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Comment by sunflowerfly | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft gave up on a phone operating system far too early.

Nah they just joined the race too late. Remember that Steve Ballmer was laughing at and dismissing the iPhone when it launched ("it's too expensive, no one will use it, it doesn't even have a keyboard"). Microsoft continued pushing Windows Mobile at that time and even spent $1B+ acquiring Danger and releasing Kin (remember that disaster?). Then Windows Phone 7 finally launched in 2010 and was rebooted again in 2012 with Windows Phone 8. By that time the mobile OS market was a duopoly, and neither users nor developers nor manufacturers cared for a third platform.

When discussing disasters, it’s impossible to ignore BlackBerry. They crafted solid devices, and their downfall from a hardware company is a tragic one. They grew too big and failed to adapt in times of “war” with a diminishing market share. However, I firmly believe they could have maintained a loyal user base over the years, at least large enough to allow them to fight another day.

Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.

I always think about BlackBerry as another Kodak.

They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them.

It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy.

If anything, Nokia was distaster.

I blame them. When you have that kind of money you can not fuck things up and invent new things.

Its difficult for leadership when you are already making billions to change ship, if you are the guy who proposes it, gets approval to work on it then executes and if the plan fails you are probably out of that cushy job.

So it makes sense not to rock the boat.

My only experience with BB was awful, though it was at the perfectly wrong time. I was responsible for developing an app for the Storm and it was really the worst of both worlds.

Storm was so funny to me. My lawyer older cousin got one excitedly and it felt like such a dinosaur compared to year old iPhones.

The lawyers I knew wrote tons of emails. Touch screens of earlier iphones were just not as good for writing long formally worded replies.

It would be like trying to write code on an iPhone today.

The storm was virtual keyboard only, and a markedly worse one where you had to click in the whole screen. Worst aspect of touchscreen keyboard (finger placement, no keyfinding haptics, still need to look directly at it) with the added slowness of needing to click the biggest possible button - one the size of a whole phone.

Storm was a very un-Blackberry phone and objectively awful. It should never have been released.

They were already working on Windows Phone when Ballmer said that. That’s why he said it. They were targeting a lower cost segment.

Android, courtesy of being open source, was just able to move much faster

I think if they had just open sourced the OS, like Android, instead of killing it, Windows Phone could have been a decent Android competitor

I think so. Heck, why don’t they open source it now? Although my guess is it’s a lot of low level C++ that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. But I’ve been surprised before. What if they used dotnet?

I suspect it shared quite a bit of code with the regular windows codebase, so open sourcing it would have exposed a lot of proprietary code (and not necessarily only their own — there may have been licensed bits that they would not even have been allowed to open source).

Aye; MS wanted to make easier porting apps into their platform from Android and iOS with project astoria and islandwood but they abandon both at some point.

Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas.

The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure.

Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot.

Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.

YouTube stomping out the good 3rd party apps on Vision Pro killed the device for me (along with it being heavy enough to give me neck aches after a few sessions of use)

The fragmentation was equally worse on the dev side. You couldn’t develop WP8 apps on Win7 and vice versa no WP7 apps on Win8. The same happened with Win8.1 and Win10. So you had 4 different phone OS completely incompatible.

At the time I was working on WP apps for a customer and needed 3 different OS installed to work on their apps.

Ever heard the phrase "too Zune"?

Both times.

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