New York City Cops Will Replace Their 36,000 Windows Phones With iPhones (theverge.com) 215
The New York City Police Department says it will give up its 36,000 Windows phones and transition to iPhones by the end of the year. The Verge reports: The switch is prompted in part by news in July that Microsoft was ending support for Windows Phone 8.1, which a large percentage of all Windows-powered phones are still using. It's a predictable end to the Windows phone, considering that its market share had already slipped below 1 percent at the time the police department adopted its phones last year. The ill-fated decision to go with the Windows phone was made solely by its NYPD deputy commissioner for IT, according to The New York Post, and apparently did not receive further judgment before implementing the program. The Windows models were Nokia Lumia 830 and Lumia 640 XL, equipped with special 911 apps, case management apps, and the ability to receive assignments. They were purchased as part of a $160 million initiative to modernize the NYPD, which has been around since 1845. The new business for Microsoft's phones was clearly not enough to keep Windows Phone alive.
I hope they get a discount (Score:5, Insightful)
Or buy older iPhones. Because that's a lot of money...
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Let me guess. (Score:2)
They are buying Apple because they are American? ;)
Got to keep those jobs in china and cash in Ireland, after all! go America!
Still, knowing how procurement contracts work, I am sure a few people in the system are running their hands together and ordering new boats.
Re: I hope they get a discount (Score:3)
Or Pokemon. Criminals, gotta catch 'em all.
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[citation needed]
If Jessica Tisch keeps her job (Score:5, Funny)
It will be absolute proof of the old saying, "No one gets fired for buying Microsoft."
The most charitable excuse for this is "IT understands how to work with Microsoft products." Of course, that's the IT flea wagging the Police Dog.
Re:If Jessica Tisch keeps her job (Score:5, Insightful)
No kidding. That was such a breathtakingly stupid decision she honestly deserves to lose her job because of it.
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It is always a bad decision to use MS products.
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That was such a breathtakingly stupid decision she honestly deserves to lose her job because of it.
That depends on the cost.
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My guess is that Microsoft would take care of her, if they haven't already.
Re: If Jessica Tisch keeps her job (Score:3)
It's progressive. That means data bits aren't binary and all data has equal value. CHMOD? Check your privilege, shitlord.
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CHMOD? Check your privilege, shitlord.
uid == 0?
Incorrect assumption (Score:2)
>> In the private sector, she'd be gone yesterday and yet we pay these people more
That's incorrect. It's not the public sector overpaying, it's the private sector underpaying.
The correct wording would therefore be:
In the private sector, she'd be gone yesterday and yet we pay the people in private companies much less despite an insecure job.
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Not really. It can be argued that having Window's phones lessened the impact of unauthorized third party apps from being installed and creating problems for the phones affecting their performance, as well as limiting their use for things outside of work obligations and the distractions that go with that
It can be argued but poorly and it's really just comparable to security by obscurity. If your organization is deploying mobile devices without MDM then you are definitely asking for a higher TCO from support issues. Use the right MDM and pretty much most of the issues you speak of are not.
Re:If Jessica Tisch keeps her job (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much she got from Microsoft.
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I wonder how much she got from Microsoft.
Probably nothing concrete, it would have been too dangerous for her and for Microsoft.
But maybe she received the promise of a very lucrative job in case things would turn bad. Just ask Stephen Elop.
Re:If Jessica Tisch keeps her job (Score:4, Insightful)
If the proprietary applications mentioned in the article summary are derivatives of their desktop or tablet cousins, then I could understand the business argument in favor of attempting to keep with the same platform, especially depending on development costs for the Windows Phone versions of those applications compared to possibly much higher costs for developing whole new applications for either Apple's phone or an Android model. It may well be possible that the costs for the applications was low enough to give some justification for trying Windows Phone generally.
