"Microsoft has pulled the plug on the Android mobile operating system, discontinuing its Nokia X smartphone products less than five months after it launched them."
"Microsoft will consolidate its Smart Devices and Mobile Phones business units into one Phone business."
"A number of facilities in Beijing, San Diego and Hungary will be scaled back, and production will be concentrated in Hanoi, Vietnam. Engineering efforts will continue to be concentrated in Finland."
"About 12,500 Nokia staff are losing their jobs because of the restructuring, out of a total of 18,000 redundancies at Microsoft."
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240224811/Microsoft-ditches-Android-after-four-month-fling
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Microsoft Ditches Android after Four-month Fling
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday July 21 2014, @12:06PM
"discontinuing its ... products less than five months after it launched them"
You'd have to be crazy to do business with these guys in general. Either as a 3rd party to the biz or as a customer.
Specifically on the topic of phones:
"delivering great breakthrough products"
Dude, its a phone. Even worse, its a windows phone. There aren't going to be any breakthroughs. Even worse than even worse, none that anyone will voluntarily use. All they can hope for is patenting everything under the sun with "... on a phone" suffixed then go patent trolling.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 21 2014, @03:04PM
Oh yeah. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Nokia forgot all about Microsoft's history. No big deal though - those thousands of people can find other jobs in tech related industry, no problem. Jobs are a dime a dozen, all over the world right now. And, if they can't find good paying tech jobs, well, they can just go back to the third world living standards they enjoyed before Nokia hired them.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Monday July 21 2014, @04:04PM
Due to budget cuts, 'extend' has been discontinued.
(Score: 1) by danomac on Monday July 21 2014, @07:38PM
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Monday July 21 2014, @03:57PM
> You'd have to be crazy to do business with these guys in general
This has been a valid point since they screwed up IBM's OS/2. Enjoy your migrations off XP, guys.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday July 21 2014, @12:40PM
Someone low down the tree got fed up with being associated with WiMo, and wanted to have a success on their resume. So they built an android phone quietly. It was released about the same time that the upper levels of management were celebrating the departure of monkeyboy. Then a couple of months later Nadella realised what happened, and went into damage limitation mode.
(Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Monday July 21 2014, @01:28PM
Too late, they already admitted that their own produce is not good enough by marketing the droid-phone in the first place. The phone was to be sold in "low budget" markets, which implies that they cannot compete on price with their own products.
That is a huge admission to make. Right so, they may be trying to reduce the damage now, but the reputation, being as bad as it was, simply got worse. Especially seen in the light that MS has been saying "linux is a cancer" and "linux cannot compete on TCO".
Laying off so many workers at the mobile division also indicates that their strengths are not as good as they let on too. MS' marketing model has been designed on controlling the market. When they only can get a few percent of the market, then it is just a matter of time before it goes titsup. The fling with the "Dark Side" just underlines that assessment IMO.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Monday July 21 2014, @04:13PM
Too late, they already admitted that their own produce is not good enough by marketing the droid-phone in the first place.
Well there was the danger of people thinking that when Microsoft/Nokia went through with releasing it. But the reality is that the project was started by Nokia alone, before the acquisition. The reasons for doing so were their's not Microsoft's.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Monday July 21 2014, @04:10PM
No. Microsoft bought Nokia mobile in Sept 2013. Nokia X phones launched Feb 2014.
Nokia X is a fork of ASOP. So there was significant software work on that, and on the phone hardware itself, plus the months it takes to do conformance testing.
Clearly the Nokia X was a Nokia project, from before Microsoft did the acquisition.
Android's benefit for phone manufacturers is that it's zero license cost. That will have been relevant to Nokia. But since Microsoft already produce their own phone OS, it's not relevant to Microsoft.
So this all makes perfect business sense, even without considering Microsoft's NIH attitude to operating systems.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @10:40PM
From the moment it was clear that the loan deal came with Elop as a condition, it was obvious that M$ was not interested in the health of their "partner", Nokia.
