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

361–370 of 724 posts

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#361

Post by donarb »

wmeredith wrote: post #124
ssully wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's probably where those ads on Craigslist coding gigs come from.

"I'll pay you $100 or split the equity for my cool new app idea!"

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#362

Post by ferongr »

zild3d wrote: post #172
woodada wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not having Play Store != not running Android apps. People's games and other apps still need Android to run. A non-Android Wechat phone would fail for the same reason Windows phones did -- no apps.

but isn't Wechat basically all the apps?

No, unless your perceptions of what the average Chinese consumer wants are warped.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#363

Post by seanmcdirmid »

zild3d wrote: post #172
woodada wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not having Play Store != not running Android apps. People's games and other apps still need Android to run. A non-Android Wechat phone would fail for the same reason Windows phones did -- no apps.

but isn't Wechat basically all the apps?

Wechat is an app platform, it isn't all the apps.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#364

Post by ngold »

mtgx wrote: post #336
ngold wrote: post #328

Apple was the 1st and got to dictate the terms of their walled garden. The told Adobe from day 1 to get lost with flash, but for a wall it had walls amazingly low for what had been tried in the past. And people lost their minds with excitement, except those pesky open source kids. Google looked around and said we want in but how? Get rid of the wall and let any carrier and everyone use it. All the carrier's saw they…

The saddest part of the story was that Nokia's amazing hardware division was lost because of this. Sure, Nokia made some classic innovator's dilemma errors, too, but they were still huge at the time Samsung got into Android (about 2x as big in phone market share). About a year or two later they decided to go with Windows Phone - the ever 2% OS of the mobile market, because it was "different". It was stupid, and also…

Eat the cost of the super phone. Make it super easy to use, develop and distribute. 5% or even flat appstore fee. Then maybe. They did it with the Xbox, but I think they got lucky with the timing on that one.

This is like them releasing an 8bit console with no games and just as expensive. In 1988, when everyone already owned a Nintendo or Sega.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#365

Post by mark-r »

coldtea wrote: post #12
Zhyl wrote: post #2

This isn't surprising, really. Windows Phone has been poorly for a long time. While I understand Microsoft's efforts at trying to approach the mobile space, it does seem that it's often at the expense of their core product - very similar to how Google nearly crippled their core offering by integrating everything with Google+. I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, e…

> I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks. It's simple: Chromebooks are crippled by the mostly-web concept and Macbooks only cater to (a part of) the more affluent end of the market.

I worked in IT support for a while, and saw that many business apps are expected to come with a browser interface now. If companies could be weaned from their dependence on Office then Chromebooks would take off. Eliminating the support issues for Windows would be a big deal.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#366

Post by theduncan »

philliphaydon wrote: post #231
joenathanone wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know how untrue this is, couple of things. First lets start with this qoute "According to Kantar's October 2013 report, Windows Phone accounted for 10.2% of all smartphone sales in Europe and 4.8% of all sales in the United States." and then this one "Microsoft announced new data from IDC indicating that Windows Phone is the second-most-used mobile platform in Latin America." Lastly, do you not remember the…

yeah iphone was launched in 2007. We are in 2017 and if you want to take marketshare from your competitors then you need to be releasing your products in all major markets. Not a couple of them. Windows phone was quite popular in Asia yet it died due to lack of devices. My mum still rocks an HTC HD7 tho.

I remember the HD7, I was eyeing it off for a while, I could buy one, I just couldn't find a phone store near me that would let me try one. I moved to Android and the HTC Desire HD.

I had been a Windows Mobile 6.1 user.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#367

Post by fpig »

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…

Windows phones themselves are fine. But two things were massive failures:

1. Microsoft created development tools that are not appropriate for real-world use cases and tried to push that on devs and companies, which failed spectacularly. The demand for apps which work on Windows desktop and Windows phone literally doesn't exist. It doesn't matter that Microsoft would have loved it if people built apps like that. If there is no demand for such apps they don't get built (and they didn't). You get garbage (compared to WPF or even WinForms) "metro" or whatever you call them now desktop apps that are intensely hated by Windows users and you get a WP app that you can't reuse to build an iOS or Android app... The UI was also completely different so you couldn't even really reuse much of the design. So no code sharing, no design sharing.

What .NET devs wanted was a way to build apps using C# that work on all mobile platforms (we never cared about a mobile app working on desktop). If you had given us that you would have had your apps purely by virtue of piggybacking on iOS, Android and .NET popularity. We complained about the retarded "multiplatform within the Windows ecosystem" approach from day 1 yet Microsoft released several iterations (not backwards-compatible, of course, so they were losing some devs each time) of this garbage before finally listening to the market and embracing Xamarin at which point it no longer mattered as WP was a joke. A LOT of people love C# and are willing to jump through hoops to develop multiplatform apps with it. XAML is also very cool. Microsoft had that part in the bag, yet completely failed to use this to their advantage. Imagine if when WP7 (or even WP8) was released Microsoft was able to say "here, you can now develop mobile apps in C# and they will also build for iOS and Android!" .NET devs would have jizzed in their pants.

2. Microsoft threw the existing WP users in the trash with WP7 -> WP8. My iPhone updated for like 7 years through god knows how many iOS versions. When I bought a new one, it felt almost exactly the same except faster due to better hardware. People were wary of buying a WP because they got burned once.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#369

Post by burnte »

hitekker wrote: post #223
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…

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.

It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone, and the guys at Android said, "Oh shit." Meanwhile Steve Ballmer said the iPhone would never succeed. Ballmer drove MS into the ground. Everyone pivoted to the iPhone model except MS, who spit out WinMo 6.5 in 2009, and finally WinMo 7 in 2010. By 2010, the race was pretty much over. The rest of what MS did was half-assed at best.

You're 100% right, MS beat MS.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#370

Post by [deleted] »

narrator wrote: post #244
dtx1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN