I've always said sales (and marketing) was Microsoft's biggest problem. The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over. The silo between Windows and development (Azure, .net etc) needs to come down fully to fix Sinofsky's mess too. We're still left with a desktop OS UI with huge animated icons designed for a phone even though they've now given up on the phone market anyway. They gave up too easi…
Very well said on the Windows phone.I have used three windows phones before switching to Android and I think the UI for simpler things like dialer ,messages or emails was better on windows phone.Especially email was so good ,it used to work a charm even on 2G.I have used built in clients and other options on Android and nothing beats the basic email client on windows phone.May be it was not feature rich for gmail but…
The whole WinRT/.NET model of WP, and the respective tooling is miles ahead of what Google has managed to pull out of Android.
Even the upcoming Android N with Android Studio takes lots of more resources than VS, doesn't provide a proper experience for NDK users and there isn't a Support Library release that isn't followed up by a quick fix release.
I really don't understand where the skilled developers that master the Google interview process end up working, surely not on Android.
However the WP in small form factors is dead, with the latest promise drop of the 512 MB WP 8.1 devices not getting the WP 10 upgrade they lost the last faithful ones that still believed.
Where it might thrive is as tablet OS, but lets see.