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http://www.wired.com/2016/05/microsofts-smartest-move-yet-letting-go-smartphones/
縮 http://tinyurl.com/zho3zor


The Smartest Thing a Tech Company Can Do? Don’t Make a Phone

科技業最聰明的事情：別造手機


MICROSOFT’S DAYS AS a smartphone company are coming to an end.
And that’s a really smart move by Microsoft.

微軟智慧型手機的日子來到盡頭了 放棄智能手機 對微軟來說是明智的一步

Last week, the company said it would sell the mobile phone business
it acquired from Nokia in 2014 to manufacturing giant Foxconn. Now
Microsoft is laying off 1,850 as it shrinks its mobile hardware
division further.

上週 微軟宣佈出售2014年從諾基亞手中收購的手機業務 買家是製造巨頭富士
康 這幾天微軟又宣布裁員1850人 因為它需要進一步裁減手機硬體部門的規模

Microsoft will still develop the Windows 10 Mobile operating system
and hints that it will still sell phones to corporate customers. So
it’s not giving up on smartphones entirely. But it might as well be.
The company was never able to get much of a foothold in the market
—so much so that last year Microsoft took a $7.5 billion write-down
on its Nokia acquisition. (It also laid off so many people in Nokia’s
home country of Finland that the government applied for economic
assistance from the European Union.)



And yet, in giving up on smartphones, Microsoft is arguably a stronger
mobile company than ever. But instead of pouring money into making phones,
the company has figured out savvy ways to put more of its products on
other companies’ phones and mobile operating systems than ever. While
it’s obviously terrible for all the people who have been left jobless,
it turns out that at the height of the mobile era the smartest thing
most tech companies can do is not make phones.

放棄了智能手機 微軟沒有爭議還是一家強大的移動企業 比以前更強大
微軟沒有單純地投入到手機製造中而花了一堆錢 反而 它找到了許多精明的方


Fire-able Offense

Maybe the idea started in 2011 when Google acquired Motorola Mobile. Or
maybe it was earlier, when Google launched its line of Nexus-brand phones
and tablets in 2010. Or maybe it started in 2007 when Apple announced
the iPhone. After all, Apple’s strategy of controlling every layer of
the mobile experience, from the hardware to the operating system to the
app store, seemed to inspire the notion that success in the mobile
market meant building your own phone. Regardless of where it began,
many of the biggest names in the tech industry decided in recent years
that the best thing they could do was plunge into the phone-making
business.

天大的錯誤




To wit: Facebook partnered with HTC in 2013 on the HTC First phone,
which featured Facebook’s custom Android interface Facebook Home.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia Devices the next year brought the
company’s line of Windows Phone handsets in-house. Not to be left
out, Amazon announced its Fire phone a few months later.



Meanwhile, if you didn’t make your own phones, others thought it
stood to reason that you should at least have your own mobile operating
system. Mozilla, the makers of the popular Firefox browser, announced
the Firefox OS, and Canonical announced a mobile version of its Linux
-based operating system Ubuntu.

如果你沒有自己的手機 別人就會認為：你至少應該擁有屬於自己的移動操作
系統。火狐瀏覽器開發商Mozilla推出了Firefox OS，Canonical推出了基於Linux
的Ubuntu移動版操作系統

Needless to say, the results were rotten. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo
in early 2014. The HTC First flopped, and Facebook quietly pulled Facebook
Home from the Google Play Store. Earlier this year, Mozilla said it
would try to repurpose Firefox OS as an Internet of Things operating
system. Even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been quite frank about the failure
of the Fire phone.



“If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger
failures right now — and I am not kidding,” he said in an interview
with Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron last week. “Some
of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”



On the Phone

Yet no one would accuse Amazon or Facebook of suddenly becoming less
relevant just because their mobile phone ventures flopped. Facebook
now controls three of the most widely used mobile apps in the world
–Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and the standard Facebook app. Amazon
is still an e-commerce and e-book giant; it also powers many of the
apps used on smartphones every day through its wildly successful cloud
services.

進入手機


Messenger, WhatsApp和Facebook APP 亞馬遜仍然是電子商務 電子書巨頭 今天

智能手機使用的許多APP都是用亞馬遜雲計算驅動的


Today’s most successful tech companies, excepting Apple and Google,
have realized that the future lies not in controlling the underlying
mobile platform but in being on everyone’s phone, whether that phone
runs Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS. Yes, those are the two most
valuable tech companies of all, but the rivals closest behind have
discovered more value in not trying to compete directly with the top
two giants.



Facebook, for one, ultimately saw more value in owning WhatsApp, which
was available on a mind-boggling array of different devices, than building
its own mobile platform. Microsoft hasn’t quite given up on Windows
phones, but it’s certainly headed in the same direction. When Satya
Nadella took over from longtime CEO Steve Ballmer, he ditched his
predecessor’s “devices and services” tagline and rebranded Microsoft
as a “productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and
cloud-first world.” That’s a mouthful, but it gets at an idea that
Microsoft isn’t as interested in selling gadgets as it is in selling
the tools that people use to get work done.


· 納拉德（Satya Nadella）接下CEO職位後 他拋棄了前任提出的“設備和服務”



Under Nadella, Microsoft finally launched fully functional versions of
Microsoft Office for iOS and Android. It snapped up well-designed mobile
apps that already enjoyed cult followings on Android and the iPhone, such
as Acompli (the basis of its much-praised iOS version of Outlook), Sunrise
Calendar (now being integrated into Outlook), and the Wunderlist task
manager. And it released acquired coding tools to make it easy for
developers to create apps that run not just on Windows/a but every
platform.

在納拉德的領導下 微軟為iOS和Andorid開發了具有完全功能的Office 它搶購了


In short, Microsoft decided the best plan was not to make its own phones
but to be on everybody’s phones. Today it’s the world’s third-most
valuable company, trailing only Apple and Google parent company Alphabet.

簡單來講，微軟決定他的最佳策略不是自己製造手機 而是進入其他系統的手機中
今天 微軟仍然是世界第三大企業 市值僅次於蘋果 Alphabet

Not that tech giants aren’t getting out of hardware entirely. Google
sold Motorola but acquired Nest and still manages the Nexus line, among
other hardware initiatives. Amazon still has the Echo, its Kindle
e-readers,and its Dash buttons. Facebook has the Oculus Rift. Microsoft
has the Xbox and its Surface tablets. But these are all ancillary
products compared to the smartphone, still the hub of most people’s
digital lives.

事實上 巨頭們沒有完全退出硬體 Google雖然放棄了摩托羅拉 但它收購了Nest


In the meantime, makers of the latest generation of popular apps show
little interest in hardware. There’s not much talk of Snapchat phones,
Pinterest headsets, or Tinder watches. They’re not trying to create
their own mobile operating systems to load with self-interested bloatware.
Instead, they’re just making apps that people just can’t resist using,
regardless of what type of phone or watch or tablet they happen to own.

與此同時 最新流行的APP對硬體興趣不大 我們沒有聽說Snapchat手機 Pinterest


This new generation of companies, in other words, realizes the smartphone
wars are over. The winners are clear. Microsoft knows it, too. Now it’s
showing it understands where the real promise lies by deciding to move on.

換句話說 新一代企業知道智能手機戰爭已經結束 輸贏已經很明顯 這一點微軟
自己也知道 當微軟決定前進時 它已理解到希望在哪裡

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