They killed what small progress they’d made on their ecosystem 2 times, simply because they got bored and decided they didn’t like the technology stack they’d previously mandated and supported. They deserved to get buried in that space.

Meanwhile Apple have kept what is essentially the same technology stack for the past decade. Sure there’s been some pain, but almost all of it had some purpose that moved the development of apps forward.

Looking back on it, they took on an extremely difficult problem having a completely new marketplace and platform against competitors with tremendous amount of pre-existing traction.

There were clearly some pivots towards universal windows compatibility, and possibility of android compatibility as well. Nobody argues there's a ton of tactical failures and the net result was a loss, but I wouldnt conflate the mobile endeavor with something half-baked nor disregard to developers

Trust has two main dimensions in my view, compassion and competence. Microsoft was not competent enough to have a surviving platform in the face of iOS or Android... even though they had roughly a 8 year lead.

That doesn't earn my trust.

How did they treat Nokia employees?

Mhmmm.

I was one of them, and Microsoft treated me very well.

Windows Phone was an amazing platform. I’ve also developed for iOS a lot. Visual studio + expression blend was way ahead of apple’s xCode. Every single piece was much better: language, libraries, compiler, debugger, emulator, UI designer.

The platform is now discontinued so I no longer develop for WP. Meanwhile, most of the skills I’ve obtained working on WP7-8 apps apply to other XAML-based platforms, i.e. WPF, WinRT, and UWP. Fortunately for me, Windows is not going from desktops any time soon.