Comment by jasoneckert a day ago
The smooth, tile-based interface of Metro/Modern UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone are underrated in my opinion. It was simple, fast, and focused on touch. While I didn't have a touch-based Windows 8 laptop or tablet at the time, I had a Windows Phone, and I enjoyed using it more than any other device I've had since.
I found a PDF that confirms the story I heard, and also has information I wasn't aware of until today:
https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0411/sidekick...
Details are on page 3.
* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.
* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.
* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.
So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):
It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.
It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.
And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.
In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.
> I always thought it was hilarious that a company called Danger lost everybody's data. The connection to Microsoft only makes it better.
Cursed marketing.
Besides the fact that we didn't have any real money to promote phones at T-Mobile (and I think we were the only US carrier with the hiptop) -
Would you believe that the first hiptop came out the same week as 9/11?!
So it was this phone that was arguably two-ish years ahead of the iPhone, but nobody seemed to know it existed, until it got some traction via sheer word of mouth. Everyone who used the HipTop basically wouldn't go back to anything else at all. The HipTop had that 'addictive' quality that the iPhone had. It was nothing like the Blackberry, where people largely used it for a single killer app.
It was announced in Sep 2001, came out in Oct 2002 (these long waits were then common for mobile phones).
I first read a review of it in a Mar 2003 magazine.
Yep. My boss came over to me that morning, asked if I'd seen the news, and basically said that if it turned out that I built the servers wrong, it would be firing time.
I kept my job.
It turned out that the reason that Paris Hilton and so many celebrities got hacked was:
* the password to her cloud storage account was the name of her dog
* once the hackers had access to her cloud storage, they could use that to get authentic phone numbers for half of the entertainment industry, because Paris Hilton was so well-connected socially.
AFAIK, nobody ever managed to get access to the servers illegitimately. The demise of the service was a failed back up of the Hitachi SAN.
Hope you at least got a sincere appology afyer that spurious accusation.
Honestly, unless it was said clearly in jest as their ass was in the same boat, that is such an extremely incompetent management communication.
I unironically loved my Windows Phone, it was great to develop for too coming from a WPF background at the time
It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.
No, the death of Windows Phone was 95% the fault of MS/Nokia.
Pre-announcing that they were leaving all Winphone 7 customers behind for Winphone 8 meant that every retailer/distributor was left with unsellable stock (because they hadn't gained enough traction to sell out initial shipments).
If this was because Nokia made bad/cheap phones that were un-upgradeable or MS being arrogant isn't something I'm remembering anymore but the end-result was pissed retailers and nobody selling WP8.
The spec for wp8 was a lot higher than wp7. There was a bit change from WinCE kernel to WinNT kernel, etc. Without much confidence, I think wp8 was dual core or higher and wp7 was single core... and maybe there was a ram upgrade too.
All that said, WP8 did a lot better than WM10, where the WP8 phones were promised to be upgradable, and then the promise was walked back for low mem phones, and the experience was poor for qualifying phones anyway.
The final build of WM10 was actually ok on my Lumia 640; but that was way after everything was canceled and mobile Edge (this was the first non Chrome Edge) was still less usable than mobile IE, even though the renderer was better.
The really poor rollout of wm10, plus the tradition of forcing developers to make split builds to support multiple versions of windows phone/mobile made things pretty bad at the end. Calling the build for WM10 only 'universal' was icing on the cake. Android has all sorts of problems, but you can have a single APK that works on lots of versions, with some amount of new features get pushed to old OS with libraries and some new features have to be detected at runtime and use alternate flows. On the other hand, Microsoft kept making new features require using new foundation libraries that were unavailable on old phones. WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WP8.1 -> WM10 was too many step changes and developers bailed at each one. Meanwhile on the desktop, a 32-bit win32s application targeting windows 3.1 has a good chance of running on windows 11.
Also, they managed to make upgrade from wp8 to wm10 break installed apps sometimes. That wasn't great.
#notbitter
Retailers couldn't sell what the carriers didn't want on their networks. The carriers had momentum from consumer demand to keep selling iPhones. The carriers were given a lot of the "keys to the car" by Android and carriers were really happy with the ability to modify Android and/or micro-manage it, so they had a lot of incentive to focus on Android.
