Place: Taco Bell
Lunch: Bacon Club Chalupa (no tomato), Nachos Supreme (no tomato), pintos and cheese, Mug Root Beer
This Bacon Club Chalupa is amazing. Bacon, chicken, some sort of sauce...yesss.
My Pintos and Cheese has no cheese. I'm too lazy to complain.
Microsoft announced the write-down of the value of their wireless handset division yesterday, just a year after acquiring it. If that seems amazing to you, consider that said handset division was acquired from Nokia, who once was the industry giant of handset makers not fifteen years ago.
My, how times have changed.
My first cell phone was a big brick analog Nokia. The high end fashion statement of handsets at the time was Motorola's StarTac flip phone. My first digital handset was the Nokia 2100 series which, at a half pound, nearly six inches in length, three inches wide, and an inch thick, was downright tiny in comparison.
But it was Nokia's next generation of digital handsets that changed everything. The Nokia 6100 series was a high-end handset that was much smaller, much lighter, and most importantly was much more power efficient. But it was its cheaper sister handset, the 5100 series, that changed everything. That was the handset that changed the top selling cell phone accessory from extra batteries to faceplates. It was so good and available at such a great price that it nearly put every one of Nokia's competitors out of business. It was by far the dominant handset in the industry for a good two years.
But that was about it for Nokia innovation-wise. Sure they came out with some odd ideas over the years (the N-Gage comes to mind), but Nokia really faded from dominance, especially during the smartphone revolution. Their last attempt at relevance was partnering with Microsoft to get the Windows Phone OS out there in their "Lumia" line. Everyone understood why they tried, but nobody expected it to work. And Nokia sold its handset division outright to Microsoft.
The thing is, Windows Phone is actually pretty great. I love the tiles and many of the features. And it has a die-hard core fan base screaming their frustration at the lack of global app support. Why the lack? Because fewer than three percent of smartphone users world wide use Windows Phones. "Why bother," say the app makers. And let's face it...Apple and Android fans are happy enough with their handsets to say the same thing. It's not only that Microsoft hasn't given anyone a compelling argument to try their product out, Google and Apple haven't given users any reason to seek out an alternative. They're all solid products. Most of you probably didn't even realize Windows Phone even existed.
Microsoft isn't killing Windows Phone outright...yet. Windows 10 is still coming, and Microsoft still partners with third-party handset makers to release Windows Phone handsets.
But expect to see fewer Lumias, if any, built by Microsoft going forward.
