5 ms·

> "abstracting all of the hardware in your life" This is precisely where I think MS failed miserably with Windows Phone. They had an incredible opportunity:

> "abstracting all of the hardware in your life" This is precisely where I think MS failed miserably with Windows Phone. They had an incredible opportunity: Make a smart phone that is a full, natural, joined-at-the-hip extension of your desktop. They did not. Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. They were playing "We too" when they should have been playing "Check this out!". Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone. Add to that an open API for developers to be able to integrate desktop Windows Phone services into their applications and MS would have had the makings of an ecosystem that would have just exploded into the business community in a massive way. Instead they wasted time and money with an offering that did exactly the same things as any other offering while trying to invent a new UI. The strategy was doomed to fail before the first phone was introduced. They tried to build an iPhone with a different UI when the business world would have energetically adopted a deeply integrated extension to desktops in the form of a smart phone. To this day, I still think I would drop iPhone in a second if MS came out with a well thought out system along the lines I described above. The paradigm shift (or the twist in thinking) is that the phone is given life as an extension to the desktop experience rather than as an afterthought that behaves as a peripheral. It would be like a sci-fi movie where the person grabs an application from the screen, it materializes as a physical device in their hand and they walk away. When they get to the office they push it into their display and it melds into that system instantly. Sci-fi aside, that feeling and utility would be incredibly useful.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications What the hell are you talking about? What does this actually mean in real terms? Right now Windows already desperately tries to do exactly what you're saying.[1] Do you want a PalmPilot-style sync app? iPad/Mac-style "Universal Control"? 1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-devices?r=1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...
- robomartin 4y ago
  > What the hell are you talking about? Care to try again? This time, pretend you know how to have a conversation.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Ah, sorry man. In my defense, you went on this long exposition that assumed implicitly that everyone at Microsoft has no idea what they're doing. I can appreciate that sentiment, but I got really frustrated trying to parse your "conceptually simple" idea. Anyway, didn't mean to start a flame war, I was just hoping to make sense of what you were trying to say
    - robomartin 4y ago
      I think the bit you missed before your reaction is that this comment was about the decisions MS made back then. Not now. Not today. In fact quite a few of the replies to my comment are from a current frame of reference. Even the link to the current Samsung/Windows integration misses the point (all you have to do is read the ridiculously complex installation and setup instructions to understand). MS, back then, missed a golden opportunity to create a truly useful differentiated product that, in my opinion, would have had a very high probability of success. The bar wasn’t as high as it is today. Slick, seamless integration between phone and desktop would have been an amazing feature. No, that did not mean running CAD on your phone. Again, the context is 2010, not today. I think that was iPhone 3 era. Something as simple as being able to seamlessly make and receive calls, send and receive SMS and do the same with email with either device, desktop or phone, would have been magical back then. Take a call in the car while you arrive at the office, once you get to your desk you put on your headset and the call continues through your computer. You can send text or links from your PC via SMS to the other person. Record the conversation if needed (with legal provisions in place). Etc. Again, don’t think 2022, think 2010. Everything is conceptually simple. It is easy to talk about ideas, quite another matter to actually implement them and do it well. Concepts are usually simple; reality is difficult. It isn’t that MS was full of unintelligent people who don’t know what they are doing. Not at all. The history of business is full of stories of intelligent and very capable people completely missing the mark or failing to recognize a shift in their industry. There’s a great book about this very subject: The Innovators Dilemma. In fact, the author makes the argument that some of these bad decisions are the result of good management. BTW, I used “seamless” to describe something that is intimately integrated to the system. No installation. Think of good USB peripherals that just work.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 4y ago
They kept rebooting the development experience, naturally even the more passionate Windows developers gave up.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone." I feel like the hardware limitations of ~2005-2012 would have made this nigh impossible. I know a few ultra-portable devices were trying to do something like this around that time, but even then they were still well above the size of smartphones. Cellular data and bandwidth was also extremely limited at that time as well, so cloud style/thin client file access would also be impractical. I can understand wanting to make a new OS/UI because the pocket PC experience was quite clunky and those devices did not have widespread adoption. There was also the novelty factor of using touch and gestures instead of a stylus. Anything resembling the windows/desktop paradigm would have been seen as antiquated. I'm sure Steve Jobs would have exploited that as strongly as he possibly could. All in all, I like the concept you have presented. I just don't think that it would have been viable at the time and I can forgive Microsoft for making the choices they made back then.
avrionov 4y ago
> "Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. " They made a device which was worse than all of the existing devices. The initial version didn't have TCP /IP support, only HTTP. The app store was full of scams, etc.
scarface74 4y ago
> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone What would be amazing about this? I have one subscription to Office365 and I can start working on a document on my Mac and then work on the sabe document on my iPhone, iPad or on the web. I can take calls from my Mac from my iPhone, copy and paste between them, bookmarks are shared, I can send a text message from my Mac, my AirPods seamlessly switch, my iPad works as a second display or I can use my keyboard and mouse to control both. What would one docked device do for me?
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  what does it do for the switch?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You mean the AirPods? I paired my AirPods to my phone and they were automatically paired to my Watch, iPad, Mac, and two AppleTVs. When I put the AirPods in my ear, whether I am on my Mac, iPad or iPhone, sound is automatically redirected. If I am on my iPad watching a video, and I take a call or start watching something on my phone, the AirPods automatically switch to my phone and the video pauses on my iPad. When I walk out the house for a run with just my cellular Apple Watch, I start listening to music on my Watch and it switches. Switching isn’t automatic for an AppleTV since that would be irritating for a shared device. But it will display a pop up and ask do you want to switch.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      heh, I meant Nintendo Switch, the console :) I was responding to the idea that being able to dock a mobile device has no advantages.
      - scarface74 4y ago
hakfoo 4y ago
There's a valid question about how much usage patterns differ on different form factors. It feels like the last two points you make contradict each other: there's a huge difference between "extension to desktop" and "pick up desktop stuff and go". Obviously, for a myriad of hardware and UI reasons, we're not doing the latter typically. The people demented enough to want desktop software in their pocket buy a GPD Win or the like. The real issue is behaviour patterns, though. Give me the performance of my desktop in a six-inch pocketable device with two day battery life, and I'm still going to use it very differently. Where do many of us spend most of our workdays? In an IDE or office suite. No matter what you do, you're not going to be able to shrink those down and be usable for anything but the most trivial tweaks on a six inch screen with a glass keyboard. We sort of saw this attempted in the early days of Windows CE/Pocket PC with its silly little Portable Office apps. A docking station might make it usable when I get BACK to a desk, but at that point, I may as well just be using the phone as an expensive flash drive for sneakernet. Okay, maybe gaming? Potentially, if done right. Genshin Impact making 82 bazillion dollars out of a game that scales from phones to desktops is the poster child. But as anyone with a Steam Deck can demonstrate, you have to pick stuff that was designed to work well with the form factor. That undermines the dream of "the entire universe of cool stuff your desktop has to offer". Media consumption? Even that's different. People may prefer local storage to streaming due to unreliable/slow/expensive mobile data, and the media they consume is often different too. I don't want to binge 90-minute episodes of anything on a phone. So we've basically tossed out most of the obvious answers for "seamless desktop extension". This means one of two things: 1) We're drilling in the wrong place. The desktop extensions we need are such paradigm shifts nobody has even given us a good demo 2) The things that define the mobile ecosystem currently-- for example, apps that lean heavily on "it has GPS and cameras", lightweight games, low-commitment consumption of media-- shape the market because they're the best use cases we've found for the form factor. I liked Windows Phone. I still have three of them in my box of bad mobile device decisions (somewhere I think there's a Palm Pre too) What I liked about it was that it seemed to have a clear and cohesive design language, and it was reliably snappy on cheap hardware. We've basically given up on the former, but Android has managed to close the gap somewhat on the latter, probably mostly through surfing on Moore's Law. Microsoft could have had one other chance, but I think they've already blew it: as privacy is becoming a selling point (see Apple and DuckDuckGo marketing), positioning themselves as "we have a business model that's not 96% ad-dependent, so we're not going to sell out your personal life for a quick nickel" could have made them the trustworthy choice, but they've burnt through any credibility they had on that front in the last few years.

