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ONE BEELLION Windows 10 devices?! OH REALLY

This word 'billion' cannot mean what you think it means

The shape of the past could walk in the present tense

Of course, Windows has evolved and the past is not the future: Windows on Phone is architecturally closer to Windows on PC today than it has been.

Also, Microsoft has introduced Universal Apps – apps from its store that can run on PC, phones, Xbox and 3D HoloLens.

So what can these new platforms of Windows Phone, Xbox and HoloLens do to counter balance the PC?

HoloLens and Windows Phone were the flagship PR initiatives at BUILD, but – tellingly – these weren’t mentioned by Myerson in his Windows 10 forecast.

Of the two, HoloLens is the exciting new innovation. Yet there’s a big difference between exciting the inner nerd, as it’s done again so successfully, and in turning a product into a sustainable commercial hit.

Right now it’s not looking like anything can lift Windows Phone; sales are somewhere between flat and negative, trailing a long way behind Android and iOS; the new hope is growth for low-priced handsets in emerging economies and markets, such as India.

Microsoft’s been here with Surface, the multi-touch table, and Kinect, the hands-free controller for Xbox. The latter became a niche product. Kinect set a Guinness World Record for units sold and helped drive record sales of the already-old Xbox 360 in the Christmas 2011 shopping period. But Kinect became a liability for Xbox and Microsoft was forced to sell it separately to Xbox One in June 2014, after which the console’s sales doubled, hitting that eventual 10 million number.

The lesson is clear: cool, new ideas quickly become disposable gimmickry. Does the fate of Surface and Kinect await HoloLens? The omens are not promising.

All of this poses a problem for Microsoft. BUILD saw the company once again try to attract developers from larger and more successful mobile platforms. Past efforts have fallen flat and there is nothing here to make us think Microsoft will succeed this time.

Microsoft has released a limited set of its own Visual Studio tools for what is a particularly demanding class of IT person. It has a track record of rolling limited or low-priced and free editions of Visual Studio for different platforms without robbing the core Visual Studio business. Further, Android and iOS apps won’t be accorded write-once-run-on-Windows-10 status by Microsoft.

Redmond talking up Windows 10 with Windows Phone and HoloLens is an attempt to wow developers and bring them over to the Windows platform in general, to help boost the fortunes of these two platforms and – yes – Windows 10 as an operating system.

But why should devs trade already popular mobile platforms for Microsoft’s lame nag, or go with something that’s very likely to see its bubble burst?

This brings us back to the PC.

Myerson is right to think it’ll be laptop, notebook and desktop that shove Windows 10 forward. It won’t, however, be upgrades from Windows 7 – upgrades are always a tiny number of any new Windows operating system’s uptake curve. It’s sales of brand-new PCs that deliver true volume.

That will leave Microsoft right where it’s always been: betting on the swinging pendulum of consumer PC sales and business PC sales.

The question is whether the Android and iOS developers will think that’s a target worth their time. The answer is likely to be “no.” Again. ®

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