Adding OpenAI to their cloud products and windows 11 highlights a missed opportunity to have AI vertically integrated in their mobile products.
Yea it was clearly their IBM PC moment.
I don’t recall how bad it was when they cut mobile, but I wonder if in hindsight it would have made sense to just keep going as it was clearly the next platform war and surely MS were always going to have a potential foothold through desktop integration
If i remember, what killed windows phone was the lack of 3rd party apps which is especially ironic since they now own the entire developer experience. They have vscode, github, azure, they could have made windows mobile a compile target and get more apps if they played the long game.
Apple is dipping their toes into XR, I wonder if microsoft will follow them later for another chance of the mobile market
@darkkite @maegul From the outside, it also seems like there was some corporate politics involved.
Apple was making its comeback thanks to Mac OSX, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
Samsung was toying with its own OS (Tizen), apps, and online services (Bixby).
Google responded by toying with hardware itself, including Glass, Nest, and at one point even buying Motorola.
So it looked like all the big tech companies were going to try to copy Apple by trying to own the full tech stack.
The then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, responded by trying to reposition his firm as a “devices and services” company. So he ended up with the XBox, Zune, Kinect, Kin, and Surface.
Then he went all-in with a takeover of Nokia.
Soon afterwards, Ballmer stood aside, and Satya Nadella took over.
Satya wanted to reposition Microsoft as a cloud-first company, competing against Google and AWS rather than Apple.
He kept the XBox and Surface, let the rest bleed money for a couple of quarters, wrote off their value as a loss, and then killed it off.
They had one too many miscues with updating Windows Phone and breaking compatibility. WP7 devices couldn’t upgrade to WP8. They waited until WP8.1 to roll out the WinRT platform with cross- compatability between PC and mobile apps. Then 10 died before they could get the Android bridge stuff working.
Their app problem was made worse by Google’s direct sabotage. They were constantly taking down any third party YouTube app and at one point were even jerking Microsoft around – offered to allow MS to develop a YT app in partnership with Google. Everything was fine through development and testing until just before release. Then Google informed MS that the app was no longer acceptable, and they were required to use only HTML5 and no native code.
The SDK was pretty awful in 7 and 8, though. Only in WP10 it started to become decent. I was happy when we dropped WP support from our app and focused on Android and iOS (although frankly, iOS is also getting on my nerves with some regularity).
Wow, so Google pulled a Microsoft. Amazing. May they both burn
Yeah, I stuck with Windows Phone very nearly to the end, but the lack of apps just made it totally unsustainable for anyone with any kind of social life that extended beyond SMS and email.
@Neuromancer @darkkite Some of the Lumia Phones with Windows Phone 8 were really nice.
And even the Lumia 530 was surprisingly good for an entry-level phone.
This is why I can’t get on board with the current state of Linux phones. Sure I’d love a niche phone OS and would love to not be tied to Google OR Apple. But I also want to be an average person who uses normal people apps and can do my banking on my phone and play a hot new mobile game or whatever.
Like so many others that have chimed in from similar posts - I LOVED my windows phone. the UI was just so good. But yeah no apps.
If you’re using Android there’s Launcher 10 on the Play Store that lets you use the Tile UI and the right-side app list/drawer. I’ve been using it for around a year now and really like it. Of course it can’t change anything other menus or anything, but it’s nice.
It does have one-time IAPs or a monthly subscription to remove ads and to enable live tiles as well.
Microsoft had their own VR platform, called windows mixed reality, but it seems they gave up development for it like a year or 2 ago since they laid off all the devs working on it. The last windows mixed reality headset thats still even relevant is the HP Reverb G2. They still have the hololens though. They also bought a VR chatting app called Altspace VR which they shutdown a couple months ago. I don’t see them going further into VR from their past failures though until its too late.
undefined> Apple is dipping their toes into XR, I wonder if microsoft will follow them later for another chance of the mobile market
Hololens was a thing like, 7 years ago. If anything, Microsoft beat them to this punch, but with a product that sucks so you don’t hear about it.
watch them start over from square 1 by rehiring all the people they laid off from their xr department
I feel like W10 Mobile is what killed it. 8.1 was great. 10 was so unstable I had to buy a new phone. Slowest phone I’ve ever owned and apps crashed regularly.
Wasn’t there an insane internal politics war going on at microsoft at that time? desktop and tablet/phone teams were sabotaging each other.
God, I miss the old UI of Windows Phone. I do not want to know how much telemetry was going on there, but the UI and UX was awesome imho
I really liked it too, 8.1 was the smoothest smartphone experience I’ve ever had.
Really, smartphone experience on android being smooth depends heavily on your phone.
I had a Galaxy A52 5G until recently. The processor should totally be enough for any usage that’s not games. The thing is though, while it’s enough, it doesn’t feel fast.
I now have a xiaomi 13 I got for the phenomenal price of 600 bucks, and man, everything that was choppy and slow now just feels so fluid and fast.
I’ve got fond memories of Windows Phone. Still salty that they pulled the plug on it.
Microsoft should make a free software DE similar to Windows Phone! WP UX was the best! Especially People app!
