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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Terry Myerson was the head of the Windows Phone division through WP 7, 8 and the early part of WP 10 and bore at least some responsibility for its (lack of) success before being promoted to head of the Windows division as a whole. The inclusion of the much derided tie-in ads in Windows required at least his tacit approval.

The general impression was that he was one of Satya Nadella's darlings. One wonders what finally felled him?

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Windows Phone was good.

The subsequent attempts to turn desktop Windows into Windows Phone were infuriating and ill-conceived. Almost everything that I liked about Windows Phone did not translate to the desktop.

And what I liked about the desktop did not translate to a Phone-ified desktop, either.

Windows Phone was definitely NOT good. It was stable, and it was visually appealing. But it was always "almost there". It always gave you the impression that the next update would get there, but updates were super slow, if you would get them at all.

At some point MS switched update strategies for WP to cut out the carrier delays. Everyone gets WP updates on time if your device is still supported. They still seem to come out once every month or two, though there haven't been any major feature updates in a long time.

Windows 10 Mobile gets updates every month, just like Windows 10 does. (Also, it's fun to measure how much faster Windows Mobile phones are still patched for major vulnerabilities than Android phones. Even the Pixel took like three extra months to get the KRACK patch.)

Android is a really really low bar.

I think he was already at the helm of Windows by the time Nadella took over as CEO. To be honest, I think they've been looking for an excuse to do this for a while. Microsoft seems to be doing well in general, but all the bad press I hear about comes out of anti-patterns in Windows (ads, telemetry, forcing updates, UWP or "Modern apps" or whatever the hell they call them now). Sometimes it takes a really long time to fire people....

He was promoted after his phone failures by ballmer (to clear the timeline)

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