They clearly took many design cues from Zune, which was another excellent product I loved that did not take off.
I think if MS Phone had stuck it out a bit longer hybrid apps may have helped bring some developers in.
It sounds like Nadella still doesn’t get it though. MSFT tried several times to “reinvent the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones” and none succeeded. Windows 8 UC targeting tablets and native apps was a disaster and ate up a lot of goodwill.
With tablet PCs and netbooks Microsoft had the right idea too early and with poor technical implementation.
I liked mine too. Sometimes I think I was the only one, but now I know there were at least three of us.
I had what I think was the lowest end Lumia at the time, a Lumia 520 maybe? It did what it did really well.
The camera was surprisingly OK. The tiles meant I could see what I needed without tapping around. It was much more responsive than other phones in its price range from what I remember too.
> I liked mine too. Sometimes I think I was the only one, but now I know there were at least three of us.
I'm pretty sure there were hundreds of us; but maybe only tens.
I don't think Microsoft understands how constantly churning the development framework impacts potential developers, because Windows is so big that developers will suffer through churn until they realize they should just stick to ancient methods that will continue to work. Windows Phone had no ancient methods, and important new OS features were tied to new frameworks anyway, but there wasn't enough users to encourage most developers to suffer through it. That they couldn't make Windows Mobile 10 work (well) on low end devices like the Lumia 520 is probably a mix of organizational and engineering failure, but either way, the push from Microsoft to build 'universal windows platform' apps that would only run on Windows Mobile 10 prompted developers to cut support for WP7 and WP8 in favor of WM10, even though WM10 never had more users than the earlier versions.
Also, mobile Edge was soooooo much worse than mobile IE, woof.
I remember a lot of positive commentary on Windows Phone's UI and concepts. It was distinctive from iPhone and Android, which, with Android largely aping iOS, were pretty same-same, so it was a refreshing reinterpretation. And besides that, a third credible competitor was and still is welcome.
I think you were far from alone in your disappointment watching it wither on the vine.
I owned a windows phone. No. It was bad. It had all the misguided UX problems of Windows 8, but in your pocket. Such bad usability. Given more time, I don’t think it would’ve gotten better based on other MS software offerings in 2023
I think he does get it, though. Windows 11 is the most touch friendly version of the OS to date. While Windows tablets aren't as common as say, the iPad, they're inherently more useful.
I will say, they do need to get their heads out of their asses for MAUI.
yes, windows phone UI and their basic apps were pretty great and easy to use for a none tech-savvy person. Lack of 3rd party apps actually provides a nice distraction-free experience. lol
I am by no means a Windows fan (Linux only sinds 2003) but Windows Phone/mobile was (and is, I have one still) awesome. Snappy, no frills, yet feature complete. Pretty interoperable. Pretty. Pity it's over.
I remember that quite differently. Windows Phone 7 lacked many basic functions like Bluetooth file transfer, the audio player didn't support gapless playback, alarm clock could not turn on your phone (a staple Nokia feature), Internet Explorer was always behind in supporting web standards (and Microsoft did not allow other browser engines). WP7 didn't even support front cameras until Mango Update.
The snappiness of apps was also hindered by network I/O in the UI thread (I mean wtf Microsoft).
WP8 did some things better but it was too little, too late. Nokia at some point bitterly complained about Microsoft's inertia in getting important features implemented that Nokia needed in order to sell phones (besides the apps, but that is another whole can of worms). https://www.techspot.com/news/53405-microsofts-slow-developm...
WP 7 is an entirely different story and not what people talk about when they say Windows Phone. It was a reskinned Windows CE because they wanted to release a product and 8 wasn't done yet.
Microsoft had a Windows CE based smartphone OS at the time, namely Windows Mobile 6.5. Releasing WP7 as a short-lived and compatibility-breaking product with show-stopping deficiencies hurt them in a major way.
And it is not that the WP8 release fixed everything that was wrong. Rather, it added to developer churn by switching to yet another API, it upset users because no WP7 phone could be upgraded to WP8 (except for the HTC HD2 which originally came with WM6.1), and it still didn't support any modern mobile web browsers.
Then there was this strange limitation to only 720p screens and dual-core CPUs until WP8 GDR3. Or that you could not disable automatic screen rotation until that update. VPN support and the notification center came only with WP8.1.
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.
If you watch the Windows UI community talks on YouTube, at least on public channels, whoever is in charge doesn't seem to grasp how much all those rewrites killed the ecosystem, and they keep asking people to invest into WinUI/WinAppSDK, which not only is yet another rewrite, the tooling is a joke versus UWP.
No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the stable technologies from the past.
Looking for some advice here. I’d be interested to develop simple GUI’s at work. I don’t have much experience of that. I have a license for VS2015 to maintain legacy VB and C++ but I think an upgrade could be arranged. I’m comfortable doing web dev but the browser remains limiting. In my situation, would learning native gui development be worthwhile or is it much easier to stick to websites and/or Electron?
Much easier to go with Electron. The choice is made for you. With native Windows, it's a dozen different solution and you waste timing playing future teller to imagine which one won't be abandoned in the future. At least with Electron you can reuse your skills with websites and it's pretty established now. Yes, it's not as fast but it's fast enough.
Using WinUI is really easy to do. Whether you're using WinUI 2.8 with UWP or WinUI 3. So native GUI development isn't difficult at all. XAML is similar to HTML in a lot of ways.
If you have your mind set on web development and want a native GUI, you could go with React Native for Windows.
Yeah, if one wants to have fun debugging all the issues that are still open since Project Reunion was announced in 2020, with less capable tooling than .NET Native and C++/CX, specially fun having to deal with CsWinRT and C++/WinRT, the latter already in maintenance, stuck in C++17, as the team is now having fun with Rust/WinRT.
At least Native AOT might support WinUI in .NET 9, something to look forward to, for anyone that still cares outside Redmond.
I listen to almost every ATP. I know the rants. None of them were along the lines of: Apple forces me to completely rewrite Overcast, or else it won't work on the next iPhone.
I’ve just created and compiled an empty WinUI3 project, and I got 131 MB of binaries just for the AMD64 architecture. The EXE from that folder crashes on startup with DllNotFoundException “Unable to load DLL 'Microsoft.ui.xaml.dll' or one of its dependencies”
Apparently, Microsoft couldn’t even setup the project template, need to manually edit the project file adding WindowsAppSDKSelfContained setting. After that it launches, but the binaries are now 151MB in 386 files, for a single AMD64 architecture.
By comparison, an empty WPF application compiles into 171 KB of binaries in 5 files, and the binary is CPU-agnostic, it runs on all CPU architectures. It depends on the .NET 7 runtime, but the runtime for my processor only takes 55MB to download. And if you’re unhappy about the runtime, you can instead target the older .NET framework 4.8 which comes preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11.
It's still worthwhile, and it will be for the foreseeable future.
If you want to dabble in desktop with C#, Avalonia is the best way to go nowadays. I'm having a blast with it working on a couple of projects for my assigned client, and in a couple of personal toy projects.
The art of creating your own desktop GUI library is probably already lost, so react/electron will be the best option. In fact you don’t even need electron. Just make it a web service. People prefer web, they used to web.
It can be pretty hard to deploy a web app in a corporate environment. Just getting an instance on a server is an uphill battle. Easier to have people run a local app.
This was exactly why I gave up on .Net ecosystem. I learned c# as my first programming language, then I started playing around with winforms and then making utility apps for windows phone, everything was great except suddenly wp got killed and they released UWP afterwards, and then UWP got killed to make rooms for whatever came after it… all happened within span of 5 years, it’s really exhausting for developers especially knowing that something you spent time learning and working with probably gonna get dropped sometimes soon..