In the US, Windows Phone tried for the "iPhone experience", which made carriers unhappy and less likely to want to sell it, which ultimately left it the case in the US at a point where only one US carrier at a time was even "exclusively" selling the latest Windows Phone hardware, and only through its dedicated retailers. It took too long for Microsoft to also realize that part of the iPhone plan in the first place was direct to consumer sales and pressuring the phone carriers to provide SIMs rather than making "exclusive" hardware deals with carriers and hoping other carriers would try to compete for buying your hardware as well.
> In the US, Windows Phone tried for the "iPhone experience", which made carriers unhappy
Carriers were especially unhappy that Microsoft bought Skype at the time and tried to run it as a loss-making business to undermine carrier voice and messaging revenues.
That was the final nail in the coffin. The reason why they didn't hit adoption in the first place is because Google prohibited their application on MS devices. Mobile YouTube already wasn't good enough, and without the rest of the GSuite (Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Calendar, Translate) it was dead in the water. And no, HERE maps and third-party clients were not good enough to tip the scale.
I put the blame squarely on Microsoft, how they released a turd with WP7 (a shiny one with responsive UI, but nonetheless a turd).
About phone OS upgrades, remember the HTC HD2 which originally released with WM6.5 but could be upgraded to WP7 and then to WP8 through after-market community ROMs. It was also Microsoft's decision to not officially allow that.
The XDA and Compaqs etc were WAY ahead of what anyone else had (even better than Sony’s PDAs) and yet they totally fumbled their lead
There are dozens of us. Loved the Lumia hardware, loved maybe not that lack of polish in places but the overall UI vision was mostly well executed. Its rigid experience across apps feels quaint now, but if we had this focus now, we wouldn’t be seeing the Light Phone, b/w UI hacks, etc pop up.
Spont on, I always considered WinRT, .NET Native, C++/CX is what COM evolution should have been back in 2001, instead of the J++ reboot.
However the way Microsoft has messed it all up, no one is left besides Windows team and some hardcode believers, to care about WinRT/WinUI any longer than what is only available via WinAppSDK.
Nokia's hardware managed to prove to me, that plastic done RIGHT, is just as good if not more practical than the metals we have today. They looked fantastic, legitimately didn't require a case, and held up very well.
Some time after Apple discontinued the plastic Macbooks, I took mine in to get the battery replaced.
I remember overhearing one of the sales folk having to explain to a woman that they can't sell her the white ones, only metal ones as she preferred the chunky plastic.
Nokias hardware has always been pretty good. Heck, some of the nokia branded HMD stuff is well built for the price
How many abandoned attempts do you feel the Microsoft mobile developer ecosytem could take before losing all faith in yet another MS mobile strategy?
In the mobile space, there was no market for just Windows Phone apps. You needed to support native Android and iOS already. WP was just another burden without a clear return.
In their desperation they started paying college students for developing apps for the platform, leading to low quality experiences.
They pushed WP hard to their channel. Many employees in MS system integrators and managed services got very cheap phones, but outside that group, just nobody bought them before in the end they started dumping them to the masses as cheapest phone in the store, but there ain't no serious market there either.
It was about 10% in Europe when they killed it, many people that could not go for Apple due to their prices where actually going for Windows Phone, because the native code (WinRT/.NET Native/C++/CX), provided a much better experience in low end phones than Dalvik with its lousy JIT was capable of at the time.
I was one of them, initially getting a Lumia as second phone even though as ex-Nokia I was kind of pissed off, developing for UAP/UWP grew on me and was much more fun than dealing with Android.
Now given how Microsoft has messed up the whole UWP, Project Reunion and WinUI/WinAppSDK I would assert there is no faith left.
I bought a 4G Nokia 3310 yesterday, and to be honest, it’s actually not bad!
I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.
Live tiles are nearly universally praised in retrospect, but it might be a case of hindsight bias [1]. The video [2] brings up some problems of the concept and why no other company copied the concept.
I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.
Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.
(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)
Are live tiles universally praised? I see them mentioned positively occasionally, but I suspect they are getting some benefit… like, they are the Windows 8 feature that isn’t immediately obnoxious. Windows 8’s UI just didn’t have any redeeming features, so the element that is merely bad gets brought up as a sort of “see I’m not a relentlessly negative hater, I’m objective” thing, I bet. Is there a name for this trope?
