Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
Windows phone was the best phone OS I ever experienced. Features were years ahead of iOS and Android.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
physical cam controls would be pimpin.
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?
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.
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.
Dark mode and live widgets.
Edit to add: https://www.howtogeek.com/809114/5-ways-windows-phone-was-ahead-of-its-time/
It missed custom apps but all the default phone apps were really great. The “people” app already had everything the android’s “contacts” app implemented in subsequent years (everything it has today) and also integrated with social networks so if you accessed a contact you could see all their posts from every social media in a custom timeline.
The “me” app also integrated all your social media notifications into one app, allowing you to post to all of them from the same place, see replies and that sort of stuff.
I don’t remember what it was, but the “mail” app had a feature that was my favorite thing in the whole WP7, but by the time WP8 came out Google had already managed to make it not wok with Gmail.
Calendar, Camera, even the keyboard. All those default apps were filled with amazing little things. Many of which we STILL don’t have in android today.
In third world countries the difference was even bigger. The keyboard suggested local words and names of local places (no system does that these days), the Nokia maps were far more reliable than Google’s (my town had been split in half by a new train line and Google maps messed up their data with that, as some streets that used to cross the whole town now had multiple unconnected segments - if you tried to follow Google directions to a McDonald’s in one of those segments, it would send you into a slum in another segment).
Plus, the whole UI was cool and the flipping tiles were quite useful.
this was a response worth reading. TY for the deets.
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.
Had Microsoft succeeded, things could have ended up the same as the pc market, with windows being used by big brands and Android being used by companies like 2011 Xiami, making highly customized experiences and that sort.
They say Microsoft lost Samsung to Android by being one month too late. Had they finished that first windows phone one month earlier, everything would probably be different today.
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
Which time?
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They did have some programs to try and push more apps, but dropped the ball far too quickly for it to gain traction.
Microsoft essentially shipped free phones out to everyone that wanted to make or port a windows phone app. Heck, I got one just to port over the schedule app I made for my small high school at the time and had maybe 300 installs.
The dev environment was actually a lot nicer to work with than the android one at the time as well.
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I had one of them, a Nokia one. They we’re not.
De-Googled android is what you want.
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.
I mourn that loss whenever I remember about it
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.
Too be fair, it was a big bet and at that point it was Nokia’s only chance of remaining at the top. It they had used android at that point in time, they would have started from the bottom in the race for the android domination that was already seeing some large companies fail. Going with Android that late would at best turn them into another Sony Ericsson unless they executed everything perfectly (which wouldn’t happen with the large amount of in-fighting the company had). Going with Windows Phone would be all or nothing. Only time showed it ended up being nothing.
My first smart phone was a windows phone
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.
I had one back in the day. I loved it honestly and was surprised they gave up.
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
One more reason I could never trust Microsoft again. They bought Nokia and ruined them.
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HTC TyTN II. Loved that thing. Used to pay Age of Empires on it.
Dropping their plans for Continuum was foolish. Now we have fully featured Linux-based phones like the PinePhone that succeed where Microsoft’s plans for Continuum failed. (As in you can plug the PinePhone into peripherals for a desktop experience.)
Phones are pushing CPUs and RAM that are on par with laptops and desktops at this point. It seems a little superfluous if we’re not allowed to do real computing on these machines. Continuum was what I saw as the future of General Purpose Computing, by taking the locked down OS design of smart phones and giving them a desktop experience when plugged into peripherals.
Once every phone is also a desktop, you suddenly have opened all kinds of options for people who only have a phone, and not a full computer. Which, last I checked, is the majority of internet users who access it via their phones. Continuum would have been a literal game changer, and they gave up on it.
It would become a situation where everyone is like “I already have my phone, I’m not even going to bring my laptop unless I need it for specific function.” Because once your phone can be an on-the-go desktop, laptops will have less allure.
I don’t even care about other features. The tiling home screen of the OS was really nice to use and when used properly by the apps could result in a “live” OS unlike the iconographic interfaces of iOS and Android. The homescreen was also old-age friendly and really a pleasure to use.
The OS ram like really smooth on 512mb RAM, unlike their counterpart android phones which were struggling back then with 2-3GB RAM.
The lumias themselves had a ton of useful features like tap to wake etc, which didn’t consume much battery and in general the Nokia cameras were top notch for the time.
Basically, the OS got killed because of a chicken and egg problem with the apps, and the OS being from Microsoft, got a death knell because of the reputation. Also for some fucking reason, Microsoft decided that the already low userbase WP7s were to be depreciated rather than provide an upgrade path fo WP8 and WP10.
Bro I kid you not the way that crazy OS took advantage of AMOLED for pure black backgrounds in every screen and along with a fluid interactivity, that design style was like a blessing from god.
