Basically Apple is selling a cozy computing environment that some people really like, whereas the operating system division of Microsoft is selling a compatibility layer between a bazillion of long tail niche applications and every single piece of hardware in existence that isn't either significantly smaller or larger than a PC (phones, supercomputers) or made by Apple. If Microsoft had an LTS version of Windows 2000 that was 64 bit, a lot of people would be willing to pay a premium. Microsoft thinks they are selling another cozy computing environment, but generally people don't really want more OS level bells and whistles.

Off topic ramble: unfortunately, Microsoft to have a bit of an acquired blindness regarding what users actually want (LTS Windows, innovate in Office or other installable software if you like) because paid software updates has so long been their culmination of visible success. Had they somehow switched to subscriptions by the time they moved to 32 bit Windows would be an entirely different beast today.

Microsoft is trying to have it both ways; turns out that's not what people really want (and when it's all about people they just fail -- Windows Phone anyone?), but because business clients (which generally doesn't mean the actual business end-users but some other department) tend to buy whatever looks good on paper.

It all just keeps going on with no real improvements. This disconnect between people and products has many forms, be it an IT project that is over budget and doesn't deliver the right stuff (often comes down to business people making impossible promises and requirements that were never properly gathered and keep changing).

Getting something that is good for the user instead of getting something that is short-term good for the business would be a good start.

>(and when it's all about people they just fail -- Windows Phone anyone?)

Everyone I knew who had a windows phone seemed to love it. If MS were taking a run at it today it would likely succeed. The nail in the coffin was Google refusing to write a Youtube app for Windows Phone and THEN blocking the app that MS wrote themselves.

I'm still shocked the EU didn't tear them apart on that move. It's about as anti-competitive as it gets. Honestly I'm still sad they gave up, we could've used a third player, even if they were going to always be a minority player.

There were hundreds of nails in the Windows Phone coffin. The straight incompatibility between 7 and 8 was a gigantic fuck you to every early adopter, dev or otherwise.

I still consider the Windows Phone (8 and 10, not 7) the best Phone OS I have ever used, and the Nokia Lumia hardware was great. The problem, as you mentioned, was that third party app support was dismal and the few apps that did exist where on the whole of a far lower quality than the Android or iOS equivalent.

> The nail in the coffin was Google refusing to write a Youtube app for Windows Phone and THEN blocking the app that MS wrote themselves.

How the hell were they not sued for that?? That is anti-competitive as hell.

Google is still doing shit like that e.g. by actively hindering Picture-in-Picture on iOS for years.

Google was de facto running the Federal Trade Commission during most of the Obama administration. The lead commissioner was a paid shill who wrote "academic" articles about how Google shouldn't face antitrust scrutiny while a law professor.

I had one and I loved it as well.

> The nail in the coffin was Google refusing to write a Youtube app for Windows Phone and THEN blocking the app that MS wrote themselves. There were at least 2 great third party youtube apps and youtube worked well in the browser as well. Including background play support which seems not to work on other platforms easily.

It works very well on Android, but it is a feature exclusive to YouTube Premium.

It also works great with Newpipe. They now even have their own F-droid repository so that you can get the latest updates asap when YouTube makes a breaking and they fix it.

It works very well on Firefox on Android, out of the box, with uBlock to get rid of commercials too. I shudder to think that one day Mozilla will tire of supporting FF on Android and I'll have to start using a YT app again...

Of course there were people that loved it, just like there were people that loved BlackBerry phones, people that loved PocketPC and people that loved the foot-x-ray-machine at the shoe store when that was a thing. I wasn't trying to say that it was bad or universally hated, and even if it was you'd find a niche that likes it ;-)

It's just that it wasn't loved by the masses, just like Zune wasn't loved by the masses, Windows S-mode isn't loved by the masses, and pretty much any Windows-on-ARM effort isn't loved by the masses.

Regarding YouTube: odd that they wouldn't make an app, you'd think that even with trident support they could at least put a web view in an app or something. You can't force a company to maken an app for another company, and with the current media/rights laws you can't make one yourself either, so not much of a lawsuit there.