Firmwarrior 4y ago

> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications What the hell are you talking about? What does this actually mean in real terms? Right now Windows already desperately tries to do exactly what you're saying.[1] Do you want a PalmPilot-style sync app? iPad/Mac-style "Universal Control"? 1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-devices?r=1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...

robomartin 4y ago
> What the hell are you talking about? Care to try again? This time, pretend you know how to have a conversation.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Ah, sorry man. In my defense, you went on this long exposition that assumed implicitly that everyone at Microsoft has no idea what they're doing. I can appreciate that sentiment, but I got really frustrated trying to parse your "conceptually simple" idea. Anyway, didn't mean to start a flame war, I was just hoping to make sense of what you were trying to say
  - robomartin 4y ago
    I think the bit you missed before your reaction is that this comment was about the decisions MS made back then. Not now. Not today. In fact quite a few of the replies to my comment are from a current frame of reference. Even the link to the current Samsung/Windows integration misses the point (all you have to do is read the ridiculously complex installation and setup instructions to understand). MS, back then, missed a golden opportunity to create a truly useful differentiated product that, in my opinion, would have had a very high probability of success. The bar wasn’t as high as it is today. Slick, seamless integration between phone and desktop would have been an amazing feature. No, that did not mean running CAD on your phone. Again, the context is 2010, not today. I think that was iPhone 3 era. Something as simple as being able to seamlessly make and receive calls, send and receive SMS and do the same with email with either device, desktop or phone, would have been magical back then. Take a call in the car while you arrive at the office, once you get to your desk you put on your headset and the call continues through your computer. You can send text or links from your PC via SMS to the other person. Record the conversation if needed (with legal provisions in place). Etc. Again, don’t think 2022, think 2010. Everything is conceptually simple. It is easy to talk about ideas, quite another matter to actually implement them and do it well. Concepts are usually simple; reality is difficult. It isn’t that MS was full of unintelligent people who don’t know what they are doing. Not at all. The history of business is full of stories of intelligent and very capable people completely missing the mark or failing to recognize a shift in their industry. There’s a great book about this very subject: The Innovators Dilemma. In fact, the author makes the argument that some of these bad decisions are the result of good management. BTW, I used “seamless” to describe something that is intimately integrated to the system. No installation. Think of good USB peripherals that just work.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 4y ago

