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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

The software biz in general has a major "out with the old, in with the new" attitude, which paired with the attitude of, "We're going to build what we know, instead of learning the old stuff which is new to us".

I've seen time and again, things like apps rewritten from scratch because nobody knew C++, and they only had C# devs. Or a massive runaround because the last guy on the team who knew C++ wrote a bunch of stuff and left a couple years back, and now nobody really knew how any of that stuff worked.

> React has had tremendous success in the web world, so why not try and get those developers more comfortable producing apps for your platform?

IMO - this is worth talking about. Zune, Windows Phone, and some others died when they did not, in fact, suck, and were pretty good products which while late to the game, could have competed if there had just been a decent app ecosystem.

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Out with the old, in with the new, doesn't have to be bad, but it depends on what your old and new are. I'd be a lot less skeptical about migrating OS-level sttuff from C to Rust than from C to React.

If the motivation is "Because I refuse to learn C", then both approaches will be bad. You can't avoid understanding what you're migrating, but seemingly Microsoft thinks they're above that. Fits with the average mindset of developers within the Windows ecosystem, at least from my experience.

Totally agreed, I have learned a lot of technologies to understand legacy systems. Either you run them or to migrate away from them. If you do not learn and respect the legacy system your migration is bound to fail.

I maintain to this day that the Zune was one of the best designed hardware and software platforms I've ever used. Probably the only truly design forward product that MS ever produced.

The Zune hardware was slick, particularly the solid state players. The music store worked great and their music licensing was so much better than Apple - $10 a month for unlimited streaming, unlimited downloads (rentals) to Zune devices and 10 free mo3 downloads to own.

Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown! That and being too late to market with a phone that used the same design language

There was also the fact that Microsoft introduced it 3 months before Apple announced the product that would kill the iPod, leading with the HDD model (a direct competitor to what would become known as the iPod Classic line) when Apple’s real flagship was the iPod nano.

There was also the crap that was Windows Media Player 11 which I tried to like for about a month.

There was also the incompatibility with Microsoft’s own DRM ecosystem in PlaysForSure which was full of these subscription music services, some of which were quite popular with the kind of people that were inclined to buy a Zune: folks in Microsoft’s ecosystem that had passed up on using an iPod and used something from SanDisk, Creative, Toshiba or iRiver instead. This is because they wanted to replicate the entire iPod+iTunes model entirely.

The 2006 lineup of iPods was also particularly strong, and included the first aluminum iPod nano’s. When Microsoft announced and released the Zune, they were counter-programming against that, right into the Holiday season with a new brand that had no name ID, with a product that was just like the iPod, couldn’t play any of your music from iTunes or Rhapsody, but with… HD radio.

More than a few missteps were made.

  > Their only misstep was making one of their colorways poop brown

i think the other big issue was calling it a 'zune' but thats just me...

Name or color had nothing to do with it imho (I like the brown personally). It was all timing. They were entering a market with a well estaablished leader (iPod) that was nearly as good, as good, or better depending on who you ask. On top of it phones themselves were taking over the music player market at the same time, which is where Microsoft really dropped the ball.

I mean, iPhone is a really ridiculous name as well if you stop to think about it.

You think having a dumb name would be a negative, but one of the biggest bands in the world is called Metallica.

“…you’re absurd, what’s a Zune?!”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jkrn6ecxthM

The Zune software 2.0 remains the pinnacle of Microsoft design

Windows Phone was actually doing well and adoption was taking off when Nadella came in and killed it. It didn't help that they changed the app framework and then blamed lack of apps. Such a brain-dead decision.

Windows Phone 7 was doing well; for some reason they did a breaking change with Windows Phone 8 and broke app compatibility. I will never understand that, they kneecapped themselves despite being multiple laps behind Apple and Google already…

The reason was moving from the CE kernel to the NT kernel between WP7 and WP8. This was supposed to make developers’ lives much easier when porting Windows 8 apps. The minimum hardware requirement had to be bumped and old WP7 devices could never meet them.

At the very least they could've created some kind of translation / compatibility layer, to ease the transition

Windows Phone was dead in the water because many services did not have first party support, and the third party clients kept getting killed / people banned from said services.

Google was extremely aggressive in muscling Microsoft out. They refused to release a Gmail, YouTube or Maps client for Windows Phone but made sure those services did not work (properly).

And indeed on top of that, Microsoft switched UI frameworks 3 or 4 times. And they left phones behind on the old OS releases repeatedly, that then couldn't run the new frameworks.

Still, Windows Phone its UI concept was really great, and I sorely miss the durability of polycarbonate bodies versus the glass, metal and standard plastic bodies of today.

What burned me was that there was no updating from WP7 to WP8 - After playing around with one and genuinely enjoying the experience, I convinced myself to buy a Lumia 900 in April of 2012, just for Nokia/Microsoft to effectively say "that was stupid, wasn't it?" when the Lumia 920 and WP8 launched just 7 months later. Releasing a so-called flagship device that they knew would be incompatible with their upcoming OS, effectively killing software support before the year was even finished, really doesn't inspire confidence in the longevity of a product.

It was always going to be difficult, but classic Microsoft blunders and extreme arrogance set back Windows Phone dramatically.

They basically couldn't stick to a strategy and alienated every potential audience one by one. I was trying to make a Windows Phone app back then and for developers they forced them to go through an extremely difficult series of migrations where some APIs were supported on some versions and others on other versions and they were extremely unhelpful in the process.

They had a great opportunity with low-end phones because Nokia managed to make a very good ~$50 Windows Phone. Microsoft decided there was no money in that after they bought Nokia they immediately wanted to hard pivot to compete head-to-head with Apple with Apple-like prices. They then proceeded to churn through 'flagships' that suffered updates that broke and undermined those flagships shortly after they released thus alienating high end users as well.

Having worked at Microsoft I think the greatest problem with the culture there is that everyone is trying to appeal to a higher up rather than customers, and higher ups don't care because they're doing the same. I think that works out OK when defending incumbency but when battling in a competitive landscape Microsoft has no follow through because most shot callers are focused on their career trajectory over a <5 year time frame.

Oh, this was like the windows 11 before windows 11. I didn't realize Microsoft made the same mistake twice.

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