Honestly, I was only interested in the hardware. Nokia made most of the phones that ran Windows phone and they made bricks.
Comment on [deleted]
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 5 months ago
Can you imagine how bad Windows phone would be today if it had survived? Co-pilot infested shit.
They were amazing in their day though.
Bahnd@lemmy.world 5 months ago
x666m@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Only good thing about them. Apps were all functionally the same and always half broken, all the time. But the phones looked pretty cool.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 5 months ago
Hard to say, actually.
- .NET took an unexpected turn towards cross-platform FOSS
- A third major player in the smartphone market may have abated the enshittificatory forces for a bit longer
- Having a platform that’s consumer-oriented, in contrast to their mostly business-oriented offerings today, might have clued them in to consumer sentiment a little better
- Having a viable path towards profitability might have made the all-in gamble on OpenAI less appealing
- Butterfly effect etc.
ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I think you’re on to something here honestly. Windows Phone was Microsoft’s last big new bet in the consumer market (you could argue Game Pass here, but the scope is more niche than a general compute platform), and I am sure that if it succeeded there would’ve been a significant cultural shift at Microsoft, similar to how the success (and subsequent revenue stream dominance) of iPhone/iOS did at Apple.
Sadly, we don’t live in that reality, so now everything Microsoft makes (again, with exception of the aforementioned and dreadfully mismanaged Xbox/Game Pass efforts) for consumers needs to have some kind of enterprise revenue angle to get greenlit at all. From experience I can tell you that a large number of great product ideas wither on the vine at Microsoft simply because management doesn’t consider anything that won’t move the needle on enterprise revenue.
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You might just be the most optimistic person… ever… lol Reading this is like watching TNG, and seeing a version of the future that could be, but never will be.
plyth@feddit.org 5 months ago
You could make it so, though.
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 5 months ago
Now I’m even more bummed out it didn’t survive. Still a good thought experiment.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
At least there would be some competition against Google and Apple.
M137@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Competition is not an objectively good thing. Just look at Microsoft now, how would what they are made anything better in the smartphone space? Their phones would be just as shitty as Win 11 is with AI and data collection.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I mean Google has gemini