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I think things like ‘People’ are more like attempts to integrate PIM services into the operating system. Just like Apple has Contacts, Calendar and Mail, Window

I think things like ‘People’ are more like attempts to integrate PIM services into the operating system. Just like Apple has Contacts, Calendar and Mail, Windows got People, the built in calendar and the built in mail app. Perhaps the people bar is useless but it is pretty useful if applications can count on the system providing a list of contacts to use, just like some apps would benefit from scheduling and presence. I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on half assedly integrating with this kind of service though because you can be assured Microsoft will have some important special features available for its own apps you’re not going to get.

WorldMaker 5y ago
I still love the People Hub the (shell of a) Contacts Manager despite it being years since it was truly great and truly a "Hub" (back in the Windows 8 era). (For a brief time the People Hub could show you a contact's most recent Twitter and Facebook messages and Text messages and let you send a quick message to them on any of those services. It was a great inversion of "I want to chat with Person, let's see what they are up to and which would be the best app to reply on" versus "I want to use Facebook to maybe chat with Person, hope I don't get distracted on the way". That "golden period" didn't last that long because Microsoft themselves had to build all the Twitter/Facebook/etc integrations to get it to happen, and couldn't keep up with social media platform API changes, and they never quite convinced the social media platforms it was in their interest to build such public footpaths into their walled gardens. That inversion was great for users, but not great for walled garden lock-in and advertising eyeballs.) The People Bar was something of a sad last gasp of the People Hub app/concept, but unfortunately after Microsoft lost/gave up the mobile device struggle and almost all of the People Hub integrations. (Almost makes it a curious question if desktop users would have paid more attention to it had it shipped in Windows 8.) > I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on half assedly integrating with this kind of service though because you can be assured Microsoft will have some important special features available for its own apps you’re not going to get. I sort of understand why that's a sometimes common opinion, but I don't feel like the evidence exists for it. Most of the "special features" Office is purported to have gotten over the years from Windows were either very early/rough previews of features that showed up in the next SDK, features Office built entirely for themselves with no intention of handing them over to the OS, or API hacks against the Windows API that the Windows team themselves publicly disliked and tried to prevent Office from doing (much less anyone copying). There are certainly documented cases of Microsoft sabotaging the performance of APIs when used by competitors, but history generally shows Microsoft as a "developer friendly platform building" company that typically doesn't keep "the good APIs" in house or "special features" to only themselves. The first part breaks a lot of trust in the second part, obviously. By the time it became the People Bar it didn't even have most of the APIs that the People Hub supported and instead mostly just acted like a popup window host for other apps. (They had learned the wrong lessons from the "walled garden" problem and thought if they made it look more like a "mobile phone" popup where people selected which "walled garden" they were interested in, companies might play in the sandbox more.)

WorldMaker 5y ago

I still love the People Hub the (shell of a) Contacts Manager despite it being years since it was truly great and truly a "Hub" (back in the Windows 8 era). (For a brief time the People Hub could show you a contact's most recent Twitter and Facebook messages and Text messages and let you send a quick message to them on any of those services. It was a great inversion of "I want to chat with Person, let's see what they are up to and which would be the best app to reply on" versus "I want to use Facebook to maybe chat with Person, hope I don't get distracted on the way". That "golden period" didn't last that long because Microsoft themselves had to build all the Twitter/Facebook/etc integrations to get it to happen, and couldn't keep up with social media platform API changes, and they never quite convinced the social media platforms it was in their interest to build such public footpaths into their walled gardens. That inversion was great for users, but not great for walled garden lock-in and advertising eyeballs.) The People Bar was something of a sad last gasp of the People Hub app/concept, but unfortunately after Microsoft lost/gave up the mobile device struggle and almost all of the People Hub integrations. (Almost makes it a curious question if desktop users would have paid more attention to it had it shipped in Windows 8.) > I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on half assedly integrating with this kind of service though because you can be assured Microsoft will have some important special features available for its own apps you’re not going to get. I sort of understand why that's a sometimes common opinion, but I don't feel like the evidence exists for it. Most of the "special features" Office is purported to have gotten over the years from Windows were either very early/rough previews of features that showed up in the next SDK, features Office built entirely for themselves with no intention of handing them over to the OS, or API hacks against the Windows API that the Windows team themselves publicly disliked and tried to prevent Office from doing (much less anyone copying). There are certainly documented cases of Microsoft sabotaging the performance of APIs when used by competitors, but history generally shows Microsoft as a "developer friendly platform building" company that typically doesn't keep "the good APIs" in house or "special features" to only themselves. The first part breaks a lot of trust in the second part, obviously. By the time it became the People Bar it didn't even have most of the APIs that the People Hub supported and instead mostly just acted like a popup window host for other apps. (They had learned the wrong lessons from the "walled garden" problem and thought if they made it look more like a "mobile phone" popup where people selected which "walled garden" they were interested in, companies might play in the sandbox more.)