back to article Nadella: Apps must run on ALL WINDOWS – PCs, slabs and mobes

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked up the big changes he has in store for the company during a conference call with financial analysts on Tuesday. And among his plans were "universal" apps that can run on any Windows platform. There was little talk of layoffs, beyond what Nadella and new Microsoft phones boss Stephen Elop …

  1. Khaptain Silver badge

    I prefer Noddy

    "The key, he said, lies in shaking up a business that has relied too long on processes that it developed in the earliest days of the PC industry."

    Strange to want to change the very same processes that made them into some of the richest people on the planet.... Software requirements haven't really change much, I seem to have been doing much the same thing for the last 20 years, the interfaces change a little but everything else remains about the same.. ( Except for the VMs)

    "The diversity of products that Microsoft has – from silicon tape-outs to services that we are continuously updating in Azure or Office 365 – is a lot more than when we first created the Microsoft engineering system," Nadella said. "That was for retail, packaged products."

    So if these products are not going to be retailed or packaged how does he expect to distribute them. The retail methods and the packaging might change a little but they still must be retailed and packaged in order that the custormer can actually recieve them.

    "We are not in hardware for hardware's sake and our first-party hardware will be aligned with our strategic direction," he said.

    Then what was it doing before if it wasn't "Aligned with strategic direction".

    Nadella really is nothing more than a stockholders sock puppet. Bill, and even Steve to a certain limit, were capable of creating an enthusiastic future.

    Nadella just bumps out Buzzwords behind empty phrases, either he is just crap at public speaking and has no imagination or he is just a terrible boss. In either case he shouldn't be going public with speeches like that.. As an investor I would start seriously considering moving MS Stocks out of my portfolio.

    He shares a lot with Tim Cook really , neither strikes the chord of desire.

    1. Belardi

      Re: I prefer Noddy

      That is because MS, like others tech companies of the 80s (Apple, Commodore, Atari) have lost their founders. Jobs, Gates, Tramiel were creating new things... C= died 20 years ago because of stupidity (Tramiel was kicked out of C= who then bought Atari Computer)

      There is simply less and less reasons to continue supporting windows/Microsoft.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I prefer Noddy

        Tramiel was a ruthless boss though, he would promise bonuses and all sorts of things and never pay them.

        The term Jack Attack was well known in Commodore, where he would have a tantrum. So it was amusing when a C64 cartridge with the same name came out.

        Jack would have kept Commodore going, it was Irving Gould who ultimately destroyed the firm by spending all the profits and flying the pet jet around living a playboy lifestyle.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I prefer Noddy

          M$ should have invented VMs. The fact that they're an also-ran in this sector too is shameful.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I prefer Noddy

            "M$ should have invented VMs."

            Bit tricky for them to have managed that. VMs were invented by Popek & Goldberg in 1974.

            MS didn't exist back then.

    2. roselan

      Re: I prefer Noddy

      I somewhat aggree. Yet MS seems in such shambles after failures in search, mobile, and now desktop os, that a no-nonsense head, going for simple and clear objectives, should help the organisation.

      I believe that's what the guy is trying to achieve.

      The one OS to rule them all, I'm not sure it's the good way (too much compromise and inertia), but at least it is a way.

      Also: Tramiel as role model, thanx for making my day :)

  2. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    You know, I had a great deal of respect for Nadella. When I met him he seemed to have his head glued on and understood the plight of his customers. But this apparently all changed when he took the CEO's seat.

    What was a brilliant engineer that looked towards creating products that businesses of all sizes needed for prices they could actually afford has become twisted into merely carrying the banner forth with different verbiage. Nadella is banging the "cloud" drum as loud as he can, not realising that it will never be an option for many of us, and won't be an option for most of us until he accepts that we don't move on three-year refresh cycles. The cloud has to be cheaper than 5 year refresh cycles for the commercial midmarket and 10 year refresh cycles for the smallest businesses.

    That's before we get into data sovereignty concerns or what Microsoft laughingly terms "support" for both Office 365 and Azure. What is on the table today is not okay, and it's not the the foundation of a stable, mass market future.

    Yes, there will always be a niche group of businesses - mostly those that are developer heavy and/or cloud evangelists that would use the cloud even at thrice the price - that will eat whatever is put in front of them without asking nasty questions about value for dollar. Yes, for certain workloads cloud computing makes good sense for enterprises...especially those that massively overpay for their IT as it is.

