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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

#221

Post by throwaway613834 »

shubhamjain wrote: post #163
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…

> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem. From my experience, that wasn't the case. I didn't own a Windows Phone but one of my friends did. According to him, what forced him to move was an overload of animations which became very irritating. I can recall a comment that sugg…

That's very true for Windows Phone. The animations definitely got irritating.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#222

Post by myrandomcomment »

When MS released the first version of Windows NT it was buggy as hell. Internal to MS they ran Banyan VINES. Bill ordered it to be ripped out and replaced with NT. It was a mess. All the coders in MS quickly started to fix all the stuff that effected them. NT 3.51 came out pretty quickly after and to be honest it was quiet good for the time. For as much money as they spent trying to get people to buy the phone or write apps, they could have given a phone to each employee and family member, told them they would pay for the cell service for a year. You do not have to take it but all other phones are banded from the office. Every app you submit you get X number of RSUs. Pretty sure all the needed apps would have turned up in that year.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#223

Post by hitekker »

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…

Agreed. The parent post reads like "the overwhelming numbers of our competitors beat poor Microsoft despite our talent, ability and courage!"

No, Microsoft beat Microsoft. It was their game to lose.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#224

Post by dtx1 »

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 worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad.

It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time.

Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it.

Then windows 10 came and it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved. The Live-Tiles got even worse since you couldn't programm them like the windows 8 ones. Just a whole mess. Couple that with the hillariously bad store interface (backend aswell as frontend) and 0 User engagement and it was bound to fail (as will all UWP apps)

You guys build a, I'm sorry to say but after 3 years of frustration it's fair to say, half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android, restricted the developers unecessarily, broke compatibility once a year requiring a complete rewrite and frankly build a product that only microsoft liked but was universally hated by their users.

It's a story of too little too late and a whole lot of arrogance on microsofts side.

Oh and don't even get me started on microsoft completely ignoring the european market where they actually got up to 15% marketshare of new devices sold for a while.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#225

Post by garganzol »

Grom_PE wrote: post #215

If only I could properly reprogram this WP8.1 phone I have here, it would've been much more interesting. But rooting/jailbreaking (in WP world called "Interop unlock") has always been awkward and possible only for the most popular types of WP: Lumia, Samsung. To write programs, it requires me to install Windows 8 or 10 — can't do with Windows 7 or Linux. Even if I write a program, this phone requires special develope…

And then those MBA types are wondering why their "business strategy" is not working. The same applies to the Windows Store on Desktop. All that walled garden nonsense they are trying to impose is not going to work. The only thing I could seriously recommend to those clerks is to eat their neckties and finally become living human beings.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#226

Post by richardknop »

unethical_ban wrote: post #194
CaptSpify wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that only works on linux systems.... The state of Linux is not great. We still can't get the basics like sound, wifi, etc out of the box. I get why it's a problem, and it's generally not the fault of Linux devs, but it's still a problem that turns people away. I really want to see Linux take over on the desktop, but turning a blind eye to our problems is a poor way to do it.

>We still can't get the basics like sound, wifi, etc out of the box. Complete and total fabrication. Video for gaming is still trouble, but I have no more issue with Linux wifi or sound output than I do with Windows. In fact, Linux networking to me is better than Windows.

Depends on your device. I have had issues on some laptops, other laptops worked flawlessly. I know this is anecdote but a lot of people share this anecdote.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#227

Post by osullivj »

ygra wrote: post #213
jmkni wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Winforms relies on core, proprietary, parts of Windows which couldn't be feasibly ported to .net core. Not sure about WPF. It's a shame because it's a great development experience.

Windows Forms is a thin wrapper around the Win32 API and GDI+. Which is good if you want to customize things on a low level, but bad if you want to run it anywhere else. But cross-platform compatibility for a UI framework was probably a very low priority in 1999 or 2000. You could port it to .NET Core, but then you could only run it on Windows, since pretty much everything is a P/Invoke into user32.dll. Generally, ha…

Strongly agree with ygra on the cross platform GUI view. This has been my experience since I coded against XVT [1] 25 years ago. I suspect it's a general truth that applies to any abstraction layer; for instance ORMs or AMQP. Abstraction layers attempt to hide complexity, but they can't make it go away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVT

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Message_Queuing_Proto...

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#229

Post by vetinari »

mtgx wrote: post #63
shadowmint wrote: post #55

This surprises no one. I'm more interested in: what's the future for UWP apps now? Another dead end like silverlight? A cross platform UI library that runs on .Net core (ie. windows, mac, linux, android, ios), some kind of hybrid of ??? and Xamarin forms could potentially be quite a nice tool... but its pretty hard to be excited about the prospect with their track record of killed off UI frameworks so far.

UWP apps wouldn't be so bad for Windows if maybe Microsoft extended their functionality a little and kept improving their performance. However, what scares me to death as a user is that if UWP is let's say super-popular with developers 5-10 years from now, and everyone builds their apps as UWP apps for Windows, then Microsoft will eventually restrict "normal" users (read: most "consumer" Windows machines) from even s…

Exactly that was the original intent with Metro apps. For developers, Visual Studio was able to provision keys (online), but otherwise you had to be inside AD domain, or have the Enterprise SKU and "sideloading key".

Only with Windows 10 it became possible to sideload non-win32 apps.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#230

Post by garganzol »

frik wrote: post #59
jmkni wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ... it doesn't matter. The whole .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 1 have the "legacy" tag on. Their new thing is .NET Core 2. The rest moved on to cross-platform.

.NET Core 2 comes very close to the full .NET Framework. Microsoft just made a full circle. Everything legacy is the hot new thing again.
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