Judas!
Seems the historically appropriate thing to shout at Dylan (and yes, I guess he might not have had any influence on this decision, be her doesn't seem to have publicly condemned it either).
346 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Nov 2009
MS are playing a long game here, a several years long game. They can't compete with Android or iOS yet, and current apps frankly work better on Win 7, but they are betting on their dominant position to make TIFKAM the GUI people use at work, and the one they see in high street PC vendors over the next few years.
Personally I don't think it *deserves* to work, because they have put the GUI ahead of the applications (you know, the thingies most people actually use a computer for). But I fear it *may* work, due to their close, almost incestuous relationships with corporate/retail customers. Like IBM in the '70s, no-one will get fired for buying MS.
Good term! Tight Facebook/Twitter/whatever integration may be great if you want it, but is worse than a useless feature if you don't, or just don't want to share your FB contacts with your other social/business groups(*). 86% of the world's population don't have a FB account after all.
(*It may well be that WP8 allows easy separation of different contact groups, but it's perception as "a FB phone" will make people think otherwise.)
Yes, but finding "shit to say about Apple" works on el Reg. Just look at all the commentards and voters falling over themselves to prove how superior they are just because of their choice of smartphone. This place claims to have a "vast IT Professional community". Heaven help the IT profession if the votes and comments here are in any way representative.
...won't mean a damn if the US decide to extradite them (no evidence needed) then offer them a plea bargain (18 months in an open prison if you plead guilty, or 30 years in a supermax if you make us have a trial).
See, they were guilty all along!
But it's the nature of the beast. The MS business model requires users to constantly "upgrade" (am I the only one to still use keyboard shortcuts because I can dig them out of my memory before I can find what I want in the &!@#ing ribbon?) Incremental change (sometime called "improvement") just won't persuade us to buy the same things again these days, so we have to be *made* to want completely new things every few years.
The lesson for MS is that unless they change that business model, they must eventually be history. Perhaps not this time, but surely one time soon.
A lot of the comments above strike me as the IT equivalent of King Canute - we don't like it so you can't have it. Well, if (and that is not yet certain) it makes economic sense for the business, then it's likely to happen, whether or not IT want it. There will be plenty of external consultancy firms telling the directors that they can do it, even if your "backwards IT guys" can't.
IT should be about finding how we can successfully, securely and efficiently embrace new ideas and technologies, not protect they way we do things now.
The tide comes in on it's own schedule, not ours.
Alternatively, isn't it possible that HP, having realized they paid *way* over the odds for Autonomy (as was widely commented at the time) are now looking for a convenient scapegoat? A foreign scapegoat at that.
Either way, HP management don't come out of this well.
Easiest way to get a P45 too.
Like it or not, BYOD is not going away, and IT departments need to realize that. I remember the same attitudes to PC's from mainframe-loving IT departments in the 80's & 90's - we should be embracing new technologies, and new ways of using technology, not just saying "no".