"Sinking ship?" I have one of these pieces of crap. It's the Titanic after sitting on the ocean floor for 100 years!

I am not sure why Windows Phones get such a bad rap, particularly the newest 950 and 950XL. As a business phone it is great, fully compatible with my company's Exchange Server, ShareFile, HighFive, Drop Box, Goggle Drive, OneDrive and best of all Continuum.

Continuum allows me to travel and access all of my documents, data and business needs, by simply attaching my phone to the dock and then to anything that has a HDMI input. the phone becomes a touch screen and keyboard. All of the Windows Office apps are available and work excellent. I no longer carry a notebook on my business trips, simple a 3"x3"x1" dock and two cables, a dual male end USB-c and a HDMI. Hotel connection is to HDMI and the TV. The dock will accept usb mouse and keyboard or usb wireless keyboard or Bluetooth to the phone.

The Phone has as much power as the Notebooks I have taken on business trips, works all around the world, expands memory via SD Card, has an excellent camera and has great battery life and the battery is accessible, so a spare battery can be carried also.

Sure it does not have all of the apps that android or apple have, but as a business phone it is perfect, at least in my option. If you want to play games and load your phone up with dozens of apps that you don't need or use, get android or apple, if you are a business person, think about your phone as your notebook, without the weight and large power supply.

As far as Microsoft killing off the Windows Phone, I have a feeling 2017 maybe a bounce back year. Since the new leadership came in, after the Nokia purchase, they have been working on software, but they are now the only OS that has a common core in both the phone and computer code. Apple has a different OS for Phones and Computers and Android is phone OS that is used for TV Boxes, but not as a computer. I also see more Windows Phone apps now than I did 4 years ago, I have a feeling something is happening and it will keep Windows Phones going.

That is my two cents on this issue, I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Windows phone suffers from the same problem as Ubuntu Phone (with which I am intimately, biblically familiar).

The problem is that hardware margins are so small. To make up for that, OEMs and carriers look to gain revenue by selling *you* as a product, and to do that they both put stuff on their device that they let you pay for the use of, and they offload much functionality to their services that they then analyze with Big Data Science to extract the gold from. Apple is particularly integrated as both OEM, device software, and cloud provider but Android is more popular with other OEMS and carriers because it allows them a bigger slice of the pie and a freer hand in embedding their own "customizations" in their devices.

Microsoft missed the boat because they have not cut deals with carriers or OEMs and are instead trying to take their cut from the Big Data bonanza, this competing directly with carriers. There is less of a compelling story for OEMs and carriers to choose a Microsoft (or any non-Android, non-Apple) phone, and the third-party phone market is teeny tiny, not big enough to make up for margins with volume.

Microsoft may hang in a while longer, but they are an also-ran in this generation of computers. We'll see how they do in the upcoming Next Wave of IoT.

Microsoft may hang in a while longer, but they are an also-ran in this generation of computers.

It goes WAY before that.

Apple introduced Newton back in 1993. Microsoft launched their own as the Handheld PC (H/PC) WAY back in 1995 or so. They were called palm-top computers. But instead they did a poor job of marketing, a poor job of developing products people actually wanted. Both products died, and Palm rose to be the market driver.

One of Microsoft's big blunders back then was supporting too many architectures. Developers needed to provide builds for ArmV4, Mips3, or Mips4, or SuperH. Eventually they settled on ArmV4 processors, with Intel's XScale chips being the most popular. For me as a developer it was a pain, we had to target four different chipsets, even into 2003 we still needed to maintain a bunch of different hardware-specific code paths.

This was probably the era of Microsoft's biggest successes. PalmOS was big, around 2002 to 2005 or so Microsoft had about 30% of the market. They added a phone, called it Windows Mobile, and it still kept about 30% of the market, slowly growing. Even so, they never bothered to build a central application store like Apple had been cultivating, they never built a comprehensive platform. It was just an OS component and software vendors were expected to market things on their own.

In 2007 they grew to 42% of the marketplace -- when the iPhone was released -- and haven't been that high since.

From a pure technology standpoint, what they had back then was extremely similar to what we have with today's smartphones. It was fully connected, ran whatever app you could find, and there were many groups competing to produce great programs. But they never figured out the big picture.

iPhone came out and they missed the key item, even though at the time many of the devices were better than the first generation iPhone when it came to hardware features. Many WM devices had more storage, more RAM, better graphics cards, higher resolution, and faster processors.

What they didn't have was a great deal with AT&T for unlimited data plans. Data plans were (and still are) fairly expensive. This was the era when most plans had 200-500 minutes, some number of texts, and a few megabytes of data for around $30/month. Some companies had deluxe 'unlimited minutes' plans for $70+/month, but they were premium plans and expensive. AT&T and Apple got together and made an unlimited data plan for $30/month. These days people pay that much for their regular plans, which always surprises me since I'm cheap and use a prepaid plan for about $30/month even today. But moving on.

