So apparently MS is giving up on mobile. Interestingly, I\u2019m still using a Windows Phone but I also have a gig where I help people with their devices, all of them being Android and iOS.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not pretty. I realized that people don\u2019t care about their devices. They mostly buy photo specs. They buy an expensive phone for the status and even that is not really a thing anymore. The UI, the features, the battery life? They don\u2019t care. They are absolutely overwhelmed by choice \u2013there are multiple ways to do a lot of things- and don\u2019t bother, they hand their phones over to someone who will do it for them. This is not generational. Young folks, older folks behave the same. \u201cI can\u2019t connect to the wifi, please do it for me\u201d.<\/p>\n
People get confused with their multiple screens, multiple folders and icons that disappear into the homescreen background. I see them spend most of their time navigating to avoid things instead of navigating to reach thing. That\u2019s not good UI design, it means that there are too many things going on. iOS is a little cleaner and concise, but not by much. Windows Phone tile system is better, to this day. <\/p>\n
The hardware made by Nokia, was and is better. I\u2019ve had four Windows Phones, one made by Samsung and three others by Nokia. they all work like they did on the first day. One of the cheap Nokia got abused to no end, falling, exploding on the ground (cover, battery out), it has not a single scratch<\/strong>. Not one. I\u2019m still using the stock charger with the stock USB cable. The cable is almost dead after years of absurd abuse \u2013nothing destroys phone cables like working in TV- but it still works. I saw iPhones shatter in the most ridiculous ways. I witnessed people buying an iPhone cable a week.<\/p>\n Windows Phones were disregarded because they were too good. Just on hardware dying, Apple and Google sold three to four times more items. Microsoft and Nokia with their phones strong as shit couldn\u2019t stand a chance. Don\u2019t forget how the business works: carriers are at the top. They need to sell data plans. they subsidize phones that die left and right, you upgrade phone\/plan every time. They\u2019re happy. Throw in phones that don\u2019t need anything and carriers end up doing support for free, not selling anything. They\u2019re not happy.<\/p>\n Developers? Yeah, they make no sense financially, as usual. They were scared that MS would have a monopoly with a store, they made it a reality with Apple so, whatever they say. Google did everything they could to not help MS in any way (that YouTube bullshit). Microsoft fucked up hard there though: their first approach \u2013polish, few features, security first- was good but then instead of acting like a group of seasoned folks who know what they\u2019re talking about because they have been making operating systems for a long time, even on mobile, the race intensified and they started to play catch up while being completely weird on the backend side (showing developers that they didn\u2019t know what they were doing). They decided to re-organize the company at the worst time ever.<\/p>\n Anyway my point is: when you design something, you have to make a stance. You can\u2019t be \u201cI think it\u2019s pretty cool\u201d you need to be \u201cthe rest is not good. We tried that. We have a better idea. We have huge ass experience that none of y\u2019all have. Hear us out.\u201d Look at notifications, MS was right from the start. Don\u2019t allow them, it\u2019s a FOMO-inducing design and it drains battery life like a motherfucker. In 2017 I see articles and comments where people share their \u201ctricks\u201d to avoid notifications like uninstalling apps etc. I mean. Really?<\/p>\n But Microsoft is a company that was build by and on dads, if I may. Dads are not asshole designers, dads follow. Dads don\u2019t create trends, they buy them for their daughters.<\/p>\n The biggest example of this paradox is the original Surface with Windows 8. Pretty fantastic V1 product. five years later, most manufacturers have a Surface-like computer and the clean full-screen square, rectangle interfaces and buttons are everywhere from Snap to Roku. The dads company had figured shit out before everyone else. Give credit where credit is due.<\/p>\n They just didn\u2019t know how to position themselves with so much innovation. They had that terrible dancing commercial running on TV and that\u2019s it. They should have gone full Steve Jobs and declare the desktop dead and move on from there. But you know, dads. Dads don\u2019t brag and even less scathe. And people are not actively sustaining competition or avoiding the creation of silos. They jump right in and regret later.<\/p>\n Almost ten years with a smartphone. What do I do most with it? Text messages, like it\u2019s 2009 on my Blackberry. I check emails but like a lot of people I don\u2019t reply from my phone because usually I\u2019m on the go and don\u2019t have time for that. I barely use maps and GPS now that I know LA pretty well. I take pictures and don\u2019t even upload them in full size because it takes too long. My mom complained the other day because sending pictures was slow. 3K by 2K pixels is a lot of data for a mildly interesting vacation landscape. I tweet or read tweets but that doesn\u2019t require more technology than ten years ago though Twitter tries. FB shows me whatever it wants so I completely stopped using it on my phone.<\/p>\n The mobile market is crazy hard and expensive so it makes sense to stay away from it when you\u2019re not #1 or #2. In terms of UI design and flow, MS executives should have shown some spine, iterated on design and told journalists, \u201cyou\u2019re understanding it wrong\u201d while wearing turtlenecks, smiling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So apparently MS is giving up on mobile. Interestingly, I\u2019m still using a Windows Phone but I also have a gig where I help people with their devices, all of them being Android and iOS. It\u2019s not pretty. I realized that people don\u2019t care about their devices. They mostly buy photo specs. They buy an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2425,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2424\/revisions\/2425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}