Adding OpenAI to their cloud products and windows 11 highlights a missed opportunity to have AI vertically integrated in their mobile products.
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
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.
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.
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.
I hear that the HP Reverb G2 experience is pretty bad these days now that theres no more updates to windows mixed reality as more bugs pop up the more windows gets updated.
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.