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Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#71

Post by spoiledtechie »

shanev wrote: post #69
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

Can confirm. Microsoft offered me $10k and free help with development to port my app.

10k seems reasonable enough to port it. Why didn't you?

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#72

Post by michaelbuckbee »

Windows Mobile is my favorite example of ecosystems being more valuable than individual user experiences. They came out later and really managed to hit a bright spot in between the customizability of Android and the sleekness of iOS. But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up, I'm not sure we're going to see any new players emerge in this current form factor of mobile computing.

So far we've seen:

- Amazon fail - Microsoft fail - Facebook fail (killed internally)

All fail at providing anything like a competitive answer to Android and iOS dominance.

What I see are all the big players lining up to take a crack at Augmented Reality when the tech hits a sweet spot sometime in the next 5-10 years. That's the reason for the crazy investments in MagicLeap, etc. it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#73

Post by EpicEng »

nova22033 wrote: post #65
nathantotten wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement o…

>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?

On the other hand, if all WP has is half-baked clones of better apps on Android/iOS, there's even less incentive to switch over.

If they were serious about growing the user base and building these apps internally was their only course of action (seems like it was) then it should have been taking more seriously (assuming parent is spot on here, I have no idea really.)

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#75

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

shanev wrote: post #69
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

Can confirm. Microsoft offered me $10k and free help with development to port my app.

Drum Kit? I'm guessing $10k just wasn't worth it for such a hugely-popular iOS app?

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#76

Post by jetti »

itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

I had a Windows Phone 7 and loved it but ended up not being able to afford the monthly payments at the time that was required for having a smart phone. I didn't have much of an app issue but that was because I didn't have the phone long enough. I have a co-worker that also had a Windows phone as his previous phone and liked it. He wanted to get another when it was time to upgrade but he couldn't, there just wasn't any available.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#77

Post by ransom1538 »

itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

"but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem"

Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.

https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-a...

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#78

Post by shadowmint »

jmkni wrote: post #46
dep_b wrote: post #31

This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny better stuff (WPF was pretty cool!) will be deprecated within two years and probably will not get significant developer traction. With a lot of confusing marketing from Microsoft. I don't think even the guru's within Microsoft itself can sum up all the different…

It looks like WPF will be supported for the forseeable future, but I get your overall point

We'll see.

I think the netstandard -> all platforms approach, combined with the aggressive depreciation of old .Net 4.6.x versions is a road map for the future.

Maintaining two entire release chains, the 4.x and the .Net core 2.x, is an impossible long term strategy.

I would be absolutely astonished if the 4.x line is quietly folded away and depreciated ('unsupported') once the netstandard surface area means the code bases that no longer run on the .Net core fall to significantly small fraction.

At that point there will just be 'one' .Net again, and it will be .Net core, on all platforms.

Significantly, there seems little to no indication (https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/43) that winforms and WPF are going to .Net core.

You might argue that Microsoft is a legacy beast, and they won't abandon their developers by dropping support for old versions, but they already are doing that in the 'you can install it, sure, but it'll never get any more updates' (#1, #2), so you know.

Don't bet the farm on a WPF app. Just saying.

#1: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-e...

#2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq...

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#79

Post by ssully »

nathantotten wrote: post #43
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement o…

I was going to chime in a little on it being a stretch. One of the promotions for students they did was near the summer of 2012 or 2013. The promotion was you got paid 100 dollars for every app published on the Microsoft store limit 5 for the mobile store and 5 for the regular store. So a total limit of $1000. My school actually had a Microsoft rep run a workshop over a weekend showing students how to publish an app on the store. He gave us a template for a number of apps to "test" with. I made about $300 that weekend by publishing 3 different variants of a wackamole game. The workshop I attended had about 25 students total and we all left publishing at least one app. Idk how wide spread this outreach was. I checked on my apps sometime last year and they were all still up. I ended up pulling them out of a mix of shame and embarrassment.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#80

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nathantotten wrote: post #43
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement o…

The problem with WP was that it was late and offered nothing very special to consumers over android/iOS (and ya, I loved my 920). Consumers had no reason to buy it, developers had no reason to dev for it, a huge vicious circle that would have been difficult to break under the best of circumstances. The war was lost when the WinMo 7 team decided to after Blackberry in 2007, ignoring the iPhone as consequential, requiring that dev/design reset later that was just too late.
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