Microsoft holding a “funeral” for the iPhone after launching the Windows Phone 7

Damn, that's cringe...

169

You just succinctly summed up Steve Ballmer's entire tenure as CEO of Microsoft.

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- Developers developers developers developers developers developers developers
  
  74
Not as cringe as this!

22
Sure, but honestly kinda funny.

9

Such a shame. Windows phones were actually really good and the developer experience was pretty awesome.

85

And after a while, they would've turned to shit as well.

20
They just had one massive problem: no apps

18
- Permanently Deleted
  
  1
I had one too, I really liked it. Only problems I ran into were things like credit card readers not working because the apps didn’t have the same access to hardware that they had on other devices. Otherwise I definitely preferred it over android.

13
- Don’t you usually have external hardware for credit card readers anyway?
  
  1
I actually really liked them. I was super excited to see what they would do with it once they bought Nokia to have that tight hardware control like iPhone/Pixel. Just a little bit head of its time in certain ways

9

I actually liked the Windows phone that I had for a short while. It just didn't have the app support.

53

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.

18
- YouTube was a big one for this. The Windows phone app worked better than its Android and iPhone counterparts and Google blocked API access.
  
  16
The UI is very simple and the performance on the phones using it was very good compared to the contemporary Android phones.

14
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.

10
This is why I never had one. I kept saying "Maybe my next phone." Then they were gone.

9
- about the same. My current phone back then had a few good years in it still, and I wanted my next one to be a Windows phone. And then they were gone.
  
  5
Same boat, loved my Windows phone. I didn't even use apps very much back then, but when it came time for an upgrade, it was gone.

7
It just didn't have the app support.

It just didn't have the app support.

3

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.

You cry.

51

I like your writing.

2

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.

39

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?

41
- My Samsung Xcover 6 Pro has no idea what you're talking about
  
  1
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.

13
- 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.
  
  14
There are a lot of cool fairly cheap Android phones these days.

5

Probably belongs on c/internetfuneral. 😆

36

I think they cut support for Windows Phones too soon, honestly. Should have stuck it out for longer.

27

Yeah even though it would've never beaten iphone it could've been a decent contentor.

10
They killed a good product that people liked (CE) to push a bad product that no one liked and then blamed everyone else when that product failed. Reminds me of a primary from a few years back...

1
- 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.
  
  3

I feel like if Microsoft had been much faster to Market (like faster than Android), they could have gotten business users and companies to switch to them. By the time they came, people were invested in iOS or Android and business users who had switched from BlackBerry went to iOS

26

Also almost every app had a iOS and android version and without a big userbase there was no incentive to make another version for windows phone as well. So if they'd got it to market sooner before android took off, a lot of app devs might have made a windows version instead of an android version.

14
- But they were first to market!
  
  The had a smartphone 7 years before Apple. The app store problem was they couldn't believe consumers would pick a device where you had to buy apps from Apple. Windows phone was like Windows desktop. You went to a store and bought a CD with the app or you went to a website and downloaded it.
  
  There were custom touch friendly skins for Windows phone even before the iPhone.
  
  They only needed to put skin on Windows Phone, up the hardware specs, corrale the existing apps into a store, and they could have matched the iPhone immediately. Instead the new Windows phone team created to compete with the iPhone fell for the old "this needs a complete rewrite" trap that new developers always fall for. Worse, they dropped the 7 phone and did another complete rewrite for the 8 phone.
  
  7

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.

19

Don't forget respect for human beings. He implemented particularly brutal stack-ranking.

20
- 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.
  
  8
Even though Ballmer was ceo during release, it was definitely the fucking moron Satya that buried Windows Phone.

3

Aren't there still "tiles" in modern windows? These things that don't really fit on a desktop system.

MS' revenge because we did not throw away our phones and bought their product.

17

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.

1

Aged like milk.

14

Windows phone OS was so good, but Microsoft bungled it every step of the way.

5

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.

9

I still miss WP8 and WM10. Great OSs that were way ahead of their time. I still hate android's/iOS lackluster keyboards and autocorrect.

7

I’ve seen like, one Windows phone in my life.

7

I owned two! One died after several years of service, so I bought another, then MS dropped support a few months after I bought it with Windows Phone 8/7.5 and I never bought another one again.

It is was an awesome OS that Google tried really hard to strangle to death.

6
- Successfully!
  
  2
I think one of your characters in gta 5 had one

3
A phone shop managed to palm one off on my FIL around the same time MS threw in the towel. He was using it until last Christmas when we got him a replacement due to it not having LTE and the 3g signal being switched off in the UK last month.
When I say he used it, I mean he could make and receive calls, and could read (but not send) texts. The lack of app support never bothered him because he never needed a smartphone in the first place. We got him a flip phone with physical keyboard and VoLTE. I had to use the WP a bit while dealing with the network to get a new 4g SIM and the UI, while alien, was surprisingly snappy for such an old device.

2

Apple:

4

Where's Ballmer

4

2010, wow

3

Remember the Zune? Pretty sure they did the same thing then.

3

Such cultish behavior!

2

Oh yeah cause windows phones have been absolute bestsellers in the past.

2

I low key love this, but I also like Scott's Tots, so maybe I just like extreme cringe.

1

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.

1