4 ms·

Imagine a world where Ballmer wasn't blinded by the desktop and enterprise market during the 2000s, and Windows Phone actually became a thing, and we had true c

Imagine a world where Ballmer wasn't blinded by the desktop and enterprise market during the 2000s, and Windows Phone actually became a thing, and we had true competition among flagship phones today. Imagine a Surface Pro phone with modern specs that could sideload any x86 application. One can dream.

SemanticStrengh 5y ago
Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The only explanation is poor leadership.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Windows phone had to introduce a store, operating system, and new hardware partners. The store was launched in tandem with Windows Phone and not added to the Desktop version until 2 years later. The OS and existing software base they had was irrelevant for small touch screens. The hardware partners they had weren't relevant to the mobile space and they weren't doing enough hardware development themselves to just rely on the in-staff hardware folks they had. Eventually they tried all these things but too late. They tried rebuilding the OS to be for more than just desktops, they tried rebuilding app platforms to not be platform specific, they tried rebuilding the interface to not be use type specific. It lead to a lot of angst due to the churn and a failure in the mobile space as their competitors already had working alternatives to all of these before they even launched. Poor leadership for sure but in waiting through all the 2000s and letting other's fill the space not because they already had everything made for them and let it fall apart. Xbox is one area that has seemed to really pan out for them which got all of these changes over time but again they launched that in the early 2000s not the early 2010s.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Windows Phone came out at a time when smartphones were still lifestyle products. Apple was the king of the hill in that respect and Google was still perceived as a pretty cool company even if having an Android phone wasn't as showy as having an iPhone. Having a phone from Microsoft meant you were probably a corporate weenie who wore pleated khakis and spent their day in a cubicle. The quality of the phone and the OS didn't really play into the perception of it. It's interesting that the perception wasn't the same in other parts of the world. Windows Phone seemed to be a premium product in Argentina. Think it had good acceptance in parts of Europe too, likely due to the Nokia versions. Perhaps trying to conquer the world except North America could have been a viable strategy but that's hard to really know and given the influence of the North American market on global culture, it might not have worked.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      Android didn’t succeed because anyone thought Google was cool. Android succeeded because it was ubiquitous when Apple was only available on AT&T and because Androids phones were cheaper.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    I still think the largest balkanization factor in the current duopoly was the cellphone carriers. They have to support the phones they sell. They want as few variables in their support matrix. QED: three options is too many. Windows Phone had several major opportunity positions where they had all the software the needed and all the hardware they needed to make a statement and then: cellphone carriers simply refused to sell SIM cards to them. For pretty much the entire lifespan of Windows Phone it generally only had one of two major US carriers reluctantly shipping its flagship and the other supposedly "angry" at Microsoft and refusing to even allow it SIM cards on its network, with flip flopping which one was which between different "flagship" phones. How does any product survive in an ecosystem that harsh?
    - blep_ 5y ago
      I still find it bizarre that phone carriers sell phones. This shouldn't be an issue, in much the same way "Comcast only supports Dell and Lenovo laptops" would be incredibly weird.
      - selectodude 5y ago
        But Comcast does only support Comcast modems. They’ll give you access but if you call with a question they’ll tell you tough shit and blame your hardware.
        blep_ 5y ago
        That hasn't been my experience, in lots of years of having to call them and make them fix dumb things. Once you get past the "no, I am quite sure there is no wifi interference on this cat5e cable" bit of the Generic Support Script, they do seem to be capable of understanding where the problem could plausibly be. (Ability to do anything about it varies.) They even helpfully provide a compatibility list: https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth
      - WorldMaker 5y ago
