Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 205 posts

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

#151

Post by akhosravian »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #102
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.

Wish they would have done this with Teams

Teams has the advantage of being able to juice their numbers by counting everyone with an office license as a customer.

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

#152

Post by chithanh »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #134
chithanh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that quite differently. Windows Phone 7 lacked many basic functions like Bluetooth file transfer, the audio player didn't support gapless playback, alarm clock could not turn on your phone (a staple Nokia feature), Internet Explorer was always behind in supporting web standards (and Microsoft did not allow other browser engines). WP7 didn't even support front cameras until Mango Update. The snappiness of a…

WP 7 is an entirely different story and not what people talk about when they say Windows Phone. It was a reskinned Windows CE because they wanted to release a product and 8 wasn't done yet.

Microsoft had a Windows CE based smartphone OS at the time, namely Windows Mobile 6.5. Releasing WP7 as a short-lived and compatibility-breaking product with show-stopping deficiencies hurt them in a major way.

And it is not that the WP8 release fixed everything that was wrong. Rather, it added to developer churn by switching to yet another API, it upset users because no WP7 phone could be upgraded to WP8 (except for the HTC HD2 which originally came with WM6.1), and it still didn't support any modern mobile web browsers.

Then there was this strange limitation to only 720p screens and dual-core CPUs until WP8 GDR3. Or that you could not disable automatic screen rotation until that update. VPN support and the notification center came only with WP8.1.

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

#153

Post by herbst »

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.

The saddest aspect for me is that every alternative had so much better battery potential than whatever android is doing.

Phones, watches, TVs all are slow and battery hungry just because nobody would opt in for a little less functionality (or app selection)

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

#154

Post by benhurmarcel »

Aleklart wrote: post #80
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?

The art of creating your own desktop GUI library is probably already lost, so react/electron will be the best option. In fact you don’t even need electron. Just make it a web service. People prefer web, they used to web.

It can be pretty hard to deploy a web app in a corporate environment. Just getting an instance on a server is an uphill battle. Easier to have people run a local app.

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

#155

Post by rbanffy »

pjmlp wrote: post #73
rbanffy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss WebOS, which was criminally cancelled by the imbecile HP hired. It took years for any other mobile platform to catch up to the convenience of my beloved Palm Pre.

I use it every day on my TVs.

Can't make phone calls, or carry my TVs in my pocket.

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

#156

Post by pjmlp »

chithanh wrote: post #146
pjmlp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no lack of games, Valve even needs to emulate DirectX and Win32, as Android developers couldn't care less about Steam Deck. The rewrites across multiple versions, that is what killed the desire to target the devices.

There were numerous comments from game developers, including from folks here on HN, that the lack of OpenGL ES was a major obstacle for porting games to Windows Phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434891 I don't understand what you write about Valve, the Steam Deck supports unmodified Win32 games which use DirectX.

One random dude on HN isn't numerous comments from game developers.

The effort to port between Windows and Windows Phone was way less than between Windows and XBox.

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

#158

Post by bzzzt »

pengaru wrote: post #59
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.

Didn't it live on as SailfishOS and Jolla, before dying for lack of customers? I too had an N9, and while I wouldn't describe it as amazing, it was reasonably good for the time and probably the best we've ever had in terms of a functional multitouch "linux phone". IMO what killed it was the closed off nature of Harmattan and the lack of support from Nokia in encouraging hacking the OS. No reproducible firmware, no tr…

I had the predecessor (N900) at the time, but I don't think the OSS community would have helped. Lots of effort was directed to typical 'hacker' uses of the phone, not stuff your regular 'end user' would need. It was fun to see a full port of OpenOffice on the thing but it needed a full minute to start and was useless on the small screen. Also, most end users don't know what to do with the terminal ;) While I think they improved a lot with the N9 Nokia was already severely outclassed by Apple, followed by Google by then. Directly stating the N9 line was unsupported at release time was the nail in the coffin.

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

#159

Post by pjmlp »

m_mueller wrote: post #148
pjmlp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being around Mac OS long enough?

such as? If I remember correctly (has been a few years), over the last 15-20 years there were iOS: UIKit -> SwiftUI MacOS: AppKit -> Catalyst -> SwiftUI there was definitely some churn within each one of those from version to version, but no complete rewrite needed afaik.

I advise then to pay attention to Apple developer podcasts for rants regarding each of them, and porting issues, you can start with ATP.

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

#160

Post by tiernano »

goosedragons wrote: post #84
tiernano wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BB10 (QNX based) phones didn't need a special plan.

yea, i was using them before that...
Post reply on HN