Why does Microsoft "give up"? (WHS, Media Center, Windows Phone, etc.)

[VirtualLarry]

Seriously, do they stick with anything, for technologies' sake? To see where things evolve, and how they might grow in the future?

Do you think that they will abandon XBox, like they did the Zune (Ok, maybe that one should have been abandoned).

I mean, they've got Windows, still, thankfully, but ... if Android takes over, will MS abandon their core product? (Actually, Microsoft specialized in programming language products, before Windows became popular and took over the market. It wasn't always their core product either.)

 

[TheELF]

Seriously, do they stick with anything, for technologies' sake? To see where things evolve, and how they might grow in the future?

Well they don't have to stick with something to see where things evolve to and so on.
They do projects as a kind of proof of concept and if it takes off they run with it, if not they got tons of experience out of it,they don't have to turn it into an endless money pit they just hang on to the idea until technology improves the one bit they thought was the problem and then they just try again.

Android already took over everything that is overtakable ( ? ) now microsoft is trying to get a foot into the android market trying to run on snapdragon,same rules apply,if it tanks they will search for what the cause was (arm being too weak) and they will wait until things change to try again.

 

[tommo123]

Well they don't have to stick with something to see where things evolve to and so on.
They do projects as a kind of proof of concept and if it takes off they run with it, if not they got tons of experience out of it,they don't have to turn it into an endless money pit they just hang on to the idea until technology improves the one bit they thought was the problem and then they just try again.

Android already took over everything that is overtakable ( ? ) now microsoft is trying to get a foot into the android market trying to run on snapdragon,same rules apply,if it tanks they will search for what the cause was (arm being too weak) and they will wait until things change to try again.

except the next time microsoft dip their toe in a market wouldn't it be fair from the consumers PoV to think "it's MS, no point investing in this since they'll just bail in a year or 2 anyway"

 

[TheELF]

except the next time microsoft dip their toe in a market wouldn't it be fair from the consumers PoV to think "it's MS, no point investing in this since they'll just bail in a year or 2 anyway"

That is the same for any product that is not well established, i.e. new.
You buy your super duper 3D TV and 6 month later you realise that nobody supports it and the 3D aspect is basically useless,microsoft had nothing to do with that one...no company ever keeps on spending on a product that doesn't get enough market share.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

"Dominant Firm" is something just short of monopoly. Even so, with "above-normal" profit prospects, if not enough people bought into the "home server" concept, or not enough people became dedicated Media Center devotees, MS is going to reassess their support and maintenance costs -- for instance, keeping up the WMC "TV Guide" listings.

Meanwhile, some user such as I begins to tailor their routine daily life to known software usage -- growing accustomed to a certain "comfort level." But technical change occurs faster than we'd want under that scenario. Lord knows how we will have to adjust our lives to further developments and changes.

And if it weren't for growing vulnerability to hackers and security breaches, we'd feel more comfortable even using an old OS version like XP for certain purposes.

Compare our situation to automobile ownership. If you happened to have a 1955 Chevy BelAir -- totally restored -- you could still be driving it without any anxieties. If it didn't have seat belts, you would install them yourself.

 

[mxnerd]

Media Center can be replaced with VLC and other free media players, but VLC's user interface sucks big time.

I like WHS very much, but it never took off. NAS products took over.

Windows Phone is DOA. Microsoft insists putting a PC UI on a small device.

And you forgot to mention Windows Small Business Server 2003 & 2011, which has everything and integrated well, but were resource hogs.

At the time, a lot of small business's server hardware just could not handle the software and the performance was joke.

 

[JackMDS]

In MS the Engineering staff is like us. Perceptive Technology and Innovation over Money.

The Marketing and most of the Mangling staff perceive Money over Technology, and currently they are in the high sit.

 

[quikah]

Windows Phone is DOA. Microsoft insists putting a PC UI on a small device.

WindowsPhone/Windows 10 Mobile doesn't have a PC UI. That was Windows Mobile/CE. Windows Phone was completely different. Their mistake for calling it windows, causes customer confusion.