    But the cloud isn't going to build tomorrow's sysadmins. An MSDN account no individual can afford (and most SMBs won't buy) isn't a replacement for Technet. Ever increasing SPLA prices aren't going to keep service providers and the channel alive, and "one app development style to rule them all" won't help your developers if everyone loathes Metro and refuses to uses Metro apps.

    Microsoft under Nadella is accelerating the decay that it was experiencing under Ballmer. Ballmer was making bets on Metro, the Cloud, Mobile and so forth...but he wasn't busily sawing off his traditional markets, products and services like Nadella.

    Now, maybe I'm horribly, completely, world-endingly wrong. Maybe I am the last hold out of a dying past and the world actually wants this cloudy, subscription-based, US law applies to your data and you have no rights world. Maybe everyone in every other part of the world has the ability to "just charge more" whenever Microsoft decides to turn the knobs on their pricing and maybe the whole world is okay with Microsoft having so much control over monthly business IT costs that they have a knob that gives them tangible effect on the global economy.

    If, however, I'm not completely batshit bananas here then many - if not most - businesses agree with me that we have yet to be convinced that this is the future we want to buy into. If that's the case, then Microsoft under Nadella is taking a gigantic risk. Killing off their partner and channel ecosystem by pieces, telling the sysadmins and technologists who supported Microsoft for decades to fuck off and kicking non-niche SMBs and the commercial midmarket to the curb.

    They are betting on the cloud - and mobile - to the point that they are willing to simply throw away all previous segments and businesses, and along with it any hope of being viewed by the general public, sysadmins, or people who sign the cheques as different (let alone better) than Oracle.

    They are prepared to bet reputation, goodwill and market share all on cloud and mobile. If they are wrong, they are done. They are actively pruning and eliminating their backup plans.

    I am willing to admit I could be the crazy one here. I don't get paid billions, Nadella does. But if there is a coherent strategy here that is something other than "wildly gambling with the jobs of 100,000+ people" I honestly can't see it.

    Microsoft feels to me like Sony did in the 90s. I looked to Sony's actions and said "you can't keep making these proprietary formats, or putting rootkits on your CDs or charging 3x what everyone else does for electronics, etc." Everyone said I was mad then; Sony was a legacy. Sony would endure.

    Well, Sony hasn't fared well. And in large part it's because of the overwhelming contempt with which they've treated their customers. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems prepared to add partners, developers and staff to the list of groups they treat with contempt, which makes me less than positive about their long-term outlook.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Remember 'universal' Windows apps for PCs, slabs and mobes? Microsoft's Nadella does

      +1

      Why didn't they make you CEO?

      1. Charles Manning

        Re: Remember 'universal' Windows apps for PCs, slabs and mobes? Microsoft's Nadella does

        > Why didn't they make you CEO?

        He probably failed the "50 buzzwords in 1 minute" test.

        1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

          Re: Remember 'universal' Windows apps for PCs, slabs and mobes? Microsoft's Nadella does

          Actually, you know the really horrifying part? I've being doing commercial content creation for startups for long enough that - when there's a need to - I actually can speak the lingo. It makes my skin crawl. I have achieved a state of actually being able to understand these folks and even converse in their twisted dialect.

          It's horrifying.

    2. Roger Greenwood

      This above all :-

      "The cloud has to be cheaper than 5 year refresh cycles for the commercial midmarket and 10 year refresh cycles for the smallest businesses."

    3. Belardi

      Hence, I'm going LINUX... already started migrating. PS4 will be my gaming system and Linux to do desktop work.

      1. BobChip
        Linux

        Going Linux

        Good choice - join the rest of us.

      2. Jamie Jones Silver badge
        Devil

        " Hence, I'm going LINUX... already started migrating. PS4 will be my gaming system and Linux to do desktop work."

        If you're going Linux, you'll have to change your gaming system to SteamOS, as PS4 is FreeBSD based.

        (Icon is closest we have to the FreeBSD icon... I think I'll start a repurposing campaign!)

    4. Semaj
      Linux

      "just charge more"

      Well, they have certainly pushed me to change more - to Linux.

      I've just moved house and we don't have a phone line yet so we're using a prepay 3g dongle. So naturally we're being conservative with bandwidth.

      So last night I boot my Windows 8.1 PC for the first time since moving, turn off Windows Updates, various sync things via the "modern" UI, App Updates via the store and all the rest of the bandwidth eating stuff I could find ... and it still keeps gobbling up data. It's the final straw for me. I've had enough.

