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> "Working on it I was told very bluntly that the target audience was corporate, and specifically corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing. ... Th

> "Working on it I was told very bluntly that the target audience was corporate, and specifically corporate IT departments who were doing the purchasing. ... This was myopic as fuck." Yeah, no, that's just pretending hindsight is insight. Mobile and Embedded Devices had just successfully battled Palm and everyone else to becoming the leading smartphone OS with Windows Mobile 5.0, with 100+ devices on the market by the time WM 6.0 rolled around. Smartphones cost as much as they do today, except in pre-2005 dollars (ouch) and mobile data rates were low and crazy expensive up at that time because the mobile operators were milking the business market. It was not at all clear that a market for consumer smartphones could be jumpstarted under those conditions. Apple's attempt to make a consumer smartphone was a huge gamble (anybody remember the Apple Newton?), admittedly helped by the considerable RDF^H^H^Hbrand leverage and design expertise they'd built up since. It wasn't at all clear that they had any momentum until the iPhone 3 came out with its money-printing app store. > "Microsoft Sync" Lay that at the feet of Nadella's takeover; that was a failure of strategic insight. Termination of the Windows Automotive division in the 2014 layoffs came as a complete surprise to everyone since the most recent releases had had very high consumer satisfaction ratings.

com2kid 4y ago
> Yeah, no, that's just pretending hindsight is insight. Not improving basic UX of a product because an organization has a bias that "end users don't matter" is always a mistake. (Even Confluence has gotten their act together in recent years!) Yes WM was on track to overtake Blackberry through a lower cost structure, but the phone's UX itself wasn't good.[1] At one point I asked why we weren't including a good onscreen keyboard and I was told that we were leaving the keyboard as something OEMs could differentiate on. (Tbf I was told later that wasn't 100% true, but no one ever did explain why we didn't try to ship a good keyboard!) > Apple's attempt to make a consumer smartphone was a huge gamble One that Google also realized at the same time needed to be made. > until the iPhone 3 came out with its money-printing app store. Microsoft had an app store for Windows Mobile that they cancelled at the last minute. The source code for it was laying around when I joined. Granted it apparently wasn't the all in one app store Apple had, but not realizing people would even be willing to buy apps was myopic. (I was told it was one person's decision to kill it...) [1] as a power user I actually loved the Windows Mobile 7 beta devices that had a keyboard and a medium sized screen, but they were already part of a bygone era by the time we got ahold of them.

com2kid 4y ago

> Yeah, no, that's just pretending hindsight is insight. Not improving basic UX of a product because an organization has a bias that "end users don't matter" is always a mistake. (Even Confluence has gotten their act together in recent years!) Yes WM was on track to overtake Blackberry through a lower cost structure, but the phone's UX itself wasn't good.[1] At one point I asked why we weren't including a good onscreen keyboard and I was told that we were leaving the keyboard as something OEMs could differentiate on. (Tbf I was told later that wasn't 100% true, but no one ever did explain why we didn't try to ship a good keyboard!) > Apple's attempt to make a consumer smartphone was a huge gamble One that Google also realized at the same time needed to be made. > until the iPhone 3 came out with its money-printing app store. Microsoft had an app store for Windows Mobile that they cancelled at the last minute. The source code for it was laying around when I joined. Granted it apparently wasn't the all in one app store Apple had, but not realizing people would even be willing to buy apps was myopic. (I was told it was one person's decision to kill it...) [1] as a power user I actually loved the Windows Mobile 7 beta devices that had a keyboard and a medium sized screen, but they were already part of a bygone era by the time we got ahold of them.