Microsoft To Add Yet Another Smartphone OS This Year 179
GMGruman writes "Someone at Microsoft either really loves mobile operating systems or can't make up his mind as to which to use, because Microsoft Thursday announced yet another mobile OS, its fifth. The new Windows Embedded Handheld OS will succeed Windows Mobile 6.5 and run on at least some existing Windows Mobile smartphones. It is not the same mobile OS, known as Windows Phone 7, that Microsoft earlier this year said would replace Windows Mobile and break with it in terms of compatibility so Microsoft could better compete with the iPhone and Google Android OS."
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
If they're such pieces of shit, where are the open standard wondrous operating systems?
Oh wait.
Steve Ballmer is an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously. Steve Ballmer laughed at google on stage at D:8 for having both android and chrome OS and now microsoft has 3 current, all slightly different mobile operating systems. I mean come on.
Heres an Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] link as I can't find the exact video on the all things d site.
Re:Steve Ballmer is an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer also laughed at the iPhone and the Wii. I wouldn't take his advice personally.
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, maybe in your fantasy world no one would use it. If the OS is good enough, one of the phone device manufacturers will leverage that advantage to make a larger profit over the others.
Unfortunately it isn't.
The Market does decide, why do you think Android and iOS are leading the pack when it comes to growth? Why do you think all the other phone manufacturers are scrambling to keep up?
Besides, Android is fairly open and the iOS is standards compliant.
Re:Steve Ballmer is an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
this is kinda what I'm getting at. I seriously wonder why nobody on the board at MS is questioning his leadership.
Er what??? Android is 100% open source (Score:5, Insightful)
Android is 100% open source. Don't like the Market? Replace it. Don't like the keyboard? Replace it. Don't like Google integrations? Remove them.
If you think all of this is somehow difficult or discouraged, I think you should take a closer look at the forums at xda-developers.com, or even at developer.android.com, where you can check out the entire OS source code with git and re-build it from scratch and re-flash your phone, if you want.
All this talk about Jailbreaking Android phones is for people who want root access but *DO NOT* want to re-flash their phone. There is no such problem for people that are comfortable replacing the software. And in fact this is what you have to do with most open source projects running on specialized hardware.
Re:It's not a smartphone OS (Score:3, Insightful)
What did you expect?
Getting nostalgic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Incompatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
If this Microsoft operating system is going to be incompatible with the other Microsoft operating systems, why not just switch to something else now and be done with it? Compatibility is the only advantage Microsoft software has, and that is being thrown out with the bathwater.
Re:Steve Ballmer is an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Er what??? Android is 100% open source (Score:2, Insightful)
Flashing a rom doesn't make your job as a bot creator easier. You can already write whever you want on an Android phone. And the networks are already in control of bandwidth regardless of the rom. So I don't understand your point.
Re:Getting nostalgic... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know when that was - it was when the big Unix vendors decided that you had to buy the very expensive kit and software then allowed you to have, if you bought a large support contract and training to manage their overly-expensive bloated stuff. Then this little upstart company was selling PCs that did most of what the big guys were doing but at a significantly lower price and with a lot more flexibility over what you could or could not do with your IT system.
How times have changed!
(Ok, there was a time in the middle when their stuff wasn't that good, but you still wanted it - ad every time an upgrade came out, you knew you had to have it because it would fix a load of problems with the software. Today that time is pretty much gone, unless you've bought sharepoint, so no-one really feels the need to grab the upgrade immediately)
Re:Getting nostalgic... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, well the market sorta forced them to sell music without DRM right? Last I checked, none of my iTunes music purchases had DRM on them.
Re:Getting nostalgic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's interesting isn't it. I think it's because it's become clear that the kind of big-ticket software that Microsoft has built itself on just isn't where the real money's going to be in a few years. It's reached a peak complexity-wise, features-wise, and usefulness-wise. Instead, collaborative service software (i.e. Google) will be the way a lot of businesses go, and consumers will go with small, cheap, and cheerful (i.e. the Apple App Store), and social network type stuff (Facebook and its successors). Portability is where it's at, and Microsoft has missed so many beats it can't catch up, especially because it means essentially cannibalising they big-ticket software business.
I'm a little wary of this trend, even though I can definitely see its value. I'm a heavy user of said big-ticket software myself (Adobe products mostly), and I don't want to see it stagnate. That said, I think it's pretty stagnant already, and needs a serious shake-up. Microsoft and Adobe's products are absurdly complex and bloated these days; there simply has to be a simpler way. And a cheaper way too!