      If this is the "cloud" future that everyone wants then count me out too. Once I've got time, Windows 8.1 is going and being replaced with Linux. I can always run a VM if I need Windows for gaming or Visual Studio and even then, next time I move jobs I'm intending to go somewhere less MS focused. And universal apps can fuck off too (you got WCF support yet MS? Thought not). Besides which, app dev on the Windows platform in general is dire compared to Android and Azure is a massive, slow, gold turd compared to AWS.

      That's me though. Having read your articles and comments I feel your pain that you and your clients will be stuck with Windows for the foreseeable future. All I can say is good luck :/

      1. Semaj
        Facepalm

        Re: "just charge more"

        Oops, I misread "charge" as "change" ... and even quoted it. What a numpty! You get the message though.

    5. Ged T

      You're not batshit bananas - I think you've pretty much encapsulated what many have as frustrations about Microsoft's 'strategy'. They seem to have no appreciation about the negative impact they have created with those who have IT investment decisions to make for their businesses.

    6. nematoad
      Windows

      Up to a point.

      "They are prepared to bet reputation, goodwill and market share..."

      Ok, I'll go along with you on most of what you say but not the quote above.

      MS managed to destroy any reputation and goodwill long ago in pursuit of the market share bit.

      The roll call of the companies Ms has screwed is long, Netscape, Novell, IBM, Digital Research etc.

      The dubious practices used to ensure MS's dominance in the market, see:

      http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm.

      Not to mention TIFKAM

      All this and more has ensured that MS is held in contempt by many people in this business for the way in which they have abused the the trust in and reliance on Microsoft.

      So yes, MS might have market share, but at what cost both to itself and all those relying on it.

      1. Chika
        FAIL

        Re: Up to a point.

        I had my feet in both camps until recently. Consider that I make my living by supporting Windows but that my home environment and a few other works bits are Unix or Linux based.

        When the whole business of Windows 8/TIFKAM came up, I considered it and ultimately rejected it because while it presented a few good bits, the disadvantage outweighed the advantages. Ballmer and others were pushed out because of the cack-handed approach they gave this whole business as well as some other complete cock-ups such as the XBone.

        I accused Microsoft of being pig-headed about their position. They just wouldn't accept that they were wrong with their approach to the operating system question, convergence and so forth. It was one of the reasons that ultimately led to a shake up in the top eschelons of power at Microsoft. Now we have this new bod in power and, for whatever reason, he is now pumping out the same b/s as his predecessors!

        It has become painfully obvious that Nadella is not his own man. He seems to be simply a shill for the financial types that control so much of corporate Merka, not simply Microsoft but throughout the corporate and political circles that control Merka. As long as this situation continues, Microsoft is liable to dwindle until it is asset stripped and left for dead, just as with so many other companies of the type with no strong leadership.

    7. bazza Silver badge

      He kinda has to

      "Nadella is banging the "cloud" drum as loud as he can..."

      He's basically obliged to do that. The term 'cloud' has become a buzzword that the majority really believe in, including MS's investors. If he doesn't bang the "cloud" drum as loud as he can then in the eye of MS's investors he's letting them down. And in the USA that's a sure way to get sued to smitereens.

      "If, however, I'm not completely batshit bananas here then many - if not most - businesses agree with me that we have yet to be convinced that this is the future we want to buy into. "

      I'm sensing only sanity in your entire comment. No bananas in sight.

      Being a buzzword doesn't mean that "cloud" is right. Like you I know that it's a terrible solution for a very large proportion of business users out there.

      I also think that it will prove to be a bad thing for consumers too. Data sovereignty and law matter just as much to individuals as to businesses. Who is to say whether pictures or comments that are perfectly normal and acceptable in, say, a European culture won't fall foul of law now or in the future in, for example, the USA? There's already problems with companies like Facebook imposing American prudishness on its European users.

      Putting one's pics and stuff into someone else's cloud means that you're dependent on that country's politicians not passing draconian laws to your detriment. Ok so that might not ever become a problem, but uploading a picture today means taking a lifelong bet. Even trivial Tweets can come back to haunt you. That sort of thing can be career limiting.

      And who is to say that clouds won't evaporate? There's no guarantee of one's personal data being permanently stored by cloud. If you'd got your lifetime's collection of photos on MS's cloud and MS suddenly and gratuitously go bankrupt, where's your photos now? Most consumers won't have a clue about that possibility and will actually believe the advertising.

      "They are betting on the cloud - and mobile - to the point that they are willing to simply throw away all previous segments and businesses, and along with it any hope of being viewed by the general public, sysadmins, or people who sign the cheques as different (let alone better) than Oracle."

