I know a few people that loved the windows phone, but frankly, I'm glad they failed. We didn't need another walled garden with a closed-source proprietary ecosystem. If they opened up the OS it could have been a good thing but there was no evidence that they had such plans.
Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
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Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#12I know a few people that loved the windows phone, but frankly, I'm glad they failed. We didn't need another walled garden with a closed-source proprietary ecosystem. If they opened up the OS it could have been a good thing but there was no evidence that they had such plans.
We did need competition and new ideas though. Badly.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#13I really liked my windows phone. The colourful live tiles and the physical design were great. What it lacked was 3rd party apps.
I also deeply enjoyed my Nokia Lumia. They clearly took many design cues from Zune, which was another excellent product I loved that did not take off. I think if MS Phone had stuck it out a bit longer hybrid apps may have helped bring some developers in. It sounds like Nadella still doesn’t get it though. MSFT tried several times to “reinvent the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones” and none succee…
I liked mine too. Sometimes I think I was the only one, but now I know there were at least three of us.
I had what I think was the lowest end Lumia at the time, a Lumia 520 maybe? It did what it did really well.
The camera was surprisingly OK. The tiles meant I could see what I needed without tapping around. It was much more responsive than other phones in its price range from what I remember too.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it never got that ecosystem because of inscrutable mismanagement so scatterbrained and perplexing that I can't wait for the insider-tells-all book about this post-iPhone period at Microsoft that I assume will arrive in a decade or two. Zune, Phone, Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT, Bing, Cortana, Continuum, Project Astoria, I'm sure I'm forgetting. Apple and Google execs must have been amused.
If you watch the Windows UI community talks on YouTube, at least on public channels, whoever is in charge doesn't seem to grasp how much all those rewrites killed the ecosystem, and they keep asking people to invest into WinUI/WinAppSDK, which not only is yet another rewrite, the tooling is a joke versus UWP. No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the s…
Looking for some advice here. I’d be interested to develop simple GUI’s at work. I don’t have much experience of that. I have a license for VS2015 to maintain legacy VB and C++ but I think an upgrade could be arranged. I’m comfortable doing web dev but the browser remains limiting. In my situation, would learning native gui development be worthwhile or is it much easier to stick to websites and/or Electron?
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#15I know a few people that loved the windows phone, but frankly, I'm glad they failed. We didn't need another walled garden with a closed-source proprietary ecosystem. If they opened up the OS it could have been a good thing but there was no evidence that they had such plans.
Previous Windows Mobile kernels had their source available for download on the web. Although not MIT licensed or anything, they were radically open for the Microsoft of the time (early 2000s!)
I believe Windows CE 7 also had its source available.
FWIW CE7 was an amazing operating system that had a minimal OS image of around 8MB on disk. (Numbers are from memory, might be horribly wrong, it was a long time ago that I worked on it.)
It was also incredibly power, CPU, and memory efficient. Windows Phones could run at a rock solid 60FPS with 1/2 the RAM of an Android phone that was dropping frames all the time.
The entire CE operating system is an example of a huge "could have been". Microsoft really never knew what to do with it, and the Windows org obviously wanted it dead, and they eventually got their way. Of course that involved stopping all Windows Phone development for years while they rewrote all APIs, lost functionality, and lost customer trust, in the transition from WP7 to WP8. WP8 eventually became a good OS, but moving to the Windows kernel means the resource usage advantage was lost, and of course app developers got fed up when a new OS came out that had less API features than the previous version.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#16One of the things I find very frustrating about Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Google) is how they will walk back nearly anything at the slightest pushback and cancel anything that isn't an immediate overnight success.
The Kinect was really, really cool tech, and I dream about what could have been if MS had not made the Kinect thst came with the XBox One optional pretty much right after it was announced.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#17Do I smell a round 2 for a Windows Phone? Imagine a new Windows Phone....that runs Android apps.
There are devices - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl...
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#18For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone, the UI was amazing. It took 5 (I think?) years for iOS and Android to sort of copy the gesture based UI, badly.
Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#19I know a few people that loved the windows phone, but frankly, I'm glad they failed. We didn't need another walled garden with a closed-source proprietary ecosystem. If they opened up the OS it could have been a good thing but there was no evidence that they had such plans.
We did need competition and new ideas though. Badly.
Did, and still do.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#20I really liked my windows phone. The colourful live tiles and the physical design were great. What it lacked was 3rd party apps.
And it never got that ecosystem because of inscrutable mismanagement so scatterbrained and perplexing that I can't wait for the insider-tells-all book about this post-iPhone period at Microsoft that I assume will arrive in a decade or two. Zune, Phone, Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT, Bing, Cortana, Continuum, Project Astoria, I'm sure I'm forgetting. Apple and Google execs must have been amused.
Isn't Bing now a competitor to Google? It's results are nearly as good and Bing Chat is available to users and will soon be rolled out to enterprises.