>(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.

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[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.