        Well, it's not just selling phones that is the issue but selling SIM cards. That's closer to the "Comcast only supports cable modems with Mac addresses they've identified and Command & Control functionality they need" analogy. (Which are things that cable modems support. Cable company operators can force certain cable modem operations similar to the way SIM cards support such things.) But also, it really isn't all that bizarre, it's got long precedent: For most of a century all phones were leased and the phone company controlled every bit of hardware on the network. That's not even the distant past, that's still in living memory, my parents grew up in households with leased phones. It took major anti-trust/monopoly breakup work to change that. So far the "use whatever phone you want" is the anomaly in the history of phone networks. (Cable companies too; most of their history all of their equipment was only leased and the era of being able to buy your own set top boxes and/or cable modems is a relatively brief anomaly versus the longer history of those networks.) The US is back down to only two/three major cell carriers (no matter how many "brands" you see; so many of them are just resellers), depending on how you want to count them (by network compatibility: two; by parent company: three). It may be time to trust-bust again.
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  Between their introduction of Surface phones like the Duo, and their Microsoft Launcher, it seems like they're aiming for that down the road.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  What would be the point of Microsoft failing with Android in the same ways that Amazon and Samsung have already failed here? (Admittedly, I still don't se a lot of the point in Microsoft running Chromium Edge other than sadness and defeat. I use Chromium Edge on my work machine because they block Firefox and I dislike Chrome and Chromium Edge is such a sad shell of what Edge once was.)
  - SemanticStrengh 5y ago
    The point you're missing is that Microsoft is actively improving chromium
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      I don't think I'm "missing" that point, but I do think you are missing mine: Amazon has tried to improve the Android ecosystem since day one, on the taking things at face value that Android was supposed to be an open platform for innovation, and instead has failed in just about every possible way. More than any other company, Amazon continues to prove that you cannot improve Android without Google's rubber stamp and that no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. Amazon's App Store is still the next biggest Android App Store after Google's and it can barely be listed as an "Also Ran" on the scorecard way below Google's numbers. Samsung similarly has spend nearly as much effort trying to improve Android and seen all sorts of failures. They've proved that few care about AOSP hardware improvements if it doesn't have Google's rubber stamp. They've proved in their own attempts no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. They've proved that you can't use AOSP certified hardware to bypass the cellphone carriers' extreme aversion to a Third option in the ecosystem and continue to fail at trying to bring Tizen phones to market (because the cell carriers don't care about AOSP, they care about "Android" TM, Google Style). What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? What would be any sort of point in Microsoft investing in AOSP-based products when they have no easier time of selling them through today's cell carriers than they had with a proven Kernel and software stack that they own entirely? Especially without Google's complete consent and access to "Play Services" and the Google App Store moat, what can Microsoft possibly offer in Android that they couldn't better offer in "Windows Phone 11" that wouldn't also see the same extraordinary bad luck/worse market conditions than Windows Phone <= 10? (ETA: Especially all that as opposed to by the time Edge switched to Chromium there were already a half-dozen other browsers using Chromium as their base and also Microsoft had already contributed multiple improvements to Chromium for years. There's no "success stories" in "Open Source" Android. There's very few people running de-Gooogled Android successfully and no one has been able to market one successfully in stores. Microsoft themselves even contributed cash for some of the hard lessons of Cyanogen, Inc.'s funding for their eventual burnout.)
somethoughts 5y ago
