Damn, that's cringe...

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

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

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.

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.

Probably belongs on c/internetfuneral. 😆

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

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

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.

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.

Aged like milk.

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):

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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

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.

Apple:

Where's Ballmer