Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake • Hacker News Board

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#61

Post by suddenexample » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

sirbranedamuj wrote: post #26

I loved my windows phones so much. lumia 900 and 920. I totally bought in to the microsoft ecosystem because I wanted to keep using that phone OS and those phones. but the ecosystem sucked ass. none of microsoft's google/apple equivalents were up to par. one night when xbox music said I didn't have license to play any of my music on a long car ride home was the last straw. I bought a galaxy note 3 that evening when I…

Is it just me or is Windows phone looked back on with really heavy nostalgia? I never found it to be revolutionary or beautiful, and while I would welcome more players in the mobile space, I think Microsoft's behavior in every other part of its business makes me glad that their foray into mobile never took off.

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#62

Post by tiernano » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #16

One 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.

bit of an anecdote on testing the Kinect. I was working in the Office devision at the time it launched and managed to (some how) get into the beta test team. They sent me one, originally with the plan of wanting it back, but in the end they said we could keep it. I still have mine somewhere with the Microsoft Asset tag on it... Anyway, after the first couple of weeks, testers got a general email about testing the device. "Please wear clothes when testing the Kinect". Anyway, on what i think it could have been, Cortana on the Xbox with a Kinect and the video features would have been perfect for a lot of things. The vision stuff for games is good, but think watching for fall detection of people in rooms, if you are out and it sees movement (given it could turn to an extent) and the ability to tell it to call someone on Skype with video! That would have been useful in 2020! It was just way too early, like a LOT of Microsoft stuff (Pocket PC, Windows Smart Phone (CE editions), Windows Phone (NT Kernel), Microsoft Tablets (XP) etc. All just a little ahead of the time...

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#63

Post by scblock » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

Yeah because how can they unethically push you to use Edge if you're not running a Windows OS. And think of all the telemetry they aren't gathering because they don't have Windows on phones. Terrible thing.

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#64

Post by MattBDev » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

If they ran their app store the way they run the Microsoft Store now then they would have had tons of apps. Developers being able to self-host their apps and list it in the store would have seriously helped the app gap.

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#65

Post by tiernano » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

zyang wrote: post #54

oblio wrote: post #18

For 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.

Blackberry went all the way with QNX and it didn't pan out either. There just wasn't room for a third player.

Might be wrong, tell me if i am, but Blackberry, especially here in Ireland, was expensive because of the extra plan to get it to work with mail. I remember spending weeks trying to get my Exchange server at home to talk to Blackberry mail... Gave up and took me 5 min to get it working on Windows Phone with Exchange Active Sync, and later with the iPhone. And for Blackberry, i had to spend extra per month for it to get it enabled. I ended up canceling that part and staying with standard data and all went well on iPhone and Windows Phone.

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#66

Post by tiernano » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #36

I never understood Microsoft's desire to use "Windows" in their mobile device marketing. That might have barely made sense back when computing was dominated by geeks, but nobody in 2023 truly cares whether their phone runs a form of Windows, just as they wouldn't care if an iPhone runs iOS instead of macOS; they want a device that does the things they want. Windows today represents more of a necessary evil than somet…

Funny you say that. I was watching the Apple iPhone keynote, the first one, and one of the things Jobs mentions is it runs Mac OSX.

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#67

Post by prmph » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #44

ravenstine wrote: post #36

I never understood Microsoft's desire to use "Windows" in their mobile device marketing. That might have barely made sense back when computing was dominated by geeks, but nobody in 2023 truly cares whether their phone runs a form of Windows, just as they wouldn't care if an iPhone runs iOS instead of macOS; they want a device that does the things they want. Windows today represents more of a necessary evil than somet…

Windows Mobile as a brand came out in 2003. The "Windows" brand itself was massive in that era. Apple branding isn't too much more inspiring (Mac to iMac to iPhone).

Many people confused Windows Phone with Windows Mobile, which came with all sorts of baggage of bad experiences. So I agree with GP, that dropping the Windows name would have been a smart move

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#68

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:29 PM UTC

MattBDev wrote: post #60

Bootvis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Using WinUI is really easy to do. Whether you're using WinUI 2.8 with UWP or WinUI 3. So native GUI development isn't difficult at all. XAML is similar to HTML in a lot of ways. If you have your mind set on web development and want a native GUI, you could go with React Native for Windows.

Yeah, if one wants to have fun debugging all the issues that are still open since Project Reunion was announced in 2020, with less capable tooling than .NET Native and C++/CX, specially fun having to deal with CsWinRT and C++/WinRT, the latter already in maintenance, stuck in C++17, as the team is now having fun with Rust/WinRT.

At least Native AOT might support WinUI in .NET 9, something to look forward to, for anyone that still cares outside Redmond.

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#69

Post by O1111OOO » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

Microsoft has this habit of trying to enter a new market like a bully. They toss billions of dollars around, they schmooze whoever needs schmoozing, millions in advertising, start name-calling competitors... brutes. Knuckle dragging brutes.

Off the top of my head: Zune (belittling Apple), Search (remember they started name-calling Google), CompuServe (paid shills brutally attacking people online), Operating Systems (attacks on Linux (FUD Advertising), BeOS (Licensing)). So much more.

What they don't do is create a product out of love or passion or belief, usually...

I was surprised when the surface lineup of tablet/laptops... surfaced. They seemed to actually care about what they were doing and really put some thought behind it. I was impressed with the hardware and I very much dislike Microsoft.

I'm glad they got owned on mobile by Google and Apple. I feel comfortable in saying they would not have brought anything positive to this market. A villain was defeated and we are better off.

Mozilla's Firefox OS, however... that's a different story. We all lost when they pulled out.

Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

#70

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 9:36 PM UTC

Bootvis wrote: post #14

pjmlp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If on .NET, Windows Forms, WPF, or the community projects from Uno and Avalonia.

For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets.

You can use Visual Studio Community if the licence still fits your work, or in the case of Qt, Qt Creator alongside a recent VS or MinGW.