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Comment by usermac | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic but I super enjoyed the UI on the Windows Phones at the time. Only topped by the WebOS from Palm even before it I recall.

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It was a great UI for mobile. It just was a terrible UI for a real computer, so people reacted badly to Microsoft trying to force it in there. Mobile devices and normal computers have very different UI needs, and you can't simply paste one onto the other - something Microsoft should've learned from their failed attempts to make a tablet with the older Windows UI.

Yeah. The Windows Phone was an amazing piece of technology. It's a tragedy it did not win at all in the marketplace.

In particular, it was pretty easy to write apps for, unlike the other two big giants.

My first smartphone was a Windows phone with half a gig of RAM and it's still the best phone I've ever owned in terms of software

What made it so great?

The OS was smooth and worked well, and the design philosophy across basically every app was extremely coherent. Everything worked well, and everything felt like it fit together. Really its only problem was the lack of apps due to companies intentionally not supporting Windows Phone (Microsoft had a YouTube client that Google made them kill off, and Google never bothered to release a replacement IIRC)

It was as though MS actually built something amazing and Nokia was back to its roots of building solid, well designed phones.

UI was very forward thinking in the right ways. Buttery smooth, etc.

Of course it flopped because a bit late (arguable) so it lacked apps.

No idea why this couldn’t have been brought to android at least as a launcher or provide some kind of support to run Android apps. Just MS being MS —ordinary users/consumers aren’t their primary target in general.

Same here. I had a window's phone at some point. Would have loved it with a stylus.

Did that have any real-world effects/benefits?

I think you could build most Linux desktops with RT enabled, but I don't think you'd gain anything UX related

One of my high school friends had a Windows phone around this time, the one with the giant camera bit. I thought it looked super cool but he hated the thing. No apps.

And the Windows Phone 7 had a hard realtime kernel!

They had some cool form factors too. I remember I had one of the phones with a landscape slide-out physical keyboard.

Ditto. Metro was the best graphic UI I ever used. I liked even on the laptop.

Same for me. Windows Phone was super smooth even on budget phones with 1GB/512MB of RAM while Android would have been choppy as hell on such hardware.

Also, the Windows 8 tablet mode had better touch and swipe UX than the current Windows 11 when put in tablet mode. What a joke Microslop has become.

Nadella needs to clean house or step down. The only thing he executed well was the cloud/hyperscaler side of the business because he caught the period when everything was moving to the cloud and MS was well positioned to take advantage of that as big companies were already invested into the on-prem MS ecosystem, but on the consumer facing side he fumbled everything, all consumer products are worse than how they were under Balmer: Windows - trash, Office - trash, Xbox - trash, Bing - trash, Copilot - trash.

It's a major problem. As present trends continue, eventually nobody is going to need any Microsoft products anymore. I'm already watching clients gradually shift away from Office to simple using Google Workspace, and eventualy they'll do the same with Windows.

AWS is the dominant player in cloud hosting. What, exactly, does anyone need Microsoft for anymore?

> As present trends continue, eventually nobody is going to need any Microsoft products anymore.

People have been saying this for about 30 years now. Just like IBM, Apple, Adobe, etc, MS will probably outlive all its haters.

>What, exactly, does anyone need Microsoft for anymore?

Brand recognition? Why do people still buy Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW when a Hyundai or Dacia does the same thing for cheaper?

Inertia and complacency? Most (non-startup) companies in Germany and Austria are Microsoft shops because that's what they've been using for 20+ years and MS has big customer support and sales teams here that wine and dine them regularly, but unicorn focused HN is oblivious to that.

Hardly anyone is still using IBM OfficeVision, though. Or, for that matter, HCL Notes.

Who said anything about that? IBM does consultancy like nobody else.

Also IBM still makes PowerPC CPUs and mainframes and those are still selling to niche customers who don't trust the cloud.

Microsoft will have its niche too if it flops.

I had a Lumia with 512MB of RAM. The OS ran great, but the web outpaced it. I couldn't open a lot of JS-heavy sites without Internet Explorer crashing.

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