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.
My org forces ChatGPT to be used through Bing Chat when internal company data is involved. It’s an avalanche of popups, dialogues, links, “did you know”s, color and animations.
Quite unpleasant to use compared to just vanilla ChatGPT, which offers a zen-like experience in comparison.
This one is funny. There was enormous marketing buildup and they even did a full release event with media outlets posting live from the audience, Apple event style.
A little more than a month later MS decided to cancel it. And to be fair, it wasn't that great of a product, but the fact that they burned through all of that development and a massive marketing rollout only to throw it in the trash a few weeks later.... just peak late-00s Microsoft.
They tried with the 3rd party apps. I still have the developer phone they gave my company to port our app.
It was a fun project, and the live tiles and flat style provided a lot of inspiration that resulted in the next version of our app for iOS and Android.
Lacking 3rd party apps was more of a symptom than a root cause in my opinion.
Instead of being scrappy and trying to do whatever it took to gain marketshare in an area they were behind in they put a ton of limitations on their platform and it tanked adoption because the people who were willing to switch and try something new were by definition people who were going to be frustrated with this behavior.
Things like not supporting multitasking or apps running in the background, blocking all exes from even being downloaded, not giving access to the underlaying file system, categorically blocking applications like video game emulators, restricting the ability to tether your phone, etc.
Yes there wasn't third-party app support and yes their maps sucked but I think both of those would have been fixed over time if they didn't take a super arrogant big brother approach to the operating system.
Microsoft both directly and indirectly turned app developers away from Windows Phone.
Mobile games at the time were all OpenGL ES, which Microsoft refused to support in favor of Direct3D.
Then there was Microsoft's perpetual need to start over. WM6.5 to WP7 broke app compatibility. WP7 to WP8, entirely new APIs. WP8 to WM10 there was UWP and Continuum, again forcing major rewrites if you wanted the new features.
And finally how Microsoft treated the devs themselves. Ad-supported apps depended on Microsoft's ad network which was artificially kept alive by Microsoft injecting money for Xbox and Office ads. Once Microsoft stopped, the whole thing folded, leaving developers with a sudden loss of income.
This is why I think the app situation would not have fixed itself over time, and MS efforts to ease transition like Project Islandwood were doomed from the start, because those fixed a problem but not the problem.
There were numerous comments from game developers, including from folks here on HN, that the lack of OpenGL ES was a major obstacle for porting games to Windows Phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15434891
I don't understand what you write about Valve, the Steam Deck supports unmodified Win32 games which use DirectX.
The comment which I linked was just an illustration. And I was talking about porting mobile games from iOS/Android to Windows Phone.
Besides that, porting wasn't easy even for apps which worked on Windows already. The API was quite different, and not in a good way. For example none of the standard Windows file I/O API was available. There was DirectX but it was DX11 FL9_3 which is not how you access GPUs on desktop Windows (you would either use DX9 or DX11 FL11_x).
What does the Steam Deck have to do with an ARM phone running a shitty locked-down version of "Windows" with a lobotomized DirectX that has half the features? You can whine all you want about OpenGL/Metal/Vulkan but it doesn't change the fact that Windows Phone failed where Android and iOS succeeded.
To me it was also crazy how basically being the third player to the table for the modern smartphone, they pretended to already be in Apple's position. Like you said, lack of third party apps killed it. On a whim I wanted to dabble in WP dev a bit in I think late 2014, and just to launch the dev environment I needed to have a dev account which was still paid at that point iirc. I guess that's how you get more people to port their apps over to a platform that has no market share.
And obviously the lack of all the Google apps. Again there was obviously some manager on crack thinking that that'll get everyone to switch to the according Microsoft offerings, and maybe people just stop using YouTube. But surprise, it didn't work out!
Also the aggressive power saving which meant every time you were sending some photos on WhatsApp or other messenger, you had to make sure to keep the screen on and the app in the foreground until it's done uploading, otherwise there was a 90% chance it would get aborted and restarted next time you turned on the screen.
Just a couple of years ago, while cleaning up the office we found an old Windows Phone in a drawer and powered it up. I could see why some people liked it, it was actually very snappy/smooth compared with Android/iOS from the same era.
Loved my Lumia 800 and 925. I actually considered the limited ecosystem a feature because I didn't want to be more addicted to the phone. And the concept of glanceable icons and all the stuff intended to keep you from getting lost in apps—great to me, but unfortunately not great for the app business model. So it died.
the hardware was amazing - you'd get top of the line processor / screen and memory for a few hundred bucks. The OS was great too; so much nicer than the "pages of apps" on other phones, mostly because there never were pages of apps available on a windows phone :(
The Lumia 940 with Windows Phone is the only Microsoft product I have enjoyed using and that miss using even today. The iPhone launcher is still years behind it today.
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.
Yeah, those weren't connected to windows phone really; it was something Nokia was playing with before the acquisition, although they may have launched after?
Forked Android with a Metro launcher and maybe they skinned the rest of the UI. I think I remember WhatsApp doing work to support them while I was there (anything Nokia made and didn't cancel before launching would have and sell enough units to matter), but I don't remember how hard we had to work; I'm guessing it didn't have google play services, but I don't remember if it had its own push services or if it just used long connections. I think maps/locations was weird because Nokia didn't hook the Google apis, so that was a bit tricky. I don't know if it could use the website distributed apk or if Nokia had an appstore, etc.
I 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.
I've been an Android user for over a decade but haven't bought a phone for myself for a while. Samsung won't update the Galaxy S8 any more and my bank decided it was too old to run their app.
The others in my family are iPhone users and I dragged an iPhone 7 out of the drawer to give it a go. Now that google's apps and Chrome are native on the platform you can set up an iPhone as almost completely a google experience.
Embarrassingly all the google services work better on an iPhone than they do on Android. I used it for a day and liked it so much I picked up a newer iPhone and transferred to that.
It will take something really bad to send me back to Android - you end up being a 2nd class citizen running Android especially around security and the amazing face recognition unlock that Apple have implemented.
However, it's pretty troubling in terms of competition - the iPhone will hit a critical mass where choosing Android will be wilfully silly.
> Samsung won't update the Galaxy S8 any more and my bank decided it was too old to run their app.
Just had a similar problem. My bank's iOS app didn't react for "confirm" button so I removed it which resulted with completely locking me out of online banking. Now I'm waiting for a bloody letter. The stale mobile duopoly, mobile as a first class citizen and web as a second class, plus "securitay" practices of banking are an infuriating experience.
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 worked on it.)
It was also incredibly power, CPU, and memory efficient. Windows Phones could run at a rock solid 60FPS with 1/2 the RAM of an Android phone that was dropping frames all the time.
The entire CE operating system is an example of a huge "could have been". Microsoft really never knew what to do with it, and the Windows org obviously wanted it dead, and they eventually got their way. Of course that involved stopping all Windows Phone development for years while they rewrote all APIs, lost functionality, and lost customer trust, in the transition from WP7 to WP8. WP8 eventually became a good OS, but moving to the Windows kernel means the resource usage advantage was lost, and of course app developers got fed up when a new OS came out that had less API features than the previous version.
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.
They would push Windows 8 AOL UI, mandatory NET mobile and usual API hell along with Store on it and CE would end similarly. At least it died without shame.
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.
> 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.
CE6 and 7 were a complete ground up rewrite from the CE5 and earlier versions. They didn't have any of the limitations that previous CE versions did.
> In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS,
My understanding is that iOS is so seriously stripped down compared to macOS that while the kernel is the same, the entire runtime is so different that it may as well be a different OS.
