What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good.
Switched from my Android to WP, loving 95% of it, have a few gripes, but far less than on Android.
For one thing, my phone no longer leaks memory. My start screen doesn't randomly take 10+ seconds to load up. My dialer doesn't occasionally decide to just screw it and not appear.
(I had those same problems across 2 different android handsets, a 2.3 model from Motorola, and a 4.2 model from Samsung)
Couple features are annoying. Too many steps to turn off GPS is one, I liked having a quick pull down drawer. But that is a minor nitpick. Compared to swearing at my phone every single day for being a bloody POS like I was doing with Android? WP is a great experience!
> What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself.
I also disagree with this, my group uses a variety of handsets, WP, iOS and Android.
If only there were a third mobile OS for you to try, one that's actually well-designed, one that even many Google employees use ...
Have you tried Windows Phone? I'm a bit biased, I spent 3 years working on it, but I'll say that of the current crop of mobile OSs out there, it is by far the best designed.
From the underlying infrastructure used by the development team (one of the few teams at Microsoft I've ever been on that really believes every daily build should be stable and reliable, and has the test infrastructure to ensure it[0]) to the lovely UI to the outstanding performance requirements the team places on themselves.
Back when I was on the WP team, a list of user frustration levels with wait times was widely disseminated. It was something like " 50ms unnoticeable to user, 100ms+, somewhat noticeable pause or skip, 250ms, interface begins to feel slow, 500ms+, user satisfaction begins to drop, 5s+, users become overly irritated" with a lot more detail and gradations of course.
The team's internal requirements was that all UI elements in the OS respond in less than 1 second, and even then, you'd better have a damn good excuse as to why what you were doing took a whole second!
The UI flies. Animations are smooth and beautiful. Anything that does not please or delight the user does not get into the code base.
The bar in Windows Phone is not "do we have this feature", the bar is "does this feature make the user happy?"
All of this is of course not spoken as an MS employee. I'm just a lowly dev, albeit one now in charge of a UI dev team, and I can tell you that our product will sure as hell meet the same bar of smooth beautiful performance that Windows Phone does. It is damn well going to be a matter of pride if nothing else, and the entire management chain here is behind me on that!
[0] The Windows Phone division has over 4000 people in it, although I am not sure how many of them are devs. Let's say 500 or so devs total (likely an underestimate!) checking in code to what is a huge code base. Now imagine every single day, you can take the code that is committed and, without worry, put it on your phone and expect it to work. Daily's aren't always 100% stable, but they are dog-foodable and usable. One thing I miss about working there is coming in every morning and flashing the latest code to my phone and seeing the incremental progress that the team made on a daily basis.
Of course this ignores that many teams work off of branches which are then tested and integrated. The overall engineering effort to keep that platform moving is huge.
I miss Symbian so much :( Oh well.
When Nokia killed Symbian, they had 60% of the phone market here in Brazil, and their sales were RISING (not declining, as they were in many other countries).
Now Brazil is the dream land for chinese knock-offs, and OS fragmentation, my startup make iOS and Android apps, and I found it bizarrely hard to sell those here, when I ask a random person on the street what phone they use, they don't know, and when I take a look I see:
If the person is very rich, or very dumb, a iPhone (very dumb because we had instances of people without money to eat taking crazy debts to buy iPhones... Apple Reality distortion field is crazy).
If the person is part of the shrinking real middle class (real because the government says that if you earn 500 USD month you are middle class, obviously this is absurd), a Samsung Android.
But those are 5% of the population at most... The rest of the population I see:
S40, Symbian (specially on... SONY phones O.o Sony had once a great Symbian line, and they were really popular here, and those phones are hell sturdy, lots of people still have them), Android customized to look like Symbian (Sony phones frequently do that too, I own a Xperia Play, and my mom a Symbian Sony Phone, and for any tasks the two are almost the same), HiPhone (a popular clone of iPhone that use some weird OS), Symbian clones (that usually have Facebook and Youtube but you cannot install anything else and is incompatible with actual Symbian), S40 phones, some blackberry and old windows phone (I never saw a WP8 phone! and I see more old windows phone than WP7 phone!)
This proved to be a nightmare to my startup, I cannot nab a random person in the street and convince them to install my app, because most likely they have some crazy phone OS that is not iOS, not Android, not WP8, not Blackberry.
And if someone launched a good sturdy phone with Symbian, hardware buttons (god how I hate touch-screen, specially when you need to dial in the rain in a very rainy country) but with a good API, I would GLADLY pay iPhone levels of money to have it. And I guess most brazillians would buy it too (although to them it must be old Symbian levels of price, iPhone level is reserved to the top 5% richest)
Is the management aware that they hate it ? Do they care?
So it's death by a thousand paper cuts.