If Android magically evaporated tomorrow Google would be just fine -- the core of their business (ad sales) doesn't fundamentally require that they control the mobile platform, although it certainly makes things easier.

Microsoft, on the other hand, had for decades been the platform company. They've historically tried to grow by pushing out from their desktop beachhead into other territory they think they can control the platform for (i.e. servers, game consoles)

Now suddenly they've found themselves behind in the highest-growth segments of the industry. In fact, just "behind" doesn't do their situation justice: they've had to spend billions just to claw themselves into a distant third place.

I expect that those billions will keep flowing. Microsoft is desperate to win this thing.

I do not agree. They don't necessarily need to control the mobile platform, but they do need access to the distribution channels.

Witness how Apple replaced Google Maps with their own solution, even before their solution was good enough, as if they couldn't wait to get rid of GMaps. At some point not so long ago, they also threatened to replace Google's search engine with Bing by default. In 2009 Google Voice was also rejected from iTunes because it was "duplicating existing functionality".

Google is basically playing Microsoft's own game from the nineties - controlling the platform makes them a valuable distribution channel, ensuring not only their survival, but also giving them leverage in expanding to new markets.

Google is bigger and much more dangerous today because of Android, which IMHO is vital for them going forward.

In iOS 7, Siri (the only search interface Apple cares about) will search Bing by default. Source: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/10/a-wiser-siri-snubs...

You've got to admit though that, the move was highly political, from both sides, Apple didn't want to provide Google with a bunch of data so Google refused to allow Apple to have turn-by-turn directions (because they happened to be supporting a competing platform), so Apple basically said screw you Google, we'll make our own maps.

Just like their search engine? They have been flushing cash down the "online services" drain for years, with nary a profit to show, nor any progress in market share. Why should the phone market be any different? They'll keep subsidizing the "WinPhone by Nokia", and flushing cash down this new drain too.

I'm seeing parallels between their attempt to break into the search engine market, and the smartphone market.

Cash is the one thing Microsoft has. Ability to make tons more cash over the next few years (at least) is another one.

Oh, and their market share in increasing http://www.brafton.com/news/google-bing-gained-search-market... , albeit at Yahoo's expense. Who knows, 3 years from now Microsoft might outbid Google on Firefox or maybe anti-trust will not let Google buy more traffic, being essentially a monopoly and all.

Bottom line: Microsoft is in for the long, long run. So is Apple and so is Google.

This whole post reads like a warning about the sunken cost fallacy!

The crux of it is Microsoft is not good at R&D today. Microsoft sells products that people still buy. People don't buy Nokia as much. What was the driver? Surely not to turn them around. We know that's not what they do with an acquisition.

And I have trouble understanding why the NSA stuff is relevant here. Believe me, I'm as upset as anyone here about it, but I really don't think that Microsoft is propped as a company by some cash that the NSA gave them to build out some relatively trivial monitoring infrastructure.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/03/a-trojan-horse-once-again-s...

Where on earth did you hear that?

Both Nokia and Microsoft are known for producing high quality products and investing heavily in R&D. The don't have a technology problem, they've got a branding, positioning and strategic problem.

> "...I think Microsoft ought to abandon the Xbox. The war is over, and Sony and Nintendo won."

a decade or so ago.

And entertainment business (because the console is just a hardware dongle) is different beast.

But unlike mobile phones and tablets owning more than one living room console makes sense. You don't have cost of switching just cost of entry (buying PS3 allows me to play Uncharted but does not prevent me from cursing xbox for lack of mouse in a shooter). And you could always bring down the cost of the device to as low as needed if you are willing to take the hit.

Right now in US and western europe the only users MS can get must be poached from Apple and Android. That is much harder task.

I'm not saying that Microsoft doesn't have a chance at all but I think the odds are against Windows phones ever reaching a significant market share no matter how much capital and R&D they stack behind it.

This is the norm. The only thing people give a shit about is their data (and that is usually when it's way to late and they're about to lose it), not the apps.

This is NOT the norm.

I had one customer who thought each phone was effectively a burner, and he threw them out when he got a new one. He also made sure the apple store activated his phone (before all went that way) as he thought it was useless to have a computer with the phone (because why was he buying the phone then?).

This story and many like it popped up again and again until I realized that the majority of users are completely ignorant of even the smallest details of how the device or its internals work, its is mostly a fashion statement.

The apple store will definitely attempt to gather that info, but at some point it is new account and have a great day!

http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/WORDS.EXE?virus

In English the plural is viruses.

