I did buy a Lumia 640 LTE, but all I can really do with it is put it away in a drawer until Windows 10 Mobile comes out, hopefully along with a few usable basic apps. No, the biggest problem with Windows Phone 8 is not that it is ugly. That is a matter of taste; I like Android better, but looks are not that important. What matters more is functionality. And this is where WP8.1 fails tragically. The first part of the problem is the limitations of the OS itself and the boundaries set by Microsoft. In the first year, phones running WP7 were nearly identical in almost everything, because MS wanted something like iPhone OS. The price was outrageous too, and iOS had been far ahead ever since 2007 by the time WP7 came out.
That is how MS lost its way, though it had run out of steam in the mobile market long before. Back then Android was not yet that widespread; it had been 2 years since the first preview of Android. The foolish and overconfident Ballmer mocked Google over Android. MS was looking for ways to sell its OS. Even though everyone at MS was against buying the dying Nokia, which, much like MS, had failed to react in time to the changing demands of the market, Ballmer went against everyone and bought Nokia. After Skype, it was another billion-dollar deal and another similar misstep. While Google was working hard on Android, the development of WP practically came to a halt.
After 1 year of work by many hundreds of programmers and engineers, the final upgrade contained so few visible new features that you could barely count them on the fingers of one hand. MS mostly just kept reworking the internals of the system over and over again. On top of that, MS almost always missed the main selling season – Christmas. Even Microsoft is starting to realize that WP will probably never be a worthy competitor to Android, because they are porting most of their apps from Lumia, plus many others, to Android. It is sad that WP was such a promising project and was botched by poor management at the biggest IT company in the world. Microsoft is now taking a beating on almost every front.
Ballmer was not a person capable of running a company as monstrous as Microsoft. Plenty of ordinary employees at MS might have handled it better. Satya Nadella is in a very difficult position, because MS is now merely holding on to the positions it won in earlier years. Metro is a chapter of its own. It looks a bit like a bad joke from ’95, or even worse, because W95 looked better too. From a programmer’s point of view, I understand that MS wanted a lightweight and efficient OS. But they messed it up again. For example, the Lumia 640 LTE has some motion data that you used to be able to turn off, but after an update you no longer can. It means tracking your every move via GPS.
The battery barely lasts at all with it on. The only solution is to turn off GPS completely. Metro is very ugly, unergonomic, psychedelic, and looks as if a first-grader had designed it. Sure, it is also simple and minimalist, and that may suit some people. I do not know how MS could forget its vision of success, which worked flawlessly – a software product must above all look good. Today functionality matters too, but people will simply always choose the prettier one; that is the precondition for winning. I feel that MS has lost its direction. It is probably a company that has not transformed itself for the new “user experiences”. Once again, it is not about ugliness.
But the apps from MS, and from others as well, simply are not user-friendly in terms of features, and whoever can is getting rid of WP. Better a slow, unreliable, buggy Android than WP, which is the same, but on top of that is aesthetically worthless. People are not that stupid. They must have gone mad at MS. And I actually like MS because of VS, C#, .NET and SQL Server, which I program in. MS is missing the train. There is no other one coming. And the night is dark, merciless and cruel. Dear MS, it is now or never!