Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

As a consumer, I loved the phone. As a developer, I was afraid to touch it. Dumping the old Windows Mobile platform for Windows Phone was understandable, but the compatibility break between Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 was really off-putting.

Though I think the biggest problem there is that it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was one more event in a fairly long list of Microsoft technologies and APIs that were shipped to much fanfare, and then abandoned shortly after release. It made it hard to feel comfortable trying any Microsoft tech that wasn't at least a fewy years old. Including mobile APIs. Which, given what happened with Windows Phone 8, did not turn out to be an overabundance of caution.

The problem hurt more than Windows Phone, too. A lot of people got sick of having the rug repeatedly yanked out from under them, and started developing on non-Microsoft tech stacks. Which then removed a lot of the need to run Windows Server, and things sort of snowballed.

Despite all his infamous ranting about the importance of keeping developers happy early on, the Ballmer years turned out to be the era when Microsoft perfected the art of alienating developers.

If you bailed out after WP8, you missed the really tragic one. Windows Mobile 10 changed everything again (and had the gall to call the new one 'Universal' apps), and they missed their target of all the wp8 phones being upgradable to wm10, and for those that were upgradable, the OS was awful for the first year, and Edge was a worse experience than Mobile IE (which says a lot).

Oh, and they decided to only target the high end of the market, instead of a full range, so they lost the low end market that was selling a lot of phones in poorer nations.

/rant of a dedicated windows phone enthusiast.

At least firefox lets me put the urlbar at the bottom now! And Android picked up dark mode from WP as well.

Friggin' windows phone. So much wasted potential...

I think part of that was the size of the paradigm shift MS tried to accomplish. It was a huge gamble and its important to take chances like that, but to change all three platforms so drastically made it hard for developers (table, PC and phone). And then I dont believe MS either A) invested enough or B) gave it enough time so when they pulled support developers definitely felt it.

They were also a couple years late, as for android and iphone had considerable market share.

I think the same can be said for google these days, there is no reason to risk investing time or money into one of their new technologies because it will get dropped if its not one of the big 4 (search, ads, youtube, GCP, maybe arguably android)

Indeed. I'm actually in the middle of dealing with blowback from some Google product yanking right now.

The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.

They did fine, insofar as they're still profitable and well-capitalized, but one has to wonder what things could have been like for them if they hadn't spent the aughties playing Dr Strangelove's Hand with themselves.

OTOH, one could argue that spending a decade eating humble pie was a necessary step in teaching them how to play nice with others.

> The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.

For sure, I think MS was panicking tbh. They missed the mobile revolution (This was Ballmer and Gates), and then cloud was starting to take off and realized their OS and Office products were not optimized or read for that shift. I think they realized they had to change, and change fast and as a result didn't go well. But at least it started the change we see today with MS (for good or bad).

> "Dumping the old Windows Mobile platform for Windows Phone was understandable, but the compatibility break between Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 was really off-putting."

My memory is fuzzy on the specifics but the breaks weren't done just for the fun of it. If I recall correctly, refactoring on a titanic scale on the Windows Phone OS was underway along with the same on Windows itself to both make Windows a componentized OS that would work on anything from a tiny mobile device to a huge server and to synchronize the architecture of WP to Windows. By the time of WP10, as the old joke goes, "the operation was a success but the patient died". It's kind of a pity.

It's not that they didn't have a plan, it's that the plan was so thoroughly ill-conceived and ill-executed.

iOS has not been unified with OS X, and Android has not been unified with Chrome OS. And all four OSes are quite successful despite the lack of unification. Meanwhile, the Windows RT Surface tablets never took off, and the Windows 8 unified experience was universally recognized as an unmitigated disaster on launch day, if not earlier.

They were always going to struggle to get app developers to port to Windows Mobile, so I'm not sure it was ill conceived to provide a single target for desktop and mobile, with the hope that more developers would take the time to support all form factors if they could use a single code base.

It was a gamble that enough native desktop apps would remain for this strategy to pay off, but they lost to web and electron apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com