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Comment by Neff | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoyed the Metro UI.

I felt like the tiles displayed the right level of information where I could quickly glance at my phone and see if there was anything important that needed my attention, while helping to reduce the mindless time I spent getting distracted by noise.

When I was using my Windows Phone it felt like the UI was built to decrease interaction with the device, which was a positive to me. It was trying to get the right information in front of me so I could get back to being detached from the screen.

But that is a sample size of 1.

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I tried one once, and I'll admit it wasn't a bad idea and seemed to work well, but, like with everything Microsoft makes, it was just plain ugly. HN users are completely discounting the importance of aesthetics here, as is typical for technical people. Just look at pre-MacOSX Apple: they always concentrated on aesthetics and made very pretty computers and UIs, even if the OS on a technical level was total garbage (no pre-emptive multitasking!), and that kept them alive long enough to become the behemoth they are now, where technically they're still not that great, but aesthetically they do well and have legions of loyal fans.

The other thing that killed them, as many have noted, was the lack of apps. That's because they were too late mainly; they were a me-too after iPhone and Android had already established their dominance. What app developer wants to spend a lot of time and resources developing a 3rd version of their app for a new platform that no one is using yet?

I didn't think Windows Phone was ugly at all but that's unimportant; I feel pretty confident that aesthetics didn't contribute much to the platform's failure.

It did alright in Europe but overall, the Windows Phone campaign was inexcusably mismanaged to such a degree that it seemed deliberate. It felt abandoned almost from day one. It was unlikely you'd see one anywhere, in any store, because it'd been relegated to retail backwaters like the Microsoft Store.

It was frustrating to watch. Essentially the whole Zune thing on replay. Microsoft does not do a good job of presenting a united force to get a product in front of the eyes of consumers or generating any sort of hype.

And then they ran Nokia through a corporate shredder, just in case you were worried that Windows Phone might have a future.

>the Windows Phone campaign was inexcusably mismanaged to such a degree that it seemed deliberate

From what I remember in the US, the phone stores just weren't interested in pushing them too much, for various reasons. That's not MS's fault.

Maybe you didn't think they were ugly, but a lot of people did. Aesthetics have never been MS's strong suit, nor has naming (their names are always horribly boring and unimaginative, unless they buy it, e.g. PowerPoint or Excel).

MS also had a bad reputation because everyone knew they made the OS on their home and/or work computer that crashed all the time. XP will still in use at that time, remember, and 95/98/Me weren't that far in the past at that point.

MS also has a bad history of abandoning their products. You mentioned Zune; right before that, they had "PlaysForSure", which didn't "play for sure" because they abandoned it and all those customers were screwed. On Windows Phone, people who bought the earlier versions were screwed because they were incompatible with the later versions. (IIRC, this was a big problem because the apps were incompatible between the versions, and this made the app store problem even worse.)

> The other thing that killed them, as many have noted, was the lack of apps. ... What app developer wants to spend a lot of time and resources developing a 3rd version of their app for a new platform that no one is using yet?

Sure, there was a lack of apps; but it wasn't all because it was too late; Windows phone 7 wasn't _that_ late to the game, and there's value being the only app for X on a platform, even if it's the smallest platform. The problem was your windows 7 app didn't work right on 8, and you probably should rewrite it again for 8.1, and you definitely need to rewrite it for 'Universal' Windows Platform for 10, except that's a waste of time since 10 never got anywhere close to the number of users as 8.

If Microsoft hadn't effectively killed Windows Mobile 10 by merging the desktop and mobile teams during development, and ended up with a solid Windows Mobile 10 release at launch, they would have been able to continue as a third platform. Supporting WP 8 devices upgrading to 10 and continuing to release lower end devices on 10 would have helped get existing developers to update their apps for 10. Having a decent browser would have helped, but Microsoft was playing the 'pretend to be iOS' game too hard, and blocked browsers from the store until it was too late; Firefox wanted to release for WP, but Microsoft said no, and IE/Edge are IE/Edge.

Given all of the things Google is doing to try to rein in apps, like Doze and this storage api revocation; it would be nice to have an option that isn't iOS.

WP 8 may have been ugly, but it was functional, and had a dark mode _everywhere_. The better tiles were really useful for getting the right amount of information, and because they were a critical part of the UI design, most apps supported them, unlike launcher widgets which are pretty hit or miss. Number badges require you to go in and reset the count to zero or they don't provide a useful signal; seeing the last message lets you delay it to later.

Funny, maybe I'm a stereotypical HN user here, but I liked Metro UI. I liked it more than Material design nonsense and skeuomorphic Apple crap. Windows Phones' UI was simple, to the point, and evoked the feelings of being half-way to Star Trek interfaces. Maybe it resonated with me because of that.

Apps were part of what killed Windows Phone, but I also think they released their OS with too little built-in features. My brother used to own a phone with early Windows version; it lacked a lot of small conveniences and tweakables that were available on contemporary Android phones. I vaguely recall sharing media with other devices was a problem; not unlike how it's with iPhones.

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