There was this spark of energy around Zune, and then Kin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin), and then Windows Phone that was just completely orthogonal to the stagnant money-printing strategy that Microsoft followed before Nadella. It was this little glimpse of an Apple-like spirit somewhere deep in the behemoth. It was exciting. But it was always treated as a side thing instead of being placed front-and-center. It's now been diffused into Microsoft's various consumer products, most obviously the Surface, but Windows Phone was already dead by the time things started to change.
Aside: despite all the jokes about it, the Zune (2nd gen and forward) was awesome. It was a little late to the game - it really nailed the traditional mp3/video player right when the iPod touch had just come out - but I think it may've been the peak of that category. Everything from the UX to the hardware buttons was so meticulously considered, the screen was much bigger than an iPod Video, it had momentum scrolling that worked really well despite lacking a touch screen, etc. It did not at all feel like a Microsoft product of the time. It was even one of the first services to offer all-you-can-download, subscription-based music. And you could download songs over WiFi.
I would love to see how Windows Phone would’ve matured.
To this day I still think about that little touch/d-pad, and wish something similar had caught on with more devices...
- Doesn't have the hard directional buttons underneath
- Isn't really helpful because you aren't scrolling through hundreds of items like you do in a music library
This. I had some Windows Phones besides my iPhones, because I liked very much what they were doing. Windows Phone 7, despite being technically weak (it was based on Windows CE), had an awesome UI. Nokia had some really affordable phones that were really well-built for the price and Windows Phone was getting traction. Quite a few friends/colleagues bought a Windows Phone, because it was the hip thing after the iPhone. The development story was also great, they used .NET and XAML (IIRC), which also made it possible to demo applications on web pages through Silverlight.
Then they screwed over all the early adopters by completely deprecating Windows Phone 7, doing one final release (7.8). None of the Windows Phone 7 devices were upgraded to Windows Phone 8. Most of the traction they had up till that point was lost and they were basically starting over with Windows Phone 8. Windows Phone 7 was already late to the market, the hard WP8 cut set them back even more years. And then it was simply too late.
There were technical reasons for WP7 -> WP8 (such as moving to the NT kernel, adding multi-processing support). But the hard cut was a catastrophical mistake. Either they should have started with the NT kernel in the first release or they should have had a gradual migration route from WP7 to WP8.