That said, if the platform was already on life support then I hope they got a screaming-good-deal for their attempt. Several years ago we faced attempting to upgrade to the latest Novell Netware or migrating to Active Directory. Netware had been in-service in the organization since the 3.x days when there was no network between sites other than for the AS/400 connectivity, so we had a long and successful history with it, but it was clear that Netware was not seeing the new development that it needed, and the time between a new version of Windows coming out and full Netware client support was getting worse with each new release. As much as we'd been successful with Novell in the past, it was clear that future success with them was strongly in-doubt, and we ultimately left.
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Porting an application from the desktop to the phone is no trivial matter, even if the APIs are similar. Yes, internal data structures and probably a fair bit of the under the hood code remains the same, but your interface, where a good deal of effort of such software goes, is going to be overhauled.
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Sure. But if there's anything I've learned in dealing with enterprise IT, it's that some things are greatly trivialized. It's possible that the sales person for the software vendor didn't themselves understand the difficulty and thus the project was quoted or bid for less than it should have actually cost. If the customer gets a quote that makes it seem cheap then it would be no surprise to consider it.
In that sense it almost doesn't matter if it really was harder than that, depending on the nature of th
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The article mentioned that they were using Microsoft's video surveillance software, but nothing about the underlying platforms. Were they Windows XP or 7 or 8? Since at the time they introduced it, the phones were based on Windows Phone 8.1.
If it was based on Windows 8/8.1, then you're right - there would have been the common underlying code base, w/ the major effort on the UI. But if it was based on Windows 7 or earlier, then there would be nothing in common, since Microsoft totally overhauled the UI.
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Unless the apps were Metro, Microsoft's "overhaul" of the UI in just about any version of the OS, ( excepting the NT/2000 to XP update ) does little to change the underlying "stuff" you need to do to "paint" the app on the screen. And even the NT/2000 to XP update did not invalidate the older apps. Metro deliberately breaks all that in order to attempt to force developers into their version of the "walled garden" model that Apple has.
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The thing that surprises me here is that neither the NYPD nor Microsoft decided to work on migrating Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 Mobile - the latter iirc which is already a default on the 640XL. Not sure about the 830, though.
I do think that the decision to go w/ iOS was a bad one, though. They just went through the experience of being sole sourced w/ Nokia/Microsoft and are now going sole sourced w/ Apple. They should have picked Android, which would have given them a vendor choice of Google, Sam
Re: If Jessica Tisch keeps her job (Score:2)
Name any drop in replacement for Microsoft infrastructure.
Re:If Jessica Tisch keeps her job (Score:5, Insightful)
She'll be getting a pussy pass on this one
I don't think it's a pussy pass she will get, she has inherited privilege due to several generations of money and the political connections that come with money.
She is a friend of the Mayor's daughter, which explains how she got the job in the first place, despite having no experience.
Android alternatives (Score:2)
That's what I wondered as well. They'd have had a choice of phone vendors - not just Samsung, but a whole bunch of others - Google, LG, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Blu... For their specialized software, they could have worked w/ Google and worked on a deal to get a particular Android version - say Marshmallow - on any phones they obtained.
Since 1845? (Score:2)
Wow, that's a long time to be running a modernization initiative.
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"somebody told them" ... is management without knowledge a requirement for IT upper echelons now?
i mean it has been highly recommended forever, since actual working knowledge of technology is a detriment to the level of management you can rise to, it seems race to the bottom has accelerated.
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I know it's New York, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Someone who got conned by an MS sales pitch, that's who.
I eagerly await the "Windows Phone is the best phone over, and only iSnobs and Android fruits care about apps!" The Microsoft phone defender is almost as pathetic as the Blackberry defender.
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The "good enough" android phones have applications to run on them, as well as a future upgrade path... Windows phones do not.