Android phones followed along after the iPhone, and Windows Mobile was rebranded as Windows Phone, and they failed again in the market. They never built up the branding, never built up the store, never built up the marketshare. The devices were decent, the OS was decent, but they never spent the resources to figure out what people actually wanted, and to build what the market actually was looking for. They continued with exactly the same Microsoft corporate beat, they never changed the tune nor their dance, and the entire world waltzed by.

Then just about a year ago the renamed back to Windows Mobile (with a 10 in the middle) and once again Microsoft is failing to build what people actually want. Microsoft is really good at building a platform that Microsoft wants, and that's what they do.

Microsoft has been missing the boat on this for two decades. They have missed opportunity after opportunity. They have always thought in terms of the global groups -- what to IBM workers want, what do government workers want -- and they never accounted for what everyone else in the world wants. Sure a corporate contract can land millions of sales, but getting everybody means many billion sales. They have always been so fixated on business customers that they overlooked the true nature of the product. I don't see any sign of change.

tl;dr: Yes, the same sinking ship they've been for 20 years.

Well, Microsoft should take care about app availability in Windows Mobile, there may be millions of apps but most used apps are no more than probably 100. Apart from "Google embargo" (not letting Microsoft to even have a Youtube app) , afaik Snapchat doesn't exist (on my own dunno what it's but people seem to care) Instagram (that is owned by Facebook that Microsoft has share) is recent addition.

In addition to this, some Microsoft apps are better or only available in other platforms than Windows Mobile. It's not easy to realize what they're after. All technology stack (Cortana (which afaik far better than Siri) , Hololens, Continuum etc) makes no sense at the end of day because usual product cycle for Windows Phones is "announce phone , announce market availability in 6 months (that's now two model cycle in some Android phones) but make it available in 9 months" and during that time (although you're not a resource hog like Android) let people think that your hardware is already "obsolete" although most complex thing most do is playing Candy Crush. No one cares about Apple Ax CPU as we don't even know if it's intended processor because all said is "X% better".

Microsoft needs act faster and be quite competitive in price terms, otherwise it will stay as an enthusiast tool for a long while.

I switched from Android over a year ago to a Lumia 950.

The reason I went with WP was:

1) Not Android. Long time Android user and got sick or late security patches or even no patches unless you have a Nexus.

2) Not Apple lol

A year in as my only phone and I would not go back to Android. The updates are a frequent as the Desktop OS. It works fast and fluid and the UI is just better than anything Google or Apple have in the same space. It is just a nice system to use, that said I am not a heavy app user.

Would I dev for it, not at the moment. That said, if you are writing for the Win10 Universal platform you would be stupid not to include the phone as it is probably not much of an ask once you have your desktop, xbox and any other format as they are just UI tweaks, as long as you are in C#.

The real thing to watch is the much talked about Surface Phone, I believe this is what MS are about to bet the farm on in the mobile space. From what I can pick up reading between the lines of MS news and rumor mill is that this could be a game changer in the mobile space.

1) Full Win10 on ARM. If the SD835 lives up to the hype and gives a good enough desktop experience then for many they will only need one device, this.

2) Folding format. It is a phone or tablet etc http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/16/14284444/microsoft-patent-phone-tablet-surface-phone-rumors
3) While MS have pulled out of Lumia Hardware they have been busy in Win10 Phone code constantly improving it, the experience now vs a year ago is worlds apart.

So if they can bring Surface Phone out in timely manner, say the next Win 10 release and Surface products Such as Surface Pro 5 etc, then it could the hook into the market MS want. Leave it for another year and they might as well just give up lol

I am impressed by the steady improvements they've been making. I've used WP7, 8, 8.1, and now 10.

Remember when the settings menu used to be a clusterfuck of unsorted, unsearchable settings pages (which even differed between phone models)? It's all organized and searchable now.

Maps, which used to be split across three separate HERE+ apps is now integrated into the stock maps app.

Visual Voicemail is finally supported (for the unaware, this is a GUI for voicemail so you no longer have to listen to "to delete this message, press 7. to save it in the archives, press 9.").

Battery usage breakdown is more accurate but my 950 still had one occasion of "whoa, why the hell do I only have 30% battery remaining when I recharged it last night?" moments where I had to power-cycle the phone. I suspect it got stuck trying to use the iris recognition login method when I turned the device off in the middle of its image acquisition step, since I turned that off and it hasn't happened since.

Win10 Universal platform you would be stupid not to include the phone

Not only UWP, there's also an IOS/Android/WindowsPhone build that can share a good chunk of code, so it would be just wrong to not target all three including the submarine-phone.