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I think Moore's Law was always going to kill CE. It has several limitations that could not be worked around and were irrelevant 25 years ago but very relevant

I think Moore's Law was always going to kill CE. It has several limitations that could not be worked around and were irrelevant 25 years ago but very relevant today. In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS, there is no future for something like CE. This is why Microsoft just moved to using their desktop kernel for future versions of Windows Phone -- it makes porting software so much easier.

com2kid 3y ago
> I think Moore's Law was always going to kill CE. It has several limitations that could not be worked around and were irrelevant 25 years ago but very relevant today. CE6 and 7 were a complete ground up rewrite from the CE5 and earlier versions. They didn't have any of the limitations that previous CE versions did. > In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS, My understanding is that iOS is so seriously stripped down compared to macOS that while the kernel is the same, the entire runtime is so different that it may as well be a different OS. And I don't think Apple hasn't tried to keep releases between the two synced up (maybe they have? No idea honestly), compared to Windows Phone which was merged closely with desktop Windows. In all honesty, Microsoft had so many resources to throw at the problem, that keeping the teeny tiny kernel team for WinCE employed was not worth losing the entire mobile market by forcing the OS teams to merge and then rewrite everything, poorly at times, from the ground up. Of course lots of Microsoft politics got involved, including killing Silverlight (which tl;dr is why corporate web apps are written in React now, killing Silverlight basically lost MS the entire internal LOB app market), and forcing a brand new API to be designed. On that note, by the time WP8 released, the OS was missing key APIs, was hard to write code for, and would only fall further behind Android and iOS. Eventually the WP platform team did get into a good release cadence, but by then the market had been lost. IMHO at that time Microsoft didn't understand the importance of regular timely releases to keep them in the news. Apple released a new phone, and a new OS version, yearly. Around 2010 MS was still doing "big bang" OS releases with multiple year gaps in-between. I worked at Microsoft at the time (started my career in Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone), and people kept asking me "is Windows Phone still around? I haven't heard anything about it in forever", with "forever" being more than a year. Everyone complains about how new phones come out every year, but if a manufacturer skips a release year, everyone assumes that the phone line is going to be discontinued. Developers stop writing apps for it, and no one wants to buy a phone that was released 16 months ago. Heck after about 8 or 9 months people know that it is time to either "wait for the next model" or "wait for the big discounts".

com2kid 3y ago

> I think Moore's Law was always going to kill CE. It has several limitations that could not be worked around and were irrelevant 25 years ago but very relevant today. CE6 and 7 were a complete ground up rewrite from the CE5 and earlier versions. They didn't have any of the limitations that previous CE versions did. > In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS, My understanding is that iOS is so seriously stripped down compared to macOS that while the kernel is the same, the entire runtime is so different that it may as well be a different OS. And I don't think Apple hasn't tried to keep releases between the two synced up (maybe they have? No idea honestly), compared to Windows Phone which was merged closely with desktop Windows. In all honesty, Microsoft had so many resources to throw at the problem, that keeping the teeny tiny kernel team for WinCE employed was not worth losing the entire mobile market by forcing the OS teams to merge and then rewrite everything, poorly at times, from the ground up. Of course lots of Microsoft politics got involved, including killing Silverlight (which tl;dr is why corporate web apps are written in React now, killing Silverlight basically lost MS the entire internal LOB app market), and forcing a brand new API to be designed. On that note, by the time WP8 released, the OS was missing key APIs, was hard to write code for, and would only fall further behind Android and iOS. Eventually the WP platform team did get into a good release cadence, but by then the market had been lost. IMHO at that time Microsoft didn't understand the importance of regular timely releases to keep them in the news. Apple released a new phone, and a new OS version, yearly. Around 2010 MS was still doing "big bang" OS releases with multiple year gaps in-between. I worked at Microsoft at the time (started my career in Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone), and people kept asking me "is Windows Phone still around? I haven't heard anything about it in forever", with "forever" being more than a year. Everyone complains about how new phones come out every year, but if a manufacturer skips a release year, everyone assumes that the phone line is going to be discontinued. Developers stop writing apps for it, and no one wants to buy a phone that was released 16 months ago. Heck after about 8 or 9 months people know that it is time to either "wait for the next model" or "wait for the big discounts".