Alternatively its interesting to imagine if instead of buying Nokia, Ballmer had instead doubled down more fully on cloud and bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS. Azure wouldn't be playing catch up now. It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google was giving Android away for free to the same handset manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on the Fire phone. Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have bungled it. That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly. [1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android without Microsoft’s antitrust woes https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windows-mobile-android-competition-comments-microsoft-antitrust https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS Microsoft’s (enterprise) customers weren’t ready for the cloud back then. They could have made a bid for the rest of the market, but I’m not sure the rest of the market wanted Microsoft.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  It would've been nice if Nokia had made another MeeGo smartphone after the N9 with the same sort of quality and usability.
- scarface74 5y ago
  Standard disclaimer: I work for AWS all opinions on my own. I wouldn’t even say Azure is playing catch up to AWS. Azure is a strong second as far as marketshare. It also has a company behind it that knows enterprise and knows how to cater to it. Technologically, I can’t think of a single enterprise/startup need it couldn’t meet. MS’s developer tools have always been great. Yes, I realize that this is a “Nixon goes to China” post. Winning in mobile is a Pyrrhic victory for Google. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made a $27 billion profit on Android from 2010-2016. Google gives more than half that much per year to Apple to be the default search engine. Losing mobile was the best thing that could have happened to MS. It let them concentrate on being everywhere.
danuker 5y ago
> that could sideload any x86 application Too bad even desktop Windows is pushing for an App Store, gradually taking control away. I see where this is going. One reason I'd use Windows anymore is if I needed a dedicated GPU now with Windows-only drivers, for its computing efficiency. I wouldn't count on it being available long-term, as proprietary software eventually loses support and compatibility with the rest of the world. However, I don't need such special hardware, and I am perfectly happy with an integrated GPU. The heaviest video or massively-parallel tasks that I perform do not warrant a dedicated one, and I run them on my CPU. The other reason I'd use Windows is if a customer required me to do so (and of course I'd charge for it).
guessbest 5y ago
Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting recognition built in to every device running locally on a 200MHz arm processor with 16 Meg of RAM. Programming was possible on WinCE 6 using .NET 2 or 3.5 as well as C++. It was very performant on a device with 64 Megs of RAM. I guess the problem was that versions after WinCE 7 binaries were not compatible with the previous versions as well as Microsoft working solely through OEM's for releases rather than direct to consumer like Apple or Google's partnerships. There were lots of also rans in the industry such as Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) not being used by anyone and the Amazon Fire. Article from 2007 : > Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device. >> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60-vs-apple-iphone-at-3/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...
- ansible 5y ago
  What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser. I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked. Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.
loudmax 5y ago
While we're at it, let's imagine a world where BeOS succeeded on the desktop. People without the technical inclination to run open source would have a choice of multiple competing commercial desktop environments rather than the current duopoly.
jayd16 5y ago
Why would it be x86? The OS isn't the holdout there. Android even supports x86.
mrkramer 5y ago
If that happened Android wouldn't exist but funny enough I trust Google more than Microsoft because Google at least pretends it cares with its once famous motto "Don't be evil".
- scarface74 5y ago
  I trust a company a lot more whose business proposition is “I give them money and they give me stuff” than having an ad tech company’s operating system running on my phone.
enos_feedler 5y ago
I think about this all the damn time. Imagine how much higher quality and stable the software stack would be if Microsoft took all of their lessons working with OEMs, chipset makers (GPUs, etc) for Windows and applied that to mobile. Instead we got an unengineered hot garbage driver interface that broke compatibility with every major android release. Absolute zero continuity across any low level APIs. Camera HAL, HAL 2, HAL 3! Isn’t the point of an abstraction layer to generalize functionality enough that you can grow into future devices and feature sets without a complete redesign of the interfaces? Google has zero vision of where mobile hardware was headed. Android design was built on Google promo culture not product design
sifar 5y ago
I like to imagine where the Meego based Nokia N9 was not burnt before launch by MS. It was far ahead of iphone/android. Things might have been different with it and it's successors.

