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Comment by newtritious | Hacker News Reader

This is just a poor analysis. By the time it came out, DRDOS was irrelevant. The G4 cube was expensive, and comparatively slow, and unreliable. The Zune had some extra features that were irrelevant to most users, a poor ecosystem and was quickly outclassed as the iPod continued to develop. WebOS definitely had some pioneering UI features, but developing apps in JavaScript was fatal for performance. Windows Phone did use flat design rather than skeuomorphism, and this was clearly the way things were going, but the platform as a whole was simply wasn’t better than the iPhone, which simply shifted to flat design soon afterwards.

These products just weren’t better. They had one or two features that were better, and that’s it.

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Windows Phone was a huge paradigm shift from an iPhone or Android. The windows phone was a phone first, and a computer second. It would try to allow you to have access to the phone for as long as possible. Android and iPhone had no native battery saving features at the time, but windows phone did! It was great for those of us who went without power for extended periods of time.

The reason it didn’t take was obvious if you spent 10 minutes inside a cell phone store with comments like “you don’t want that phone because there aren’t any apps.” That was true, to an extent. However it had all the apps you’d ever need and some unofficial ones that blew the official ones on other platforms out of the water. Literally, people were attracted to it but were sold something else after being told all the negatives without the positives (the best camera at the time, surround sound recording, etc). That’s why it failed, nothing to do with “features” just sales people given higher commissions to sell something else.

I don’t know anything about the other things.

Blaming it on lack of apps is easy, but why is that?

My hypothesis is that MS did the same thing with Windows Phone as Google does with chat platforms.

MS had Windows Mobile 6.5. It had glorious phones like the HTC Diamond and the HTC HD2. It competed with the iPhone and Android, but it was steadily loosing because the UX essentially belonged to a different era, one where resistive touchscreens and styluses were the norm. WM 6.5 survived many many years afterwards

MS drops WM 6.5 and replaces it with Windows Phone 7 with no upgrade path, no compatibility, no migration path and no native apps(only CLR). Phones were cool even if technically limited.

MS then drops WP 7 (up to 7.8) and replaces it with WP 8. Again no upgrade path and only partial compatibility but at least we finally have native apps (and games). By this point the race was lost. People were no longer willing to invest in the platform and already iOS and Android were a long distance ahead. Phones were already lagging behind Android counterparts with few flagships. MS was also suffering because of Qualcomm.

MS finally released WM 10 and it was finally a really nice OS that just lacked apps, even from Microsoft themselves which started to release apps on Android and iOS first or only. Microsoft also slowly lost its hardware partners after it bought the biggest one, Nokia. The only phones were Lumias from MS and 1 phone from HP. At this point everyone saw it as a dead platform with a cult following. At the end, it was a really nice OS.

MS gives up, uses Android on the Surface Duo (which was made for Windows Mobile) and signs a partnership with Samsung to preload MS apps on Galaxy phones.

Meanwhile, you could upgrade an iPhone for 4 years or more. And even if the original was very very lacking (no apps, just webapps, no video, no copy paste, no file system, etc.) it captured the imagination and Apple iterated. And Google (and hardware partners) iterated in lockstep.

And now both are reinventing the wheel in lockstep. Other than foldables, we have not seen an innovation in this space for a long time.

I didn’t blame it on lack of apps, per se. Rather on the sales(wo)men selling it as such. The lack of apps never bothered me. Even these days, I rarely use apps (usually only 3-4) and I venture most people use less than 20 in any given month. Lack of apps doesn’t matter if all the apps in the store are mostly junk, or are only used rarely, if at all, once downloaded.

> The windows phone was a phone first, and a computer second. It would try to allow you to have access to the phone for as long as possible. Android and iPhone had no native battery saving features at the time, but windows phone did! It was great for those of us who went without power for extended periods of time.

You literally spent half of your comment discussing one feature, and explaining that windows phone was a phone first and a computer second.

That’s why it failed. Smartphones are obviously used as computers almost all the time, and the phone is a legacy feature.

I would venture that it wasn’t so obvious at the time. I liked that my phone lasted as a phone long into the night (I was usually the only one with a working phone to call a cab). These days, you are correct. I can call a cab from an app in my phone, message support about a package, etc. back in those days though, a phone as a phone was very much a requirement for everyday living.

It was completely obvious at the time that people were buying smartphones because of the computer and not the phone.

Otherwise they wouldn’t have caught on.

I bought it for the phone, camera and music.

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