And I don't think Apple hasn't tried to keep releases between the two synced up (maybe they have? No idea honestly), compared to Windows Phone which was merged closely with desktop Windows.
In all honesty, Microsoft had so many resources to throw at the problem, that keeping the teeny tiny kernel team for WinCE employed was not worth losing the entire mobile market by forcing the OS teams to merge and then rewrite everything, poorly at times, from the ground up.
Of course lots of Microsoft politics got involved, including killing Silverlight (which tl;dr is why corporate web apps are written in React now, killing Silverlight basically lost MS the entire internal LOB app market), and forcing a brand new API to be designed.
On that note, by the time WP8 released, the OS was missing key APIs, was hard to write code for, and would only fall further behind Android and iOS.
Eventually the WP platform team did get into a good release cadence, but by then the market had been lost.
IMHO at that time Microsoft didn't understand the importance of regular timely releases to keep them in the news. Apple released a new phone, and a new OS version, yearly. Around 2010 MS was still doing "big bang" OS releases with multiple year gaps in-between.
I worked at Microsoft at the time (started my career in Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone), and people kept asking me "is Windows Phone still around? I haven't heard anything about it in forever", with "forever" being more than a year.
Everyone complains about how new phones come out every year, but if a manufacturer skips a release year, everyone assumes that the phone line is going to be discontinued. Developers stop writing apps for it, and no one wants to buy a phone that was released 16 months ago. Heck after about 8 or 9 months people know that it is time to either "wait for the next model" or "wait for the big discounts".
One 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" :-)
It is hard, really, really hard, to convince game developers and publishers to make games that require an optional accessory. It's been tried again and again and it is never more than a mild success and usually an abject failure. They want to target the base platform, which will always have a dramatically larger install base.
Thr original Kinect was just such an optional accessory, and yeah, didn't have much in the way of third party support.
The XB1 could have, and would have, encouraged more devs to use and experiment with the Kinect because devs could be assured that every single user would have one hooked up.
Except that Microsoft chickened out instead of sticking to their guns. As usual.
I hope they learned that lesson and now have at least 10% more power than Sony. It doesn’t really matter but early adopters drool about minor performance differences.
That's not how you bring in adoption or sell products. They should have build something amazing using Kinect that everyone would have wanted one and not cared about buying it separately. Then if everyone had one then devs would have come. But they themselves did not have some amazing use for it.
That's naïve. No matter how amazing your launch game is, a large fraction of your install base will just never bother. Maybe they don't have the money, or they're just frugal. Maybe they're skeptical and reluctant to upgrade. Maybe they just don't like whatever genre of game.
It has been tried again and again and again. Optional console accessories and upgrades just never have enough of an install base to attract a critical mass of devs.
Outside of a few specific games that went all-in, I remember the Wii & Wii U game ecosystem as largely ignoring the wiimote and the gamepad in favor of standard controls.
Going further back in time, I remember the GameCube/n64 and gameboy game-relevant accessories as largely being limited to a few games each, and always as an optional bonus feature that never really mattered that much
IIRC, the Kinect was supposed to be an integral part of the XB1 package, but was made optional to compete (price-wise) with the PlayStation 4. Pretty unfortunate.
No, there is absolutely no way to integrate the Kinect into games in a meaningful way. Name just one example where it was done so that you would think "wow this has potential". Throwing grenades by gesture in call of duty? Biggest LOL ever. When I'm playing a competitive multiplayer title, I want precise, quick controls, and not let go of my controller to gesture around like a brain-damaged monkey.
With Kinect, you had to make a game that was entirely designed around it, and not have some random mix where you play with the controller and occasionally use gestures. And there really only are so many types of games you can come up with where it doesn't feel like you made something for the Kinect just for the sake of it..
I think the market tried quite a few things with Kinect on the 360, and the most convincing game to me was dance central, because it didn't entirely feel like a casual game with a bit of tech-demo scent, where you'd lose interest after a week and then maybe only ever pull it out again when you have friends over.
We'll never know because it was never really tried. With novel tech, there needs to be plenty of experimentation.
The market did not try quite a few things with Kinect. Most publishers put out a game, one single game, presumably subsidized by MS, and then went back to making games for the base console because there was not a Kinect install base.
> We'll never know because it was never really tried. With novel tech, there needs to be plenty of experimentation.
I call bs, the original Kinect was a commercial success and around for long enough. The tech was there, casual gamers were there, anyone could've picked it up and release an awesome AAA game with kinect to conquer the existing gaming audience. The price of the Kinect quickly dropped to 100$ after the initial price of 150$, which any serious gamer would've spent without hesitation. How is it Microsoft's fault that nobody did create such a killer app? Again, give me an example of anything that had at least potential. Or if you're that convinced it would've worked, you must have come up with your own ideas over the years, right?
> The market did not try quite a few things with Kinect.
It's the same vicious cycle as with the VR hype. In the end companies have to face the harsh reality that nobody really cares about their hyped up product and cut their losses.
Microsoft actually did try really hard with the Kinect (already in the Xbox 360 generation) but it just didn't work out. I wonder how much money they lost on that whole experiment (or maybe they actually made money, apparently they sold 35 million overall which isn't too shabby actually).
I actually listed dance central in my comment! But I'd still consider that a casual game and nothing most hardcore gamers would be interested in. The thing it had going for it was that it kept you motivated for way longer than most other titles. Kinect adventures got boring quite fast, and like most other titles turned into that fun game for small casual evenings with a couple friends over.
Force-bundling it with the Xbox one enraged the (hard)core gamers as they had to pay for an addon that the last few years showed they have no need for, and for the casual gamer, it was too expensive. It had success with casual gamers on the 360 because that console was already relatively old and thus affordable when the Kinect appeared.
microsoft had the potential with Kinect to tie it into xbox live or something + Skype. In my opinion, they had an epic opportunity to have a great video call solution and they blew it.
> The original Kinect was just such an optional accessory...
The Xbox One was then tightly integrated with the Kinect, but that was such an unpopular move that they eventually gave up (first by no longer requiring the Kinect to be connected [1], then by no longer shipping a Kinect with each Xbox [2]) - so it's not for lack of trying. The thing was just unpopular with Xbox users.
...also as an Xbox 360 user at that time I saw Kinect as an expensive toy, and the completely brainless Xbox One marketing (which made very obvious that I'm not their target audience) was one of the main reasons why I gave up on the Xbox and went back to PC gaming.
> Microsoft is making another Xbox One policy change by allowing gamers to use the upcoming console without Kinect.
> upcoming
They did not try. There was no trying. It was not eventual. They folded before it ever came to market.
And the thing already had worse performance than the PS4, so dropping the Kinect really meant just having an inferior product with no product differentiation.
The second article shows though that they had bundled Kinect with each Xbox One for about half a year before giving up (I guess they really got thrashed hard by PS4 sales and went into panic mode).
The thing is simply that Kinect made the Xbox One more expensive than a PS4, and that for a piece of hardware that most Xbox users saw at best as a gimmick. It probably was the first sane decision of the bungled Xbox One launch.
The Kinect was released in November 2010. Are you suggesting they’re still running it?
My understanding is it died ~six months after the Xbox one released (early 2014) when they stopped bundling it with that console. They kept selling it for several years after, but it was inconceivable it would do anything but die at that point.
I mean, it was a better gimmick than the Wii, but it turns out the Wii was good enough.
