81–90 of 205 posts
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Read it as “Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on (Windows Phone and mobile) was a mistake”
My memory is fuzzy but was: Windows Phone == Nokia? Or was Windows Phone not Nokia?
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Microsoft thought the way you do for years after the iPhone came out. They thought they’d be fine competing using CE based systems. They completely underestimated the advantages a modern, secure, pre-emptive multitasking OS with proper process isolation, fine grained multi threading, and all the other features you get that a workstation class Unix OS bring to the table. That 8MB footprint sound great, until you consi…
CE6 and 7 had all of those. From CE6 onwards, CE was a fully modern OS. Not only that, it was a brand new OS written from the ground up that was designed to be modular and battery efficient. Sadly it never got a chance to shine, as internal politics killed it.
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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…
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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 g…
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 (…
How exactly they cared about surface? It was a premium toy that was never perfected for pros (these huge displays they discontinued) or e-waste (all 4gb go models). It cost twice for any minimal reasonable hardware configuration. It had insanely impractical weird IO (minidp from 10s in 20s) and fabric palm rest. It was targeted to push in enterprises where their sales noses are so deep they sometimes don’t even need…
I think I found someone who dislikes Microsoft more than I do. Nice to meet you:-) LOL
Seriously... you are mostly correct about the hardware deficiencies, I won't argue this. The surface line started off very badly but... it engaged. To this date, I don't think you can even get Linux running on any of them w/o some effort.
Mine's was a quick comment and had more to do with Microsoft redefining the hybrid Tablet/Laptop market. It was, I think the only time that I could recall, when they finally took the lead on something. Some hiccups, of course, but overall an industry defining success. It was odd - for me - to see Microsoft leading the field in anything.
I always saw MS as a company that envied someone else's innovation and tried to replicate that success. From Office Programs early on, AOL competitor, VisiCalc/Lotus 1-2-3 competitor, Gaming, Browsers... the list is nearly exhaustive.
Even small things like sound formats, image formats... they needed to upend someone else's established format and replace it with their own. Even their original OS - DOS - wasn't theirs but a hacked version of someone else's effort.
I'm certain you know their history (comment meant for some others reading this).
Finally with Surface, they designed and helped re/define the Tablet/Laptop market in a design pleasing way. They also added Surface Studio - which I thought was very effective. I remember seeing videos on their thought processes, who they consulted when they created Surface Studio. After years of envisioning brutes, they presented themselves as polished professionals during these formative 'Surface' years.
Just wanted to expand on my previous quick comment for clarification.
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.
Microsoft tried the Kinect for 13 years. How long are they supposed to let a product run? It was a cool tech solution in search of a problem.
It is hard, really, really hard, to convince game developers and publishers to make games that require an optional accessory. It's been tried again and again and it is never more than a mild success and usually an abject failure. They want to target the base platform, which will always have a dramatically larger install base.
Thr original Kinect was just such an optional accessory, and yeah, didn't have much in the way of third party support.
The XB1 could have, and would have, encouraged more devs to use and experiment with the Kinect because devs could be assured that every single user would have one hooked up.
Except that Microsoft chickened out instead of sticking to their guns. As usual.
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).
I think you are conveniently ignoring the explicitly bad rep Windows had, even for people who bought and used Windows in their homes. It had none of the draw that Apple had following their iMac/iBook/iPod era.
Zune was building a good customer base, but MS threw that away too of course.
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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.
Kin! lasted 48 days in the US, never launched at all in Europe (squarish smartphone for "the younger set".)
A little more than a month later MS decided to cancel it. And to be fair, it wasn't that great of a product, but the fact that they burned through all of that development and a massive marketing rollout only to throw it in the trash a few weeks later.... just peak late-00s Microsoft.
I always felt like Microsoft was in a hard place when it came to Windows Phone. If they tried to market it as a third party alternative to Android, why would manufactures give up an OS they can customize and not have to pay to license (Do you have to pay of the play store?). Locking down Windows Mobile in the iPhone way is counter to how Microsoft runs Windows right now and would be a major uphill battle. The iPhone…
Ironically, they were in the phone OS space before Apple and Google, so arguably, they were too early, inasmuch as the experience they acquired blinded them to the possibilities of smartphones just as the category truly took off.
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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).
> Apple branding isn't too much more inspiring I think you are conveniently ignoring the explicitly bad rep Windows had, even for people who bought and used Windows in their homes. It had none of the draw that Apple had following their iMac/iBook/iPod era. Zune was building a good customer base, but MS threw that away too of course.