Re: No More Windows/Xbox Franken-Handheld?

On Tue, 6/3/2025 9:12 AM, Daniel70 wrote:

<thread drift>

Some time ago, don't MS produce a mobile-phone that ran some sort of Windows OS.
 
Are they still about??

There has been more than one device type, for mobility.
There was the Palm Pilot, and various other companies made
"hand held devices that didn't make phone calls" :-)

I don't know if any Wikipedia article will do the history
justice. I certainly can't write this article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile

At one time, they bought a portion of Nokia, and a guy with
a last name of "Elop" ran it, for maybe a year or so. This would
be in addition to other mobile device types Microsoft made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nokia

   "Sale of mobile phone business to Microsoft On 25 April 2014, Nokia sold its
    mobile phone business to Microsoft for approximately €3.79bn. €1.65bn was paid
    by Microsoft for a ten-year license to Nokia's patents."

Panos Panay may have taken the place of Elop, running the division.
Panay quit last year, and someone else is running it now. Presumably
these things happen, when the terms of being awarded a bonus, are
too hard (impossible) for an executive to achieve.

     Hardware Division
        |            |      ...   |      ...  |
     Former        surface      Other HW     (No more Mice and Keyboards)
     Windows OS    Tablets
     Division
     7000 devs

The thing was, for mobile devices like SmartPhones, some of the companies
were just crushing by the others. Blackberry for example, had a loyal customer
base, but the pressure from other companies helped tip it over. Even Microsoft
could not save Windows Mobile. Nokia was also under pressure back then,
it had loyal customers, but the loyal customers could not save it either.

But I would not count Microsoft out. They dabble in things that are
seemingly dead, so never say never.

Other companies dabble, they get burned, they learn a lesson,
they don't do it again. Canonical (Ubuntu) had hardware aspirations
at one time, but the money drain from activities like that, serves
as a reminder to not do that. You need deep deep pockets and a
don't care attitude, to enter existing markets and bump other
companies out of the way. You have to be prepared to lose a lot of money.

Whereas Microsoft is likely to still have a giant pile of money,
and continuing to experiment with Phones or Phone-Like devices
could still be there. Remember that a small company made a
"StarTrek Badge" for the shirt pocket. You press it and I
think you would be in communications with an AI. That was
their plan. For a company like Microsoft, they would immediately
begin to salivate when seeing a "new device type" like that.

You can see an example of the tinkering here. Things you assume they
have made, but perhaps you don't know the history. I only assumed
they made one, and before I saw this, I had no idea what it would
look like.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/microsoft-band-2-review/

Microsoft made a computer table. It cost $10,000 each, and the table
surface was a display (to give some idea of the size). I believe it
might have been touch sensitive, so you could pinch and twist an
item seen in the display and move it around. Or, you could draw
on the table top, and your artwork would show on the display.
Sometimes corporations buy toys like this, but I don't expect they
sold very many.

Microsoft is even dabbling in AI. The AI is not sufficiently breakthru
material, to be guaranteed to succeed. While many large dollar figures
are bandied about, and there is a lot of "gambling" going on, in
the end it could still fail... because it's too expensive. It's almost
like the High Tech industry has a death wish, to just implode and disappear,
due to the amounts of money listed as being inbound. (Companies buying
nuclear reactors, or one twit buying a rocket company because he
thinks he is launching datacenters into space.)

   Paul