People didn't want to pay a premium price for a motion gimmick. The Wii hit the sweet spot for casual gamers and they didn't care that the fidelity was lousy.
bit of an anecdote on testing the Kinect. I was working in the Office devision at the time it launched and managed to (some how) get into the beta test team. They sent me one, originally with the plan of wanting it back, but in the end they said we could keep it. I still have mine somewhere with the Microsoft Asset tag on it... Anyway, after the first couple of weeks, testers got a general email about testing the device. "Please wear clothes when testing the Kinect".
Anyway, on what i think it could have been, Cortana on the Xbox with a Kinect and the video features would have been perfect for a lot of things. The vision stuff for games is good, but think watching for fall detection of people in rooms, if you are out and it sees movement (given it could turn to an extent) and the ability to tell it to call someone on Skype with video! That would have been useful in 2020! It was just way too early, like a LOT of Microsoft stuff (Pocket PC, Windows Smart Phone (CE editions), Windows Phone (NT Kernel), Microsoft Tablets (XP) etc. All just a little ahead of the time...
Quite the contrary, in my opinion. Microsoft kept going with XBOX despite of years of criticism, especially during the early cablegate days. Kinect was a feature only enjoyed by a niche audience, no disrespect intended. Despite being an avid gamer, I never even once considered buying Kinect.
For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone, the UI was amazing. It took 5 (I think?) years for iOS and Android to sort of copy the gesture based UI, badly.
I miss Psion which ironically abandoned the market because they thought Microsoft would dominate it. Some of their ease of use has never been replicated.
All the things that made WebOS interesting and a competitor to both iPhone and Android (and Blackberry, and Windows) are gone and not usable in the TV interface.
I remember some people did have a half-working port to the PinePhone, but I don't know how far did it go.
Might be wrong, tell me if i am, but Blackberry, especially here in Ireland, was expensive because of the extra plan to get it to work with mail. I remember spending weeks trying to get my Exchange server at home to talk to Blackberry mail... Gave up and took me 5 min to get it working on Windows Phone with Exchange Active Sync, and later with the iPhone. And for Blackberry, i had to spend extra per month for it to get it enabled. I ended up canceling that part and staying with standard data and all went well on iPhone and Windows Phone.
Yeah no one would make apps for 3rd place, Android already has the problem of being the 2nd target for many new apps. It's worth it for services but a lot of times the Apple app is better because users pay more.
You're looking at everything through the present lense.
Android wasn't in full swing back then. Linux + Qt could have been built up into an amazing mobile OS. I'd argue Android could have ended up as the 3rd place OS.
Nokia just needed to switch to being the premier Linux + Qt phone maker instead of the only one + trying to lock everything up on top of Linux + Qt.
Didn't it live on as SailfishOS and Jolla, before dying for lack of customers?
I too had an N9, and while I wouldn't describe it as amazing, it was reasonably good for the time and probably the best we've ever had in terms of a functional multitouch "linux phone".
IMO what killed it was the closed off nature of Harmattan and the lack of support from Nokia in encouraging hacking the OS. No reproducible firmware, no trivial flashing of community builds standing on the shoulders of what Nokia shipped on the phone. We'd be in a very different place today had the N9 been where the PinePhone is in terms of ability to easily derive and swap out distros, and the vibrant community this enables.
I had the predecessor (N900) at the time, but I don't think the OSS community would have helped.
Lots of effort was directed to typical 'hacker' uses of the phone, not stuff your regular 'end user' would need. It was fun to see a full port of OpenOffice on the thing but it needed a full minute to start and was useless on the small screen. Also, most end users don't know what to do with the terminal ;)
While I think they improved a lot with the N9 Nokia was already severely outclassed by Apple, followed by Google by then.
Directly stating the N9 line was unsupported at release time was the nail in the coffin.
It was the Nokia board that gave him a contract with a bonus clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, as discussed on the Finn press at the time.
I always felt like Microsoft was in a hard place when it came to Windows Phone.
If they tried to market it as a third party alternative to Android, why would manufactures give up an OS they can customize and not have to pay to license (Do you have to pay of the play store?).
Locking down Windows Mobile in the iPhone way is counter to how Microsoft runs Windows right now and would be a major uphill battle. The iPhone kinda lucked out being able to pull this off due to when it came out I think.
All of this leads to them needing a healthy enough install base to get developers to make apps.
Personally I don't think they gave up too soon, I think they were fighting an uphill battle that they were likely never going to Win. It didn't really matter how many good ideas they had when they were up against 2 very entrenched platforms.
The problem was, they were too late.
> In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.
Why does that quote give me Windows 8 vibes? The idea of a single platform and UI for everything? That worked super well.
There was an article a couple of days ago on Windows CE going out of maintainence. I worked on building a touchscreen tablet that used it, I don't see why Windows Mobile should have been any less configurable than Windows CE.
Ironically, they were in the phone OS space before Apple and Google, so arguably, they were too early, inasmuch as the experience they acquired blinded them to the possibilities of smartphones just as the category truly took off.
> Personally I don't think they gave up too soon, I think they were fighting an uphill battle that they were likely never going to Win
They did give up, because hardware development and support costs a ton of money, and they preferred the margins from selling Excel licenses.
They could have done what Apple did and invested heavily in hardware development for 10 years. They even had Microsoft stores rolled out, with clean Windows computers without malware installed by default.
But there was no stomach for lower profit margins and a longer term play.
I loved my windows phones so much. lumia 900 and 920. I totally bought in to the microsoft ecosystem because I wanted to keep using that phone OS and those phones. but the ecosystem sucked ass. none of microsoft's google/apple equivalents were up to par. one night when xbox music said I didn't have license to play any of my music on a long car ride home was the last straw. I bought a galaxy note 3 that evening when I got home.
Is it just me or is Windows phone looked back on with really heavy nostalgia? I never found it to be revolutionary or beautiful, and while I would welcome more players in the mobile space, I think Microsoft's behavior in every other part of its business makes me glad that their foray into mobile never took off.
Windows Phone and Zune are looked back with nostalgia. As someone that had both (including a Zune HD), I don't get it either. I wish I could go tell my teenage self to get over my short-lived "anti-Apple" phase and just ask for an iPod Touch in 2009.
I used 8.1 until 2020 and 10 until a few months ago, so no nostalgic distortion. 8.1 was the pinnacle of the platform, clean, snappy, no-nonsense. 10 already was much more bloated, apps looked crammed, and if it would still be in active development today, it would probably suck as much as the desktop pendant.
I think the team behind 8 had just a lot of freedom and could work on their vision, but then with 10 everyone had to leave their mark somewhere because they knew how to "fix" it and get it to succeed.
I wonder if part of it was that they filled a gap that was sort of broken.
Low-end Android phones used to suck. Hell, even high-end ones. There was a lot of jank, battery life was mediocre, software looked and felt patched together.
Windows Phone delivered a really good experience even on the bottom-of-the-line hardware, Things were smooth, and most stuff (because it was either first-party or from committed devs) was built to fit the design language.
I 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 something to be excited about. Microsoft should have dropped the Windows angle entirely and named their phone platform something else, even if it actually did use Windows under the hood.
Many people confused Windows Phone with Windows Mobile, which came with all sorts of baggage of bad experiences. So I agree with GP, that dropping the Windows name would have been a smart move
Windows phone was garbage though,with no real multi tasking and IE as the only browser.
Nokia/Elop screwed up big time by going with this and it killed Nokia
As opposed to Apple with no real multi tasking and Safari as the only browser? ;)
The difference was Apple had a clear vision on what they wanted the technology to be while Nokia was divided between squeezing a bit more out of Symbian or invest in their 'follow up' Linux-based line. They didn't need Elop to screw up, they did that perfectly by themselves.