 

[tommo123]

That is the same for any product that is not well established, i.e. new.
You buy your super duper 3D TV and 6 month later you realise that nobody supports it and the 3D aspect is basically useless,microsoft had nothing to do with that one...no company ever keeps on spending on a product that doesn't get enough market share.

IMO - not really. a new company is a risk to invest with but you use your judgement. re: 3d tv - i don't use 3d and don't use smart features so it doesn't really matter who i go with as long as it does what i want.
MS just seem to try for a while then bail (band, zune, phones etc) so in my mind MS are not a company i would consider unless they were in a good position in that market - but by then i'd already be with a competitor.

 

[XavierMace]

It's called running a business. If something isn't profitable, you stop doing it. Zune was a failure from the start. They dropped the ball hardcore with Windows Phone and dug themselves an insurmountable ditch. Continuing with it would have just been a waste of money. WHS had an exceedingly small market base. For it to have a chance to gain any traction, they would have to seriously step it up.

 

[tommo123]

It's called running a business. If something isn't profitable, you stop doing it. Zune was a failure from the start. They dropped the ball hardcore with Windows Phone and dug themselves an insurmountable ditch. Continuing with it would have just been a waste of money. WHS had an exceedingly small market base. For it to have a chance to gain any traction, they would have to seriously step it up.

but they don't. it's like they expect a "church of apple" response to their products then bail when it doesn't achieve the success they expected leaving their customers pissing in the wind. they're free to do that but we customers are also free to not consider new microsoft products

 

[IamDavid]

Microsoft transformed into a patent driven business years ago. Every one of the "failures" you mentioned will be long term financial successes due to the patents acquired while testing on the ignorant public. From a business standpoint it's brilliant, from the consumer standpoint it's infuriating. The $7B in losses on the Nokia deal will be steep to recover but it barely slowed them down in the only # that matters to them, the stock price. The Microsoft Band was a brilliant example of what their doing.

 

[Ketchup]

For Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center - Microsoft didn't/ doesn't have enough control to make them work. If Apple ran something like this, all the computers sold with this would have TV controllers and would probably have a little more software to make them do what they were intended for and make it more apparent that they can. And they would show commercials like crazy for what they had. With Microsoft's structure, a vendor would put Media Center on an otherwise plain-jane computer and call it special - when I worked retail I've seen them do it: "Media Center" PC's on the shelf with no TV controller to be found. Oh, but it has a special headphone jack on the front along with the Special OS!).

For Windows Phone - they were late to the party and even then they didn't try hard enough to make it work. If you go outside this forum, I bet you 90% of the population don't even know what a Zune is.

The one thing they do right, as others in this thread have mentioned, is know how to drop sinking ships.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I remember when WHS was all the rage. I was running Linux with MD raid at the time. A lot of people raved about WHS, and yeah it did sound neat what it could do, but I've never liked putting my trust in proprietary software for something as critical as file storage. Sure enough, MS pulled the plug on it. That's all too often what happens. Then you're dead in the water.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I remember when WHS was all the rage. I was running Linux with MD raid at the time. A lot of people raved about WHS, and yeah it did sound neat what it could do, but I've never liked putting my trust in proprietary software for something as critical as file storage. Sure enough, MS pulled the plug on it. That's all too often what happens. Then you're dead in the water.

To be more accurate, you could say MS pulled the plug on the cheap OEM discs you could buy for $50, which implemented a scaled-down version of the Windows 2003 and then the 2008 R2 OS.

I know two electronics technician retirees, each with more computers than you can count on one hand. Yet each of those individuals was never inclined to create even a peer-to-peer LAN or add a "home server" to it. And I know retirees of white-collar professions who began to keep a PC in the home since the early 1990s. But they would never bother to have a home server, or even a LAN.

We are a very small cadre of enthusiast users drifting among a sea of mainstreamers who could care less for WHS. This also goes for your HTPC Win Media Center enthusiasts.

That being said, at the very least MS simply used their existing OS technologies to roll out "WHS." You could ask why they couldn't cross-subsidize the latter with the "enterprise" versions for which they charges hundreds or thousands of dollars. They can set prices because they're the dominant firm, and their product has a monopoly aspect given its mainstream and prevailing usage.

