary AI bot assistant. 

Cortana had great potential when launched but all the other platforms have matured much faster than the Master Chief's AI. Microsoft are showing no real move to making Cortana's existing features to work well globally and keep adding US only features. It's a sure receipe for parochial AI. A sort of "Truman Show" AI that works great inside a limited bubble.