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Windows Phone will not receive new features, and there will be no new Windows Phone hardware. The initial release was on October 21, 2010:
During the weekend, Microsoft's Joe Belfiore tweeted confirmation of something that has been suspected for many months: Microsoft is no longer developing new features or new hardware for Windows Mobile. Existing supported phones will receive bug fixes and security updates, but the platform is essentially now in maintenance mode.
Microsoft's difficulties in the mobile market are no secret, but for a time the company looked as if it was keeping Windows Mobile as a going concern regardless. Through 2016, Microsoft produced new builds for the Windows Insider program and added new features to Windows Mobile. At around the time of release of the Windows 10 Creators Update in April this year, that development largely ground to a halt. Windows Mobile, which already lacked certain features that were delivered to Windows on the PC, had its development forked. PC Windows development continued on the "Redstone 3" branch (which will culminate in the release of the Fall Creators Update later this month); Windows Mobile languished on a branch named "feature2."
[...] We might well wonder why Microsoft didn't say so sooner and instead strung along not only the platform's fans but even OEM partners; it's hard to imagine that HP would have built its Elite x3 phone had Microsoft been clearer about mobile.
Even with this announcement, there's still speculation that Microsoft is going to bring out a new device—something phone-like but not a phone—that'll compete, somehow, in the mobile space. For all the rumors about a "Surface Phone," though, it's unclear precisely what this device would do that is meaningfully different from anything else on the market or if it will be compelling enough to reverse the company's mobile fortunes. For now, all we can do is mourn: the best mobile platform isn't under active development any more, and the prospects of new hardware to run it on are slim to non-existent.
They should release an app that runs full Windows on an external display when an Android smartphone is docked. Put those 8-10 cores to good use.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:58PM (16 children)
I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner as Windows mobile was too little, too late, right from the start. I have honestly only seen one or two actual Windows phones is use in the wild. And that was a few years back. I'm sure MS was desperate to give the mobile market their best shot but Google and Apple already carved up that market long before MS was in the game. It's ironic they failed to see the market materialize given the history of Windows Mobile right back to the CE days on palmtops going back to the mid/late 90's. Someone fell asleep at the wheel for sure.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:19PM (1 child)
Among those who clearly fell asleep at the wheel were BillG (who was focused on his charitable work and thus not watching Microsoft too closely) and Steve Ballmer (who was probably too busy throwing chairs and yelling "Developers!").
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @04:36AM
You forgot to put "charitable" in quotes.
If he was actually giving away money, wouldn't his net worth be going down?
Everything Gates has done since he "retired" has been a scheme to insert strong "intellectual property" mechanisms into a place that doesn't already have those or has been a tax dodge or has been both.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:00PM (8 children)
Microsoft couldn't innovate its way out of a wet paper bag. Throughout its entire history it's been last to market with shoddy, inferior cheap knock-offs of the competition. It's only where it is due to historical accident and ruthless business practices.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:30PM (4 children)
The dismal failure is somewhat punctuated by what a head start they had on today's dominant players. Super early on with pocket computers Microsoft really did have a relatively good thing going with Windows Mobile. My wife had a Dell Axim back around 2002, and it really was a very functional pocket PC. It was way before smartphones and even before I remember seeing many Blackberry devices in the wild. Granted it wasn't a Microsoft branded device, but jam a mobile radio in that old Dell Axim and you would have had a smartphone at least 5 years before the first smartphones. Despite having a working mobile OS years before iOS or Android they managed to show up way late to the party with a phone.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:24PM
Of course Microsoft is going to develop some good products. Funded with buckets of ill gotten monopoly money and shady business practices. How could they not have some successes out of the things they try. They could also afford to hire a lot of very bright people.
It is amusing to see how quick the brain drain was with the emergence of Google and the other internet companies.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:03PM (2 children)
They were always late to the game. They were late to GUIs, they were late to the internet, they were late to about anything.
However on the PC they could afford to be late, because they had the dominant operating system, and people were unlikely to switch away soon as they would have had to replace all their software. With the mobile platform, things were different. Here it mattered to be in time, because it was an established platform.
With PC operating systems, they didn't have the problem because back then the deal with IBM essentially guaranteed them to become the standard platform.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:05PM
Reminder to self: Don't forget to proofread.
