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Comment by Aoyagi | Hacker News Reader

And this is why Windows Phone is what it is. The only thing MS is actually interested in is what (they think) directly projects to sales according to analyses, which are undoubtedly mostly based on "automated feedback" from current users and other "big data". Where are the times they actually cared for the (vocal) minorities?

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MS is still a business. Why should they care about the vocal minorities?

It can be argued that opinionated design is more successful that design by committee. I think the most effective approach is to begin with opinionated design prototypes then triage and refine using A/B testing.

MS can be accused of relying too heavily on user surveys, making their designs a bland blending of averages that please nobody (see: the Office Ribbon). Thus the Ford quote gets trotted out, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

The point is that MS are using a greedy optimisation algorithm with which they arrive at a local maximum that is well below the global maximum for quality of end product.

Just a hint: If you use WP and ever CC someone or Reply All, be thankful it's in there.

What do you mean? Am I supposed to be grateful for something that I have used on Symbian for years before? I take it Android or iOS don't have it in their default mailing software, but that's not something to be thankful for. Those are pretty basic features missing.

I mean the kind of feedback oriented design MS uses can easily generate a scenario where "Reply All" and CC are considered not mainstream enough to warrant entry to their phone OS.

I agree with your sentiment. It just feels we're dangerously on the edge of "casuals" (to borrow a word) dominating the aim of software design.

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