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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: 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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.