Indeed, when I had a chance to play around with one I thought it was a pretty decent take for a first try.

I had no idea Google played this dirty trick, if that’s how it went they’d indeed deserve a thorough spanking for it.

I suspect Microsoft being Microsoft they must’ve made other blunders to murder the platform so badly though

I'd say the bigger nail in the coffin was, ironically, Microsoft's level of security/sandboxing.

tl;dr - Snapchat and a lot of other 'killer apps' never were written for the platform, and at least some of that was because the apps on Android/iOS did things Microsoft wouldn't let you (I think tracking when the user took a screenshot was one)

Snapchat refused to make a Windows Phone app. Microsoft even offered developers and resources to help, and they still refused.

I wonder how would it work if they ripped out all the crufty apps and UI configuration tools and replaced them with simple (dumbed down) controls like Gnome or Apple do.

All the more advanced knobs made available via Powershell, also like Gnome or Apple. Indeed any professionally managed configuration isn’t maintained with point’n’click panels anyway...

It's not as easy it sounds. It took a whole generation to decouple printing subsystem from UI libraries.

Also power users tweak a lot of little advanced settings via these point'n'click panels anyway. Even tuning a desktop PC needs a lot of tinkering down the road.

Windows is a very powerful platform as is but, it's not well suited to everything due to its architecture and design choices. This situation is equally valid for all operating systems out there.

Maybe it’s time for them to split out NT and a home/office-light edition again

They do, with Server 2019 for corporate servers. But your point is that no one is running Server 201x as their desktop OS, unlike the NT 4 .1 days, which then was rebranded into windows 2000, or NT 5

There's also the LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel) build of Windows 10[1], which doesn't have any of the consumer bits and bobs, and other than security fixes isn't designed to have any feature updates post deployment.

---

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...

LTSC is fantastic in that it ditches all the cruft. I wish they had a consumer-friendly license for it, though. Microsoft's vision for consumer windows 10 is no longer an unobtrusive platform that doesn't get in the way of the user, much less force unwanted features on them.

I wouldn't say _no one_, but it's definitely not common: https://www.windowsworkstation.com/

I definitely remember running windows 2008r2 on my home desktop because at the the time that was all that was available in the "your educational institution neither gives .edu emails or has arranged anything with microsoft" tier of dreamspark.

During my stint at MS many years ago, we were running 2008r2 as a Workstation OS and it was pretty good.

And the fact that qualcomm seems to be lagging behind apple's SoC.

Microsoft should split windows into two distinct versions.

Microsoft Windows Enterprise - focus on long term compatibility etc (essentially what windows is now)

Microsoft Windows X (seeing as they like using that letter) - which is way friendlier to breaking changes and advancing the OS.

I can't see any way for Windows to actually improve long term without doing this.

That "X" would basically be what's running on the ARM surface and arguably the whole line of precursors back to CE could be described like that. They end up wildly unpopular because they have all the bells and whistles people begrudgingly accept to get the one feature they want (continuity) but lack this one that they accept the others for. Continuity isn't just for enterprise. Non-technical users abhor having to re-learn anything or give up the procedures they struggled so hard with adopting (there are probably still some who feel uneasy if they haven't run defrag for more than two months, despite of having switched to NTFS more than a decade ago) and gamers and the like have lots of niche hardware and software solutions that easily puts the unsupportedness of vintage enterprise software to shame. Continuity is a key feature.

What I think could work, and would eventually lead to the same situation as "Enterprise/X" would be the reverse: a "regular" Windows aiming to eventually build a Microsoft equivalent of the Apple walled garden and a "continuity subscription" that's more conservative than what Windows is now (trivial example: opt into Cortana instead of opt out, barely)

PS: I understand that you are talking about low level technological differences and I seem to be hung up with UX, but I believe that separating groups on the high level would be the only viable way to eventually follow different paths on the low level.

