381–390 of 724 posts
Apple was the 1st and got to dictate the terms of their walled garden. The told Adobe from day 1 to get lost with flash, but for a wall it had walls amazingly low for what had been tried in the past. And people lost their minds with excitement, except those pesky open source kids. Google looked around and said we want in but how? Get rid of the wall and let any carrier and everyone use it. All the carrier's saw they…
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Wow, I didn't even know Intel was a RAM chip maker before doing microprocessors... or that Microsoft started with BASIC. Thanks for the historical notes!
OK, now you're making me feel old. I knew those things through personal experience. I suppose you didn't know that HP made calculators either?
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For now. Some of the younger people aren't having any of that shit these days.
If they work at any big enterprise it is either Outlook or Lotus Notes. The latter will make them love Outlook.
I started my career with an employer which used Lotus Notes and has quite a bit of investment with custom Domino apps.
I'm glad that's in the past.
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Did everything they could... Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.
Hey, if you're optimizing for "number of apps on our store" I bet it worked great! Why spend $100,000 developing something one app when you could get 1000 for the same price?!
> leaves out the fact that 99% of them are either web wrappers or low quality games
This is why we have confounding factors, kids.
I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…
Im still on the platform. I was holding out, hoping for something. But I guess my current phone will be my last windows phone. Sad.
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This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement o…
>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?
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Until you hit a bug. The one that killed us was we had to deploy a registry fix to 2000 workstations at hundreds of companies because they broke ClickOnce in IE9 and later. It still isn't fixed today. We still have to eat the administrative cost. Over time, that's a shit ton of cash leaked out on a mistake the vendor has made.
Clickonce is such garbage. I'm sorry I ever heard of it.
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I wouldn't help Microsoft for $10000000. I'm sure many others feel the same.
Is that an exaggeration or do you mean that literally?
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They threw about $500k at my employer at the time to hire some Eastern European company to build an app. They ended up stringing something together that got deployed on like 10 phones. The problem was that a big enterprise customer is clueless about mobile apps, and Microsft’s endemic NIH syndrome made it difficult to work with business systems that aren’t Microsoft platforms. O365 is a great example... the office pl…
Outlook+Exchange is really the thing keeping Microsoft alive.
Clear area for disruption here. But it's IT stuff, so no one wants to touch it because it's not a cool selfie app.
I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…
I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally h…
According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Most consumers don't care but it is something I was surprised iPhones[1] and Android[2] didn't have at least at the time. In addition continuum is unique/better in many ways although that is more recent. It has been a while since I have used a Windows Phone.
[0] Windows 8.1 definitely had it in 2014 according to this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10652/windows-phone... I'm pretty sure Windows Phones predating this also had it although documentation seems lacking.
[1] Wi-fi assist was introduced in iOS 9(2015). https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296
[2] There are apps for Android that do this but at least this one is 3rd party. No sources says it predates 2015. I have not experimented with this on Android. https://www.guidingtech.com/54831/get-ios-like-wi-fi-assist-...