Blackberry fell, because their phones were shit and they fucked up their launch of app store. Keyboard alone almost had no impact on their failure. And there were other keyboarded phones like Sony X10 Mini Pro, HTC Dream.
Making experience ass for majority to make poor experience for super tiny minority is stupid. Windows Mobile and Windows should never be same OS and should be treated so. Just like iOS wasn't Mac OS back in the day. The only reason why they merge them is to reduce development costs of the products into one product. Otherwise, no self respecting developer would ever try to pull this shit. You can't make mobile interface work well on desktop, just like you can't make desktop interface for well on mobile stuff. It's not moving forwards, it's only moving forward in terms of Microsoft finances, about which I don't care.
And btw tablet sales have been pretty much in toilet after initial iPad hype. they became niche thing just like they always were. Even fucking hybrids and 2 in 1s probably outsell them now. So they were stupid device that nobody wanted, but due to Apple clout and hype sold for a while well. Yay. Now they went to their graveyard.
It likely wasn't the reason either. I heard that half charged batteries survive longer in shipping and have lower chance of arriving faulty. Keeping lithium battery flat out empty is likely hurting their lifespan.
Pretty much since Windows 7 has been in existential crisis over what it wants to be. To please Karens or to be a proper power user OS, now that is a question.
In my country at least 70% of Windows users use cracked Windows anyway, so lol
Or Microsoft shouldn't have fired their beta testers and QA department, but as long as they save money...
They don't even try hard. 11 is just 10 with lipstick. 10 was 7 with lipstick. Vista was 7 beta. XP was just like 95. 8.1 was a real experiment and I could see its appeal, but once they angered office Karens, tablet Karens had to shut up and accept that 10 won't be so tablet oriented.
Jesus, stop scaring little kids. Microsoft and open source. Sun will sooner hit Earth than Microsoft doing that.
On serious note, Windows RT was pretty good, but it flopped, because there weren't enough quality software on Microsoft store. Now that was a proper tablet OS and it didn't anger desktop users. MS should have just sticked with that and made RT for tablets forever and Windows for office Karens and nerds forever. Xbox shit could be integrated later on both and as suggestion, not as something showed down our throats. All these excuses and rationalization about 11 are just because it's a sucky OS and it won't work all that well on tablet and on desktop. It's a poop solution to both, instead of elegant forking.
That's why I mentioned "few other brands" as well
, but even android brands ended up giving up on the keyboard. I never said that the keyboard was a reason for failure, but that people didn't saw the keyboard as a must have feature, and now you have the gen Z who grew up with virtual keyboard and are really good with them.
Tablet sales are growing:
Worldwide Tablet Market Shares, 1Q21: After Recording Hypergrowth for Most of 2020, the Tablet Market in the New Year Continued to Ride the Wave (idc.com)
Worldwide Tablet Shipments Return to Growth in 2020, Fueled by Unprecedented Demand, according to IDC
Canalys: Surging tablet sales offset desktop PC declines in Q2 2020 | VentureBeat
and Hybrids don't outsell them, but this sudden growth also coincide with the moment that tablet stopped being bigger phones and started to have and an interface and apps of their own.
this doesn't look like a failing market to me:
I mean...
Microsoft Open Source | Microsoft Open Source
I remember people saying that GitHub is doomed when Microsoft bought them...the Tech world is still scarred by the Gates/Ballmer era, but I honestly feel like Microsoft has become softer. I mean a linux subsystem inside Windows?
Just to be clear, I'm merely explaining the reasoning as to why Microsoft hasn't just been selling a glorified Windows 2000 for decades, computers aren't just a nerd affair anymore, the world into which win 2000 was born and the world right now are quite different, so they had to adapt and cater to a mainstream audience...But I'm not saying that make a perfect job at it ( I still think that people are sometimes going overboard with the criticism, there's a lot of admin tools that I can't uninstall and that I have no use for, but I'm not mad about them ) The issue is that unlike macOS who's really focused on their target, windows is schizophrenic visually and functionally.
macOS was always meant to be mainstream, simple, and ready to use for most common task out of the box with their bundled software. That was always the pitch, and that was always why people bought macs. Windows background is different, it's complex, you had so much control over it that you could break it if you were careless or went too hard with the optimizer tools
. It's the "default" OS because the computers are cheap, most programs and games are there, but windows itself isn't really "sexy". Alternative ISO, and tools always tried to make the base Windows better
Now Windows is trying to be like macOS, an OS that a mainstream user won't feel the need to enhance so much...some stuffs are good like the multi desktop, the clipboard history...but they are still oblivious to tabs in the explorer, being able to have a quick look at a file when pressing space, or colors and tags for folders, but are doing weird niche things like paint 3D, or how they don't implement video screen recording into the snapshot tool, but don't tell you that the xbox shortcut can record the whole screen, not just games, so you don't actually need OBS for that.
When people are saying that a version of windows was good, they just meant that it wasn't bugged, or offensive, and they were still installing add-ons to make the basic experience better. That's why I'm considering that the intent to add new functionalities isn't bad, but the windows team need to really focus on productivity tools first and entertainment later. Right now macOS looks like a more serious OS when it's supposed to be the funny one
I agree that they should have kept the beta testing, but people don't daily drive beta version, beta testing is good to see how people react to new things, find bugs, but it's not great to see how people use windows on a day-to-day basis for their main usages. And beta testers are still a small data set who tends to be tech savvy
Why iPod Batteries Come Fully Charged: How Your Design Wins Customers (entrepreneurship.org)
Most of the stuff that I'm saying are coming from books that I've read about UX design, and my studies in post grad digital design, we had a whole course about how gathering data is important to make a product, but there's isn't a perfect way to do it, you either got methods that generate small amounts of data, and can be dishonest, since people knows that they are being tested, so they act in a different manner, or methods that are invasive, but really effective and truthful.
It's an odd decision because windows for workstation could have taken a place in the VFX industry where Linux is traditionally preferred for the cost, the customizability, and the sheer speed of the OS, but ho well. (Maya, substance painter, nuke, renderman are programs who are natively available on Linux, but windows could have enjoyed the edge of having access to the adobe suite, zbrush etc...)