Re:Getting nostalgic... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your post is indicative of what's holding Microsoft back. The whole ground is shifting, and it's Apple and Google that have managed to move into (or even create) this new world, and Microsoft has not.
Here's what I think a lot of people think the "computing" landscape will look like in a few years: most people will have a phone or iPad-like device instead of a laptop or desktop computer. They will probably dock with a big screen and keyboard for serious work. Most documents will be held in 'the cloud', with local cache. The software to work on them will either be web-based or small and cheap.
This trend will be most noticeable in developing markets, where people will use their phones for what rich countries were using desktop PCs for up until now. For example, in Africa I noticed huge numbers of people have phones (not the latest and greatest, but not old crap either), but virtually no one owned their own PC. They will probably skip the PC step altogether, because in a year or two their phones will do most of what they would find useful in a PC anyway. They will go to Wifi hotspots and use their phones, in much the same way as they go to internet cafes now.
Apple is obviously a major contender (and driver) of this landscape. Google too.
Microsoft will retain its stranglehold on (some) business for quite a while, but that will be seen as a small part of a much larger marketplace. It will continue to exist and make money for a long time to come, but it won't have much pull over the general direction of computing.
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:4, Insightful)
If they're such pieces of shit, where are the open standard wondrous operating systems?
Perhaps here [android.com]? Or maybe even here [maemo.org]?
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't suggest that at all. Clearly they bought it with the intent of using it to build a good cross-platform SDK solution for their phones. What I did suggest was that they'll probably kill it anyway, despite their good intentions, because they're completely clueless about what developers and users want from modern smartphone platform.
Re:Steve Ballmer is an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Watch for new videos of/interviews with Steve Ballmer.
2) Note what products he dismisses and/or laughs at.
3) Purchase stock in the makers of those products.
4) PROFIT!!!
I think we've finally nailed down step 3...
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Carpetshark says that Nokia products have shit lifespans; because he is talking about the "lifespan" of a hardware product during which it continues to be updated to the latest software features(within the bounds of hardware limitations. For a pricey computer-in-a-cellphone-box like the N900, that isn't at all unreasonable, nor is Nokia's record in the area exactly unblemished.
Mdwh2 disagrees, because Nokia has been(if anything) rather retro in the pace at which they kill old OSes, and much of their hardware is among the more bulletproof stuff in the consumer sector. Even your $40 nokia candybar is quite likely to be in almost exactly the same shape it was purchased, after some years of none-too-careful use. This is also true, albeit more relevant to products that aren't the N900.
Nokia is, perhaps, the most talented of the previous generation of handset makers. Their OSes are a little quirky, and they aren't on the bleeding edge of hardware; but they churn out, by the million, solid handsets that will do whatever they did the day you opened them for a nice long while. I've had several that have done exactly that(which was what I wanted, so I was happy). Trouble is, if you are expecting the new support model, where "lifespan" means "serious software updates, not just a critical bugfix or two", they are rather tepid. Android has some dark corners that are even worse; but the N900 is the equivalent of the Nexus One, the company-endorsed OS flagship model.
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Fortunately you can buy an Android phone or an iPhone and keep your app purchases between phones and carriers.(Android->Android and iPhone->iPhone obviously)
Which is a blessing compared to the absolute crapfest it used to be.
Re:Steve Ballmer is an idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Getting nostalgic... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're spot on in your analysis of where the consumer market is heading but when it comes to the business side of things office life is still dominated by standard desktop / laptop computing using big ticket software for most workers. I don't come across many businesses in my line of work where users don't have a desktop or laptop running Windows and Office in addition to one or more big ticket industry specific software applications with the one large noticable exception being the health-care industry where more and more providers are moving to tablets, which for doctors and nurses who aren't stationary makes perfect sense.
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
I am also an N900 owner.
While Meego won't be officially supported on the N900, it's worth noting that the N900 remains the reference platform for it. Additionally, the community support for Maemo is unbelievably good; I wouldn't be surprised at all if the N900 port of Meego remains an active community project for years. This is partly because most of the people who own N900s are geeks, and because the N900 is completely open (there are a plethora of custom kernels available for use on it).
tldr: Having a completely open device with no offical support is way better than having a closed device with official support.
Re:They're all proprietary pieces of shit. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you take the time to read the article and comments I linked to above, you'll see others explaining the same problem, and an ex-nokia staff member explaining that Nokia are aware of the problem, acknowledge it internally, know what they need to do to fix it, but just can't get it done because of company structures.