SemanticStrengh 5y ago

Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

ramesh31 5y ago
>Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The only explanation is poor leadership.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Windows phone had to introduce a store, operating system, and new hardware partners. The store was launched in tandem with Windows Phone and not added to the Desktop version until 2 years later. The OS and existing software base they had was irrelevant for small touch screens. The hardware partners they had weren't relevant to the mobile space and they weren't doing enough hardware development themselves to just rely on the in-staff hardware folks they had. Eventually they tried all these things but too late. They tried rebuilding the OS to be for more than just desktops, they tried rebuilding app platforms to not be platform specific, they tried rebuilding the interface to not be use type specific. It lead to a lot of angst due to the churn and a failure in the mobile space as their competitors already had working alternatives to all of these before they even launched. Poor leadership for sure but in waiting through all the 2000s and letting other's fill the space not because they already had everything made for them and let it fall apart. Xbox is one area that has seemed to really pan out for them which got all of these changes over time but again they launched that in the early 2000s not the early 2010s.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Windows Phone came out at a time when smartphones were still lifestyle products. Apple was the king of the hill in that respect and Google was still perceived as a pretty cool company even if having an Android phone wasn't as showy as having an iPhone. Having a phone from Microsoft meant you were probably a corporate weenie who wore pleated khakis and spent their day in a cubicle. The quality of the phone and the OS didn't really play into the perception of it. It's interesting that the perception wasn't the same in other parts of the world. Windows Phone seemed to be a premium product in Argentina. Think it had good acceptance in parts of Europe too, likely due to the Nokia versions. Perhaps trying to conquer the world except North America could have been a viable strategy but that's hard to really know and given the influence of the North American market on global culture, it might not have worked.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    Android didn’t succeed because anyone thought Google was cool. Android succeeded because it was ubiquitous when Apple was only available on AT&T and because Androids phones were cheaper.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  I still think the largest balkanization factor in the current duopoly was the cellphone carriers. They have to support the phones they sell. They want as few variables in their support matrix. QED: three options is too many. Windows Phone had several major opportunity positions where they had all the software the needed and all the hardware they needed to make a statement and then: cellphone carriers simply refused to sell SIM cards to them. For pretty much the entire lifespan of Windows Phone it generally only had one of two major US carriers reluctantly shipping its flagship and the other supposedly "angry" at Microsoft and refusing to even allow it SIM cards on its network, with flip flopping which one was which between different "flagship" phones. How does any product survive in an ecosystem that harsh?
  - blep_ 5y ago
    I still find it bizarre that phone carriers sell phones. This shouldn't be an issue, in much the same way "Comcast only supports Dell and Lenovo laptops" would be incredibly weird.
    - selectodude 5y ago
      But Comcast does only support Comcast modems. They’ll give you access but if you call with a question they’ll tell you tough shit and blame your hardware.
      - blep_ 5y ago
        That hasn't been my experience, in lots of years of having to call them and make them fix dumb things. Once you get past the "no, I am quite sure there is no wifi interference on this cat5e cable" bit of the Generic Support Script, they do seem to be capable of understanding where the problem could plausibly be. (Ability to do anything about it varies.) They even helpfully provide a compatibility list: https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      Well, it's not just selling phones that is the issue but selling SIM cards. That's closer to the "Comcast only supports cable modems with Mac addresses they've identified and Command & Control functionality they need" analogy. (Which are things that cable modems support. Cable company operators can force certain cable modem operations similar to the way SIM cards support such things.) But also, it really isn't all that bizarre, it's got long precedent: For most of a century all phones were leased and the phone company controlled every bit of hardware on the network. That's not even the distant past, that's still in living memory, my parents grew up in households with leased phones. It took major anti-trust/monopoly breakup work to change that. So far the "use whatever phone you want" is the anomaly in the history of phone networks. (Cable companies too; most of their history all of their equipment was only leased and the era of being able to buy your own set top boxes and/or cable modems is a relatively brief anomaly versus the longer history of those networks.) The US is back down to only two/three major cell carriers (no matter how many "brands" you see; so many of them are just resellers), depending on how you want to count them (by network compatibility: two; by parent company: three). It may be time to trust-bust again.
KoftaBob 5y ago
Between their introduction of Surface phones like the Duo, and their Microsoft Launcher, it seems like they're aiming for that down the road.
WorldMaker 5y ago
What would be the point of Microsoft failing with Android in the same ways that Amazon and Samsung have already failed here? (Admittedly, I still don't se a lot of the point in Microsoft running Chromium Edge other than sadness and defeat. I use Chromium Edge on my work machine because they block Firefox and I dislike Chrome and Chromium Edge is such a sad shell of what Edge once was.)
- SemanticStrengh 5y ago
  The point you're missing is that Microsoft is actively improving chromium
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    I don't think I'm "missing" that point, but I do think you are missing mine: Amazon has tried to improve the Android ecosystem since day one, on the taking things at face value that Android was supposed to be an open platform for innovation, and instead has failed in just about every possible way. More than any other company, Amazon continues to prove that you cannot improve Android without Google's rubber stamp and that no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. Amazon's App Store is still the next biggest Android App Store after Google's and it can barely be listed as an "Also Ran" on the scorecard way below Google's numbers. Samsung similarly has spend nearly as much effort trying to improve Android and seen all sorts of failures. They've proved that few care about AOSP hardware improvements if it doesn't have Google's rubber stamp. They've proved in their own attempts no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. They've proved that you can't use AOSP certified hardware to bypass the cellphone carriers' extreme aversion to a Third option in the ecosystem and continue to fail at trying to bring Tizen phones to market (because the cell carriers don't care about AOSP, they care about "Android" TM, Google Style). What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? What would be any sort of point in Microsoft investing in AOSP-based products when they have no easier time of selling them through today's cell carriers than they had with a proven Kernel and software stack that they own entirely? Especially without Google's complete consent and access to "Play Services" and the Google App Store moat, what can Microsoft possibly offer in Android that they couldn't better offer in "Windows Phone 11" that wouldn't also see the same extraordinary bad luck/worse market conditions than Windows Phone <= 10? (ETA: Especially all that as opposed to by the time Edge switched to Chromium there were already a half-dozen other browsers using Chromium as their base and also Microsoft had already contributed multiple improvements to Chromium for years. There's no "success stories" in "Open Source" Android. There's very few people running de-Gooogled Android successfully and no one has been able to market one successfully in stores. Microsoft themselves even contributed cash for some of the hard lessons of Cyanogen, Inc.'s funding for their eventual burnout.)