Should of course have been: because it was not an established platform.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:12PM
Except that MS had a established platform, in the form of PocketPC. But they threw that away and stated over with WinMob7, something that seems complete madness given how they have bent over backwards to maintain compatibility on the PC.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:18PM (2 children)
Not entirely true. Yes, Microsoft couldn't innovate its way out of a paper bag. But its products are not all knock offs. Some of Microsoft's products are acquired winners that were able to innovate their way out of a paper bag. Or some were just plain outright stolen.
You mentioned business practices.
Let me tell you about Internet Explorer.
Rewind to 1995. The internet is here. The Mac OS (classic) internet experience is greatly superior to Windows. Because of MacTCP, easy dial up setup, and nice GUI applications (Mosaic, Netscape, GUI Telnet, GUI Email, GUI Usenet with nicely automated download and reassembly of multi-part binary postings, and etc, etc).
Bill Gates: the internet is just a fad.
Suddenly, Microsoft wakes up and smells the Intarweb tubes! OMG Quickfully! We need one of those intartube browser things right now!
A developer (Spyglass) has a decent web browser for Windows called Spyglass. Microsoft acquires the Spyglass browser for $100,000 up front plus a nice royalty percent of sales.
Microsoft renames the browser to Internet Explorer and guess how many copies were ever sold to date?
Microsoft works over IE in order to "Microsoftize" the Internet to put all non-Windows platforms at a disadvantage. Over time, Microsoft invested $150 Million in IE -- without ever selling a single copy. Obviously they had some motive that was worth that large expenditure.
Also there was IIS. The laughingstock of HTTP servers. On the laughingstock of server OSes. And Front Page to design your sites with massive bloated unnecessary markup. Oh, and Front Page's license was sweet: you agreed that using Front Page, your web site would never disparage Microsoft, it's products, related companies or Expedia. Once that came to light, use of Front Page dropped sharply. Anyone on the internet would realize that a site built with Front Page could not be trusted to be unbiased. Imagine a news site using Front Page.
Then there was Java. Microsoft embraced it. Then they extended it -- in directly violation of the black letter of the written contract Microsoft signed. It was an obvious deliberate attempt to poison the standard platform neutral Java API with special sweetly addictive Microsoftisms that only appeared on Windows. Figuring most developers would develop and test on Windows, they would only later realize that they had locked themselves in to Windows. Sun sued, and won $1.2 Billioin. So Microsoft created C# and .NET.
I could go on and on. The entire history of Microsoft is just littered with the wreckage and corpses in the wake of Microsoft. If you had a great product that Microsoft was interested in, they would "acquire" you. Or worse they would "partner" with you. Of course, the agreement includes a clause that if you become insolvent that all your IP reverts to Microsoft. Naturally your new "partner" Microsoft would be trying to put you out of business before the ink on the agreement was dry so they could have your IP for virtually nothing.
Or Microsoft would just outright brazenly steal your work. Like Stacker and MS DOS 6. Google it for yourself. Short version: Microsoft included the actual binaries of Stacker's disk compression in MS DOS 6. Eventually Stacker won, but their market was destroyed since everyone already had it.
I could go on, but I'll stop now. It is sad that today's kiddies seem to think highly of Microsoft. Don't shake hands with them. If you do, count your fingers afterward.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:14PM (1 child)
Can't see anything different from Apple. The iPod os was bought. The iPhone screen tech was bought. Hell, even iTunes may have been bought.
It is how the west coast tech scene works these days. Startups are not out to grow big, but to get the attention of some existing gorilla and join their tribe...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:28PM
You're not looking far enough back. Look at Apple back in the same time periods I mentioned for Microsoft. Look back to the 80's and first half of the 90's. At that point, Apple really was a great company. I was, at that time, a card carrying Apple fanboy. And developer. Apple was all about tech and true ease of use. Not: do it my way because it is different. And not: this is what looks best rather than what functions best. At that point BYTE magazine wrote that the entire history of the microcomputer industry was basically an effort to keep up with Apple. And Apple was way ahead of PCs on everything. CD-ROMs. QuickTime video. Plug and Play hard drives (but with big fat SCSI connectors, but still anybody could easily plug in a drive). Not using a processor that had "segment" registers. Having a 24-bit and later 32-bit flat memory model. It took Microsoft until Windows 95 to have a quite decent Mac knockoff. At that point Apple was going downhill. No new innovations.
