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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

#181

Post by flohofwoe »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #175
flohofwoe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original Kinect was just such an optional accessory... The Xbox One was then tightly integrated with the Kinect, but that was such an unpopular move that they eventually gave up (first by no longer requiring the Kinect to be connected [1], then by no longer shipping a Kinect with each Xbox [2]) - so it's not for lack of trying. The thing was just unpopular with Xbox users. ...also as an Xbox 360 user at that ti…

From the first article, > Microsoft is making another Xbox One policy change by allowing gamers to use the upcoming console without Kinect. > upcoming They did not try. There was no trying. It was not eventual. They folded before it ever came to market. And the thing already had worse performance than the PS4, so dropping the Kinect really meant just having an inferior product with no product differentiation.

The second article shows though that they had bundled Kinect with each Xbox One for about half a year before giving up (I guess they really got thrashed hard by PS4 sales and went into panic mode).

The thing is simply that Kinect made the Xbox One more expensive than a PS4, and that for a piece of hardware that most Xbox users saw at best as a gimmick. It probably was the first sane decision of the bungled Xbox One launch.

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

#182

Post by flohofwoe »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #174
iforgotpassword wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is absolutely no way to integrate the Kinect into games in a meaningful way. Name just one example where it was done so that you would think "wow this has potential". Throwing grenades by gesture in call of duty? Biggest LOL ever. When I'm playing a competitive multiplayer title, I want precise, quick controls, and not let go of my controller to gesture around like a brain-damaged monkey. With Kinect, you h…

We'll never know because it was never really tried. With novel tech, there needs to be plenty of experimentation. The market did not try quite a few things with Kinect. Most publishers put out a game, one single game, presumably subsidized by MS, and then went back to making games for the base console because there was not a Kinect install base.

It's the same vicious cycle as with the VR hype. In the end companies have to face the harsh reality that nobody really cares about their hyped up product and cut their losses.

Microsoft actually did try really hard with the Kinect (already in the Xbox 360 generation) but it just didn't work out. I wonder how much money they lost on that whole experiment (or maybe they actually made money, apparently they sold 35 million overall which isn't too shabby actually).

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

#183

Post by xbmcuser »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #173
xbmcuser wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how you bring in adoption or sell products. They should have build something amazing using Kinect that everyone would have wanted one and not cared about buying it separately. Then if everyone had one then devs would have come. But they themselves did not have some amazing use for it.

That's naïve. No matter how amazing your launch game is, a large fraction of your install base will just never bother. Maybe they don't have the money, or they're just frugal. Maybe they're skeptical and reluctant to upgrade. Maybe they just don't like whatever genre of game. It has been tried again and again and again. Optional console accessories and upgrades just never have enough of an install base to attract a c…

Nintendo sells consoles with great experiences let alone accessories

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

#184

Post by setr »

xbmcuser wrote: post #183
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's naïve. No matter how amazing your launch game is, a large fraction of your install base will just never bother. Maybe they don't have the money, or they're just frugal. Maybe they're skeptical and reluctant to upgrade. Maybe they just don't like whatever genre of game. It has been tried again and again and again. Optional console accessories and upgrades just never have enough of an install base to attract a c…

Nintendo sells consoles with great experiences let alone accessories

Outside of a few specific games that went all-in, I remember the Wii & Wii U game ecosystem as largely ignoring the wiimote and the gamepad in favor of standard controls.

Going further back in time, I remember the GameCube/n64 and gameboy game-relevant accessories as largely being limited to a few games each, and always as an optional bonus feature that never really mattered that much

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

#185

Post by pathartl »

generj wrote: post #4
damiankennedy wrote: post #2

I 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 think he does get it, though. Windows 11 is the most touch friendly version of the OS to date. While Windows tablets aren't as common as say, the iPad, they're inherently more useful.

I will say, they do need to get their heads out of their asses for MAUI.

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

#186

Post by ravenstine »

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).

Besides the confusion with Windows Phone that someone else here mentioned, 2003 was a different era. We have Windows today, but it represented something else back then. There weren't really other good examples of full-blown computing at the handheld scale back then. Yes, there are some arguments to be made for other platforms, but let's face it, having Windows in the palm of your hand would have meant the power of a desktop/laptop in your hand. Today, and even starting ~15 years ago, the novelty of having any particular operating system in the palm of your hand largely diminished in favor of whomever could do it right, regardless of what the underlying OS was. In other words, a diminishing number of everyday people are loyal to any particular OS or architecture. If anything, calling something else "Windows" will give them the wrong set of expectations. At best, it will make people expect it to mimic Windows, and at worst people will associate it with things like viruses, blue screen of death, etc. A totally new name would have given Microsoft's phone line a clean slate in terms of branding.

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

#187

Post by steve1977 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #178
steve1977 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using macOS at home for about 23 years now, but what was the last really useful new feature they added?

Microsoft still has no equivalent to the Preview app. Signing and filling out PDFs is a common use case.

Well I was rather talking about the operating system itself, not the apps.

But if you want to take this particular example, it’s very simple to just download Acrobat Reader or some alternative.

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

#188

Post by lotsofpulp »

steve1977 wrote: post #187
lotsofpulp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft still has no equivalent to the Preview app. Signing and filling out PDFs is a common use case.

Well I was rather talking about the operating system itself, not the apps. But if you want to take this particular example, it’s very simple to just download Acrobat Reader or some alternative.

Acrobat reader does not let you edit PDFs. And trusting 3rd party programs on Windows is not something I would advise for non tech savvy people.

My point is Windows has a known malware problem, editing PDFs is a common need these days, and Microsoft has the resources to provide a built in non malware PDF editor.

Yet they do not bother to fulfill a simple need for their customers.

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

#189

Post by Apocryphon »

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…

Sailfish is still around, albeit very barely

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

#190

Post by chithanh »

pjmlp wrote: post #156
chithanh wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The comment which I linked was just an illustration. And I was talking about porting mobile games from iOS/Android to Windows Phone.

Besides that, porting wasn't easy even for apps which worked on Windows already. The API was quite different, and not in a good way. For example none of the standard Windows file I/O API was available. There was DirectX but it was DX11 FL9_3 which is not how you access GPUs on desktop Windows (you would either use DX9 or DX11 FL11_x).

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