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Comment by rawgabbit | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs and Apple can put together a music store and iPod prototype that was sexy, easy to use, and wowed the music executives who knew Napster and iPods were the future. Meanwhile Microsoft still manages to infuriate their own users with things like Windows 11 start menu. Not to mention the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/itunes-10t...

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> Not to mention the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.

Can't comment on the ecosystem since back then my only option was piracy, but the second and third generation players were very good. The HD is still one of the sleekest pieces of hardware that I used. But Apple couldn't be beat at that point.

I’ve heard the final generation of Windows phones were very good too. But it was the same problem.

By then all their partners had abandoned them and developers were annoyed by multiple total SDK changes.

But it really didn’t matter. Because Android and iOS were so entrenched I can’t imagine they would have ever succeeded.

Windows Mobile 10 was pretty garbage, until the last release or two, after it was already very discontinued and suddenly the UI performance got good. If it had launched like that, and if Intel hadn't dropped x86 for phones days before the Continuum demo, and maybe if Microsoft had kept their promises about WP8 devices being upgradable to 10 and relatedly if WM10 was viable on low end hardware like wp 7 and 8 were... It might have been worth it for developers to rebuild their apps as 'universal windows' apps that only worked on windows mobile 10, not the versions that actually had an install base.

I don't think Windows Phone was necessarily going to get beyond a strong third place, but WP 8.1 on a low end phone was a lot more usable than Android on similar specs, and Apple had/has no desire to touch that part of the market. Continuum on the high end, if the desktop side included win32, could have anchored the other end of the market.

Would have been nice if they hadn't told Firefox they couldn't build for WP though. Mobile IE was garbage, and Mobile Edge for WM10 managed to be worse.

> Windows Mobile 10 was pretty garbage, until the last release or two, after it was already very discontinued and suddenly the UI performance got good.

Oh I can guess what happened. Management and the talkers in general lost interest so some programmers could finally do what they wanted without anyone removing the start button or putting it in the middle of the task bar.

Windows phones hadn't had the start button since it was dropped in the WinCE to WP transition, so positioning of the start button was never an issue. ;p

I had all generations of Windows phones, and the experience was very good from the beginning.

The keyboard felt incredibly fast and the entire UX felt "slippery" in a good way. Things just seemed to move and slide under your fingers. I thought I'd get back to that feeling with an Android 120hz display, but it still doesn't feel the same.

Of course, the browser sucked, and it didn't have many apps. It also took forever for Samsung (and I think Nokia) to add a front-facing camera.

The Nokia N9 was slick. The Windows ballcrap they shipped on the devices instead was a shit show.

Zune HD hardware might've been solid, but the UI/software was slow and limited. I remember it taking ~5 seconds to load the calculator app. Not to mention nobody wanted a device like that without a robust App Store. I get people liked the Zune brand, but I think people overrated it.

The second and third generations came out after the iPod Touch that had a full App Store.

There's another batch of emails from those times (can't find the link, but they will definitely appear again) where Gates is fuming that Apple has iPods, and none of their partners that have privileged access to Microsoft (like Creative) can come up with anything even closely resembling it. A few years later MS came out with Zune (so they had to do this themselves), but yeah, it was already too late.

This. It's always been wild to me how tone deaf Microsoft has always been. I always read these internal emails thinking how wildly out of touch with their own users they are.

Microsoft is not, and never has been, a consumer company. They’re a business that does things for other businesses. They understand that really well.

MS has had one successful consumer product: the Xbox. That seems to have been given total autonomy. And they have still screwed up a few times (Xbox One launch) by falling into old patterns.

Apple was a user company under Jobs. Is still kind of is (they clearly don’t care about businesses), but not as much, and I’m getting a bit worried.

I think the real tell for Apple’s future will be who Tim Cook chooses to replace him. Financially, Apple is incredibly strong. You could argue that operations was Apple’s weakest point when Jobs left, and that Cook was the right choice to cement profitability and the ops side of the business as CEO. Now it’s time for some new product lines to cannibalize existing products and bring the company forward. If Tim picks another business / operations guy to run the company instead of a product person, I do think the product first culture and DNA Jobs left will die out over time.