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It's just the nightmare event of when someone from upper management pops their head around the door at the IT department and say "Oh hey guys, heads up, we just signed a contract for this new tech you're going to need to support for the next three years, look for my email with details on what we bought!" When upper management makes tech purchasing decisions whilst keeping themselves 100% insulated from their techs, that's what happens. A smooth sales pitch nullifies all technical and critical review, and
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...just whoindahell could be dumb enough to think that Windows phone would ever last? Hell, us North Georgia Rednecks(TM) stayed away from them in droves! Christ, that one sale must have been half of all Windows phone sales. What maroons!!
Re:I know it's New York, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...just whoindahell could be dumb enough to think that Windows phone would ever last? Hell, us North Georgia Rednecks(TM) stayed away from them in droves! Christ, that one sale must have been half of all Windows phone sales. What maroons!!
Well, assuming this was a great modernization I assume she's coming from a world of mostly Microsoft laptops/tablets/servers and that this was her and their first real adventure into smartphones. They probably have a good business relationship and don't mind being a Microsoft shop. They needed a platform to run their custom apps, how many apps the app store has is less of a concern and they probably got a good discount. And Microsoft has in general offered 5+5 years of support on the desktop, they've rarely left their business customers hanging. In isolation the business case might have looked decent until you take a big step back and realize the platform is dying and there's a very real chance Microsoft will pull out of the market entirely and mobile phones aren't like laptops where you just tank them up with your OS image. I'm not saying it was a good decision but I can understand how you'd make a near-sighted decision like that.
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I never have understood this obsession with user-replaceable batteries. The battery in my 5S, which I bought when it came out, is slowly losing its capacity. Even if I go with Apple, $80 over more than three years isn't much.
Oh no (Score:5, Funny)
There goes the 1% market share that Windows Phone had...
I wondered about that (Score:2)
we all know the end was near when dunkin donuts removed the app from the Windows store.
Ahh, it is only taxpayer dollars!
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"there's so many things that Microsoft does better on Android and Iphone that just don't work on Windows Mobile 10"
Doesn't seem like a ringing endorsement to me. If anything, it's the exact opposite of what you accuse filesiteguy of.
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Didn't have to wait long for the vague "The Windows phone is so superior!
That isn't even remotely what he said - did you actually read his comment?
He said he questioned the initial decision to go with Windows Phone, even though he's "one of the last ten people on the planet with a Windows Phone".
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Um, if you read the comment, I stated I liked WM10 better but realize it is dying. In fact, check out the speed of opening an HTML email on Outlook under Iphone vs. Windows Mobile. The Iphone is faster using the same WiFi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNyaTOtlhzs
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Windows Phone offered nothing that the other major phone OSs didn't offer.
They announced that a new Windows phone OS on ARM would be able to run native Win32 apps, which could be interesting if it is ever released. There's demand for device consolidation to a single piece of hardware, and still a lot of legacy Win32 apps out there.
Shrinking by the minute I would guess, and/or capable of being provided by virtual desktops otherwise, so maybe they've canned that too.
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Thing is; Windows Phone WAS a good platform. I have run WP as my primary work phone for 3 years now, literally just replacing it over the weekend with an Android device because (a) I destroyed the screen at a conference last week and (b) it was just getting long in the tooth and battery was not great after all this time.
I actually had the Lumia 830. It was pretty solid, had a decent and easy to use interface, and took one hell of a beating in the time I owned it even before its shattering experience. Damn t
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Windows Phone offered nothing that the other major phone OSs didn't offer.
Apart from an interface that isn't terrible you mean?
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Great quote from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
I loved this...
"Nobody purchases 36,000 phones based on the judgment of one person," a source said. "I don’t care if you’re Jesus f--king Christ, you get a panel of experts."
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Re:Great quote from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Read TFA - they just started two years ago, and have been in the process of deploying them since then. 0-2 years is not "several years" by any stretch of the imagination.
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And by the time the current iphones become obsolete and need to be replaced, they will be able to replace them with new iphones and continue running the same applications. They won't need to drop everything and start again.
