Comment by dpark
8 years ago
The set of people interested in running external DACs for their phones is vanishingly small. I’m pretty sure that losing that market wasn’t what doomed Windows Phone.
Regardless, my point wasn’t that the hardware was perfect for everyone or every use case. The point was that there were premium Windows Phone devices before the 950 showed up. The 950 arrived after the end state for Windows Phone was pretty obvious.
> The set of people interested in running external DACs for their phones is vanishingly small.
The point is that everybody is a different niche. If you start this attitude that feature X is uncommon and not worth the effort, then you do that for a thousand feature X's, eventually you make a product for no one and since you can't predict what niche feature X will suddenly become more important later, the future doesn't happen on your platform.
I have talked to far too many people at MS who have exactly this dismissive attitude about every single feature.
The “features” missing from Windows Phone were mostly high quality 3rd party apps. Windows Phone had a ton of great features in itself.
As a dev (at Microsoft), I’m well aware of the potential risk of dismissing features. However, I’m also aware that features are not free. Everyone who actually ships has to make tradeoffs. You can’t ship every feature so you have to cut ones that you think are low value (to the customer or the business, depending on how you look at it).
I spent time at MS too, and I have worked on a WP app, and I don't think my comment has been grokked here. It was the app platform I was thinking of the most that was missing lots of features, and I would say the whole approach to how the app platform people exposed device capabilities was both wrongheaded and not at parity with what the other guys did. And instead of being aware of this gap and taking corrective action, they doubled down into Raymond Chen style "every feature starts at minus 100 points", which works well if you have a desktop monopoly but not as well in a truly competitive market, and meanwhile can be used to justify a lot of bad behavior.
I don't think the whole answer fits in a comment box though. If you have interest in learning more offline I can explain it further.
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