This sounds too ironical to give a miss!! On May 2, Microsoft proudly launched its new Surface product, a Laptop. With the Surface Laptop launch, Microsoft let go of its claim of bringing category-creating Surface devices. Laptops after all are one of the most matured devices that belong to a very saturated (or in plain-speaking dead) market category.
Now, Microsoft’s Exec Alex Kipman claims in an interview to Bloomberg that “the Phone is already dead”.
“We’re not going to come out with another device that someone’s done,” says marketing chief Mehdi. Anyway, smartphones are yesterday’s news, says HoloLens inventor and in-house futurist Alex Kipman. “The phone is already dead,” he says. “People just haven’t realized.” Kipman is convinced some kind of mixed-reality device like the HoloLens will replace the phone—a theory echoed over at Apple.
Smart Phones, which are now touted by analysts to be reaching to same maturation phase, are still newer and more vibrant as a form-factor when compared to laptops. But fact remains that Microsoft has never been able to understand and ace Phones or Smartphone as a form-factor. It kept failing with its ever-changing strategy and periodical platform reboots leading to this stage.
The duality in claiming Phones as dead and then proudly supporting Mobile platforms like Android and iOS with its software, even selling some of those Android Phones in its stores, is quite stark. Phones or rather Smart Phones as a form-factor will keep thriving for at least one more decade and Microsoft has always been an outlier as far as its impact on Mobile industry is concerned.
Source: Bloomberg