This was Sendo and Marc Brown all over again. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [theregister.co.uk]
The times that a M$ "partner" has ended up as roadkill are legion.
My take on the initial "partnership" was that it was to make sure Android didn't get a foothold in Nokia.
If Nokia died in the process? Eh.
Has anyone actually used one of these Nokia Android phones?
When it was announced that these would be produced, my next thought was **How screwed up will these be?**.
I could easily imagine M$ throwing sand in the gears of the the competition.
If Nokia got a bad name because of of a bad Android implementation on their hardware, eh, no skin off M$'s nose; Redmond had been willing to write off Nokia as a loss from the start.
When a giant beast is mortally wounded and is thrashing around in its death throes, it can kill smaller weaker creatures that have the bad fortune to be nearby.
Expect to see more corpses before M$ finally stops breathing.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 21 2014, @01:21PM
Anecdotally when it came out (recently) I figured we'd soon get a Microsoft Debian release. Like ubuntu but with official support for clippy. But if its only going to have a 5 month lifetime...
I've been kind of wondering about the xbox one the same way. So its all about playing games on the tablet or FPS/minecraft on the desktop computer/steam box. So I "need" a new $500 console with $70 games, why, exactly? I could get a fast new tablet with that dough. Or an even fancier phone. Or one heck of a graphics card. And that would get me more and better gaming than a console and MS will probably discontinue the thing in 5 months anyway.
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Monday July 21 2014, @01:55PM
My phone recently got the ability to display its screen on a TV using Chromecast (so you get the benefit of a sofa and big screen compared to computer gaming). I played a game on it which was interesting; I suspect that some games where you don't need close inspection of the screen will work well (the one I played was controlled by the phone movements, and another one had two controls which was tapping either side of the screen, which I didn't need to look at to do).
Casting and playing a game did use up quite a bit of phone battery, however.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 22 2014, @01:57AM
a Microsoft Debian release
Oh, c'mon. You're more aware of M$'s business model than that.
...or did I miss a sarc tag again.
If M$ can't patent something, they give it a wide berth.
The only attention they're likely to give NIH stuff is to bribe presstitutes to bad-mouth it.
Surely you remember M$'s "Linux is a cancer" pronouncement.
The M$/FOSS episode I remember was when M$ got caught violating the GPL, reusing FOSS code in Hyper-V.
They then "donated" their code to the Linux kernel.
Before beginning his actual code review on that, GregKH found that most of M$'s submission was bloat.
He had to remove two-thirds before he started. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [unixwiz.net]
Down in the thread, [soylentnews.org] an AC suggests that M$ should port their OS APIs to Android.
The other day when Nadella's announcement surfaced, I thought **The only way left for M$ to get -new- customers is to start producing apps for Android and iThingies**.
As for me, I'm done with depending on closed code.
I can't image anyone depending on anything M$ is involved with.
.
5 month lifetime
Haven't we all learned that "Microsoft support" is an oxymoron?
Geez, you even have to wait till next month to get this month's patches from them.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday July 21 2014, @01:44PM
It didn't help that their one (X family) Android device straight up looked like windows 8. You can't even tell that it was Android. They should have just used the popular Lumia hardware and put Android on it. They set themselves up for failure and put the blame on the OS. They talk like nobody can sell an Android phone, which is just silly.
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(Score: 1) by blackpaw on Monday July 21 2014, @02:54PM
Bad idea, Android runs like on ass on equivalent hardware. Much as you might dislike Win8, it runs well on entry level hardware, better than Android.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday July 21 2014, @05:56PM
Not a bad idea. The Lumia 1020 hardware is identical to the Nexus 4 (both good and popular phones). Both with 2GB ram and Snapdragon S4 Pro. Unless you're talking about something other than the SoC and memory? Not sure what else could "run like ass" though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Lumia_series [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_4 [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday July 21 2014, @06:05PM
I had a Nexus 4 and was extremely fast and smooth. Hardly 'like ass'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @07:25PM
Don't be obtuse, he said "entry level hardware."
