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Microsoft plans to announce a major new round of layoffs as early as Wednesday, as the company seeks to further cut costs in a shifting technology landscape.
The layoffs are in addition to the about 18,000 employees that Microsoft said it planned to let go a year ago, according to people briefed on the plans, who asked for anonymity because the details were confidential. The new job cuts are expected to affect people in Microsoft's hardware group, among other parts of the company, including the struggling smartphone business that it acquired from Nokia last year in a $7.2 billion deal.
...
In June, Microsoft said it was selling its online display advertising business to AOL, as the company exited a business for which it once had high hopes.Another area in which Microsoft is stumbling is smartphones, a market in which it has continued to lose market share since acquiring Nokia's handset business. Microsoft has so far failed to turn the Windows Phone operating system, which runs on its handsets, into a vibrant alternative to the two leading mobile platforms, iOS from Apple and Android from Google.
How do you read the tea leaves, Soylent? What does the future hold for Microsoft?
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:29PM
I am not an apple fan and not willing to throw myself into the apple ecosystem.
by the same token, I have huge mistrust for things from google and android is a pretty bad system (imho) given how good it could have been, especially considering the amount of brainiacs that google supposedly has on employ.
sadly, MS phone won't ever be what I want, either. we need a good third choice, one where there is ownership instead of buy-to-rent (so to speak). at this point, I have given up all hope for anything even close to freedom on a phone. it can't exist. its too tempting to governments and corporations to let people just talk and exchange data with full privacy and trust. it can't happen. people always ruin things. and the money interests have taken complete ownership of things 'mobile'.
I use phones as little as possible, I don't install apps and I hate the whole concept, as it currently is now. we had a window of time when it could have been a cool portable computer revolution. now, its all about convincing people to carry tracking devices with them. that's what it truly boils down to, sad to say. all else is just candy to get you to carry one.
and so, MS won't save us, google won't and apple won't. I know there is some ubuntu phone thingie but even ubuntu is not some corp I would trust, anymore. less evil than the rest, but still too aligned with corporate profits and data mining.
at some point, I may go full retro-tard and just build/carry an arduino phone, like the ladyada DIY on her site. very minimal, but you can trust about 98% of it and that's pretty good. (can't ever trust the mobile rf and control module, but at least you get full say over its rf state and OFF does truly mean OFF, when you command it.)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:43PM
Have you tried not owning a phone? Of course you haven't. Why if you didn't own a phone, you wouldn't even exist.
(Score: 4, Touché) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:57PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:07PM
1. Buy from a corp that fucks you over, or
2. Start your own shoe company, or
3. Go barefoot.
You have chosen option 1, selling out.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:24PM
The difference is that Shoes are simple enough that a ton of people could make a quality shoe and the two shoe companies in the world would soon cease to exist. The problem is that the cost to enter into the Phone / Internet Business is pretty steep, if you want to be a major competitor.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @01:22AM
seems fair enough in theory, and i think you're right that a ton of people could make a quality shoe prototype, but when it ccomes to mass production the quality of the prototype is meaningless. quality in mass production is about repeatedly achieving the same output regardless of the perceived quality of the actual output. if you can repeatedly reproduce identical pairs of shitty plain white nondescript sneakers and sell them cheap, with a bit of nouse you can succeed in selling a quality product.
if you have poor mass production quality, you might market a totally awesome space shoe that also gives headjobs, but if every second she falls apart in a matter of days, you're gunna go out of business.
in this respect, shoes aren't as different as you might think to phones. when we buy shoes or phones or any number of widgets, we expect that they will perform as advertised. if they don't we demand our money back, so the difficulty for someone who manufactures shoes and phones is less about making something awesome and more about how to satisfy projected demand without fucking up your reputation for manufacturing quality.
there, ftfy
if you had also appended this to the line about shoes it would have made the shoe prospect as challenging as what you were trying to paint for phones
this has less to do with the actual product/service and more to do with marketing, lobbying, legalities and other nefarious activities, and is also why many big companies will expand by spending significant amounts of money for acquisition of a company that already has a product with established market share, because establishing yourself in a new market from scratch is a huge gamble. most businesses fail due to infant mortality.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:36AM
A significant difference regarding barrier to entry: shoes don't need a nation wide communication network to function. If you make ten pairs of shoes, you can sell ten pairs of shoes. But who will by a phone that only has service in one small town?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by yarp on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:09AM
Pfft! You just wait until the iShoe is announced.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday July 10 2015, @01:21AM
Narp?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:43PM
Ubuntu Phone [ubuntu.com]
Firefox Phone [mozilla.org]
On Ubuntu paranoia:
Just kidding though, it looks like you were right:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ubuntu-touch-privacy-default-alexander-hanff [linkedin.com]
https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/156 [privacyinternational.org]
http://mdeslaur.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/ubuntu-touch-and-user-privacy.html [blogspot.co.uk]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:09PM
There is also the Jolla Phone with Sailfish OS.
https://jolla.com/jolla/ [jolla.com]
It is not entirely free as in libre.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 08 2015, @08:07PM
And not all that available yet, alas!