If sales were better and Microsoft had continued with Windows phone it probably would have saved Nokia.
I think you are conveniently ignoring the explicitly bad rep Windows had, even for people who bought and used Windows in their homes. It had none of the draw that Apple had following their iMac/iBook/iPod era.
Zune was building a good customer base, but MS threw that away too of course.
Besides the confusion with Windows Phone that someone else here mentioned, 2003 was a different era. We have Windows today, but it represented something else back then. There weren't really other good examples of full-blown computing at the handheld scale back then. Yes, there are some arguments to be made for other platforms, but let's face it, having Windows in the palm of your hand would have meant the power of a desktop/laptop in your hand. Today, and even starting ~15 years ago, the novelty of having any particular operating system in the palm of your hand largely diminished in favor of whomever could do it right, regardless of what the underlying OS was. In other words, a diminishing number of everyday people are loyal to any particular OS or architecture. If anything, calling something else "Windows" will give them the wrong set of expectations. At best, it will make people expect it to mimic Windows, and at worst people will associate it with things like viruses, blue screen of death, etc. A totally new name would have given Microsoft's phone line a clean slate in terms of branding.
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).
I 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. )
If 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.
About YouTube, Microsoft could have done the same as Amazon on the Fire devices, put the website into an app. Instead they used some non-public API to access videos, presumably due to the deficiencies of their browser engine. Of course Google shut that down.
They’ve practically given up on Windows, too, considering it stays put while macOS continues year by year to improve by adding useful features and ecosystem integration.
Just to name an example:
There is excellent integration between iDevices.
With Windows you have Phone Link which allows access to messages and notifications, but it is a far cry from Apple Continuity. For things like access to the phone camera you still need 3rd party software.
Acrobat reader does not let you edit PDFs. And trusting 3rd party programs on Windows is not something I would advise for non tech savvy people.
My point is Windows has a known malware problem, editing PDFs is a common need these days, and Microsoft has the resources to provide a built in non malware PDF editor.
Yet they do not bother to fulfill a simple need for their customers.
Acrobat Reader does let you sign PDFs and fill in forms, those were the two use cases you mentioned.
Windows has a built-in PDF reader with basic editing functionality in the form of Microsoft Edge actually (although I've never used it for that purpose to be honest).
As for a non-malware PDF editor, I'm not sure if Preview.app is such a great example in light of the recent image processing zero-days ;)
Yeah because how can they unethically push you to use Edge if you're not running a Windows OS. And think of all the telemetry they aren't gathering because they don't have Windows on phones. Terrible thing.
If they ran their app store the way they run the Microsoft Store now then they would have had tons of apps. Developers being able to self-host their apps and list it in the store would have seriously helped the app gap.
Microsoft has this habit of trying to enter a new market like a bully. They toss billions of dollars around, they schmooze whoever needs schmoozing, millions in advertising, start name-calling competitors... brutes. Knuckle dragging brutes.
Off the top of my head: Zune (belittling Apple), Search (remember they started name-calling Google), CompuServe (paid shills brutally attacking people online), Operating Systems (attacks on Linux (FUD Advertising), BeOS (Licensing)). So much more.
What they don't do is create a product out of love or passion or belief, usually...
I was surprised when the surface lineup of tablet/laptops... surfaced. They seemed to actually care about what they were doing and really put some thought behind it. I was impressed with the hardware and I very much dislike Microsoft.
I'm glad they got owned on mobile by Google and Apple. I feel comfortable in saying they would not have brought anything positive to this market. A villain was defeated and we are better off.
Mozilla's Firefox OS, however... that's a different story. We all lost when they pulled out.
How exactly they cared about surface? It was a premium toy that was never perfected for pros (these huge displays they discontinued) or e-waste (all 4gb go models). It cost twice for any minimal reasonable hardware configuration. It had insanely impractical weird IO (minidp from 10s in 20s) and fabric palm rest.
It was targeted to push in enterprises where their sales noses are so deep they sometimes don’t even need to bribe CEOs to push their sales initiatives. Even corp drones refused to use it and returned to HP. Who even need this stand contraption for work? Who need touch on Windows? May be people just buy macbook AND ipad for the same price?
They cancelled RT hardware without any delay while windows 10 mobile can run fine. What they did with surface phone? Right, dropped android support like a cheap chinese factory. Do you want to fix your out of warranty 3 yo surface? No sane technician will take it, even if you told him how MS is in (love) with right to repair. Surface is a joke. Well may be .NET developers can use it because how easy it is to develop LOBs with new .NET tools and how productive you feel all the time working with new cool features of C#.
I think I found someone who dislikes Microsoft more than I do. Nice to meet you:-) LOL
Seriously... you are mostly correct about the hardware deficiencies, I won't argue this. The surface line started off very badly but... it engaged. To this date, I don't think you can even get Linux running on any of them w/o some effort.
Mine's was a quick comment and had more to do with Microsoft redefining the hybrid Tablet/Laptop market. It was, I think the only time that I could recall, when they finally took the lead on something. Some hiccups, of course, but overall an industry defining success. It was odd - for me - to see Microsoft leading the field in anything.
I always saw MS as a company that envied someone else's innovation and tried to replicate that success. From Office Programs early on, AOL competitor, VisiCalc/Lotus 1-2-3 competitor, Gaming, Browsers... the list is nearly exhaustive.
Even small things like sound formats, image formats... they needed to upend someone else's established format and replace it with their own. Even their original OS - DOS - wasn't theirs but a hacked version of someone else's effort.
I'm certain you know their history (comment meant for some others reading this).
Finally with Surface, they designed and helped re/define the Tablet/Laptop market in a design pleasing way. They also added Surface Studio - which I thought was very effective. I remember seeing videos on their thought processes, who they consulted when they created Surface Studio. After years of envisioning brutes, they presented themselves as polished professionals during these formative 'Surface' years.
Just wanted to expand on my previous quick comment for clarification.
I loved my mpx200 when everyone else had their Nokia candy bars. Small flip phone, outside display, SD card, USB connectivity, windows platform. I still have it.
I predict the death of Windows Phone will eventually cause Windows to be totally eclipsed by ChromeOS. Not today, not anytime soon, but Alphabet is in an INCREDIBLE strategic position JUST because of Android.
They also who’ve no business trusting Microsoft when it comes to privacy, this being a company who has infamously stolen its competitors products several times and later bankrupted them, yet that hasn’t stopped them from succeeding.
Had Lumia 620 for as long as it was viable to have one. Wasn't jealous if iPhones at all and Android was a misery in comparison. Poor selection of apps but also no parasitic gambling and micropayment apps, the absolute minimum of apps was there. I missed the tinder revolution though.
When will he admit that giving up on Windows was a mistake? Windows doesn't feel like an OS Microsoft actually care about, and hasn't done for years. The level of investment it requires to just pay down its horrendous levels of tech debt clearly aren't going into it, their own initiatives don't get adopted by their own developers and then there's the famous comment posted here asserting that the Windows UI designers all use Macs.
Microsoft hasn't just given up on mobile, they've given up on the desktop. At this rate Windows will eventually just become a fork of ChromeOS that uses Wine to run apps.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadThey clearly took many design cues from Zune, which was another excellent product I loved that did not take off.
I think if MS Phone had stuck it out a bit longer hybrid apps may have helped bring some developers in.
It sounds like Nadella still doesn’t get it though. MSFT tried several times to “reinvent the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones” and none succeeded. Windows 8 UC targeting tablets and native apps was a disaster and ate up a lot of goodwill. With tablet PCs and netbooks Microsoft had the right idea too early and with poor technical implementation.