In English, there's never a reason to use anything other than "viruses".

Actually, virus is a "mass noun" (uncountable) and has no plural. If it ever had a nominative plural it would be vira, and out of anything, viri is its genitive singular.

No, that's the Latin plural of vir; viri means "men" not "poisons" ("virus" means "poison" in Latin.) [1]

http://www.google.com/#q=translate+viri+from+latin+to+englis...

If one person is ignorant in one domain, that doesn't mean that person doesn't excel in another domain. Stupidity is relative.

E.g. my father can't use a computer and thinks his computer is broken whenever he has minor problems with it. On the other hand he has a perfect track record in managing government institutions and the family's business and he's also extremely good at handling money and being a cheap bastard. He never learned to use a computer simply because he can delegate such tasks to his subordinates (or me).

And yet you've placed him in the bucket of people with more money than brains, simply because somebody on this planet sold his computer because it was virused.

That said, to pull off an iPhone- and Android-style upset though, Microsoft would need a correspondingly huge difference in user experience though. The UI on Windows Phone is nifty, but it's not enough of a game changer for most people. It'd really have to be something like successful execution of wearable computing or the convergence described here: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/want-t...

I've posted several times about the awful experience:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6012362

I had some very ugly experiences setting up one for my cousin (I stupidly didn't lie and registered her as being from Uruguay and under 18), which made the phone behave like a brick ("sorry, no apps available in your country", "sorry, you have to be over 18 under laws from another country to use most of the features of this phone").

Changing the Live account did not work, I had to reset the phone and create another account for her, lying about her age and country so the phone could work properly (she wanted to use Skype and WhatsApp, not exactly the most demanding use case).

Even blackberry's didn't have nearly as high a share as iOS or Android.

I didn't feel locked in at all to the "app ecosystem". Honestly web and email were paramount and everything else is secondary. At some point in the future I believe native apps will be passe in favor of a complete move to web applications making the underlying platform completely personal preference.

...oh.and at one time I was locked into my Palm Pilot. After that my Blackberry. Tell Apple to look at Palm or RIM if they want to know how long being the popular phone on the market lasts.

The primary way it is better is that the screen is so much bigger. This is easy to dismiss, but it makes a ton of UI hacks done for the iPhone needless. For example, the fact that the address bar isn't on the screen all the time is a hack to compensate for the small screen. Then that leads to a need for the hack where you click the top of the screen in the browser to rapidly scroll to the top. Sometimes that's a nice feature, but only if your screen is so small that they can't always display the address bar unless you've scrolled all the way to the top. Sometimes it's the most annoying thing in the world - like when you've scrolled past 7 pages of information reading in the browser and then accidentally click the rapid scroll-up button. There is no rapid scroll-down button to undo that.

My wife has an iPhone 5 and honestly it feels like a tiny little toy when I use it. The screen is ridiculously small.

Now for the other nice things... I can copy music to it without the iTunes bloatware. I plug my phone in, something pops up and then I just copy music to it. With Windows Phone, I have two copies of my music - my computer and my phone. With iPhone I had three copies - what was on my computer, what was on my phone and what the iTunes library. Keeping three things in sync was a massive pain.

The integration to Skydrive is much better than iCloud as well. My Lumia 928 has 32 GB of storage but with SkyDrive I get an additional 125 GB (of which 25 GB was free). I can seamlessly access pictures, video and music right from it as long as I have a signal.

The Nokia maps are the best maps application I ever used. Much better than either Google Maps or Apple Maps. Speaking of signal - the maps application have online and offline capabilities. So if I have no signal whatsoever there is a local copy of map data on my phone so I can still get directions.

I have three young kids and my Windows Phone has a KidZone. I put certain apps in there and then put it into the KidZone mode and my kids are locked into those apps unless they type my password. No more deleting icons accidentally, no more sending emails on my behalf accidentally, no more doing anything I don't want them to do like they did constantly with my iPhone.

This is long enough - the bottom line is that Windows Phone is superior in every way that matters to me to any iPhone I ever owned.

I have a Jelly Bean tablet with a 10.1" screen that I use every day and am happy with it.

To which I'd say the screens on WP8 and Android flagships are ridiculously large and poorly calibrated.

I feel as though I'm in the minority: but it pains me to use anything larger than an iPhone 4S. (The iPhone 5 included, sadly.)