Re:Great quote from TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
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Multiple people deserve to be fired for this (Score:4, Informative)
She's deputy commissioner of information technology. Where in the world was her boss when she made this decision?
Failure to act is still accountable.
Makes sense (Score:2)
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I know you're trying to be facetious, but what you're saying is actually quite true. Assuming they deploy the enterprise management tools and so forth on these phones, they can lock them down so that only selected interfaces are available, white-listed applications, etc... I don't know enough about android to know whether the options are as locked down. You do not want your officer being able to install the latest, and compromised, version of a solitaire game in a unit that also has access to police record
Wow! (Score:3)
So Windows phones lose 95% of their user base?
Those Phones can be upgraded to Wondows Phone 10 (Score:2)
That is NOT a long term solution (of course), but at least gives the NYPD time to better weight their options...
If the "Custom Egineered APPs" stop working if you go from 8.1 to 10, you have to hang not only the rich hag, but also the programers/coders who "Engineered" these APPs.
My guess is that the phones will be upgraded to WinPho10, and the Rollout of new iPhones (or whatevur) will be gradual, just as the rollout of the original WinPho ones took two years.
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>> Windows 10 Mobile ... an upgrade.
What are you talking about ?
W10 an upgrade ??????
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If the "Custom Egineered APPs" stop working if you go from 8.1 to 10, you have to hang not only the rich hag, but also the programers/coders who "Engineered" these APPs.
How are the developers supposed to know when they write the app that it won't be compatible with the next version of the OS? Assuming they're not doing anything they're not supposed to like using unsupported APIs and such.
Times are changing (Score:2)
Will they get the new iphone or an mix of 7 and 8? (Score:2)
Will they get the new iphone or an mix of 7 and 8?
36,000 phones? (Score:2)
I didn't know there were that many Windows phones out there in the wild. With this return, that will make this the first smartphone to enjoy negative sales.
"ill-fated"? How? (Score:4, Interesting)
Jessica's response (Score:5, Interesting)
http://nypdnews.com/2017/08/de... [nypdnews.com]
Interesting part:
"The contract entered provided for the smartphones at no cost. It also allowed for the NYPD to replace the smartphones with devices of our choosing two years later, also at no cost."
She also claims that they're already neck deep in Windows, so the Windows phones were easier to roll out. Plus, iOS and Android didn't allow "us to cost-effectively utilize prior investment in custom Windows applications."
As others have noted, she's a political appointee. It would be interesting to find out why or how the contract provided for the smartphones at no cost.
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http://nypdnews.com/2017/08/de... [nypdnews.com]
Interesting part:
"The contract entered provided for the smartphones at no cost. It also allowed for the NYPD to replace the smartphones with devices of our choosing two years later, also at no cost."
She also claims that they're already neck deep in Windows, so the Windows phones were easier to roll out. Plus, iOS and Android didn't allow "us to cost-effectively utilize prior investment in custom Windows applications."
As others have noted, she's a political appointee. It would be interesting to find out why or how the contract provided for the smartphones at no cost.
Free phones, plus free replacements 2 years later, plus the functionality to run your custom Windows applications? I think I would have made the same decision, provided that testing confirmed app functionality.
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Doesn't Bing pay people to use it, too?
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It's been that way for a long time. Google, Apple, and Facebook all make money from selling your data to the highest bidder. Microsoft doesn't.
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Do you have a link to the exact contract and do you know who was responsible for developing the original apps that would have to to be totally rewritten for Windows 10?
The circle continues (Score:2)
IT director / executive makes overwhelmingly bad decision, costs organization millions, gets bonus.
Film at 11.
Used Windows Phones ... (Score:2)
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Phones from October 2014. In their rush to beat up everybody involved, the editors forgot to mention when they bought the phones.
That's a decent run for a bunch of cheap phones. Just shred them, zero residual value.
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The second model, the Lumia 640XL, is still officially supported by Windows 10 Mobile.
