Steve Ballmer Retirement Impact on Windows Phone?

[watercooled]

http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/conten...-high-dry.html

According to that article, the future of WP looks bleak with another CEO, do you really think it's all that bad, or have I just found another massively-exaggerated-rumour website?

I'm personally not overly keen on WP, but I don't see it as bad as some people make out, and it seems to cope fairly well on less powerful hardware.

And, would the acquisition of Skype really make that much of an impact? It's not like it's not available equally easily on other platforms, and iOS bypasses SMS *by default* IIRC, and carriers haven't exactly shied away from that! TBH, with the rollout of unlimited SMS/calls packages, it comes across that UK carriers at least are starting to settle in for the lack of profit from the old business model.

[Infinite]

No, it won't go away. Too much time, money and investment has been put in for MS just to say nevermind.

[TheAnimus]

Yeah that is just a link bate article.

Personally I hope a new CEO would help whip up some more dev continuity across the platforms (ie XNA successor) maybe even look at licensing a RT version for TVs or something similar. Really work on the continuity of the platforms.

But they sure as hell won't be scrapping their phone OS any time soon. What they need to do is converge it further, windows 9 is certain to do this, but the question is how far.

It wouldn't make sense for MS to scrap win phone, it is a product which has been gaining more market share and traction of late. Now Windows RT on the other hand..... Well that future is odd.

[GeorgeStorm]

I certainly hope it doesn't go, easily my favourite phone OS

[Lil-Diabo]

I certainly hope it doesn't go, easily my favourite phone OS

Agreed, I've only played around on someone else's lumia and I really liked it.
Was about to get the 925, but waiting to see how much the 1020 will be when it gets here

[watercooled]

Yeah that's essentially what I was thinking; ditching the mobile market would be a hugely risky move, especially after so much time/money spend on development. They might not have gotten into the market in a big way as quickly as they'd have liked, but I don't see adoption slowing, especially now we're seeing a more complete line-up of WP devices from low to high end. In fact, even the lower end devices seem to offer impressive value for money.

As for RT, I think market perception is more of a problem than the system itself; people see Windows and expect it to perform like a PC. If the devices were seen as a tablet (essentially what they are), they might live up to expectations better?

And TBH there aren't a huge amount of RT devices available anyway, I wonder how much of that could be due to MS competing with their own customers on the hardware front? This new Nokia tablet could have some impact on the market too...

[TheAnimus]

Why go up against microsoft's hardware? You've either got to go very high end, or very low end. The risk that they would subsidise it is huge. Now they have someone would have to be crazy to go in there. I think Nokia are very crazy for doing a 10" rather than something more unique.