I'd love to leave the iOS ecosystem, as I agree with your other criticisms. I long for the days where I can use foobar2k to manage my portable media player again -- but there's _no where for me to go._

The iPhone isn't a "little toy" to me, it's the only flagship phone I can use comfortably.

I feel left behind, as if I'm some sort of refugee from the display wars. -- Who will cater to me? Sony seems to be on the right track. At least their giant-Xperia has finally relocated the controls to be a bit more ergonomic.

Windows Phone may or may not have a shot in hell, and things don't look good in the short term. But finding success somewhere in mobile is a strategic imperative for the company.

Doing that through a hardware acquisition seems strange. And to Ben's point, this is a particularly weird "Why buy the cow?" scenario, given the preexisting partnership that served roughly the same purpose.

We'll see what Microsoft is thinking, but I'm scratching my head. Consumers are fickle, to your point, but en masse, they're also creatures of convenience. Android and/or iOS seem like mighty convenient platforms right now, from a consumer's POV.

This sounds like (some years ago) "I think Google ought to abandon their search engine, the war is over and Yahoo and Altavista won"

Now I understand that search engines are a lot easier to switch to than phones etc. but it still makes for a less compelling comparison.

If you count it that way, Microsoft has been in the mobile phone OS business for well over a decade and they still have essentially no traction. They had traction back when the smartphone market was tiny, but they didn't expand with the market once Apple and Google blew it open.

If Google were still struggling to get traction with their search engine in 2010, I think it would be quite fair to say that Yahoo or whoever had won and maybe they should give it up.

– Android is cheaper than Windows Phone (many phone makers pay Microsoft to be able to use patents used in Android, but even then, Android is cheaper than Windows Phone)

– Android has lower system requirements than Windows Phone

– Android has a thriving app market, Windows Phone doesn’t

Windows Phone low-end phones will only be hit if Microsoft convinces network operators to push them. That could happen if network operators were to regain power over the consumer by doing so. For instance, it could mean that on those phones, the app market is managed by the network operator, customers would pay different rates for different kinds of data, and customers could only use a pre-installed web browser that serves the network operator’s ads.

He just assumed that Windows Phone would have the same virus issues as Android.

This isn't to say it can't or hasn't happened on phones running factory stock roms, the Samsung /dev/exynos-mem permission bug on its own was one example of a huge attack vector on a limited set of Android phones, I just haven't seen or directly heard of it happening on a stock phone.

I hear later versions of Android did get smoother on flagship phones, but I don't know how or if that translates to lower-end devices.

Currently both the core team and OEMs are striving hard to work around it (reversing it would be impossible as it's baked in).

However, I think as mobile platforms increasingly take on the role of general purpose computers, it will actually end up being a net benefit, and Apple's decision will look as short-sighted as the lack of true multitasking in older Macs.

But maybe not? Who knows...

Samsung and Apple both need to make money on their phones. Microsoft does not. Both Bing and Xbox were operated at a loss for years; it paid off for Xbox but not (yet?) for Bing.

I agree with your points regarding limitations with Windows Phone. Just because an opportunity exists doesn't mean that they will succeed. Although I am unconvinced that the app market is that important. A few key apps are important, but Android app purchases lag heavily behind iPhone, and it is reasonable to suggest that feature phone users will lag even further (especially without a locally integrated payment system in developing markets).

But at the moment the feature phones and almost-smart phones by Nokia, i.e. the Asha series, are not running the Windows Phone OS, but the S40 OS (which is some kind of Symbian I believe).

There's one notable area where Microsoft has competed and thrived: Microsoft does quite well on the Mac platform, possibly making more money from each Mac sold than it does from each Windows PC sold. And there are in fact more viable word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program competitors it needs to worry about on the Mac than there are on Windows (Apple's just for starters).

What's short-sighted is Microsoft not being willing to pursue the strategy it has been successful with on the Mac on other platforms such as Android and iOS, and gambling everything on creating another platform it can strong-arm users and developers on -- something it has only quasi-succeeded in doing once (XBox).

I wouldn't call it a level playing field. They've had a lot of time to make inroads into the market by not documenting the office file formats for as long as possible, so people had no choice but to buy their software.

The formats are documented now, but it's very hard for the competition to get people to switch from a product they are already comfortable with.

Clearly the mobile market is far bigger than the game console market, but fact of the matter is that the Xbox got far more traction early on than Windows Phone has ever gotten.

"The war was over" for online search before Google entered in the game.

The war was over for mp3 players until the ipod came out.

The war was over for Apple back in 98.

The war was over for internet browsers until Chrome came out.