Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What's Your Beef With Windows Phone?
First time accepted submitter occasional_dabbler writes "Reviews by 'commentators' such as this one predict certain doom for both Nokia and Microsoft on the basis of the OS being a failure, yet whenever the Lumia handsets are reviewed in the mainstream press they are often highly praised. Windows phone is an immature OS, certainly, but it does pretty much everything you need in a smartphone, is getting better with each update and it is beautiful. I have a Lumia 800, and now I'm used to how it and the WP OS works I find it a painful process to go back to an Android or iPhone for some obscure app not yet supported on WP. WP gave me the same feeling I got when I bought my first iBook, fired up OS X 10.1 and realized I had just been shifted up a decade. So why so serious? What do Slashdotters who have really tried WP think of it?"
All those f*ckin' tiles drive me nuts! It's like a kindergardener's art project!
When Nokia effectively became a Microsoft subsidiary, they killed off all their linux-based cell phones. If that's not enough to enrage an average slashdotter, I don't know what is.
It's about as bad as when automotive bought up streetcar lines to destroy them and replace them with buses.
Slashdot might have an obsession over N900 linux brickphones and 20-year-old Microsoft crimes, but Windows Phone is a total failure on the consumer level. People would rather buy Motorola Droids even though the adverts feature ninjas and giant robots.
My theory is the Windows brand is heavily associated with your shitty XP work computer, and nobody wants that crap in their pocket.
I think you are right about this. With consumers, Windows as a brand has negative value. They would have been better off calling it an X-Phone. I know at one point Zune Phone was considered, but they were at least smart enough to avoid that. OTOH, they call their ARM Table OS "Win RT", so they are still clueless when it comes to marketing.
I'm sure there's at least some rational hate too.
Program Intellivision!
Not compatible with iTunes App Store content.
Beetween You/Apple/Microsoft, I would hardly blame Microsoft for you being locked in to some ITunes crap.
Probably some, but not all. The premise of the post is cloying. Not all of the reviews have been positive at all. The OS has any number of deficiencies, as noted by a number of professional (rather than blogging) reviewers:
1) Not very well-designed user interface; often primitive when compared to iOS and Android Honeycomb, even BBOS
2) Highly unevolved app market place; much perceived incompatibility with applications on mobile websites
3) Potentially shorter battery life
4) Fewer free apps
5) Uses Bing rather than Google (or Apple) services; Bing is seen as inferior, right or wrong (I'm neutral)
Some of it's irrational perception, some of it's that Microsoft responded to iOS and Android very slowly; it's taken a seeming lifetime (for the computerbiz) for them to even bring them to market. Worse, they're also seen tied to Nokia's phones, which while very nice phones, aren't popular in the smartphone arena because of Nokia's steadfast support of dying OS platforms. So the post itself isn't very astute and draws a conclusion that trolls responses, IMHO.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The rabies seems to have spread to the entire rest of the planet, too. 98 percent of smartphone buyers seem to "irrationally" not want Windows Phone phones whether they're slashdotters or not and despite the glowing reviews and spontaneous euphoria it induces in blog post commenters.
I'm a big slashdot fan, but it's not that influential.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm a Canadian so I'm not sure how true this is, but I think Europeans tend to look at disdain at Microsoft as a corporation. The were convicted as abusing their monopoly in the EU and in the US, but election of GWB gave them a free pass in the US penalty phase.
Having Nokia effectively surrender their crown jewels to Microsoft by a former Microsoft exec doesn't exactly do any favours to image of Nokia as a strong and vibrant company. Perception is more than half the battle to marketing, and marketing is a huge component to smart phones (very few people actually NEED one).
That's just from outside the fishbowl looking in. Also telegraphing your moves before you have a plan in place is such a dumb idea. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, Nokia should have milked all their 'legacy' technologies dry while working on the 'next great thing (whether it was with Microsoft or not).' Instead they drove a heart through their products publicly and called it a day.
Having been around /. for a very long time, now, it seems like there's definite opportunity to educate.
For a while now, Microsoft has been trying to "clean up" its image, but for anyone who's been around here for any amount of time will remember why they've needed to in the first place. History isn't a cheery place, and it makes no sense to try to look at it with rose tinted glasses. Steve Ballmer is still around, Gates still has influence, and the company hasn't really changed much. The software it has produced has increased in quality over time, but there are economic reasons for that.
The distaste for Microsoft is most definitely rational.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
30+ years of experience with Microsoft underlies that "hatred" that you so cavalierly dismiss as "irrational."
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me for decades and I must be a certified Microsoft specialist.
I actually had someone say to me yesterday "Talk with $x. He's a Microsoft Certified Professional Licensing Expert. He can answer all your licensing questions."
Really. Do you think your licensing system might be a tad bit fucked if you require a certification process to understand it?
I don't get the impression that the majority of people really care about MS's abusive behaviour or anything like that (even if they should).
You underestimate the influence of mavens. The average user is not going to drop dollars on a phone or phone plan if their favourite tech expert doesn't like it.
The notable exceptions here would be Windows and iOS, but for two very different reasons. People use Windows because everybody else uses Windows, and it would be just too inconvenient to change. It's a form of lock-in. People use iOS thanks to a combination of effective marketing and design.
Windows phone has little to no lock-in leverage, and MS and its partners have done nothing to pull millions of happy iphonesters away from Apple. Much like Linux on the desktop, it's not good enough for WPn to be as good as iOS, they have to be compellingly better--and convince people of this--to win mindshare at this point. In a karmic twist, MS now finds itself at both ends of this problem.
So with the average user feeling somewhat indifferent about Windows Phone, and their techy friends recommending iphones and android, MS stands without a market until they do something drastic and carve out their own, and it's been decades since they've done anything really significant in that vein.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
But Windows Phone has no excuse for being late to the party.
WinCE displaced PalmOS, to the extent that most of the Palm-brand phones had WinCE on them. Microsoft is NOT new to the smartphone market--they were there when it got started, before we were even sure we were going to call them smartphones.
Microsoft is not like Apple or Google; both of whom brought phone OSes to market when they had never produced a phone OS before. Apple had experience with Newton, ages ago, but all Google had was the ability to look for things.
That's part of why we're not cutting Microsoft any slack.
The other part is, all the people who said it was unacceptable that the iPhone didn't do X when version 1 or 2 were on the market means that Microsoft should ALREADY KNOW the system MUST do X. They didn't need to release "what they've got so far" to find out what customers really want, they can see what the market has already done.
And Microsoft is huge and has gobs of money; why SHOULD we cut them any slack? This isn't the clever little Silicon Valley start-up upstart taking on the Man. This is the Man.
I'm not the GP, but, well, yeah. You should hate the current tech landscape, too. It's awful, for the reasons outlined above.