I have a $59 lumia 520 I bought from walmart in order to run h2o wireless in low volume ($10 for 100 minutes every 3 months).
It is butter smooth. You won't find a $60 android phone anywhere near as responsive. Now if only I could do openvpn on WP81...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday July 21 2014, @08:50PM
Don't be mean : ) When i first stated "popular Lumia hardware" i should have said "modern Lumia hardware". Obviously older versions of Android can run on more constrained phones but i have no idea about something like Android 4+ on constrained hardware. I surrender to that point.
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(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday July 21 2014, @02:34PM
Oh wait, nevermind, this is Microsoft, doesn't matter who the CEO is.
I wish them luck on their journey to get past the "OS of the week" stage of product development.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @02:58PM
"OS of the week"
You do realize MS has been in the phone market longer than android and iphone put together?
There is a reason it was called wince. It made you do that, if you tried to use the thing for many of the 20-30 models out there.
MS had a decent phone market. No really. The carriers made sure it stunk. They charged for data by the troy oz (think 10-15 dollars 1-2 megabytes). Remember the ipaq? It was quite the neat thing back around 2002-20003. It was natural progression was a cell modem in it. That is until the carriers got ahold of it. They wanted it 100% locked down and only their apps on it. On top of that no real way to modify it. The carrier stores were rip offs in pricing for the apps you got. Then the qualification hoops you had to go thru to get a piece of software on it was painful and *expensive*. Then on top of that activesync was garbage. The phones would regularly 'forget everything' and basically wipe themselves back to factory state.
Apple went in and basically said 'our way or we go somewhere else'. They learned an interesting lessons from MS. As MS went first.
At this point though. No one wants it anymore. Their window of opportunity was in 2002. That is long gone. They will have to sell them at a discount to android and iphone. Only then would they be able to pick up market share.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 21 2014, @03:11PM
I'm sure glad the carriers haven't done any of that stuff to Android, or any of the other more modern phones!
Oh, wait - they have, haven't they? That is precisely why they have CyanogenMod. So, in effect, you're saying that Microsoft cannot do exactly what all the Android producers have done, right?
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday July 21 2014, @04:11PM
There are alternatives of course, lay-people just don't realize what they are. Off contract phones, Nexus phones, etc are fantastic. Unlocked, free of bloatware, and in the case of Nexus, amazingly well priced. I recently switched myself and several others to a 'tablet plan' that scales up with how much data is used, is month-to-month, and set up up VOIP. My typical bill has gone from $75 to $20 while gaining features. I'm hoping they try to put a stop to the practice as I'm itching to file another CRTC (Canada's FCC) complaint. So far there's probably not enough people like me doing it. These are the advantages of owning your phone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @06:16PM
I'm sure glad the carriers haven't done any of that stuff to Android, or any of the other more modern phones!
At least it is better. You have the option now to undo it or just buy without the stuff sometimes (depending on your carrier). Even then it is sometimes iffy depending on you buy the wrong phone that has been locked.
That is precisely why they have CyanogenMod. So, in effect, you're saying that Microsoft cannot do exactly what all the Android producers have done, right?
At the time yes. MS could barely get the carriers to look at them much less give people 2+gig data plans. And why should the carrier look at them. They would have been subsidizing 400+ dollar phones (they eventually started doing that). But at the time they could give you 100 dollar phone and eat the cost if you picked up a 2 year contract.
MS had massive (still does probably) contracts with the carriers. Very few people had unencumbered legal MS source code. It was 'open' as far as you could see how it worked but not open enough to use. If you think the Android phone market is fragmented the MS one was way worse. At least 3 CPU families and about 5-6 different levels of compatibility between each family.
