Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has exited the smartphone business for the time being, and at least one exec there says it’s no big deal. “The phone is already dead,” Alex Kipman, the inventor of Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality glasses, told Bloomberg in an interview. “People just haven’t realized.”
The statement might come as a surprise to Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which announced on Tuesday that it had sold more than 50 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2017 — a number that actually disappointed investors, who were expecting around 52 million.
But Microsoft’s smartphone business never took off, and the company has essentially exited the smartphone market which it entered in 2013 with the purchase of Nokia. It has since then laid off most of the employees it gained in that acquisition and written down its entire value. The only way Microsoft would get back in, marketing manager Yusuf Mehdi told Bloomberg, is if it could do something different.
The interview follows Microsoft’s introduction on Tuesday of the Surface Laptop, a $999 device that runs a limited version of Windows for education called Windows 10 S. Microsoft is making a new push to grab more of the education market from Google’s Chromebooks and Apple iPads, but the Surface Laptop is also an effort to get more students to consider Microsoft products in place of their favored Mac laptops.
Everything and everyone dies eventually; it is just of question of time. We tend to concur with this view though as the overall idea behind the smartphone was to trap the populace in the land of OZ and it has worked brilliantly. The next step will be to trap a significant portion of the population in an alternate reality, and that will be achieved with some virtual reality device that will replace the smartphone. For those who can think and use their brains, the world will become increasingly lonely as you will find that most individuals around you could be classified as the living dead; gives new meaning to the TV series the walking dead.