Would sell for $50 or more on ebay.
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How much would tech time be to wipe them and run the ebay auctions? Remember these are government employees, don't expect effort.
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15 minutes. Optimistic government worker ratio of 1 guy working, 3 guys watching makes that an easy person hour. Real world will be significantly higher.
In NYC, there is no way the average loaded government worker cost is less than $100/hour. For someone capable of wiping a phone, double that.
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Other thing that I wonder - did they use SD cards on the phones - for things like pictures, police data and so on? If yeah, the iPhone decision makes even less sense, since they won't be able to re-use them there. I can't imagine them not using it - the maximum internal storage any of the Lumias had was 32GB.
Full resets of Lumias are not daunting tasks - they may take a little while, but after one is done, it's as good as new. Only thing here - since they went for iPhones, these phones are useless. T
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When Windows phones work so great. /s
The support. Also, as apps are getting yanked from the store, there's less reason to stay w/ it, when they are using features like E911, case management and special assignment apps.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I never have the opportunity to use Windows Phone, couldn't even say if it had a blue screen of death. I carried a .. what was it called, Windows Mobile 6? ...phone for awhile. (Work phone. No choice.) What I liked most about it is the popup "(blank) has caused an error and will now close". Something that could be easily ignored, right? Punch OK and move on. But the thing that was not named happened to be the audio driver. The phone would not ring or make any alert sound until it was rebooted. And would only ring or beep up until the next "(blank) has caused an error and will now close".
After fighting with that for awhile, it was: never again. No Microsoft personal electronics. So I completely missed out on the Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8 debacle. That sounded like fun.
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He also refused to accept that when he got the "(blank) has caused an error and will now close" error he needed to restart or he would not hear any calls.
All missed calls were the IT department's fault, and he was often aggressive about it, until my boss kicked his office door in (almost literally) called him a total dickhead (or similar).
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That last part of your post made me very happy. There's a time when you just have to go "excuse me, can I see that for a second?" SMASH "There ya go."
That's precisely what I upgraded to: A blackberry. Still the best keyboard in the business, and the best integration into the intranet.
But then, IT was outsourced on a Friday, BES crashed on a Saturday, and remained down for three weeks while offshore admins proved their absolutely lack of any training whatsoever. By the time BES was back up, I was already
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I know that supervisor very well. He told me that he was just mad because you were trying to plug a ps/2 keyboard into the USB port.
That would be a problem since "plug-and-pray" USB wouldn't become widely available until several years after that incident.
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Anybody with about 3 days of IT experience should be able to determine whether or not a keyboard is broken.
Including a keyboard that mostly works except when it doesn't? Intermittent failures are hard to troubleshoot.
Yes, he probably smashed the keyboard on your desk only because he couldn't legally smash it over your head for being a time-wasting moron.
Really? I thought he was just being an asshole.
What a dumb lesson.
No, a practical lesson. When you have a PC with a intermittent failure, you can wait for it to fail or break it to request reimaging.
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Then go get another one from those storage closets that take two weeks to clean up.
At a video game company? No. My supervisor had to buy a replacement and a few spare keyboards on his lunch break.
Speaking of which, what's the office chair budget like for your group?
No clue. Why?
Yeah, how DO you manage that?
I do my job.
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If it costs $15 to replace the keyboard, and it costs the company $30 of a tech's time to "troubleshoot" / "fix" the problem, then the proper response is to immediately swap out the keyboard, and only spend further time on "troubleshooting" if/when a new & known-good keyboard fails to work properly.
It was a $60 keyboard and I was the $16/hr tech who was looking at it.
Now he was being an asshole?
Destroying company property.
No, a practical lesson. When you have a PC with a intermittent failure, you can wait for it to fail or break it to request reimaging.
Wait, you reimage your PC every time you have a keyboard issue?
