Is the Windows phone fan community imploding?

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Great analysis from Jason Ward at Windows Central: The Windows phone community may be the most passionate group of smartphone fans on the internet. Sa
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Maybe some day Microsoft will get its act together. In the interim, sorry, but life’s too short.

Back when I worked for others in high tech engineering (think Dilbert), I always used to marvel at the fact that we could never run a project for longer than about a year without immediate success – i.e., profit – or it would just be canceled by management. That was actually a good thing in a lot of cases, because somehow a lot of really stupid projects got approved and started.

I can’t even begin to imagine the mindset at Microsoft where projects that are obvious failures can be continued not just past the first fiscal year, but for many years past the point where failure is obvious. Someone, somewhere must be awfully convincing with an argument like, “Please, boss, just another year or two of funding our losses and I promise you we’ll start to turn a profit.” Or something else entirely – planned failure.

Obvious failures:

• Trying to staple a mobile operating system onto Windows, but with zero integration and which doesn’t actually take advantage of any of the good parts of Windows.
  
• Trying to come along not first, not even second, but THIRD (with a company never known for sexy products) and hoping to make any kind of dent in an established smart phone (and to some extent tablet) market.

Some of the dumbing-down actually started in Windows 7, but it was still substantially a no nonsense operating system that could fairly easily be employed to do serious things. Windows 8.1 got a LOT worse, but by the heroic actions of people adept at tweaking could still be employed to do good work. Windows 10, not so much, because Microsoft is breaking everyone’s tweaks every 8 months. It’s starting to become clear they’re actually orchestrating the failure of Windows.

There were those of us who saw clearly, literally a few hours after the Windows 8 previews became available, that there was no merit in the toy App world, and lo and behold after 4 years there’s STILL nothing exciting there. C’mon, people, Apps do NO MORE than web pages!

There is no such thing as patient management willing to continue developing an utter failure after so many years, with no idea spark for the development of new things to fix the obvious problems. The plan must be to fail, because Microsoft is systematically stripping Windows of the one thing they excelled at – business data manipulation.

Windows Phone has failed. It failed a long time ago!

I hear Windows tablets are pretty nicely engineered hardware, but I’m just not seeing anyone with one, and to be brutally honest I – a lifetime Windows geek – haven’t really desired one myself.

By now Microsoft ought to have a professional COMPUTER operating system – a worthy successor to Windows 7 – for actual content developers and engineers – ready for release. Instead we have “Windows 10 Creator’s Edition” that does essentially NOTHING innovative where it counts. I’m sorry to break the news, but 3D Paint and the ability to put interactive 3D graphics in Powerpoint presentations really aren’t making a whole lot of content developers and engineers excited!

Last night I was watching the credits for “Zootopia”. Cute little film, superbly animated. All Linux and Apple. There is a lesson there.

-Noel

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That’s because you forget that this is the classic attitude of a monopolist long after it has caused it to lose monopoly. This is reinforced by any ability to make money in other ways to sustain the failed project until the failure succeeds.

What MS should have done is take Win7 as a base, add all the Win10 stuff that is not really OS but apps and add it as optional modules for a price. That would have given them a framework to innovate, a source of income, an eco-system that would have migrated to WP and would have kept the mass of old users happy and attract new users.

However, this cannot happen with a LT monopolist used to have its way, who has long lost the ability and willingness to compete. Show me one monopolist who has escaped this fate.

All their blah-blah pretense about competition, all companies strive for monopoly because they know that they can make so much money during it that who cares what happens after. Ask Amazon, Uber, AirBnB out to bait an switch alternatives out of existence.

 

 

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You know, I went to the Windows Central site from one of the links here, and I read a bunch of the comments.  It’s fascinating to see that from the perspective of so many in the Windows mobile community, Satya Nadella is written off as “another desktop dinosaur,” or something similar.

It’s evident that Nadella himself has become a metaphor for what (some of) the users think is lacking in Windows 10 on mobiles… if Windows 10 mobile isn’t mobile-y enough, they say Nadella is a desktop guy.  Perhaps, from their perspective, they see 8 as a product from the Ballmer era, and since 10 is less mobile-y than 8, Nadella must be a misguided desktop guy trying to undo the progress 8 made in the mobile platform.

This, of course, misses the simple observation that as what is supposed to be a unified platform, the failure of 8 in the desktop world means the entire thing failed, and Microsoft, rather than realizing that the thoroughly rejected “one UI to rule them all” idea was foolish, decided to take a second stab at it with Windows 10.