I had what I think was the lowest end Lumia at the time, a Lumia 520 maybe? It did what it did really well.
The camera was surprisingly OK. The tiles meant I could see what I needed without tapping around. It was much more responsive than other phones in its price range from what I remember too.
I'm pretty sure there were hundreds of us; but maybe only tens.
I don't think Microsoft understands how constantly churning the development framework impacts potential developers, because Windows is so big that developers will suffer through churn until they realize they should just stick to ancient methods that will continue to work. Windows Phone had no ancient methods, and important new OS features were tied to new frameworks anyway, but there wasn't enough users to encourage most developers to suffer through it. That they couldn't make Windows Mobile 10 work (well) on low end devices like the Lumia 520 is probably a mix of organizational and engineering failure, but either way, the push from Microsoft to build 'universal windows platform' apps that would only run on Windows Mobile 10 prompted developers to cut support for WP7 and WP8 in favor of WM10, even though WM10 never had more users than the earlier versions.
Also, mobile Edge was soooooo much worse than mobile IE, woof.
#totallynotstillbitter
I think you were far from alone in your disappointment watching it wither on the vine.
I will say, they do need to get their heads out of their asses for MAUI.
The snappiness of apps was also hindered by network I/O in the UI thread (I mean wtf Microsoft).
WP8 did some things better but it was too little, too late. Nokia at some point bitterly complained about Microsoft's inertia in getting important features implemented that Nokia needed in order to sell phones (besides the apps, but that is another whole can of worms). https://www.techspot.com/news/53405-microsofts-slow-developm...
And it is not that the WP8 release fixed everything that was wrong. Rather, it added to developer churn by switching to yet another API, it upset users because no WP7 phone could be upgraded to WP8 (except for the HTC HD2 which originally came with WM6.1), and it still didn't support any modern mobile web browsers.
Then there was this strange limitation to only 720p screens and dual-core CPUs until WP8 GDR3. Or that you could not disable automatic screen rotation until that update. VPN support and the notification center came only with WP8.1.
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.
No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the stable technologies from the past.
At least Native AOT might support WinUI in .NET 9, something to look forward to, for anyone that still cares outside Redmond.
iOS: UIKit -> SwiftUI
MacOS: AppKit -> Catalyst -> SwiftUI
there was definitely some churn within each one of those from version to version, but no complete rewrite needed afaik.
Apparently, Microsoft couldn’t even setup the project template, need to manually edit the project file adding WindowsAppSDKSelfContained setting. After that it launches, but the binaries are now 151MB in 386 files, for a single AMD64 architecture.
By comparison, an empty WPF application compiles into 171 KB of binaries in 5 files, and the binary is CPU-agnostic, it runs on all CPU architectures. It depends on the .NET 7 runtime, but the runtime for my processor only takes 55MB to download. And if you’re unhappy about the runtime, you can instead target the older .NET framework 4.8 which comes preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11.
For C++, you're better off with Qt, wxWidgets.
You can use Visual Studio Community if the licence still fits your work, or in the case of Qt, Qt Creator alongside a recent VS or MinGW.
Only if you need cross platform.
On the Microsoft tooling stack even MFC offers better development experience on Visual Studio.
I left it out on purpose, because I doubt the OP would like to use MFC, and I wouldn't even recomend XAML C++ development experience to my enemies.
If you want to dabble in desktop with C#, Avalonia is the best way to go nowadays. I'm having a blast with it working on a couple of projects for my assigned client, and in a couple of personal toy projects.
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.
Quite unpleasant to use compared to just vanilla ChatGPT, which offers a zen-like experience in comparison.
A little more than a month later MS decided to cancel it. And to be fair, it wasn't that great of a product, but the fact that they burned through all of that development and a massive marketing rollout only to throw it in the trash a few weeks later.... just peak late-00s Microsoft.
It was a fun project, and the live tiles and flat style provided a lot of inspiration that resulted in the next version of our app for iOS and Android.
Instead of being scrappy and trying to do whatever it took to gain marketshare in an area they were behind in they put a ton of limitations on their platform and it tanked adoption because the people who were willing to switch and try something new were by definition people who were going to be frustrated with this behavior.
Things like not supporting multitasking or apps running in the background, blocking all exes from even being downloaded, not giving access to the underlaying file system, categorically blocking applications like video game emulators, restricting the ability to tether your phone, etc.
Yes there wasn't third-party app support and yes their maps sucked but I think both of those would have been fixed over time if they didn't take a super arrogant big brother approach to the operating system.
Example of what I'm talking about: http://i.imgur.com/JfFiuO4.png
Mobile games at the time were all OpenGL ES, which Microsoft refused to support in favor of Direct3D.
Then there was Microsoft's perpetual need to start over. WM6.5 to WP7 broke app compatibility. WP7 to WP8, entirely new APIs. WP8 to WM10 there was UWP and Continuum, again forcing major rewrites if you wanted the new features.
And finally how Microsoft treated the devs themselves. Ad-supported apps depended on Microsoft's ad network which was artificially kept alive by Microsoft injecting money for Xbox and Office ads. Once Microsoft stopped, the whole thing folded, leaving developers with a sudden loss of income.
Developers from countries in Microsoft's 2nd tier additionally reported poor treatment and Kafka'esque bureaucracy preventing them from publishing apps: https://toshl.com/blog/why-publishing-on-the-windows-phone-m...
This is why I think the app situation would not have fixed itself over time, and MS efforts to ease transition like Project Islandwood were doomed from the start, because those fixed a problem but not the problem.
The rewrites across multiple versions, that is what killed the desire to target the devices.
I don't understand what you write about Valve, the Steam Deck supports unmodified Win32 games which use DirectX.
The effort to port between Windows and Windows Phone was way less than between Windows and XBox.
Besides that, porting wasn't easy even for apps which worked on Windows already. The API was quite different, and not in a good way. For example none of the standard Windows file I/O API was available. There was DirectX but it was DX11 FL9_3 which is not how you access GPUs on desktop Windows (you would either use DX9 or DX11 FL11_x).
It was still DirectX and Win32 for the most part.
Only FOSS indie devs make such an uproar of OpenGL and friends.
Walk around GDC, PAX, GDCE to see how much professional game developers care.
And obviously the lack of all the Google apps. Again there was obviously some manager on crack thinking that that'll get everyone to switch to the according Microsoft offerings, and maybe people just stop using YouTube. But surprise, it didn't work out!
Also the aggressive power saving which meant every time you were sending some photos on WhatsApp or other messenger, you had to make sure to keep the screen on and the app in the foreground until it's done uploading, otherwise there was a 90% chance it would get aborted and restarted next time you turned on the screen.
Imagine a new Windows Phone....that runs Android apps.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/3447036-microsoft-android-a...
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X_family
https://m.gsmarena.com/nokia_x-6067.php
Forked Android with a Metro launcher and maybe they skinned the rest of the UI. I think I remember WhatsApp doing work to support them while I was there (anything Nokia made and didn't cancel before launching would have and sell enough units to matter), but I don't remember how hard we had to work; I'm guessing it didn't have google play services, but I don't remember if it had its own push services or if it just used long connections. I think maps/locations was weird because Nokia didn't hook the Google apis, so that was a bit tricky. I don't know if it could use the website distributed apk or if Nokia had an appstore, etc.
I've been an Android user for over a decade but haven't bought a phone for myself for a while. Samsung won't update the Galaxy S8 any more and my bank decided it was too old to run their app.
The others in my family are iPhone users and I dragged an iPhone 7 out of the drawer to give it a go. Now that google's apps and Chrome are native on the platform you can set up an iPhone as almost completely a google experience.