I'm sure there was some meeting where at the end of the pitch deck was some one said:
"...and after people acclimate to them, we'll put ads there! Advertising Directly in the UI!"
The problem MS created was WP7 was a technical dead end: a feature phone OS with a Silverlight UI, which was almost impossible to bypass, hurting third party support a lot.
WP8 was a far "better" OS, but it came with higher system requirements more comparable with Android.
Google never got enough crap on for their stunts with youtube in that era though.
It's hard to fault Microsoft for doing what they did with WP7, though. They needed to make a statement that they were still committed to phones since WinCE was truly dead. So they made an MVP "Preview" of what the next Phone OS would be.
WP7 was sold to me in more like that language of "this is a quick MVP on the way to the next phone". It was exciting at that time in that way, seeing it as the hail mary pass of "What if we replaced WinCE with all the things we learned from the Zune? How quickly can we do a version of that which will give the right impression and set us up for the next 'real' version?"
Unfortunately yes, it wasn't sold to everyone with that perspective. I think Microsoft may have counted on developer enthusiasm a bit more to get the word across.
Also to be fair, that was still the era where "everyone" bought the new iPhone at launch and iOS compatibility was seen as somewhat equally spotty that if you didn't have the latest hardware you didn't expect the next iOS version to run well and you'd expect to get left behind on apps. It was also the era where Android was often non-upgradeable between versions on hardware (because carriers wouldn't "certify it") and you generally assumed an Android device was version locked to whatever OS version you bought it with. Microsoft may have felt somewhat safe needing a hardware jump between WP7 and WP8 exactly because that was de facto the case with iPhone and directly the case with Android at the time.
Touch-optimized UI on phone/tablet: Perfect.
Touch-optimized UI on desktops: One step away from where it belongs.
Touch-optimized UI on servers: Very very out of touch.
Firing sinofsky for it: Good.
Yeah I agree. It was a little weird without a touch screen, but at that point I was not navigating the start menu visually with a mouse anymore anyway.
Windows phone was great. I think I got it when Android was still growing up. I liked the focus and the speed for sure.
Microsoft's bread and butter is no longer OSes, I think, and it's unfortunately starting to show.
This. The “mobile-ization” of desktop interfaces is a bane on current computing. The metaphors of work between desktop and mobile devices are wildly different.
Obligatory car analogy: a mechanic working in his shop has a completely different set of tools available than if he was going into the field to fix a car.
Genuine question - what horrid menu is that? I'm using whatever version is in Debian Trixie (48), and haven't noticed anything new or different.
I really think GNOME is good at making an interface that works well on both, so is KDE to some extent with kirigami
> The ... UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone... underrated in my opinion. It was ... focused on touch.
That's why it was rated low. Most people were using this interface on PC's and laptops, without a touchscreen, where a touch-focused interface does not make sense. Maybe it was good choice for Windows Phone or Windows Tablet, but people were not rating it based on that experience. The very idea of using a single UI for both a touchscreen-oriented and no-touchscreen, kbd-and-mouse computers is the most problematic aspect of it.
> It was simple
No, it wasn't simple. There was the simple part, but things not integrated into the simple part were a hodge-podge of previous Windows versions' UI. Now, I like some of the previous Windows versions' UI, but putting a simple veneer on something does not make it simple; if anything, a little more complex.
> It was fast
The fact that an OS UI in the 2010s or 2020s need to be commended for being fast is kind of sad. Plus - I don't believe it was that fast. Did you try running it on, say, a 15yro machine relative to the Win8 launch time? i.e. 1998? Even with a 10yro machine I believe it was kind of sluggish.
I had an Android phone and my friend had a Windows Phone. I wanted to get a Windows phone but by the time I came around to needing a new device it was already killed off. Too bad.
If it wasn't for the T-Mobile Sidekick, Microsoft probably wouldn't have had to buy Nokia.
Here's the story:
I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)
The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.
In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.
*Here's the funny part:*
This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)
Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:
*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*
But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.
At some point, the backups failed.
Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.
While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.
One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.
*poof*
Gone forever.
The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...
I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)