Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
There’s nothing stopping Microsoft from coming out with a new phone line, other than poor management.
Replace “new phone line” with pretty much anything ‘positive’ and it fits Microsoft.
Better OS? Nope! Shit management. Better productivity software? Nope! Shit management. Better cloud and virtualization platform? Nope! Shit management.
The first day I used Windows 8 RC, I was flabbergasted that anyone approved that dumpster fire for release. They’ve been trying to unfuck that ever since, and at dead snail’s pace. Thanks, shit management! You’re why I left systems administration to be a bad programmer!
What do you program in? Ive really enjoyed the new .NET ecosystem, but I’m sure it’ll go to shit eventually just like the rest of their products…
That’s the irony! Mainly working in C# .NET (and some SSIS) and maintaining an unfair amount of legacy VB on ETL processes.
FWIW I was working in Java on the middle-end of Oracle for a few years before changing positions to where I am.
But at least I’m never on-call!
For real. AOSP is open source, and Google is taking more things private. MS could start driving AOSP since FOSS projects go where the group contributing the most wants it to go.
That would force them to adopt different languages internally though. I don’t know what they are doing these days, but something tells me it’s not kotlin and jetpack.
They’re already talking up .NET MAUI. Their cross-platform C# application UI.
I’m also not sure MS cares that much if that gets them in the game.
It’s not that easy on the hardware side. Keep in mind that the way both Google and Microsoft previously entered this market was by buying an established manufacturer (Motorola and Nokia, respectively). But Microsoft squandered Nokia’s manufacturing assets and would need to either start from scratch or acquire somebody else. But there aren’t many manufacturers left that are decent, non-Chinese, and willing to sell.
There’s also the option to pair with a manufacturer and ask them to put Microsoft’s OS on their phones, but Google would most likely lean on anybody attempting that and threaten to revoke their access to Android trademark and Google Services. Samsung is the only manufacturer in a position to tell them to suck it but they’re locked into a complex struggle with Google and it’s anybody’s guess if taking Microsoft on board would help or hinder their position.
The appeal of the “we could have been a contender” fantasy for Microsoft is the idea that they’d be printing money by collecting the 30% tax on apps and in-app purchases. If they were 100% dependent on Samsung, they’d be printing at least 50% less money
Windows Phone failed because there were no apps for it. There was no YouTube app, no Facebook app, no Twitter app, etc until very late or never at all. They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones. The OS was great and worked on a wide range of hardware. It could have been a great enterprise solution and they seemed to be heading that direction but the lack of third party made it little more than A Microsoft feature phone.
Actually, the main cause it failed was because Microsoft bullied the manufacturers until they said enough and bailed out. So they were forced to buy a manufacturer to keep going (Nokia) then gave up halfway through after buying it.
Microsoft has stupid amounts of cash and could have kept Windows Phone going indefinitely, even at a loss. It’s how they broke into the console market, by keeping the Xbox going at a loss for a decade.
Yeah the lack of apps would have been a problem initially but everybody would have relented given enough time, and in the meantime most of the missing services could have been accessed in a browser.
They couldn’t even be bothered developing their own apps for it. The mail app began to lag behind Outlook on Android, Minecraft was never ported to it when it could have been a killer exclusive app.
Google was often guilty of that too. I remember a number of Android apps that were pretty far behind the iOS ones. I don’t think that is the case anymore though.
There were also a bunch of iOS apps behind Android ones. Remember when iOS finally got widgets? Different companies focused on different functionality first. But at this point, android and iOS have had the time to play catch-up with each other.
Difference being that Apple does not make Android apps. Google’s own apps on iOS were behind their own on Android. I recall the YouTube and Maps app missing some features for quite a while on Android that were on IOS. I get that companies silo teams from each other but it’s a little embarrassing when you’re software on your platform is behind your software on your competitor’s platform.
OS-wise, yeah it has largely been Apple playing catch up with iOS aside from messaging.
That reminded me when the Remote Desktop app turned up on Android before the Windows Phone. Ludicrous.
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I knew it would be this before it loaded and I am happy to be reminded of it. Baller was such a weirdo.
Holy fuck he looks like he’d been on a cocaine binge for days.
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Oh my word, why have I never seen this before?
This was the downfall of BlackBerry as well.
QNX-based BB10 OS was phenomenal, and their hardware was top notch.
It was the lacking app ecosystem that killed it.
You need to read up on the fall of Blackberry. It was extremely badly mismanaged. It wasn’t the lack of apps that killed them.
I was a BB developer right around the time of their demise. It never mattered how good or bad their OS was, because the development environment for BB was complete shit - which was a big part of why nobody wrote apps for it.
They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones.
