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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

#161
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Irrelevant for the fact that WebOS is still around.

All the things that made WebOS interesting and a competitor to both iPhone and Android (and Blackberry, and Windows) are gone and not usable in the TV interface.

I remember some people did have a half-working port to the PinePhone, but I don't know how far did it go.

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

#162
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Windows phone was garbage though,with no real multi tasking and IE as the only browser. Nokia/Elop screwed up big time by going with this and it killed Nokia

As opposed to Apple with no real multi tasking and Safari as the only browser? ;)

The difference was Apple had a clear vision on what they wanted the technology to be while Nokia was divided between squeezing a bit more out of Symbian or invest in their 'follow up' Linux-based line. They didn't need Elop to screw up, they did that perfectly by themselves. If sales were better and Microsoft had continued with Windows phone it probably would have saved Nokia.

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

#163
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrelevant for the fact that WebOS is still around.

All the things that made WebOS interesting and a competitor to both iPhone and Android (and Blackberry, and Windows) are gone and not usable in the TV interface. I remember some people did have a half-working port to the PinePhone, but I don't know how far did it go.

If it was a worthy competitor it would have stayed around in mobile devices, I was never impressed with the Web based UI in the Psions.

Nokia had already tried it a couple of years before with the Web runtime for Symbian, and it wasn't great either, nor the failed Firefox OS.

It lives on as TV OS, and actually the experience is much better than Android TV, regarding the UI junk (less of it), hence why I got it.

And yeah, there are people still shipping apps for it to run on TV, if one feels so inclined to do so.

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

#164
When will he admit that giving up on Windows was a mistake? Windows doesn't feel like an OS Microsoft actually care about, and hasn't done for years. The level of investment it requires to just pay down its horrendous levels of tech debt clearly aren't going into it, their own initiatives don't get adopted by their own developers and then there's the famous comment posted here asserting that the Windows UI designers all use Macs.

Microsoft hasn't just given up on mobile, they've given up on the desktop. At this rate Windows will eventually just become a fork of ChromeOS that uses Wine to run apps.

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

#165

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.

Quite the contrary, in my opinion. Microsoft kept going with XBOX despite of years of criticism, especially during the early cablegate days. Kinect was a feature only enjoyed by a niche audience, no disrespect intended. Despite being an avid gamer, I never even once considered buying Kinect.

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

#166
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.

I’ve just created and compiled an empty WinUI3 project, and I got 131 MB of binaries just for the AMD64 architecture. The EXE from that folder crashes on startup with DllNotFoundException “Unable to load DLL 'Microsoft.ui.xaml.dll' or one of its dependencies”

Apparently, Microsoft couldn’t even setup the project template, need to manually edit the project file adding WindowsAppSDKSelfContained setting. After that it launches, but the binaries are now 151MB in 386 files, for a single AMD64 architecture.

By comparison, an empty WPF application compiles into 171 KB of binaries in 5 files, and the binary is CPU-agnostic, it runs on all CPU architectures. It depends on the .NET 7 runtime, but the runtime for my processor only takes 55MB to download. And if you’re unhappy about the runtime, you can instead target the older .NET framework 4.8 which comes preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11.

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

#167
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 wouldn't even include Catalyst in the list. It is only relevant to a small subset of developers.

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

#169
post #54
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.

Yeah no one would make apps for 3rd place, Android already has the problem of being the 2nd target for many new apps. It's worth it for services but a lot of times the Apple app is better because users pay more.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish they would have done this with Teams

I feel like there is an entire OS starting up behind Teams, when I start/open it up

There is, it's called SharePoint.
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