Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 724 posts

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#121

Post by nathantotten »

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?

You have to consider this in the context at the time. Yes it would have been expensive, but Microsoft was investing BILLIONS into Windows Phone. Microsoft and partners spent something like $700 million dollars just on marketing for the launch of Windows Phone 7[1,2].

To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish. And I am not saying they should have done this for only one app. I am saying they should have done this for many apps. If they had created quality versions of, say, the top 25 apps for mobile at the time they would have been in a much better position. I believe they could have made significant traction with business users. Remember, at the time Office wasn't available on other platforms and was (is) a huge draw for many people.

If they had been successful with the strategy and gained market share the partners would have wanted to take over their own apps anyway to enable monetization. But they needed users for that and to get users they needed apps. You have to jump start it somehow.

Now, would it have made any difference? Who knows. But IMO, you either need to not do it or you need to do all parts of it right. You can't go half way on the ecosystem and expect to succeed in an already challenging market.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dol... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-20...

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#122

Post by pier25 »

I don't think the problem was primarily the lack of apps but a major reason to use Windows mobile.

With iOS you get the high end hardware and deep integration with Apple's ecosystem.

With Android you get deep integration with Google's services and a wide range of devices in prices and features.

What did you get with Windows mobile?

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#123

Post by shanev »

phkahler wrote: post #86
spoiledtechie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can you say that without knowing 1) what the app is and 2) what tools it was built with? There's also the problem of ongoing maintenance on multiple platforms. In the best case, it was written with a dual platform toolkit (iOS and Android) and MS adds a 3rd platform to that toolkit to make it easy to port and maintain all three. Even if that were all true, it's won't be for every developer and you'll still have p…

1) http://www.drumkit.co

2) Built in Objective-C with a custom audio engine in C++. Audio latency on Android was horrible at that time, MS was probably worse. It would have been a terrible app on those platforms if I did port it. This was before cross-platform toolkits existed. It needed to be a native app with low level access audio to hardware. I wasn't going to make an app where you tap a drum and wait 100ms to hear a sound.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#124

Post by wmeredith »

ssully wrote: post #79
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…

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…

Did everything they could...

Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s

It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#125

Post by Tepix »

simonw wrote: post #89
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #72

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 fa…

Don’t forget Mozilla, Ubuntu, Nokia and Blackberry.

Plus Tizen and Jolla.

Let's see what will happen with the Purism Librem 5. Obviously, they just just a very small niche player, just like the Copperhead OS guys and Silent Circle.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#126

Post by pjmlp »

pm90 wrote: post #113
rqs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software) I don't love the design, but I like it. Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen. Yes, there are some bad designs in the Windows 10 Mobile, but all of them are fixable. And once those problems get fixed, it will be gorgeous. I feel very sad about…

Its a free market, and the market has spoken. I think its the right strategy for MS to accept that the market is just not going to accommodate yet another mobile ecosystem. And its not for lack of trying: they've been trying for over a decade now to break into the mobile OS market. They had tablets running a version of Windows much before iPad; they had "Smartphones" running windows much before 2007. There's gotta be…

I only see a value on .NET apps on Android for those companies planning to do both iOS and Android, or re-using existing .NET code.

For those just targeting Android, specially given the global market share, they are better off with plain Java/Kotlin + NDK, than adding yet another layer to debug and extra APK size.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#127

Post by seanmcdirmid »

wodenokoto wrote: post #101
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WeChat has done that to some degree. Given that WeChat is basically a platform at this point, one could imagine a WeChat phone coming out in china, bypassing Android completely. Not sure what would be the point though.

A wechat phone would be obvious and I don't know why they don't do it. Remember that Google play and all the other play services are not available in China.

I think google play is a available, just nothing else is. Anyways, there are plenty of alternatives.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-Play-in-China-function

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#128

Post by naikrovek »

amatheus wrote: post #48

Where does this leave Windows Universal Development? Hardly Universal if it’s only for Windows 10 desktop. I’m no Windows nor Xbox user, but do people develop using Universal for both? Are there other platforms right now worth targeting for Windows Universal?

There's still HoloLens, Surface Hub, XBox, and IoT Core and Enterprise.

My employer writes UWP apps for itself, because we have all of these devices (even XBox) and write UWP apps for them all (because with the exception of IoT Enterprise, they're all UWP-only.)

IoT Mobile is still a SKU that Microsoft sell, by the way. Guess what IoT Mobile is? It's Windows Mobile.

It isn't dead, it's just not getting new features. It'll be replaced by OneCore in the not too distant future, I imagine.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#129

Post by Tepix »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #84
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #72

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 fa…

WeChat has done that to some degree. Given that WeChat is basically a platform at this point, one could imagine a WeChat phone coming out in china, bypassing Android completely. Not sure what would be the point though.

Aren't Android phones in China already shipping without the Google Play store? So I see them as rivals to the Google Android ecosystem.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#130

Post by jorvi »

megaman22 wrote: post #22
jeff_petersen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my (bigcorp) experience, its all windows all the way with macs available only to developers who have a need (iOS dev usually). And don’t forget that developers are a tiny minority of employees.

As seemingly ubiquitous as Macbooks are, their market share has never really budged. It's been 3-5% for the entirety of the OS X era.

That's because there has never been a <$999 MacBook. If you purely start to look at the Ultrabook segment then MacBooks have an absolutely staggering market share.
Post reply on HN