| I'm convinced it's because he wasn't a developer himself.
He chanted "developers" but never seemed to push for anything developers wanted. The moment Silverlight was announced, I was waiting for Microsoft to take on a cross-platform apps strategy crossing desktops/laptops, phones and Xbox (all platforms Silverlight was on). Looking into the SDKs and other info showed that each of these platforms were running a different build of Silverlight entirely, sporting separate APIs for the same features. Then Microsoft announced Windows 8, only for me to find that it doesn't run Windows Phone 7 apps. So they then later announce Windows Phone 8 which sports some of the API stack of Windows 8 but ultimately didn't run Windows 8 apps. Then they later release Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 which for the first time ran the same apps!
But still sported drastically different features, execution of the same features and even separate app stores (though Microsoft made up for this by letting devs link one purchase to both stores). And then there's Xbox One, which runs Windows 8 but sports a separate API stack and a separate store. I'm not sure if Nadella is the reason why, but the moment he stepped in we get Windows 10 for desktops/laptops, phones/tablets, Xbox One and more all sporting one unified app store and API stack, something I wanted to see Microsoft do since 2007 and I know I'm not alone in having wanted these things. Ballmer was clueless on the developer front. If he focused on developers the way he should've from the beginning, the Zune could've even survived.
It sounds silly, but the Zune was a pre-iPhone device running an offshoot of Windows Mobile with Wi-Fi.
How Microsoft didn't push to put a browser, apps and Xbox Live games on these things I can't comprehend.
Even if it wouldn't be the best experience, it would be an experience that largely didn't exist yet at the time. |