But they can also tell folks like us: "If you want to build a server [at home or in a small business] -- spend the $400+ to buy Windows Server 2012 or 2016 Essentials." From WHS, that seems like a huge jump, but then the WHS OEM installation discs were originally meant for a hardware bundle in the first place.

 

[XavierMace]

I remember when WHS was all the rage. I was running Linux with MD raid at the time.

WHS was never "the rage". In fact I find most of their users to be just like Linux users thinking their product is way better and more popular than it is and telling everybody else how they should use it too. It's a tool. If it does what you need it to, great. But it's not for everybody.

but I've never liked putting my trust in proprietary software for something as critical as file storage. Sure enough, MS pulled the plug on it. That's all too often what happens. Then you're dead in the water.

FUD, see my previous sentence. The majority of enterprise storage is closed source. The only open source storage system I've seen a small business run is FreeNAS and I don't know any large businesses trusting them for their primary storage. Most enterprise OS's are at least partially closed source. At no point have I ever seen ANYONE dead in the water because their file storage was closed source and this includes WHS users. If you've somehow managed to find yourself in a situation where you're dead in the water, meaning all your data is gone, then you're to blame for having a bad setup to begin with.

But they can also tell folks like us: "If you want to build a server [at home or in a small business] -- spend the $400+ to buy Windows Server 2012 or 2016 Essentials." From WHS, that seems like a huge jump, but then the WHS OEM installation discs were originally meant for a hardware bundle in the first place.

The problem is WHS was too much of a niche product, and yes I used both revisions extensively. It was too locked down for the home lab people (or businesses, which makes sense since the H stands for Home), 2011 dropped an arguably "key" feature, and at this point offers very little over their consumer OS. The only real benefit it would still offer is automated backups of other computers on the network. But personally the whole reason I have a file server is so that I don't keep anything of value on the desktops and therefore don't need to back them up. I'm only concerned about backing up the server and WHS didn't help in that regards. With that said, the one concession I think they should have made was to implement the WHS management GUI into Essentials as an option. Having a single, easy to read, GUI to perform all your normal tasks was great, especially for the home users. Server Manager continues to be a slow, convoluted mess. You can get used to the organization of it, but it's still slow.

 

[Red Squirrel]

FUD, see my previous sentence. The majority of enterprise storage is closed source. The only open source storage system I've seen a small business run is FreeNAS and I don't know any large businesses trusting them for their primary storage. Most enterprise OS's are at least partially closed source. At no point have I ever seen ANYONE dead in the water because their file storage was closed source and this includes WHS users. If you've somehow managed to find yourself in a situation where you're dead in the water, meaning all your data is gone, then you're to blame for having a bad setup to begin with.

Find an old san or other proprietary storage system that is out of warranty and see how much luck you have getting spare parts or getting it to work if it fails. Yeah, you're dead in the water because it's proprietary and there's not much info out there on it.

I know, I have a half million dollar SAN in my basement that I originally got thinking I could just slap bigger drives in it which is not the case. I don't use it because I can't trust it to be able to find parts for it if I run into issues - even the drives are proprietary, I can't put my own drives in it. I could not get more than $50 for it now because nobody wants it. The big enterprises use the expensive proprietary stuff because they only keep it for like 5 years and switch it all out once the warranty is out. For home use that's not viable. I much rather stick to something open source.

 

[XavierMace]

You're now talking hardware vs software. That's a totally different discussion.

 

[Red Squirrel]

You're now talking hardware vs software. That's a totally different discussion.

They kind of go hand in hand when it comes to storage.

 

[XavierMace]

A) We're talking about Windows HOME server. I don't know anyone running a 100% proprietary setup at their house and yes I know other people besides myself running servers at home.
B) The OS being discussed runs on non-proprietary hardware which makes your entire post irrelevant to the topic at hand.
C) There's many closed source storage platforms that run on generic hardware. Windows, Solaris, VMWare VSAN, etc.
D) If you bought an entirely closed ecosystem with no thought on how to migrate off that ecosystem should the need arise, I refer you back to:

If you've somehow managed to find yourself in a situation where you're dead in the water, meaning all your data is gone, then you're to blame for having a bad setup to begin with.