Blackberry at their end (circa 2011 or so) started handing out $10,000 grants to developers to make apps for them. I thought about applying for one, but $10K is not much at all to develop a decently-featured app that does anything, and BB’s development environment was such an unbelievable clusterfuck that really no amount of money could have made worthwhile to endure.
Also: 16-bit color lol.
16-bit color
What the fuck?
5 bits each for red and blue and 6 for green. Who needs more than that?
The only reason I liked it at all was that I created a lot of owner-drawn controls (since the built-in Blackberry “fields” were shit) that used a lot of bitmap memory for animation, and reducing your memory footprint by a factor of two (compared to 32-bit graphics) wasn’t worthless, especially for the older devices.
Snapchat was the big one missing that really put the nail in the coffin towards the end there.
That is because every single mobile version of Windows was incompatible (After version 6) with the previous. They kept reinventing the wheel over and over again.
The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.
The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.
Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.
I really miss the OS… My favorite phones at the time
Yep, if you don’t even have the stuff the first iPhone came with, your platform isn’t going to make it.
The first iPhone didn’t come with those things. There wasn’t even an App Store until a year and a half after it came out. The first gen was pretty much crap. It didn’t have 3g when other phones of the time did. It had the best browser but it was slow as shit. The whole page would turn gray when you scrolled around. There was no copy/paste. You couldn’t sync with Exchange. It was missing basic features that other phones of the time had. It was probably the 3GS or the 4 when it got really good.
It did have YouTube and maps.
WP had a far superior 3rd party YouTube app than any other platform’s first party app at the time. The only reason why they didn’t have a first party was because Google was intentionally throwing road blocks to prevent it from happening.
Serves them right for what they did to Nokia.
Maemo and Meego were so good
Yes, they were. These bastards destroyed the biggest European tech company for nothing. And Nokia had all the services required and the technical know-how to rival Google.
All credit to Microsoft, but as an ex Nokian my feeling is that Nokia killed itself unwittingly when it bought NavTeq. Because of that sunk cost, they were unwilling to adopt Android as it would invalidate the acquisition, with the leaders responsible still at the reins. Life with Android would be far from the heyday of the past, but living is living.
I was using the N900 when it came out and at that point Android was in no way superior to whatever Nokia was doing. Their main misstep was choosing Windows Phone and shipping the N9 as a dead-on-arrival product. Nonetheless the UX was pretty ahead of its time and we could have had a real Qt based Linux phone OS
I love my N900 and N9 but by the time they were released Android already had unstoppable momentum. It’s all about software developers’ uptake of the platform. Maemo didn’t have it, WP had barely more, but neither was enough to compete. I think Nokia could have been the peer of Samsung as an Android OEM. Their logistics was arguably better even though they didn’t have the vertical integration of Samsung.
Edit: if they’d not had the risk-averse management a few years earlier the N770 could have developed into a competitive smartphone platform… But managers were fixated on candybar phones and endless variations on feature phones instead of reaching for their future.
By the time he was CEO it was already dead. He was right to kill it.
I have my doubts that a three-horse phone race would have been stable in the first place, as one of those three (Android, iPhone was too established) would have likely fallen out of favor. And then, you all would be complaining about monopolistic practices Microsoft would inevitably be doing.
Google is not a good company, but they have treated Android much better than they could be.
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yeah, more competition - not another gigantic conglomerate that wants to integrate my phone into my operating system.
more competition would be great, another google/apple type - meh.
Unfortunately only a ‘gigantic conglomerate’ stands a chance against Google and Apple. The other smartphone OSs - Ubuntu, Manjaro etc. - have a tiny market share.
Just look at how Firefox OS struggled even in developing countries, where it could run much better than Android in low-end smartphones. Then Reliance (a big and very cut-throat company) licenced it and now it has a decent marketshare in India. There are plenty of good alternative OSs, but without a big war chest they aren’t getting mainstream acceptance.
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I’m hoping the slow creep of right to repair laws will help with this. Forcing manufacturers to provide spare parts, documentation and diagnostic tools to independent shops I think will inevitably lead to more open devices in general.
There would already be a vibrant community of smartphone Linux distros right now if bootloaders were unlocked and manufacturers were more forthcoming with documentation.
very good point. the best use for that ewaste would be decent retreads for people who just need a phone and don’t care that it’s a few years from ‘latest and greatest’.
one day… they’re certainly powerful enough these days.
Remember when Microsoft had an awkward funeral for the iPhone?
https://www.cnet.com/pictures/microsofts-funeral-for-the-iphone-photos/
It’s very “going up to to your crush to let them know you’re over them but they don’t even know your name” energy.
Windows phone was the best phone OS I ever experienced. Features were years ahead of iOS and Android.