The worshiping of windows compatibility /continuity (which I do consider to be impressive from an engineering standpoint) is astounding to me. It leads to what we have now - which, to me at least, is a frankly unusable operating system. A hodge-podge of 20 years worth of patterns, menus and systems. Some menus in windows feel they're in a completely different operating system.

This is why they should have 'Enterprise' and 'X' to me - they dont even have to look at different, but it frees one windows kernel team to do whatever they want and not have to worry about supporting loads of legacy systems. They'll naturally deviate.

It's actually kind of ironic to me that the best feature they've released in years (WSL) is essentially jamming another operating system into the mix. Like there's not enough going on there already!

I'm reading so much about how good Proton is that I'm considering dropping windows even for my gaming machine.

I consider the wildly mixed UIs not a symptom of compatibility but a symptom of the succession of hopeless attempts to be more than that. The incomplete new GUI generations are surely not caused by compatibility burdens affecting the kernel team.

No but they're a symptom of the 'all work on the same product' situation - if they were split, the people wanting to update the UI etc would work on the new version alongside the kernel team for the new version.

Microsoft's main problem is marketing - to be more specific, a naming problem.

Windows everywhere

They doomed Windows phone with the name WINDOWS.

Their windows on ARM, Win RT push was also handicapped and doomed the moment they named it Windows...

Explanation.

Windows means:

1. BSOD, instability, viruses,

2. Expectations of ability to run billions of existing windows software

The first thing that popped in anyone's mind about Windows Phone was 1 above.

For ARM, many frustrated customers returned their store-bought Windows ARM devices after they got home and could not run normal vlc, chrome, existing games...

Microsoft having realized this, has spent the last 4 years+ working on the ability to run classic windows apps on windows for ARM. They placed their bet on faster chips - Apple got there first.

If Microsoft names their ARM operating system something else, initial marketing dollars would be initially higher. But it would be worth it.

To developers, nothing will change, it's the same UWP, same APIs.

Imagine xbox was called "Windows Gaming". It too would be dead.

> Imagine xbox was called "Windows Gaming".

isn't Windows gaming the richest market for games since a proper market for games exists?

Yes! Today is a good day to reread Phil Haack’s 2014 essay on the lengths MS goes to for backwards compatibility: https://haacked.com/archive/2014/05/27/backwards-compatibili...

Edit: Haack heavily cites Raymond Chen from 2003: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42...

On the flip side, supporting all that backward compatibility has been a massive anchor on Microsoft's ability to move Windows forward from decisions made in the past.

Yeah Microsoft is a like King John signing the Magna Carta to keep the thrown. Apple is like Louis XIV.

I believe you mean throne.

Still, as developer on the JVM I find the concept of a "Game of throwns" exceptional.

Ahah, "Game of throwns". Can only imagine the disaster :D

Be sure to catch every episode.

And optionally rethrow.

Oops!

And of course Sinofsky from this summer.

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-relentless-stra...

Apple is also delivering some immediate obvious value to make for the migration pain, given the huge battery life increase and what look like substantial performance gains over the previous models.

Oh, sure, and Enterprise SKUs are going to be pinned into those holes forever, but Microsoft could've been more aggressively pushing their platform on the consumer side if they wanted to make any of the changes they've tried in the last ten years stick.

The view from the outside on every Windows platform initiative in the past year is dismal failure, even if the platform has incrementally benefitted a bit from each.

Most software is effectively still written on the same platform it would've been for Windows 7. That's a bad look for everyone building everything there since.

Even internally: Microsoft's own platforms largely failed to embrace UWP. If your own internal developers aren't buying in, why would anyone else?

If you liked apple because it ran your Mac apps, you already got off that train when they moved to Intel in the first place.

No, you got off that train during the 68K to PPC transition.

6502 to 68k

I actually did leave Mac at 68000 to 68020 transition. Color was interesting but too much money for a high school kid... Cue a shiny 386 for which you could by Turbo Pascal!!

Now that was a real disaster that made me leave the Apple ecosystem.