Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

This is karma for the way they started their 'Windows Smartphone' project, aka 'Stinger' (their internal name). They partnered with UK-based Sendo, who should have been their go-to-market partner, until Microsoft nicked all the code and gave it to HTC. They, in turn, partnered with Orange to bring out the SPV. How do we know it was Sendo's code? becuase it had Sendo's bugs - the eact version could be determined by which bugs it had and didn't have.

When Microsoft starts out like this, they deserve every little failurethey get!

Refs: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts_masterpla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_SPV

So that's Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft that failed with phones.

I think it's safe to say we will never see a viable third option in mobile.

Might as well start thinking of the next great paradigm shift but even there it's hard to see anyone out maneuvering Apple and Google.

My surprise wasn't at the fact that someone would give up money due to morals; my surprise was at the fact that helping Microsoft (or putting ads in software, in VLC's case) would be considered a moral wrong. That sounds like quite an exaggeration to me. Microsoft has done a lot of good things too, and so have ads. The fact that they have negative aspects doesn't mean anything less than 90 degrees away from their direction is a moral wrong.

Windows 8 "metro" UI caused an uproar for many reasons, some of the biggest ones being:

- the start menu covered the whole screen

- applications could only run full screen, even the simplest ones. You literally couldn't have 2 applications on the screen at the same time.

- it was hard to close applications

- it was very difficult to find the shutdown/reset/etc options

- the metro versions of "default" apps looked bad and were vastly inferior to the "old" versions. A lot of system settings ones had this problem, too (not relevant to the average user, but I use a VPN that is impossible to set up to work in the simple "metro" VPN app, but if you find and start the old win7 app which still exists, you can set it up correctly and you can even connect to it from the "metro" VPN app after that)

- a lot of computer games that worked on 7 didn't work on 8 (likely unrelated to metro UI but still a reason for many people not to update)

Some problems were fixed in Windows 8.1. In Windows 10, most of these things are fine (although Win10 gets hate because of its update system and because it installs unwanted apps, but it seems to have much more acceptance overall).

Windows 8 basically offered nothing to the average user except annoyance so people didn't want to update. It had a very nice improvement for developers in the form of Hyper-V, which is the only reason I upgraded, and only after 8.1 was released.

The root problem with Windows 8 UI was that it was clearly not designed with the intention of being a better desktop UI. It was designed with the intention of forcing users to get used to the Windows Phone-style UI on their desktop computer, in hopes that they will then buy Windows Phones out of familiarity. Basically desktop Windows had to "take one for the team". We can see here how much that helped WP.

Here is a sample scenario that blocks me from doing certain development actions:

--- Steps to Reproduce --- 1. Launch VS 2017 2. Create new UWP blank app 3. Build it 4. Go to project's bin\Debug folder in File Explorer. 5. Find app's .EXE file and double-click it

--- Actual Results --- .EXE file cannot be launched. Error: "This application can only run in the context of an app container."

--- Expected Results --- .EXE file is launched. Main app window appears and it works as usual

>Double clicking an .APPX installs it.

Just checked that. Nope, this is what I get for my freshly compiled app when I click on corresponding .APPX file: "[Window Title] How do you want to open this file? [Content] Look for an app in the Store [OK]"

Any solution to this? These files should be consumable at the OS level.