Ask Rudyard Kipling, who once famously said about the French: "Their business is war, and they do their business." And boy howdy, a quick glance at France's history shows business is booming:
Since 387 BC, France has fought 168 major wars against such badasses as the Roman Empire, the British Army and the Turkish forces. Their track record isn't too shabby, either: They've won 109, lost 49 and drawn (or as close as you can "draw" a war) 10 times. Professional boxers have been crowned world champions on shittier records than that.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393124,00.asp
For the record: MS’s marketing of the WP is getting abysmal results.
Just went by Vodaphone’s website again. Only one phone. I think I did the same thing a year ago.
Nothing has improved. After a whole year+ time.
What’s exactly is the problem? It’s not that phones are expensive – people are buying more expensive ones (iPhone), it’s not that people want the best (they are buying Android). It’s plain and simple that the whole marketing message is not working.
How about a more grass routes approach? Cheaper too.
- One big issue is that the Vodaphone and Telecom store salespersons don’t know what it is. They don’t have one.
Give the phone away to them. Any self respecting restaurateur knows that if you want waiters to sell the food…they have to know what it is. Give it away to the waiters/phones sales people. Only catch is that the phone bill has to be in their name so that they don’t turn around and flip it. Then again, who cares. They might like it if they made more money off of it than their lousy salary. - Hit up the devs…free motivated and vocal talent. a prize a month for the best entry per usergroup = 5 or so active usergroups = 60 phones. Big whoopee.
Are they vocal enough? Sure. Ever heard of blogs? 600 blog entries talking about it is not bad. And with a bit of noos, 60 local newspaper articles talking about their local winners. And the WP. - Not only that, you also get 60 new ideas for apps. (Ok..6…but still….)
- Hook up with the Startup Network. Give them a prize for best speech. Who cares. It gets fresh thinkers using it. Vying for it.
- Give it to the real-estate association. Hook them up with the above mentioned devs to write them the tool the want. Hook them back up to the local newspapers to write up how local devs solved problems for the local real estate agents. Using the WP.
- Help those that have the phone convert others: discount the phones they convert, splitting the diff between the two.
- Take the hit out of the $5.00 MS is getting for every android sold…at a 12 to 1 ratio that gives 60$ that can be split between two users… A nice meal…found with the fab service to find local restaurants…available on the Phone.
- Discounts available if purchases via the phone: write an app that offers discounts to WP users. Order a Subway via WP, save 5$…means they have to have a WP. The old adage that the way to get to a man’s heart is through his stomach applies…
- And stop saying we follow Headquarters drum. That’s a cop out for not thinking of creative, local – and most importantly, successful – marketing.
- When I say local, note that I am not suggesting attaching free phones to Tui bottles with No.8….or giving them to boy racers, or advertising WP7 with really cheeky over the top TV adds. I said successful local ideas…Not dumb ones.
Ok. A prediction…
- Considering WP7 had disallowed access to the underling API, only allowing accesss to Ag and XNA
- Considering BUILD’s message was that porting Ag apps to Metro would be a walk in the park
I’m going to predict that the WP API’s are dead, to be replaced with a subset – or full?!?! – version of WinRT by the next version of WP…somewhere like WP8. Hopefully not 9.
At that point, Windows will have a unified OS.
The port of WP7 Ag code to WinRT based code– according to BUILD statements – would be relatively trivial. Just namespaces really.
Maybe they’ll go one day so far as to sell a WinRT-only based OS as the primary Consumer solution, and a WinRT+Win32 and call it something like Windows Enterprise. That’s a bit of stretch.
But the WinRT on a phone is not – it’s the only thing that makes sense.
The downside for SLAMD is that it means Silverlight is a one trick pony.
It’s not used on the web (thanks Apple…) Not used on the desktop (thanks Bob Muglia). Not got much life in it to work on the phone (thanks BUILD).
Probably time to move on.
The usual logged off screen is now a bit more useful… a clock…
Like the new task manager…although I find it a shame that it’s still within the older windows frame format…
I played around, found the experience frankensteinish – two os’s stuck together… Getting into apps was easy – getting out of them without knowing if they were still running in the background (they are) consuming resources, was…disconcerting.
And then the Preview of Blend 5…with only one language supported:
That’s about when I closed down VMWare Workstation 8.
It’s Alpha, I know. But from my experience of Windows 7, Alpha means Release, basically. If anything, it will have a couple of bugs released, and features removed, rather than added.
I love the underlying story WinRT – but the UI layer is still the convoluted mess of Vista, reskinned as 7, now with another wrapper over that. It’s nowhere near as homogenous as it needs to be.
The experience is erratic.
d
Doing a K2 project. Interesting experience trying to mix it with good SOLID / IoC patterns… Hum
Not happy with this post..hope it’s not accurate:
http://wmpoweruser.com/ifa-2011-samsung-not-showing-any-windows-phones/
How many times have I signed in after hours via RDP to be greeted by what the laptop’s cam sees…
(Really hate those ceiling tiles…)
I’m sometimes RDP’ing into the workstation at work, where I host n VM’s running in VMWare Server.
And as VMWare Server is a piece of #FAIL in terms of stability, I sometimes have to reboot the machine.
Which is not possible in some cases, as the Start button shows only Logoff – not Shutdown.
The easy solution around that is to use the Command line. Just Start/Run and type:
shutdown -r -t 5
The –r switch is the important thing to notice – it reboots the machine (in other words, without that, you just shutdown the machine and won’t be able to get back into it till you get to the machine in the morning…oops).
Coming to a wrist near you soon:
Links:
http://bit.ly/nrUWAr