Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
There’s nothing stopping Microsoft from coming out with a new phone line, other than poor management.
Replace “new phone line” with pretty much anything ‘positive’ and it fits Microsoft.
Better OS? Nope! Shit management. Better productivity software? Nope! Shit management. Better cloud and virtualization platform? Nope! Shit management.
The first day I used Windows 8 RC, I was flabbergasted that anyone approved that dumpster fire for release. They’ve been trying to unfuck that ever since, and at dead snail’s pace. Thanks, shit management! You’re why I left systems administration to be a bad programmer!
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.
Windows Phone failed because there were no apps for it. There was no YouTube app, no Facebook app, no Twitter app, etc until very late or never at all. They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones. The OS was great and worked on a wide range of hardware. It could have been a great enterprise solution and they seemed to be heading that direction but the lack of third party made it little more than A Microsoft feature phone.
They couldn’t even be bothered developing their own apps for it. The mail app began to lag behind Outlook on Android, Minecraft was never ported to it when it could have been a killer exclusive app.
Google was often guilty of that too. I remember a number of Android apps that were pretty far behind the iOS ones. I don’t think that is the case anymore though.
There were also a bunch of iOS apps behind Android ones. Remember when iOS finally got widgets? Different companies focused on different functionality first. But at this point, android and iOS have had the time to play catch-up with each other.
Difference being that Apple does not make Android apps. Google’s own apps on iOS were behind their own on Android. I recall the YouTube and Maps app missing some features for quite a while on Android that were on IOS. I get that companies silo teams from each other but it’s a little embarrassing when you’re software on your platform is behind your software on your competitor’s platform.
OS-wise, yeah it has largely been Apple playing catch up with iOS aside from messaging.
This was the downfall of BlackBerry as well.
QNX-based BB10 OS was phenomenal, and their hardware was top notch.
It was the lacking app ecosystem that killed it.
I was a BB developer right around the time of their demise. It never mattered how good or bad their OS was, because the development environment for BB was complete shit - which was a big part of why nobody wrote apps for it.
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I knew it would be this before it loaded and I am happy to be reminded of it. Baller was such a weirdo.
Holy fuck he looks like he’d been on a cocaine binge for days.
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Oh my word, why have I never seen this before?
They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones.
Blackberry at their end (circa 2011 or so) started handing out $10,000 grants to developers to make apps for them. I thought about applying for one, but $10K is not much at all to develop a decently-featured app that does anything, and BB’s development environment was such an unbelievable clusterfuck that really no amount of money could have made worthwhile to endure.
Also: 16-bit color lol.
16-bit color
What the fuck?
5 bits each for red and blue and 6 for green. Who needs more than that?
The only reason I liked it at all was that I created a lot of owner-drawn controls (since the built-in Blackberry “fields” were shit) that used a lot of bitmap memory for animation, and reducing your memory footprint by a factor of two (compared to 32-bit graphics) wasn’t worthless, especially for the older devices.
That is because every single mobile version of Windows was incompatible (After version 6) with the previous. They kept reinventing the wheel over and over again.
The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.
The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.
Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.
Snapchat was the big one missing that really put the nail in the coffin towards the end there.
I really miss the OS… My favorite phones at the time
Serves them right for what they did to Nokia.
Remember when Microsoft had an awkward funeral for the iPhone?
https://www.cnet.com/pictures/microsofts-funeral-for-the-iphone-photos/
It’s very “going up to to your crush to let them know you’re over them but they don’t even know your name” energy.
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yeah, more competition - not another gigantic conglomerate that wants to integrate my phone into my operating system.
more competition would be great, another google/apple type - meh.
Unfortunately only a ‘gigantic conglomerate’ stands a chance against Google and Apple. The other smartphone OSs - Ubuntu, Manjaro etc. - have a tiny market share.
Just look at how Firefox OS struggled even in developing countries, where it could run much better than Android in low-end smartphones. Then Reliance (a big and very cut-throat company) licenced it and now it has a decent marketshare in India. There are plenty of good alternative OSs, but without a big war chest they aren’t getting mainstream acceptance.
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I’m hoping the slow creep of right to repair laws will help with this. Forcing manufacturers to provide spare parts, documentation and diagnostic tools to independent shops I think will inevitably lead to more open devices in general.
There would already be a vibrant community of smartphone Linux distros right now if bootloaders were unlocked and manufacturers were more forthcoming with documentation.
very good point. the best use for that ewaste would be decent retreads for people who just need a phone and don’t care that it’s a few years from ‘latest and greatest’.
one day… they’re certainly powerful enough these days.
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.
Fuck you, I loved the design of windows phone. Bring able to size the tiles different and have them show content on the home screen was awesome. And the hardware was cool too. I still look at the photos I took on my windows phone and compared to my galaxy s22 ultra they still look just as good if not better in some cases.
Honestly the wort thing about win phone was salty developers who not only refused to port apps over no matter how easy MS made it, but also went well out of their way to shut down any community apps made using their API, like the Snapchat dead did.
