4 ms·
>Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility, shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage. Backward compatibi
by xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
>Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility, shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage.
Backward compatibility with a platform which has almost zero market share is worthless.
- digi_owl 9y agoPocketPC/Mobile, in particular in the corporate world, was massive. And in the "consumer" world, HTC made a name for itself by making PocketPC based devices with a range of designs. Come the Windows Phone 7 announcement, they also renamed the PocketPC lineage to Phone 6.5, but it was clear that Microsoft was barely keeping it on life support. Thing was that Phone 7 could not run PocketPC lineage software, full stop. This meant that all those corporate and consumer programs (Opera Mobile came to be on PocketPC a decade before Americans were all hot and bothered about web on a mobile devices) had to be rewritten anyways, so why not look for alternatives (like Android).
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y agoYes, WinMo was still being used in the enterprise, mainly in industrial PDAs, but definitely not in the consumer market. I think that the main reason why Microsoft decided to drop compatibility with WinMo (apart from small marketshare) was the fact that it was using extremely outdated UI conventions. Almost all Windows Mobile apps were designed to be used with a stylus. Tiny widgets, small fonts etc. There was no place for that in the post-iPhone-launch world. Benefits from creating new OS from scratch outweighted value added by compatibility with an outdated platform.