Embarrassingly all the google services work better on an iPhone than they do on Android. I used it for a day and liked it so much I picked up a newer iPhone and transferred to that.
It will take something really bad to send me back to Android - you end up being a 2nd class citizen running Android especially around security and the amazing face recognition unlock that Apple have implemented.
However, it's pretty troubling in terms of competition - the iPhone will hit a critical mass where choosing Android will be wilfully silly.
Just had a similar problem. My bank's iOS app didn't react for "confirm" button so I removed it which resulted with completely locking me out of online banking. Now I'm waiting for a bloody letter. The stale mobile duopoly, mobile as a first class citizen and web as a second class, plus "securitay" practices of banking are an infuriating experience.
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 worked on it.)
It was also incredibly power, CPU, and memory efficient. Windows Phones could run at a rock solid 60FPS with 1/2 the RAM of an Android phone that was dropping frames all the time.
The entire CE operating system is an example of a huge "could have been". Microsoft really never knew what to do with it, and the Windows org obviously wanted it dead, and they eventually got their way. Of course that involved stopping all Windows Phone development for years while they rewrote all APIs, lost functionality, and lost customer trust, in the transition from WP7 to WP8. WP8 eventually became a good OS, but moving to the Windows kernel means the resource usage advantage was lost, and of course app developers got fed up when a new OS came out that had less API features than the previous version.
Not only that, it was a brand new OS written from the ground up that was designed to be modular and battery efficient.
Sadly it never got a chance to shine, as internal politics killed it.
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.
CE6 and 7 were a complete ground up rewrite from the CE5 and earlier versions. They didn't have any of the limitations that previous CE versions did.
> In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS,
My understanding is that iOS is so seriously stripped down compared to macOS that while the kernel is the same, the entire runtime is so different that it may as well be a different OS.
And I don't think Apple hasn't tried to keep releases between the two synced up (maybe they have? No idea honestly), compared to Windows Phone which was merged closely with desktop Windows.
In all honesty, Microsoft had so many resources to throw at the problem, that keeping the teeny tiny kernel team for WinCE employed was not worth losing the entire mobile market by forcing the OS teams to merge and then rewrite everything, poorly at times, from the ground up.
Of course lots of Microsoft politics got involved, including killing Silverlight (which tl;dr is why corporate web apps are written in React now, killing Silverlight basically lost MS the entire internal LOB app market), and forcing a brand new API to be designed.
On that note, by the time WP8 released, the OS was missing key APIs, was hard to write code for, and would only fall further behind Android and iOS.
Eventually the WP platform team did get into a good release cadence, but by then the market had been lost.
IMHO at that time Microsoft didn't understand the importance of regular timely releases to keep them in the news. Apple released a new phone, and a new OS version, yearly. Around 2010 MS was still doing "big bang" OS releases with multiple year gaps in-between.
I worked at Microsoft at the time (started my career in Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone), and people kept asking me "is Windows Phone still around? I haven't heard anything about it in forever", with "forever" being more than a year.
Everyone complains about how new phones come out every year, but if a manufacturer skips a release year, everyone assumes that the phone line is going to be discontinued. Developers stop writing apps for it, and no one wants to buy a phone that was released 16 months ago. Heck after about 8 or 9 months people know that it is time to either "wait for the next model" or "wait for the big discounts".
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.
It was a cool tech solution in search of a problem.
It is hard, really, really hard, to convince game developers and publishers to make games that require an optional accessory. It's been tried again and again and it is never more than a mild success and usually an abject failure. They want to target the base platform, which will always have a dramatically larger install base.
Thr original Kinect was just such an optional accessory, and yeah, didn't have much in the way of third party support.
The XB1 could have, and would have, encouraged more devs to use and experiment with the Kinect because devs could be assured that every single user would have one hooked up.
Except that Microsoft chickened out instead of sticking to their guns. As usual.
Granted price isn’t the only reason - MS’s self-inflicted bad PRs and slightly lower graphical performance of the XB1 - but it really wasn’t helping.
At the end of the day, their core demographic wasn’t interested in the gimmick that was the Kinect.
It has been tried again and again and again. Optional console accessories and upgrades just never have enough of an install base to attract a critical mass of devs.
Going further back in time, I remember the GameCube/n64 and gameboy game-relevant accessories as largely being limited to a few games each, and always as an optional bonus feature that never really mattered that much
With Kinect, you had to make a game that was entirely designed around it, and not have some random mix where you play with the controller and occasionally use gestures. And there really only are so many types of games you can come up with where it doesn't feel like you made something for the Kinect just for the sake of it..
I think the market tried quite a few things with Kinect on the 360, and the most convincing game to me was dance central, because it didn't entirely feel like a casual game with a bit of tech-demo scent, where you'd lose interest after a week and then maybe only ever pull it out again when you have friends over.
The market did not try quite a few things with Kinect. Most publishers put out a game, one single game, presumably subsidized by MS, and then went back to making games for the base console because there was not a Kinect install base.
I call bs, the original Kinect was a commercial success and around for long enough. The tech was there, casual gamers were there, anyone could've picked it up and release an awesome AAA game with kinect to conquer the existing gaming audience. The price of the Kinect quickly dropped to 100$ after the initial price of 150$, which any serious gamer would've spent without hesitation. How is it Microsoft's fault that nobody did create such a killer app? Again, give me an example of anything that had at least potential. Or if you're that convinced it would've worked, you must have come up with your own ideas over the years, right?
> The market did not try quite a few things with Kinect.
Hit me.
Microsoft actually did try really hard with the Kinect (already in the Xbox 360 generation) but it just didn't work out. I wonder how much money they lost on that whole experiment (or maybe they actually made money, apparently they sold 35 million overall which isn't too shabby actually).
Dance Central 3 and Just Dance 2015 (?) were terrific.
Kinect was great for music/rhythm/dance games in general.
Now I want to go back and try Fruit Ninja, Kinect Adventures, and the Gunstringer.
Force-bundling it with the Xbox one enraged the (hard)core gamers as they had to pay for an addon that the last few years showed they have no need for, and for the casual gamer, it was too expensive. It had success with casual gamers on the 360 because that console was already relatively old and thus affordable when the Kinect appeared.
The Xbox One was then tightly integrated with the Kinect, but that was such an unpopular move that they eventually gave up (first by no longer requiring the Kinect to be connected [1], then by no longer shipping a Kinect with each Xbox [2]) - so it's not for lack of trying. The thing was just unpopular with Xbox users.
...also as an Xbox 360 user at that time I saw Kinect as an expensive toy, and the completely brainless Xbox One marketing (which made very obvious that I'm not their target audience) was one of the main reasons why I gave up on the Xbox and went back to PC gaming.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/12/4615586/xbox-one-no-longe...
[2] https://kotaku.com/microsoft-announces-xbox-one-without-kine...
> Microsoft is making another Xbox One policy change by allowing gamers to use the upcoming console without Kinect.
> upcoming
They did not try. There was no trying. It was not eventual. They folded before it ever came to market.
And the thing already had worse performance than the PS4, so dropping the Kinect really meant just having an inferior product with no product differentiation.
The thing is simply that Kinect made the Xbox One more expensive than a PS4, and that for a piece of hardware that most Xbox users saw at best as a gimmick. It probably was the first sane decision of the bungled Xbox One launch.
You are free to pay $100 for gimmicks all you want.
My understanding is it died ~six months after the Xbox one released (early 2014) when they stopped bundling it with that console. They kept selling it for several years after, but it was inconceivable it would do anything but die at that point.
