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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

#541

Post by dragonwriter »

fpig wrote: post #436
Spooky23 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They threw about $500k at my employer at the time to hire some Eastern European company to build an app. They ended up stringing something together that got deployed on like 10 phones. The problem was that a big enterprise customer is clueless about mobile apps, and Microsft’s endemic NIH syndrome made it difficult to work with business systems that aren’t Microsoft platforms. O365 is a great example... the office pl…

I'm not sure what your beef with Windows as a client OS is but if you're saying that the UI should be dumbed down, remember how the attempt to do so with Win8 backfired and that Microsoft quickly reverted most of those changes in Win8.1. As the older generation is dying off / retiring, the percentage of people who have been using a computer for a long time has increased immensely, the "secretary who can't figure out…

> the "secretary who can't figure out copy/paste" issue is becoming less relevant every day.

Well, yeah, since the non-executive secretaries have been replaced by Office and network drives, essentially.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#542

Post by Animats »

pducks32 wrote: post #432
Animats wrote: post #426

Does this mean that Groove Music will go the way of Zune and PlaysForSure?

It already did. They are shutting down the streaming service.

Microsoft is not part of the music ecosystem.

("PlaysForSure is not part of the Zune ecosystem" - Microsoft flack, 2006)

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#543

Post by jarjoura »

Look I don't want to beat a dead horse, but Microsoft has no one else to blame but themselves. The launch version was a great early adopter MVP and moved the entire mobile industry to a content first paradigm (flat UI). However, they never tried to catch up in the feature department. Instead they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.

So during all of those years, developers were left with those same C# MVP APIs that didn't support all the various things 3rd party companies needed. It required hiring a specialist C# engineer and spending extra time to fill in the gaps left behind. No company was going to do that with a phone barely at 10% of the market.

Microsoft should have ruthlessly focused on getting feature parity with iPhone and Android, and released updates every month. Showed the world they were serious about being a 1st-tier dominant player.

Instead, they felt lazy and slow. I think there was 18 months between one release to the next without a peep from them. That's no way to instill confidence that they were competent at their job.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#544

Post by pbarnes_1 »

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…

Nope.

We're a mid-size SaaS app and not a single person from MS made any sort of overture to us apart from "you should develop for Windows Phone!". It would have cost us like 100-200k and 9-12 months of developer time to do this. And then again for 10. And provide support for the rest of time. Nope!

We laughed at them in the background and awaited its eventual death. That we didn't put a single second of effort into developing for this platform has finally been vindicated! :)

Forcing devs to rewrite stuff every major release made it pretty clear no one there cared about developers.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#545

Post by j_s »

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.

Microsoft used to only make money selling software licenses. This has changed with Azure cloud stuff, but the majority of their incentives still don't align with their developer/customers.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#546

Post by seltzered_ »

Previous discussion on windows phone's death - "Who Killed Windows Phone?" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835372

Notably @saurik's comment on google's relationship on windows phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835776

It's interesting considering the competing platform influence as today we're seeing headlines of the amazon echo show getting discounted after the youtube support got pulled: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/9/16448280/a...

My first memory of windows phone was running wp7 on an htc hd2. At the time it was curiously interesting since I was writing code with WPF. In the beginning were definately some interesting aspects on paper - the legitimized 'jailbreak' mode, decent multi-tasking for it's time, writing apps with visual studio/c# (which felt much better than xcode at the time, and had a community defining many of the initial reactive/mvvm work used in many places today). But watching friends purchase Lumias that didn't get updates for wp8 months later showed just how much has to be done on a support front, especially for a new platform.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#547

Post by freehunter »

r00fus wrote: post #443
freehunter wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they tried many times to get into mobile Tried? When the iPhone came out, Windows Mobile had already existed for 7 years and had 40%+ of the smartphone market. I'd say that's a little more than "tried".

Just a reminder: the "smartphone market" was a pitifully small creature when compared to the behemoth that iOS and Android service today... I wonder why that is? It's a painful reminder that Microsoft doesn't do "blue ocean" strategies very well. They need someone to compete against and dominate over and coopt the marketshare. All their successes involve "parleying" a beachhead on someone else's turf (VisiCalc/Lotus1…

I think that's underplaying Windows Mobile a little bit. Did Blackberry or Palm do any better? All of them came out around the same time and shared roughly the same success. Yes the smartphone market was far smaller, but technology was far inferior compared to the Android/iOS era. It's like wondering why the home PC market was so small before the Windows era began: technology hadn't caught up yet. That doesn't mean you should discount DOS, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, or early Apple efforts. They were successful in their own right, and without them we wouldn't have modern PCs. Likewise without Blackberry, Palm/Handspring Treo, and Windows Mobile, we would never have had the iPhone.

It's also worth remember the Apple Newton if you ever start to question the mobile technology decisions of Microsoft or wonder how Apple would have fared if they chose to compete then. They tried. They failed.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#548

Post by amigoingtodie »

smitherfield wrote: post #441
digi_owl wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5. Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform. Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.

> Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone. Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).

But no 3rd party apps. That was an after thought.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#549

Post by acdha »

jarjoura wrote: post #543

Look I don't want to beat a dead horse, but Microsoft has no one else to blame but themselves. The launch version was a great early adopter MVP and moved the entire mobile industry to a content first paradigm (flat UI). However, they never tried to catch up in the feature department. Instead they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory. So during…

> they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.

I think it’s easy for us to focus on software but I don’t think any of that mattered compared to failing so badly on the hardware side. Over that period, how many weeks were there where they had phone hardware which was competitive with Android, much less iOS? It seemed like every time I saw it mentioned the cycle was “ looks cool but the phone specs are like my old phone”.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#550

Post by amigoingtodie »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #505
thomasz wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were great at getting their OS preinstalled on nearly every PC. They were really good at backwards compatibility, and they were absolutely ruthless against their competition. But they always, always sucked at marketing.

you don't view "getting their OS preinstalled on nearly every PC" as marketing?

Nope. Windows 95 had a huge promotion, but most PCs already came with the OS installed, unless you built your own PC.
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