• Dra@lemmy.zip
    0·
    5 months ago

    This is what happens when you spend your whole existence corporate brown nosing. Every forced chuckle at the bosses bad joke, every falsely optimistic outlook, eventually rots your soul.

    You end up so dishonest that you become unable to tell reality from your own manufactured optimism, and it spreads to all parts of your life.

    You become unable to acknowledge hard truth about your relationships with other people, and instead just optimise for the aesthetics of tedious niceties instead of anything with substance.

    Your kids think you are a loser, Your wife loses respect for you. You still merrily greet them every morning, but are unable to see the disinterested response.

    She seeks emotional fulfilment elsewhere, you are unable to see the signs, you wallpaper over your own instincts with “maybe she’s tired” and “she can have her own friends!”.

    She divorces you after hoping for years you would get the hint and do it first.

    You are alone in your new economy apartment after downsizing from the house sale. You like it, it’s all you need really after all!

    You look at your Windows phone on the bare table. The battery died after you were on it to the utilities people all day. You pick it up.

    You see the face of an old, broken man smiling vaguely back at you.

    You cry.

    • alekwithak@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      They killed a good product that people liked (CE) to push a bad product that no one liked and then blamed everyone else when that product failed. Reminds me of a primary from a few years back…

      • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        The people who used Windows Phones loved them. The UI was great, live tiles were legitimately the best, and integrating social media apps into your “people” feed was genius.

        It just sucks that it didn’t get third-party app support from developers.

  • LittleBorat2@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months ago

    Aren’t there still “tiles” in modern windows? These things that don’t really fit on a desktop system.

    MS’ revenge because we did not throw away our phones and bought their product.

  • TotalSonic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Steve Ballmer lacked two things: vision and taste, - and his personal lackings ended up coloring all of MS’s efforts and products during his tenure as CEO.

      • TotalSonic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Yeah, I think the only thing Ballmer has ever respected is money, he seems to me just a bean counter and obnoxiously hyped up “salesguy” in his personality, with not much depth beyond that.

    • daq@lemmy.sdf.org
      0·
      4 months ago

      Even though Ballmer was ceo during release, it was definitely the fucking moron Satya that buried Windows Phone.

  • CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    I miss those days. Back then, cell phones were far more affordable and there was real innovation. Back then there were so many different vendors and so many OS’s, things were actually exciting.

    Now it’s just Apple or Android prices are out of control, features get removed so they can sell you something, and there’s no innovation.

    • TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      No innovation?

      Over the last few years they’ve innovated ways to do away with removable/replaceable batteries, headphone ports, and SD card slots while also making the phone entirely out of glass and sticking the front facing camera obnoxiously right in the middle of the top of my screen. If that isn’t progress, what is?

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
      0·
      5 months ago

      I don’t know about more affordable. I’ve paid around the same price for like 15 years and while cheap smartphones used to be total shit now even the cheaper ones do a fine job. I think the price on “adequate” stuff has gone down but the upper tiers have just gotten more expensive.

      • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        5 months ago

        Yea people forget you don’t have to buy the latest more expensive phone. I have a nord, about 300 to 400 bucks. It’s great. My mom has the latest Samsung, paid a grand and she doesn’t use 90 percent of the features. It’s ridiculous.

          • NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml
            0·
            5 months ago

            I got a Pixel 6pro for €280 the year before. That will be fine for many years to come.

            I stopped buying flagship phones when they went above €500 or so. And these days I wonder why I ever wanted them.

  • BigMoe@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    I feel like if Microsoft had been much faster to Market (like faster than Android), they could have gotten business users and companies to switch to them. By the time they came, people were invested in iOS or Android and business users who had switched from BlackBerry went to iOS

    • Venator@lemmy.nz
      0·
      5 months ago

      Also almost every app had a iOS and android version and without a big userbase there was no incentive to make another version for windows phone as well. So if they’d got it to market sooner before android took off, a lot of app devs might have made a windows version instead of an android version.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        But they were first to market!

        The had a smartphone 7 years before Apple. The app store problem was they couldn’t believe consumers would pick a device where you had to buy apps from Apple. Windows phone was like Windows desktop. You went to a store and bought a CD with the app or you went to a website and downloaded it.

        There were custom touch friendly skins for Windows phone even before the iPhone.

        They only needed to put skin on Windows Phone, up the hardware specs, coral the existing apps into a store, and they could have matched the iPhone immediately. Instead the new Windows phone team created to compete with the iPhone fell for the old “this needs a complete rewrite” trap that new developers always fall for. Worse, they dropped the 7 phone and did another complete rewrite for the 8 phone.

        • Nollij@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          It seems you’re confusing Windows Phone with Windows Mobile. They really are (were) separate products with minimal overlap

          • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
            0·
            5 months ago

            Yeah, I used the wrong marketing names. They kept changing the name every few years Windows CE, Palm sized PC, PocketPC, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone. I switched to Android after Windows Mobile. My point was they didn’t have to be separate. Windows CE with data came out 9 years before the iPhone. There was a large market of apps. I had a Philips Nino in 1998. It had voice recognition for simple tasks (“Nino dial Chris”) and a cf slot to add features like a modem.

            There were third party skins for Windows CE that added finger friendly touch so you didn’t need the stylus for most things. Windows and Office were successful because they never threw out everything and started over. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/

    • Raxiel@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      A phone shop managed to palm one off on my FIL around the same time MS threw in the towel. He was using it until last Christmas when we got him a replacement due to it not having LTE and the 3g signal being switched off in the UK last month.
      When I say he used it, I mean he could make and receive calls, and could read (but not send) texts. The lack of app support never bothered him because he never needed a smartphone in the first place. We got him a flip phone with physical keyboard and VoLTE. I had to use the WP a bit while dealing with the network to get a new 4g SIM and the UI, while alien, was surprisingly snappy for such an old device.

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
      0·
      5 months ago

      I owned two! One died after several years of service, so I bought another, then MS dropped support a few months after I bought it with Windows Phone 8/7.5 and I never bought another one again.

      It is was an awesome OS that Google tried really hard to strangle to death.

    • Pacmanlives@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      I actually really liked them. I was super excited to see what they would do with it once they bought Nokia to have that tight hardware control like iPhone/Pixel. Just a little bit head of its time in certain ways

    • Dagamant@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      I had one too, I really liked it. Only problems I ran into were things like credit card readers not working because the apps didn’t have the same access to hardware that they had on other devices. Otherwise I definitely preferred it over android.