      Unfortunately Apple has shown the market that business customers don't generate as much profit as the consumer market. MS have to follow suit. Investor pressure again, they want a piece of that action. In MS's investor's eyes business customers can go hang if the consumer market is going to deliver 10 times as much profit.

      As it happens I don't think that MS are capable of generating a consumer market like Apple have. They're just not that sort of company. If sales figures are anything to go by Windows 7 and XP (i.e. old stuff) is what you use at work whilst Android & iOS (i.e. not Windows) is what you actually buy for yourself as a consumer. MS's investors can't see that and even if they did they probably wouldn't care. Investors aren't into keeping shares long term, all they want is for the price to rise in the short term so they can make a quick buck.

      If taken to the extremes this strategy will drive business computing users increasingly towards Linux. I like and use Linux professionally. It's so close, but unfortunately I don't think it is yet the universal business tool that many would like it to be.

      A Windows Domain is a very good way of controlling a business's desktops. Linux can use a domain for authentication and other services and can indeed serve it (Samba 4), but it's pretty hopeless in comparison to Windows when it comes to controlling what desktop users can and cannot do.

      In a business setting you quite often need the level of control that Windows gives you. Total user freedom is sometimes something you have to take away so that your business can be seen to be complying with the various laws that control different business sectors.

      If Linux did get (free?) management tools akin to a Windows Domain then I think that it would be game over for MS. Even if they did reverse their strategy and try to keep their traditional markets as a plan A.5 I think that the business sector would tell them to get stuffed.

    8. John Sanders
      Alert

      """"When I met him he seemed to have his head glued on and understood the plight of his customers. But this apparently all changed when he took the CEO's seat."""

      Just like any other politician these days.

      MS's problems have always been the same:

      1) They can not win, or compete, they have to dominate and crush the competition.

      2) They are immensely greedy.

      3) They resort to dirty tricks at every single opportunity.

      4) They have an over inflated sense of importance.

  3. Captain DaFt

    Call Scooby and the gang!

    Are they sure he's not Ballmer in a mask?

    A lot of talk about a sea change, but little points to a concrete direction, and his 'bold' move so far is straight out of Ballmer's playbook:

    After 7.2 billion is plunked down for Nokia's phone division, he's shutting down the lines that make a profit, laying off the workers and shutting down the factories.

    Uh, what the heck did they buy? just the name? Nope, they're not even keeping that!

    HERE Maps? Apparently that and Nokia's Lumina case designs were worth all those billions.

    Either that, or they *realllly* wanted Elop back.

    (Maybe he's the only guy that can remember the master password to Live?)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Call Scooby and the gang!

      Crazy thing is they didn't even get Here maps. That still belongs to Nokia. MS bought just the money losing handset business while Nokia still exists as a network and mapping company.

      1. Captain DaFt

        Re: Call Scooby and the gang!

        "Crazy thing is they didn't even get Here maps."

        Hmph! Looks like all they got out of it was then was massaging Ballmer's ego.

        Quote: "if Microsoft would have lost Nokia, they would have lost Windows Phone, and Ballmer saw that as a mortal threat. "

        From http://stratechery.com/2014/making-sense-microsoft/

        Big surprise to me was this slide from COO Kevin Turner's keynote:

        http://2yj23r14cytosbxol4cavq337g.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/WPCSlide-620x342.png

        where he show's that Microsoft's share of the total device market is only 14%! (that's PCs, tablets, phones, etc.)

        1. earplugs

          Re: Call Scooby and the gang!

          M$oft is chasing the hybrid/tablet market just when revenues are evaporating. Instead of pretending that WinOS is the one platform to rule them all it should've just ruled each market long ago. Nadella is just delaying on technical grounds, repeating the mistakes of Nokia and RIM. Good riddance.

    2. Belardi

      Re: Call Scooby and the gang!

      Guess they keep Nokia engineers and simply send the manufacturing to China... as usual.

      the whole thing seems stupid.

      Wouldn't have been cheaper to have paid a Chinese company to make a phone with a MS logo on it?

      1. roselan

        Re: Call Scooby and the gang!

        Nope, they are closing their finn's research center, laying all engineers off.

        (finns sound quite angry about it).

    3. John P

      Re: Call Scooby and the gang!

      It seems pretty astonishing that Satya is saying that MS experiences should be available on any platform, all in the same week they reveal that they're shutting down Nokia X, the only part of the Nokia business that ships any decent volume.