By 2000, OS X was out, Jobs was back. Apple was a different company. And I didn't like it. In 1997 I happened to become highly interested in Linux. In 1999 I got my first Linux box. Within a couple years, I was no longer using my old Macs and was pure Linux.
You're talking about the modern Apple. And I would agree with you. The modern Apple bought or copied.
The iPhone was a visionary idea. But it was just software. All of the hardware was from third parties, and much of it from Samsung. Apple sues the whole industry (Motorols, then HTC, then Samsung) over crap like bouncy scrolling or slide to unlock? Really? If I were an engineer wanting to solve the how to unlock a phone problem when there is no keyboard, the only solution is some sort of screen gesture.
The iPhone's Apps was not visionary. I was already playing with writing Java "midlets" that ran on most all candy bar phones and flip phones of the day. Anyone who was doing this could see the potential to have a standard app store instead of each mobile network having it's own app store. And various compatibility nits between different devices your app might run on. Apps were an obvious thing to many people when the iPhone appeared. But the iPhone brought uniformity.
Apple should just die. And I could never have imagined myself saying that thirty years ago in my twenties.
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(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:34PM (1 child)
Yeah I did see some Windows CE days in the 90's but Palm had a big headstart on them before they blew their momentum with splitting into Palm and Handspring and losing the plot with the transition to a fully realized smartphone that Apple and Google managed. In my nightmares I still see the creepy chick from the ad campaign for Palm's last mobile phone...
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:16PM
Palm did the split because they were both producing hardware and licensing the OS/platform. And some of those licensees were starting to get worried that Palm would give themselves a first runner advantage, and were looking elsewere (hello Microsoft).
MS may be looking at a similar situation these days as they push their Surface line forward...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:32PM (2 children)
Not only was Microsoft too little, too late for Mobile, Steve Ballmer actually laughed at the original iPhone announcement. Obviously Apple just doesn't get it. How could a phone without a keyboard ever succeed?
See my post elsewhere here, but Microsoft almost missed the Internet in the 90's.
They also almost missed the rise of cheap Linux powered netbooks that would be Windows killers. They headed that off by twisting the OEM's arms. The fatal flaw in netbooks is that the hardware was made by the same companies making Windows PCs and laptops. Microsoft could threaten to not give them favorable license treatment, or even not give them Windows licenses at all. The deal was: Microsoft would resurrect dead XP, put it on Netbooks -- and the OEMs would get it for free, as long as they promised that all the netbooks' hardware would be forever crippled with inadequate specs -- even if those netbooks did not run Windows.
With a history of not keeping their eye on the ball, and near misses, it was bound to happen. Microsoft did actually miss the rise of mobile devices and smartphones. Throughout their history they viewed the world as "PC centered". Everything was a PC. Even a laptop. They tried tablets, but that form factor just didn't work with a desktop OS. So it was "obvious" to Microsoft that tablets couldn't possibly take off. And the only processor in the world is Intel. What other processor could one use in a mobile computing device? So there is no possible threat of serious mobile computing devices. Just can't happen.
But Microsoft did have the world's champion chair thrower.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:20PM (1 child)
Miss, MISS?! Not by a long shot!!!
The smartphone didn't start with iphone unless you have massive US consumer blinders on!
Apple was a latecomer to the scene, and they more got attention by leveraging their existing iPod/ITMS market than the iPhone itself.
Microsoft had been in the smartphone business for a decade already, as had the likes of Nokia, (Sony)Ericsson, Siemens and Motorola.
The blunder was that existing players bought the eyecandy angle and ended up alienating their existing, loyal, customers by rebooting product lines.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:34PM
Elsewhere here I point out that the iPhone was not so revolutionary as some think. The idea of Apps was already obvious.
Microsoft didn't see the vision in the iPhone. And later in Android. They had Windows Mobile, and they thought it was enough. I think they missed the revolution. Modern smartphones as we have them today were a paradigm shift. And Microsoft missed it. They only tried once it was already too late.
Apple was a latecomer to mobile phones. But the iPhone did change the whole industry from flip phones and candy bar phones into what most people use today. Google with Android wanted to lower the bar for everyone to have smartphones so they could have a new way to deliver ads.
If Microsoft did not miss the smartphone revolution, then why is Windows Phone dead? Oh, yeah. Because it had no apps. Without apps, you can't sell phones. Without a base of phones, you can't attract app developers. The same problem Linux desktop faced against Windows.
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