somethoughts 5y ago

Alternatively its interesting to imagine if instead of buying Nokia, Ballmer had instead doubled down more fully on cloud and bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS. Azure wouldn't be playing catch up now. It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google was giving Android away for free to the same handset manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on the Fire phone. Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have bungled it. That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly. [1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android without Microsoft’s antitrust woes https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windows-mobile-android-competition-comments-microsoft-antitrust https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...

mr_toad 5y ago
> bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS Microsoft’s (enterprise) customers weren’t ready for the cloud back then. They could have made a bid for the rest of the market, but I’m not sure the rest of the market wanted Microsoft.
Apocryphon 5y ago
It would've been nice if Nokia had made another MeeGo smartphone after the N9 with the same sort of quality and usability.
scarface74 5y ago
Standard disclaimer: I work for AWS all opinions on my own. I wouldn’t even say Azure is playing catch up to AWS. Azure is a strong second as far as marketshare. It also has a company behind it that knows enterprise and knows how to cater to it. Technologically, I can’t think of a single enterprise/startup need it couldn’t meet. MS’s developer tools have always been great. Yes, I realize that this is a “Nixon goes to China” post. Winning in mobile is a Pyrrhic victory for Google. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made a $27 billion profit on Android from 2010-2016. Google gives more than half that much per year to Apple to be the default search engine. Losing mobile was the best thing that could have happened to MS. It let them concentrate on being everywhere.

danuker 5y ago

> that could sideload any x86 application Too bad even desktop Windows is pushing for an App Store, gradually taking control away. I see where this is going. One reason I'd use Windows anymore is if I needed a dedicated GPU now with Windows-only drivers, for its computing efficiency. I wouldn't count on it being available long-term, as proprietary software eventually loses support and compatibility with the rest of the world. However, I don't need such special hardware, and I am perfectly happy with an integrated GPU. The heaviest video or massively-parallel tasks that I perform do not warrant a dedicated one, and I run them on my CPU. The other reason I'd use Windows is if a customer required me to do so (and of course I'd charge for it).

guessbest 5y ago

Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting recognition built in to every device running locally on a 200MHz arm processor with 16 Meg of RAM. Programming was possible on WinCE 6 using .NET 2 or 3.5 as well as C++. It was very performant on a device with 64 Megs of RAM. I guess the problem was that versions after WinCE 7 binaries were not compatible with the previous versions as well as Microsoft working solely through OEM's for releases rather than direct to consumer like Apple or Google's partnerships. There were lots of also rans in the industry such as Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) not being used by anyone and the Amazon Fire. Article from 2007 : > Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device. >> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60-vs-apple-iphone-at-3/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...

ansible 5y ago
What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser. I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked. Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.

loudmax 5y ago

While we're at it, let's imagine a world where BeOS succeeded on the desktop. People without the technical inclination to run open source would have a choice of multiple competing commercial desktop environments rather than the current duopoly.

jayd16 5y ago

Why would it be x86? The OS isn't the holdout there. Android even supports x86.

mrkramer 5y ago

If that happened Android wouldn't exist but funny enough I trust Google more than Microsoft because Google at least pretends it cares with its once famous motto "Don't be evil".

scarface74 5y ago
I trust a company a lot more whose business proposition is “I give them money and they give me stuff” than having an ad tech company’s operating system running on my phone.

enos_feedler 5y ago

I think about this all the damn time. Imagine how much higher quality and stable the software stack would be if Microsoft took all of their lessons working with OEMs, chipset makers (GPUs, etc) for Windows and applied that to mobile. Instead we got an unengineered hot garbage driver interface that broke compatibility with every major android release. Absolute zero continuity across any low level APIs. Camera HAL, HAL 2, HAL 3! Isn’t the point of an abstraction layer to generalize functionality enough that you can grow into future devices and feature sets without a complete redesign of the interfaces? Google has zero vision of where mobile hardware was headed. Android design was built on Google promo culture not product design

sifar 5y ago

I like to imagine where the Meego based Nokia N9 was not burnt before launch by MS. It was far ahead of iphone/android. Things might have been different with it and it's successors.