I have friends who worked at Microsoft Xbox. As far as I understand, they indeed work like a completely separate company from the rest of Microsoft.

I know it was purposefully stated that way. Gates recognized “normal Microsoft” would ruin it. And I think they still tried by trying to get it based on normal Windows at one point as opposed to something highly custom based on the same kernel.

The Surface is fairly successful, isn't it? At least I'm assuming they're not plugging away st a total failure after all the time still.

That’s just a Windows computer. They’re well reviewed, but I’m not sure they’re very consumer focused. I know plenty of business users use the too.

The Surface models with an ARM (can’t remember the name) were clearly more consumer aimed, but those flopped.

Really I meant more non-computer.

WebTV never set the world on fire (though it seems to have been more popular than most people realize). Zune was supposed to be pretty good, but initial marketing kind of killed it. And WMP wasn’t exactly loved software the way iTunes was. Remember when iTunes was great?

The Active Mates toys didn’t take off, though that’s not a surprise. Spot watches! And shoving Windows CE in the Dreamcast didn’t help.

I’m struggling to think of things MS has done outside of computers, peripherals, and the Xbox. There are probably tons, they’d try anything in the 90s.

Sometimes I start edge when something does not work in firefox. Everyone knows you want your browser to be quick, snappy and use few resources.

What does Edge do? It shows you a unskippable, un-closable "how-to" (as if I've never used a browser), and a make-an-account-and-sync nag. It takes a minute to click though, what a turn off!

It hasn't popped up for me in a while, but it definitively happens sometimes.

Interestingly I've had the same experience with firefox, I keep it installed as a fallback if something isn't working in chrome but every time I (infrequently) use it I have to dismiss several popups about new features and how to switch to it as my primary browser/import history etc.

I think I saw this too with firefox. My memory is a little hazy on this detail, but the _critical_ difference with firefox is that ctrl+t let me open a new tab and leave the sync-a-nag alone. Edge did not allow that, and I actually hat to wait while it was "Working on it".

This resonates so hard. I really wish that SW stop assuming that if they are just installed, then the user is a complete ignoramus who needs to be educated and onboarded. I (for reasons) frequently install OSes from scratch and all the boilerplate is so tedious.

even worse, Mozilla has begun using startup as an opportunity to deliver VPN advertisements.

Well, this is coming from the people who brought you the old Edge; the first browser with a input queue, so that the stop button waits until the browser engine is ready to stop it; and then all of your many other button presses play out after that.

Edge as a Chrome reskin is better than that at least. But then again, so was IE.

Microsoft also had the PlaysForSure platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure . This platform included standards and certification for hosting music for sale and for physical services that would download and play such DRMed music.

Rhapsody was one company that hosted a certified marketplace and sold the iRiver line of devices that worked reasonably well. They went on to buy the Napster brand eventually.

They (Rhapsody) even had a MUSIC SUBSCRIPTION service many years before anyone else did and it worked well. Everybody trashed it though saying nobody wanted to rent music.

Then of course Microsoft Zune didn't use the platform and developed their own thing. I think PlaysForSure is dead, but maybe some stub lives on.

EDIT: clarified subscription service was Rhapsody, not Microsoft

> iPod prototype

> Windows 11

These two things are ~20 years apart. I don't think Microsoft in 2000 could have made iPod, but Apple also these days commonly fault on software experience.

> the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud

I'm not too sure. There's a directly line from the Microsoft Zune to Window's modern design language. I don't think that's too much of a dud.

I agree it wasn’t a dud, it was just way too late.

It was followed far too closely by iPhone / iPod touch. Gates was at the debut of the product though.

I had an original Zune in Brown and helped organize the first pre-release public zune ~fan demo (that I know of.)

It was held at my buddy’s tea shop on green lake.

Microsoft in 2000 wasn't even making an Xbox.

Zune was a dud because it was late to the game, and also was too expensive to compete with a superior UI similarly priced in the iPod.

It was a fine music player, with a ton of wasted potential as a general purpose computer during a time before everyone had smartphones.

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