I used a windows phone for a while and while the ui was good, it failed in some critical ways and because the people at MS had their heads to far up their bosses asses, there was never a fix.
4 things that were game breakers (iirc, it’s been a few years):
if you set the same alarm every day, then the alarm worked reliably. If you set a special recurring alarm for 1 day in the week (at the time I had to get up early every Friday), then that alarm would work once and then not anymore after that.
if someone send you an sms (or a number inside an sms), then it was not possible to add that number to contacts. You had to manually open contacts and type in the number.
the app store was forced localized and if you lived in a small market, you could only see reviews and review scores from that market. Not all apps where available either. With how few users windows phone had, there were no useful aggregated review scores available, only dodgy ones. Fortunately there was a user made app with which the global store could be opened, but as an out of the box experience, it sucked.
the app store was filled to the brim with the lowest quality shovelware in existence. I once went in to find if Firefox had an app and I found a shitload of apps called stuff like “install Firefox now”, each for a small amount of money. So I went to Google and found that there was no Firefox app yet and those were all scam apps. If the Microsoft CEO then goes on the news and proudly proclaims how many apps their appstore has, then you also now that they had no intention of ever fixing this shit and it was going to stay shit forever.
Steve Ballmer lacked two things: vision and taste, - and his personal lackings ended up coloring all of MS’s efforts and products during his tenure as CEO.
Yeah, I think the only thing Ballmer has ever respected is money, he seems to me just a bean counter and obnoxiously hyped up “salesguy” in his personality, with not much depth beyond that.
If I recall correctly, there was a reported incident of him taking an employee’s personal iphone during a meeting and smashing it. While it’s understandable that a CEO might be upset that an employee is using the competition’s products, that is also a completely inappropriate response and destruction of property. Guy’s been an obnoxious asshole all his life, and has only been surrounded by people who had reason not to upset him - his ego has got to be through the roof.
Actually that last sentence is true of pretty much every rich shitbag out there.
Also a good ceo would ask why the employee uses the competition and treat it as free market research. Or just be a jackass that convinces them to associate your company with abuse
This is what happens when you spend your whole existence corporate brown-nosing. Every forced chuckle at the bosses bad joke, every faux-optimisitic email, eventually rots your soul.
You end up so dishonest that you become unable to tell reality from your own manufactured optimism, and it spreads to all parts of your life.
You become unable to acknowledge hard truth about your relationships with other people, and instead just optimise for the aesthetics of lukewarm niceties instead of anything with substance.
Your kids think you are a distant loser, Your wife loses respect for you when you completely fail to register her emotional needs. You still merrily greet them every morning, but are unable to see the disinterested response.
She starts to quietly seek fulfilment elsewhere, you wallpaper over your own instincts with “maybe she’s tired” and “she can have her own friends!”. The well-trained optimism reflex is so embedded, you can no longer comprehend doing anything else.
After time the inevitable dragged out divorce comes and goes, you have a moment of reflection, alone in your new downsized economy apartment. You like it, it’s all you really need after all. You can do whatever you want, and that makes a nice change.
You look at your Windows Phone on the bare table. The battery died after you were on it to the utilities people all day. You convince yourself an iPhone would have died way sooner. Plus, they are so ugly anyway.
You pick it up to appreciate the glossy front. You see the face of an old, broken man smiling vaguely back at you.
The people who used Windows Phones loved them. The UI was great, live tiles were legitimately the best, and integrating social media apps into your “people” feed was genius.
It just sucks that it didn’t get third-party app support from developers.
Those tiles completely failed at doing the one thing they were supposed to do, which was giving you information at a glance. Far too often, it would show you information that was outdated and no longer relevant.
For some apps, quite intentional. I remember some app makers hating Microsoft so much that they’d refuse and also block API access when MS made their own versions of apps for their users.
I am still upset that iPhone and Android have not even come close to matching the simplicity of Windows Phone. I feel like I had to take a huge step backwards when my Windows Phone died.
I miss those days. Back then, cell phones were far more affordable and there was real innovation. Back then there were so many different vendors and so many OS’s, things were actually exciting.
Now it’s just Apple or Android prices are out of control, features get removed so they can sell you something, and there’s no innovation.
Over the last few years they’ve innovated ways to do away with removable/replaceable batteries, headphone ports, and SD card slots while also making the phone entirely out of glass and sticking the front facing camera obnoxiously right in the middle of the top of my screen. If that isn’t progress, what is?
I don’t know about more affordable. I’ve paid around the same price for like 15 years and while cheap smartphones used to be total shit now even the cheaper ones do a fine job. I think the price on “adequate” stuff has gone down but the upper tiers have just gotten more expensive.
Yea people forget you don’t have to buy the latest more expensive phone. I have a nord, about 300 to 400 bucks. It’s great. My mom has the latest Samsung, paid a grand and she doesn’t use 90 percent of the features. It’s ridiculous.
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