They kept rebooting the development experience, naturally even the more passionate Windows developers gave up.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

>"Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone." I feel like the hardware limitations of ~2005-2012 would have made this nigh impossible. I know a few ultra-portable devices were trying to do something like this around that time, but even then they were still well above the size of smartphones. Cellular data and bandwidth was also extremely limited at that time as well, so cloud style/thin client file access would also be impractical. I can understand wanting to make a new OS/UI because the pocket PC experience was quite clunky and those devices did not have widespread adoption. There was also the novelty factor of using touch and gestures instead of a stylus. Anything resembling the windows/desktop paradigm would have been seen as antiquated. I'm sure Steve Jobs would have exploited that as strongly as he possibly could. All in all, I like the concept you have presented. I just don't think that it would have been viable at the time and I can forgive Microsoft for making the choices they made back then.

avrionov 4y ago

> "Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. " They made a device which was worse than all of the existing devices. The initial version didn't have TCP /IP support, only HTTP. The app store was full of scams, etc.

scarface74 4y ago

> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone What would be amazing about this? I have one subscription to Office365 and I can start working on a document on my Mac and then work on the sabe document on my iPhone, iPad or on the web. I can take calls from my Mac from my iPhone, copy and paste between them, bookmarks are shared, I can send a text message from my Mac, my AirPods seamlessly switch, my iPad works as a second display or I can use my keyboard and mouse to control both. What would one docked device do for me?

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
what does it do for the switch?
- scarface74 4y ago
  You mean the AirPods? I paired my AirPods to my phone and they were automatically paired to my Watch, iPad, Mac, and two AppleTVs. When I put the AirPods in my ear, whether I am on my Mac, iPad or iPhone, sound is automatically redirected. If I am on my iPad watching a video, and I take a call or start watching something on my phone, the AirPods automatically switch to my phone and the video pauses on my iPad. When I walk out the house for a run with just my cellular Apple Watch, I start listening to music on my Watch and it switches. Switching isn’t automatic for an AppleTV since that would be irritating for a shared device. But it will display a pop up and ask do you want to switch.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    heh, I meant Nintendo Switch, the console :) I was responding to the idea that being able to dock a mobile device has no advantages.
    - scarface74 4y ago

hakfoo 4y ago

There's a valid question about how much usage patterns differ on different form factors. It feels like the last two points you make contradict each other: there's a huge difference between "extension to desktop" and "pick up desktop stuff and go". Obviously, for a myriad of hardware and UI reasons, we're not doing the latter typically. The people demented enough to want desktop software in their pocket buy a GPD Win or the like. The real issue is behaviour patterns, though. Give me the performance of my desktop in a six-inch pocketable device with two day battery life, and I'm still going to use it very differently. Where do many of us spend most of our workdays? In an IDE or office suite. No matter what you do, you're not going to be able to shrink those down and be usable for anything but the most trivial tweaks on a six inch screen with a glass keyboard. We sort of saw this attempted in the early days of Windows CE/Pocket PC with its silly little Portable Office apps. A docking station might make it usable when I get BACK to a desk, but at that point, I may as well just be using the phone as an expensive flash drive for sneakernet. Okay, maybe gaming? Potentially, if done right. Genshin Impact making 82 bazillion dollars out of a game that scales from phones to desktops is the poster child. But as anyone with a Steam Deck can demonstrate, you have to pick stuff that was designed to work well with the form factor. That undermines the dream of "the entire universe of cool stuff your desktop has to offer". Media consumption? Even that's different. People may prefer local storage to streaming due to unreliable/slow/expensive mobile data, and the media they consume is often different too. I don't want to binge 90-minute episodes of anything on a phone. So we've basically tossed out most of the obvious answers for "seamless desktop extension". This means one of two things: 1) We're drilling in the wrong place. The desktop extensions we need are such paradigm shifts nobody has even given us a good demo 2) The things that define the mobile ecosystem currently-- for example, apps that lean heavily on "it has GPS and cameras", lightweight games, low-commitment consumption of media-- shape the market because they're the best use cases we've found for the form factor. I liked Windows Phone. I still have three of them in my box of bad mobile device decisions (somewhere I think there's a Palm Pre too) What I liked about it was that it seemed to have a clear and cohesive design language, and it was reliably snappy on cheap hardware. We've basically given up on the former, but Android has managed to close the gap somewhat on the latter, probably mostly through surfing on Moore's Law. Microsoft could have had one other chance, but I think they've already blew it: as privacy is becoming a selling point (see Apple and DuckDuckGo marketing), positioning themselves as "we have a business model that's not 96% ad-dependent, so we're not going to sell out your personal life for a quick nickel" could have made them the trustworthy choice, but they've burnt through any credibility they had on that front in the last few years.