People didn't want to pay a premium price for a motion gimmick. The Wii hit the sweet spot for casual gamers and they didn't care that the fidelity was lousy.
Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
It took years for any other mobile platform to catch up to the convenience of my beloved Palm Pre.
I remember some people did have a half-working port to the PinePhone, but I don't know how far did it go.
Nokia had already tried it a couple of years before with the Web runtime for Symbian, and it wasn't great either, nor the failed Firefox OS.
It lives on as TV OS, and actually the experience is much better than Android TV, regarding the UI junk (less of it), hence why I got it.
And yeah, there are people still shipping apps for it to run on TV, if one feels so inclined to do so.
IIRC, WebOS was the first mobile to rely on WebKit for the whole UI presentation layer. Prior to that, nothing was fast enough.
It took something like four years until Apple and Android passed Nokia's market share. They had their chance to fight.
Android wasn't in full swing back then. Linux + Qt could have been built up into an amazing mobile OS. I'd argue Android could have ended up as the 3rd place OS.
Nokia just needed to switch to being the premier Linux + Qt phone maker instead of the only one + trying to lock everything up on top of Linux + Qt.
Much easier sell than random new OS.
I too had an N9, and while I wouldn't describe it as amazing, it was reasonably good for the time and probably the best we've ever had in terms of a functional multitouch "linux phone".
IMO what killed it was the closed off nature of Harmattan and the lack of support from Nokia in encouraging hacking the OS. No reproducible firmware, no trivial flashing of community builds standing on the shoulders of what Nokia shipped on the phone. We'd be in a very different place today had the N9 been where the PinePhone is in terms of ability to easily derive and swap out distros, and the vibrant community this enables.
I use the Nokia N9 alarm clock was an example of a perfect piece of software.
It was the Nokia board that decided to hire him.
It was the Nokia board that gave him a contract with a bonus clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, as discussed on the Finn press at the time.
Phones, watches, TVs all are slow and battery hungry just because nobody would opt in for a little less functionality (or app selection)
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".
“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on (Windows Phone and mobile) was a mistake”
Windows Phone == Nokia?
Or was Windows Phone not Nokia?
If they tried to market it as a third party alternative to Android, why would manufactures give up an OS they can customize and not have to pay to license (Do you have to pay of the play store?).
Locking down Windows Mobile in the iPhone way is counter to how Microsoft runs Windows right now and would be a major uphill battle. The iPhone kinda lucked out being able to pull this off due to when it came out I think.
All of this leads to them needing a healthy enough install base to get developers to make apps.
Personally I don't think they gave up too soon, I think they were fighting an uphill battle that they were likely never going to Win. It didn't really matter how many good ideas they had when they were up against 2 very entrenched platforms.
The problem was, they were too late.
> In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.
Why does that quote give me Windows 8 vibes? The idea of a single platform and UI for everything? That worked super well.
Ironically, they were in the phone OS space before Apple and Google, so arguably, they were too early, inasmuch as the experience they acquired blinded them to the possibilities of smartphones just as the category truly took off.
They did give up, because hardware development and support costs a ton of money, and they preferred the margins from selling Excel licenses.
They could have done what Apple did and invested heavily in hardware development for 10 years. They even had Microsoft stores rolled out, with clean Windows computers without malware installed by default.
But there was no stomach for lower profit margins and a longer term play.
windows phone come back :(
I think the team behind 8 had just a lot of freedom and could work on their vision, but then with 10 everyone had to leave their mark somewhere because they knew how to "fix" it and get it to succeed.
Low-end Android phones used to suck. Hell, even high-end ones. There was a lot of jank, battery life was mediocre, software looked and felt patched together.
Windows Phone delivered a really good experience even on the bottom-of-the-line hardware, Things were smooth, and most stuff (because it was either first-party or from committed devs) was built to fit the design language.
Apple branding isn't too much more inspiring (Mac to iMac to iPhone).
The difference was Apple had a clear vision on what they wanted the technology to be while Nokia was divided between squeezing a bit more out of Symbian or invest in their 'follow up' Linux-based line. They didn't need Elop to screw up, they did that perfectly by themselves. If sales were better and Microsoft had continued with Windows phone it probably would have saved Nokia.
I think you are conveniently ignoring the explicitly bad rep Windows had, even for people who bought and used Windows in their homes. It had none of the draw that Apple had following their iMac/iBook/iPod era.
Zune was building a good customer base, but MS threw that away too of course.
Mac -> iMac -> iPod -> iPhone
Obviously the iPod gives us AirPods and HomePods.
I imagine there are users of *Pod devices that have never seen or used an iPod!
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. )
With Windows you have Phone Link which allows access to messages and notifications, but it is a far cry from Apple Continuity. For things like access to the phone camera you still need 3rd party software.
Also in my experience the integration is not always as smooth as advertised (and hard to troubleshoot when it’s not)
They just improved the performance too.
But if you want to take this particular example, it’s very simple to just download Acrobat Reader or some alternative.
My point is Windows has a known malware problem, editing PDFs is a common need these days, and Microsoft has the resources to provide a built in non malware PDF editor.
Yet they do not bother to fulfill a simple need for their customers.
Windows has a built-in PDF reader with basic editing functionality in the form of Microsoft Edge actually (although I've never used it for that purpose to be honest).
As for a non-malware PDF editor, I'm not sure if Preview.app is such a great example in light of the recent image processing zero-days ;)
How did this shitshow get past hundreds of developersc, testers, and product managers?
Off the top of my head: Zune (belittling Apple), Search (remember they started name-calling Google), CompuServe (paid shills brutally attacking people online), Operating Systems (attacks on Linux (FUD Advertising), BeOS (Licensing)). So much more.
What they don't do is create a product out of love or passion or belief, usually...
I was surprised when the surface lineup of tablet/laptops... surfaced. They seemed to actually care about what they were doing and really put some thought behind it. I was impressed with the hardware and I very much dislike Microsoft.
I'm glad they got owned on mobile by Google and Apple. I feel comfortable in saying they would not have brought anything positive to this market. A villain was defeated and we are better off.
Mozilla's Firefox OS, however... that's a different story. We all lost when they pulled out.
I think I found someone who dislikes Microsoft more than I do. Nice to meet you:-) LOL
Seriously... you are mostly correct about the hardware deficiencies, I won't argue this. The surface line started off very badly but... it engaged. To this date, I don't think you can even get Linux running on any of them w/o some effort.
Mine's was a quick comment and had more to do with Microsoft redefining the hybrid Tablet/Laptop market. It was, I think the only time that I could recall, when they finally took the lead on something. Some hiccups, of course, but overall an industry defining success. It was odd - for me - to see Microsoft leading the field in anything.
I always saw MS as a company that envied someone else's innovation and tried to replicate that success. From Office Programs early on, AOL competitor, VisiCalc/Lotus 1-2-3 competitor, Gaming, Browsers... the list is nearly exhaustive.
Even small things like sound formats, image formats... they needed to upend someone else's established format and replace it with their own. Even their original OS - DOS - wasn't theirs but a hacked version of someone else's effort.
I'm certain you know their history (comment meant for some others reading this).
Finally with Surface, they designed and helped re/define the Tablet/Laptop market in a design pleasing way. They also added Surface Studio - which I thought was very effective. I remember seeing videos on their thought processes, who they consulted when they created Surface Studio. After years of envisioning brutes, they presented themselves as polished professionals during these formative 'Surface' years.
Just wanted to expand on my previous quick comment for clarification.
Microsoft hasn't just given up on mobile, they've given up on the desktop. At this rate Windows will eventually just become a fork of ChromeOS that uses Wine to run apps.