How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft

Re:How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft by bambax on Friday February 10, 2017 @05:28PM (#13619481)

> without the app ecosystem to back them, it doesn't matter that the phones are great

Is this true? It sounds true but I wonder if it actually is.

(I for one don't care about apps -- at all. I want a "smartphone" because I want the ability to browse the web, and that's it. I can't be the only guy like this.)

And even if it were actually true that apps are important, if you're MS, can't you jump start the app ecosystem? Android being opensource, how hard would it be for MS to make a phone capable of running Android apps (and yet be a different phone with a different OS of course)? (Also, they have Xamarin).

> Microsoft is basically waiting...

Well, yes, they don't seem to be trying very hard. This is quite strange.

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Re:How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft by ocdtrekkie on Friday February 10, 2017 @10:15PM (#13620740)

The thing is... they've tried a lot of this. They've paid developers to port to Windows Phone before. It wasn't enough. They'll practically give you free hardware if you tell them you're developing an app. Realize that Google and Apple do not give a crud about you if you develop an app for their platform. Microsoft will fall over itself trying to help you if you develop for their platform, even if you are a little guy making a little app.

Microsoft already HAS developed the ability for Windows Phones to run Android apps. (They actually sent me a free phone just to test the feature!) Sadly, they decided not to release it, and we don't really know why. It could have been that they were worried about developers settling for Android apps instead of making UWP apps. Or Google could've threatened them, which seems plausible too. (Android is kinda "open" source, where yes, it's open source, but Google will do underhanded things if you dare to use it in any way they consider a risk to their dominance.) I can tell you the Android Bridge for Windows Phone worked amazingly, and my demo unit phone still has that version of Windows on it.

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Re:How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft by bambax on Friday February 10, 2017 @11:24PM (#13621003)

> Or Google could've threatened them

Threatened them with what? They don't seem afraid to go after Google (cf. Bing), nor should they.

It's a shame the feature you're describing hasn't been released, really! Any hope it might? When was this?

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Re:How Satya Nadella revived Microsoft by ocdtrekkie on Saturday February 11, 2017 @09:00AM (#13622633)

The other name it went by is Project Astoria, you can find a lot of the Internet about it. There's pretty much no chance of it being released at this point, unfortunately.

Microsoft and Google each have subtle and not-subtle ways of attacking each other. Google doesn't really feel threatened by Bing, everyone thinks Bing is a joke (even if it is pretty decent), plus Google steals all their best ideas from Bing. But things like the popups Google has on their sites to tell Edge users Chrome is better, Microsoft's retaliatory popups in Windows that tell Chrome users to try Edge, etc. Google has aggressively broken compatibility of their various services with Windows Mobile devices before. They definitely have options if they want to harass the others' customers.

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