If you’re on Android you should try Launcher 10. Very customizable Windows Phone tile interface. Although it has in-app purchases for a couple bucks each to disable ads and enable live tiles (they work really well) or alternatively a paid $0.99/month subscription for both. Still gets active support, as it just got one to improve support for foldable devices
Once every phone is also a desktop, you suddenly have opened all kinds of options for people who only have a phone, and not a full computer. Which, last I checked, is the majority of internet users who access it via their phones. Continuum would have been a literal game changer, and they gave up on it.
At the time when Windows Phone was released, the iPad had been released 7 months prior (both in 2010). It looked like consumers would continue to own a desktop or laptop computer, likely running Windows. It certainly wasn’t clear that mobile phone and tablet computing power and functionality would rise to the point of consumers dropping laptops and desktops altogether as is happening today.
Choosing to back Continuum meant possibly losing two Windows desktop licenses, and possibly worse, an MS office license. Why would you need to buy multiple Microsoft licenses if your single Mobile Phone device held both your Phone, Mobile, and Desktop OS licenses, as well as your Office Suite license?
They weren’t willing to risk current day (at that time) profits for a future selling fewer licenses.
They weren’t willing to risk current day (at that time) profits for a future selling fewer licenses.
That certainly matches their modus operandi. I would agree with this for the most part, but by 2010 they were already working on Office 365 and moving to the idea of Software as a Service. While Office 365 wouldn’t be functionally available to everyone until later in 2011, it was clear they had plans to work around having a license tied to a device, and instead starting to roll out Microsoft Accounts to which the licenses would be tied.
Why would you need to buy multiple Microsoft licenses
This is really beginning to bug me. How much cool stuff and innovation have we lost out on because the companies have to put their bottom line ahead of making great, all-in-one devices. They’re all at it, and I’m sick of it.
Like, the iPad is an incredible bit of kit, absolutely hampered by iPadOS, because Apple are shit scared of people choosing to use just an iPad instead of buying that and a Mac. Imagine how great an iPad Pro running macOS could be. Full OS when attached to a keyboard, iPadOS when in tablet mode.
With Motorola’s Atrix we saw a future where a smartphone with a decent amount of power could be dropped into a laptop case and immediately become a fully fledged PC. Every major smartphone manufacturer could offer that right now, but they’re too scared to cut into their revenue streams, so we end up getting offered the same shit every year.
We have Linux phones that succeed?
I guess I should have been more specific. They’ve succeeded specifically at what continuum aimed to do, which was allow a full desktop experience when plugged into peripherals.
Oh, right. True, that does work fine. The machines are powerful little computers after all.
Man, I’m still disappointed that canonical bungled their play for an Ubuntu phone. A seemless transition between phone and desktop with their OS would’ve been amazing.
my favourite windows phone moment was when they had a funeral for the iphone lol
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
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.
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
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?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the third chief executive of the software giant to admit the company has made some serious mobile mistakes.
Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, wrote off $7.6 billion related to Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nokia phone business.
Asked about a strategic mistake or wrong decision that he might regret, Nadella responds:
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was also slow to respond to Android and the iPhone threat, focusing the company’s efforts on Windows Mobile while famously laughing at the iPhone, calling it the “most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”
“I regret there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows [Vista] that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone,” explained Ballmer.
The company is constantly updating its Phone Link app to link Android and even iPhone handsets to Windows, and Microsoft has a close relationship with Samsung to ensure its mobile Office apps are preinstalled on Samsung’s Android handsets.
The original article contains 378 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 48%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
There’s nothing stopping Microsoft from coming out with a new phone line, other than poor management.
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.
That’s really not a big barrier. Just add a couple folks with experience in the desired tech and any good dev team will continue to be a good dev team, even if everything changed under them.
Absolutely, they could if they wanted to and they do have Android devs on staff for the Xbox app. I just get the impression there isn’t a lot of focus put on those efforts (given the state and featureset of said Android app). But, they could focus on it if they really cared about it. Problem is, it’s an unknown to the C level execs so it’s probably too risky to spend money on. Gotta keep those shareholder profits up or risk their positions.
What about Windows subsystem for Android?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/
It even gives developer options where you can sideload unsigned apk files for developing your own.
I mean, they’ve at least made inroads with Android, it’s not impossible to consider them making moves in the area.
It sure seems like they still do love their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.
I wish this can be true but that’s bow how trillion dollar companies work. There’s lot of redtape involved. Think of it as one drug dealer is not allowed to deal drugs on other dealers turf. But something tell me if we start praising elon , probably he’ll take the bait and might drive aosp away from google but I also fear he might burn the whole thing down to the ground lol
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!
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.
Microsoft does make phones - the Surface Duo line. Unfortunately it’s really not comparable to other phones in the same price range.