So its similar but not the same. MS had legal reasons not to do what cyanogenmod. Even CyanogenMod has its 'legal' issues but mostly everyone looks the other way.
The GUI was way better than what was on your basic flip phone. But compared to things like Palm it stunk. They mismanaged the whole thing front to back. With the carriers heaping on more misfortune. It took a dick like Jobs to break the logjam.
Like I said too little too late. They could have owned this market. Instead they mismanaged the whole thing and gave all the work out to subcontractors.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday July 21 2014, @04:45PM
"OS of the week": Week for hyperbole, year would have been more accurate. Still a bad model to switch so often.
In 2002 I was using a palm pilot and loving it mostly for the things you point out that MS got wrong. And you are right about how their window has passed.
Palm had the right philosophy. it is not a whole computer, it should not pretend to be. Batteries should last more than a day, fewer taps to get what you want. Do your core stuff great before you add more features. IR beaming of apps to anyone. I got some good stuff from random strangers in airports.
I was tempted by the PocketPC stuff with their 32 or 64 MB of space and stuff. But every time I played with one in a store I was underwhelmed. it was like giving up my uncolorful motorcycle for a full color cargo van. Horribly inefficient and cumbersome which I also thought of every windows phone I touched. When the OS is the bloatware you should abandon ship.
A Palm worked great for me because I didn't need/want a cell phone. And if I did need one the Treo line was pretty good. Shame the Pre line is dead, I wanted one of them for a while. Oh well, all just regrets and memories now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @05:21PM
If Microsoft is smart, they will take their Windows Everywhere [time.com] slogan to heart and port the Windows Phone API to android.
Nowadays "Android" is really AOSP (Android Open Source Project) [android.com] plus the proprietary Google Play API. [android.com] Making Windows Phone yet another proprietary API on top of AOSP is not a big stretch.
Right now app developers have to do iphone and android, going with a 3rd platform means nearly 50% more work. Porting the WP API to android would eliminate all of that overhead. They could still do just 2 platforms and still get apps that work on android. In the meantime that would slowly build up the number of native WP apps so that a WP-only phone would eventually have a good pool of apps to choose from.
But they would have to be serious about it. No half-assing it. A full-fledged WP API - complete, fast, up to date, etc. Not a second-class citizen. Cross-compiling in the build environment would also have to dead-simple, not much more complicated than a checkbox on the GUI.
Incidentally, this is why I think Firefox phone has a chance. Since that environment is entirely browser-hosted, any app for firefox-phone also works on any platform with a firefox port. Personally, I would much rather see firefox phone succeed than Windows Phone, I'm just saying what Microsoft ought to do for their own benefit not ours.
(Score: 1) by WanderCat on Monday July 21 2014, @06:16PM
With this announcement, all they need to do is to hire Darl McBride as EVP of "Special Projects" and their deformation will be complete!
(Score: 1) by rickatech on Monday July 21 2014, @07:58PM
Nuff said
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Monday July 21 2014, @08:43PM
um. that's why Microsoft bought Nokia. - to gobble up a patent portfolio. the Jobs are gone, but the lawsuits will go on forever..
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 21 2014, @10:04PM
FTFY
.
(yeap, make sense with the original capitalisation).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by arslan on Tuesday July 22 2014, @01:25AM
I definitely would have bought a Nokia with Android in it even if it has the MS logo on it... Nokia's hardware is one of the best. In any case, skimming Elop's comment from the article, it looks like the focus on hardware is now secondary. Whatever OS it runs, looks like Nokia's rep. for good hardware will be going down the drain... what a shame.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 22 2014, @07:14AM
No pressure for innovation, really.
as long as taiwanese, chinese etc. build mainboards, keyboards, mice and all other stuff that goes with a PC and the consumer only understands "winblows" then that is what is going to be "infecting" this hardware.
so sitting down (or standing) at your bench in some factory you can think: "i'm building a computer for windows". 99%. really. sad.