++ the future of Microsoft Lumia mobile phones ++

The Blue Screen of death has been around so long, I'm pretty sure its part of the OS now. That should be an embarrassment for Microsoft, but for some dumb reason, its not. Oh yeah, they simply don't care. 

Three things on Wiley's relaunch. First, you can't order the phone from their website for the States. Secondly, how much fun to read at the end of an article announcing Wiley's ordering the phone's production there's article about yet another app getting killed off (RBS, not a minor one). Third, Wiley doesn't make the phone. Its actually been sold under a few different companies (Originally released 2015 at a lower price). That"s kind of funny. Oops, fourth, Wiley has been in bankruptcy since the start  of the year. 

Wait a minute, is this the Surface Phone? Hmmm. Crappy specs, cheaply made. Yep. That could be it. Sounds like a Surface device. 

And don't start on the dwindling number of apps. Thats just an argument you just can't win and just make yourself sound really dumb.

You're speaking Reg.... That's the direction.

And microsoft and apple dont harvest data? At least google is up front t about it

ok, and if wishes were horses beggars would ride. I go back to an earlier comment:- if we want MS to change their minds we have to give them a good business reason to do so and that is a mountain of a problem given where we are starting from; a long thread on this forum with various conflicting views does not take us there - fun though it may be.

Chriskagunda's kind words on my post summed it up better than I: we have become inseparable from our mobile phones and the first company that takes this on board may well be able to gain market share, Apple had it by default but seem to be giving it away because they don't recognise it, Samsung have never taken that approach, Pixel seem to be going in the right direction but Google don't have a good rep because their business model is to harvest data. Perhaps the application of this is where MS can find room to move forward - but they will take a LOT of convincing and so would I in their shoes.

I was thinking more about the enterprise space with Azure .net AD Office SQL server etc. I agree there's nothing innovative but, in general, they can make scalable stuff work - for a price. Their concept for UWP was probably good at the design stage but delivery has been so poor the market has once again moved ahead of them, the same happened with WHS. 

Surface does have some nice features which were innovative at the time but, again, they tried to copy the Apple model instead of striking out with something better - realistically priced and capable of third party repair/upgrade would be an excellent starting point but I think they've proved that hardware is beyond them many times. Hololens as a POC looks great but they've missed. the boat on consumer VR.

The bloat is, as you say, inexcusable (I've not noticed any issue with w10m on the 950 but as we've discussed before I use very few additional apps) but given that they haven't been able to take Apple's approach and dump users who don't upgrade I can see where some of it comes from, maintaining a driver model that supports kit from 2000 can't be easy and, presumably, they take the easy way out and just build everything into the baseline because of the backlash they get when they try to deprecate something no matter how old. I know a major manufacturer of ATM who is still insisting that MS should continue to support XP because their bank customers won't pay for an upgrade. That's not to excuse it though, they did well to shoe horn VMS style architecture into NT but then broke it and have been playing catch up with themselves ever since. They do seem to be accepting its unsustainable so, theoretically, they should be able to reduce the footprint going forward but I won't hold my breath either.

Linux is the model I assume you prefer and I can see the attraction but whilst I love Open Source as a concept I'm still skeptical about entrusting mission critical applications to a support infrastructure that relies, partially, on volunteers, if I discover a defect that's affecting line of business I have to have a vendor who is willing to stand behind a product not wait until some student in the Ukraine finishes his thesis and  get's around to it. I know the situation is better than that but if support stopped because my Ukrainian friend got a job with Google who explains that to my board? At least with MS you can argue there's someone worth suing at breach of contract.