Re:How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around
by sumtechguy on Friday October 23, 2020 @11:10AM
(#24870280)
No kidding... WinCE should have been a stripped down NT. Instead it was this 'other' thing that they drug along that was 'windows' but not quite 'windows' and a pain to dev for. They were stuck in this weird spot where they had to create a build system that took into account of every BOM every crappy cell phone the ODMs could come up with. Then married to cell phones that would forget everything you setup on the drop of a hat. Apple did something different that changed the market. They put an unlimited plan on it, decent amount of NAND, a good touchscreen, and a straight forward GUI that worked in the small screen market.
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Re:How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around
by ThrowawayB7 on Friday October 23, 2020 @03:25PM
(#24872897)
> "They were stuck in this weird spot where they had to create a build system that took into account of every BOM every crappy cell phone the ODMs could come up with."
Well before Windows Phone existed, they already had to deal with that for Windows CE 1.0 to 6.x and all the PDAs/phones that used them. Android has to deal with the same thing. Nothing was new about that for Windows Phone.
Aside from that, Microsoft had to deal with that already anyway because of Windows CE Embedded / Windows Automotive and all the miscellaneous gadgets people wanted to use it with.
Re:How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around
by projektfu on Friday October 23, 2020 @01:37PM
(#24871888)
It’s an example of the company trying to avoid kneecapping the cash cow when experimenting. I really liked the Workpad z50, which was really the first netbook. Its windows CE runtime was light and useful, and booted instantly with execute-in-place. Its flaws were, in my opinion, entirely due to Microsoft not wanting to let CE become a viable alternative to NT. (That, and using a mask ROM instead of flash).