Microsoft Losing Against iPod, iPhone, iOS, iMessage, Slack, Dropbox

Re:Microsoft Losing Against iPod, iPhone, iOS, iMessage, Sla... by scarface74 on Monday April 15, 2019 @02:03PM (#19667352)

Let’s say that Microsoft had “won” the mobile phone war and was in the same place that Google is now with Android. What would they have won?

Android has only made Google $21 billion in profit in its entire history....less than Apple makes in one quarter.

https://www.google.com/search?q=android+oracle+revenue&ie=UT...

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Re:Microsoft Losing Against iPod, iPhone, iOS, iMessage, Sla... by rimliu on Monday April 15, 2019 @02:13PM (#19667433)

IIRC MS were making more money from the Android phone being sold than Google (some patent stuff).

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Re:Microsoft Losing Against iPod, iPhone, iOS, iMessage, Sla... by WorldMaker on Monday April 15, 2019 @05:26PM (#19669080)

Efficiencies of scale, for one thing. Microsoft with a strong mobile OS sharing a kernel and a greater software ecosystem with its desktop OS only has to make an app once and flex that across mobile and desktop. Instead, Microsoft today absolutely has to build apps for iOS, Android, and Windows to stay competitive.

This is probably a good thing in the long run for Microsoft as some of its more innovative work has been when it's tried to focus on cross-platform software (its founding era, and the early GUI wars, for instances), but that vision of a single flexible OS across all device form factors is still an attractive one, especially from an efficiency of scale perspective.

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Re:Microsoft Losing Against iPod, iPhone, iOS, iMessage, Sla... by scarface74 on Monday April 15, 2019 @06:08PM (#19669355)

They already tried that. It was a horrible experience with Windows CE. The .Net Compact Framework was a subset of the .Net Framework. You could run a .Net compact targeted app on the desktop. I wrote Windows Mobile apps back in the day. You could also write C++/MFC apps that targeted both. They weren’t great apps.

But today MS has Xamarin that is a good enough cross platform framework for enterprise style apps.

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Re:Microsoft Losing Against iPod, iPhone, iOS, iMessage, Sla... by WorldMaker on Monday April 15, 2019 @06:26PM (#19669460)

Don't forget that Windows CE was rather dominant, though. It's partly that Windows Mobile 6.x was a market leader for long enough that Microsoft somewhat seemed to ignore the iPhone in its early days.

Windows CE never had the efficiency of scale convergence quite in mind, though. Windows CE was never quite Windows at the kernel level, for instance, and it was a competing OS inside Microsoft in some ways that mattered in the old xkcd siloes pointing guns at each other fashion.

Windows 10 mobile, especially towards the end (Redstone 3) was so very similar to Desktop Windows under the hood. It was still a fork, but it was a converging fork.

(UWP still sometimes gets unfavorably compared to the .NET CF, but UWP has always been more powerful and capable than CF and CE-era C++/MFC, even at its "worst" when Windows 8 launched. Especially now that .NET Core is open source and "leading" the .NET Framework/.NET standards rather than vice versa, UWP is much stronger than .NET CF ever was.)

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