I loved Windows Phone. I had one of the very first devices (Samsung Omnia 7). I developed several apps at the very beginning. Too bad it never caught up with Android and iOS, I felt it was superior in many aspects (except the ecosystem, of course).
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
#42Do I smell a round 2 for a Windows Phone? Imagine a new Windows Phone....that runs Android apps.
Microsoft had an Android compatability layer in WM10 betas, as well as an iOS layer. They didn't launch either, afaik, running the apps without platform services isn't great, so then it's a push towards developers --- port your app to WM10 much easier... But there's still work, and IMHO, the user share on WM10 wasn't compelling enough for new developers to do the work.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/3447036-microsoft-android-a...
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-...
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#43One 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.
Out of all the examples, why Kinect? They did the right thing and made it accessible for developers, but why would the Kinect ever work for Xbox players who are on average 33 year old males? It was gimmicky and fraught with bad silliness from the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Milo
The Kinect (and especially the cheap knockoffs that followed) changed the field of amateur robotics, just not gaming... in robotics, there was a lot of "it was great for us but we really have no idea why they did that" :-)
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#44I 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).
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#45I doubt it would have succeeded. The latent associations with the unreliable and bloated Windows CE was too strong which had a halo effect — the vibe was that Microsoft tried to shoehorn Windows into mobile devices where it doesn’t really work.
It wasn’t until later than Windows Phones came out but the association with Windows was just too strong. I owned a Nokia Lumia and to be honest it was an ok experience with the tiles and everything but the iPhone just felt so much more polished as a consumer device. The Windows branding was a liability to be honest.
Microsoft’s design language felt too corporate and if you look at any of their OS interfaces today they’re just so uncool. Smart phones are lifestyle devices and being too corporate is a liability. (Unless you’re BlackBerry but somehow there’s a coolness to the BlackBerry branding — even Obama used one. I doubt he would have used a Windows phone. )
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#46Title: "and mobile was a mistake". That's misleading as the article correctly states, that it was admission the company made some serious mobile mistakes (in strategy / approach). Not that "mobile was a mistake".
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?
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#47I know a few people that loved the windows phone, but frankly, I'm glad they failed. We didn't need another walled garden with a closed-source proprietary ecosystem. If they opened up the OS it could have been a good thing but there was no evidence that they had such plans.
Previous Windows Mobile kernels had their source available for download on the web. Although not MIT licensed or anything, they were radically open for the Microsoft of the time (early 2000s!) I believe Windows CE 7 also had its source available. FWIW CE7 was an amazing operating system that had a minimal OS image of around 8MB on disk. (Numbers are from memory, might be horribly wrong, it was a long time ago that I…
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 consider all the things you’re giving up in order to hit that target.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#48I know a few people that loved the windows phone, but frankly, I'm glad they failed. We didn't need another walled garden with a closed-source proprietary ecosystem. If they opened up the OS it could have been a good thing but there was no evidence that they had such plans.
Previous Windows Mobile kernels had their source available for download on the web. Although not MIT licensed or anything, they were radically open for the Microsoft of the time (early 2000s!) I believe Windows CE 7 also had its source available. FWIW CE7 was an amazing operating system that had a minimal OS image of around 8MB on disk. (Numbers are from memory, might be horribly wrong, it was a long time ago that I…
I think Moore's Law was always going to kill CE. It has several limitations that could not be worked around and were irrelevant 25 years ago but very relevant today.
In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS, there is no future for something like CE. This is why Microsoft just moved to using their desktop kernel for future versions of Windows Phone -- it makes porting software so much easier.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn't Bing now a competitor to Google? It's results are nearly as good and Bing Chat is available to users and will soon be rolled out to enterprises.
Yes! Bing is finding its footing and is introducing nifty value-adds.
But, that has taken a long time, during which it was mostly the butt of jokes.
So, not saying all of these were abject failures and a few are still around and doing OK (Surface) or better (Bing). But, I'd argue that the projects were so rushed and reactionary that they were delivered compromised, embarrassed, and with too little direction and advocacy.
Oh, and I'd like to add Microsoft Store to the list.
Re: Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
#50If I am not mistaken Windows Phone had some steep competition from Google, Google was actively trying to block any of its services (e.g. youtube) from working on the platform. With popularity of google products at the time it was very hard to convince people to stick to the platform.