Damn, that's interesting!

Remember the Zune? Pretty sure they did the same thing then.

I used a windows phone for a while and while the ui was good, it failed in some critical ways and because the people at MS had their heads to far up their bosses asses, there was never a fix.

4 things that were game breakers (iirc, it's been a few years):

1. if you set the same alarm every day, then the alarm worked reliably. If you set a special recurring alarm for 1 day in the week (at the time I had to get up early every Friday), then that alarm would work once and then not anymore after that.

2. if someone send you an sms (or a number inside an sms), then it was not possible to add that number to contacts. You had to manually open contacts and type in the number.

3. the app store was forced localized and if you lived in a small market, you could only see reviews and review scores from that market. Not all apps where available either. With how few users windows phone had, there were no useful aggregated review scores available, only dodgy ones. Fortunately there was a user made app with which the global store could be opened, but as an out of the box experience, it sucked.

4. the app store was filled to the brim with the lowest quality shovelware in existence. I once went in to find if Firefox had an app and I found a shitload of apps called stuff like "install Firefox now", each for a small amount of money. So I went to Google and found that there was no Firefox app yet and those were all scam apps. If the Microsoft CEO then goes on the news and proudly proclaims how many apps their appstore has, then you also now that they had no intention of ever fixing this shit and it was going to stay shit forever.

Aged like milk.

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.

Such cultish behavior!

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.

I think they cut support for Windows Phones too soon, honestly. Should have stuck it out for longer.

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.

I actually liked the Windows phone that I had for a short while. It just didn't have the app support.