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Thursday July 09 2015, @05:19AM
Hopefully: https://soylentnews.org/breakingnews/article.pl?sid=15/07/08/1840235 [soylentnews.org]
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:21PM
good article links. the linked-in one is interesting since it has some interaction with ubuntu guys.
we know ubuntu has sold out. mint got started from that (plus many others). why anyone would trust an ubuntu phone, I'm not sure. its not compelling enough to jump to and you have many of the same problems the other big guys have.
once the marketing and money guys get into something, they completely ruin it. phones were the next thing they all flocked to, to ruin, after they ruined the internet. previously, they ruined tv (it always had ads, but it got worse over time and has not trended downward, not ever). even education (college) was ruined by the moneyed interests (the textbook 'factories', included).
as I said, I don't expect it to fix itself. at best, I can try to put up with the crap that's out there and try to keep it at its minimum. just like the noise level on the unwashed web; without noscript and blockers, its more noise than signal, at this point.
really a shame that mankind seeks to ruin things like it does. some of us are out there trying to create a better place, while most of the rest are happy 'just to watch the world burn'.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:09PM
I wish there was a serious market for generic phones that could run any operating system - you know like PCs are. Well established hardware environment (x86) with industry standard interfaces for add-ons (PCIe, SATA, USB etc) enables PCs to run Windows, Linux, BSD etc. Now suppose there was a platform that had a standard processor family (ARM and/or Atom) with standard bits inside. Then set up a range of OSes - Android, Cyanogenmod, Win10 whatever. You could buy the phone without having to buy phone+OS+bloatware+corporate control of your environment.
I just got my first smart phone and hate the bloat. Android is also an environment I don't trust too much. Why must every app access everything. Seriously - why does a solitaire game need my location and my contact list? And why does Google listen to everything I say (I know, so does Siri and Cortana etc - hell, even some "smart" TVs can listen to you).
So who created the PC environment we all know and (sort of) love? - Microsoft. Yes, IBM started the ball rolling, but once they lost control of the market, MS set the hardware standard for the next generations of PCs.
So why is Microsoft trying to sell hardware+software that is a poor clone of Apple/Android? Why not separate the two - let everyone else make the phones (generic) and concentrate on the OS. They could start by hacking Win10 onto popular phones (like Cyanogenmod does) and then branch out to less common phones while generating interest by the Chinese and Korean phone makers in a generic platform.
This would make Ubuntu and others available on phones without them going the hardware route.
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Wednesday July 08 2015, @07:56PM
I've already completely given up on any kind of advanced phone system in my pocket. Not only do I have no privacy, but corporations are just sucking up the data on a constant basis. That data is my location, where I go, how long I stay there, and where supported, just what aisle I was in. All of that in addition to who I talk to, and when. Every new device, or software I install, I have to disable all of the location based software already.
A phone is merely a tracking system for governments and corporations that splits the data between the intelligence communities and Big Data proffering lucrative predictions of consumer activity . We can only hope that the intelligence community has our best interests at heart, but I don't believe that for a second.
I'm exclusively on burner phones that I swap out regularly. What I would like to do is go full retro-tard and develop a bluetooth connection that allows us to negotiate a connection over the phone line like t38 fax support. It wouldn't be all that great (t38 isn't a silver bullet for faxes over VOIP), but you could at least layer on instant messaging with 100% unbreakable privacy between two nodes. (Use a custom OTP setup)
I think you have to take it that far, since endpoint-to-endpoint encryption on the phones themselves can never be trusted. Likewise, the Red Phone, Black Phone, Banana Phone, Whatever Phone, all suffer from the exact same problems. They might *possibly* be more private, but you're still leaking massive amounts of information just being connected to a carrier at all.
My only solution is using disposable (or exchangeable) burner phones connected up to your own equipment to treat the phone as an untrusted route.
Aside from that, our only hope is to marginalize the carriers themselves, and that will only happen with a vibrant Wi-Fi collective that can deliver coverage in the cities. It's coming, but not anywhere near close to the coverage areas of the cellular carriers. The ones I know about in Northern California are pretty nice for $5 a month, but don't have enough coverage to reach parity with a cell phone.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by puzzled_decoy on Wednesday July 08 2015, @08:18PM
Sooo.... you want something like Jolla Phone [jolla.com]?
(Score: 1) by multixrulz on Thursday July 09 2015, @04:35AM
I wouldn't mind having a very dumb phone if I could have a smartphone as a nice mobile computer. In fact, I did that for 6 months until my dumbphone died. But that's still not a good option.
I don't install apps and I hate the whole concept, as it currently is now. we had a window of time when it could have been a cool portable computer revolution.
So true. The apps suck, as does the OS. iOS and android suck in different ways, to be sure, but the bottom line is that nobody has your interests in mind when you buy into that ecosystem.
Now if only I could run ArchLinux on smartphone hardware...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @06:16AM
Great post, 100% of how I feel as well.
I'm kinda hoping for a Fairphone + Replicant some day when they fix the hardware design. The current generation is less than perfect Here's more on the subject http://blog.replicant.us/2013/11/fairphone/ [replicant.us]