[cyberax]

Yeah, especially funny since they had the early lead with their iPaq PDAs and Windows CE. Which they completely squandered by ignoring them.

Then they acquired Nokia that already had an almost-ready ecosystem of apps, with good snappy UI. And then spent two years building a (shitty) framework on top of the long-neglected Windows CE kernel. Which was known from the start to be a stopgap solution before they port the full WinNT kernel.

[hakfoo]

The difference is that iOS was clearly designed to wow the consumer. It was shiny, it offered the promise of full-scale web browsing and the established media ecosystem. It was not a power tool. (remember the first versions didn't even offer third-party apps).

Windows CE/Mobile was heavily shaped by the corporate presence. People didn't queue up at midnight at Best Buy to buy CE devices, they were sent down from IT and ran a handful of bespoke line-of-business apps. People associated them with big clunky barcode scanner devices, not sleek hi-fi media players. It had all the consumer charm of a corporate lanyard and ID badge.

I'm not sure they could have respun the existing product to get that to "sexy consumer facing item" without a huge rework anyway. And the rework was excellent-- I liked Windows Phone enough to own 3 (a Lumia 1020, then replacing it with a 530 after the screen broke, and a bargain 640 as a modest upgrade) The experience was smooth even on the bottom-range device and it felt more holistically designed than contemporary Android.