      Unless there are some major profitability issues with Nokia X that we don't know about, the ability to keep them as an "on-ramp" in to the MS and WinPho ecosystem would've been the best thing they got out of the Nokia acquisition.

    4. TheOtherHobbes

      Re: Call Scooby and the gang!

      >Are they sure he's not Ballmer in a mask?

      Nadella and Microsoft are being scripted by the ghost of Douglas Adams.

  4. hplasm
    Meh

    "...developers are targeting not just Windows Phone customers..."

    "... with their apps, but the entire Windows installed base of 3.2 billion users."

    How many of which run the crappy app UI?

    I don't think so...

    1. AMBxx Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: "...developers are targeting not just Windows Phone customers..."

      Wall to wall Windows 8 here, plus WP 8.1. Still won't be buying Metro Apps for business use - what's all the full screen nonsense? Even with the new 'drag to fill part of the screen', they don't mix well with 'proper' applications.

      Metro feels like that nasty multi-tasking add-on you used to be able to add to DOS. Just looks nicer.

      Nice for games though!

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        Re: "...developers are targeting not just Windows Phone customers..."

        "Metro feels like that nasty multi-tasking add-on you used to be able to add to DOS. Just looks nicer."

        Geoworks Ensemble 2.0: Metro before it was cool.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "...developers are targeting not just Windows Phone customers..."

        Have you talked to any of your users? 80% of mine insist on running all of their regular Windows Apps full screen all the time anyway, even on 1920x1080 monitors (the "special" ones even manage to get approval for 2 monitors, so that they can run 2 apps full screen at the same time, if they can figure out how to get one of them from screen 1 to screen 2!).

        Now that Win8.1 has added those fugly Close and Minimize bars in the top right of the "modern" apps, I think most of them would be perfectly at home with Metro Apps.

  5. jb99

    "productivity and platform company for the mobile first, cloud first world"

    This just encourages me to abandon windows entirely as they clearly don't care about it any more and just move onto linux for everything, as clearly they are not interested in PCs any more at microsoft just in "the cloud" whatever that is.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      But the first - and only - true "Cloud OS" (in the sense that it runs virtually nothing locally and is designed for mobile and cloud apps exclusively) is Chrome OS. So is Microsoft's "mobile first, cloud first" (customer last) approach in fact a ringing endorsement that Google is the future?

      Enquiring minds want to know...

    2. Joe Montana

      Cloud first

      Well if everything is in the cloud, it doesn't matter what your client device is... Thus a cheaper client device running Linux is a no brainer.

      1. John P

        Re: Cloud first

        I think this is the point of what they've realised.

        So many people have realised that they don't need a PC for browsing the internet and playing games, a cheap Android tablet or shiny iThing will do for that. Every individual who comes to this conclusion is lost revenue, so they need to ensure their products work on other platforms or the browsing and playing consumer market will continue to move over to Android and Apple.

        This is evident from the next version of .net officially supporting Mono. They need to get out on to other platforms and stop restricting themselves to Windows. Every product will now have to survive on it's own merits, not just keep going because it is dependent on or depended on by another product (ie Needing Windows to run virtually every MS product). As these products become cross-platform, Windows will have to stand on it's own 2 feet or die.

        The only worrier is the comment about their services being best on a Windows device. If this just means added features and integrations that's fine. But given MS' form, it probably means they will be horribly crippled.

  6. Charles Manning

    MS arrogance doesn't change

    Back in 1995 or so, I worked for a company doing computer telephony. At the time it was the biggest such company in the world and we pretty much knew all there was to designing computer telephony products and the software architectures needed to drive them.

    Myself + a few of the others flew half the way around the world to visit the MS campus to talk to a new "computer telephony" team they were putting together to try to extend TAPI (MS's telephony API) into new directions for computer telephony servers (eg. running 0900 phone sex lines, voice mail,...).

    Their most experienced person on the team had "read a couple of books last week" and fiddled a bit with MS TAPI. Between the 5 or so of us visitors, we had about 25 years of experience in designing telephony server architectures. They explained what they wanted to do. We shook our heads and explained, politely, why their ideas were crap and why ours were better.

    In the end the "couple of books" guy said something like: "Well it doesn't really matter. People will do it our way because we're MS and we tell them what to do."

    TAPI never really went anywhere.

    Ironically, or coincidentally (depending on your POV), our meetings were in the same building - a short walk down the corridor - from some people working on MS Bob. We got a brief guided tour and were told some suff about MS Bob, which, they told us, was going to revolutionise the computer experience.... buzzwording us (paradigm, visual metaphore, emotional bond,...) almost as badly a Nadella does now. No doubt if it has been 2013 they would have said "meme".