You need reading glasses. I wrote "PC," not "keyboard," with an intermittent failure. Those tend to be software-related. These days you can reimage a PC at the user's desk while they're out for lunch..
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Supports up to 250 lbs based on 5-10 hours of use per day
I have that chair for my home office. Never had a problem with it. Enterprise-level office chairs tend to cost twice as much, if not more. I've never broken a chair, if that was you were implying.
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And the person who was sitting there unable to work because they had no keyboard - how much money did you waste by leaving him without a keyboard while you "asked for second opinions"?
IIRC, It was the keyboard for my own system. That would explain why my supervisor had to out to a buy a replacement and spare keyboards.
Don't blame me because you can't defend your original point and decided to move the goalposts.
You're moving the goalposts by not paying attention.
These days you can reimage a PC at the user's desk while they're out for lunch.
[...] Because just a couple months ago, you assured us that reimaging a system takes a *minimum* of 4 hours - which means you're tied up for some portion of that, and the user is without a computer for a minimum of 4 hours.
Another example of why you need reading glasses. I wrote "these days" as in 2017, not in 1997.
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We are telling you that you are exceeding the weight limits for that chair, and until it collapses and shoves an air cylinder up your fat ass, of course you won't see a "problem".
If you have reading glasses, you would have noticed my statement that I've never broken a chair.
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You wrote the linked comment in 2014, not in 1997. And I've seen you make other comments here that largely affirm the same thing: that it takes several hours to reimage & restore a desktop.
That was the PC refresh project at eBay in 2011-12. User data wasn't stored on the network and had to be copied from the old system to the new system, which took a minimum of four hours to complete. The actual imaging of the new system took 20 minute.
So, try again, creimy.
What's next?
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The blue screen of death is something that many officers don't want to deal with personally.
I've had 3 Windows phones over the years - a Lumia 520, an Icon and a 550. None of them ever gave me a blue screen of death!
Re: Why? (Score:2)
I like my Windows phone. Nary a problem. Hell, it's the only Windows system I have.
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Governments like to know where their staff are, what they are doing and saying.
Some features had to be supported.
Re:Government spending (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a perfect example of wasteful government spending. Would any company in the world spend that much money on a short-lived program? A real company, accountable for its financial decisions would either slowly roll out another version as phones died and could not be supported, or figure out how to pay for extra support while developing an alternative.
Also, any IT guy worth 2 cents would never have chosen Microsoft phones for a fleet.
When they were in Nokia's hands, the Lumia did have a fair bit of marketshare, only that both Apple and Samsung increased the gap against them. Given that the phones had a shared ecosystem w/ Microsoft's mainstream Windows, and that Microsoft had overhauled Windows w/ the metro UI to look like the phone, it made perfect sense for a company to build a fleet around them.
Let's look at the apps that a company could use that Microsoft provided. There was Office - including OneNote and Outlook: OneNote alone made this phone worthwhile, and at the time, Microsoft wasn't aggressively promoting Office on Android or iOS. Then there was maps - both Bing and HERE maps. There were other apps like unit converters (now integrated in the calculator), currency converters and so on. Also, at the time, typing was a lot smoother on Windows Phone 8.1 than on the contemporary versions of either iOS or Android (both have caught up since). If the reason one wanted a phone was something to have their office data on, as opposed to playing Pokemon Go, this was a good phone. It did have some major shortcomings though - Uber was barely supported, Lyft wasn't, nor were there any VOIP apps, and this last, IMO, was a killer. Yeah, one could use Skype, but I've never found it smooth to use.
Also, at the time, Ballmer was at the helm and he was fanatical about this platform, so Microsoft was solidly behind it while he was around. Things changed once he was gone and Nadella took over.
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They are not as bad as the NHS (national health service) in the UK which is still running unpatched Windows XP on nearly all their critical machines.
Unsurprising, coming from a country that insists in cutting off its nose to spite its own face. Over, and over again.
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