Comment by modeless
1 day ago
> the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!
It showed
CE was a dog and probably a big part of the reason Windows Phone failed. Migrating off of it was a huge distraction and prevented the app platform from being good for a long time. I was at Microsoft and worked on Silverlight for a bit back then.
Windows phone 7's kernel was amazing. It was a complete rewrite from the old kernel and had incredible performance, minimal resource usage, and an amazing power profile.
IMHO the reason for Microsoft's failed phone venture was moving onto the windows kernel and 2xing system requirements.
Strongly disagree. Optimizing for resource usage above all else was the wrong thing. The developer experience was beyond awful. Terrible tooling. And poor resource isolation meant that it didn't recover from errors during development, needing constant reboots, like the bad old days of Windows 3 or classic Mac OS. There was no chance of building a decent app platform for third party native code on top of it because of that.
Phone hardware was exploding in capability at the time and the right thing was to lean into that and offer the same developer experience as on desktops with the same OS kernel, like Apple did from the beginning with Darwin and Android with Linux. Microsoft only realized too late.
Really? It’s always felt to me like it was app availability — for all the efforts, the app marketplace was a fraction of a fraction of the competitions’, and much like the network effects in social media, if you can’t catch up quickly, it can be almost impossible to ever do so. Haemorrhaging billions per quarter takes a strong stomach and a long vision, one that’s likely to put any executive’s tenure at risk. Nevertheless, it interesting to think what things might’ve looked like had Microsoft persisted another decade.