    Some things really don't change.

    1. ben_myers

      Re: MS arrogance doesn't change

      I had similar experiences working for a once-a-hardware-company that wanted to integrate more closely with the early, early Windows, either 2 or 3, later on for a once-thick paper every-two-weeks magazine. Both times, it was the Microsoft way or the highway.

      I also went to one of the first Microsoft Windows 1.03 seminars, where the Microsofties droned on and one about their wonderful Windows APIs. The Stevie B himself did a Q&A with the audience of software developers. I had the stones to say that the API was really impressive for what it could do, but where are the programs that generate user interface code, rather than hand-coding it all. Steve blew off the question, saying that this was up to 3rd party developers. In other words, Microsofties hadn't thought of it yet, so it was not worth doing. What an arrogant SOB!

      Then they all wonder why no one shows them the love. The high-handed business tactics that made them oodles of cash are now catching up with them.

  7. Cipher

    As new stars are born, old ones must die...

    Analogy from the world of Astro-Physics:

    The old star, Microsoft, having spent itself begins to collapse under the weight of of its own gravity. Occasionally flaring up in a desperate attempt to continue shining bright, as it consumes itself and casts off material destined to be the genesis of a replacement. Having prospered by the "cycle", the cycle comes to its inevitable end...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So, looks like we'll get Office for Android Tablets

    Which would make that 12" Samsung quite tempting. I think this is the best approach for Microsoft:

    - And if those services run on Windows, then fine

    - And if they run on iOS, Android or Linux, also fine, as long as Microsoft are monetizing them.

    1. Charles Manning

      Re: So, looks like we'll get Office for Android Tablets

      More like Office for XBox.

      That might actually work. Johnny gets a reward of playing a game once he's finished writing his book report.

  9. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Shareholder abuse

    It never ceases to amaze me how these uber-CEOs can with the stroke of a pen make billions of dollars vanish, and everybody thinks it's OK?

    Microsoft buy Nokia's handset division, then close most of it. Whu?

  10. David 163

    bing

    It seams that I am not the only person in the world that uses bing. I prefer the results to google. (after doing my own unscientific studies. All my friends point and laugh when I suggest giving it a go.

    1. Eponymous Cowherd

      Re: bing

      Sounds like a stitch-up to me.......

  11. Anonymoist Cowyard

    Sadly the mainstream press have fallen for the spin.

    the BBC for example, seem to believe that all devices will be able to run Win32 Windows apps, which't isn't true.

    Microsoft are saying that another new app format will be able to run on phones, console, tablets and the desktop (hmm, sounds like Java to me.....)

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Easier said than done

    Developing the interface for an app that will work properly on a 4.5" touch screen and a laptop screen using a mouse doesn't sound too simple. You pretty much need to code two GUIs for it, or use the smartphone GUI on the laptop and waste most of the extra real estate.

    Look at Facebook, for instance. There's a reason they don't try to cram the web page into the app, or use the GUI from the app on the web page. If you have two separate interfaces, it is akin to having two different programs that use the same API library.

    What's the incentive for developers to go through the extra work to target Modern and produce a full sized GUI and a touchscreen GUI, versus simply producing a Win32 application that they already know how to build? All that extra work to build the Modern app with two GUIs only adds 1% to their potential install base - probably that extra work would be better spent either creating a iOS app for that IBM/Apple alliance, or an Android app to access the bulk of the mobile market!

    1. Captain DaFt

      Re: Easier said than done

      "What's the incentive for developers to go through the extra work to target Modern and produce a full sized GUI and a touchscreen GUI, versus simply producing a Win32 application that they already know how to build?"

      Not much. If past actions are any indication, most developers/software companies will develop for their target system. (Phone, computer, or tablet)

      Then tweak it just enough to run half-assed on the other systems to get Microsoft's seal of approval.

  13. Someone Else Silver badge
    FAIL

    Oh - comma - goodie!

    For example, the OneDrive and OneDrive for Business engineers now work as a single team, as do the Outlook and Exchange groups and the Skype and Lync teams.

    Partial Translation: Skype will be dumbed-down to the level of Lync, as there isn't an engineer in Micros~1's stable capable of understanding, much less maintaining and extending, Skype; and besides, Skype is NIH, so therefore must die (leaving it around for comparison w/ Lync would embarrass said stable, y'know...).

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