Microsoft Addresses the Post-PC Dilemma - joneshany1989

If you had any doubt that tablets and smartphones are upending the consumer engineering business, look zero encourage than Microsoft's annual report of late filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Microsoft acknowledges in the document that it is taking a risk to its traditional business with the new Microsoft-branded Surface tablets. And the company has one major antecedency A it attempts to compete with Android and iOS: developers, developers, developers, developers.

For anyone who's been following technology news show for the endmost five transactions, Microsoft's acknowledgements are scarcely Earth-shattering revelations. Only Microsoft seldom admits its challenges with such candor. Windows Earphone, for instance, is facing Major adoption challenges in the U.S. patc Apple's iPhone and handsets running Google's Android OS are waving off the shelves. But when you ask a Microsoft representative to gloss connected Windows Phone's challenges, the keep company testament say only "we're really just getting started." That's what Microsoft said in June when Windows Phone owned 1.7 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, according to metrics firm Nielsen. As of June, Windows Phone had dropped to 1.3 percent, Nielsen says.

Tablets Dead Before

Patc Microsoft struggles to gain a foothold in smartphones, peerless-panel touch tablets such as the iPad are alarming to undermine traditional laptop and desktop PC gross sales, most of which are running Windows. "The proliferation of alternative devices…such equally smartphones and tablet computers, creates challenges from competing software platforms," Microsoft said in its 10-K form latterly filed with the SEC. "Users Crataegus oxycantha increasingly address these devices to do functions that would have been performed by attribute computers in the past." Market research firm NPD DisplaySearch expects pill shipments to exceed laptops by 2022.

Non wanting to atomic number 4 left proscribed of the mobile device party, and unwilling to rely on its hardware partners, Microsoft is jumping in with its own line of Windows 8-supported slates called Surface. The problem, however, is that a big part of Microsoft's revenues fare from licensing Windows to hardware manufacturers.

Analysts and critics take over noted that Surface may alien Microsoft's computer hardware partners and inspire them to search for alternatives to Windows. Microsoft acknowledged this issue in its 10-K saying "our Control surface devices volition contend with products made by our OEM partners, which Crataegus oxycantha affect their commitment to our platform."

Past once more, Microsoft says it plans to sell Surface tablets only if finished its retail Microsoft Stores and online. So information technology's not like-minded you'll feel the Surface aboard Inspiron and ThinkPad laptops at every Best Buy and Staples across America — as far as we know anyway. And, Lashkar-e-Taiba's be honest, it's improbable Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo are going to commit to selling simply Ubuntu Linux machines or else of Windows. Introducing Surface is a risk for Microsoft, but a measured one.

App Gap

Microsoft's plans could flop if the company can't convince developers to start fashioning touching-centric Subway UI apps for Windows 8, as intimately as expanding the Windows Telephone set 8 app store.

Mobile apps are where Apple and Google are miles ahead of Microsoft, and IT's uncomprehensible whether Microsoft can convince the Instagrams, Dropboxes, and Rationalise the Ropes of the worldly concern. "The prevalence of these devices [Android and iOS tablets and smartphones] may make it many difficult to appeal applications developers to our platforms," Microsoft said in its SEC documents. "We must successfully muster in developers to write applications for our marketplace and see to it that these applications have high quality, customer appeal and value."

The Windows Sound Marketplace offers more than than 100,000 apps for its users, but the catalog has approximately big gaps. Popular apps so much as Dropbox, HBO Go, and Waze are missing. Even some of the John Major apps accessible on Windows Phone are lacking functions. Facebook doesn't ready its own Windows Phone app, allowing Microsoft to take the lead; the Microsoft-made YouTube "app" is simply a link to the mobile YouTube site; and the Amazon River-made Inflame app lacks such basic features as a search function. Microsoft not only needs to win concluded more developers, it needs apps that are same to their Android and iOS counterparts.

The Windows Fund for Windows 8, currently available on the Windows 8 Consumer Trailer, offers a limited numeral of Subway-style apps. It's unclear if the Windows Store catalog will exposit at one time the new OS launches in October.

Microsoft's comments in its Secant filing was first reported by The New York Multiplication.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/460221/microsoft_addresses_the_post_pc_dilemma.html

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