[jasoneckert]

The smooth, tile-based interface of Metro/Modern UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone are underrated in my opinion. It was simple, fast, and focused on touch. While I didn't have a touch-based Windows 8 laptop or tablet at the time, I had a Windows Phone, and I enjoyed using it more than any other device I've had since.

[einpoklum]

> The ... UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone... underrated in my opinion. It was ... focused on touch.

That's why it was rated low. Most people were using this interface on PC's and laptops, without a touchscreen, where a touch-focused interface does not make sense. Maybe it was good choice for Windows Phone or Windows Tablet, but people were not rating it based on that experience. The very idea of using a single UI for both a touchscreen-oriented and no-touchscreen, kbd-and-mouse computers is the most problematic aspect of it.

> It was simple

No, it wasn't simple. There was the simple part, but things not integrated into the simple part were a hodge-podge of previous Windows versions' UI. Now, I like some of the previous Windows versions' UI, but putting a simple veneer on something does not make it simple; if anything, a little more complex.

> It was fast

The fact that an OS UI in the 2010s or 2020s need to be commended for being fast is kind of sad. Plus - I don't believe it was that fast. Did you try running it on, say, a 15yro machine relative to the Win8 launch time? i.e. 1998? Even with a 10yro machine I believe it was kind of sluggish.

[jmkni]

I unironically loved my Windows Phone, it was great to develop for too coming from a WPF background at the time

[wiseowise]

It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.

[timpera]

Same here. My Lumia 635 was one of my best purchases ever, it was so capable for the price. It's a shame that they stopped believing in it.

[tgv]

I liked it too. But it never was great. E.g., I remember that the calculator had date computations, but the year input was a dropdown going from 1900 to 2100 or something like that.

Look at all 5 of us reminiscing here...

[rachr]

The Lumia Icon/930 I had was genuinely the best phone I have ever used, from both a hardware quality and software perspective. It made the competing iPhone 5 look like garbage.

[electroglyph]

the Nokia hardware was pretty great, too!

[pjmlp]

Spont on, I always considered WinRT, .NET Native, C++/CX is what COM evolution should have been back in 2001, instead of the J++ reboot.

However the way Microsoft has messed it all up, no one is left besides Windows team and some hardcode believers, to care about WinRT/WinUI any longer than what is only available via WinAppSDK.

[alfiedotwtf]

I bought a 4G Nokia 3310 yesterday, and to be honest, it’s actually not bad!

[PeterStuer]

How many abandoned attempts do you feel the Microsoft mobile developer ecosytem could take before losing all faith in yet another MS mobile strategy?

In the mobile space, there was no market for just Windows Phone apps. You needed to support native Android and iOS already. WP was just another burden without a clear return.

In their desperation they started paying college students for developing apps for the platform, leading to low quality experiences.

They pushed WP hard to their channel. Many employees in MS system integrators and managed services got very cheap phones, but outside that group, just nobody bought them before in the end they started dumping them to the masses as cheapest phone in the store, but there ain't no serious market there either.

[snoman]

I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.

[johnvanommen]

If it wasn't for the T-Mobile Sidekick, Microsoft probably wouldn't have had to buy Nokia.

Here's the story:

I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)

The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.

In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.

*Here's the funny part:*

This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)

Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:

*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*

But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.

At some point, the backups failed.

Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.

While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.

One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.

*poof*

Gone forever.

The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...

I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)

[johnvanommen]

I found a PDF that confirms the story I heard, and also has information I wasn't aware of until today:

https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0411/sidekick...

Details are on page 3.

* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.

* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.

* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.

So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):

It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.

It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.

And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.

In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.

[xhevahir]

Wasn't the Sidekick the phone in the Paris Hilton hack? Man, that was a long time ago.

[meinersbur]

Live tiles are nearly universally praised in retrospect, but it might be a case of hindsight bias [1]. The video [2] brings up some problems of the concept and why no other company copied the concept.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

[2] https://youtu.be/OgXlNaYXRu4

[WorldMaker]

I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.

Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.

(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)

[bee_rider]

Are live tiles universally praised? I see them mentioned positively occasionally, but I suspect they are getting some benefit… like, they are the Windows 8 feature that isn’t immediately obnoxious. Windows 8’s UI just didn’t have any redeeming features, so the element that is merely bad gets brought up as a sort of “see I’m not a relentlessly negative hater, I’m objective” thing, I bet. Is there a name for this trope?

[normalaccess]

I'm sure there was some meeting where at the end of the pitch deck was some one said:

"...and after people acclimate to them, we'll put ads there! Advertising Directly in the UI!"

[fidotron]

The problem MS created was WP7 was a technical dead end: a feature phone OS with a Silverlight UI, which was almost impossible to bypass, hurting third party support a lot.

WP8 was a far "better" OS, but it came with higher system requirements more comparable with Android.

Google never got enough crap on for their stunts with youtube in that era though.

[whizzter]

Not to mention that WP7 customers couldn't upgrade to WP8, meant that both customers and resellers had devices they couldn't do shit with.

[klglrksbjkt]

Touch-optimized UI on phone/tablet: Perfect.

Touch-optimized UI on desktops: One step away from where it belongs.

Touch-optimized UI on servers: Very very out of touch.

Firing sinofsky for it: Good.

[wombat-man]

Yeah I agree. It was a little weird without a touch screen, but at that point I was not navigating the start menu visually with a mouse anymore anyway.

Windows phone was great. I think I got it when Android was still growing up. I liked the focus and the speed for sure.

Microsoft's bread and butter is no longer OSes, I think, and it's unfortunately starting to show.

[VTimofeenko]

I really liked the idea of what they did with the start menu of win8. Whenever I opened the start menu, my intent was to focus on look for something in the start menu, not multitask, so live tiles were perfect. IIRC I even wrote a couple of toy apps with those tiles. Win8.1(blue?) was much more polished experience though, original 8 had a lot of rough edges.

I had an original Lenovo yoga and boy the desktop touch experience was bad. Hardware wise it wasn't winning any prizes either. The cooler died a couple of times and replacements were a pain to procure.

[xattt]

This. The “mobile-ization” of desktop interfaces is a bane on current computing. The metaphors of work between desktop and mobile devices are wildly different.

Obligatory car analogy: a mechanic working in his shop has a completely different set of tools available than if he was going into the field to fix a car.

[mghackerlady]

I really think GNOME is good at making an interface that works well on both, so is KDE to some extent with kirigami

[duskdozer]

I used GNOME forever and didn't think much of it, until that horrid menu was added in 4x and I had to switch.

[lifetimerubyist]

I had an Android phone and my friend had a Windows Phone. I wanted to get a Windows phone but by the time I came around to needing a new device it was already killed off. Too bad.