You're moving the goal posts to try to fit your original statement which was completely incorrect given the context.

 

[WelshBloke]

Media Center can be replaced with VLC and other free media players, but VLC's user interface sucks big time.

VLC supports TV tuner cards? And gives you a full listing guide, allows you to schedule recording of TV programmes and pause live TV?

 

[CSMR]

WM: Such a shame. MS finally had an excellent OS. Now we are left with iOS (inflexible and lacks file management) and Android (ridiculously inefficient).
XBox: This should stick around, provided Microsoft can unify PC and XBox code. Hopefully they can then start to re-engage with the TV/HTPC market.
Media Centre: HTPC and set top boxes are still hugely lacking in the market, but to compete Microsoft needs to have rebuild Media Centre as a remote-controllable OS, much less expensive and much more power efficient than XBox, which runs UWP apps.
WHS: Fun but the market was very niche.

The core products will not be killed:
.Net: the managers actually tried to kill this around Windows 8, trying to push people to web frameworks! Horrible! Thankfully developers revolted and now .Net is back on track.
Windows: This is one of the most profitable products in the world. Doing OK now; they need to finish the transition begun in Win8, improved in Win10, but still incomplete.
Office: Their main and most profitable products. They are doing realy well here, adding software and improving their market share.

 

[mxnerd]

VLC supports TV tuner cards? And gives you a full listing guide, allows you to schedule recording of TV programmes and pause live TV?

That's the biggest missing part. Microsoft just don't want to support a free product that needs constant data updates.

For that you can try https://www.team-mediaportal.com/

Setup seems complex though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb2ncePf8fE

 

[kn51]

That's the biggest missing part. Microsoft just don't want to support a free product that needs constant data updates.

For that you can try https://www.team-mediaportal.com/

Setup seems complex though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb2ncePf8fE

MS screwed over a ton a people with WMC. And when I say a ton, I mean a small vocal minority that require cablecards with Play Ready.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

MS screwed over a ton a people with WMC. And when I say a ton, I mean a small vocal minority that require cablecards with Play Ready.

Well, that would be . . . me. But the real source of difficulty there is DRM and HDCP. Whether the software component is called "Play Ready" or "HD HomeRun DVR" -- that's something else. So far, I don't think we've seen it done better than in WMC. "HomeRun" is just an example of a proprietary solution for people with MS-orphaned SiliconDust hardware.

I have to come forward and admit something that "small vocal minority" doesn't adequately describe. A lot of us, and certainly before HDCP changed things, invested time, effort and a few bucks in DVR capability, experimenting with movie editing software, grabbing clips and putting them together. Eventually, we saw how we preferred the interface of WMC, which offers functions beyond any STB menu and channel guide.

We racked up experience in troubleshooting WMC malfunctions and nuanced configurations. Initially, it can be a confusing ordeal, but like anything, one becomes familiar with navigating through it. By this time, with everyone locked into the HDCP constraints, STB cable-TV subscribers were also acquiring TIVO and then cable-provider DVR or on-demand features.

But after all that DIY suffering, we don't like giving up what works really well once properly set up, and we don't want to dump our cable-card triple-tuners.

Maybe Windows 10 has potential to accommodate internet-TV subscriptions without using separate interfaces. But with a cable-subscription with really good premium-channel coverage, one is not eager to just switch over to a handful of different subscriptions and uncertain possibilities for integrated access, even if we would also lose what can be above $200 in a bundle of services including internet, Cable-TV and telephone.

But it is a continuation of the conflicts evident in the 1980s with Betamax and VHS -- whether you can "copy" broadcast captures, digital rights and the Jack Valenti media Nazis. A user may not have in mind to abuse copied content, but the restrictions imposed through HDCP completely changed the ball-game and added difficulty for everyone. Maybe the situation encouraged providers to offer DVR and On-Demand when they might not have done so otherwise. I'm not sure.