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Comment by codingmyway | Hacker News Reader

I've always said sales (and marketing) was Microsoft's biggest problem. The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over.

The silo between Windows and development (Azure, .net etc) needs to come down fully to fix Sinofsky's mess too.

We're still left with a desktop OS UI with huge animated icons designed for a phone even though they've now given up on the phone market anyway. They gave up too easily just as Windows phone was starting to overcome that screw up and become popular with some non techy users as it really is the most user friendly.

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Very well said on the Windows phone.I have used three windows phones before switching to Android and I think the UI for simpler things like dialer ,messages or emails was better on windows phone.Especially email was so good ,it used to work a charm even on 2G.I have used built in clients and other options on Android and nothing beats the basic email client on windows phone.May be it was not feature rich for gmail but usability was better .Many of my colleagues is of the same opinion who switched from windows phone to Android.All Microsoft had to do was fix the developer ecosystem but looks like the platform is abandoned. An alternative other than Android or iOS would have been better

But those are just apps, not the OS and there are any number of replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android - are you suggesting that NONE of them are as good as the Windows Phone default apps?

I have tried at least 3 most popular dialer in play store and none of that was as good or simple as windows phone's.I did find T9 search good but searching through the recent call list or finding a linked contact was felt better on windows phone.My biggest gripe is about the email clients.I am still looking for one which is very simple to use and has a simple UI.I find even Microsoft outlook offering is bloated or not simple as windows phone's.

WP does integration rather nicely, especially of multiple email and social media accounts. People prefer WP because they aren't interchangeable parts but a coherent whole.

And you don't have to spend ages trying apps and giving random developers access to your phone in order to achieve this. And app-less WP is much nicer to use than an stock Android, which in turn is much nicer than all the vendor or carrier mutilated Androids.

>replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android

It's a smartphone; communication is its entire raison d'être. Those things ought to be awesome right out of the box and, on Android, they're definitely not.

Here's another user who considered some MS phone at least the two last times I switched but ended up on Xperia and later S7 because water resistance. (This felt important because of field work and kids at home.)

I got a Lumia to get into the whole WinRT model when it got introduced and also because C++ is a first class language on WP.

The whole WinRT/.NET model of WP, and the respective tooling is miles ahead of what Google has managed to pull out of Android.

Even the upcoming Android N with Android Studio takes lots of more resources than VS, doesn't provide a proper experience for NDK users and there isn't a Support Library release that isn't followed up by a quick fix release.

I really don't understand where the skilled developers that master the Google interview process end up working, surely not on Android.

However the WP in small form factors is dead, with the latest promise drop of the 512 MB WP 8.1 devices not getting the WP 10 upgrade they lost the last faithful ones that still believed.

Where it might thrive is as tablet OS, but lets see.

All they (the sales & marketing again) had to do was give devs time before opening their mouths and giving the impression that they are no longer pushing it, just as Sinofsky did with .Net and WPF.

Windows phone apps were the most profitable to write unless you had a blockbuster as your app was actually likely to be found in the app store but why bother when they kill it with what can only be called anti-marketing

> The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over.

That doesn't necessarily lead to a successful company.

As a proud engineer myself, I'm not arrogant enough to believe that my kind are the most important in any company. Google has terrible product direction, customer support, and communication, for example.

I'm not saying it's necessarily cause and effect but when the people developing the products are enthusiastic and proud of the product it certainly helps.

Sure it helps, but it's certainly not necessary or even sufficient. The industrial landscape is littered with great products poorly marketed that failed, and poor products greatly marketed that succeeded.

We used Windows phones at my last place. I would say that the biggest problem for corporate users is the confusion between Azure AD accounts and Microsoft accounts (we didn't manage the phones in any way). It was really hard to explain to users why they had to register a new account at Microsoft when they already logged in to Office 365 daily.

I have at least three different Microsoft accounts, between individual, MSDN, and Office365 variants. All of them use the same email address. I never know which account I'm going to get logged into, and I've seen some really fun OAuth redirect loops when the cookies get scrambled.

Supposedly, it's possible to link accounts, to resolve some of this clusterage, but it doesn't seem to work, or I haven't sprinkled enough chicken blood about or performed the process in the hour of the wolf under during a blue moon...

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