Microsoft, you’re killing me here… Seriously, this is about the most stupid thing I have ever seen. One of your partners, and not even a ranking one at that, had a device at MWC15 that was running Windows 10 and you didn’t. I’m baffled, bewildered and bumfuttled. Most of all, I wonder how did this happen? It’s not like in the past where the OS is a super secret that nobody knows about. It’s not like there are some new features that will floor the universe. This was your chance to stand along side HTC, Samsung and anyone else that would have you, smile and show off this next major step in Windows history. Instead, we had the same happy go lucky speeches, the see you at BUILD and a few new mid-range handsets.
The bad news of course for everyone involved is that the Alcatel device is nothing new. It was just the Pixi 3 (announced at CES) with an older build of Windows 10 running on it. Quite a few sites are saying that this is great as it shows more manufacturers are jumping on the Windows bandwagon, but to me it just shows how lost Microsoft is on the device front. The 640 is announced with Windows 8.1 but will be upgraded to 10, yet 3 booths down, I can see a device running Windows 10. It’s just not a very reassuring picture to me.
Perhaps if Microsoft had just dropped the bomb, the one that everyone was waiting for, the Lumia 1040 with that 50MP camera, 5” display, that SD card slot for saving those monster images (or dual SD slots?) and a partnership with Adobe for getting Photoshop or Lightroom mobile installed? Or maybe the 1540 with a higher PPI screen and more power behind it? If Microsoft had done this, and just smacked the industry with something great, I’m thinking Xbox360 great here, perhaps people would be talking about that for a few months while we wait for it to come out instead of why the Samsung and HTC offerings aren’t good enough upgrades.
I think Microsoft is stuck between being a devices and services company and being something they are not. By opening up the freemium market to Office and other Microsoft products, they will gain users. By showing off new handsets, they will gain users. By creating great Apps for other platforms, they will gain users. The problem is those users aren’t switching to Windows. The market share isn’t going to increase and that means that the developers will continue to blow off the OS. By making decisions like they did for MWC15, they just seemed to confuse the faithful and miss out on attracting many new users.
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