Since the idea of the unified platform was to spur development of Windows store apps that could broaden Windows Phone’s appeal, it was imperative for MS to get its OS onto desktop PCs.  That meant moving the slider farther from mobile and more toward desktop, which predictably angered mobile users– but the irony is that this move was not made for the benefit of the desktop platform, but for the mobile one.  MS cannot leverage the large number of desktop PCs that can also run apps to spur app development if there is not a large number of desktop PCs that can run apps.

This whole situation also shows (on several levels) that a universal UI ends up being equally mediocre on multiple platforms.

PC-oriented people like me often consider Windows 10 to be too mobile-oriented.  Since Windows mobile has zero appeal or importance to me, I evaluate Windows based wholly on its PC presentation.  For more than a quarter of a century, Windows PC users have had an OS that is designed specifically for the desktop PC, and I, for one, don’t intend to accept anything less than this.  MS achieved glory with Windows XP and Windows 7, so they know how to accomplish this goal.

The problem is, though, that MS is now (according to Nadella) “Mobile first, cloud first,” and that puts us desktop people as… well, I don’t know, but certainly not first.  We’re being used as a step-stool so MS can reach higher to grab the elusive brass ring engraved with “mobile.”  Windows 10 is just a continuation of that effort to employ Windows PC users as a resource for MS to exploit in order to reach the customers they really want, the mobile customers, than as valuable customers themselves.

Given that centuries of experience have taught us that “a Jack of all trades is a master of none,” it’s no surprise that an OS that tries to serve two platforms simultaneously leaves users of each platform thinking that OS is oriented too much toward the other side.  Whichever side of the fence you happen to inhabit, there’s no denying that the “one UI to rule them all” idea is holding you back.

Canonical, the developer of Ubuntu Linux, has finally thrown in the towel on its Unity desktop environment (one that had the same goals as Windows 8 and 10, and arguably did a better job of it).  Since phones and PCs are both computing devices that do a lot of the same things (browsing, games, running MS office, etc.), it seems that one grand UI or OS to run them both would be achievable, so it’s not surprising that GNOME, Canonical, and MS have tried it.  While users have already concluded that the emperor has no clothes, it has taken the clothiers a lot longer to accept it.  It turns out that the differences between the mobile and PC platforms are a lot more significant than the “unify” proponents had believed.

If Windows mobile really is dead, can we finally close the door on this experiment and get back to a Windows that’s designed strictly for the platform it’s running on?  Apple has chosen this route, and there’s no lack of interoperability between its Mac and iOS platforms.  They don’t have to have the same UI or run the same kernel code to be able to work seamlessly with the same data.  Data is inherently platform-agnostic; not so of UIs or OSes.

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My only problem with the concept that “we must build a system that is unified and necessarily a compromise” is this:

Computers have monstrous capacity nowadays – more than EVER before – both for computing and for storage. People don’t always remember that 500 gigabytes is five hundred million kilobytes and relate that to when computers had tens or hundreds of kilobytes.

Given all this gargantuan capacity and speed, it’s entirely possible that by maintaining, and even enhancing all the configurability that Windows once had, Microsoft could have – should have – continued to improve the OS for desktop use AND for mobile use.

For example, it took anyone with half a brain about a minute after seeing the first Windows 8 pre-release to know that Microsoft should have made it possible to run Apps in windows from day one. That wasn’t rocket science, it was a complete lack of vision or technical prowess on Microsoft’s part.

And whose idea was it that elegant themes (and even the standard of adhering to the theme) had to be dropped? Why flat and lifeless? People with phones and tablets want elegant things too.

NOTHING technical forced them to drop desktop advancement entirely in order to pursue mobile applications.

No, management at Microsoft must be so simple-minded that they can’t conceive of more than one project at a time, and/or they just let their programmers get lazy. They needed (and still need) to develop on BOTH fronts vigorously.

-Noel

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Noel Carboni wrote:

And whose idea was it that elegant themes (and even the standard of adhering to the theme) had to be dropped? Why flat and lifeless? People with phones and tablets want elegant things too.

Absolutely.  I have an Android tablet, and every time I use it (which isn’t much compared to my PCs!) I am struck at how tasteful and attractive the UI is, as compared to Microsoft’s utterly drab and ugly UWP.

Take a look at this screenshot of the calculator app I have on my tablet.  It’s not part of Android, but it’s a fairly typical app as far as appearance.  It’s written fully for touch, but compare the appearance to this screenshot of the Win 10 calculator I grabbed from the web (I looked for one that had it in landscape mode, fullscreen, as on my tablet):

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Noel Carboni

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That comparison strikes me as useful vs. some fanatical “polar bear in a snowstorm” initiative.

Long live skeuomorphism (i.e., the 3D appearance of buttons, etc., so you can perceive where they are).

I have just returned skeuomorphism to GDI window controls in my Win 10 setup…

What a PLEASURE to use by comparison to the drab, borderless theme it ships with.

-Noel

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