I remember it being good hardware and the OS was actually really good. It felt very fast when a lot of Android phones still felt sluggish. What they really screwed up was the third party apps. Nobody was making anything for it and they didn’t give developers a reason to. It was a product that should have succeeded if not for bad management.
This is really the same thing that happened with Blackberry. I’m a mobile developer and I was doing entirely Windows Mobile (which wasn’t Windows Phone) from 2005 to 2010, and then I got a Blackberry project dumped in my lap. I was astonished to find that 1) Blackberrys were actually very powerful and adaptable devices, and 2) BB’s development environment was the shittiest thing ever invented in the history of humanity.
Yeah, the situation reminds me of BlackBerry. I had the 8900 and it was my favorite phone. I remember when they finally did have a little App Store thing and it was terrible. They threw it together in a hurry so I can only imagine how shitty the dev tools were.
Ironically enough, the dev tools were there (and shitty) from the very beginning in the early 2000s, and they were never really improved upon. The biggest problem was that the code libraries were broken up into multiple (and not completely logical) modules and each module you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by a remote server every time you wanted to run your in-development app. The signing server was often slow (or completely down) so sometimes it would take 45 minutes to an hour just to test out a one-line code change (the more modules you included in your app, the longer the overall signing process would take, so I frequently ended up writing my own methods to do standard shit that was in the libraries, just to avoid the compile time hit). Sometimes I would just give up and go home because testing was literally impossible.
On the other hand, it was a great built-in excuse for fucking off. If my managers ever caught me napping, I would just say the signing server was down. I was careful never to tell them about isthesigningserverdown.com, which back in the day told you whether the BB signing servers were actually down or not.
Haha that’s hilarious. 87% success rate!! https://web.archive.org/web/20101109032847/http://isthesigningserverdown.com/beta
Thanks for the PTSD!
Yup. Even the docs on how to use the store from a dev perspective were always out of date or missing completely.
Man you didn’t have to remind me about my Q10. The phone is a hardware masterpiece and the only thing let down was the software going EOL last year. I only wish they release the firmware to public since they were shutting so community can take it from there.
My brother had one and loved it! But outside of basic tasks he couldn’t do anything with it. Eventually he switched to Android just to have apps.
I tried it, but then realized I couldn’t even view my photos I took with my Nexus phone at the time. No Google photos app, and the web browser just took me to a page that said my phone isn’t supported.
YouTube was also only supported via a third party app, and was missing pretty much every feature.
As soon as I realized I would struggle to do the most basic tasks, I bailed.
name a few. please.
I’m open to being wrong but you need to provide evidence to sway me, because I’ve used windows phones and developed for them when they were desperate to get games in their app store and it was wretched early on. like comically bad. so whatever firmed up over the years, please, enlighten me, I’m genuinely curious where they were years ahead.
Fuck man I loved windows phone like the guy you’re commenting too, and I agree with him. I could have commented and told you all the features I liked that were ahead of its time, about 8 years ago, but … It’s been so long I can’t remember shit anymore! Hahaha
Edit: the Camara was fucking awesome. Physical Camara button was pretty dope too, never caught on with other phones so who knows if I’m alone in saying that
Google Nexus (and now Pixel) has always allowed you to double tap the power button to open the camera, and then use the volume buttons to take the photo. Or you can use the volume buttons to zoom in and out.
Isn’t this the same? Dedicated buttons that launch the camera and take photos?
Similar but slightly inferior UX. No double-tapping, just a full press (I think) then you can half-press the camera key just like a normal camera to focus, then fully-press to capture. Small, but something I miss, like how if I switch to Android (save for some models) I’ll miss the Palm/iPhone ringer switch - but holding volume down is also something Android-y I miss.
Samsung Galaxy phones are the same way, honestly I think you can even set up an iPhone to do that. It’s not the same … The lower was on the bottom right side of the phone, and was in a perfect position to hold your phone like a camera and snap a picture.
physical cam controls would be pimpin.
Dark mode and live widgets.
Edit to add: https://www.howtogeek.com/809114/5-ways-windows-phone-was-ahead-of-its-time/
The app support was just so bad in a time where it couldn’t afford to be that bad. But yes windows phone 8 was my favorite UX for a smart phone ever
Loved my 920. HW was sleek and the live tile interface was years ahead of those silly round dots you got on iOS or Android. Sadly they were too late to the game to secure any app interest…oh…and they were Microsoft as well.
I actually had a W10 phone as my work phone. I had no issues with the OS, but app availability was absolutely abysmal. All the crazy W8 touch optimizations suddenly made a lot of sense. Too bad it died so soon.
Microsoft had every advantage. They were in the mobile space for years before Apple with PocketPC. They also had a freaking tablet.
They fucked it up with uninspired design (a start menu and task bar on a mobile?!) and lack of follow through.
