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Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#471

Post by rconti »

chefkoch wrote: post #445
notatoad wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sysadmins aren't big fans of disruption either. You could build the greatest active-directory replacement in the world and no IT department would touch it with a ten foot pole because it isn't what they're used to.

> Sysadmins aren't big fans of disruption either. You could build the greatest active-directory replacement in the world and no IT department would touch it with a ten foot pole because it isn't what they're used to. It's all fun and games untill 2000 users cannot log into their machines because your new shiny active directory replacement didn't work.

Right. Automation means you can break things faster than ever. When you're asking someone who's already busy to rip out the guts and start over, and, if you're lucky, it will successfully do exactly what the old thing did... what's the incentive? So often in the ops/admin world changes can only make things worse and make your life miserable. And if your team doesn't have the bandwidth to deal with those 2000 users one-by-one.... good luck!

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#472

Post by dc443 »

pjmlp wrote: post #316
winphoneappdev wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having done my fair share of windows phone app development (8.0, 8.1, 10) I can confirm. Microsoft incentivized app development, and paid top game development companies millions and gave them featured placements for their half-assed windows phone ports. And then as a regular joe you would actually put in the effort* to get things working well. Then you would watch these bug-plagued big name 3-star ports appear out of…

Give it a few more OS releases and Android will be the only one supporting GL.

Would Apple really drop OpenGL? They are smarter than that...

They could do it, though. They could.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#473

Post by emodendroket »

WorldMaker wrote: post #434
emodendroket wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest frustration, to me, is that WPF was basically left on the vine while they pursued this WinRT stuff.

I think the evolutionary path connecting WPF and "this WinRT stuff" is extremely clear and if you've built WPF you can build UWP. UWP .NET/XAML is great to work with if you know WPF, it's truly a successor to WPF in every way. (It'll be even better soon [as in next month] thanks to .NET Standard 2.0.)

That may be so, but WinRT comes with a bunch of limitations, so there isn't really a no-brainer choice for application development, and also, considering how deeply it's associated with the unpopular Windows Store app and Windows phone, who wants to throw in their lot with it? Frankly it hasn't seemed worth investing that much time into any of them and I pretty much just end up reaching for yet another WinForms MVP app. But WinForms practically works against you in the effort to separate UI from behavioral code so that isn't that satisfying either.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#474

Post by rconti »

pweissbrod wrote: post #457
godzillabrennus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They even held a funeral for their competitors devices: https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-win... This didn't age well.

I'll file that next to the windows 7 release party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

Oh god, I forgot all about this. How was this only 8 years ago? I love how, at 0:38, you can see the guy on the left covering up a laugh.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#475

Post by collinmanderson »

criddell wrote: post #111
jk2323 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is my understanding that MS has given up on ARM. Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones, which partly solves the "app" problem. They just run a regular windows on the phone.

> Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones Sure, but right now Apple and their ARM designs are running away from everybody else. Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything? I think MS is conceding the entire phone space. Full screen form factors (like laptops is and large tablets) are very important but for small devices I don…

Exactly. Microsoft is abandoning phone, but I imagine they'll still exist in the business-tablet area.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#476

Post by maxxxxx »

emodendroket wrote: post #287
cjsuk wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They also rewrite stuff half way through and tell you it's the same project just to piss you off. Windows Workflow and Windows Communication Foundation for example. I'm really disinclined to invest in any of their technology because my headspace is finite and I want to deliver business value, not change the unworn carpets once a year.

Most of the legacy stuff continues working long after it's the hot new thing, though.

But it never matures. You are stuck with half-assed stuff in many cases.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#477

Post by smitherfield »

v-yadli wrote: post #465
smitherfield wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone. Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).

http://mobilehtml5.org/ I'm interested in how you would define full-featured . Please check the symbian & opera columns. Also, iOS 1.0 ships with Safari3.0, not Safari3.1.1 in this test. In iOS 2.0 they introduced a new feature that allows you to save web pictures to Photos. Full-feature redefined. :) Edit: a full-featured television indeed, by Alan Kay's definition: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay…

I mean full-featured in the sense of end user experience. If you have any example prior to 2007 of a mobile browser rendering the full New York Times website perfectly,[1] I'm all ears. But as I remember the below link was, for good reason, the biggest "wow" moment of any demo Steve Jobs ever gave.

[1] https://youtu.be/RIRQg8AJxuw?t=41m24s

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#478

Post by lelandriordan »

rchaud wrote: post #233

Had Microsoft's acquisition strategy been different, they could have significantly boosted WM's hopes. The lack of official apps for Whatsapp and Instagram on WP were user's biggest complaints by far. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and Whatsapp in 2014 for a combined total of $20 billion. In roughly the same period, Microsoft bought Skype, Minecraft and LinkedIn for a total of around $36 billion, the bulk of that…

I agree that they overpaid but I think you are missing something big: they didn’t buy LI to improve Windows Phone, they bought it to integrate with Outlook and give their Enterprise SAAS products like Dynamics an edge in the war with Salesforce. I work at a financial firm and LI is essential to the long sales process for our applications.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#479

Post by windows8q »

dtx1 wrote: post #224
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

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…

> Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it.

What was so horrible about it? I almost invested in a surface just off the strength of the UI; I rather liked that they were trying to merge desktop and tablet. Why was the experience so bad?

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