[shados]

I know it's not quite the same and is a lot more complicated, but...

What was Microsoft (PocketPC) and Palm's lead in hand held computing back in the days, right before Apple shit over everything they did in one announcement?

Wearable as currently imagined kind of suck. Making them better while keeping the same concept is just gonna make something that sucks faster/lighter. Someone needs to come in and take the world by storm with something we didn't think of yet. Maybe that will STILL be Apple, but it could be someone else.

[pjmlp]

In what concerns Microsoft, if they had doubled down on WP7 model (Silverlight + XNA) and just opened the C and C++ toolchain to app developers (NDK style), instead of rebooting the ecosystem multiple times, their stuff would probably still be around.

[MichaEiler]

Thank you. I was wondering about this too. Breaking app compatibility between WP7 and WP8 was IMHO the death sentence for the platform...

[pjmlp]

Except that doing it once wasn't enough.

8.0 had separate models for phone, tablet and desktop.

Then 8.1 unified tablet and desktop, while keeping phone apart for view code, so UAP was born.

With Win10 everything got merged together as UWP and the whole One Core marketing happened.

Then since the WinDev team had some score to settle, C++/CX was deprecated and replaced by C++/WinRT, which to this day after 4 years in development, still expects developers to manually edit IDL files and the generated code without any kind of Visual Studio tooling support.

Now they have WinUI 3.0 with 1700+ issues on Github, with Project Reunion just hitting 0.8, with the very long term roadmap of unifying everything, assuming it doesn't get canned as well.

So most of us that believed on the ideas behind WinRT just gave up, and went back to classical Forms/WPF/Win32.