[quadrifoliate]

> Windows Phone was a miles ahead of droid and iOS and lost only due to the anti-microsoft culture of silicon valley.

It was painful as hell to develop for Windows Phone. You had to use Windows on the laptop you were developing on, and go through licensing crap for that. Then you had to install Visual Studio, and then some weird addon to that. They were losing developers at every stage of this process, and would never admit that the process was a pain or try to simplify it. (My guess is that all three of these were handled by different departments at Microsoft who were forced to integrate with each other's products).

So in my opinion, it has nothing to do with anti-Microsoft culture, but more to do with the fact that Microsoft was too arrogant to realize that they were the underdog in this race by a significant margin.

[sumtechguy]

Former WincCE 2.x/3.x dev here. I had to work in this platform for a few years due the hardware my company wanted to ship.

MS really could have owned that market. ActiveSync made sure they didn't. They were a good 3-4 years ahead of everyone else tech wise. However, their dev stack was awful and full of gotchas. Apple and Google imploded that and made it easy to dev for. Their crazy BOM build system was a fork of visual studio 6 which was cobbled together with CMD scripts. Then on top of that the OS arch was different than pretty much anything else. There were some seriously bad spots where if you used the wrong system dll you could crash the box. Oh you need a new firmware to fix that good luck as there is no built in firmware update on your box. Have fun spending 2 months getting that patched firmware out of the company too.

Your guess about different depts is almost right. They also outsourced portions of it. Some parts were internal. The licencing around it was byzantine. Also portability was shoddy. That was due to the MIPS/ARM ISA environment. Every phone was slightly different from each other (you can see similar issues today with ARM dev boards). x86 did not end up there as IBM compat was king and if you didnt have that no one bought your board, ARM/MIPS do not have that type of market force. You had to in some cases ship an executable for each phone. Then on top of that the phone carriers wanted to charge 40-50 dollars per megabyte sent/recv.

[Stierlitz]

@sumtechguy: “Former WincCE 2.x/3.x dev here. I had to work in this platform for a few years due the hardware my company wanted to ship. MS really could have owned that market”

WincCE, WinCE, you cannot be serious. WinCE was produced as a response to the ‘Palm Pilot’. WinCE ran on a “Palm PC”, not to be confused with the “Palm Pilot”. Palm sued and Microsoft renamed it to "Palm-sized PC" or the ‘Palm PC’. MS really could have owned the market with the TRON real-time operating. Microsoft did joint the TRON consortium and then lobbied to have it excluded from the North American market.

https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-settles-palm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/microsoftjoinst-engineforum....

[sumtechguy]

fair enough...

[encom]

I don't see how that's different from Apple locking developers into their own crappy tools.

[quadrifoliate]

Firstly, around the time this started (~2009), Apple was starting to make OS upgrades free for a bunch of users for instance. Their software rarely failed to install, and almost never threw weird errors around licensing. Neither did Android's.

And secondly, remember what I said around being the underdog. Apple had first mover advantage in this field, they could afford to make their tools a little more annoying and still have developers sign up. Microsoft was the underdog, they should have given away a free copy of Windows with all the Visual Studio crap preloaded to developers; that would have gone a long way towards getting developer mindshare. But that would not have made sense to the revenue obsessed execs at Microsoft, and so did not happen.