I’m not talking about windows phone, I’m talking about PocketPC
There was also Windows CE, which was a real shitshow. I had a Vadem Clio, which I still wish I had because I was a beautiful piece of hardware… but it was so hampered by having Windows CE installed on it.
He finally admitted to it. I was a Windows Phone user until the end. It’s sad that it was discontinued.
I was about to buy my first one when they discontinued them, they looked pretty dope!
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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?
my favourite windows phone moment was when they had a funeral for the iphone lol
There really was something about the windows phone UI though. If you weren’t around to try it, it’s hard to properly explain how different and fresh the flat pane interface felt compared to iOS and Android. It really was a phenomenal design language compared to the same old thing in the market.
I honestly believe it they had just sucked it up and subsidized the cost of doubling the ram on those last Nokia devices, it could have been good enough to break through. Microsoft had everything possible to gain from integrating the desktop-to-mobile workflow for business clients. Then they threw it out the window…
Seriously, I doubt many people here who aren’t used to corporate environments can fully understand how big the market was, that Microsoft gave up, by not spending enough to fill the BlackBerry hole that formed. They had 98% of the solution already developed, and fumbled the ball with a single yard left to go.
There was room for three players, if one of them actually serviced the business environment; and nobody was better positioned to do so than Microsoft at the time. Excel and PowerPoint that synced from your work machine, to the field, in a zero trust environment… Gah… they were so close.
I had Lumia, on Windows 8 it was okayish, but when it moved to Windows 10…oh my god it was amazing. And the fact that you also got an amazing screen and amazing camera made the experience magical
They really needed to listen to their enterprise customers. Windows Phone could have easily taken over as the ‘corporate phone’, if it had any integration at all. With the side benefit that their corporate customers also employ the developers that could build out the apps they needed to create the marketplace.
Instead they tried to take on Apple and Google, in an end user space that had already been thoroughly saturated, with a product that was barely on par.
My first smart phone was a windows phone
Same, a Nokia Lumia 710. Lack of app support is what killed them. Even mainstream apps you had to have a third party version, Facebook, Insta, etc.
Man nokia used to make great phones.
One more reason I could never trust Microsoft again. They bought Nokia and ruined them.
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.
I had one back in the day. I loved it honestly and was surprised they gave up.
Mine was too sort of. It was windows mobile 6 HTC shadow. This was before android and around the time iPhone was released.
Unless we’re counting the sidekick 2 as a smart phone, in which case that was my first.
HTC TyTN II. Loved that thing. Used to pay Age of Empires on it.
Mine was too. Shit phones.
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De-Googled android is what you want.
THANK YOU! That’s what we were all saying when you stopped caring about it.
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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.
I think they can still reboot with an Android base. They can just do what they did for edge. Pull a Google. Sell hardware with very polished software. Android would give them full access to all Android apps. Also they already have outlook and office apps made for android.
Honestly I would rather see a large company like Microsoft build their own OS from the ground up. Without play services you wouldn’t be able to use a lot of play store apps even if you installed the apk file. I think Google provides a lot of baked in services to developers to lock their apps into the google ecosystem. Microsoft wouldn’t really add anything of value to android in my opinion, we already have one big company looking over our shoulder, I don’t think we need a second. I think the Amazon Fire phone proves that even with a lot of money to burn it’s hard to break into google’s market.
Microsoft making their own platform that is not UNIX-like would probably get a lot more interest than just modifying android.
They are going to have the same problem they had with their original phones. No apps. They could never get enough developers to care about the OS without a user base. You also can’t get a user base without apps. That’s what killed the windows phone.
Amazon tried to use the kindle formula on a cell phone. The problem is that the main reason the kindle was successful was there was no real competition. They also only need to provide books not apps for the kindle. The cellphone market was a lot more mature with a ton of options. They came in with a mediocre phone that had less apps and less configurability. They tried to do the Apple walled garden on an Android phone. Clearly they didn’t understand their market.
microsoft does have a launcher for android. I’ve heard good things about it, but haven’t used it myself so can’t confirm
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Android open source bits are fine and all, but a lot of apps require Google Play Services which is not open or free.
Google Play Services has some quite strict requirements to adhere to in order for Google to licence that to you.
This includes have certain Google apps preinstalled on the device. Including Chrome.
I also doubt Microsoft would be happy with Google having the ability to cut them off whenever they damn well please.
There are a ton of phones in China running Android without google services . If you try to cut off Microsoft you would also be hurting all those Chinese phones. Google also can’t do that without being sued by Microsoft for not allowing competition.
Well, the idea behind FOSS is that you can share the common stuff and build your own stuff on top and while doing so improving the common stuff, testing uncommon usecases and adding features.
Personally I would love to have another bigger company working on Android next to Google, because that means they would (hopefully) implement their own “google services”, to not rely on Google.
If that takes off, then apps will need to support both, making it more sensible to either create stable generic interfaces, where a third completly open-source implementation can more easily dock into, or not rely on them unnecessarily.
The only real problem with android is that the license is not GPL, so companies are not required to cooperate and likely end up creating their own silos.
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