Category: Opinion

A few weeks ago a good friend of mine who shall remain nameless but works for Samsung sent a Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 8″ tablet.  The joke was, I showed up at a meeting with my Toshiba Encore 2 8″ tablet and he, being an Android centric company, gave me a fair amount of shtick over the Windows tablet coming into the meeting.  In reply, I said, send me a tablet and I’ll happily give it a go.

So there you go.  I now have a Galaxy Tab 4 tablet (which I have to send back to him BTW).

With the amount of travel I’ve had going on though it wasn’t until this past week and weekend that I had the chance to use this tablet and, more importantly, Android in anger.  The net result:  It was a very depressing experience but not for the reason you would expect from an admitted Windows and Windows Phone fanboy.

Throughout the lifecycle of the product we call Windows, the programs or applications we run on them gone through far more naming conventions.  When I started with Windows 3 back-in-the-day, we call them programs and really, up until Windows 7 that name pretty much stuck.  You would occasionally see “Application” but generally we call them “Programs”.  Enter in the iPhone, the App Store, the Google Play Store and yes, even the Windows Phone store and we have shrunk it all down to “Apps”.  But with Windows 8, we decided to throw in some confusion for the fun of it.  We have Modern Apps which run on the Start Screen in Windows 8.  Then we have the Desktop Apps which run in the desktop environment.  Don’t forget that we have Windows Phone apps because those are different than Windows apps – Modern or Desktop.  It seems that in Windowsland, App can mean a lot of different things.

Which is why I think Microsoft has hit it squarely by settling on Windows Apps for Windows 10.  It conveys the message that they have been promoting: One Windows for all devices.  But it does much more than that.  It avoids the confusion of what has become Universal apps today which to be honest, really aren’t that universal and clarifies to the consumer that this app works on everything simply because of its name.  While the verdict is still out on how successful Windows 10 will be, I think one of the master strokes for Redmond may be in this simple but powerful name for applications.

I am writing this post, at least the beginning of it, from my Toshiba Encore 2 Windows tablet cruising at 32,000 on my way to Orlando. The first fifteen minutes of this flight where a challenge for no other reason than the inability for Modern Internet Explorer being able to sort out the inflight WiFi service.  The browser kept timing out and failing as I watched others around me quickly and easily get online with their various devices.  That was my indicator that the inflight WiFi was working just fine.  Frustrated, I dropped into Internet Explorer on the desktop.  I was online in 3 minutes.

This experience is all to common when it comes to using Modern apps in Windows 8.1.  They often do not play nice or are so out of date from a feature perspective that they border on being useless.  Modern IE is not alone in this quandary and if Microsoft wants Windows 10 to be successful, the Modern app experience has to improve.

Why would I suggest such a thing when the desktop and Start menu dominate the Windows 10 PC experience? Because it is these modern apps that will be the universal apps across all your devices. And while I have suggested that universal apps alone will not make Windows 10 a success, they will certainly be a part of it.  That means Microsoft themselves and the developer community must – absolutely must – improve not only the performance of Modern apps but the features to bring them inline with the desktop or other platform counterparts.

This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we have already seen some interesting developments for Windows and Windows Phone.  First, we saw the announcement of the new Lumia 640 and Lumia 640XL, two mid-range devices that Microsoft will be launching globally, including here in the United States.  On the same day we saw Microsoft discuss in great detail Universal apps and the architecture underneath those apps for all things running Windows 10.  That latter point has garnered a lot of attention as it should.  Microsoft is general and Windows Phone in particular has been a fragmented mess that the company has essentially rebooted three times now.  They have to get it right with Windows 10 for Phones and universal apps will be a key part of that success.  I’ve said as much in the past and continue to believe that is the case.  I’ve encouraged developers to keep the faith as universal apps will make their lives and the lives of consumers easier in a Windows 10 world.

But universal apps in themselves will not save Windows Phone.  If anyone reading this believe that is the case, I’m sorry, but you are misguided.  They will play a big role, but they cannot be the only thing that changes if the platform on mobile is to survive.  It will take a level of marketing that Microsoft has never done with Windows Phone, a commitment – with consequences – from carriers, and partnerships that may seem unholy but are necessary.  The problems with Windows Phone go much deeper than Universal apps and lack of developers.  It’s a fundamental perception problem.

Before Twitter was taken over by llamas and dresses of different colors, there was a flutter of a different type.  It started with Google’s purchase of SoftCard, a mobile payment solution, and the subsequent dropping of Windows Phone support just two days after the acquisition.  The result means that Microsoft and Windows Phone have no mobile payment app or system available in the short term (rumor has it that Microsoft is coming out with something with Windows 10 for Phones) so we loyal users will need to continue to whip out the plastic to make a purchase and not our shiny Lumia’s.

The undertone of the move however was far more ominous than just Google pulling support for one Windows Phone solution.  Google has never supported Windows Phone and scarcely Windows on the desktop.  In fact if you search the Windows Store you will find exactly one app from Google for Windows 8.1.  That one app is Google Search.  There is no Gmail app.  No Google+ app. Not even YouTube. Nothing.  Meanwhile, in the Google Play store, if you do a search for Microsoft you will find 64 apps they have developed for Android.  Sixty Four!  To make it more challenging, many of these apps are better on Android than they are on Windows Phone.  I expect that to change in Windows 10 for Phones but today, it is what it is.

If you look in the Windows Phone Store for Google apps you will find exactly one app as well, Google Search.  So really, the comparisons are not even a comparison.  It’s one sided.  But it gets worse and it is quite clear that Google wants nothing to do with Microsoft.  Need proof?  Go look at iTunes.

Today’s announcement from the OneDrive team of the new OneDrive API is great news.  For those of you who aren’t developers, the new OneDrive API will allow developers to allow full functionality of OneDrive in their apps.  It also provides better speed and includes the ability to retrieve new changes to files and folders to keep a large set of files efficiently in sync.  It allows rsumable uploads of files up to 10GB via file-fragment uploading for things like videos and it allows for a customizable file thumbnail images to be delivered between the developers app and OneDrive.  For consumers, the new OneDrive API may not sound super sexy but it will bring a new level of OneDrive integration into apps regardless of the platform of that app – iOS, Android, Windows or Windows Phone.  What it means is you can expect more apps on your favorite devices to be integrated with OneDrive.

The more exciting news and one that I suspect many people – including developers – missed is one line that is in the blog post about the new OneDrive API.

Internally, we are beginning to use the new API in all of our apps. This ensures that everyone is building on the platform with the same set of tools. Whenever we have access to new functionality, so will you.

For the developer community this is huge for one reason if for no other.  It means that Microsoft will not change the OneDrive API just for themselves.  It will be for everyone including them internally.  That in effect future proofs their apps and makes OneDrive as a platform far more viable.  This is big news peeps.