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If you’re talking about WinCE/Pocket, etc, it was an extremely bad UI paradigm for a phone and a button free design in this case made it worse, not better and no one copied that especially not after the iPhone was announced and shown.
The last iteration of Windows Phone (eg: Metro) was actually quite good, but wouldn’t have existed without iPhone/Android before it. It being more like iPhone wasn’t what hurt it, what hurt it was that they never got the dev support needed. My wife had a Windows phone for around a year, and the thing that ultimately moved her to iPhone wasn’t that she didn’t like the phone, it was that she was constantly left out of things because it was probably more rare for an app to hit Windows Phone than Linux.
Microsoft did have the right idea with getting to mobile/tablets before most, but MS has never really had good taste when it comes to software UI.
Part of their issue is their desktop and x86 legacy apps ecosystem was no use on ARM touch devices.
But more competition than 2 would have been nice. We need stuff to move back to mobile web apps instead of apps. Then it’s platform independence and the sandbox is interchangable.
We could have had webOS
Fuck you, I loved the design of windows phone. Bring able to size the tiles different and have them show content on the home screen was awesome. And the hardware was cool too. I still look at the photos I took on my windows phone and compared to my galaxy s22 ultra they still look just as good if not better in some cases.
Honestly the wort thing about win phone was salty developers who not only refused to port apps over no matter how easy MS made it, but also went well out of their way to shut down any community apps made using their API, like the Snapchat dead did.
I’m not talking about windows phone, I’m talking about PocketPC
There was also Windows CE, which was a real shitshow. I had a Vadem Clio, which I still wish I had because I was a beautiful piece of hardware… but it was so hampered by having Windows CE installed on it.
He finally admitted to it. I was a Windows Phone user until the end. It’s sad that it was discontinued.
I was about to buy my first one when they discontinued them, they looked pretty dope!
It’s really was.
Mistake for them but good for consumers. We all need more competition in this industry
Huh? How was cancelling the third most popular phone OS in the US good for consumers or in any way increasing competition in the industry?
It is funny to me that they gave up on the Windows phone right when it was starting to actually kinda work and gain some market traction.
It was literally during an era where people were leaving iphone in droves (begrudgingly) for android. Windows phones could have easily stolen a ton of marketshare from Samsung and Google.
my favourite windows phone moment was when they had a funeral for the iphone lol
There really was something about the windows phone UI though. If you weren’t around to try it, it’s hard to properly explain how different and fresh the flat pane interface felt compared to iOS and Android. It really was a phenomenal design language compared to the same old thing in the market.
I honestly believe it they had just sucked it up and subsidized the cost of doubling the ram on those last Nokia devices, it could have been good enough to break through. Microsoft had everything possible to gain from integrating the desktop-to-mobile workflow for business clients. Then they threw it out the window…
Seriously, I doubt many people here who aren’t used to corporate environments can fully understand how big the market was, that Microsoft gave up, by not spending enough to fill the BlackBerry hole that formed. They had 98% of the solution already developed, and fumbled the ball with a single yard left to go.
There was room for three players, if one of them actually serviced the business environment; and nobody was better positioned to do so than Microsoft at the time. Excel and PowerPoint that synced from your work machine, to the field, in a zero trust environment… Gah… they were so close.
I had Lumia, on Windows 8 it was okayish, but when it moved to Windows 10…oh my god it was amazing. And the fact that you also got an amazing screen and amazing camera made the experience magical
They really needed to listen to their enterprise customers. Windows Phone could have easily taken over as the ‘corporate phone’, if it had any integration at all. With the side benefit that their corporate customers also employ the developers that could build out the apps they needed to create the marketplace.
Instead they tried to take on Apple and Google, in an end user space that had already been thoroughly saturated, with a product that was barely on par.
My first smart phone was a windows phone
Same, a Nokia Lumia 710. Lack of app support is what killed them. Even mainstream apps you had to have a third party version, Facebook, Insta, etc.
Which wouldn’t have necessarily been a death knell, except by the point Microsoft had gotten their eggs into the Windows Phone basket, major platforms had already started shutting down functionality that could be accessed through third party applications so the App Store/Play Store official versions were the clearly superior ways to use the platforms.
In many cases, like with reddit even, third party applications are how many people have preferred to access these platforms, so long as the platform doesn’t lock down the API to kneecap them.
Man nokia used to make great phones.
Man Nokia used to make great
phoneslethal weaponsSo did Samsung
I had one back in the day. I loved it honestly and was surprised they gave up.
Mine was too sort of. It was windows mobile 6 HTC shadow. This was before android and around the time iPhone was released.
Unless we’re counting the sidekick 2 as a smart phone, in which case that was my first.
HTC TyTN II. Loved that thing. Used to pay Age of Empires on it.
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De-Googled android is what you want.
