It’s probably worth pointing out that Windows has very much not been developed for free. Up until Windows 8 and still today in some cases Windows license cost in the neighborhood of $250, and there are parts of the OS that have not changed since Windows 95, the format hard drive dialogue for instance. That’s before we even start mentioning how much they took from IBM to develop Windows secretly while helping IBM develop OS/2.
The App Store itself was the product of a creation of a unified code base between Xbox and Windows Phone and Windows and Windows RT, Then they threw that out with the bathwater because fuck Windows Phone for some reason.
Windows was sold that’s true and as you say the app store came with the attempt at a mobile / tablet OS.
Windows is well into the extract phase of the product. Microsoft missed the mobile boat and fewer and fewer people are buying laptops. Grandma gets by on a tablet etc. so things are just going to get worse and worse for Windows users going forward.
There was no attempt at making a mobile or tablet OS, they actually succeeded in unifying the code base. To this day there is only one operating system and it runs everything that runs “windows”. This is no different than the way Linux works or Apple’s Darwin works. That’s what they set out to achieve at Windows Vista and what they succeeded at around the time of the Xbox One. At that time, I as a developer could write one app and it would run on a Windows phone, a Windows tablet, the Xbox, and Windows PCs. Then they chose to kill that paradigm in favor of what we have today.
That’s what I was trying to point out, this was an intentional choice. They could go back to making Windows phones and tablets and shit and letting the unified app platform work the way it was supposed to at any time but they continue to choose not to.
It’s probably worth pointing out that Windows has very much not been developed for free. Up until Windows 8 and still today in some cases Windows license cost in the neighborhood of $250, and there are parts of the OS that have not changed since Windows 95, the format hard drive dialogue for instance. That’s before we even start mentioning how much they took from IBM to develop Windows secretly while helping IBM develop OS/2.
The App Store itself was the product of a creation of a unified code base between Xbox and Windows Phone and Windows and Windows RT, Then they threw that out with the bathwater because fuck Windows Phone for some reason.
Windows was sold that’s true and as you say the app store came with the attempt at a mobile / tablet OS.
Windows is well into the extract phase of the product. Microsoft missed the mobile boat and fewer and fewer people are buying laptops. Grandma gets by on a tablet etc. so things are just going to get worse and worse for Windows users going forward.
I’m not sure I made my point very well:
There was no attempt at making a mobile or tablet OS, they actually succeeded in unifying the code base. To this day there is only one operating system and it runs everything that runs “windows”. This is no different than the way Linux works or Apple’s Darwin works. That’s what they set out to achieve at Windows Vista and what they succeeded at around the time of the Xbox One. At that time, I as a developer could write one app and it would run on a Windows phone, a Windows tablet, the Xbox, and Windows PCs. Then they chose to kill that paradigm in favor of what we have today.
That’s what I was trying to point out, this was an intentional choice. They could go back to making Windows phones and tablets and shit and letting the unified app platform work the way it was supposed to at any time but they continue to choose not to.